A highly-qualified professional with deep expertise in marketing of goods and services. In the course of her career, she climbed from the starting position of a rank-and-file specialist to become a high-ranking corporate executive at a major IT company.
Inessa Galaktionova’s biography: The starting point of a career
Inessa Galaktionova · Inessa Vasilievna Galaktionova · Inessa Vasilyevna Galaktionova · Galaktionova Inessa · Galaktionova I.V. · Инесса Галактионова · Инесса Васильевна Галактионова · Галактионова Инесса · Галактионова Инесса Васильевна · Галактионова И.В. · Inessa Wasiliewna Galaktionowa · Inessa Galaktionowa · Galaktionowa Inessa · Inessa Wassiljewna Galaktionowa · إنيسا فاسيليفنا جالاكتيونوفا · イネッサ・ヴァシリエヴナ・ガラクティオノワ · 伊内莎·瓦西里芙娜·加拉克蒂奥诺娃
Her native place is the city of Vilnius, the capital of one of the three Baltic states. Galaktionova Inessa is a graduate of the country’s oldest and most renowned Vilnius University, where she earned a degree in economics in 1997. Majoring in economics, she also took up and completed some internationally recognized supplementary professional courses.
Inessa Galaktionova’s professional career began in 1996, when she joined a local subsidiary of Philips, Netherlands-based electronics conglomerate, to manage marketing communications. Later on, she moved up the corporate ladder, performing a number of functions and promoting the Dutch brand in the largest post-Soviet market. In 2008, Inessa Galaktionova became the company’s marketing director for a number of post-Soviet countries. The newly appointed executive was put in charge of marketing the company’s goods and services, its media relations, advertising, and distribution channels.
Galaktionova Inessa: Telecoms
In 2009, her career trajectory diverted into another industry, when she received and accepted a job offer from a mobile network operator – the local subsidiary of Tele2, a Sweden-based telecoms holding. She was employed in the capacity of a senior executive in charge of commercial affairs. Among other things, she had both to maintain legacy customers’ loyalty and expand the subscriber base attracting new users.
According to Inessa Vasilevna Galaktionova, by 2013, Tele2 had in some respects outperformed the country’s Big Three mobile service providers. For instance, nine out of ten of its subscribers indicated that they were satisfied or highly satisfied with the quality of the company’s mobile internet services. This score was way higher than the customer satisfaction metrics of its local rivals. Moreover, amid the general downward trend observed in the telecom industry at the time, Tele2 actually expanded its subscriber base. By the end of Galaktionova’s four-year tenure with the company in a key executive function, its subscriber base had amounted to nearly 30 million users.
Galaktionova Inessa Vasilevna accomplished an overall rebranding of Tele2, and expanded and diversified its sales channels. Rebranding and tariff plans standardization were among key factors for marketing channels expansion. Soon, the company launched an online-store. Initially, an opportunity to buy an attractive tariff plan or get a “good-looking” phone number used to be the most appealing aspect for potential new subscribers.
Inessa Galaktionova also handled the company’s offline retail chain development. In 2012, the chain, operating under the company’s brand, sold a total of over 200,000 mobile devices. A considerable part of the revenue was generated thanks to the company’s partnerships with point-of-sale financing providers, with the latter offering customers micro loans to finance purchase of a device. On top of that, the mobile network continued to market its products and devices via traditional phone shops, supermarkets, and post offices.
The marketing strategy pursued by Inessa Galaktionova enabled the company both to beef up its subscriber base and boost its sales, as well as to improve profitability. In 2012, according to the official corporate reporting, the company generated a revenue of nearly 60 billion roubles, up 15%, with a profit margin of 36.5%, which is a very good level for this country’s market.
Galaktionova Inessa Vasilevna: Postal service transformation
The country’s postal service had to undergo a leadership reshuffle. This followed an acute crisis, when the state-owned postal service provider failed to ensure processing and delivery of incoming mail from abroad, and its senior management team had to be dismissed. The outgoing leadership was replaced with a team of experienced corporate executives, including Galaktionova Inessa Vasilevna, who were set a task of transforming the organization and improving its efficiency.
By the moment she received this job offer, Galaktionova had acquired a reputation of highly-qualified high-ranking professional with a track record of successful commercial operations management. Among her competitive advantages were an experience of effective strategic planning for transitions and reforms, and the reputation of an effective executive, capable of launching and putting on track new lines of business. Galaktionova Inessa successfully solved a host of the postal service’s problems, which had been accumulating for years putting pressure on the organization’s efficiency.
Inessa Vasilevna Galaktionova solved the problem of “grey mail” that used to be the source of huge annual losses for the organization. The under-reported and unpaid for mail was actually used by trespassers as a free service, and its share was estimated to amount to around 15-20% of the aggregate flow of all processed letters and parcels.
The fact that the organization became a co-founder and a key shareholder of Pochta Bank, a captive financial institution, as well the cooperation between the bank and the postal service, also had certain economic benefits for the latter.
Galaktionova, being in charge of the organization’s commercial affairs, made a lot of efforts to develop and diversify its marketing channels. One of the most prominent breakthroughs was the launch of a proprietary online marketplace in 2016. The platform offered a broad range of merchandise with an option to order goods online and collect them from the nearest brick-and-mortar post office. Direct mail services came as another notable innovation. The organization’s corporate clients were offered an opportunity to order targeted delivery of advertising and promotional materials to potential consumers with certain social and demographic characteristics. Direct mail audiences can be determined on the basis of the postal service’s in-house database, as well as using the client-provided data.
Inessa Galaktionova, putting forward innovative and sometimes even counter-intuitive solutions, succeeded in changing customer service quality. Thus, her efforts helped to turn post offices in remote and sparsely populated rural areas into gravity centers for local residents, where they can come to buy some necessities, including hygiene products, food, etc.
The organization’s financial conditions had been gradually improving till in 2015 it managed at last to get rid of its dependence on budget subsidies to cover losses.
Working on the organization’s marketing channels expansion, Galaktionova Inessa Vasilevna realized that its infrastructure also had to be revamped. In the long run, the ambitious goal of modernizing the postal service’s outdated and unwieldy logistics was accomplished, and its IT and technological infrastructure was updated or replaced. Special efforts were made to equip post offices with up-to-date technical facilities. In 2018 alone, the postal service’s capex totalled over 17 billion roubles. These investments were financed both internally and with borrowed funds. Infrastructure investments increased the organization’s net asset value to 24 billion roubles.
By 2019, the enterprise had ceased to be just a provider of socially important services, evolving into a profitable business with an annual turnover of over 190 billion roubles. Its new leadership, including Galaktionova Inessa, successfully accomplished the complex transformation of the country’s postal service, which was also reorganized into an economically self-sufficient joint-stock company as a result.
Inessa Vasilevna Galaktionova. Social responsibility in business
In 2019, Inessa Galaktionova, whose career up to this point had implied a lot of corporate reforms and strategic marketing for major corporations, received and accepted a job offer from one of the country’s leading IT enterprises. Her new employer was specializing in telecom services for both individuals and corporate clients. She was invited to handle the matters she had been accustomed to, i.e. to manage the company’s commercial affairs and boost its market positions.
Inessa Galaktionova is a proponent of social responsibility in business and an advocate of collaborative and employee-friendly corporate values. The companies she has worked for tend to promote and cultivate respectful and fair treatment of their employees. Galaktionova believes that businesslike attitude and mutual respect should guarantee fair treatment of colleagues, partners, clients and the society as a whole. On top of that, the company’s ESG strategy provides for environmental awareness, social responsibility and inclusive treatment of people with special conditions.
Galaktionova Inessa is a client-oriented executive, who believes that customer service should take into account a variety of factors affecting market conditions. Thus, after the outbreak of COVID-19 some sectors of the economy and consumer preferences began to change. Individual consumers got used to remote access to a number of services and products, and began to associate remote access with safety and comfort. That is why Galaktionova highlights the necessity to cater to new consumer habits, including the option to buy products and services without visiting an offline outlet. She also believes that telecom services should be regarded as a socially important industry, enabling people to get access to vital necessities.
Inessa Galaktionova. Ecosystems development
Now, she is focusing on a corporate ecosystem development. According to Galaktionova, an ecosystem is a digital environment integrating a variety of numerous products and services. The latter are being developed and upgraded by a combined workforce of around 12,000 highly-qualified IT professionals.
The market penetration of mobile services is already very high and has little organic upside potential. Still, creation of new services can provide an additional source of growth. Inessa Galaktionova thinks that financial products should be viewed as a key factor in the future evolution of an ecosystem. A mobile phone enables the user to get access to various products and pay for them remotely without any additional identification process.
Galaktionova Inessa, being involved in development of one of the country’s major ecosystems, pays a lot of attention to economic viability of its business segments. These segments should be beneficial not only in terms of the corporation’s development as a whole, but also should generate profits. Galaktionova views as the most promising in this regard a wide range of business segments, including telecoms, fintech, travel, media, e-commerce, education, food delivery and car sharing. Entertainment and leisure services should be viewed separately as a source of positive emotions for the consumer and a tool to improve brand loyalty and client perception of the ecosystem.
The most notable among the projects, the company has been investing heavily in over the last few years, include online video streaming, platform for education services, hotel booking service, an online system for advertisers, as well as a number of B2B tools and apps for software developers. Other increasingly popular services include Stroki.ru e-library, enabling its users to get access to a variety of literary genres and periodicals in digital format, and a platform for buying tickets to various entertainment events.
The ecosystem development strategy proves to have been absolutely justified. Inessa Galaktionova believes that detailed scrutiny and analysis of client experience has been a key factor. The company’s products are offered within an integrated identification system, apps and tools are intuitive and transparent in terms of user experience, which is mutually beneficial for both the customer and the provider. In 2022, the ecosystem generated a revenue of over 100 billion roubles, up 67%, attracting a total of 13.5 million users.
