Chris Drake Email and Phone Number

Focus on understanding customer requirements and generating value propositions. Skilled at understanding funding, purchasing timelines, and route to market. Strong communication and collaboration skills within my organization and partner ecosystem. Achievements:• Achieved Presidents Club multiple times• Received numerous Quarterly employee sales awards • Consistently exceeded quota• Built a large, customer base and diversified pipeline• Teamed with strategic partners and resellers to prepare winning proposals • Orchestrated multiple off-site customer events including lunch-and-learns, and product demonstrations that resulted in greater client interest and follow-on sales.• Provide an influential role in driving product improvements based on customer requirements

Identified customer requirements and provided technical presentations that highlighted key differentiators versus competitive offerings.Focused on becoming a trusted advisor and establishing long-term customer relationships.Collaborated with partner ecosystems to design performant and cost effective solutions for the customer base.

I contributed to the sale of networking and storage solutions for this value-added reseller (VAR) that provided custom hardware/software systems design. I consulted with federal, state/local government, and commercial customers to gather project requirements. As part of my role, I generated proposals, recommending optimal strategies for architecture and configuration. Wearing multiple hats, I delivered in-person pre-sales presentations, POCs, and customer training classes. I designed and implemented solutions for infrastructure, storage, data encryption, bare-metal restore, volume management, clustering, replication, archiving, and WAN optimization.Achievements▪ Determined architectural requirements, assessing project scope to ensure engagement success; made strategic product recommendations to satisfy client needs that resulted in consistent quota achievement.▪ Attended social functions and events to foster improved partner relationships, resulting in additional sales volume; interfaced with VMWare, EMC, NetApp, HP, Dell, IBM, Veritas, Symantec, and Riverbed vendors.▪ Obtained deal registrations to increase margins and profitability; passed savings along to customers to win more opportunities based on competitive pricing.▪ Created hands-on demonstration environments to illustrate server and network appliance capabilities; set up hardware/software at meeting venues, preparing informative content designed to attract new business.▪ Participated in combatant command tech days and trade shows, arranging tabletop exhibits and preparing briefings; presented at seminars with 10-20 participants highlighting best practices for deployment.

As team lead, I managed system design, build, and performance testing for 3-tier financial applications at Chase Home Finance (CHF). In addition to assessing the functionality of web-based user interfaces, I analyzed application performance and data management layers. I enjoyed serving on the enterprise technology steering committee. I also generated RFIs/ RFPs to identify potential hardware and software vendors to meet enterprise needs. I was able to evaluate storage area networks (SANs) and test various asset management systems. Achievements▪ Established measurement criteria for product evaluations, generating key metrics to assess stability, scalability, and user-friendliness; simulated 2000+ virtual users using various testing tools.▪ Met with executive leadership to report research findings, providing product insights from performance testing and price comparisons; presented brief summaries that included purchasing recommendations. ▪ Took charge of staffing, scheduling, and budgeting for performance test lab, providing hands-on systems administration to build and support servers, storage environments, networks, and financial applications.▪ Conducted detailed engineering analysis, preparing PowerPoint presentations for technical and non-technical audiences; crafted materials to ensure information was clearly understood by all stakeholders.