Neville Nagesh

Neville Nagesh has spent the past year trying to change how Sennheiser approaches business development in the Middle East: less dependence on individual tenders and more focus on long-term sector strategies.

He identified higher education, large corporates and government research as three areas worth developing, then built targeted approaches around each. Current opportunities include a multi-site voice-lift and classroom collaboration project with a major UAE technical college, product testing with a Saudi energy company and work with a Saudi university modernising close to 100 buildings. None has closed yet, but Nagesh says the resulting pipeline is the largest and most strategically important he has built.

The approach marks a significant shift from his earlier career. At Darwish Holding, Nagesh progressed from design engineering into responsibilities spanning sales targets, vendor relationships and consultant engagement before moving formally into business development. He says the hardest lesson was discovering that technical expertise alone did not create a pipeline; better results came from asking more about a customer's objectives and investing patiently in relationships.

His technical grounding remains substantial, with certifications including CTS, Dante Level 3, Crestron design, Extron control, AMX, KNX and Navori.

Having built a life across India, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE, Nagesh also credits cultural understanding and long-term relationships as important to how he now operates across the region.