Michelle Waterman

As a Cortex Sales Specialist at Palo Alto Networks I am responsible for driving the growth of the company's Cortex and Cloud business solutions within the Silicon Valley, Enterprise West Region. Key responsibilities include:

• Customer Relationship Management: Develop and maintain strong relationships with clients, fostering business growth and aligning customer strategies with Cortex and Cloud objectives.
• Strategic Sales Leadership: Lead strategic sales campaigns from initial contact through procurement, utilizing in-depth knowledge of sales cycles and forecasting.
• Technical Expertise: Engage in detailed technical discussions, describing complex cybersecurity solutions into clear business value propositions for customers.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with sales engineers and other internal teams to deliver tailored, customer-centric solutions.
• Partner Engagement: Collaborate with alliance partners to develop joint strategies, enhance customer engagement, and deliver innovative solutions.
• Experience in selling complex solutions such as SIEM, EDR, SOAR, and CNAPP.
• The ability to articulate business value and operational benefits important to the CIO and CISO levels, as well as solution and use case selling at the Director level security teams.

Aug. 2022 - Nov. 2023 I worked as a Cloud Security Sales Specialist at Cisco Systems within the SLED West Region between. Key responsibilities include:

• Consistently exceeded revenue goals on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis.
• Delivered demos and presentations of Cisco's latest Zero Trust Network Access solution, "Secure Access". Delivering value-add propositions and helping CISOs discover value in wholistic solutions that integrate natively with the entire security stack.
• Extensive knowledge of a wide variety of cloud security, SaaS solutions, such as: CASB, DNS, SEIM, Cloud Delivered Firewall, RBI, Email security, DLP, MFA, ZTNA, and Endpoint security.
• In depth knowledge of competitor differentiators to the above-named security solutions, to better address key questions and prove our solutions strength in these spaces.
• Focused on building and maintaining relationships with CIO/CISO & director level contacts with-in all of my accounts. Identifying core needs and developing strategies to build and expand successful partnerships between customers and Cisco security solutions.
• Daily interactions and collaboration with Cisco Account Managers, Sales Engineers, resellers, and customers to understand projects and deliver maximum impact to close every opportunity successfully.
• Team-lead and mentor to new hires in the last three years of my roll at Cisco.

2009-2022 I worked as an Advanced Threats Security Sales Specialist at Cisco Systems within the SLED West Region. Key responsibilities include:

• Consistently met and exceeded monthly/quarterly/ annual goals typically targeted anywhere between $2-$12 million annually.
• Product specialist covering: All of Content Security, Cisco Umbrella, AMP at all layers (including email, web gateways, NGFW, NGIPS, NGISR and Endpoint), ThreatGrid, Cloudlock, and Duo.
• Successfully managed pipelines through the full sales cycles, over 100 opportunities at a time, spanning dozens of partners and distributors.
• Worked tightly with channel partners to promote sales, grow pipeline, develop long term relationships. This included developing incentive programs, training sessions, and making sure all partners have the resources needed to execute successful leads and close business.
• Consistent and reliable presenter. Able to quickly identify key client needs, pains, competition, decision makers, and budgets while presenting solutions and applicable values.

• Consistently one of the top sales performers with highest closed revenue.
• Worked with existing clients to ensure satisfaction, retention and growth with new services.
• Responsible for running weekly and monthly sales pipeline reports, training the sales team new hires, and generating lead generation campaigns.

• Top performer in reaching sales goals - #1 Inside Sales Representative in 2006 and 2007
• Successfully evangelized Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions to eLearning buyers.
• Sales responsibilities included lead qualification, relationship selling, web-touch selling through WebEx, daily conference calls, and overall pipeline management
• Coordinated multi-departmental resources to manage sales opportunities from beginning to end, ensuring a smooth sales process and successful close.
• Created online work force training modules for new hires. (WebEx basic training, Siebel overview training, and Sales Order Processing best practices).