DAN (Dhanuka) FERNANDO

Over the past three years, I have significantly expanded Workiva's client base across the Western Australia, Victoria, and New Zealand regions within ANZ. Workiva, a US-based and publicly listed SaaS vendor, has been extending its reach into the ANZ region for approximately five years. Given the limited brand recognition in this region, my role involves developing go-to-market activities such as webinars and fostering strong partner relationships within the partner ecosystem, which includes the Big Four (notably Deloitte, KPMG, and PwC) as well as other renowned consulting organizations such as Accenture.

Key Responsibilities and Achievements:

• Actively generating sales opportunities in collaboration with Inside Sales, Solution Sellers, and Partnerships to generate qualified opportunities.
• Conducting initial introduction presentations to client stakeholders, covering problem statements, Workiva's value proposition, and organizational background. Coordinating tailored presentations in partnership with the solution consultant team following process discovery sessions. Utilizing information gathered during the needs analysis phase to deliver compelling demonstrations of the Workiva platform to economic buyers and decision-makers, fostering customer belief in the necessity of Workiva solutions.
• Engaging and collaborating with Workiva's partner ecosystem to source and influence license opportunities within prospective clients and customers.
• Developing and executing account plans for existing strategic clients to drive further adoption.
• Guiding the sales process to closure by demonstrating Workiva's value propositions leveraging the Command of the Message methodology.
• Providing consistent and accurate forward-looking information through pipeline assessment in Salesforce to local and US-based leadership, including MEDDPICC.
• Gathering internal support for pursuing an account.
• Maintaining strong knowledge of Workiva solutions through ongoing training.
• Engaged in product training, demonstrations, consumer awareness, branding, and acquisition initiatives to raise awareness and revenues.

As the most experienced senior business development manager in Thomson Reuters' ANZ team. I currently manage my responsibilities in driving new business growth with the added mentoring and team leadership responsibilities within the state team of 4 business development managers

Key Responsibilities and Achievements:

• Develop, implement, and maintain sales activities including close plans and strategic account plans.
• Build and maintain long-term relationships with senior stakeholders and with the client's management team driving new business growth via relationships.
• Working directly with marketing leadership on new strategies on new business generating campaigns.
• Assist sales director with strategy for sales growth, hiring and onboarding of new staff.
• Report directly to regional leadership team on strategic opportunities.
• Manage relationships with leadership of internal partners including professional services, customers success, support, proposition and finance.
• Consistently developed a prospect pipeline of 3x annual quota.
• Closed collaborative deals with our external's partners including KPMG.
• Manage portfolio of key strategic clients for TR driving cross sell opportunities with both whitespace and existing clients.
• In 2018 I closed an enterprise deal which is largest opportunity win for Thomson Reuters in Asia Emerging Markets with first year value of 9 million AUD.
• This includes commercial conversation spanning 65 countries.
• 2018 Winner of Presidents Club with 500%+ of Quota.

In my role as Business Development Manager I was responsible for driving new business for Thomson within the Tax and Finance compliance space.

Key Responsibilities and Achievements:

• Managed a portfolio of top 2000 ASX clients based in government and corporate sectors.
• Driving pipeline opportunity creation by proactively reaching out to new and existing customers to build relationships, setup discovery calls presentations and meetings for both new business and cross sell opportunities.
• Identify potential white space prospects via industry research.
• Coordinate strategy meetings with internal and external partners to maximise success rate of product demonstrations.
• Drive opportunity through all stages of pipeline progression from creation to close.
• Creation of proposals, negotiated contractual agreements and coordinating with the legal, propositions product teams in bringing commercial discussion to a successful close.
• In this role I have achieved above my quota at 121% and 105% in respective years.

I was responsible for managing a large portfolio of existing clients, including several ASX listed companies, multinationals, SME's, government bodies and professional services firms. Leading a broad range of client focused activities ranging from implementations pre-sales product demonstrations and ongoing clients support and relationship management.

Key Responsibilities and Achievements:

• Maintaining strong relationships with key stake holders, ongoing support for key users of Thomson Reuters financial solutions and undertaking specialised consulting projects to deliver services or customised products to meet client needs.
• As was a product specialist acted as key contact for both internal and externally generated queries regarding process and functionality.
• Project managed and delivered the testing phases of corporate tax platforms including managing nationwide business testing before release to market, overseeing test case design, case allocations, liaising with development team members and reporting to key internal stake holders at director level.
• Responsible for presenting nationwide internal and external training sessions for new, existing users and key stake holders across a broad range of financial software solutions.
• Worked closely with the Business Development team as a presenter of first look demonstrations to key stake holders of potential new clients.

My role at PWC in the tax technology team involved providing solutions support to the corporate tax client base. This included technical support and consulting in areas of Corporate Tax and Fringe Benefit Tax.

Key responsibilities included:

• Support query resolution.
• Onsite customized support and training of key client contacts.
• Coordinated issue resolutions and tracking.
• Reviewed clients tax filing papers thoroughly to determine eligibility for additional tax credits or deductions.