University of Michigan

Fuqua School of Business at Duke University

Product Management, Field Marketing, and Sales Enablement Leader

Raleigh, North Carolina, United States

Enabling great teams, building market-leading products, and making life easier for your sales team

Product Management & Field Marketing Leader

Responsible for field marketing and marketing operations: channel marketing and channel programs, vertical marketing, regional marketing, and commercial lighting pricing.- Defined channel program structures and annual targets, aligning distributors’ and Cree’s objectives: growing the company’s share of business, and accelerating new product adoption. Strategic partners grew revenue up to 100% year over year.- Launched mobile-friendly learning management system (LMS) for internal and external sales team members,  organizing hundreds of hours of video content into strategic learning paths and using monthly modules to cover the latest innovations.- Simplified communications across functional teams and accelerated customer responsiveness through evaluation and implementation of third-party web-based tools for sales training, channel program enrollments, market development claims, and distributor stock rotations.- Created marketing collateral, integrated campaigns, and utilized marketing automation to generate marketing-qualified leads for US sales territories and 6 target verticals (education, healthcare, industrial, municipal, automotive, petroleum). Target verticals, representing 30% of commercial lighting business, grew at a rate of 38% year over year.- Implemented new quoting processes using <a href="http://SalesForce.com">SalesForce.com</a> and Oracle Configure Price Quote (CPQ), improving standard quote delivery time 40% and increasing margin over 4 consecutive quarters.- Delivered data visualization and analysis of historical Oracle ERP sales which enabled regional pricing strategies and delivered 2% incremental margin by partnering with the internal IT team, using an agile development approach.

Cree

Director Of Field Marketing and Sales Enablement

Leader of go-to-market team for $4B Services Routing Technology Group focused on value-added reseller (VAR) and distributor partners, including direct engagements with partners, incentive programs, and training.- Enabled partners to accelerate sales ramp of new solutions through development of deep relationships with multiple tier-one partners that included participation in national sales meetings, customer demonstrations, and early field trials.- Boosted top-line revenue and profitability for Cisco and partners by enabling increased solution-selling capabilities.- Improved partner-focused marketing by creating sales enablement packages that resulted in thousands of new click-throughs to partner resources.Directed all activities for the 2900 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISRs), Cisco’s flagship “branch office routers” with 85% market share in access routing market. Managed a team of 3 Product Managers and 3 Technical Marketing Engineers. Trained 2 team members with no previous product marketing experience.- Negotiated the development priority list with Engineering and Sales, driving maximum business impact with limited resources. New products were released with strategic hardware and software features, customer feedback was positive, and products transitioned on-forecast.- Conducted competitive analysis activities, prepared field-facing materials, and drove product strategy, mitigating market threats and ensuring product family maintained market share greater than 85%.

Cisco Systems

Manager Product Management

Managed platforms, modules, accessories, and Cisco IOS features for the 2800 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISRs). The 2800 Series platform was the largest contributor of revenue and profit in $3B branch office router portfolio.- Co-authored Product Requirements for the Integrated Services Routers Generation 2 (ISR G2) platforms, refreshing a $3B business. Cisco stock earned an analyst upgrade (from “hold” to “buy”) on the strength of the ISR G2 offering.- Forecasted platforms, modules, and spares for $1B of business, achieving forecast within 5% for FY08 and managed FY09 forecast through the economic downturn, minimizing inventory expenses while controlling lead times.- Drove higher revenues and maintained product margins by determining pricing for product bundles, platforms, modules, and accessories. Revenue per customer and discounts maintained through the economic downturn.- Presented product value proposition and roadmap to global customers from executive level to network engineers, achieving consistently high scores in post-presentation surveys.

Product Manager

Product owner of the Digital Patroller, a mobile digital video recorder (MDVR) and back-end software system for video storage and retrieval. Integrian was a venture-funded start-up provider of rugged, in-vehicle digital video recording systems for the public safety and public transportation markets. Annual revenues in 2005 were $30M. - Developed 24-month product roadmap, dramatically consolidating code branches and creating strategic direction for product based on feedback from sales, support, operations, and customers.- Increased sales run rate 400% during last 6 months of 2005, representing more than 90% of Integrian’s revenues by leading cross-functional lean start-up process to aggressively release, evaluate, and expand market-leading software features for the system and peripherals.

Integrian

- Led engineering team in early field trials of new hardware and software for the wide-area networking/ metro-area networking (WAN/ MAN) market; responsibilities included managing feature list, software readiness, and engineering support during customer testing- Team lead covering quality assurance testing of Gigabit Ethernet port adapter; tracking open issues to closure, coordinating test efforts across numerous features, prioritizing bugs with designers

Software QA Engineer

- Performed quality assurance testing on the mid-range routing platform; assisting designers with implementation of Sonet layer 1 and layer 2, HDLC, frame relay, and MPLS protocols- Designed daughtercard for Cisco SS7 (telecom signaling) FPGA-based port adapter and supported initial deployments; first year revenues from telecom service providers in Europe and Asia of $20M- Designed a co-processor module and re-use of a previous router design to develop a router to provide IP backhaul from a wireless base-station; initial success lead to orders near $40M- Drove cross-discipline technical meetings to ensure input from hardware, software, mechanical, test, compliance, and manufacturing engineers, Product technical requirements met or exceeded- Eliminated the need for $300k processor redesign by implementing a FPGA-based fix for an ASIC bug during prototype beta-testing

Hardware Design Engineer

- Defined product requirements for specific telecommunications environments to ensure compliance with U.S. and European electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) regulations- Recommended design changes to telecommunications hardware in order to address potential EMC issues; resulting design changes enabled shorter EMC test cycles- Completed EMC testing on several telecom products enabling over $100M sales in U.S. and Europe; testing included radio frequency (RF) radiated emissions, radiated immunity, conducted emissions, conducted immunity, and electrostatic discharge requirements- Authored technical documentation for presentation to major customers- Developed new test procedures and implemented new technologies making EMC lab tests more efficient and more repeatable

Dave VanSpybrook