MARC BUCHANAN

Heading a strategic global team of sellers, product specialists & pre-sales engineers aligned to serve the needs of a diverse set of UK head quartered enterprise businesses with globally spanning operations (retail, CPG, utilities, energy, travel). My core focus on both new sales penetration of our digital services portfolio and revenue retention of our existing traditional services (collocation). I act as the senior commercial stakeholder using my 25 years of dual technical and commercial knowledge to provide a true 'trusted adviser' experience to senior leadership clients in a consultative transparent manner.

Many of these clients sit in regulated markets with unique business challenges trying to navigate through their own digital transformation journeys, My role exists to enable and optimise business outcomes through the adoption of our services in a hybrid multi cloud world with an overarching data and AI strategy.

Representing the new Logo development engine of Softserve UK, I seek out engagements to deploy teams of specialists within a client working on programmatic engagements with specific focus on data democratisation, analytics and artificial Intelligence. Working in partnership with the 3 main hyperscalers (AWS, Microsoft, Google) to generate momentum in opportunity discovery/referrals I leverage my many relationships and understanding of their goals to align Softserve campaigns into multiple Industry verticals or horizontal market plays. Targeted to achieve £4 million in annual new logo professional services revenue I engage with clients along with my virtual team as an industry subject matter expert to promote the art of the business outcome made possible by adopting digital technologies.

Having started the year extremely well with Softserve I was diagnosed with a life changing illness and had to take a step back to focus on my health; an operation, recovery and rehabilitation.

Aligned to four separate EMEA enterprise teams at AWS (Retail, Engineering, Digital Native & Israel) representing the GTM team (Go To Market). Working as a senior seller supporting the account managers my role was to engage on the top twenty active opportunities looking to using VMC on AWS across EMEA at any time. Providing subject matter expertise to clients and partners on how to facilitate large scale enterprise public cloud migrations and transformation program best practice tailored to the specific strategic needs of our customers. Targeted to achieve $2 million in new consumption revenue for the year 2021-2022 within region.

Having already closed a number of new logos that year I won a 3 year $21.6 million transformation project with Sainsbury's supermarket December 2021 making it the largest VMC on AWS deal in EMEA that year also positioning myself as the number one sales person within EMEA for my division.

Representing IBM public cloud services aligned to 5 global accounts generating over $900 million annual revenue across a multiple of vertical industries (financial services, energy and CPG). Targeted to drive growth of their public cloud portfolio (consumption only). Commercial ownership of all public cloud revenues working in conjunction with the wider account team to facilitate POC workshops and drive adoption of the portfolio of services. At the time IBM had recently sold their managed services business ‘GTS’ re-branding as Kyndryl along with ensuring separation of IBM technology and IBM Consulting. This posed an issue with having two separate ex IBM divisions embedded within the accounts part of the wider existing IBM contractual framework actively pushing clients towards the main hyperscaler platforms and not promoting IBM cloud services.

After spending 6 months trying operate within this new landscape I left IBM to join Softserve having achieved 85% of my annual OTE in those 6 months.

Cross portfolio selling (Cloud, Network, CyberSecurity) within retail, leisure and construction verticals. At Claranet the Senior Account Director is responsible for all virtual teams engaged on a customers account and is the senior escalation point this was advantageous to developing deep relationships with customers. As the trusted advisor and subject matter expert on technology adoption I was able to successfully cross sell and upsell the portfolio. Key alignment with core hyperscaller partners (Microsoft, AWS, Google) allowed for the successful delivery of a number of transformational projects in brands such as Harvey Nichols, JD Sports, Lush, and Kier Group

Although the Covid pandemic hit in March 2020 I managed to exit the year as the top performing Account Director achieving £2.9 million in gross profit, 126% of pre pandemic annual sales quota.

In response to the pandemic Claranet embarked on a complete restructuring and redundancy process, I opted for voluntary redundancy and joined AWS.

Commercial ownership of 5 global accounts within varying Industry verticals (financial services, marketing, SAAS providers, retail) Nurturing relationships with customers to identify opportunities to expand Rackspace wallet share inline with executing against their business goals. Rackspace announced their partnership with AWS in 2016 closely followed by Azure and then Google 2017 allowing us to facilitate expanding public cloud adoption through Rackspace customers and constantly positioning ourselves as the trusted advisors at the top of the technology adoption curve delivering a number of transformational programs with clients such as Aberdeen Asset Management, American Express, Fiverr, Pipedrive, Harvey Nichols and many more. During the last 3 years of my tenure at Rackspace I achieved a top 3 salesperson position EMEA for consecutive years.

• 2018-146% (3rd place)
• 2017-314% (1st place)
• 2016-167% (2nd place)