Ashish Gupta on Adobe culture, creativity in enterprise sales, and building the future of digital experiences

Growing up, Ashish Gupta, senior director for US enterprise sales at Adobe, played cricket and dreamt of becoming a doctor. However, in high school, his interests turned towards technology. He eventually earned his bachelor’s and master's degrees in computer science. “I wanted to become a doctor to make an impact in people’s lives,” he recalls, “And then I was drawn to technology for the same reasons—I’m intrigued by the ways technology can make the world a better place for everybody.”

After school, Ashish launched a career in consulting and brought his passion for helping customers drive business outcomes in sales and sales leadership roles at some of the world’s leading tech companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce.

When Ashish was approached about his current role at Adobe, he was attracted to Adobe’s culture, which instills creativity and entrepreneurship while promoting diversity and equality. In addition, the leadership’s focus on being a market leader in the MarTech space solidified his interest.

“Adobe believes their core differentiator is its people and products, and thus they invest heavily in both. In addition, there is a focus on doing the right thing for the community. Adobe’s culture and values have deep synergies with mine,” Ashish says.

Why digital experience at Adobe is so exciting right now

Adobe is on a mission of making the digital economy personal. “Every business is focused on providing personalized customer experience at scale in (near) real-time. This is the differentiator for every brand today,” he says. “And Adobe is in a unique position to help our customers with this goal with Adobe Experience Cloud.”

Beyond the products, what Ashish loves most about digital experience and enterprise sales at Adobe is the company’s unique blend of big-company resources with startup energy. “We’re a startup within Adobe and defining the future of Adobe’s go-to market strategy,” he says. “And, customer experience is a huge market opportunity which means an exciting opportunity to drive transformational initiatives with the customers and career growth for people on our teams.”

Leading sales with creativity and diversity

“One of Adobe’s leadership capabilities is creativity, and in enterprise sales, this translates to entrepreneurship and risk-taking,” explains Ashish. “We empower folks to take risks and figure things out, and we have their backs.”

Ashish also puts a huge emphasis on the needs of the market, which means making sure that his teams have the right tools and skills to service customers where they need the most help. “With this approach, we’re able to bring out the best in our teams and make a huge impact.”

Diversity is also at the top of Ashish’s priority list. He looks for people who are ready to embrace creative challenges in the fast-changing DX world and whose experiences and backgrounds can bring new ideas to the team: “I believe that, as a leader, if you’re building a team with different perspectives and backgrounds, you can serve your customers with diverse backgrounds well. And at Adobe, we’re lucky to be able to attract the best talent in the industry—so we make each other better. It’s really hard to beat.”