Darren Pleasance

Darren Pleasance leads Cisco's Go-to-Market Strategy & Operations Organization, which drives the company’s go-to-market model and supports ongoing performance improvements for Sales, Marketing, and our Partner Ecosystems. His team is also responsible for enabling the sales teams and partners with the training, incentives, tools and the infrastructure that they need to succeed.

Previously, Darren led Google’s Global Customer Acquisitions team, dedicated to driving Google's growth in the advertising space across a diverse set of countries and industries. In this capacity, Darren was responsible for guiding Sales, Marketing, Market Intelligence and Support teams to attract businesses of all sizes to Google's many advertising services. The goal was to make businesses aware of how Google's services could help them succeed and to provide them the highest quality on-boarding experience in the industry.

Prior to Google, Darren was a Partner in McKinsey's High-Tech Sector and Marketing & Sales Practice and the founder of McKinsey's global Small and Medium-sized Business (SMB) practice. In this role, Darren specialized in helping clients build high-performing sales, marketing, and support channels to serve customers across the spectrum from large enterprises, to small and mid-sized businesses. In the high-tech sector, Darren’s major focus was on helping clients build high-performing direct and indirect sales models, including managing the transformation of these models due to growth in Cloud infrastructure and services.

Darren holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from UC Santa Barbara and an MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management.