I’m very proud and honored to manage a highly skilled and dynamic partner leadership team here at Pure Storage. It takes true collaboration, focus, grit, and a healthy dose of humor to continue to expand our global ecosystem. It’s also vital that we ensure all routes to market include the best of the best Resellers, Distributors, Global System Integrators, Managed Service Providers, and Technology Alliances that our customers deserve. Our award-winning Partner Program is one reason why our partners like working with Pure, but another reason is our incredible team of leaders who have just been named to CRN’s Women of the Channel 2023 list.
It’s a Sweep…Again! CRN’s ARC Category of Enterprise Network Storage Hardware
Partner Focus First and Always
It’s no surprise to anyone here at Pure that so many women from our partner team have been included on this list. This impressive recognition is primarily thanks to their dedication to the channel while pursuing successful outcomes with each engagement and campaign. It’s also due to Pure’s unwavering commitment to having a strong, diversified workforce in which employees can achieve high levels of personal and professional success. I’m privileged to work with such talented, dedicated women and thrilled to highlight their work in this blog post.
Leaders Who Excel
Samara Halterman is the Global Head of Partner and Alliance Marketing. Thanks to spending many years building and developing a highly successful team with a channel partner, she brings a fresh and unique perspective to Pure on what our partners value. Samara is responsible for leading Pure’s global channel across all routes to market. This includes marketing strategy and execution, spanning the “to/with/through” global marketing campaigns, and promoting programs that maximize positive outcomes for Pure’s partners and customers. She’s a data-driven marketer who asks “How can we make it happen?” when faced with a challenge while supporting a partner’s sales efforts.
Samara pushes boundaries and welcomes opportunities to think creatively when developing new programs and campaigns. It helps the customer, the partner, and Pure Storage. She truly wakes up every day to wave the partner flag at Pure!
Megan Minkiewicz has recently been promoted to Sr. Director, Global Partner Programs & Experience, as a result of her passionate focus on building an innovative and award-winning Partner Program. Megan has more than 26 years of consumer, SMB, and enterprise channel marketing and partner management experience in high tech companies. She has a proven record of success in leading large strategic initiatives, strategy, and programs within the channel. She’s achieved success across all sizes of companies, from startups to $5 billion entities. She’s a huge advocate for our partners’ success, encouraging them to differentiate their offerings as they respond to ever-changing customer needs and requirements.
Megan’s innate adaptability allows her to understand and appreciate the partner experience and what it takes to engage successfully across all routes to market and a myriad of personalities and expectations.
Lauren Rodabaugh is the Director of Global Partner Marketing and leads a team that supports Pure’s top managed partners. She’s responsible for developing strategic marketing plans across the Reseller, Global System Integrator, and Managed Service Provider routes to market. Lauren uses her creativity to build meaningful demand generation programs for partners to use to build pipeline. She and her team understand the opportunities that come with growing channel capacity, and keep a maniacal focus on collaborating with partners to find new opportunities to scale their businesses.
Cheri Schumacher is the Sr. Director, Subscription Go-To-Market on my team. With more than 25 years of experience managing partner relationships and driving the transformation of partner sales strategies, she has a passion for increasing partner execution and effectiveness through automation, enablement, and operational improvements. Cheri leverages her in-depth knowledge of sales processes and best practices to develop programs that expand the intelligence, productivity, and goal achievement of Pure’s partner sales teams. She has a keen focus on creating models for partners to sell subscription services. This includes the “why” and “how” of selling subscriptions for them to establish long-term relationships and successful annual recurring revenue.
One of Cheri’s strongest skills is being persistent and having a “never give up” attitude. It helps her transform initiatives into actions and results that drive change for our partners and for Pure.
Anja Stadelhofer-Walsh holds the exciting role of Director, Global Alliance Marketing, at Pure Storage. Anja truly understands the importance of a global role, thanks to growing up in Germany. She’s an accomplished international marketer with a unique background of working in the channel. When she said “yes” to Pure Storage in 2017, Anja brought more than 20 years of progressive experience in channel, Alliances, OEM partnerships, and global marketing to us. She enjoys working in a fast-paced environment with globally distributed and cross-functional teams. Her passion is in creating and implementing a full lifecycle for new programs from scratch. At Pure, Anja drives thought leadership and awareness, demand generation, and pipeline creation.
Thanks to her global perspective, she embraces every opportunity to learn best practices both professionally and personally. Anja applies what she learns each day, in each project, and with each alliance relationship to new challenges and opportunities to help Pure’s partners be successful.
Kristine Wedum has been the Channel Sales Director for North Central & Canada for more than three years here at Pure and has spent her entire career in the channel. It’s led to her passion for building an unrivaled ecosystem of partners to deliver an exceptional experience to customers. Over the course of the last decade, Kristine has built a professional brand that centers upon operational excellence, creativity, collaboration, and execution. She loves to create success through new programs, new strategies, or new approaches to help her partners and teammates reach goals at higher and higher levels. Kristine leads a team that thrives on exceptional enthusiasm, motivation, and personal commitment to producing incredible results for all partners.
Kristine knows it’s important to be liked and respected as a partner, a leader, and as a Puritan. This is the foundation she leans on as she establishes both professional and personal relationships. Her enthusiasm and focus on the future have earned her a seat at the partner leadership table and will continue to enable her success at Pure.
Proud to Lead; Humbled to Be Named
In my years here at Pure Storage, it’s been exciting to watch our 100% partner model grow and thrive. We continue to expand our global ecosystem by aligning with organizations whose vision and goals for delivering innovative storage and data management solutions complement what we do. Together, Pure and our partners will grow our business, leverage the ability to scale, and strengthen our relevance in customer businesses around the globe. It’s this cohesive approach to the market that will be our path to continued success.
My position as Vice President of the Global Partner Organization affords me the chance to grow professionally each day. I’m incredibly proud to lead the Pure Storage women who are named on the Women of the Channel 2023 list, and humbled to be included on CRN’s Women of the Channel Power 100 roster.
I’m dedicated to all things channel in everything we do at Pure. I’m always excited to see our partners grow pipeline and win deals. Pure Storage offers partner-minded leaders a space to achieve great success. Can you see yourself at The Orange?
