Carrie Ferrero: Revolutionizing Telecom with a Data-Driven Strategy

Carrie Ferrero, Vice President of Sales Engineering and Enablement at Connectbase, has been with the company for over five and a half years, wearing various hats throughout her journey. Her roles have evolved from pre-sales and post-sales to customer strategy and product development, showcasing her versatile approach to business transformation. At Connectbase, sales engineering is crucial in delivering transformational solutions to customers while ensuring that internal teams are educated about these solutions. Sales Engineers are a bridge between customers and departments like marketing, development operations (DevOps), product, and sales, ensuring that everyone is aligned with the customer’s needs. They are essentially the voice of the customer, a vital aspect of any business. A key focus of her role has been driving the company’s overall strategy, particularly through the Sales Engineering function.

Sales Engineering at Connectbase plays a foundational role in delivering transformational solutions to customers. Carrie explains that Sales Engineers are the heartbeat of the organization, bridging gaps between different departments such as marketing, dev ops, product, and sales. Their primary task is translating the customer’s needs to all departments within the company, ensuring that the solutions provided are effective and understood by all internal stakeholders. Over the years, Carrie has come to realize that understanding the customer’s journey is essential for successful solutions. Sales Engineers can offer valuable advice, often providing more effective and efficient paths toward achieving customer goals. Knowing the processes, teams, systems, and tools that the customer uses is critical to building impactful solutions. This advisory role builds trust and fosters long-term partnerships with customers, turning them from mere clients into strategic partners.

When it comes to leading a team, Carrie’s approach is grounded in authentic leadership and mentorship. She believes that setting clear expectations, being vulnerable, and teaching accountability are the keys to building a successful team and cultivating a productive culture. Carrie doesn’t just strive for numbers. She strives to create an environment where everyone is hyper-focused on collaboration, problem-solving, and learning from one another. By empowering each team member to have a voice and encouraging them to bring their ideas to the table, she fosters a sense of ownership and responsibility. he takes pride in teaching her team that trust is essential in any partnership. This collaborative culture is not just about work, it’s about igniting passion within her team. Carrie believes that passionate people are the ones who turn the impossible into the possible, and without passion, employees will never reach their full potential. This, in turn, is a loss for both the individual and the company.

Sales Engineering at Connectbase involves dealing with complex technical solutions, and ensuring that the sales team understands these intricacies is one of Carrie’s primary responsibilities. To simplify this, she encourages collaboration through discussions of new use cases and various perspectives. For her, it is essential to understand the “what,” “why,” and “how” before addressing a problem with a product or solution. This process involves what Carrie refers to as “day-in-the-life” training, where the team gets hands-on experience and identifies gaps in knowledge or process. These training sessions, combined with research and sharing ideas, often lead to game-changing insights. Carrie is a firm believer in the power of passionate people. Carrie also advocates for taking time to reflect on problems, sometimes suggesting that her team “sleep on it.” In her own experience, many solutions or ideas have come to her after taking a break and giving her brain time to process the information subconsciously.

Measuring the success of sales engineering efforts is another critical aspect of Carrie’s role. She believes in making complex concepts simple, both for her team and for customers. Simplifying the sales process helps to shorten sales cycles, increase the success rate of proof of concepts, and reduce the number of demos required before a customer signs on. As Sales Engineers, one of the primary responsibilities is translating the product’s capabilities into terms the customer can easily grasp, while also communicating the customer’s requirements back to internal teams like development and marketing. This requires the ability to “speak” multiple languages, figuratively, whether it’s technical jargon for the developers or business terms for the marketing team.

To measure the success of her Sales Engineering efforts, Carrie focuses on simplicity. She believes that the ability to translate complex solutions into simple terms is a key indicator of success. This simplicity makes it easier to track sales cycles, proof of concept success, and the number of demos required before securing a deal. Carrie also emphasizes the importance of automation and system integration. By focusing on APIs and automated processes, the team can provide significant ROI upfront, leading to long-term growth and customer satisfaction. Carrie also focuses on system integration and automation to drive partner growth. By measuring how many upsells resulted from seeds planted in previous engagements or Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs), Connectbase can track the long-term impact of Sales Engineering efforts. This collaboration across departments also helps reduce customer churn, ensuring that customers remain satisfied and continue to grow alongside the company.

In the rapidly evolving telecommunications and network data industry, Carrie is particularly excited about the growing use of Connectbase’s Global Location ID (GLID) system. This system allows customers to drive accuracy, strategy, and efficiency by leveraging location-based data to create what she refers to as “Location Truth.” The ability to dynamically price products and services using this data is a game-changer for the industry, which has traditionally relied on outdated methods like emailing rate cards and building lists. Carrie highlights the danger of automating bad data, which can lead to costly errors. Instead, she emphasizes the importance of automating trusted data, which can provide strategic insights and allow companies to be more agile and competitive.

Innovation is at the core of what Carrie does at Connectbase. She is always looking for ways to add value to existing products by enhancing visibility and analytics. By integrating workflow-driven capabilities with data-driven logic, Connectbase provides an ecosystem that offers immense value to stakeholders. Every opportunity is viewed as a chance to innovate and improve the product, and Carrie encourages her team to focus on what the product could look like 10 years down the line. This forward-thinking approach keeps Connectbase ahead of the curve and is essential to its partners’ daily operations.

Customer feedback is also a critical component of innovation at Connectbase. Carrie has an “ideas pad” where she documents ideas and suggestions from customers. She ensures that she captures the what, why, and how of each request, then links it to similar requests from other customers. These ideas are then related to tickets in the company’s platform and prioritized based on their potential impact, revenue generation, or quality improvement.

Looking ahead, Carrie envisions a future where artificial intelligence (AI) plays a significant role in the telecom industry. In the next five years, she predicts that AI will help build strategies for market expansion, calculate real-time build costs, and drive dynamic pricing in small ecosystems and marketplaces. This will allow telecom companies to move away from outdated standards, such as using USPS for location data, and adopt more accurate methods that reflect the realities of modern connectivity. By reducing fallout rates during the validation stage, Connectbase has already saved customers millions of dollars, and Carrie believes this trend will continue as the industry embraces improved standards.

One of the biggest challenges customers face in network buying and selling is trust. Carrie emphasizes that building trust in partnerships is critical to avoiding costly mistakes and wasted time. Connectbase helps solve this problem by ensuring that locations are valid, standardized, and properly matched, allowing for faster and more accurate quoting. By building trust in the process, customers can be confident that they are making informed decisions, which ultimately leads to more successful partnerships.

Carrie’s approach to partnerships is rooted in trust, consistency, and transparency. She makes it a point to understand the internal processes of her partners, from their lead-to-cash workflows to the tools and systems they use. By identifying potential breakdowns or inefficiencies, she can offer solutions that improve the partnership for the long term. Her focus is always on the bigger picture by building relationships that last, rather than chasing short-term wins.

In her role as VP of Sales Engineering, Carrie has learned the importance of strategy and measurement. Setting clear objectives key results (OKRs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) early in the year allows her team to stay on track and adjust their strategy as needed. These metrics help ensure that the team is consistently growing and achieving its goals.

To aspiring Sales Engineering leaders, Carrie offers advice to embrace problem-solving and solutions on the fly. Sales Engineers are trusted advisors, responsible for building solutions that take into account the partner’s future growth. By incorporating these solutions into quarterly business reviews, they can better forecast opportunities and develop meaningful strategies that lead to long-term success.