Brig Serman
Senior global sales leader
Consistent Growth in Highly Competitive Markets – Strategic Alliances and Partnerships
About Me
Senior Global Sales Leader with extensive experience leading global sales by building strategic alliances to accelerate growth and secure market share in highly competitive environments.
Successful at applying an uncommon vision to anticipate market disruption, fuel global sales, and improve profit margins to drive significant revenue growth and business transformation in the technology space.
Business Growth
Adept at using data-driven approaches to address market opportunities, consistently delivering growth during an overall decline in business.
Turnarounds & Partnerships
Expertise in turning around multiple businesses, launching new strategic alliances, and forging go-to-market partnership initiatives.
Increased Revenue
Known for realigning sales and partnering models during the shift to cloud computing, driving noteworthy increase in managed service provider revenue across a four-year period.
Team & Thought Leadership
Specialize in building global sales organizations and building trust and confidence across a matrixed organization. A noted industry speaker and presenter.
Achievements
Success StoriesWork History
IBM
One of the largest technology firms in the world with more than 440,000 employees serving information technology needs and generating $79.6 billion in revenue from customers in 170+ countries.
Director, IBM Global Commercial Cloud Platform | 2018 - 2019
Led the global commercial cloud platform sales with ten direct and 600+ indirect reports worldwide. Administered $600 million in annual recurring revenue. Drove the evolution of IBM sellers in support of cloud and cognitive sales aligned to IBM strategy. Developed and executed the global sales strategy for the IBM cloud platform.
- $50 million increase in recurring revenue over the first six months achieved by driving a 5% improvement in new trial conversions of paying customers through the implementation of a local market and language outreach program; replicated this initiative globally to take advantage of using local language skills.
- $10 million in incremental recurring monthly revenue produced in the first six months by noting a 60% rise in credit card transaction pre-approvals; developed a risk analysis to convince IBM finance to relax the pre-approval criteria to inject more competitiveness into the online marketplace.
- 10% global growth reached, overcoming a business decline, by implementing a skills overhaul, installing a new management system, and addressing key gaps in the customer purchase path through digital sales.
- 3% to 10% YTY improvement in cloud platform results in four quarters realized by identifying the root causes behind low customer conversion rates and implementing actions to close key customer purchase path gaps.
Director, IBM Global Commercial Segment | 2015 - 2018
Served as the worldwide executive leader for IBM global commercial segment. Launched a new customer segment in January 2016 with $6 billion in annual revenue and double-digit growth. Managed the strategy, sales, marketing, and offerings aligned to this market. Expanded routes to market for channel, digital, web, and direct sales.
- $500 million in incremental recurring revenue generated by delivering eight quarters of 1% to 3% growth during a time of corporate business decline through the deployment of an initiative leveraging 1,400+ repeatable solutions built by IBM’s strategic alliance and business partner offerings that drove growth in each market.
- $100 million in recurring revenue attained by launching a program to monetize embedded partnerships and reduce coverage on those partners failing to create incremental revenue; filtered out “lifestyle” partners leveraging the IBM logo without a return to IBM and shifted sales coverage to those partners generating incremental revenue.
- 40% reduction in selling, general and administrative (SG&A) expense while sustaining high single digit growth by launching the commercial customer segment forcing the discovery of a new mode to address this segment by moving coverage to a channel and digital sales model.
- 4% growth accomplished and business objectives exceeded in six months in Japan by leading the turnaround of the commercial customer segment through a data-driven root cause analysis approach to highlight essential actions to drive improvement and by convincing senior management to implement those activities.
Director, Global Sales, IBM Midmarket & MSPs | 2011 - 2015
Oversaw a team of six people at the worldwide level. Provided business direction to approximately 1200 colleagues related to $4 billion in annual revenue with double-digit growth.
- $1.65 billion turnaround in revenue, previously in a $450 million negative position realized by building a global team of 320 high performance sellers for managed service providers, optimizing resource alignment to market opportunity, improving employee retention, and spurring five times growth in the MSP segment.
- $800 million in incremental sales in four years attained with triple digit growth annually by introducing a new business model to capture a market shift to managed service providers (MSPs) and redeploying 40% of resources to this segment that purchased hardware and software from IBM to use in the distribution of cloud-based service offerings.
- $200 million in additional revenue and a three-point profit margin improvement posted by spearheading the shift of IBM’s business from low margin, high volume servers to high value, high margin software and services resulting in a 30-point boost in revenue share earned from high value offerings.
Director, Director, Global Sales, IBM Smart Business | 2009 - 2011
Managed sales as a member of the senior leadership team for IBM Smart Business. Built the global sales engine including staffing, channel recruitment and development, measurements, incentives, and sales execution.
- $100 million in annual new business sales added by forming a 40-person global sales organization across India, China, and Italy as part of the Smart Business launch, establishing sales objectives and management systems to help bring results accountability in all markets, and recruiting 1,000+ independent software vendors as part of this platform.
Vice President, Strategic Alliances | 2006 - 2009
Guided cross industry strategic alliances that included Lawson, Genesys, Kana, and the Symphony Technology Group. Managed a team of 15 people in business development, technology enablement, marketing, and geographic sales.
- $1 billion market opportunity addressed by rolling out a technology initiative between IBM Research and an Israeli venture capital firm that combined cutting edge sensors to scan materials two inches into the interior with IBM’s networking, communications, and data analytics, creating a distinctive offering for security and defense applications.
- $600 million in annual revenue earned from IBM partnerships by developing training curriculum and testing leading to a new professional certification with the Associate of Strategic Alliance Professionals; this certification now used by IBM and the industry as the standard for strategic alliance certification as a key partnership and go-to-market model.
- $10 million in yearly income produced by forging an embedded technology relationship with Lawson, a top enterprise resource planning (ERP) software vendor, with a solution built on IBM WebSphere technology and included in a run time license with every installation resulting in a license upsell to 20% of the Lawson customer base.
IBM Strategic Alliance Executive - Cisco | 2003 - 2006
Directed the North America strategic alliance between IBM and Cisco. Drove sales execution around joint offerings with a team of ten people helping post annual revenue of $500 million.
- $500 million in yearly revenue recorded through new technology sales by launching a new business initiative focused on systems integration companies, or web integrators, a partner seldom engaged with by IBM, that specialized in transitioning traditional companies to a web-based delivery model.
Additional Experience with IBM: Business Unit Executive, Sales Manager, Printer Specialist, Marketing Representative
Transitioning to Higher Value Solution Selling Generates Revenue of $200 Million
The technology giant’s business changed dramatically with a divestiture of an X86-based server business to a third party, representing a momentous hurdle to success. This low margin business accounted for as much as 80% of revenue in some markets. The divestiture highlighted a substantial shift in the skills and partner focus needed to succeed beyond that event. Challenged by the misalignment of the sales skills and business partner focus mandated to go beyond the divestiture and establish a long-term direction to move to higher value solutions.
Transformed the sales teams to more sharply align to the post-X86 server landscape. This involved intensive retraining, implementing incentive plans to drive this shift, establishing new business partner relationships aligned to higher value solutions, and in many cases, replacing sellers that failed to make the transition.
Succeeded in shifting to higher value solution selling. Transformed the midmarket business to the point of noting almost 50% of revenue generated from these high-value solutions, representing a 30-point improvement in revenue share, greater than any other part of the company’s business. Additionally, this shift produced an incremental $200 million in revenue and a three-point profit margin improvement.
Discovering Root Causes for Sales Issues Returns Japan to 4% Growth
The Japan sales team struggled with performance in multiple quarters that even suggested the sales leader risked replacement. Decided to assist the team to understand the cause of the subpar results and help develop a plan to address the situation. Hindered by a strong resistance to change as well as a reticence to accept help outside of Japan. Needed to overcome this by building trust with the team as well as by pinpointing a method to identify root cause issues impacting performance in this market and helping the sales leader implement plans to mitigate these issues.
Led a deep dive analysis of the root causes impacting performance by applying a data driven approach that separated opinion from facts while minimizing personal or local bias. Made an exhaustive effort across sales, finance, and operations to understand local market dynamics, issues impacting sales, and actions to possibly take to improve results. Presented the findings and recommendations to the country’s senior leadership team. From this analysis, discovered the Japan sales team seemed too heavily dependent on a high concentration of large customers. If those customers failed to make a purchase, performance suffered. Developed a plan for the sales team to invest more time and effort across a broader set of customers to reduce high concentration customer dependencies. Assisted the team in shifting focus to cloud service providers and strategic imperatives to sharply differentiate solutions. Also implemented the repeatable solution model to increase sales volumes.
Team Japan returned to growth of approximately 4% and within six months returned to consistently exceeding business objectives.
Shifting to a New Cloud Model Boosts Revenues $800 Million
The shift of customers moving workloads from on premise to cloud-based implementations turned into a key development and directly impacted server sales as almost half of the midmarket customers at the time already shifted some workload to the cloud. The technology conglomerate neglected to aggressively compete for this business. Challenged by the unpreparedness for this market disruption because of the alignment of business model to a traditional, on premise capital acquisition strategy. Needed to shift the seller and business partner focus away from traditional, on premise server sales to a cloud service provider model.
Launched the cloud service provider initiative to capture the shift to cloud computing. Moved 40% of sales headcount to this mission, aligning to business partners and customers creating “as a service” offerings in the cloud. Accelerated a global infrastructure to support this effort, leveraging third party industry analysts to build compelling use cases in segments such as online gaming, and other non-traditional industries for the firm.
The cloud service provider business turned into the key driver of the midmarket performance. Delivered triple digit growth each year in the first few years, stabilizing at double-digit growth in later years. Expanded this business segment from $200 million to more than $1 billion annually in four years.
Easing Credit Card Approval Requirements Produces $10 Million in Monthly Revenue
New client acquisition through the company’s online cloud marketplace declined 90% in recent years. Once the primary source of new clients, integration into the company after the acquisition of a major Infrastructure as a service provider created inhibitors to the success of this route to market. Notably, up to 90% of credit card transactions required manual review, resulting in substantial fallout of potential customers likely to move forward with the purchase process. Challenged by operating from a weak position to run an online marketplace. The financial policies served large enterprise transactions rather than commercial transactions through a credit card. The corporation’s risk policy appeared far too stringent to enable this type of purchase model. The considerable amount of manual pre-approvals that the conglomerate mandated resulted in many customers stopping the purchase and moving to a competitor not viewing the customer as a credit risk.
Created a risk analysis used to convince the finance team to relax credit pre-approval standards for online purchases. This analysis showed that 90% of customers that used the corporation’s cloud through a credit card purchase never exceeded a certain amount per month in billing. In addition, the company needed an average of three months to identify a fraudulent credit card order. This maximized risk per customer at a significantly lower amount than the exposure that the finance team applied in the original analysis. Requested that the development team update credit evaluation algorithms to automatically approve credit cards based on the new guidelines.
This boosted the company’s competitiveness with other online marketplace providers and resulted in a 60% expansion in the number of customers automatically approved to purchase in the online marketplace. This decreased the number of customers that opted out of the buying path and led to an incremental $10 million in monthly recurring revenue in the first six months.
Implementing Repeatable Solutions Results in Revenue of $500 Million
A key to midmarket segment success remained in finding strategies to drive high volume, high value, and scalable sales without increasing sales expenses that included building large face-to-face sales teams. The major technology corporation lacked an effective high-volume sales model that operated without a heavy investment in sales resources. Challenged by the need to create a high-volume sales engine to drive sufficient revenue to achieve budgets and possess the ability to replicate globally while faced with sizeable expense reductions.
Took industry specific offerings from partners and built local references for these solutions. Aligned marketing actions to drive demand generation activity targeting customers similar to the reference customer. Found that solutions incorporating high value offerings posted greater success and easier differentiation. Examples of these offerings included using predictive analytics to build training regimens for professional sports teams, using weather data to analyze and predict crop yields in the wine industry, and applying AI-based facial recognition capabilities to assess massive amounts of video data for border control applications. Provided each seller with specific targets for the number of repeatable solutions to create with local partners. Aligned marketing budgets at the global and local levels to shift 25% of the spend to directly support repeatable solutions.
Within three to six months of implementing repeatable solutions in each global market, the local market improved sales results and drove YTY growth. Launched more than 1,400 repeatable solutions globally, driving an incremental $500 million in recurring revenue. This key component of the strategy ultimately helped to drive eight quarters of 1% to 3% growth.
Turning Around Negative Results Produces Revenues of $1.65 billion
The head of the business partner organization attempted to convince the chairperson that the cloud-service provider business needed transitioning from the commercial segment to the business partner organization.
Hindered by strong political agendas with many senior executives wanting to take over the growth engine fueled by the managed services provider business. Challenged to maintain this growth while navigating the political currents. Needed to convince senior leadership that this wrong move potentially eliminated the growth engine in commercial. This shift created a mismatch between the way these customers engaged and their preferred method of engagement.
Built a business proposal to maintain coverage of managed service providers in the commercial segment. Remained relentless in the drive to keep this alignment. Reached a point where others suggested the strong personal opposition damaged my reputation. Accepted this feedback and the reaching of the decision. Developed and led the transition plan to shift this part of the business to the channel and fully committed to the success of that move, despite an opposite personal opinion.
Secured the respect of colleagues in the channels team for professionally leading this transition, accepting the decision, and committing to success. Within two years, the original position personally taken proved correct as the business suffered because of the move. Convinced senior leaders to move the business back to commercial and restore the sales coverage model. The strength of this team helped return the managed service provider segment to growth, recovering from a $450 million negative impact due to reorganization before generating revenue of $1.2 billion.