After NetApp, I did something I hadn’t really done before: I left infrastructure entirely.

Oracle, IBM, NetApp — whatever the specific product, I’d spent two decades selling things that lived in a data center or a cloud console. Storage, compute, databases, analytics engines. Yext is none of that. Yext is a digital presence platform — it manages the “knowledge graph” of facts about a brand (locations, hours, providers, services) and makes sure that information shows up correctly everywhere a customer might look for it: Google, Apple Maps, review sites, and increasingly, whatever AI tool someone’s asking instead of searching. #NewCategory

In healthcare specifically, that’s a bigger deal than it sounds. Get a location’s hours wrong, or list the wrong doctor at the wrong clinic, and you’re not just annoying a customer — you’re potentially sending a patient to the wrong building. Selling that story meant a whole new pitch, to a whole new buyer: not IT, but marketing and brand leaders who think in terms of patient acquisition and experience, not uptime and throughput. Different room, different language, same job of finding the pain and proving you can fix it. #NewPitch

I came in as Director of Sales for Healthcare in the Western US — but as a player-coach, which meant carrying my own quota while also mentoring a team carrying theirs. I hadn’t done that particular juggling act in a while, and it’s a genuinely different rhythm: you’re closing your own deals and reviewing theirs, in the same week, sometimes the same day. Delivered 120% of my individual number and generated $25M+ in pipeline.

The bigger structural move was rebuilding the Western US territory into an actual top-50 strategic account plan across healthcare payers and providers, instead of whatever list had accumulated over the years. That discipline paid off in wins with Humana, Scripps, Kaiser Permanente, HonorHealth, and El Camino Health — a mix of payer and provider logos that, frankly, I was proud to have across one territory plan.

A year into it, a different kind of pull showed up — not a bigger territory or a new vertical this time, but a much smaller company that needed something I’d been building a reputation for since my Great West days at IBM: actual sales discipline, from the ground up. That’s next.

#Yext #DigitalPresence #Healthcare #PlayerCoach