Advisory Board
The Sales Executive Institute is guided by a team who has collectively helped companies to generate tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue.
Linda Connly
Bain Expert Partner, Commercial Excellence
Linda is an accomplished senior executive with over 25 years of high tech operating experience and an experienced board member. She currently is an Expert Partner in the Commercial Excellence practice for Bain & Company focused on go-to-market transformations. Linda is an independent
public board member at Zebra Technologies. Zebra (NASDAQ: ZBRA), an S&P 500 company, is a global leader in enterprise asset intelligence, ensuring every asset and worker on the edge is visible and optimized. Linda is a board member for Presidio, a leading NA IT solution provider focused on Digital Infrastructure, Business Analytics, Cloud, Security, and Emerging solutions.
She is also a Trustee at Saint Anselm College. Her expertise in architecting highly effective organizations is highlighted by her work leading EMC's
go-to-market integration team responsible for integrating 25K employees for the largest tech merger in history between EMC and Dell. Linda also was recognized for transforming and globalizing EMC's Global Inside Sales organization responsible for $3B in product and renewal revenue with 750
employees.
Mike is dynamic leader with over 25 years of sales experience who knows first-hand what it takes for a sales professional to succeed in today’s B2B landscape. Mike currently serves as CEO and on the Board of Directors of TechTarget (Nasdaq: TTGT), a global leader in purchase intent-driven marketing and sales services that deliver business impact for enterprise technology companies, overseeing over 1,000 employees across eight countries. He started as a sales representative within TechTarget and was promoted into many executive leadership positions throughout his 19-year career at TechTarget. He also serves on the Board of Advisors for the Martha Love School of Business at Elon University and is a lecturer at Babson College’s Sales In Action course for both undergraduate and graduate students. During his personal time Mike enjoys spending time with his family and has been coaching baseball (ages 8-18) for the past 25 years.
Michael Cotoia
CEO at TechTarget
Steve Niemiec
CRO at TechTarget
Steve has over 18 years in the technology media space, and is the CRO of TechTarget (Nasdaq: TTGT) where he is responsible for over $250m in annualized revenue. Steve is a transformative commercial leader with a focus on revenue strategy, sales expertise, and driven by a results philosophy. He currently oversees a global sales force of over 140 sales representatives based across the US, Western Europe, Beijing, Singapore and Sydney. Aligned with this, he drives the organization’s sales operations and customer experience teams. Steve is passionate about empowering his team members to reach their professional and personal goals, and he is constantly focused on evolving his teams at TechTarget to be customer centric, data-driven, and transformative. Steve currently resides in Massachusetts and has 3 kids. He is a graduate of Providence College.
Vini is an Associate Professor of Sales and Marketing at Babson College. For almost a decade, he led Babson Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Platform (BEEP), an accelerated growth-focused program for scaling up businesses and economies of cities around the world. In this capacity, he implemented multi-year entrepreneurship ecosystem projects such as Manizales Más (Colombia), Scale Up Milwaukee (USA), Scale Up Rio (Brazil), Scale Up North East Ohio (USA), Scale Up Panama, Scale Up Atlantic Canada (Canada), and Scale Up Xela (Guatemala). He views selling as a mindset and a life skill— the ability to get a resource or buy-ins and build lifelong relationships. In his quest to put sales at the center of all entrepreneurship discourse, he developed the sales curriculum at Babson College. “Entrepreneurship needs sales to sail,” he will often say. His unique experiential approach to course design and delivery makes his students, regardless of their career choices, fall in love with sales, the lifeblood of every organization. His articles have appeared in the Harvard Business Review and the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, among others. He is co-author of Entrepreneurial Selling - the facts every entrepreneur must know.
