From IBM and Cisco to Cloudflare: 30 Years in Enterprise Sales | Vinti Batiste

Hi, my name is Vinti Batiste and I am Vice President of Sales for our U.S. Enterprise business here at Cloudflare. I started Cloudflare in November of 24 and I'm based here in Los Angeles, California. My career over the last 30 years spans across IBM and Cisco. I was at Cisco for 25 years and I had the privilege to do some really incredible things across different parts of the business, both at IBM as well at Cisco. And really most of my career has been in sales, primarily focused on our enterprise customers that started at IBM when I was part of our consumer packaged goods and retail division. You know, the DNA within IBM was to always focus on that end customer and make sure that we provide the outcomes that they were looking for. And that's really what I've always enjoyed about being in sales. Frankly, it's being able to help our customers and help them be successful. And of course, helping them grow their business. And at Cisco, I had several roles from individual contributor and then shifting into leadership, running our media sales division, financial services group. And then I had an opportunity to really pivot and shift a little bit more internally versus some of the external roles that I had customer facing. And I decided to do that and just kind of take a leap to grow myself and my career. So I first did a chief of staff role at Cisco, working for our customer experience officer directly, running some of the most strategic initiatives for the company, as well as the operations for the entire worldwide group for our customer experience team. And then after doing that, I had the opportunity to run our global enterprise segment, which meant really focusing on segmentation for our customers globally, as well as running our business value proposition team, focus on ROI. And again, that was stuff that I absolutely loved doing because it was connecting the dots between what our customers wanted and how we could sell to them. And then my last role at Cisco was running the America service provider team that included Canada, Latin America, and the US. And the division really consisted of our largest and most strategic customers within technology, media, and telecommunications. And I think back on the 30 years, what I love the most about being in sales is really being the bridge between our customer outcomes and the technology. It's really fun and gives me a lot of motivation energy to be part of our customer's business because you get to work with so many different parts of their organization, from the IT team to the security team, to finance, to their C -suite. And it's really incredible. And I think fulfilling to see the experience that they're trying to create, whether it's an incredible app, a new app on the phone, or how you consume content on a Friday night, sitting on your couch with your loved one. It's just fun to see that come to life through technology. So that's been my career over the 30 years. Can you also give us a perspective of what is your current job at Cloudflare? So my current job as Area Vice President of Sales for the US business, and specifically focused on what we call our named and our digital native customers. So these are customers with employees in around 2,500, all the way up to 10,000 employees in the organization, and also our digital native customers. Think of them as any company born after 2001. So they're cloud native customers who have incredible high propensity to buy. They have really grown up in the cloud. And for them, Cloudflare is a household name. So my role specifically is leading an organization and a team of approximately 160 account executives. And together, we are focused on making sure that we help our customers be successful. We help them be secure. We help them engage and understand how to secure their business through AI, through the Cloudflare platform. And it's been an incredible journey. All the innovation that Cloudflare has fully aligns to the things that our customers are looking for, be to market, and at the end of the day, minimizing risk in their business so that they can be successful and profitable, and create the right customer experience that we all look for when we download an app and use our phone every single day. Can you give us a fun fact of your time at Cloudflare? And also, why not, one achievement at Cloudflare that you're most proud of in this 15 months? Yes. I mean, I will tell you, I am so proud of the team. Over the last 15 months, we have done some incredible things, including winning new logos with customers that we had met for the very first time. Cloudflare had not spoken to them because we were focused primarily mid-market, early Cloudflare days. And now, we're moving upstream into the enterprise business. So it's been just so great to engage with our customers, showcase our platform, and the value that we can provide to your business. One of the things I'm most proud of from last year in 2025, fiscal 25, is we grew the business north of 80 percent year over year, and had material impact to Cloudflare's bottom line. And we couldn't have done it without everyone on the team just rallying in the same direction, hyper -focused on customer success. One of the fun facts I'll share with you, I think it was week two on the job at Cloudflare, and I was in the San Francisco office in the Nexus exec briefing room, and I was doing my all-hands with the whole team at the time. The room was full, and it was my first introduction, actually, in meeting in person with the team. And during the middle of the all-hands, Michelle Zatlin walked in and wanted to say hello to everyone. And I will tell you, it was just such a defining moment for me, and just cementing the fact that this is absolutely where I wanted to be. I mean, we had one of the co-founders walk in with just ease and grace, and just wanting to engage. Hadn't seen and experienced that just for the last 30 years when I think back. And I was just so impressed and excited about, you know, having her come into my all -hands. And I think it is pretty cool. I was probably the most surprised. I think maybe everybody else who'd been at Cloudflare a lot longer was used to the co -founder walking in, but it's not something I'd experienced. And I was just super excited to have her be part of the all-hands that day. I think the month is really important to just take a pause and celebrate. But at the end of the day, the motion of supporting everyone around us and being inclusive, male, female, etc., should happen every single day. I think Give to Gain is all about paving the path for others and helping others and lending a hand. I've been very fortunate to get that from my mentors, and I continue to want to give back and mentor others. And one of the biggest pieces of advice that I give to anyone I mentor, anytime I'm talking to men or women early in career, is say yes. Don't be afraid. Embrace the change. Embrace the journey. And say yes to a new role. Say yes to a new opportunity or to a new assignment. Because that's how you grow, and that's how you learn, and that's how you make new connections. And that ability to do that is actually going to just pay off in such a big way, because then you'll be able to do the same for others. What's a piece of advice or tip you can give to others just starting out in your industry or field? I think there's a couple of pieces of advice that I always give to those that are starting off in the field. First, let your customer be the guiding light, North Star. Don't get bogged down by, I think, the internal minutiae. As long as you really understand the customer and understand the relationship, you will always be successful in sales. Because customers truly appreciate someone that puts themselves in their shoes, puts themselves on the other side, understands their challenges, understands their KPIs, their initiatives, how they're incented, and where they're focused. From a personal standpoint, I would say, I mean, I said this earlier, be fearless. Continue to say yes to new projects, new assignments. But also, don't be so hard on yourself. I think a lot of folks that are early in career find themselves saying, I wish I hadn't done that, or maybe I should have done something differently. I think it's okay to make mistakes, as long as you learn from those and get better. The only way you do that is if you continue to grow and be curious. What's the best way you've used AI so far? So for me personally, day -to-day using AI is critical to the business. Many different things, right? So even today, as an example, as I meet with customers, the things that I'm leveraging AI for is understanding their last quarterly earnings, having a quick summary about their business, understanding where they've been successful and what are some of the challenges they have. A couple of weeks ago, we met with a customer and before walking into that meeting, I leveraged AI to understand that they had completely changed their go-to-market. And so one of the first questions I asked the customer, it wasn't about CDN and developer, it was really about, talk to me about how the go-to-market changes impacted the IT organization and how now you have to support the go-to-market organization with different tools, with different finance tools, et cetera. And I'll tell you, the customer actually took a step backwards and they were really surprised that we had done the right research, we're asking the right questions and that we knew materially this was extremely important to them because they just announced it on an earnings call. So I leverage AI that way. I'll tell you that sales is every day, you have to be really, really good at math. So I leverage AI a lot of times to just from a math equation standpoint, looking at probability, how we're going to run our forecast, the probability of us closing deals, our conversion rates, looking at our pipeline and understanding where we really need to be versus where we are. And so AI has been really helpful for that. And I'm actually really excited about how we can continue to use it within the sales organization. One of my biggest productivity hacks is quite simple and it's to block out time on the calendar, to think, to think about my priorities in the morning and to really know going into the day, what are the two or three things I absolutely have to get done because the day can kind of suck you in and there's always something urgent and a new fire drill. But having that just at 30 minutes in the morning is super helpful. And I encourage everyone to do that before you jump into your first meeting to get grounded on what you need to do for the day. And last but not least, what's the thing about sales that most people don't know, but they should? I think there's a lot of misconception about sales. And I'm sure my family wouldn't be happy if I said this, but I will anyway. I think even my family sometimes doesn't understand what I do. To me, sales is a math problem. You have to forecast, you have to know your number, you have to know what your conversion is going to be. You really have to also provide the right ROI to your customer in order to win the proposal and the deal and get it across the finish line. I think it's really evolved in the last 30 years. I think a lot of the misconception is it's still about taking your customer to lunch, dinner, going golfing and building that relationship. But I'd say that our customers have evolved as well. The market has moved. They're extremely savvy. They don't want just a high-level presentation because they would have already researched it online. They would have leveraged AI to understand what Cloudflare does. And so it's really important as a sales person and a sales leader, when you walk in to see a customer, to be focused on their business and to really look at how you can build an ROI for them that either saves them money or mitigates their risk and be able to showcase that. Because that's really how you're going to win the customer and how you're going to win for Cloudflare.