Maestro Spotlight on Doreen Marchetti: Agenting Powerful Partnerships

Doreen Marchetti connects people. She understands that sales is a collaborative process, an extension of a company’s ecosystem that should benefit all parties. If you talk to her for ten minutes, she’ll have three suggestions for the people you should talk to next. Given that her LinkedIn community amounts to almost 25,000 professional relationships (what we might have called, back in the day, having a “big Rolodex”), Marchetti has the power to make those introductions happen. 

Back in 1982, Marchetti was a recent Duquesne University graduate with a B.S. in mathematics, a minor in computer science, and a teaching certificate. She had shown an early knack for helping people and thought that might shape her career options. She’d also grown up in a blue-collar household where business strategy was rarely the dinner-table conversation.

“I wanted to be a schoolteacher, and there were no jobs for math teachers, back then—believe it or not, how things change!—and then I got the call from IBM.” (Also, for the record, from Mellon Bank, Case Western, and…Apple. A trusted uncle advised her to steer clear of the latter, because it was based “in a garage.”) 

For 37 years, Marchetti worked at IBM Corporation in selling and developing key strategic relationships with channel partners such as Red Hat, Tech Data, and Lenovo, as well as coordinating with team members in 19 countries. Over time, Marchetti proved her sales acumen by delivering 50% year-over-year (YOY) growth, with revenues of $500M+ annually. This was at a time that usually reported an average of 10% YOY growth. More recently, as the Vice President of Strategic Alliance and Channel Sales at Global Knowledge, a Skillsoft Company, she led a team of talented channel-sales managers and negotiated with leadership to expand support to Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) and Customer Sales Managers (CSMs), who—together with account managers—accomplished 85% YOY growth in the first year. 

I’ve been around long enough to know an expert in the field when I meet one. If you’ve got a mission that seems impossible, Doreen Marchetti can help you get it done. She knows that teamwork and trust create a successful sales organization. All she needs is a chance to spin open that Rolodex.

SECRET SAUCE

What’s the secret to helping people sell? Marchetti believes it is the art of good questions, active listening, and “getting to that nerve where they want to talk to you back,” she says. “A lot of sales calls end pretty badly because all it is is someone talking about features, functions, benefits, and then, ‘goodbye.’”

Early in her work career, people repeatedly told her she had a “girl next door” quality. She could have taken that as a marginalization of what she could accomplish. Instead, she embraced it as part of the larger package of what she has to offer, which includes bottomless and transformative energy. She is a straight talker who values integrity and attributes an inherent, positive value to the truth. 

“That’s the thing that people have told me my whole frickin’ life: I’m always so positive,” Marchetti laughs. “I bring that out in people, to feel very much at home to talk about whatever they want to talk about.” That quality encourages prospects to reveal pain points, so that Marchetti can then help them understand how the company she represents will address those pain points. “I have a knack for being able to help people get back into a positive space.”

Being a great sales professional is one thing. Being a great manager is another, and Marchetti speaks from the experience of having managed over 100 employees across several companies. She emphasizes the importance of maintaining good work-life boundaries, something that she feels has improved in recent years, but she also worries that employees aren’t blocking out enough time to think, process, and learn, because of a culture that constantly suggests hopping on calls—calls that could be biweekly instead of weekly, or perhaps replaced entirely by a thoughtful email. 

“Not all bosses are great bosses. Maybe they’re a phenomenal sales rep, and so they get promoted because they make their quota eight quarters in a row,” she points out. “But they’re not great bosses unless they’re teaching and helping their sales reps become better sales reps.”

WORST-KEPT SECRET

In addition to her role with Maestro Group, Marchetti works with the Multi Gen Innovation Group; iSolverisk; TeamLift; Do Think Do; Workforce, Innovation, Trust and Influence (WITI); and the Jewish Home at Rockleigh. In her capacities as consultant or board member, she approaches every organization with her trademark positivity, as a coach who can help leaders develop their teams and raise funds. She offers hard-won advice to C-level executives about the importance of authentic alliances. 

Marchetti never forgets the power of person-to-person bonds. While at Global Knowledge, she conceived an opportunity to work with the United Nations for the distribution of technical training in Third World countries. She found a champion at the UN, and the two women strategized a partnership. This was a pronounced shift from her previous experiences in corporate settings such as Cisco, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, and Marchetti was excited to make a difference in a new sector. Then, fate intervened. 

“I got fired the morning I was supposed to meet with a senior director of the United Nations to talk about this,” Marchetti tells me. (In the recording of our interview, I say, “Oh nooo!”) 

With access to her company computer cut off, Marchetti had to wait until her contact called to inquire about the missed meeting. When she explained what had happened, the United Nations chose to continue their partnership with Marchetti, because that’s where the trust resided. Within 24 hours, Marchetti had an offer to be flown in as an advisor and provide contacts for new collaborations, resulting in fresh opportunities for underserved markets.

There are two lessons here. The first is one of Marchetti’s grit and resilience. The second speaks to best practices for management, because Marchetti emphasizes the shortsightedness of her former employer. When you let someone go, she counsels organizations, you can’t disregard their calendar or contacts. Laying someone off isn’t a secret to be kept; you have to craft a message that acknowledges the transition.  

“I would want them to do that,” she says. “Customers and partners deserve the dignity of having that information.”

SECRET WEAPON

Procuring potential channel or partner additions to a sales team requires not only a big network, but expertise and endurance. For a recent client, the call for applicants led to conducting forty interviews in two weeks’ time. Marchetti lost her voice but welcomed the rush.

“I love learning about people,” she reflects. Her secret weapon is simply requesting, “Tell me your story.” But she doesn’t ask that up front. Marchetti waits until a connection has been established before specifying, “Tell me your story from your lens—where you are today—and base that on where you were before and where you want to go.”

“None of us are where we are ‘today’ if we didn’t have yesterday,” she says. “Yesterday is the telling story. Especially for women.”

Marchetti is an equal-opportunity networker, but she particularly roots for women forging paths in business. This is due, in part, to the nuances of her own story—which included arranging remote work with IBM long before that was an accepted practice, when her pregnancy made a long commute untenable. She spent years clocking in 60- or 70-hour weeks while raising two sons, and periodically hopping on planes for international travel (she has been to more than 50 countries and counting). Today, she co-organizes F.O.R.G.E.D. (“fostering opportunities, resilience, growth, empowerment, and development”), a series that is hosted by WITI, as well as other online opportunities for professional women.

In 2023, Marchetti also launched a support group for people with parents diagnosed with dementia. As a caregiver for her own mother, she empathizes with the challenges to those simultaneously maintaining working full-time. From memory, she cites a study cosponsored by National Alliance for Caregiving (NAC) and AARP that showed the number of unpaid caregivers in America has climbed to 53 million as of 2020—a demographic that includes a disproportionate number of women. 

At the end of our conversation, Marchetti apologized for her story being so “bouncy,” as if she’d seemed all over the place. But what I noticed was the variety of her experiences, the frankness in how she spoke of them, and how I found myself sharing stories in return about caregiving and being a woman in the workforce. She also pulled her friend’s poetry collection off the shelf to make sure I knew to check it out, and suggested I make a connection with a start-up venture that she advises. The best secret agents know how to conduct their missions in plain sight.

Ready to make a sales connection? Reach out at mastery@maestrogroup.co for more information on partnerships, training, coaching, assessments, and more.