MotorOctane Appoints Shivraj Shinde As Business Head Of Digital Sales
MotorOctane has appointed Shivraj Shinde as business head of digital sales, giving the automotive content platform a dedicated revenue lead as it pushes for growth.
- Role: business head, digital sales, MotorOctane
- Remit: digital revenue growth, new digital business, website growth, monetisation and sales team expansion
- Previously at: Autocar India, V3Cars, CarWale and Autoportal.com
- Background: digital media and business growth across the automotive category
- Reporting into: MotorOctane's leadership, as the platform builds a dedicated revenue function
- Company: automotive content and digital platform
What The Digital Sales Role Has To Fix
The remit named in the appointment is broad enough to be revealing. Digital revenue growth, new business development, website growth, monetisation strategy and building out the sales team are five jobs, and listing all five suggests the function is being built rather than inherited.
That is the usual position for a creator-led automotive platform reaching the point where audience is no longer the constraint. Traffic and subscriber numbers arrive first, and the commercial apparatus to convert them tends to be assembled afterwards, often several years later than it should be. Building out high-performing sales teams, named explicitly in the remit, is the part that takes longest and is hardest to hire for.
A Category That Hires From Itself
Shinde's record is entirely within automotive digital media: Autocar India, V3Cars, CarWale and Autoportal.com. That is not a narrow career so much as an accurate reflection of how the category buys.
Automotive advertising in India runs through a small set of manufacturer and dealer relationships, and the people who hold those relationships move between the same handful of publishers. A platform hiring into this role is buying the contact book as much as the discipline. MotorOctane has said it expects his expertise to be a valuable addition, and expressed confidence in his leadership through the platform's next phase of growth. More appointments.
Advertisement
