92 – Partner Spotlight on CDW – Solve for Customers and Do the Right Thing

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For this podcast episode, I was excited to welcome a friend and former colleague, Aletha Noonan, the Senior Vice President of Product and Partner Management at CDW. In this partner spotlight of CDW, Aletha shares her focus to solve for customers and do the right thing.

Aletha is responsible for managing CDW’s relationship with its community of industry-leading technology partners. Also, she directs the day-to-day operations of CDW’s procurement team, keeping a broad selection of technology readily available to customers. She and her team orchestrate the integration of partner solutions into CDW’s omnichannel sales organization.

I’ve known Aletha since we worked together at Microsoft. I invited her because I focus on helping partners team with organizations like CDW to scale better and deliver their solutions. I was also very interested in her career journey.

In this episode of the podcast, Aletha and I discuss:

  • How to partner with CDW
  • Her view on the transformation and what we see at this time
  • As a successful woman of color, she shares her perspective on how she advanced her career to a senior role at a Fortune 500 company. 
  • Advice for partners on how to optimize for success.

I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I enjoyed my time with my friend, Aletha Noonan.

LINKS & RESOURCES

As with each of my episodes, I appreciate your support. Please tell your friends about Ultimate Guide to Partnering™ and where they can find us.

This episode of the podcast is sponsored by Ultimate Partnerships. Ultimate Partnerships helps you get the most results from your partnerships. Get Partnerships Right – Optimize for Success – Deliver Results – Ultimate Partnerships.

Transcription By Otter.AI – Please Pardon Typos Below

Announcer  0:00 

Welcome to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering in this podcast Vince Menzione a proven Industries sales and partner executive brings together technology leaders in this forum to discuss transformational trends and to deconstruct successful strategies to thrive and survive in the rapid age of cloud transformation. And now, your host, Vince Menzione.

Vince Menzione  0:30 

Welcome, or Welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to Partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host. And as we kick off the four year anniversary of this podcast, I’m thankful to all of the amazing thought and business leaders who’ve come to this podcast to share principles, success strategies, and best practices that help technology organizations thrive during this age of change and transformation. for this episode of the podcast, I was delighted to welcome a friend and a former colleague, Elisa Noonan, the Senior Vice President of Product and partner management at CW Elisa is responsible for managing CW his relationship with its community of industry leading technology partners, and I’ve known Elisa since we both work together at Microsoft. In this episode, we discuss her organization, her view on the transformation, her perspective as a successful woman of color, and advice for partners on how to optimize for success. I hope you enjoyed this episode. As much as I enjoyed my time with Alisa Noonan. Aletha, welcome to the podcast.

Aletha Noonan  1:40 

Hey, Vince, I’m glad to be here. Nice way for us to connect virtually,

Vince Menzione  1:44 

I am so excited to sort of see you today and have you here as a guest on Ultimate Guide to Partnering. You and I have had the chance to work together while you were at Microsoft. And of course, also in your roles at CDW. You’re the senior vice president for product and partner management at CDW. So I am excited to welcome you here today.

Aletha Noonan  2:05 

Glad to be here.

Vince Menzione  2:06 

So what an incredible journey. And we will deep dive into that a bit later. But for our listeners that might not know CDW, can you start by telling us a little bit more about CDW and the role of you and your organization?

Aletha Noonan  2:21 

Sure, I’d love to do that. So CDW is a global technology solutions provider. We have locations across the globe, we were founded here and outside of Chicago in 1984. And since then, by way of organic growth and acquisitions, we’ve expanded our footprint across the globe, with a big presence in the UK and Europe and Canada and a very robust business here in the States. I’m responsible for product and partner management. And my team really curates the relationships that partner strategy to a partner how we leverage partner investment and how we take our partner solutions with multiple partners to market through our to our end-user customer segments, we reach across the CDW omnichannel, which is made up of more than 2000 sellers and another 4000 pre and post-sales engineers and architects to serve customers and essentially all verticals.

Vince Menzione  3:21 

it’s astounding to me how the organization has grown over the years, you’re such a large and multinational organization now. And I had been partnering with CDW for many years over my career, going back to I guess I’ll call it the early days. And I work with ISVs and other partners on how to be most effective partnering with other organizations. Why should these organizations partner with you and your organization?

Aletha Noonan  3:49 

You know, as I mentioned, we do business across all verticals essentially. And I think that really the strength of CDW is our connection, our connectivity with the end-user customers, and our depth of the relationships with end-user customers. We have customers that have been buying from us for 10, 20, nearly 30 years. And so our relationships run deep in terms of connectivity in the depth of the relationship, but also in engineering resources. We’ve done installations we’ve done refreshes, we’ve taken them through events, I like to say that with many of our customers, we’ve seen them through all seasons. So you know, sometimes it might be an expansion into multiple campuses, sometimes it might be an acquisition, or whatever that may be we have grown up with our customers. So our depth and our connectivity into the customers is pretty deep. And I think as we think about partnerships, you know, CDW’s ultimate mission is to serve the end-user customers to solve problems. And so we do that by way of partnering. So I think it’s a critical need for us to just stay focused on serving the customers and the segments in the markets that need us. And the only way we can do that was with healthy and robust partnerships.

Vince Menzione  5:05 

So I hear partner intimacy quite a bit in what you just said, and also building these partner, this partner ecosystem of partner to partner and working with these organizations. And then you also mentioned a little bit earlier, I want to emphasize this a little bit like CDW really invested, I’ll say early on to transition, right from being that transactional partner to be more of a complete solution provider. Can you expand on that a little bit? Sure.

Aletha Noonan  5:33 

It started right back in the Microsoft days when we used to build our Microsoft technology practices and, you know, have a layer of architecture and engineering support in that pre sales process. And it’s grown into very deep seated team and technical sellers, but also the overlay resources and ultimately, a very large engineering footprint. When we think about where we are in the lifecycle of customer decision making, we’ve really moved to the left earlier on in that consultative process. But we also, you know, are able to leverage the great strength of our of our transaction and our distribution capabilities is interesting, because it came to play quite a bit this past year when the pandemic hit. And we had customers that were typically used to us shipping into one specific physical location. And then all of their accounting crew were working from home, and we had to get them up and running. So that distribution capability, which is just a core kind of transactional strength really came into play. But prior to that, we also had to consult and design, what do you need to have secure work from home workforces?

Aletha Noonan  6:44 

So

Aletha Noonan  6:45 

it’s really kind of a tale of two cities have, we started as a very strong transactional reseller, and we’ve evolved to a consultative technology solutions provider with the strength of that that reselling arm to

Vince Menzione  6:59 

Yeah, and you’ve done a lot of work on that whole delivery and lifecycle with your clients as well, if I remember, right, but I visited your distribution center way back in the day, and I saw the work that went on to embrace the customer on all aspects of technology.

Aletha Noonan  7:14 

It’s interesting, because we just had a very large public deal, public meaning public sector deal. And it involved designing the solution, installing and integrating the solution, delivering it across the US. And then post event decommissioning those devices. And there were 10s of 1000s of devices. So when you think about, you know that the where the business is headed, it really is adding that you know, the needs of the customer, but that have a technical lien, but they needed to take place in hundreds, if not 1000s of locations or end users.

Vince Menzione  7:53 

Yeah, it’s quite a capability that you have around that. So you and I have been around partnering, you’ve been around partnering for quite some time, both at Microsoft and CDW, and I coach organizations and leaders on what makes great partnerships, given your amazing set of experiences, working with partners in multiple roles, and now leading a partner-facing team, what do you believe makes what characteristics Do you believe makes a great partner?

Aletha Noonan  8:18 

you think back to the 80s and the 90s. It You know, a lot of partnering was negotiating It was about the negotiation and the win. And I think about partnerships today, and I think about the essence of who we are and who we want to be. And it’s really about deal making. So we can mutually benefit the players in the partnership, but ultimately serve the customer. So I think what makes a great partnership is, is having that that lens and that clarity of the mission we’re trying to serve, whether it be for end user, healthcare care customers, or K 12 customers or a particular financial institution, by focusing on that ultimate problem we need to solve or opportunity whether it’s in a larger group of similar customers or with an individual customer, it makes that partnership, the charter or the partnership, easier to understand and certainly following it based on how do we make this so that we will have we want to partner again. So yeah, I think about partnerships in terms of how do we have a mutually beneficial partnership to serve the end user customers, and put us in a place where we can do this, you know, ideally, more than once those are those are great partnerships to you when you can find solutions that you can replicate.

Vince Menzione  9:28 

I love that.

Aletha Noonan  9:29 

You know one thing and I don’t mean to run on and on and on. But we are hearing quite a bit from our OEMs and particularly our OEMs that are kind of leaning into customer-centric solutions. And you know that not just that horizontal play, but that vertical niche plays. But we are hearing more and more that as a differentiator and multi, you know, triage or partnerships, how do we build a set of solutions that we can bring to a set of customers with similar needs. So as we think about business verticals or smaller end-user segments, and not just said a segment like retail, but a really specific segment like a set of customers or type of customers and retail, it’s a great way to bring the essence of what the customer wants, but also bring all the different factors of multi members of that partnership, which I think is going to be more and more critical.

Vince Menzione  10:20 

You know, you bring up a good point, because I recall very early on, in fact, cw was probably one of the first organizations outside of Microsoft to embrace more of an industry lens and a vertical focus. And I remember working with your public sector team very early on, of course, in my role at Microsoft, too. And you verticalized across, you know, even with education, you broke it out into K 12. and higher ed, you have a nonprofit vertical team, which is unusual for most organizations. So you seem to have that focus that a lot of organizations haven’t invested in

Aletha Noonan  10:51 

yet. So you know, it’s interesting, because we have those mature verticals. And I do recall, you know, as you’re in your role in the public sector partnership for such a long time, you worked really closely with those mature verticals like healthcare and our government sex segments and our education segments. But the other thing we, you know, we’ve learned, Ben says, How do we have that same lean, but in keep them in the segment, so you know, a customer, maybe retail customer and our east corporate region, but also have, you know, the commonalities of being a retail customer. So we do have those mature verticals, which tend to be very large verticals, where their behavior and their buying patterns are the same. And then we have the softer verticals, where their needs are the same. And they sit in our commercial or corporate organization. But we have, you know, plays and messaging and marketing and intelligence around those verticals, I actually think as we think about bringing in multiple partners from different avenues of expertise, it’s really an delivering customer-centric, vertical centric or horizontal spread centric solutions. And CW is capable of that, you know, how do we take that into our ecosystem? Focus on a subset of customers that may sit across, you know, a number of different regions or vice presidents.

Vince Menzione  12:10 

So when you look at the partner ecosystem that you work with, what do you believe are the biggest challenges that these partners face today?

Aletha Noonan  12:17  

You know, it No, no, no, no, no, that it’s new. But it’s awfully noisy. So I think that you know, cutting through the noise and having some level of there, there’s something nice about being a partner or solution that solves the problem. And some of the times just being good isn’t good enough, because of all the noise in the ecosystem. So I think, how do we help you and one of the things that CDW does is how do we help partners bring their message to the end-user customers and tap into our reach? And then how do we have them leverage our enablement, so that our sellers know, here’s, here’s the theme, and here are the priorities for this type of solution. Here are the problems than it solves. And, you know, how do we reach those end-user customers, because they just, there’s a lot of input, you think about even today, I was talking about this with some co-workers, just days ago, the hundreds of emails, people have decided that email because they’re you’re working from home, the emails can be long and detailed, or click here. No one even wants to watch a video. That’s more than two minutes. So yeah, it’s tricky for partners, particularly partners who have great things. They’re trying to reach the end-user customer, tricky to get through that noise.

Vince Menzione  13:28 

Yeah, you know, I talk about the fatigue, or all experience it when we’re on zoom, and team calls all day long. And our sellers are doing the same, and they’re fatigued by all of these mentioned, it’s really hard to even watch a two-minute video. And yet everybody’s trying to get there. Like they’re trying to get their message across to you. And I work with these organizations. And it’s like, you got to be super crisp. Like, what, what’s the one thing that makes you stand out? And it’s not necessarily about the reads and speeds of your technology? It may be about like, we solved this problem better than anybody or were easier to do, but whatever it might be. And to your point, I think it’s getting that message, like crisp and clear. Do you agree?

Aletha Noonan  14:06 

Oh, absolutely. And I think that anytime you can use customer use cases or scenarios, it helps you know if you think about those of us who are making the decisions, or in buying and selling and in procuring and making decisions on what we’re going to pitch to a customer, and if you’re a customer making a decision on what you’re going to consume, having it boil down to the use cases, and the examples and the clarity of the solve, I think is so, so important. And I think, you know, I always say start, start with the end. So what is it? What is the end, not, don’t, don’t do a build-up because assuming people have no time start, start with the end, I have an x that can solve this. And we have examples of customers across these, you know, verticals or this particular set of customers or we’ve been able to do this. We find that that’s, you know, kind of happens organically Are sellers. But we do ask our partners to do that. How do you help us understand the problems you solve not just in numbers and data, but in the story behind what happened? And then what was the end result. So I’d say start with the end and get really good at storytelling too, you know, the different audiences.

Vince Menzione  15:17 

First of all, start with the end in mind is one of my favorite. It comes from Stephen Covey, I think about it that way. And then the storytelling piece as well, right, we all have to get better at storytelling and telling our brand story. So such a good point. If you had a situation where a partner wasn’t getting it, right, working with your team, what do you wish you had said to them now that you didn’t say at that time,

Aletha Noonan  15:38 

the thing about CDW is we’re so big, and we have such reach, that sometimes partners make the mistake of thinking, therefore, we’re transactional. So they just kind of talk to us as if kind of like I go back today wasn’t really the 80s, because I wasn’t in the industry until the 90s. But to go back to the just make another call, you know, give another impression, or whatever it may be. And it’s really, it’s more than that. It’s having a point of view that is focused on the customer. And I know, we all say that, but it reaches people. If you tell a story, think about being a parent, and somebody tells you a story about oh, I have that problem. Try this, whatever it may be, like, focus on it, this is what the customers were doing. And we did this, it gets your attention. There was a partner recently that had a solution I’d never heard of, I’m still not sure I know how to pronounce the OEM name, smaller partner. He was a parent at my kids High School. And then he kind of caught me off guard and had a real conversation with me. And he told me what it did. And it made so much more sense than the email I had received, you know, a couple of weeks prior. So I just kind of get to the point. But don’t mistake reach for transactional.

Vince Menzione  16:47 

That’s a really good point. I agree goes back to that storytelling conversation we were having, and about being very customer specific. You know, we have been living in this time, like we’re getting to the one year anniversary, at least for me, my last flight was on March 1 of last year, you know, we have all seen so much what are you seeing now in your business? So you didn’t expect to see

Aletha Noonan  17:08 

me besides everybody’s kids and pets on calls, which I think is pretty,

Vince Menzione  17:12 

pretty awesome. You know, we’ve gotten a lot of grace around that, right? We don’t, you know, it’s okay, if the kids are in the room and the dogs barking,

Aletha Noonan  17:20 

it is interesting, I think that the connection of the reality that people have lives outside of work really kind of humanizes all of us. So I’ve seen that. And I think it sort of helps take some of the fatigue away guests and to know that, oh, you have a dog too. And or our CEO was hosting a call the other day and forgot to turn off our mute button. It’s kind of nice that she forgets to because I know I forget. So having that that human element, I think is kind of helped with the pace of the work that we’re doing. You know, the other thing that we’ve seen and I’ve seen a lot of is just this better perception of what is important and what is not important, I think early on, we expected people to always be on video because all of a sudden, we were working from home or physically together. And now there’s this sort of expectation that you use video and video is appropriate, but it’s still okay to make a phone call. We’re the first few months, I felt like it was like a trial and error. I feel like we’re in a position now where people can be productive, but they can also not be held to these standards that are almost impossible, you know, in no real-world setting. Would you be physically staring at somebody for nine hours a day?

Vince Menzione  18:26 

Yeah. Such a good point, right? At least, you know, we forget the fact that we walked down the hallway, we had a little bit of a break, we grabbed a cup of water. And then when we’re sitting in the meeting, you know, candidly, a lot of us would do is we’d be on it. We’d also be on our computers and our phones while we were listening to the conversation, but we weren’t staring all the time.

Aletha Noonan  18:45 

Worried about being camera ready?

Vince Menzione  18:47 

That’s right. So talk to me about your team as well. I know that you had a tragic death in your team, one of your co-workers died of COVID this year. How are you coaching your team differently now at this time?

Aletha Noonan  19:01 

You know, it’s we talked about this a little bit. And I have to say, My heart is broken, not just for my coworker and his family and all of us, but really just for the circumstance of tragedy that has hit our country. One thing I can say though, having lost a co-worker and really tenured Nan in the industry, we received an outpouring of stories of the impact that he made of the relationships that he had. I mean, they were just beautiful, wonderful, wonderful stories, and sometimes they were these long stories and never split really specific about a thing. Other times they were like, hey, he hired me and I’ve always been inspired or whatever it may have been. But it occurred to me how often do we tell people who are alive the impact they’re making on us? You know, I think that as you think about being a leader, whether it’s a you know, in a business relationship like you and me that were we do business together or being somebody direct reporting leader or even somebody who does business with someone How often do we say, hey, thanks, you made me feel great. And you also helped me move my initiative forward. Or that moment in time, when I had a bad day, and you called me into the office, I appreciated that, or thank you for giving me the extra time to work on this project, because I got to meet people I would never meet. So I am holding myself accountable for giving people more feedback on those moments in time that made an impact on me. I know that when people feel like they matter, they do better work, and they feel better about themselves. And given that we are experiencing this, you know, a tremendous amount of fatigue and uncertainty with the pandemic, and all of the things that have happened in our country, what better time to get good at checking in with people, and not just saying, hey, Adeboye, but saying I want to tell you a story about that day. Do you remember that time you did X, Y, and Z? Or just yesterday, I used an example you gave me, you know, you reference Stephen Covey who’s a book, but there are 100 people that we think about daily because of a decision we made or remark, as I’m talking to you, I’m thinking about when we used to work together and how kind you were to me when I was new to the team and back in the industry. And I’ve been staying home with my kids for five years. But you probably didn’t know that. So I think we all need to be feel better, and what better way to feel better, and, you know, also spin the flywheel of great things happening, then they tell people really specific stories about how they’re making an impact.

Vince Menzione  21:30 

Yeah, wow, that was, um, thank you very much for that compliment. But, and you’re probably right, I don’t remember that. Specifically, I do remember working with you. And I’m really enjoying working with you. But you said some really insightful things here about this year that we’ve had that’s been like no other. And I do want to pivot a little bit about you and your professional background, but also dive in a little deeper on the topic of diversity inclusion. First of all, you’re a woman, you’re also in a leadership capacity in a major company, CDW, and a black woman, and have worked at both CDW and Microsoft, two major corporations and maybe a year or more ago, we might just have a watered-down conversation about our upbringing and our life experiences. You know, I feel like we’re at a different point now. And I think it’s good to have more deep and meaningful and authentic conversations on this topic. Would you mind telling our listeners a little bit more about Aletha, where you grew up your background, your experiences that shaped your path and trajectory? And got you to this place? I think we’d love to learn a little bit more about you. Yeah, sure.

Aletha Noonan  22:32 

You know, one thing I’ll say is, the one thing to know about me as a black woman, is that we’re not all the same. So it’s interesting when you’re in a smaller group, whether whatever that dimension of diversity may be, they’re like, oh, there’s the girl table. Oh, what a black people think. So by nature of having just one or two, there’s this expectation that you can represent this larger group. And we’re not all the same. I had a Caucasian mom and a black Dad, I grew up in a private Catholic school, I was one of the only brown people think I was the only brown person in grade school. And then I went to a more diverse high school, my parents were working-class, and I was on scholarship, but it wasn’t free. But you know, I was on the lower end of the economic profile of my peers. But I don’t have this same story that necessarily all brown and black people have. But there are some things we have in common. And as you move into the professional world, and I think about you know, I finished school in 92, I had my first job in the summer of 92. And join the technology industry in 94. So So as long as I’ve been in a professional workplace, I generally that first 10 or 15 years stuck out a little bit, you know, and maybe even more so because I was a woman in tech. And so there is something that goes along with sticking out and having to fit in sometimes you may see that show up as sharp edges. And sometimes you may see that as what do you mean by that and, you know, see feeling slightly offended. You know, it’s interesting when you’re a black woman, or for me, particularly either you get kind of generic feedback, or you get feedback on where you need to develop. And you know, that is a thing I remember having. And I could be the number one person on the board and the number one contributor to the business, but I was told what I needed to work on to fit in. So I’ve had this kind of background of having to, to fit in and having to always make it work. I remember once and this is a more of a feminine lean, being in the room with our second CEO. And there were three of us it was an off-site was a top 40 people in the company, and so is the sales directors on up through the executive committee. And there were just a handful of women at that company at the time. And three of the handful of us were sitting together to me, they told us to separate and I simply just hire more women. You know, I’ve never had a separate So you kind of, if you think about the experience of being a person, a black person, you kind of had a set of things that are happening. And although you could say, well, you start from the same place because you started in the same job, that’s not necessarily the case, there’s often, you know, you may be two or three generations away from slavery or poverty, that’s not uncommon in the black community, it doesn’t mean that you’re any less intelligent or any less capable. But your set of examples instead of things to draw upon might be different. So I think there’s, there’s one element of me personally, I’m, I’m not exactly the same as all the other black people and nor or are they. But then there’s also this commonality of when you have brown skin, and you are you, you suffer from a certain set of things. I mean, it is not rare that I’ve gone into a meeting where I’m the biggest boss in the room, and nobody looks at me. And you know, they, they wait for somebody, they wait for the person of power, who is usually a Caucasian man to make the remarks. Now, granted, now, there’s social media, and hopefully, people have read their backgrounders and see the pictures. But if you think about growing up in a world where you have to prove yourself from the moment you walk into the room, there are some things that happen, I had the great fortune of having people, I’ve worked for all four CDW CEOs in some capacity. But I’ve had the great fortune of having people try a little harder with me or recognize that I’m interested. And I’ve also made myself really available. Early on in my career, I was there was an opportunity to volunteer Michael Ghazni, our founder had a one of charity work, one of the charities he did, there was an opportunity to volunteer, I knew I should volunteer because it would give me access to the senior leaders. So I kind of got to know them. And I think I took it upon myself to have people get to know me for my work and my capability. But I had to do that. So if you fast forward to where we are today, Bryan Stevenson, who I just think the world of and I had the great fortune of hearing speak four or five years ago who wrote Just Mercy. And many of you probably heard of him as a social justice activist. I know that a lot of people have a lot of corporate companies have had him come speak. But he has a concept of proximity. And it’s about how do you know the answer? If you don’t know the question? And how can you help shake people if you’re doing it from this, like, you know, ivory tower, and not really know where they’re coming from. So as I think about my personal experience, as a senior leader, or as a young black woman, I think about so much of it was when people know you up close, and I hear your perspective or your potential, then it takes away, it strips away some of this, well, we can hire this person, but they have to have this special job, you often see like, the black woman, the black people in the women 10 or 15 years ago, were always in like they were the VP but they were the VP there was like the VP light, you know, you really want to know if you’re doing well and check if you’re doing well, you have people of all dimensions running big businesses and p&l. And if not, maybe you’re not getting up close and personal with those people that have had great potential and promise. So I do think there is a lot to be said about getting to know people and understanding them as opposed to well, they need to work a little harder to fit in. I’ll give you one more story, there was a young black man that sat on the same floor as me when I worked at the downtown offices, CDW these last couple of years. And I talked to them off, and I would go out of my way to check in on them. It was just a nice, friendly, one of our newer tendered co-workers. And one day who’s talking to me, and I just loved that he had the courage to always like, not put his head in my office and say, do you have a few minutes or want to get your input on this? And we were talking about something and he said he was having a hard time fitting in so he was what you know, a

minority by count. And I said, Well, you know, we do these happy hours and these other social events. And he said, I even have a hard time with small talk this young man growing up in such a different environment than he says I didn’t grow up going out to eat or going on vacation. So he said I have a hard time a small talk, had I not had that conversation, hey, put you in a room I invited you to the event, make it work. It’s not necessarily the same. So as if we want to run diverse teams and be a high-performing country or economy, then we have to light up all people, not just the people who have the fortune of a great zip code last name or you know family inheritance. Well,

Vince Menzione  29:27 

you brought up you unpacked quite a bit here. And I think when I got out of it the most was that the what we project that people are or how we I don’t want to use the term stereotype. But I guess I should we project that people because they come from a certain background or a certain color or they’re women versus men, even when we don’t think we’re judging we are subliminally judging or casting them into a mold. And what I think I think I heard you say is that they’re all different molds and we can’t we can’t always assume that everybody fits in or has the same effect. experiences that we’ve had, like this young gentleman you’re talking about?

Aletha Noonan  30:03 

Yeah, I think so. And I think so much of it is just really about that, that up close and personal connections of inspiring people to be all that they can be. But you can’t do that in a with a textbook, you got to get closer to the people and closer to the, to the groups of people, you know, then I still I’m, I’m married to an attorney, I live in a nice zip code, and Chicago, Illinois. I’m a senior vice president of a Fortune 500 company. And I still will walk into places where I don’t get talked to, by the, you know, it’ll go a retail setting where I don’t get acknowledged for 15 or 20 minutes, and I’m not wearing, you know, my baggy sweatshirt, I’m just talking about like a normal woman, they’re just assuming that I can’t, and I leave those places or I watch sometimes I just observed so it’s not a moment in time when you are a person who has been in a culture that a world that it’s okay to, to dismiss people of color. And in talking about this black lives matter, this all lives matter. All Lives certainly matter. But we’ve had in this country, the experience where it’s okay to have Black Lives Matter less. You know, I remember, I remember as a child, I remember as a child, I started my grade school A year later, because I was on the waitlist for the Catholic school and I started the grade school the year later, I was the star reader in first grade, I got to second grade, they would not put me in that top reading group, they would not put me in that top grading group, I could outrage anybody in the room, it took forever I remember going home and crying about it. And my mom probably maybe knew what was going on. But There is no doubt in my mind reflecting back on that they didn’t have it was anyone who set me up for failure. But houses young black girl going to be the star reader. So you know, if you’re a person of color, and you say, Black Lives Matter, I certainly believe all lives matter. I love white men, I’m married one. But I have to say there is a reality of I have clubs. And when I was in high school, there were clubs, I wasn’t allowed to go into it, my friends were allowed to go they wouldn’t let me they would my brown people and everyone went black people are maybe a little brown people and let me in. They certainly didn’t let black people be members. And I and the fact that I am friends that would go hurt my feelings, it hurt my feelings that I grew up. And then you grew up kind of sometimes you have your old offensive, you don’t want to be you want to assume good intent. But I don’t get the privilege of sending my mixed kids to college without looking at the dimension of diversity. I’m like, I don’t want my daughter to go to college that has 1% of blacks and 2% of other race, you know. So if you think about all of the layers of the experience, it’s real. But the only way that we can light up everybody and motivate everybody is by, you know, getting to know people and assuming good intent and understanding that people start from different places

Vince Menzione  32:52 

really good, really good feedback here and good points you’ve raised. I’m curious because you had pet such a stellar career. Was it? Was there some coaching along the way? Was there a mentor or group of mentors? Was there some piece of advice or some philosophy that you took forward that helped you to become like this amazing success, this amazing person, by the way, we’ve got to work together, I just think that you are just a very kind and amazing individual, I would say not everybody has both the skills and the grace that you have, like, was there something along the way that that really like set you on a path?

Aletha Noonan  33:30 

You know, I appreciate that, thank you for saying that. I don’t find myself to be amazing, but I am older. You know, I didn’t hit the half-century mark. And I decided in the last you know, however, many years, I wanted to, I wanted to be kind and I wanted to assume good intent. So I do believe that most people are good tend to fundamentally I believe most people are good, I think we’re more aligned than we are apart. And I approach things like that. So I approach and things that if I, you know, if I feel I’m offending someone or someone’s offending me, I think maybe we’re just not enlightened, or we’re not seeing this from the same way. I generally genuinely believe that there is more alignment than dissension that people are so caught up and focusing on the dissension. So that is a thing that I’ve come to part because of my own experiences. I had mentors all along the way. And some of them were like big mentors, like, I’m going to mentor you. And we’re going to regularly talk about this. And some of them are moments in time. I remember when I was a young salesperson, I thought I was pretty good. Yeah, I was. I was pretty good. And I was like, on this on my sales team for the guy I was working for at the time, Alan Weiss. I was praying, you know, typically one two or three on his team. And one day he showed me the numbers and he said, Why are you always at number one you should be at the top of the list every day. You’re the best salesperson I had at that moment in time. That’s all I need. And I’m like, oh, I’m the best at this and the best salesperson I better show up and be the best salesperson. So I do think there are small moments of meant impact that really make people go Oh, I think I want to go to war. I can’t I get away Let them down. I’m there I’ve been an aggressive person. And then there’s, there’s those big moments where I was about to take a job. I was newer at CDW, and there was the founder who was Michael Krasny. And then there was a number two, the president who was Greg Zeeman. And I was about to take this other job. And my boss said, well, and I was probably about nine months into sales, and I was off to a great start. And Greg Zeeman said I want to talk to him. So I didn’t talk to Craig. CDW at the time was five or 600 people, maybe 120 salespeople, but I didn’t regularly engage with the President. So he said, Greg Stevens that I want to talk to her before she takes the job. So he brought me to his office. And I remember calling my friend’s mom. So my parents were blue-collar working class, and they had great advice, but it just wasn’t necessarily corporate advice. So I remember calling my friend’s mom who had worked for IBM, who kind of independently would mentor both of us because she was my roommate. And she had been in tech. And she was my friend, stepmom. And we just would regularly talk about things. And I called her and I said, so I was going to take this other job, and I would get my base salary would go up, but just so you know, I would not my variable competent, I would have been a salesperson to take this job at CW. And she said, Well, a couple of things. If the president doesn’t want you to take the job, you probably shouldn’t take it. Because why would the President pay attention to you and that job would still be there in a couple of years if that’s what you really think you want to do. So you may want to listen to him. And I said, Okay, well, I’m not going to take the meeting. I don’t really want to talk. I’m kind of afraid, right? I’m like, 25, I’ll take the meeting. She goes, Oh, yeah, you’re taking the meeting. Because when you’re ever gonna get in one room with the president, again, here’s what you’re gonna do with them. So that free conversation got me this regular dialogue with CDW President, I took the meeting. And he gave me some great advice that day, too. And part of it was a dream a little bigger, you know, he said, You know, I know you could do this other job. But I think you could be a star here. And I think you do X, Y, and Z. And he just expressed a tremendous belief in me. And we had this like, normal conversation. And again, I was, you know, hadn’t been in the workforce for very long. And I didn’t know like, I wasn’t that old. But he was older than me, you know, old wealthy professionals calling me in their office having a conversation with me. So it was a great conversation. And it was a real conversation, we pray talk for half an hour. And he gave me his perspective of how he’d grown up and, you know, but He really said, you know, you should believe you can do these bigger things. And that’s part of the opportunity for you. So I had lots of mentors along the way, that early in my career, it was moments in time that really matter to make me think, well, maybe I can do this.

Vince Menzione  37:32 

I love that. So lots of advice and learnings along the way from several role models. You know, I’d like to spend a moment we talked I asked you about personal philosophy, but I wanted to dig in a little deeper here on this one. And I think I heard some things along the way. But is there a personal philosophy like when Aletha wakes up in the morning when she when her feet hit the ground? Like is there a way you start your day or you think about life?

Aletha Noonan  37:56 

Well, I have a couple of thoughts. I do have a philosophy, and I heard of him Norman Schwarzkopf years ago, I heard Norman Schwarzkopf today make a decision to do the right thing. And I do spend a tremendous amount of time thinking about doing the right thing and making decisions in my personal and professional life as a mother, as a neighbor, as a worker, as a leader. But it really kind of as a grounding guiding principle for me, and the other one that I think about and the other kind of, you know, besides that, as my daughter tells my youngest daughter, Lexi always says, she doesn’t ever want to go to bed mad. So she will come in and give me a hug and a kiss, even if she was, you know, teenage, teenage snooty that day. But there is a you know, there’s this kind of things you live by about how you want to be as a person or whatever it may be. But the other one for me is really about the camera is always rolling. And I just, you know, I want to playback the reel and feel good about it. And I also want to be aware that, when I think of it, I think about this, and this is advice I’ve gifted to young people, and when you’re looking for a new job or an opportunity, or you want, like you and I were talking about earlier, to have a good partnership, you want to have people to rollback their earlier interactions with you. And that’s really where the relationship or the or the trust was formed. So I have a big point of view that giving and building relationships over time is so much more important than any one moment in time. And I know that Adam Grant, I think wrote the book, give and take, and I’m all about, you know, what can I do to help other people with their journey. There’s a woman who called me yesterday, my daughter did some service work for her organization. And she wanted my advice on some project she’s working on, I have no idea what the conversation is going to be about. And if I just decided that I didn’t have any time because I assume I never have any time I probably wouldn’t have taken the call with this woman was a big influence in my daughter’s life and the service work that she did for her and she went on a trip to Honduras with her. So of course, I’m taking the call. So I just have this point of view that I’ll generally take any call or support anybody in a way that I can if it’s a moment that I believe the camera is always rolling, whether it’s an A, and people are gonna playback that camera to make their long term decisions about you. And I believe in making a lot of deposits. And I don’t want to make deposits so that I can have a tit-for-tat relationship. But I just believe that you know, having friends and putting good things out there, you know, maybe somebody will be good to me or to my family or my coworker one day, but in the meanwhile, it goes back to, to do the right thing.

Vince Menzione  40:27 

Yeah, refer to that somewhat as an abundance mentality, right, get more than you wish for in return. And then you said, you know, do the right thing. And the cameras always rolling. I love that. I love the both of those. If we had a boat billboard for you, I think we would put that on there.

Aletha Noonan  40:42 

I have some other ones that are really ready for primetime podcast.

Vince Menzione  40:49 

We could have the R version of this podcast next time, maybe over a glass of wine. But you know, speaking a glass of wine if you were hosting a dinner party. And this is at a time when we all could get together and not worry about masks and socially distancing. Maybe we’ll have our vaccines at that point. You can invite any three people to this dinner party from the present or the past. They join your amazing dinner, who would you invite to that party? And why?

Aletha Noonan  41:14 

Hmm, well, never good at these questions. I don’t remember seeing this on the preview. But it was at the bottom there. While I’m reading about somebody or listening to something, I’m like, Oh, that’s the person I would invite to the dinner party. That’s the one. Well, I would certainly invite my mother. Um, she has been dead for 30 years. And she kind of knew everything about everything. Now that I’m a mother, I know everything. But my mom was a waitress at a fancy dining place. So she hit she knew how to how you dress and where you put your napkin. And she also had a very fine dining kind of taste buds. So she knew how to cook and she knew how to dress and she was a great party guest. In fact, I’ll tell you one story about parties. And I’m going to go back to that list. I was born on December 23. And I was raised Catholic. So I was born near Christmas. And we believed in Christ and we also believed in Santa Claus. So my mom for years would host a neighborhood party for me, and Santa would be invited. And all the neighbors would be invited. No, I didn’t know this at the time, but she would have the neighbor, parents give a gift. So she would contribute the Santa to the party. And then all of the people would bring a gift ahead of time. So we’d all come to my birthday party, and everybody would get to meet Santa and get a gift. I think that ended right around the time I was like, eight or nine when somebody got a better gift than me. And I’m like, this really isn’t the best party. So if I were having a dinner party and inviting anybody, I’d certainly invite my mom and I get to more people, I probably invite Barack Obama, I sure have a lot of questions for him, you know, as I think about my own story, and I think about my own point of view. And I have this tiny little place on the map of history. And he has this big place on the map of history. I want to know what it was really like I did read Michelle’s book becoming, and I really related to it, because she raised her kids in Chicago, and she talked about being a professional woman, a working woman married to a man who broke a lot of barriers. So I’d really be interested in hearing quite a bit from him. And I think that that would be super interesting. And then I would invite Sean Connery,

Aletha Noonan  43:24 

because why wouldn’t you invite Sean Connery? I, so a couple of reasons. You know, I want to know about his 007 story, but also, I really wanted my favorite actors ever. And I wish that he was still he’s still here.

Vince Menzione  43:37 

He just passed away this past year, just before the holidays,

Aletha Noonan  43:41 

so I would invite Sean Connery. I think that he is a great actor. I thought he was a man of many things. And I really like to watch his movies with my husband. And is one thing that you know, one of the entertainment things that he and I have in common and I think you’d be a great dinner guest

Vince Menzione  43:58 

Oh, you have to serve vodka martinis right shaken not stirred, or whatever it was.

Aletha Noonan  44:02 

I was there and my mom could probably make them

Vince Menzione  44:05 

there you go. Sounds like a great party off to come visit. And you know, you had been an amazing guest. I want to thank you. You are that person that you described earlier. Like you took the call right away when I say hey, would you come and join us here on Ultimate Guide to Partnering but you know, I’d love to ask for our listeners. I didn’t ask you this earlier about partners like closing comments and advice that you would have to our partner listeners on engaging with CDW and how they can optimize their own success this year?

Aletha Noonan  44:34 

I would say like anything do your homework you know know know where there is a play or a point of view or solution adjacency and we do have quite a bit on our website so there’s an opportunity to have a you know really kind of focused ask, you know, I would say if you’re having challenges reaching CDW connecting with CDW you can always email me and I’ll find you the right person which is Aletha at CDW calm, but I think if we focus on the customer and there’s a struggle behind it, we’ll find somebody to listen to that story. Oftentimes, our partners that are new or not as mature in their relationship with us get great success by finding a few sellers and customer-facing engineers or architects to talk about their shared view of how this solution solves that customer. So gaining some internal advocacy is always a great idea, because that goes a long way. And we find that if sellers or business or customers are already using it or interested in it, it certainly goes a long way.

Vince Menzione  45:29 

I love that. Aletha, thank you so much for being a guest on Ultimate Guide to Partnering.

Aletha Noonan  45:34 

Thank you. Thank you for having me. It’s so nice to virtually see you. And I can’t wait to listen to the podcast. Thanks so much.

Transcribed by otter.ai

For this podcast episode, I was excited to welcome a friend and former colleague, Altha Noonan, the Senior Vice President of Product and Partner Management at CDW.

Aletha is responsible for managing CDW’s relationship with its community of industry-leading technology partners. Also, she directs the day-to-day operations of CDW’s procurement team, keeping a broad selection of technology readily available to customers. She and her team orchestrate the integration of partner solutions into CDW’s omnichannel sales organization.

I’ve known Aletha since we worked together at Microsoft. I invited her because I focus on helping partners team with organizations like CDW to scale better and deliver their solutions. I was also very interested in her career journey.

In this episode of the podcast, Aletha and I discuss:

  • How to partner with CDW
  • Her view on the transformation and what we see at this time
  • As a successful woman of color, she shares her perspective on how she advanced her career to a senior role at a Fortune 500 company. 
  • Advice for partners on how to optimize for success.

I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I enjoyed my time with my friend, Aletha Noonan.

LINKS & RESOURCES

As with each of my episodes, I appreciate your support. Please tell your friends about Ultimate Guide to Partnering™ and where they can find us.

This episode of the podcast is sponsored by Ultimate Partnerships. Ultimate Partnerships helps you get the most results from your partnerships. Get Partnerships Right – Optimize for Success – Deliver Results – Ultimate Partnerships.

Transcription By Otter.AI – Please Pardon Typos Below

Announcer  0:00 

Welcome to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering in this podcast Vince Menzione a proven Industries sales and partner executive brings together technology leaders in this forum to discuss transformational trends and to deconstruct successful strategies to thrive and survive in the rapid age of cloud transformation. And now, your host, Vince Menzione.

Vince Menzione  0:30 

Welcome, or Welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to Partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host. And as we kick off the four year anniversary of this podcast, I’m thankful to all of the amazing thought and business leaders who’ve come to this podcast to share principles, success strategies, and best practices that help technology organizations thrive during this age of change and transformation. for this episode of the podcast, I was delighted to welcome a friend and a former colleague, Elisa Noonan, the Senior Vice President of Product and partner management at CW Elisa is responsible for managing CW his relationship with its community of industry leading technology partners, and I’ve known Elisa since we both work together at Microsoft. In this episode, we discuss her organization, her view on the transformation, her perspective as a successful woman of color, and advice for partners on how to optimize for success. I hope you enjoyed this episode. As much as I enjoyed my time with Alisa Noonan. Aletha, welcome to the podcast.

Aletha Noonan  1:40 

Hey, Vince, I’m glad to be here. Nice way for us to connect virtually,

Vince Menzione  1:44 

I am so excited to sort of see you today and have you here as a guest on Ultimate Guide to Partnering. You and I have had the chance to work together while you were at Microsoft. And of course, also in your roles at CDW. You’re the senior vice president for product and partner management at CDW. So I am excited to welcome you here today.

Aletha Noonan  2:05 

Glad to be here.

Vince Menzione  2:06 

So what an incredible journey. And we will deep dive into that a bit later. But for our listeners that might not know CDW, can you start by telling us a little bit more about CDW and the role of you and your organization?

Aletha Noonan  2:21 

Sure, I’d love to do that. So CDW is a global technology solutions provider. We have locations across the globe, we were founded here and outside of Chicago in 1984. And since then, by way of organic growth and acquisitions, we’ve expanded our footprint across the globe, with a big presence in the UK and Europe and Canada and a very robust business here in the States. I’m responsible for product and partner management. And my team really curates the relationships that partner strategy to a partner how we leverage partner investment and how we take our partner solutions with multiple partners to market through our to our end-user customer segments, we reach across the CDW omnichannel, which is made up of more than 2000 sellers and another 4000 pre and post-sales engineers and architects to serve customers and essentially all verticals.

Vince Menzione  3:21 

it’s astounding to me how the organization has grown over the years, you’re such a large and multinational organization now. And I had been partnering with CDW for many years over my career, going back to I guess I’ll call it the early days. And I work with ISVs and other partners on how to be most effective partnering with other organizations. Why should these organizations partner with you and your organization?

Aletha Noonan  3:49 

You know, as I mentioned, we do business across all verticals essentially. And I think that really the strength of CDW is our connection, our connectivity with the end-user customers, and our depth of the relationships with end-user customers. We have customers that have been buying from us for 1020, even near nearly 30 years. And so our relationships run deep in terms of connectivity in the depth of the relationship, but also in engineering resources. We’ve done installations we’ve done refreshes, we’ve taken them through events, I like to say that with many of our customers, we’ve seen them through all seasons. So you know, sometimes it might be an expansion into multiple campuses, sometimes it might be an acquisition, or whatever that may be we have grown up with our customers. So our depth and our connectivity into the customers is pretty deep. And I think as we think about partnerships, you know, CDW’s ultimate mission is to serve the end-user customers to solve problems. And so we do that by way of partnering. So I think it’s a critical need for us to just stay focused on serving the customers and the segments in the markets that need us. And the only way we can do that was with healthy and robust partnerships.

Vince Menzione  5:05 

So I hear partner intimacy quite a bit in what you just said, and also building these partner, this partner ecosystem of partner to partner and working with these organizations. And then you also mentioned a little bit earlier, I want to emphasize this a little bit like CDW really invested, I’ll say early on to transition, right from being that transactional partner to be more of a complete solution provider. Can you expand on that a little bit? Sure.

Aletha Noonan  5:33 

It started right back in the Microsoft days when we used to build our Microsoft technology practices and, you know, have a layer of architecture and engineering support in that pre sales process. And it’s grown into very deep seated team and technical sellers, but also the overlay resources and ultimately, a very large engineering footprint. When we think about where we are in the lifecycle of customer decision making, we’ve really moved to the left earlier on in that consultative process. But we also, you know, are able to leverage the great strength of our of our transaction and our distribution capabilities is interesting, because it came to play quite a bit this past year when the pandemic hit. And we had customers that were typically used to us shipping into one specific physical location. And then all of their accounting crew were working from home, and we had to get them up and running. So that distribution capability, which is just a core kind of transactional strength really came into play. But prior to that, we also had to consult and design, what do you need to have secure work from home workforces?

Aletha Noonan  6:44 

So

Aletha Noonan  6:45 

it’s really kind of a tale of two cities have, we started as a very strong transactional reseller, and we’ve evolved to a consultative technology solutions provider with the strength of that that reselling arm to

Vince Menzione  6:59 

Yeah, and you’ve done a lot of work on that whole delivery and lifecycle with your clients as well, if I remember, right, but I visited your distribution center way back in the day, and I saw the work that went on to embrace the customer on all aspects of technology.

Aletha Noonan  7:14 

It’s interesting, because we just had a very large public deal, public meaning public sector deal. And it involved designing the solution, installing and integrating the solution, delivering it across the US. And then post event decommissioning those devices. And there were 10s of 1000s of devices. So when you think about, you know that the where the business is headed, it really is adding that you know, the needs of the customer, but that have a technical lien, but they needed to take place in hundreds, if not 1000s of locations or end users.

Vince Menzione  7:53 

Yeah, it’s quite a capability that you have around that. So you and I have been around partnering, you’ve been around partnering for quite some time, both at Microsoft and CDW, and I coach organizations and leaders on what makes great partnerships, given your amazing set of experiences, working with partners in multiple roles, and now leading a partner-facing team, what do you believe makes what characteristics Do you believe makes a great partner?

Aletha Noonan  8:18 

you think back to the 80s and the 90s. It You know, a lot of partnering was negotiating It was about the negotiation and the win. And I think about partnerships today, and I think about the essence of who we are and who we want to be. And it’s really about deal making. So we can mutually benefit the players in the partnership, but ultimately serve the customer. So I think what makes a great partnership is, is having that that lens and that clarity of the mission we’re trying to serve, whether it be for end user, healthcare care customers, or K 12 customers or a particular financial institution, by focusing on that ultimate problem we need to solve or opportunity whether it’s in a larger group of similar customers or with an individual customer, it makes that partnership, the charter or the partnership, easier to understand and certainly following it based on how do we make this so that we will have we want to partner again. So yeah, I think about partnerships in terms of how do we have a mutually beneficial partnership to serve the end user customers, and put us in a place where we can do this, you know, ideally, more than once those are those are great partnerships to you when you can find solutions that you can replicate.

Vince Menzione  9:28 

I love that.

Aletha Noonan  9:29 

You know one thing and I don’t mean to run on and on and on. But we are hearing quite a bit from our OEMs and particularly our OEMs that are kind of leaning into customer-centric solutions. And you know that not just that horizontal play, but that vertical niche plays. But we are hearing more and more that as a differentiator and multi, you know, triage or partnerships, how do we build a set of solutions that we can bring to a set of customers with similar needs. So as we think about business verticals or smaller end-user segments, and not just said a segment like retail, but a really specific segment like a set of customers or type of customers and retail, it’s a great way to bring the essence of what the customer wants, but also bring all the different factors of multi members of that partnership, which I think is going to be more and more critical.

Vince Menzione  10:20 

You know, you bring up a good point, because I recall very early on, in fact, cw was probably one of the first organizations outside of Microsoft to embrace more of an industry lens and a vertical focus. And I remember working with your public sector team very early on, of course, in my role at Microsoft, too. And you verticalized across, you know, even with education, you broke it out into K 12. and higher ed, you have a nonprofit vertical team, which is unusual for most organizations. So you seem to have that focus that a lot of organizations haven’t invested in

Aletha Noonan  10:51 

yet. So you know, it’s interesting, because we have those mature verticals. And I do recall, you know, as you’re in your role in the public sector partnership for such a long time, you worked really closely with those mature verticals like healthcare and our government sex segments and our education segments. But the other thing we, you know, we’ve learned, Ben says, How do we have that same lean, but in keep them in the segment, so you know, a customer, maybe retail customer and our east corporate region, but also have, you know, the commonalities of being a retail customer. So we do have those mature verticals, which tend to be very large verticals, where their behavior and their buying patterns are the same. And then we have the softer verticals, where their needs are the same. And they sit in our commercial or corporate organization. But we have, you know, plays and messaging and marketing and intelligence around those verticals, I actually think as we think about bringing in multiple partners from different avenues of expertise, it’s really an delivering customer-centric, vertical centric or horizontal spread centric solutions. And CW is capable of that, you know, how do we take that into our ecosystem? Focus on a subset of customers that may sit across, you know, a number of different regions or vice presidents.

Vince Menzione  12:10 

So when you look at the partner ecosystem that you work with, what do you believe are the biggest challenges that these partners face today?

Aletha Noonan  12:17  

You know, it No, no, no, no, no, that it’s new. But it’s awfully noisy. So I think that you know, cutting through the noise and having some level of there, there’s something nice about being a partner or solution that solves the problem. And some of the times just being good isn’t good enough, because of all the noise in the ecosystem. So I think, how do we help you and one of the things that CDW does is how do we help partners bring their message to the end-user customers and tap into our reach? And then how do we have them leverage our enablement, so that our sellers know, here’s, here’s the theme, and here are the priorities for this type of solution. Here are the problems than it solves. And, you know, how do we reach those end-user customers, because they just, there’s a lot of input, you think about even today, I was talking about this with some co-workers, just days ago, the hundreds of emails, people have decided that email because they’re you’re working from home, the emails can be long and detailed, or click here. No one even wants to watch a video. That’s more than two minutes. So yeah, it’s tricky for partners, particularly partners who have great things. They’re trying to reach the end-user customer, tricky to get through that noise.

Vince Menzione  13:28 

Yeah, you know, I talk about the fatigue, or all experience it when we’re on zoom, and team calls all day long. And our sellers are doing the same, and they’re fatigued by all of these mentioned, it’s really hard to even watch a two-minute video. And yet everybody’s trying to get there. Like they’re trying to get their message across to you. And I work with these organizations. And it’s like, you got to be super crisp. Like, what, what’s the one thing that makes you stand out? And it’s not necessarily about the reads and speeds of your technology? It may be about like, we solved this problem better than anybody or were easier to do, but whatever it might be. And to your point, I think it’s getting that message, like crisp and clear. Do you agree?

Aletha Noonan  14:06 

Oh, absolutely. And I think that anytime you can use customer use cases or scenarios, it helps you know if you think about those of us who are making the decisions, or in buying and selling and in procuring and making decisions on what we’re going to pitch to a customer, and if you’re a customer making a decision on what you’re going to consume, having it boil down to the use cases, and the examples and the clarity of the solve, I think is so, so important. And I think, you know, I always say start, start with the end. So what is it? What is the end, not, don’t, don’t do a build-up because assuming people have no time start, start with the end, I have an x that can solve this. And we have examples of customers across these, you know, verticals or this particular set of customers or we’ve been able to do this. We find that that’s, you know, kind of happens organically Are sellers. But we do ask our partners to do that. How do you help us understand the problems you solve not just in numbers and data, but in the story behind what happened? And then what was the end result. So I’d say start with the end and get really good at storytelling too, you know, the different audiences.

Vince Menzione  15:17 

First of all, start with the end in mind is one of my favorite. It comes from Stephen Covey, I think about it that way. And then the storytelling piece as well, right, we all have to get better at storytelling and telling our brand story. So such a good point. If you had a situation where a partner wasn’t getting it, right, working with your team, what do you wish you had said to them now that you didn’t say at that time,

Aletha Noonan  15:38 

the thing about CDW is we’re so big, and we have such reach, that sometimes partners make the mistake of thinking, therefore, we’re transactional. So they just kind of talk to us as if kind of like I go back today wasn’t really the 80s, because I wasn’t in the industry until the 90s. But to go back to the just make another call, you know, give another impression, or whatever it may be. And it’s really, it’s more than that. It’s having a point of view that is focused on the customer. And I know, we all say that, but it reaches people. If you tell a story, think about being a parent, and somebody tells you a story about oh, I have that problem. Try this, whatever it may be, like, focus on it, this is what the customers were doing. And we did this, it gets your attention. There was a partner recently that had a solution I’d never heard of, I’m still not sure I know how to pronounce the OEM name, smaller partner. He was a parent at my kids High School. And then he kind of caught me off guard and had a real conversation with me. And he told me what it did. And it made so much more sense than the email I had received, you know, a couple of weeks prior. So I just kind of get to the point. But don’t mistake reach for transactional.

Vince Menzione  16:47 

That’s a really good point. I agree goes back to that storytelling conversation we were having, and about being very customer specific. You know, we have been living in this time, like we’re getting to the one year anniversary, at least for me, my last flight was on March 1 of last year, you know, we have all seen so much what are you seeing now in your business? So you didn’t expect to see

Aletha Noonan  17:08 

me besides everybody’s kids and pets on calls, which I think is pretty,

Vince Menzione  17:12 

pretty awesome. You know, we’ve gotten a lot of grace around that, right? We don’t, you know, it’s okay, if the kids are in the room and the dogs barking,

Aletha Noonan  17:20 

it is interesting, I think that the connection of the reality that people have lives outside of work really kind of humanizes all of us. So I’ve seen that. And I think it sort of helps take some of the fatigue away guests and to know that, oh, you have a dog too. And or our CEO was hosting a call the other day and forgot to turn off our mute button. It’s kind of nice that she forgets to because I know I forget. So having that that human element, I think is kind of helped with the pace of the work that we’re doing. You know, the other thing that we’ve seen and I’ve seen a lot of is just this better perception of what is important and what is not important, I think early on, we expected people to always be on video because all of a sudden, we were working from home or physically together. And now there’s this sort of expectation that you use video and video is appropriate, but it’s still okay to make a phone call. We’re the first few months, I felt like it was like a trial and error. I feel like we’re in a position now where people can be productive, but they can also not be held to these standards that are almost impossible, you know, in no real-world setting. Would you be physically staring at somebody for nine hours a day?

Vince Menzione  18:26 

Yeah. Such a good point, right? At least, you know, we forget the fact that we walked down the hallway, we had a little bit of a break, we grabbed a cup of water. And then when we’re sitting in the meeting, you know, candidly, a lot of us would do is we’d be on it. We’d also be on our computers and our phones while we were listening to the conversation, but we weren’t staring all the time.

Aletha Noonan  18:45 

Worried about being camera ready?

Vince Menzione  18:47 

That’s right. So talk to me about your team as well. I know that you had a tragic death in your team, one of your co-workers died of COVID this year. How are you coaching your team differently now at this time?

Aletha Noonan  19:01 

You know, it’s we talked about this a little bit. And I have to say, My heart is broken, not just for my coworker and his family and all of us, but really just for the circumstance of tragedy that has hit our country. One thing I can say though, having lost a co-worker and really tenured Nan in the industry, we received an outpouring of stories of the impact that he made of the relationships that he had. I mean, they were just beautiful, wonderful, wonderful stories, and sometimes they were these long stories and never split really specific about a thing. Other times they were like, hey, he hired me and I’ve always been inspired or whatever it may have been. But it occurred to me how often do we tell people who are alive the impact they’re making on us? You know, I think that as you think about being a leader, whether it’s a you know, in a business relationship like you and me that were we do business together or being somebody direct reporting leader or even somebody who does business with someone How often do we say, hey, thanks, you made me feel great. And you also helped me move my initiative forward. Or that moment in time, when I had a bad day, and you called me into the office, I appreciated that, or thank you for giving me the extra time to work on this project, because I got to meet people I would never meet. So I am holding myself accountable for giving people more feedback on those moments in time that made an impact on me. I know that when people feel like they matter, they do better work, and they feel better about themselves. And given that we are experiencing this, you know, a tremendous amount of fatigue and uncertainty with the pandemic, and all of the things that have happened in our country, what better time to get good at checking in with people, and not just saying, hey, Adeboye, but saying I want to tell you a story about that day. Do you remember that time you did X, Y, and Z? Or just yesterday, I used an example you gave me, you know, you reference Stephen Covey who’s a book, but there are 100 people that we think about daily because of a decision we made or remark, as I’m talking to you, I’m thinking about when we used to work together and how kind you were to me when I was new to the team and back in the industry. And I’ve been staying home with my kids for five years. But you probably didn’t know that. So I think we all need to be feel better, and what better way to feel better, and, you know, also spin the flywheel of great things happening, then they tell people really specific stories about how they’re making an impact.

Vince Menzione  21:30 

Yeah, wow, that was, um, thank you very much for that compliment. But, and you’re probably right, I don’t remember that. Specifically, I do remember working with you. And I’m really enjoying working with you. But you said some really insightful things here about this year that we’ve had that’s been like no other. And I do want to pivot a little bit about you and your professional background, but also dive in a little deeper on the topic of diversity inclusion. First of all, you’re a woman, you’re also in a leadership capacity in a major company, CDW, and a black woman, and have worked at both CDW and Microsoft, two major corporations and maybe a year or more ago, we might just have a watered-down conversation about our upbringing and our life experiences. You know, I feel like we’re at a different point now. And I think it’s good to have more deep and meaningful and authentic conversations on this topic. Would you mind telling our listeners a little bit more about Aletha, where you grew up your background, your experiences that shaped your path and trajectory? And got you to this place? I think we’d love to learn a little bit more about you. Yeah, sure.

Aletha Noonan  22:32 

You know, one thing I’ll say is, the one thing to know about me as a black woman, is that we’re not all the same. So it’s interesting when you’re in a smaller group, whether whatever that dimension of diversity may be, they’re like, oh, there’s the girl table. Oh, what a black people think. So by nature of having just one or two, there’s this expectation that you can represent this larger group. And we’re not all the same. I had a Caucasian mom and a black Dad, I grew up in a private Catholic school, I was one of the only brown people think I was the only brown person in grade school. And then I went to a more diverse high school, my parents were working-class, and I was on scholarship, but it wasn’t free. But you know, I was on the lower end of the economic profile of my peers. But I don’t have this same story that necessarily all brown and black people have. But there are some things we have in common. And as you move into the professional world, and I think about you know, I finished school in 92, I had my first job in the summer of 92. And join the technology industry in 94. So So as long as I’ve been in a professional workplace, I generally that first 10 or 15 years stuck out a little bit, you know, and maybe even more so because I was a woman in tech. And so there is something that goes along with sticking out and having to fit in sometimes you may see that show up as sharp edges. And sometimes you may see that as what do you mean by that and, you know, see feeling slightly offended. You know, it’s interesting when you’re a black woman, or for me, particularly either you get kind of generic feedback, or you get feedback on where you need to develop. And you know, that is a thing I remember having. And I could be the number one person on the board and the number one contributor to the business, but I was told what I needed to work on to fit in. So I’ve had this kind of background of having to, to fit in and having to always make it work. I remember once and this is a more of a feminine lean, being in the room with our second CEO. And there were three of us it was an off-site was a top 40 people in the company, and so is the sales directors on up through the executive committee. And there were just a handful of women at that company at the time. And three of the handful of us were sitting together to me, they told us to separate and I simply just hire more women. You know, I’ve never had a separate So you kind of, if you think about the experience of being a person, a black person, you kind of had a set of things that are happening. And although you could say, well, you start from the same place because you started in the same job, that’s not necessarily the case, there’s often, you know, you may be two or three generations away from slavery or poverty, that’s not uncommon in the black community, it doesn’t mean that you’re any less intelligent or any less capable. But your set of examples instead of things to draw upon might be different. So I think there’s, there’s one element of me personally, I’m, I’m not exactly the same as all the other black people and nor or are they. But then there’s also this commonality of when you have brown skin, and you are you, you suffer from a certain set of things. I mean, it is not rare that I’ve gone into a meeting where I’m the biggest boss in the room, and nobody looks at me. And you know, they, they wait for somebody, they wait for the person of power, who is usually a Caucasian man to make the remarks. Now, granted, now, there’s social media, and hopefully, people have read their backgrounders and see the pictures. But if you think about growing up in a world where you have to prove yourself from the moment you walk into the room, there are some things that happen, I had the great fortune of having people, I’ve worked for all four CDW CEOs in some capacity. But I’ve had the great fortune of having people try a little harder with me or recognize that I’m interested. And I’ve also made myself really available. Early on in my career, I was there was an opportunity to volunteer Michael Ghazni, our founder had a one of charity work, one of the charities he did, there was an opportunity to volunteer, I knew I should volunteer because it would give me access to the senior leaders. So I kind of got to know them. And I think I took it upon myself to have people get to know me for my work and my capability. But I had to do that. So if you fast forward to where we are today, Bryan Stevenson, who I just think the world of and I had the great fortune of hearing speak four or five years ago who wrote Just Mercy. And many of you probably heard of him as a social justice activist. I know that a lot of people have a lot of corporate companies have had him come speak. But he has a concept of proximity. And it’s about how do you know the answer? If you don’t know the question? And how can you help shake people if you’re doing it from this, like, you know, ivory tower, and not really know where they’re coming from. So as I think about my personal experience, as a senior leader, or as a young black woman, I think about so much of it was when people know you up close, and I hear your perspective or your potential, then it takes away, it strips away some of this, well, we can hire this person, but they have to have this special job, you often see like, the black woman, the black people in the women 10 or 15 years ago, were always in like they were the VP but they were the VP there was like the VP light, you know, you really want to know if you’re doing well and check if you’re doing well, you have people of all dimensions running big businesses and p&l. And if not, maybe you’re not getting up close and personal with those people that have had great potential and promise. So I do think there is a lot to be said about getting to know people and understanding them as opposed to well, they need to work a little harder to fit in. I’ll give you one more story, there was a young black man that sat on the same floor as me when I worked at the downtown offices, CDW these last couple of years. And I talked to them off, and I would go out of my way to check in on them. It was just a nice, friendly, one of our newer tendered co-workers. And one day who’s talking to me, and I just loved that he had the courage to always like, not put his head in my office and say, do you have a few minutes or want to get your input on this? And we were talking about something and he said he was having a hard time fitting in so he was what you know, a

minority by count. And I said, Well, you know, we do these happy hours and these other social events. And he said, I even have a hard time with small talk this young man growing up in such a different environment than he says I didn’t grow up going out to eat or going on vacation. So he said I have a hard time a small talk, had I not had that conversation, hey, put you in a room I invited you to the event, make it work. It’s not necessarily the same. So as if we want to run diverse teams and be a high-performing country or economy, then we have to light up all people, not just the people who have the fortune of a great zip code last name or you know family inheritance. Well,

Vince Menzione  29:27 

you brought up you unpacked quite a bit here. And I think when I got out of it the most was that the what we project that people are or how we I don’t want to use the term stereotype. But I guess I should we project that people because they come from a certain background or a certain color or they’re women versus men, even when we don’t think we’re judging we are subliminally judging or casting them into a mold. And what I think I think I heard you say is that they’re all different molds and we can’t we can’t always assume that everybody fits in or has the same effect. experiences that we’ve had, like this young gentleman you’re talking about?

Aletha Noonan  30:03 

Yeah, I think so. And I think so much of it is just really about that, that up close and personal connections of inspiring people to be all that they can be. But you can’t do that in a with a textbook, you got to get closer to the people and closer to the, to the groups of people, you know, then I still I’m, I’m married to an attorney, I live in a nice zip code, and Chicago, Illinois. I’m a senior vice president of a Fortune 500 company. And I still will walk into places where I don’t get talked to, by the, you know, it’ll go a retail setting where I don’t get acknowledged for 15 or 20 minutes, and I’m not wearing, you know, my baggy sweatshirt, I’m just talking about like a normal woman, they’re just assuming that I can’t, and I leave those places or I watch sometimes I just observed so it’s not a moment in time when you are a person who has been in a culture that a world that it’s okay to, to dismiss people of color. And in talking about this black lives matter, this all lives matter. All Lives certainly matter. But we’ve had in this country, the experience where it’s okay to have Black Lives Matter less. You know, I remember, I remember as a child, I remember as a child, I started my grade school A year later, because I was on the waitlist for the Catholic school and I started the grade school the year later, I was the star reader in first grade, I got to second grade, they would not put me in that top reading group, they would not put me in that top grading group, I could outrage anybody in the room, it took forever I remember going home and crying about it. And my mom probably maybe knew what was going on. But There is no doubt in my mind reflecting back on that they didn’t have it was anyone who set me up for failure. But houses young black girl going to be the star reader. So you know, if you’re a person of color, and you say, Black Lives Matter, I certainly believe all lives matter. I love white men, I’m married one. But I have to say there is a reality of I have clubs. And when I was in high school, there were clubs, I wasn’t allowed to go into it, my friends were allowed to go they wouldn’t let me they would my brown people and everyone went black people are maybe a little brown people and let me in. They certainly didn’t let black people be members. And I and the fact that I am friends that would go hurt my feelings, it hurt my feelings that I grew up. And then you grew up kind of sometimes you have your old offensive, you don’t want to be you want to assume good intent. But I don’t get the privilege of sending my mixed kids to college without looking at the dimension of diversity. I’m like, I don’t want my daughter to go to college that has 1% of blacks and 2% of other race, you know. So if you think about all of the layers of the experience, it’s real. But the only way that we can light up everybody and motivate everybody is by, you know, getting to know people and assuming good intent and understanding that people start from different places

Vince Menzione  32:52 

really good, really good feedback here and good points you’ve raised. I’m curious because you had pet such a stellar career. Was it? Was there some coaching along the way? Was there a mentor or group of mentors? Was there some piece of advice or some philosophy that you took forward that helped you to become like this amazing success, this amazing person, by the way, we’ve got to work together, I just think that you are just a very kind and amazing individual, I would say not everybody has both the skills and the grace that you have, like, was there something along the way that that really like set you on a path?

Aletha Noonan  33:30 

You know, I appreciate that, thank you for saying that. I don’t find myself to be amazing, but I am older. You know, I didn’t hit the half-century mark. And I decided in the last you know, however, many years, I wanted to, I wanted to be kind and I wanted to assume good intent. So I do believe that most people are good tend to fundamentally I believe most people are good, I think we’re more aligned than we are apart. And I approach things like that. So I approach and things that if I, you know, if I feel I’m offending someone or someone’s offending me, I think maybe we’re just not enlightened, or we’re not seeing this from the same way. I generally genuinely believe that there is more alignment than dissension that people are so caught up and focusing on the dissension. So that is a thing that I’ve come to part because of my own experiences. I had mentors all along the way. And some of them were like big mentors, like, I’m going to mentor you. And we’re going to regularly talk about this. And some of them are moments in time. I remember when I was a young salesperson, I thought I was pretty good. Yeah, I was. I was pretty good. And I was like, on this on my sales team for the guy I was working for at the time, Alan Weiss. I was praying, you know, typically one two or three on his team. And one day he showed me the numbers and he said, Why are you always at number one you should be at the top of the list every day. You’re the best salesperson I had at that moment in time. That’s all I need. And I’m like, oh, I’m the best at this and the best salesperson I better show up and be the best salesperson. So I do think there are small moments of meant impact that really make people go Oh, I think I want to go to war. I can’t I get away Let them down. I’m there I’ve been an aggressive person. And then there’s, there’s those big moments where I was about to take a job. I was newer at cw, and there was the founder who was Michael crazy. And then there was a number two, the president who was great zeeman. And I was about to take this other job. And my boss said, well, and I was probably about nine months into sales, and I was off to a great start. And Greg zeeman said, I want to talk to him. So I didn’t talk to Craig. CW at the time was five or 600 people, maybe 120 salespeople, but I didn’t regularly engage with the President. So he said, Greg Stevens that I want to talk to her before she takes the job. So he brought me in his office. And I remember calling my friend’s mom. So my parents were blue collar working class, and they had great advice, but it just wasn’t necessarily corporate advice. So I remember calling my friend’s mom who had worked for IBM, who kind of independently would mentor both of us because she was my roommate. And she had been in tech. And she was my friend, stepmom. And we just would regularly talk about things. And I called her and I said, so I was going to take this other job, and I would get my base salary would go up, but just so you know, I would not my variable competent, I would have been a salesperson to take this job at CW. And she said, Well, a couple of things. If the president doesn’t want you to take the job, you probably shouldn’t take it. Because why would the President pay attention to you and and that job would still be there in a couple of years, if that’s what you really think you want to do. So you may want to listen to him. And I said, Okay, well, I’m not going to take the meeting. I don’t really want to talk. I’m kind of afraid, right? I’m like, 25, I’ll take the meeting. She goes, Oh, yeah, you’re taking the meeting. Because when you’re ever gonna get in one room with the president, again, here’s what you’re gonna do with them. So that free conversation got me this regular dialogue with CWA President, I took the meeting. And he gave me some great advice that day, too. And part of it was dream a little bigger, you know, he said, You know, I know you could do this other job. But I think you could be a star here. And I think you do X, Y, and Z. And he just expressed a tremendous belief in me. And we had this like, normal conversation. And again, I was, you know, hadn’t been in the workforce for very long. And I didn’t know like, I wasn’t that old. But he was older than me, you know, old wealthy professionals calling me in their office having a conversation with me. So it was a great conversation. And it was a real conversation, we pray talk for half an hour. And he gave me his perspective of how he’d grown up and, you know, but He really said, you know, you should believe you can do these bigger things. And that’s part of the opportunity for you. So I had lots of mentors along the way, that early in my career, it was moments in time that really matter to make me think, well, maybe I can do this.

Vince Menzione  37:32 

I love that. So lots of advice and learnings along the way from several role models. You know, I’d like to spend a moment we talked I asked you about personal philosophy, but I wanted to dig in a little deeper here on this one. And I think I heard some things along the way. But is there a personal philosophies like when when aletha wakes up in the morning when she when her feet hit the ground? Like is there a way you start your day or you think about life?

Aletha Noonan  37:56 

Well, I have a couple of thoughts. I do have a philosophy, and I heard of him Norman Schwarzkopf years ago, I heard Norman Schwarzkopf today make a decision to do the right thing. And I do spend a tremendous amount of time thinking about doing the right thing and making decisions in my personal and professional life as a mother, as a neighbor, as a worker, as a leader. But it really kind of as a grounding guiding principle for me, and the other one that I that I think about and the other kind of, you know, besides that, as my daughter tells my youngest daughter, Lexi always says, she doesn’t ever want to go to bed mad. So she will come in and give me a hug and a kiss, even if she was, you know, teenage, teenage snooty that day. But there is a you know, there’s this kind of things you live by about how you want to be as a person or whatever it may be. But the other one for me is really about the camera is always rolling. And I just, you know, I want to playback the reel, and feel good about it. And I also want to be aware that, when I think of it, I think about this, and this is advice I’ve gifted to young people, and when you’re looking for a new job or an opportunity, or you want, like you and I were talking about earlier, to have a good partnership, you want to have people to rollback their earlier interactions with you. And that’s really where the relationship or the or the trust was formed. So I have a big point of view that giving and building relationships over time is so much more important than any one moment in time. And I I know that Adam Grant, I think wrote the book, give and take, and I’m all about, you know, what can I do to help other people with their journey. There’s a woman who called me yesterday, my daughter did some service work for her organization. And she wanted my advice on some project she’s working on, I have no idea what the conversation is going to be about. And if I just decided that I didn’t have any time because I assume I never have any time I probably wouldn’t have taken the call with this woman was a big influence in my daughter’s life and the service work that she did for her and she went on a trip to Honduras with her. So of course, I’m taking the call. So I just have this point of view that I’ll I’ll generally take any call or support anybody in a way that I can if it’s a moment that I believe the camera is always rolling, whether it’s an A, and people are gonna play back that camera to make their long term decisions about you. And I believe in making a lot of deposits. And I don’t want to make deposits so that I can have a tit for tat relationship. But I just believe that, you know, having friends and putting good things out there, you know, maybe somebody will be good to me or to my family or my coworker one day, but in the meanwhile, it goes back to, to doing the right thing.

Vince Menzione  40:27 

Yeah, refer to that somewhat as an abundance mentality, right, get more than you wish for in return. And then you said, you know, do the right thing. And the cameras always rolling. I love that. I love the both of those. If we had a boat billboard for you, I think we would put that on there.

Aletha Noonan  40:42 

I have some other ones that are really ready for primetime podcast.

Vince Menzione  40:49 

We could have the RV version of this podcast next time, maybe over a glass of wine. But you know, speaking a glass of wine if you were hosting a dinner party. And this is at a time when we all could get together and not worry about masks and socially distancing. Maybe we’ll have our vaccines at that point. You can invite any three people to this dinner party from the present or the past. They join your amazing dinner, who would you invite to that party? And why?

Aletha Noonan  41:14 

Hmm, well, never good at these questions. I don’t remember seeing this on the preview. But it was at the bottom there. While I’m reading about somebody or listening to something, I’m like, Oh, that’s the person I would invite to the dinner party. That’s the one. Well, I would certainly invite my mother. Um, she has been dead for 30 years. And she kind of knew everything about everything. Now that I’m a mother, I know everything. But my mom was a waitress at a like a fancy dining place. So she hit she knew how to how you dress and where you put your napkin. And she also had like a very fine dining kind of taste buds. So she knew how to cook and she knew how to dress and she was a great party guests. In fact, I’ll tell you one story about parties. And I’m going to go back to that list. I was born on December 23. And I was raised Catholic. So we was born near Christmas. And we believed in Christ and and we also believed in Santa Claus. So my mom for years would host a neighborhood party for me, and Santa would be invited. And all the neighbors would be invited. No, I didn’t know this at the time, but she would have the neighbor, parents give a gift. So she would contribute the Santa to the party. And then all of the people would bring a gift ahead of time. So we’d all come to my birthday party, and everybody would get to meet Santa and get a gift. I think that ended right around the time I was like, eight or nine when somebody got a better gift than me. And I’m like, this really isn’t the best party. So if I were having a dinner party and inviting anybody, I’d certainly invite my mom and I get to more people, I probably invite Barack Obama, I sure have a lot of questions for him, you know, as I think about my own story, and I think about my own point of view. And I have this tiny little place on the map of history. And he has this big place in the map of history. I want to know what it was really like I did read Michelle’s book becoming, and I really related to it, because she raised her kids in Chicago, and she talked about being a professional woman, a working woman married to a man who broke a lot of barriers. So I’d really be interested in hearing quite a bit from him. And I think that that would be super interesting. And then I would invite Sean Connery,

Unknown Speaker  43:23 

john Carr,

Aletha Noonan  43:24 

because why wouldn’t you invite Sean Connery? I, so a couple of reasons. You know, I want to know about his double Oh, seven story, but also, I really wanted my favorite actors ever. And I wish that he was still he’s still here.

Vince Menzione  43:37 

He just passed away this past year. So for the holidays,

Aletha Noonan  43:41 

so I would invite Sean Connery. I think that he is a great actor. I thought he was a man of many things. And I really like to watch his movies with my husband. And is one thing that you know, one of the entertainment things that he and I have in common and I think you’d be a great dinner guest

Vince Menzione  43:58 

Oh, you have to serve vodka martinis right shaken not stirred or whatever it was.

Aletha Noonan  44:02 

I was there and my mom could probably make them

Vince Menzione  44:05 

there you go. Sounds like a great party off to come visit. And you know, you had been an amazing guests. I want to thank you. You are that person that you described earlier? Like you took the call right away when I say Hey, would you come and join us here on Ultimate Guide to Partnering but you know, I’d love to ask for our listeners. I didn’t ask you this earlier about partners like closing comments and advice that you would have to our partner listeners on engaging with CW and how they can optimize their own success this year.

Aletha Noonan  44:34 

I would say like anything Do your homework you know know know where there is a play or a point of view or solution adjacency and we do have quite a bit on our website so there’s an opportunity to have a you know really kind of focused ask, you know, I would say if you’re having challenges reaching CW connecting with CW you can always email me and I’ll find you the right person which is aletha at CW calm, but I think if if we focus on the customer and there’s a struggle behind it, we’ll find somebody to listen to that story. Oftentimes, our partners that are new or not as mature in their relationship with us get great success by finding a few sellers and customer facing engineers or architects to talk about their shared view of how this solution solves that customer. So gaining some internal advocacy is always a great idea, because that goes a long way. And we find that if sellers or business or customers are already using it or interested in it, it certainly goes a long way.

Vince Menzione  45:29 

I love that. Elisa, thank you so much for being a guest on Ultimate Guide to Partnering.

Aletha Noonan  45:34 

Thank you. Thank you for having me. It’s so nice to virtually see you. And I can’t wait to listen to the podcast. Thanks so much.

Transcribed by otter.ai

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