Because of the current economic climate our publication has started a series of discussions with professional individuals meant to engage our readers with relevant companies and their representatives in order to discuss about their involvement, what challenges they have had in the past and what they are looking forward to in the future. This sequence aims to present a series of experiences, recent developments, changes and downsides in terms of their business areas, as well as their goals, values, career history, the high-impact success outcomes and achievements.
Results oriented, talented and innovative technology professional with over 15-years of achievement in progressively challenging roles in Fortune 500 companies and software startups leading sales initiatives across Asia Pacific, UK, Europe, Japan, Latin America, Middle East, and North America, Rodney Foreman has broad technical knowledge base balanced by well-developed leadership and organizational skills with a demonstrated talent for exceeding corporate goals.
More about Cobalt Iron and Rodney’s experience can be found below:
Tell us more about your role in Cobalt Iron?
I am the Chief Revenue Officer at Cobalt Iron. We provide a Software as a Service solution for Data Protection. My role is primarily focused on leading direct and indirect sales success. I define the sales strategy and go to market for our solution across Europe, UK, Middle East, Africa, Canada and North America. I work closely with our marketing team to define sales and marketing campaigns to attract customers and drive brand awareness. I work with our channel partners to ensure they are focused on our brand and selling to Enterprise customers. I support our sales team and partners to make sure they are successful in the market.
What is the most difficult part of your job? But the most rewarding one?
Most difficult part of my job lately is dealing with the economic uncertainty created by COVID-19. This has lengthened sales cycles and frozen customer budgets making it difficult to sell our solution. The most rewarding part of my job is witnessing the value our customers obtain from buying our Data Protection solution.
Is there anything that you would change about your professional path?
No, I’ve had a career that has taken me from technical design and architecture to product management to channel, mid market and OEM sales to CRO. It has been a very rewarding career.
What’s your key strategy for the development of your company?
Our strategy is primarily focused on delivering a Data Protection platform that works across multiple backup and recovery vendor’s products to provide a single user interface and analytics engine for the Enterprise customer. Our partnership with IBM is very strategic and we will have some major announcements that grow our relationship and expand our presence together in the market next year. Our development and success is built around the continued success of our customers and that is the foundation of everything we do at Cobalt Iron.
What do you think about the next period of time, keeping in mind the pandemic and the new business climate? How will your industry be affected?
The health and safety of everyone is top of mind. The face to face customer meetings are now accomplished via Zoom and I think this will be the standard for some time into the future. The IT industry has been affected as we must enable a remote workforce and the need to have true SaaS based solutions is much more prominent. Data and the analytics of data will be more and more important in health care and other industries as AI and BI becomes more prominent in the services we all utilize and products we purchase.
What books do you have on your nightstand?
I am reading a lot of books written by Brene’ Brown, Reboot by Jerry Colonna and Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss is a book I reference regularly.
