Moments of impact from Aarushi Dham's career
McKinsey & Company · Senior Business Analyst · February 2026A private equity-backed robotics portfolio company had strong sales momentum in Europe but was struggling to gain traction in the US market, putting its Q2 2026 robot placement targets at risk. The PE firm engaged McKinsey to diagnose why deals were stalling in the US and to build a go-to-market plan that could get the sales pipeline back on track. As part of this workstream, I investigated the root cause of stalled deals and found that while the robot's key competitive advantage was its price point, sales reps struggled to translate that into a compelling, quantifiable business case for prospective customers. To solve this, I designed and built an economic calculator that laid out the total cost of ownership for our client's robot versus competitor products at a line-by-line level. I grounded the tool in rigorous data collection, combining desk research with expert interviews, and validated the model's assumptions and outputs directly with sales reps to ensure it reflected real-world customer conversations. Once rolled out, sales reps began using the calculator across client pitches within the first quarter, giving them a consistent, reliable tool to make the value proposition tangible during sales conversations. This directly contributed to shorter sales cycles and helped close new deals, putting the company on a stronger path toward hitting its Q2 2026 US placement targets.
McKinsey & Company · Business Analyst · February 2025A retail client was facing rising costs driven by increasingly complex packaging and needed to identify ways to reduce spend without eroding customer perception or satisfaction. I was tasked with leading the customer sentiment work stream within this design-to-value initiative, responsible for pinpointing which packaging components customers felt had room for improvement and could be redesigned or re-sourced, then presenting actionable recommendations to senior client stakeholders. To ground the analysis in real customer feedback, I designed and led a focus group study across 30+ customers, mapping pain points across the full purchasing journey. I then aligned these identified friction points with the broader cost reduction targets, ensuring that any recommended changes would simultaneously address customer dissatisfaction and unlock savings opportunities — rather than treating cost-cutting and customer experience as competing priorities. The recommendations I developed directly informed the redesign of several key packaging components, cutting added annual costs while proactively resolving the pain points customers had flagged. This work was set to roll out across approximately 4,000 store locations, giving the client a scalable path to reduce costs at a broad, systemic level while strengthening rather than compromising the customer experience.
McKinsey & Company · Senior Business Analyst · August 2025A client had acquired a novel Biologics product in 2022 and scaled it to $15M in revenue by 2024, but faced a critical strategic question: how to grow it to $100M by 2028. Leadership needed clarity on where to allocate investment dollars across sales/commercial, R&D, and marketing, and which U.S. geographies held the most untapped whitespace worth pursuing. I led the geographic whitespace analysis and built the financial model comparing ROI across sales, R&D, and marketing investment scenarios. I partnered directly with the GM of the business and functional leads to develop model inputs, and reported findings and recommendations to the CFO. To build the analysis, I pulled claims and prescriber data by region to score geographies on unmet need and competitive density, then overlaid internal sales rep coverage data to pinpoint where the business was and wasn't selling effectively today. From there, I constructed a 5-year scenario model in Excel comparing three distinct investment mixes across sales reps, R&D pipeline extensions, and marketing spend, stress-testing assumptions with functional leads before finalizing the recommendation. The impact was substantial: we identified opportunities for sales expansion across the US, a decision projected to drive double digit revenue growth across the coming years. Beyond the immediate investment decision, the roadmap I built became laid the foundation for future budget planning / resource allocation conversations.