VP of Business Development / Sirius Technologies, Singapore

Nov 2022 - Current

As the Vice President of Business Development and Solutions Sales, I am responsible for scaling the sales and presales teams for the global market. I ramped myself up quickly and am now on track to closing my first USD 1M opportunity. In addition to selling to strategic accounts, I created a sales handbook for sales/presales after reviewing our products and win-lost analysis. This handbook aims to increase the probability of winning in the enterprise segment. I also created a sales forecast model that aligns with CFO’s objectives: booking to cash-in. Note: Sirius did not have a sales forecast dashboard before I joined the company.

VP of Solutions Consulting / AI Rudder, Singapore

Nov 2021 - Jul 2022

As the Vice President of Global Solutions Consulting at AI Rudder in Singapore, I am responsible for building a world-class presales consulting team for the global market. My first achievement was working with the co-founders and other VPs to secure $50M Series B funding. In parallel, I analysed the existing operations and inserted solutions consulting and professional services functions into the value chain, which I used for strategic planning with the COO, the VP of Marketing, the VP of Sales, and the VP of Finance. After six months of execution, the Solutions Consulting team could win opportunities independently.

Regional VP of Solutions Consulting / Zendesk

2015 - 2021

I had the privilege to help Zendesk grow the Presales organisation in the Asia Pacific right from the beginning. My ultimate goal was to build a fast-growing sustainable presales team for the region, which was very challenging but achievable. For the first few years, my strategy was to focus on two areas: recruiting highly-skilled individuals who could be team leaders/managers in the future and enabling them with the proper foundation. I worked very closely with HR for the first one and borrowed the best Principal SC from the HQ for training presales resources in the job.

After a series of successful executions, I got the expanded responsibility of managing the entire Asia Pacific Presales team. I shifted my focus to coaching team leaders and line managers with this responsibility. I worked with local leaders in each territory to define localised processes on top of the global direction. Along the process, I created presales activities checklists that guarantee consistency and improve productivity.

After using these checklists for a year, we could identify impactful yet time-consuming activities. This led me to lead a Design Thinking workshop to find a way to automate those tasks. We then formed a virtual team in APAC to create a tool that allows users to automate 80% of their customisations from the pre-defined templates. This tool is now being used globally and could save around 8,000 man-hours per year.

Presales Lead, Southeast Asia & Korea / Microsoft

2004 - 2008, 2012 - 2014

I had many roles in Microsoft, and I worked for Microsoft twice. The first time in 2004 and the second time in 2012. My first role in Microsoft was the first Partner Technology Specialist for Asia, responsible for enabling partners for enterprise solutions. At that time, Microsoft was not well received as an Enterprise “Server” Stack vendor. My job was to prove to partners that Microsoft’s server technologies were enterprise-grade and then enable them to do solution-selling for Microsoft’s server stack.

After successful years in infrastructure products, I moved to Microsoft Dynamics, doing partner enablement before leading direct presales engagement for strategic accounts. Experience from partner enablement could help me coach local presales resources to win large deals consistently.

Note: In 2008, I left Microsoft for Eclipse Computing in the UK because of a coup d’etat in Thailand, and I had to find a safe place for my family.