Seeking New Opportunities

It is time to move on from Microsoft after a bit over 19 years. But how can I summarize my experience? I usually explain that I’m an expert at bridging business and technology, building teams and delivering programs that help communities, customers, partners and sales teams thrive.

With that in mind, I am now actively seeking a management or individual contributor role that will directly engage with customers or partners, develops innovative technical solutions, leads strategic sales, customer, or partner programs, or manages overall business operations.

My top specialties, with examples, include:

SPECIALTIES	EXAMPLES	IMPACT
Bridging business and technology sides of conversations	1. Took a consultative sales approach with Fortune 1000 customers explaining how the Microsoft “stack” of software can improve their business 2. Explained social media to brand advertisers in terms that made it approachable, yet helped drive paid advertising	1. Shortened my account team’s sales cycle and increased the attach rate of additional products in our sales opportunities 2. Increased customer satisfaction for educating brand advertisers on more than what Microsoft sells
Building leading-edge teams, including cross-organizational, cross-functional and cross-country	1. Built a new team to create high-quality solution demonstrations from top-performing sales engineers 2. Managed a pan-regional team of product managers to drive consumer marketing in partnership with sales and business development 3. Built a temporary team of developers, designers and operations to deliver Messenger TV in 20 markets and 12 languages	1. Sales field was able to spend more time selling and less time configuring and building new demos 2. Increased adoption of online consumer products across the region leveraging partners, top brands and online marketing 3. Increased online usage of Messenger and MSN Video, which increased online ad inventory
Delivering programs for communities, customers, partners and sales teams	1. Transformed high-touch sales with the Microsoft Technology Center’s “Envisioning Show” and replicated it at 14 facilities around the world for local sales teams 2. Initiated the Win/Loss program for ad sales and established competitive sales objection handling, combining them to create and update sales strategies 3. Building the Digital Doughnut networking group in San Francisco for the local marketing & tech community	1. Allowed local sales teams to shorten their sales cycle and increase the attach rate of additional products in their sales opportunities 2. Trained Account Executives in the US and Europe to understand competitive products and overcome sales objections 3. Successfully growing the local audience for Digital Doughnut’s North American expansion

Visual Studio and pubCenter Integration

With Visual Studio Express 2013, we now have the ability to add a reference to a connected service, right from within Visual Studio. This is briefly explained in MSDN:

New Feature – pubCenter Integration with Visual Studio (Windows 8.1 Preview)

Before now, you would have to go to pubCenter and set up an application and all of the ad units, which gives you ApplicationId and AdUnitId values that are unique to you. Now, this is done in Visual Studio. To demonstrate it, I created a short video (sorry the audio isn’t great – I need to get a better microphone)