Arshad Carim

Director

Consulting Experience:
Arshad Carim is a Director with The Alexander Group, Inc. Mr. Carim has experience working with clients across multiple industries, including software, hardware, networking, electronics, distribution, transportation, and general business to business. His areas of focus include sales effectiveness and productivity, sales performance management, sales quota programs and sales incentive compensation design. Through his client work, Mr. Carim has developed insight into the sales challenges at both large and mid-size companies operating with both direct and indirect channel sales models.

Business Experience:
Prior to joining the Alexander Group, Mr. Carim spent six years gaining experience in various marketing and sales management positions in the telecommunications industry. Mr. Carim has directly managed a large regional wireless company’s local market sales force, providing leadership to a team of sales representatives. In addition, he managed the company’s launch of nationwide paging services in all market areas.

Education:
Master of Business Administration, University of California – Berkeley Haas School of Business
Bachelor of Science in Marketing/Management, University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business
Bachelor of Applied Science, University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science

David J. Cichelli

Senior Vice President
David is a national expert in sales compensation and is the Firm’s sales compensation practice manager. He helps his clients develop field incentive plans that ensure alignment between corporate sales objectives and sales resources. David is a frequent speaker on sales effectiveness and sales compensation issues. He is author of WorldatWork’s one-day class on sales compensation. He is author of “Compensating The Sales Force,” McGraw-Hill 2004. He is a contributing author to Sales and Marketing Magazine.

Recent Engagements:
For a large global express package company, David helped his client dramatically increase sales of international freight and ground solutions by tying total incentive earnings to balanced sales performance. And, for a large retail bank, David provided solutions that brought balance between customer service goals and sales efforts. And, finally, David helped a national television cable company develop best-practices sales coverage solutions for local markets.

Prior Experience:
David has been with The Alexander Group for over 20 years. His previous experience includes field sales support for an industrial chemical company and a sales compensation practice manager for a large human resources consulting firm.

Education:
BA Pennsylvania State University
MS Michigan State University

Alistair Clark

Principal

Consulting Experience:
Mr. Clark has been a sales management consultant for ten years, managing the U.S. and Latin American operations of a boutique sales consultancy firm before joining The Alexander Group. He brings extensive international sales consultancy experience, having worked with Fortune 1000 organizations across Europe, The Americas and Australasia. He has been responsible for clients in the publishing/media, consumer goods, IT/high-tech, financial services and B2B industrial sectors. Areas of expertise include channel strategy, sales team effectiveness and productivity, key account management, go-to-market organizational restructuring, and sales compensation redesign.

Business Experience:
Prior to his consultancy career, Mr. Clark spent nine years as an accomplished sales and marketing line manager, working for leading U.K. consumer products and services organizations such as Autoglass Ltd, Coloroll PLC, and Caradon PLC.

While with Autoglass Ltd, a UK windshield repair and replacement company, he was responsible for the redesign of the sales and marketing function, including redeployment of sales team resources and an upgrade of the national accounts program. As General Manager for Sales and Marketing with Caradon PLC, a home products company, conglomerate, he was responsible for several key new product launches and for the delivery of higher net realized prices across the company’s product range.

Education:
MBA, Manchester Business School, UK
BSc, 1st Class, King’s College, University of London, UK

Robert C. Conti

Senior Vice President
Bob is the CFO of the Firm. Additionally he is in charge of the Firm’s technology services consulting business. He is located in Scottsdale, AZ. His consulting work is focused on implementing software and IT infrastructure solutions that drive increased sales results. He has personally managed projects in sales deployment, sales process design, sales analytic development, and sales compensation design.

Recent Engagements:
Bob recently worked with a financial services organization to develop and assess new customer profitability models and then to realign the sales organization to the most profitable opportunities. His work at an international wholesale distribution company involved changing their customer coverage model and sales compensation programs to drive significant improvements in gross margin performance. As a direct result of the engagement the company experienced an increase in sales and gross margins while achieving a reduction in direct sales expense. His work with a leading enterprise software company has helped them significantly reduce the internal sales operations expenses while improving the support to their sales force by implementing automated solutions that improved the business processes.

Prior Experience:
Bob has been with The Alexander Group for 20 years. Prior to that, he founded an energy services company, and has also served as a consultant for an international human resources consulting firm.

Education:
MBA Southern Illinois University
BS United States Air Force Academy

David Eddleman

Director
David supports the Southeast Region and works on a variety of issues with clients in the areas of sales strategy, operations, performance management and incentive compensation. He has over 15 years of experience consulting to Fortune 500 companies in multiple industry verticals including networking, media, wireless communications, software, hardware, and information technology.

Recent Engagements:
David recently worked with a global provider of networking equipment to improve their channel partner effectiveness. The objective was to mitigate channel conflict and to expand the client’s current market penetration utilizing business partners in particular segments. The project began with understanding the client’s desired outcomes of their go-to-market strategy and the role of their business partners. The project team then identified gaps via multiple sales and crediting data analyses, and by utilizing best practice data from peer companies. David then worked with senior leadership to help craft winning business partner practices and provided specific recommendations to better leverage channels.

He also worked with a leading professional services firm to streamline sales processes, evaluate the effectiveness of the sales organization, and to align incentive compensation plans. The project included evaluating the inventory of offerings, customer demand, and the client’s market strategy. David consulted with the senior leadership team to formulate account management strategies, create a new sales organizational structure, and re-define sales roles.

Prior Experience:
Prior to joining The Alexander Group, David served as Chief Marketing Officer for Teleworx, a consulting and software firm that provides services to national wireline and wireless telecom carriers. He set market strategy for the firm and managed the sales organization. Prior to Teleworx, he was a Director and consulting practice leader of the Communications Group at Navigant Consulting where he provided thought leadership in the areas of network strategy and competitor analyses for global carriers. Before Navigant, David was a senior manager at Cap Gemini Consulting where he led numerous projects for Fortune 500 clients both in the US and in Latin America. His project work spanned multiple types of engagements including market analyses, competitive strategy, go-to-market strategies, and operational improvements.

Education:
MBA, Graduate School of Business, Columbia University
MA, School of International Affairs, Columbia University
BS, Mechanical Engineering, University of Maryland

Lindy Fishburne

Principal
Lindy focuses on managing our key accounts headquartered in the west and consults with sales and marketing executives of major high-technology companies. Lindy's five years of consulting experience include work in a variety of hardware, software and networking companies. Her areas of focus include channel design and optimization, commercial/SMB sales strategy and channel management practices.

Recent Engagements:
Recently, she led a team in designing the three year strategy for channel growth in emerging market countries. This work included development of metrics to track and monitor channel and business health in addition to development milestones. The strategy addressed required roles, ratios, partner landscape and enablement needs. The Board of Directors approved increased funding and headcount for these markets based on the visibility and accountability outlined in the plan.

Prior Experience:
Lindy has led business development and sales efforts at two venture-funded technology companies. She spent four years as a key management team member at Collabrys, Inc., a CRM and email marketing software company. She was responsible for securing initial reference accounts and subsequently designing the major account sales strategy, sales team recruitment, sales training and account management processes. She joined The Alexander Group after the successful sale of the company. At the Internet-based demand-aggregation business, she grew the channel partner distribution to over 40 key portals, established partner rules of engagement and negotiated co-marketing programs. Working as a Product Marketing Manager at Coca-Cola Foods, Ms. Fishburne had a lead role in two product launches that leveraged new distribution channel.

Education:
MBA University of Texas at Austin
BA Duke University

Ted Grossman

Director

Consulting Experience:
Theodore (Ted) Grossman is a Director with The Alexander Group, Inc. Mr. Grossman has extensive experience in the areas of business strategy, business process re-engineering, and project management with a functional specialty in sales force and channel effectiveness. Mr. Grossman has significant industry background within the software, telecommunications, and high tech manufacturing industries. His areas of focus are sales and channel management solutions including sales process effectiveness, sales job design, partner selection and management.

Business Experience:
Prior to joining the Alexander Group, Mr. Grossman has had eighteen years of experience spanning both management consulting and line management primarily in the high tech and software industries. As a Senior Manager for a Big “5” consulting firm, he managed many large scale and strategic business process improvement projects. Within the software industry Mr. Grossman has held positions in sales and alliances, corporate marketing and business and financial operations. Mr. Grossman has successfully managed both sales and services P&Ls, as well as created and managed strategic alliance for two companies. He also spent several years as the divisional controller for Marketing Oracle Corporation.

Education:
Masters of Business Administration Fuqua School of Business (Duke University)
Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy University of California at Berkeley

Drew Isaacman

Principal
Drew leads the Firm’s consulting business in the Southwestern Region. He works with sales & marketing executives across strategy, structure and management initiatives with particular emphasis on go-to-market planning, sales and marketing coverage optimization, and metrics and measurement. This work spans multiple industries including high-tech, financial services, insurance, telecommunications, distribution and consumer goods.

Prior Experience:

Prior to joining The Alexander Group, Drew led brand management efforts at Callaway Golf within their U.S. marketing organization. There he was responsible for the overall direction and business results of two brands totaling more than $100 million in revenue.

Prior to his time at Callaway, Drew led the go-to-market strategy consulting practice at MarketBridge, a professional services firm based in Bethesda, MD. During his ten year tenure, he worked with both US-based and international clients, developing sales and marketing operating models that optimally utilized resources against available market opportunities. He also managed the internal operations of the firm, responsible for the recruiting, development and staffing of 50 consulting professionals

Drew spent two years in the Washington, DC office of Mercer Management Consulting, managing strategy and operational improvement initiatives for a broad array of telecommunications, high-tech, financial services and transportation clients.

Education:
M.B.A. from The Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina
B.S. Industrial Engineering, Drexel University

Linda J. Mahoney

Vice President
Linda’s consulting work focuses on helping organizations improve the productivity of sales channels individually and synergistically. She enjoys helping companies explore channel optimization strategies to identify the initiatives that will have the greatest impact on sales productivity – both in the short term and over an extended period of time.

A key area of emphasis is on effective sales strategy execution. This includes ensuring that sales strategies are pragmatic and can be successfully absorbed by the sales organization; creating management systems that provide early visibility into results; and developing communication materials that are compelling and appropriately focused.

Recent Engagements:
Linda recently worked with a global high technology firm to enhance the productivity of their Business Partner channel. The engagement began with profiling the type of Business Partners that would be most effective in selling their products into target markets. Analysis was then completed to identify gaps in the current portfolio of Business Partners. Leveraging input from the partner community, the value proposition was enhanced, including the development of a new Business Partner incentive plan. Implementation of the enhanced incentive plan has increased the number of “attractive” Business Partners, the number of new engagements from Business Partners, and average revenue per transaction four fold.

Prior Experience:
Linda held leadership positions at Time Warner and PepsiCo prior to entering management consulting. In these organizations, she gained experience effecting change in complex sales and marketing organizations. Prior to that, she worked for GTE (now Verizon) as a team leader with accountability for selling the outsourcing of application development and data center hosting targeted at the health care industry.

Education:
MS Michigan State University
BS The University of Connecticut, Summa Cum Laude with Distinction

Eric Maurer

Principal

Consulting Experience:
Eric Maurer is a Principal with The Alexander Group, Inc. a sales and marketing management consulting firm that specializes in the effective use of resources to maximize sales and profits for its clients. Mr. Maurer has eight years of management consulting experience, working with companies across several of the Firm’s key industries including telecommunications, communications equipment manufacturers, software, computer peripherals, and healthcare. Mr. Maurer is responsible for the Firm’s operations and personnel in the Midwest U.S. Mr. Maurer has worked on projects related to sales strategy, sales organization structure and job definition, quota setting and allocation and sales compensation design.

Recent projects include:
Developing a new coverage model for a Fortune 100 transportation company. The client merged multiple acquired organizations into one sales organization.
Working with a large capital equipment manufacturer to develop consistent job roles and incentive compensation structures for their global dealer network.
Improving sales effectiveness at a multi-national information provider.

Business Experience:
Prior to joining The Alexander Group, Mr. Maurer managed an independent retail operation. He was responsible for all purchasing, merchandising and staffing decisions.

Education:
BS University of Dayton in Marketing

Frank McGinnis

Principal

Consulting Interests: Frank McGinnis is a Principal with over 15 years of consulting experience working with both global corporations and smaller organizations across a variety of industry sectors including high tech, telecommunications, information services, consumer products and transportation. His work has focused on the key drivers of top line growth including product and service development, pricing strategy, sales force effectiveness, global account management and new market entry.

Recent Engagements:
Frank led the creation of a global sales strategy for one of the world’s largest airline reservations system providers. On another assignment, Frank led the organizational redesign of the 2,500 member field sales organization of one of the world’s largest telecommunications providers. Other projects have included developing sales organizations in overseas markets, post merger sales force integration and new product development.

Frank has published numerous articles on marketing and sales force effectiveness in business journals and leading business periodicals.

Prior Experience:
Before joining the Alexander Group, Frank was a Partner with the global consulting firm, A.T. Kearney. Prior to that Frank served as a Senior Engagement Manager for McKinsey and Company.

Education:
M.B.A., Yale School of Management, Yale University
B.A., Economics, Duke University

Marc Metzner

Vice President
Marc is a Vice President with The Alexander Group, and has over 15 years experience working across industries (e.g., publishing, telecom, computer software, services, and manufacturing) to improve sales and marketing strategy and effectiveness.

As National Director of the firm’s Sales Coverage Practice, he leads bi-monthly executive roundtables and benchmarking programs with Fortune 500 Sales and Marketing VPs on key sales strategy topics. He also frequently speaks and writes articles and white papers on best practices for optimizing sales coverage. Topics on which he has focused recently include: Managing Sales Transformation, Creating An Agile Sales Organization, New Products Selling, Sales Force Integration, Leveraging Inside Sales, and Change Management For Sales.

Recent Engagements:
Marc recently conducted an engagement with a major electronic publishing company to document the practices of their star sales reps and replicate these practices across the organization. The project started by clarifying desired strategies with senior management followed by evaluating the alignment of sales practices, time management, teamwork, coaching, and skills with strategy implementation. Marc helped define winning practices and produced detailed recommendations to improve sales coverage and productivity. The project team created individual development plans for all reps designed to scale up winning practices throughout the organization. The project has helped the client increase revenue growth, decrease cost of sales and improve new product launches.

Prior Experience:
Prior to joining The Alexander Group, Marc was a manager in an international Big Five consulting practice. There he worked on strategy development, market analysis, and sales organizational redesign for computer, high-tech and telecom companies, as well as strategy and market entry for telecom service providers.

Education:
MBA Yale School of Management, Yale University
MPA Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs, Princeton University
BA State University of New York

Barbara Meyers

Director

Consulting Experience:
Ms. Meyers is a director with The Alexander Group, Inc. As a member of the firms’ Healthcare Consulting Practice, over the past thirteen years, she has worked extensively in the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, medical product and health insurance industries. Ms. Meyers’ areas of concentration include sales strategy development, sales process analysis, coverage strategy, organization and job design, performance metrics, sales compensation design and quotas.

Business Experience:
Prior to joining The Alexander Group, Ms. Meyers spent nine years working for two major pharmaceutical companies, developing a broad base of experience in product management, marketing information management and sales. Her product management responsibilities included developing two launch campaigns to physicians and consumers and managing the implementation of a joint marketing partnership. In marketing information management, Ms. Meyers designed forecasting, pricing, and promotion response models to optimize the impact of sales resources and product promotion spending. As a field sales rep she promoted products to cardiologists and generalists.

Education:
Master of Science, Operations Research and System Analysis, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Bachelor of Arts, Mathematics, St. Olaf College

Michael R. Miller

Vice President
Mike is responsible for the firm’s management consulting practice in Stamford, CT. He works with clients in a variety of industries including technology, financial services, manufacturing, health products, and consumer goods in North America, Europe, and Asia. His client work focuses on sales strategy, organization restructuring, resource deployment, performance management, and incentive compensation. Mike is a frequent speaker on sales management topics, and enjoys the variety of working with clients across industries and around the world. In particular, Mike enjoys testing sales growth strategies from one industry to another to develop innovative consulting solutions for clients.

Recent Engagements:
Mike recently worked with a global electronics company to restructure field and telesales resources to improve customer coverage and territory alignment. He helped clarify customer coverage requirements, by segment, evaluated sales channel capabilities against those requirements, and redeployed sales resources to improve productivity.

He also recently worked with a global health products manufacturer to clarify sales job roles and develop appropriate incentives in ten countries. He developed an approach that permits the company to manage different sales forces around the world according to global principles and standard processes. At the same time, he identified the processes and practices that are more appropriately left to vary according to local market conditions and management judgment.

Prior Experience:
Prior to joining The Alexander Group, Mike worked for the general management consulting firm, A.T. Kearney, in New York. There he managed consulting engagements, mainly with communications and electronics firms. Previously, he worked for McGraw-Hill, where he directed content development and business development for an industry research business.

Education:
BA Wesleyan University

Christopher J. Nagle

Principal
Chris works on a variety of marketing and sales management issues. His areas of focus include market opportunity assessment, customer segmentation, sales organization and sales job design, resource sizing, and sales incentive programs.

Recent Engagements:
A recent engagement with a leading Biotech company examined the current coverage strategy and identified areas for improvement. The work focused on: a) Understanding resource time allocation for both selling and non-selling activities, and b) Mapping the increasingly complex prescription decision-making process, which included physicians, nurses, office management, managed care payers and patients.

An optimum coverage model was designed based on four criteria: 1) Sales representative capacity (i.e., available sales time), 2) Workload (i.e., number of physicians, call frequency and call duration, 3) Geographic drive time, and 4) Impact of managed care.

The result was a coverage model that allocated resources designed to reach and serve influencers along the entire buying continuum.

Prior Experience:
Prior to joining The Alexander Group, Chris worked in the pharmaceutical industry as a financial analyst, a sales representative, and as a product manager for three major pharmaceutical companies. His work as a financial analyst was in the new product development division of Sterling Winthrop. As a sales representative with Merck Pharmaceuticals, he was responsible for cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and vaccine products. He worked in product management for Glaxo Pharmaceuticals. His focus was on competitive revenue and market share analysis for the anti-ulcer market with emphasis on identifying opportunities to expand the market and preparing a marketing strategy for launching a product line extension.

Education:
MBA The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, The Kenan-Flagler Business School
BS Wake Forest University, The Wayne Calloway School of Business and Accountancy

James J. Stifler

Vice President
Jim’s consulting work is focused on helping Fortune 500 sales and marketing executives increase effectiveness, with particular emphasis on technology companies. His business career has been dedicated to sales and marketing management - as a practitioner and management consultant. He enjoys diagnosing sales growth challenges in extremely complex, multi-channel businesses and helping executives make fact-based decisions for improved performance.

Recent Engagements:
Jim recently helped senior management at a Fortune 500 technology company design and implement solutions for improving sales force productivity across all sales channels and geographies. The primary work steps included identifying and prioritizing top opportunities for improving sales productivity, helping executives communicate sales productivity priorities and key initiatives to the worldwide sales organization, and developing the management system for monitoring the impact of key sales productivity initiatives and improving sales productivity. Since program implementation, the amount of time sellers spend on quality selling time has increased, and seller feedback shows that the usage and effectiveness of several priority sales tools has improved.

Prior Experience:
Jim was in sales and marketing with Lexmark International prior to entering management consulting. With Lexmark his roles included building an effective business partner channel in a large geographic territory, and developing and growing business with select Fortune 500 accounts. In addition, he was the sales and marketing executive for an emerging technology company.

Education:
MBA Goizueta Business School, Emory University
BSBA University of Florida, with Honors

Gary S. Tubridy

Senior Vice President
Gary is the General Manager in charge of the Firm’s management consulting business. He is located in Stamford, CT. His consulting work is focused on increasing marketing and sales effectiveness with particular emphasis on technology and medical products companies. He has personally managed projects in sales organization design, sales force sizing and deployment, sales performance management, and sales compensation design. Gary’s interests include diagnosing sales management issues (e.g., declining or flat sales growth, increasing losses to competition, sales force turnover), and helping clients execute action plans to improve results. He is currently researching best practices of leading sales organizations in North America and enjoys organizing events specifically for top sales executives, including The Chief Sales Executive Forum. He is one of three founding stockholders of the Firm.

Recent Engagements:
Gary recently worked with a pharmaceutical company to identify bottlenecks in sales productivity. Using sales time data to calculate the true value of each selling hour, he helped re-prioritize call patterns and activities to ensure greater focus on high potential/low share accounts and relationships.

He also recently worked with a healthcare services provider to assess target segment potential and test whether sales strategy aligned with growth opportunity. He found over-emphasis on current, smaller clients at the expense of growth opportunity in the mid-market. He recommended re-deploying field assets toward higher potential mid-sized accounts while using tele-resources to maintain current business at smaller accounts.

Recent work at a building products manufacturer involved assessing sales compensation program alignment with a business plan that called for improved profit. He helped integrate profit margin into the performance metrics dashboard and sales incentive plans. The resulting plans emphasized value-added selling and lessened reliance on discounting.

Prior Experience:
Gary has been with The Alexander Group for 20 years. Prior to that, he was in sales with the IBM Corporation. At IBM he was responsible for accounts in the manufacturing, process, and financial services industries. He coordinated large account marketing activities, customer and sales representative training seminars, and local selling efforts for four national account sales teams.

Education:
MBA Graduate School of Business, Columbia University
BA Brown University

Paul Vinogradov

Vice President
Paul is responsible for The Alexander Group’s management consulting practice based in San Francisco, California. His consulting work focuses primarily on assisting clients to develop and execute sales management strategies that generate profitable revenue growth. His client work includes major engagements with Fortune 500 companies in software, hardware, networking, media, financial services, healthcare, general business to business, and retail. Paul enjoys assisting clients to discover and leverage industry-specific and cross-industry best practices for sales excellence. He has personally managed projects in customer segmentation, sales coverage and channels strategy, sales organization, sales force sizing, sales metrics dashboards, sales management practices, sales quota programs, sales compensation design, and sales and marketing operations. Paul finds that the collaborative nature of consulting suits his interests and passions to work alongside sales leaders to refine their vision, develop solutions, and drive change. He is a frequent speaker on sales effectiveness and sales compensation design.

Recent Engagements:
Paul recently worked with a networking products company to improve sales strategy in their channel sales organization. Through a series of focus groups and interviews on all six continents and a global survey on sales time and sales effectiveness, he helped lead a team to develop a more effective and efficient sales coverage model using channel partners.

He also recently managed a global sales compensation design effort for a major storage solutions company. As with many high tech firms, the client needed to shift from a product to a solution selling approach. The project aligned sales roles and the incentive program with the company’s growth strategy.

Paul also recently completed a sales effectiveness roadmap engagement with a major publishing company. Weeks of in-depth data analysis and fact-finding resulted in a short list of eight specific sales improvement solutions for the client including an inside sales model to improve field productivity and reach smaller customers, and a deployment model to improve new product sales.

Prior Experience:
Prior to joining The Alexander Group, Paul worked for an international economic development consulting firm in strategic planning and best practices research. Additionally, he has worked as a sales strategy consultant for an on-line directory services firm, as well as director of development for an international business economic development organization.

Education:
MBA University of Texas at Austin
BS Managerial Economics and Communication, University of California at Davis