Richard Smith
Vice President
Worldwide WebSphere Sales
IBM Corporation
As Vice President, Worldwide WebSphere Sales, Richard Smith is accountable for the profitable growth of WebSphere’s vast product portfolio including effective execution of The Software Group’s Global SOA initiative. Additionally, Richard is responsible for the development and implementation of WebSphere’s coverage strategy which includes optimizing IBM’s direct sales force as well as channel partners to expand market reach and impact. Richard is also a member of IBM’s Senior Leadership team, which is chartered with the leadership of growth strategies across all IBM brands.
Previously, Richard was Vice President for Business Partner and SMB Sales for The Software Group. In this role, he developed an integrated SMB and Channel coverage strategy to accelerate profitable growth across five complex product groups. This included aligning coverage with the needs of diverse customer segments, and effectively integrating multiple routes to market to optimize them individually and synergistically.
In 2004, Richard was named Vice President for The Software Group with responsibility for five regions including Greater China Group, Japan, South Korea, ASEAN and Australia/New Zealand. Key areas of focus included optimizing sales productivity through leverage of multiple channels, marketing excellence, effective management coaching, and aligning resource deployment with market opportunity. He consistently achieved quarterly growth targets that exceeded industry norms for each of the five regions. He secured these results by creating a results-oriented sales culture that was passionate about innovation and customer satisfaction.
In 2002, Richard was named Vice President of Sales and Operations for IBM Software Group in Asia Pacific. Richard was responsible for software sales, business partners and sales operations. Richard's team produced successful results -- each of IBM’s software brands retained the number one position in nearly every market in which IBM competes -- across each region and every market segment.
Richard joined IBM in 1994 as a database Sales Specialist. He then progressed through a variety of Software Group positions based in Hong Kong, New York, and Tokyo. While in New York, as the Worldwide Sales Operations Director, amongst his other responsibilities, he was chartered with developing a new sales incentive plan to reward top contributors and reinforce a high performance culture. About 10,000 salespeople were directly impacted by implementation of the plan which achieved the desired objective of substantially driving sales growth.