NetApp has anointed a new sales leadership team under the helm of President César Cernuda.
The members are:
- Rick Scurfield, who is promoted from SVP, Globals, Verticals, and Pathways to Chief Commercial Officer
- Max Long has been hired as NetApp’s SVP North America, joining th company from Adobe, where he was Chief Customer Officer
- Alex Wallner is promoted to NetApp’s SVP International. He was previously the company’s SVP for w-w Enterprise and Commercial Field Operations.
Scurfield will be responsible for building a new ‘go-to-market motion’ strategy, which includes direct sales and channel coverage. Long and Wallner are responsible for sales in their regions. Long will run direct sales, channel sales and demand generation in North America and Wallner will lead the execution of all NetApp go-to-market activities in the rest of the world. The appointments are effective from May 1.
The new sales structure is intended to facilitate NetApp’s goal to drive more leads, handle those leads faster, track progress more closely and get them processed into orders. The company also wants the digital and virtual sales teams and sales operations to work more effectively with NetApp’s direct sales force and channel partners.
Cernuda, who joined NetApp from Microsoft ten months ago, said the company is “implementing these changes to better serve [organisations’] needs. We will soon deliver a personalised, data-driven engagement model that allows our current and future customers to move at warp speed and aligns with the new way they want to engage with their solution partners.”
NetApp said the evolution of its data-driven GTM model and cloud-led sales organisation is expected to be a continuous process. That indicates Scurfield, Long and Wallner will be making changes in their respective fiefdoms to meet Cernuda’s goals.
William Blair analyst Jason Ader told his subscribers about a session with NetApp CFO Mike Berry earlier this month. “With respect to the impact on share gains from recent sales headcount additions (NetApp added 200 new sales reps in second half 2019 and 2020), NetApp management believes that new hires contributed to solid growth in the Americas geography (where sales were up 11 per cent year-over-year), though some portion of the recent hires are still getting ramped up.”
