By Laura Romero
Tatiana Sebby, Channel Sales Manager at 8×8, was recognized by Cloud Girls in collaboration with Women in the Channel (WiC) and Channel Partners, the leading resource for the telecom and IT channel community, as a Rising Star in the second annual Cloud Girls Rising Awards announced April 12, 2017, at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo in Las Vegas.
The Cloud Girl Rising award was created to honor women in the telecom and IT channel who have shown leadership and innovation in the emerging cloud space as well as to inspire more women to step forward and follow their example. This year the award was given to two Trailblazers and one Rising Star.
Sebby was honored as a Rising Star, a female up-and-comer in the cloud community who has shown initiative in advancing cloud and next-generation technology solutions for her organization, customers and the industry.
Sebby, has more than 10 years of experience in the IT services industries. Since joining 8×8, Sebby has applied her knowledge in new ways, creating new service offerings with leading cloud companies. She joined 8×8 to manage sales and business development for the CDW national account. Previously, she held account executive management positions at Singlehop, Integrated Data Storage and CDW.
Cloud Girls is pleased to share more about Sebby in this edited excerpt from her award application.
How did you get started in the cloud?
In the last few years, I transitioned from inside sales account management at a large distributor, to enterprise account management at an IaaS company and now national channel sales management for a UCaaS industry leader.
In this current role, I was able to work on a project to help develop a new service offering. We had traditionally played in the small business space but with my past experiences selling into the enterprise, I was asked to come on board and push the envelope. It took the right customer with enough faith to be the first but the stars aligned.
We made the business case to upper management to create a new BaaS service offering geared to service the enterprise space. It was great experience to get my hands in this process from the ground up. We worked on internal education of various teams; marketing, sales, finance, legal, presales engineers, project management and support technicians. Meanwhile, in parallel we still needed to compete for the business which we ended up winning.
What have you done to develop future women cloud leaders in your organization and in the industry?
Prior to joining 8×8, I learned that my then employer had named a young woman as my successor. Channel is a whole new world for one coming from a marketing and inside direct sales background. I offered to train the young woman one-on-one over two weeks to educate her on channel partnerships, the complexity of the sale process, our competition, CDW’s organizational structure, how it compares to their competitors, how are each company and the teams within incentivized, who are the key stakeholders.
Since then we have continued to meet regularly to discuss personal development, career goals and tactical strategy for the day to day growth in the business. At the end of the 9 months she more than doubled the funnel. Due to various reasons she decided it was time she needed to change companies but wasn’t sure where to begin. We looked at the new emerging technology and the industry leaders in order to narrow down the right career move. I’m very proud to say she’s gained confidence in her abilities and has now landed herself a new job with a leader in the IaaS space.
How have you been successful implementing or promoting cloud technology, management principles or processes?
I was two years removed from working with one of the nation’s leading provider of wealth management technology. I had sold them much of their on-premises EMC storage, Cisco UCS and virtualization solutions. This time they were interested in what my new clients were adopting for BaaS. After many months of discussion on our current approach, this was still not sufficient. The right solution was staring us in the face but it wasn’t an offering my company had. Instead of walking away, we decided to pursue it seriously and create a solution that would backup and secure their clients data properly.
This project was the most creative and competitive I’ve been part of to date as I had to engage at every level within my organization. This allowed me to understand all angles of what’s most important to each group. I came back with a comprehensive approach to the solution for my client and we secured the business over the incumbent and over their preferred data center solutions provider who was also pushing a managed cloud service leveraging the client’s existing technology.
How have you created a corporate vision for cloud services in your organization?
My organization is a pure cloud play model, so a corporate vision is already in place. However, I have influenced how we work with our retail partners. In one example, we were selling, pre-configuring and shipping directly to retail clients, certain Polycom equipment needed for the overall solution provided through our retail partner. This was mostly for quality assurance purposes. We have now trained our retail partner’s configuration centers to pre-provision Polycom phones to ship plug and play to customers, allowing their sales teams to recognize the revenue and incentives, while retail clients consolidate their purchasing power.
Have you mentored other women in the channel above, below and at your level?
Yes, I’ve had the opportunity to help other women in sales and channel in a few ways. Recently, I spent time assisting a former teammate transition to the cloud industry after nine years of providing on premise hardware. Based on her interests, we narrowed it down to a handful of cloud providers and then selected a security services company for her next job. I’ve also presented at a different women’s partner conferences about how to start speaking cloud and selling cloud services.
About the Author
Laura Romero is Director of Solution Partners at Plex Systems, Inc. and team member for the Cloud Girls Communications Work Group.
About the Editor
Jeanine Sicinski is channel marketing manager for ViaWest and team member for the Cloud Girls Communications Work Group.