Peter Sulava
Account Manager | Salesperson | Customer Success
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About
Successful sales professional with 14+ years of sales success with a focus on new logo acquisition, supporting, managing, and growing accounts, consistently delivering multi-million-dollar revenues.
Business acumen to build pipeline, manage long sales cycles, and partnering with cross-functional pursuit teams, closing deals by solving business problems for significant value and ROI impacts.
Engaging, authentic, compassionate relationship-builder with network of key contacts in financial services, automotive manufacturing, distribution, retail, local government, energy/utility, hospitals/healthcare, and communications.
Result-driven, agile learner who rapidly builds technical subject matter expertise and key relationships.
Experience
IBM 2008 to 2022
Account Manager, Enterprise Solutions (2015 to 2022)
- Promoted to lead sales of enterprise storage, network infrastructure, and hyper converged solutions as well as open-source security and analytics software to strategic accounts and SMBs.
- Served as Sales Trainer and mentor to 15 staff members, developing peak performing sales teams. Developed sales strategies, techniques, scripts, and collateral for use by sales team.
- Developed productive business partnerships with OEMS, distributors (VADs) and resellers (VARs): Arrow, CDW, Converge, Ingram Micro, Tech Data, Brocade, Cisco, Kyndryl, Red Hat, Splunk, and others.
- Managed multi-year sales cycles to win strategic accounts: Cox Communications, Epic Global, Fiserv, Home Depot, Navicent Health. Built business cases to prove >10X ROI on multimillion-dollar deals.
- Acquired sponsors to fund sales and client appreciation events.
- Gained deep insights into IBM’s complex global supply chain to ensure on-target delivery of client solutions and quarterly revenue recognition.
- Recognized as a global subject matter expert and consistent top performer, earning maximum bonuses and raises for OTE.
- Closed sales of $4.4M-$9M per year; exceeded quota by 110%-170%.
- Promoted to serve on a strategic sales team of 8, serving as a Presales Engineer in complex storage sales to Fortune 500s in the Eastern U.S.
- Contributed to multi-million-dollar deals with The Federal Reserve Bank, SunTrust, Bank of New York, Equifax, and Home Depot.
- Developed value proposition by producing briefings, proof of concept (POCs), and total cost of ownership (TCOs), differentiating IBM’s existing and emerging technologies across security, performance management, and physical infrastructure solutions.
- Enabled team delivery of 120% to a $15M goal in 2015 “100% Club.”
- Consulted with diverse international clients to evaluate their storage environments, producing recommendations to scale up, improve uptime, address security gaps, and reduce costs.
- Produced, presented, and defended recommendation for software defined storage, comprehensive reporting tools, disaster recovery, backup, and consistency across data centers to C-suite executives in financial, insurance, and communications industries.
Education
KENNESAW STATE UNIVERSITY: Pursuing Bachelor of Business Administration: Marketing concentration, anticipated 2023.
Key courses: Consumer Behavior, Professional Selling, Marketing Research, social media, Management, Finance, Accounting, International Marketing, Advertising, B2B Marketing. GPA 3.5
GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY
Associate of Science, Physics
TRAINING & CERTIFICATIONS: Salesforce CRM, Security/Cloud/Infrastructure Sales, Kubernetes, Open Shift, Open Source, Hybrid Selling, Spin Selling, Call Management, Banking and Insights, Architectural Selling Professional Expert Certification, Financial Selling: Executive Conversations, IBM storage, security/AI/BI software certifications
Product Certifications:
IBM Professional Selling Certification: Experienced and then Expert
Hybrid Cloud Certification
Insight Selling to the CxO
Financial Selling: Executive Conversations
