Early sales experience builds solid base for new CEO

by Jay Rizoli

Originally published at: Mass High Tech

Ken Bero, president, CEO of Datawatch Corp.
Lots of boys grow up dreaming of becoming an athlete. Considerably fewer grow up dreaming of becoming a CEO. Ken Bero got to do both, sort of.

Bero, chief operating officer at Datawatch Corp. in Chelmsford, was named last month the company's new president and chief executive officer, effective Dec. 31. It's the latest stop in a 30-year career for the sales and marketing executive and former guard for the Bates College (Maine) Bobcats.

I guess if you had talked to me as a kid, my aspiration was to be a ballplayer, either baseball or basketball, he said. That's a far cry from what I ended up doing, but I did play Division III basketball, so I was able to reach that goal to some degree.

The New Britain, Conn., native left Bates with a degree in political science and got his MBA at Northeastern University before heading to Southern California to sell color copiers for computer graphics and printing developer CalComp -- not his first choice, he says, but a necessary one once he turned his eye from finance to marketing.

Someone told me that if you want to be in marketing you have to carry a bag for a while and sell, Bero said -- and he did, hitting 105 percent of his sales goals in the first year.

Bero's trip West lasted a while, taking him to management positions at Tektronix Inc., Access Graphics, Navidec Inc. and Business Objects before he came home, in effect, to Datawatch. He was COO and executive vice president of sales and marketing at Navidec, bringing the company from $5 million to $32 million in revenue in four years. As vice president of North American channel sales at Business Objects, he helped bring company revenue from $30 million to $75 million.

Bero joined Datawatch in June 2006 as vice president of enterprise sales for North America and became COO in March of this year. And he's thrilled with what he envisions for the company.

We've got a fabulous opportunity in the enterprise information management marketplace, he said. Every organization has more information than they know what to do with, and the challenge is how to use it.

Bero, who also joins the Datawatch board of directors, says that while his first CEO position is a milestone, he's never forgotten that early sales experience.

That's been one thing that's stayed with me, he said. There's no substitute for spending time with customers, getting to know their concerns and requirements.

Jay Rizoli is a freelance writer in Franklin.

 

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