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Summary

During his time at Cisco and Synamedia he developed his skills in a variety of environments ranging from small start-up to leading global corporation, across multiple business and public sector areas, including:

• Building, developing and leading high-performance international sales and business development teams with a record of accomplishing growth across EMEA, APAC and Americas
• Business process design and implementation including Dynamics 365 Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solution configuration, eCommerce Portal (PowerApps), Enterprise Resource Planning (D365 FAO), Business Intelligence (PowerBI), and cloud services including Azure and AWS and
• Modern Workplace transformation with productivity software (Office 365) – most importantly successfully transforming organisations to adopt and realise the benefits
• Planning and implementing major business transformation and offshoring / nearshoring / outsourcing programs
• Extensive experience with Mergers, Acquisitions and Divestitures
• Negotiating and winning complex multi-$M software and SaaS solution contracts, working at CXO level. Leading both direct sales and business development teams and orchestrating virtual teams across product management, engineering, services, finance, security and legal
• Many years of experience in Technology, Service Provider, Media, and Public Sectors
• Successful Go-to-market strategy, planning and execution including partnership and reseller development, content creation and web presence
• Product management and product marketing experience with in-depth understanding of many technology areas and their business applications including Big Data, Cloud, Collaboration, CRM, Data centre, eCommerce, IoT, Networking, Security, Software development, Unified Communications and Video
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, familiar with presenting to and building relationships with CXOs while presenting at events with audiences of thousands
• Extensive experience and successful record of accomplishment driving change and operational excellence – convincing people of the business benefits, linked to technology and overcoming objections to change

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Sales and Business Development

Mike has built and led successful teams of sales and business development professionals across EMEA, APAC and the Americas focussed on selling complex software, networking, and SaaS solutions, where he drove business growth to in excess of 200% of target and closing deals ranging from $100Ks to $10Ms.

Based on his extensive sales and business development experience he can aid you with:

• Recruitment of sales and business development professionals
• Creating and executing Go-To-Market strategies
• Developing and delivering sales training focussed on executive engagement and solution selling
• Running global sales meetings
• Developing and delivering novel “dual screen” presentations and demonstrations to CxO audiences
• Responding to and winning large and complex RFPs
• Profit and Loss deal analysis
• Negotiating complex contracts
• Creating sales incentive plans to drive focus on winning new business

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Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Mike has extensive experience as the executive sponsor and business owner of CRM for sales, marketing, supply chain and finance. He has handled the complete definition, creation, launch, training, and operation of a new CRM platform. He can help you with either a new or updated CRM that will accelerate your business, from lead to cash including:

• Defining and optimising business processes
• Converting business requirements into detailed system requirements that your IT and vendor teams can implement
• Advising on CRM platform selection
• Outbound marketing, event management and lead generation
• Contact management, profiling, and interaction tracking
• Opportunity qualification, management, and development
• Forecasting processes, dashboards, reports, and analysis
• Automated quoting of complex solutions including use of Configure Price Quote (CPQ) platforms
• Integration into finance and supply chain platforms for fulfilment, billing, and revenue recognition
• Integration of CRM with productivity and collaboration tools and business processes to drive increased productivity, including Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Exchange, SharePoint and Power BI
• User training for sales, marketing, finance, and supply chain

Mike’s CRM platform experience includes Microsoft Dynamics 365, Saleforce.com, Power BI, and Tableau.

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eCommerce Portals

Mike’s eCommerce platform experience includes Microsoft PowerApps Portals, Microsoft Azure Active Directory with Single Sign On (SSO), and Amazon.com B2C.

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Operations

Mike has significant operations experience, particularly in sales and services, and can aid you to optimise or transform the efficiency of your organisation.

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Business Transformation and Offshoring / Nearshoring / Outsourcing

Mike has led business transformation projects from first concept through to execution including off shoring to Asia and Eastern Europe, resulting in $Ms of savings. He can aid you with strategy and execution to deliver significant cost savings while keeping a high-quality workforce and customer service.

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Mergers, Acquisitions and Divestitures

Mike has been deeply involved in multiple acquisition integrations of multi-$B business and a major divestiture and later new business setup.

Mike has extensive experience evaluating potential acquisitions and subsequently integrating acquired companies. He can aid you with:

• Evaluating potential acquisition targets financially and culturally and assessing how they could help you grow revenue and expand into new markets
• Planning and executing acquisition integrations to quickly achieve synergies while keeping the unique culture of the acquisition and adopting its best practices into your company

Mike’s experience in company divestures enables him to help both the selling or buying company including the terms and conditions of the sale agreement and later the setup of a new standalone business or merger with an existing business. His experience accelerating completion of Transitionary Service Agreements (TSAs) can save both parties $Ms.

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New Business Setup

Mike was a key member of the business setup team for Synamedia, which was a new company formed from the sale of Cisco’s Service Provider Video Business Unit to Permira Capital. His work enabled Synamedia to save $Ms in TSA fees and quickly get running as a new business. Mike also has experience with start-up setup including the founding of his own consulting and e-commerce businesses.

His experience can aid you with either the setup of a new business or optimising an existing business.

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Modern Workplace Digital Transformation

Mike has a passion for modern workplace digital transformation. He was the executive sponsor and business champion at Synamedia, which was a newly formed ~3,000 employee company formed from the sale of Cisco’s SP Video business unit. He was a key member of the team that evaluated the productivity platform options including Slack, G-Suite, WebEx, and Office 365. He led the business adoption of Office 365 and Power BI, integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365, Atlassian Jira and Confluence, together with ServiceNow.

Mike championed the transition from a slow email centric siloed culture to an agile and open culture enabled by Microsoft Teams for collaboration, Office 365 co-authoring and Power BI business dashboards. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic Mike championed and aided the transition to home working with a strong emphasis on video-based collaboration.

Mike’s experience can aid you no matter where you are in your organisation’s modern workplace digital transformation. Whether that be by helping you choose a new platform, integrate your approach or drive adoption.

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Product Management and Product Marketing

Mike has a strong background in product management and product marketing from Cisco. His experience can help you with many aspects of product management including pricing and go-to-market strategies, competitive analysis, and positioning.

His strong technical and business understanding can help you effectively communicate your products, services, or solutions, to C-level audiences. Including helping you create business benefit focussed content such as:

• Combined presentations and demonstration workshops
• Web content
• White papers
• Social media presence

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Channels & Partnerships

Mike has considerable experience finding and developing distributors and resellers channels to market as well as complementary partnerships, from both his time at Cisco and Synamedia. This ranged from working with some of the largest SIs and IT vendors in the world through to highly focussed specialist resellers and technology providers.

His experience can aid you in refining your go-to-market, create or refine your partner programs and find great partners to accelerator your business.

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Service Provider

Mike has many years’ experience with SPs across the global, particularly in EMEA with a focus on sales and business development. He has worked at CxO level across networking, data centre, cloud, collaboration, and video domains.

His experience and contacts can aid you with go-to-market into the SP sector or if you are an SP help you get the most out of your vendor partnerships.

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Media, Broadcast and OTT Video

Mike has worked extensively in the media, broadcast, and OTT video sector at both Cisco and Synamedia in sales and business development leadership. He and his team won major video contacts across this and the SP sectors. His experience with TV and Video platforms, content security, anti-piracy and media encoding, and delivery can aid both technology companies working in this sector as well as media companies, broadcasters, and OTT video providers.

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Public Sector and IoT

Mike worked in public sector in EMEA for many years, with a strong focus on Local Government and Education. He was a member of the Cisco EMEA Public Sector leadership team where he led Cisco’s business development group and founded and ran the Cisco Network Academy Program (CNAP) in Europe. CNAP provided an outstanding education in networking for 100,000s of students across 1000’s of universities, colleges and schools. Built on a world class curriculum, labs, and Learning Management System (LMS). Mike led Cisco’s Building Schools for the Future program engagement which focussed on using technology to create Smart Buildings and Smart Learning. Mike was also one of the founders of UK NetYear, a not-for-profit dedicated to enabling schools to build their own networks.

Mike led Cisco’s EMEA work on Smart Cities, which had a strong focus on IoT as well as organisational and cultural transformation, which frequently lead to C-level engagement with public sector leaders and at times politicians – particularly at the annual Cisco Public Sector Summit at the Nobel Peace Prize.

His experience in public sector and IoT can aid both public sector organisations looking to accelerate their transformation as well as supplier’s intent on expanding their public sector business and partnerships.

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Technology Experience

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Skills and Personal Expertise

Quotes from 360 feedback and LinkedIn:

“Mike’s strength is his ability to gain the confidence of his team and to set clear and reachable objectives for the individuals”

“Mike is the go-to person for innovation, collaboration, new gadgets and great ideas. Mike was my manager for over a year in Cisco. He always kept the team motivated and shared knowledge. I believe he is one of the best managers I ever had, as his people skills are highly developed. His work ethics is immaculate and so easy to work together with. He goes out of his way when you ask for some help and guidance”

“Mike is extremely inspiring to work with. He combines his knowledge, the market opportunities and creativity rarely seen in Cisco. He is very likable and strong in building relationships both within and outside Cisco and excellent in cross functional work. He is very knowledgeable and proud about Cisco. During my 8 years in Cisco Mike is the best manager I have had”

“He is a demanding manager but leads by example gaining people’s respect and commitment. He loves Cisco and his passion shows”

 “Mike is a strong analytics thinker and pragmatic. Has genuine drive to excel in his role and leverages his past knowledge to leverage developing strategy and team”

“Creative thinking. Good technology understanding. Good team builder!”

“People skills – engaging, upbeat demeanour and ability to communicate clearly”

“Very analytical, knows how to develop effective programs for the field. Understands the impact of new market trends”

“Mike is highly driven, creative thinking individual who can be relied upon to deliver upon the needs of the business. He manages multiple level stakeholders well and has been a positive leader for progressive change. It’s been a pleasure to work with Mike over the years and I would highly recommend him”

“Mike is intelligent, articulate, good humoured and understands the transformational capability of technology”

“Mike is a business and solutions driven individual who can be relied upon to handle complex cross functional challenges and drive them to closure. Mike can also be trusted to find creative ways to find new framework to meet new business challenges”

“Mike is an exemplary business executive. I have worked with him for over a decade and have seen him lead diverse and high-performance teams. That which distinguishes Mike from other execs is the clarity of vision that he possesses, his clear communication style, and his ability to drive for results while simultaneously maintaining a calming influence”

“I worked with Mike at Synamedia for a year. My primary interaction with Mike was as the CRM (Microsoft Dynamics 365) and eCommerce (Microsoft PowerApps Portal) exec sponsor and business owner. In this role Mike was instrumental in the launch and continuous improvement of both CRM and the reseller/customer-facing portal at Synamedia. Mike was a great interface to the business, including sales, marketing, finance, product management and supply chain. He knew Synamedia’s business inside-out and had a clear vision of how CRM should be meeting the requirements of Synamedia’s quote-to-cash processes. As the CRM business owner Mike challenged the business and the CRM delivery team as/when needed, including changing business processes where it made more sense vs simply automating all current processes. He was also very pragmatic when balancing requirements vs CRM native functionality. Mike is very business, technically and analytically minded; over the course of this past year he has produced many, very detailed business requirements documents. Mike cared deeply about the user experience and to that end he ensured that the CRM solution was as easy to use as possible. He also provided very good training for Synamedia teams and resellers, including documentation, webinars, video tutorials and one-to-ones. On top of all that, Mike is a genuinely good person, with a great sense of humour, and is a pleasure to work with”

“I have known Mike McKeown since 2004 when I created the Public Sector vertical at Cisco. Mike was one of the key individuals in the team, leading our activities in Education and Local Governments. He was always willing to engage and assist individuals in the field. His knowledge in Public Sector was extremely helpful and his creativity was key as he engaged with new concepts in the field. I highly recommend Mike and would be willing to have a discussion if needed to explain my enthusiasm for this individual”

“Mike spearheaded a pilot of Microsoft Teams to evaluate and champion best practices for collaborative working across the globe within Synamedia. As the success of this platform grew, Mike’s incredible energy and driving force ensured that Teams has played a crucial role in our strong customer relationships and seamless processes, both internally and externally. When faced with a challenge, Mike’s technical knowledge and ‘can do’ attitude is a huge benefit to the team. At Synamedia, we are proud of the Modern Workplace Management solutions that we have adopted, particularly during these months of lockdown”

“I had the pleasure of working with Mike in both Cisco and Synamedia and throughout I can say that Mike is one of those natural catalysts to motivate and get things done which would be beneficial in any environment. Mike has a natural ability to provide clear articulate consultation on specialist subjects and to pragmatically adapt, fine tune and distil the key take always for any given audience in a manner which each person can relate to”

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Education

Mike holds a BSc Hons in Computer Science and Mini-MBA from INSEAD

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Personal

Mike is an active member of his local community; until recently he was a Parish Councillor for his local village and Events Committee chairman of the Lower Mill Estate Homeowners Association (LMEHA) where he organised and ran summer and New Year events for 200+ people. He previously chaired the LMEHA for 3 years.

His main hobby is photography. In addition to taking and editing photographs, he also runs a local photography club and organises an annual competition.

He also enjoys clay pigeon shooting and scuba diving with his sons. Mike loves the use of technology in his and his family’s lives. His home is automated with Alexa, Phillips Hue Lighting, Nest Thermoset, Sonos Music & Home Theatre and Logitech Harmony Device Control. He also believes technology can help the environment. He moved to owning a Tesla EV and offsetting his heating and flight carbon emissions.