Jim Hays, CEO & Principal Instigator
Jim is the Founder and CEO of the ASPIRE! Group. Jim possesses more than two decades of experience in both Sales and Sales Management position in the advanced business communications solutions market for leading companies, including ROLM, IBM, Octel, Intecom, Geotel, and Cisco. Jim pioneered the sale of integrated voice messaging systems for IBM/ROLM and Octel. Additionally, he has extensive background in the sale of Call Center/Customer Interaction Solutions for IBM/ROLM, Intecom, Geotel, and Cisco. Jim is a noted writer and speaker on Unified Communications and next-generation Customer Interaction solutions and strategies. His speaking engagements have included speaking on UC selling strategies at the Cisco Worldwide UC Partner Summit in Phoenix, AZ last fall, the recent Cisco FY08 Global Sales Meeting in Las Vegas, NV, and the Cisco Unified Communications Partner Summit in Miami Beach, FL in November.
Jim is a former Cisco employee who came to Cisco through its acquisition of Geotel Communications, a publicly-held software company focused on the Customer Interaction Solutions market. While at Cisco, he pioneered the sale of the very first Cisco IP Contact Centers and Customer Voice Portal systems. In addition to his work as a Cisco employee, Jim worked for key applications-focused Cisco Channel Partners, Spanlink and Vista IT. As an independent consultant, Jim developed many of the messaging and Go-to-Market strategies for the Customer Contact Business Unit at Cisco and coined the now widely-used term, Customer Interaction Network. His consulting work for Cisco also includes extensive work in the Go-to-Market strategies and messaging for the “QuickStart for Cisco Unified Communications” project.
Over the past four years, Jim has conducted over 150 workshops and trained more than 3,000 Cisco and Channel Partner sales professionals in over forty-seven different countries located throughout all four of Cisco’s US/Canada, Europe, Emerging Markets, and Asia Pacific Theatres.
Chris Luxford, Senior Consultant & Change Agent
As a long-time driving force in moving the Cisco ecosystem toward greater business relevance and sales excellence, the ASPIRE! Group has identified a critical gap in business process expertise and consulting services offerings within the existing sales engagements of Cisco and its Channel Partners.
After a worldwide search for an executive with the background and skills needed to lead an important new consultancy services practice, the ASPIRE! Group is pleased to announce the appointment of Chris Luxford to the company's executive team. His initial focus will be the development and launching of the ASPIRE! Group's new Business Process Transformation Methodologies and Consulting Services Practice. This unique new consultancy offering is being developed exclusively for Cisco and its authorized Channel Partners.
Luxford is the former CEO of 3D Networks Australia, a key Cisco Channel Partner focused on innovative business communications and collaboration solutions. A breadth and depth of industry expertise and visionary leadership skills enabled Chris to accelerate 3D Networks' success in the sales and implementation of Cisco advanced communications applications, including sophisticated customer interaction environments. Chris has also been a strong advocate within the Cisco ecosystem for improving interoperability between Cisco and Microsoft as a means for facilitating innovation within customer environments.
Prior to joining 3D Networks, Chris was a pioneer in the development and growth of the Australian call center market. As a senior consultant with SFC Consulting Services, he excelled at helping his clients understand how to better align their people, processes, and technologies to achieve mission-critical business outcomes.
ASPIRE! Group CEO, Jim Hays, emphasized that, "The addition of an experienced Cisco Channel Partner executive and consultant of Chris' caliber further expands our ability to deliver on the ASPIRE! Group's mission of empowering the Cisco sales ecosystem to more effectively sell the value of integrating business strategy, processes, and models with advanced communications and collaboration applications, infrastructrures, and architectures."
Mike Downs, Senior Instructor
Mike has served in both individual contributor and sales management roles for a wide range of technology companies, including Cisco Systems, Webline Communications, Sterling Software, Secure Computing, and Seagate Technology. While at Cisco, Mike was the Regional Manager for the team that sold and implemented the very first IP Contact Centers. His “real world” perspective on selling to executives is a result of having served as a Vice President of Sales for nearly a third of his career.
Mike brings more than 20 years of relevant sales and sales management background to the ASPIRE! Group and its workshop experience. Mike’s experience leading a sales team at Webline Communication, promoting the use of Web Collaboration as a tool for more effective communication, was instrumental in the eventual acquisition of Webline by Cisco Systems. Mike has had instrumental roles in several start-up companies, including leading these start-ups in to the acquisition phase of their evolution. Mike’s experience participating in board level meetings provides a strong foundation for relating the significance of top level IT decision-making, by non IT executives, for participants in the workshops he conducts.
Mike’s experience at Cisco coupled with significant executive-level experience enables him to bring greater relevancy to ASPIRE!’s consultative sales strategies and its workshops. As a result of this experience, he has the unique ability to help clients cross the chasm from what Unified Communications products “are” to what they “do” and then shape this differentiation into language that effectively creates demand for Unified Communications with executives.
Over the past several years Mike has conducted more than 100 workshops in dozens of countries in every theatre around the world for Cisco and its authorized Channel Partners.
Andrew Cadwell, Senior Consultant, Partner Strategies
Andrew comes to the ASPIRE! Group from KickStart Alliance where he has been doing extensive consulting work for Cisco and a number of Cisco Channel Partners. His most recent work involved the creation of rapid-adoption value propositions and competitive strategies for Cisco Advanced and Emerging Technologies.
Prior to launching his consulting career, Andrew was the Vice-President of Northwest Operations for INX, Inc., a Cisco Gold Partner with Masters Certifications in Advanced Technologies. While at INX, he quickly grew the business, completed mergers and acquisitions, and accelerated Cisco Advanced Technology sales and delivery initiatives. Andrew’s work with INX began as a result of its acquisition of Infogroup Northwest, where he served as Executive Vice President and Principal. His Cisco ecosystem experience also includes serving as the Cisco Solutions Manager and an Enterprise Client Business Manager for AT&T Corporation.
With nearly two decades of business development, strategic marketing, sales leadership, and operational management experience in technology, Andrew has an enviable track record of profitable business growth and a demonstrated level of expertise at capturing and retaining market share within the Cisco ecosystem. Andrew’s three day training seminars with Cisco VAR clients are designed to deliver custom strategic training in the areas of Sales Positioning, and Project Management as well as Management and Engineering training.
Andrew’s collaboration with the ASPIRE! Group on the development of several new workshops has served as an integral part of the Transactional to Transformational Selling Framework that is being piloted around the globe within both Cisco and the Channel Partner community.
Janet Gregory, Senior Consultant
Janet Gregory is a senior consultant and workshop leader who brings extensive expertise in sales and marketing consultancy and sales force development to the ASPIRE! Group.
Janet has more than twenty-five years of experience in sales and sales management for leading companies within the Unified Communications industry, including ROLM, IBM, Octel, Latitude Communications, and ShoreTel. Her career began with sales and sales management roles for digital PBX/ACD and voice messaging pioneer, IBM/ROLM. Her responsibilities expanded at voice messaging leader, Octel Communications. Janet was on the founding executive team at Latitude Communications, which was later acquired by Cisco. As VP Sales at Latitude, she lead the company to a successful IPO. Following Latitude, Janet served as the VP of Sales at ShoreTel, a Cisco competitor in IP Telephony. She helped ShoreTel become profitable and was responsible for developing effective Go-to-Market strategy, sales messaging and sales process. Her most recent experience prior to teaming with the ASPIRE! Group was as Founder and Principal of KickStart Alliance, a sales and marketing consulting firm.
She helped establish a technology partnership between Cisco and Latitude prior to Latitude’s acquisition by Cisco. Her current knowledge of Cisco UC products was derived from the extensive competitive analysis that she conducted while formulating ShoreTel competitive strategy against Cisco and more recently in her work collaborating with current Cisco projects and sales teams.
Janet has trained, coached, and mentored hundreds of highly-successful sales professionals. Janet has prior certification as a trainer for Xerox Professional Selling Skills and SPIN® Selling. Recent experience with KickStart Alliance has involved sales development, custom workshop development and delivery.
Michael Dillhyon
Michael Dillhyon currently serves as the Managing Director of Avadilon and Co., a Swiss-based investment firm specializing in exit planning for latter stage software and emerging technology firms. Michael brings to Avadilon a successful track record as an entrepreneur, principal investor, and strategic advisor.
Previous to Avadilon, Mr. Dillhyon founded two US firms focused on the telephony and unified communications market space, Netelligent Corporation and ActiveObjects where he held the roles of President, Chairman and CEO respectively.
Over the course of his career, Michael has held strategic management and technical consulting roles with firms such as Sequoia, Analysts International, Panurgy and Kizan. He speaks regularly on the business of software. In addition, Mr. Dillhyon is a weekly contributor on global management issues for World Radio Switzerland (“The Consultant”).
Mr. Dillhyon holds degrees in Biochemistry and Anthropology from Florida State University, as well as a MBA in Finance and Economics from the Olin School of Business. Michael has completed residencies in international finance at the London School of Business, economics at Fudan University in Shanghai and is now completing his second year of Harvard Business School’s Owner/President program (OPM).
Born in Miami, Florida and raised in the US, Michael now lives with his wife and two children in the canton of Zug, Switzerland.
