Ironside is excited to welcome Maria Ippolito into our organization as our new Practice Director for Sales Performance Management. She’s a high-energy, results-driven executive who has over 25 years of experience in engineering, marketing, sales, and sales operations management. Maria’s dynamic blend of expertise and industry experience perfectly embodies Ironside’s commitment to meeting the unique requirements of each of our customers’ sales performance management (SPM) goals and provides the foundation needed to take our existing SPM practice to the next level.

With a proven track record of driving overall profitability and effectiveness of sales channels in both startup- and enterprise-level technology and life sciences companies, Maria is able to hit the perfect mix of technical skill and strategic awareness needed to show clients the value that SPM processes can bring to their organizations.

During her career, Maria has directed and supported initiatives around many SPM-related activities, such as:

• Business planning tool implementation
• Sales analytics and reporting
• Quota setting and territory design
• Compensation design and administration
• ICM system implementations
• CRM implementations
• Sales process design and optimization
• Mobile sales enablement deployments
• Competency profiling for sales force recruitment and expansion
• Sales training and coaching

Regardless of the project she takes on, Maria’s core focus is always transformation to drive top line revenue and bottom line cost savings. She redefines how companies think about their sales process and the technologies they’re using by building highly functional teams, planning and rolling out process changes, and acquiring the tools organizations require to improve and optimize.

Maria’s list of credentials is extensive and distinguished. She has held key directorial positions at places like Smith & Nephew, Sales Science, Bolt, Beranek & Newman, and ITP Boston, Inc. and has overseen major process changes and improvements at all these companies. She also served as a cofounder of her own company, which was based on manufacturing simulation software that she took part in developing after receiving her Master of Science and Bachelor of Science degrees in Industrial Engineering and Electrical Engineering from Purdue University.

Here are some highlights from Maria’s numerous accomplishments:

• Successfully integrated two separate sales forces into a single unit after a $1.7 billion acquisition by Smith & Nephew, the largest they had ever made. Assimilated three different sales channels and restructured the entire US field organization, including new territory alignments and compensation plans.
• Built a world-class ICM system from the ground up at Smith & Nephew, transforming what was a manual process relying on Excel spreadsheets into a robust automated database for compensation plan design simulation and compensation plan efficiency analysis. The infrastructure she put in place now supports 1200 reps on 40 plans across 5 channels.
• Established a center of excellence for commercial process optimization at Smith & Nephew to drive internal efficiencies and sales force effectiveness.
• Championed Smith & Nephew’s transition to a modern business intelligence (BI) framework, providing a self-service sales analytics tool to the company’s field reps to encourage data-driven sales activities.
• Rebuilt the North American sales team at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, motivating the existing employees and recruiting new sales executives and technical consultants to create a high-performance sales engine.
• Developed and marketed the first commercially available input-driven manufacturing simulation software for optimizing discrete part manufacturing processes, cofounding her own company, Horizon Software, Inc., based on the technology. Horizon was later acquired by ITP Boston, Inc.

If you’d like to see what SPM can do for your company, check out our SPM page.