Summary
Overview
Work History
Education
Skills
Websites
Accomplishments
Key Interests
References
Timeline
Generic

Sandhya Ashok

Morgan Hill,CA

Summary

Dynamic Briefing Manager with a strong focus on customer relations and event development. Known for driving collaborative briefing sessions, leveraging negotiation skills, and delivering tailored agendas that meet diverse client needs.

Overview

25
25
years of professional experience

Work History

Briefing Program Manager

NetApp
San Jose, CA
06.2024 - 10.2024
  • Designing custom agendas for customers and partners
  • Managing Solution Series, an education series aimed at providing customers, partners and internal sales engineers to understand recent as well as updated solutions
  • Briefing facilitation, engaging with the customer/partner group from the beginning of the briefing day until the end by moderating sessions as needed
  • Understanding NetApp technology, developing content to help provide information to speakers about the customer requirements for the individual sessions.
  • Organizing prep calls, managing executive engagements in the briefings.

Briefing Program Manager, VMware Discovery Center

VMware
Palo Alto, CA
03.2023 - 11.2023
  • Planning customized agendas to meet the requirements of customers and partners
  • Working with executive offices, assisting account teams to prepare prep documents
  • Identifying the best speakers for briefing topics, scheduling prep calls
  • Utilizing my exceptional communication skills, collaborative and negotiation skills to present the best agenda to the customer/partner
  • Subject knowledge/awareness of solutions in order to understand the product lines
  • Collecting, corelating and concisely packaging the relevant information required from customer insights session to the stake holders.

Executive Briefing Center, Briefing Manager

ServiceNow
Santa Clara, CA
08.2021 - 10.2022
  • Customized agenda creation, regular briefings, planning, influencing, driving in person, virtual and hybrid briefings
  • Collaborated with senior executives on briefing content for customer delivery.
  • Partnered with internal teams to identify, recruit & coordinate with the best SME speakers for various sessions as well as planned interactive demonstrations with demo engineers to yield best customer experience
  • Ensuring speaker preparations, including those of C-level executives, revising prep documents as needed based on pre brief calls

Senior Program Manager, Customer Experience Center (CXC)

Cisco
San Francisco, CA
12.2000 - 10.2020
  • Exceeded expectations in leading enterprise, service provider, web-scale customer briefings by partnering with internal sales, product and executive teams to deliver world class custom agendas to global and local customers.
  • Detail oriented and excel at planning, influencing, driving projects and programs
  • Collaborated with senior executives (including the Office of the CEO) on briefing content for customer delivery.
  • Partnered with internal teams to identify, recruit & coordinate with the best SME speakers for various sessions as well as planned interactive demonstrations with demo engineers to yield best customer experience
  • Consulted with global account teams and internal teams at the highest level to craft customized agendas and content that are tailor made to create high impact for Cisco technologies and scoring strategic wins for Cisco sales teams
  • Built collaborative relationships with cross functional teams within Cisco to deliver consistent, measurable results and continued to work towards a strong team culture
  • Worked in lockstep with senior executives, SMEs providing white glove communication, content curation for coveted Fortune 100 customer briefings with the intent to close deals, foster relationships with customer executives, SMEs and reduced sales cycles significantly
  • Program managed anywhere between 12 – 15 executive/technical briefings per month (including short lead) successfully ensuring high quality results, customer feedback and post briefing follow up.
  • Developed speaker database for various verticals/segments
  • Led the Voice of the Customer sessions and provided critical feedback to the internal speakers group, CXC management team as well as proposed changes needed based on account teams’ and customers’ evaluations.
  • Worked with SMEs, both local and international, in developing dynamic CXC topics that aligned business objectives to customer priorities, evolving risks, global trends and technical topics on architecture and design.
  • Managed a similar workload of virtual/digital briefings per month, including virtual multi customer/multi partner events of 100+ attendees effectively with the use of Cisco’s collaboration solutions during COVID 19 in 2020.
  • Consulted with account teams and SMEs to deliver compelling agenda topics (data center automation, cloud architectures, IoT, security architecture) to increase business potential as well as product and solutions demonstrations targeted at the content discussed through virtual labs.
  • Specialized in managing multi customer and multi partner (both virtual and in person) briefings

Program Manager, Operations, Research Center

Cisco
01.2007 - 01.2011
  • Organized engineering learning (Nerd Lunch) for technical teams within Cisco. External speakers/professors from top Universities were invited to speak about the most recent research topics related to Cisco’s solutions/platforms.
  • Scheduled and managed Cisco Fellow and DE quarterly meetings
  • Developed and implemented innovative programs for the newly formed Cisco Research Center such as Speaker Bureau – creating a database of speakers for various research topics, content building.
  • Conducted top engineering workshops, Fellow/DE meetings, engineering training and managed research programs recruiting top scholars nationally and globally for the Visiting Scholars program. Some key individuals invited include Dr. Vint Cerf.
  • Planned and executed the coveted Cisco Pioneer Awards organized in partnership with the President & CEO’s office, and managed the program’s winning category selections, organized the banquets to celebrate winners.

Program Manager, Enterprise Segment, Executive Briefing Center

Cisco
01.2000 - 01.2007
  • Managed 20+ executive briefings per month, working with the sales teams from enterprise

Education

MBA - Marketing

National University
Sunnyvale, CA

M.A. - English Literature

Madras University
Chennai, India

BSc. (BS) - Chemistry

Madras University
Chennai, India

Skills

  • Program management and consulting
  • Agenda and event development
  • Business development strategies
  • Customer relations management
  • Negotiation skills
  • Influential communication
  • Conflict resolution techniques
  • Stakeholder engagement
  • Leadership and operations
  • MS Office suite proficiency
  • WebEx and Microsoft Teams
  • Skype and Zoom expertise

Websites

Accomplishments

  • Collaborated with Sales teams, SMEs to capture customer objectives, to design effective briefing planning.
  • Successful in planning and leading strategic, complex briefing sessions providing world class experiences to customers and partners.
  • Exceptionally strong negotiation & influencing skills, deep rooted understanding and appreciation for various cultures.
  • Ability to accommodate last minute changes needed to run a successful briefing.
  • Managed industry events (CiscoLive,) customer and partner workshops & collected valuable feedback.
  • Co-facilitated Fortune 500 executive briefings with account teams.
  • Developed a learning program for customer experience briefing managers.

Key Interests

  • Passionate about customer experience.
  • Leveraging my 20+ years of experience in creating business playbooks.
  • Increasing employee competencies by identifying their potential.
  • Foster efforts to reduce carbon footprint.

References

References available upon request.

Timeline

Briefing Program Manager

NetApp
06.2024 - 10.2024

Briefing Program Manager, VMware Discovery Center

VMware
03.2023 - 11.2023

Executive Briefing Center, Briefing Manager

ServiceNow
08.2021 - 10.2022

Program Manager, Operations, Research Center

Cisco
01.2007 - 01.2011

Senior Program Manager, Customer Experience Center (CXC)

Cisco
12.2000 - 10.2020

Program Manager, Enterprise Segment, Executive Briefing Center

Cisco
01.2000 - 01.2007

MBA - Marketing

National University

M.A. - English Literature

Madras University

BSc. (BS) - Chemistry

Madras University

Similar Profiles

CREATE PROFILE