Who's Who of Professional Women

ELIZABETH A. BAKER

Elizabeth A. Baker began her professional journey at Berry College, where she obtained a bachelor’s degree in accounting. She followed this with a master’s degree in finance and statistics from the University of St. Thomas. Encouraged to enter sales by her then-fiancé, now husband, she embarked on her career in technology sales with Lotus Software in San Francisco, California, in 1988 before joining the Quintus Corporation in Palo Alto, California, from 1993 to 1995. Between 1995 and 2005, Ms. Baker worked at Oracle in Redwood City, California, where she was consistently a top sales leader and led a team focused on highly competitive opportunities.

Ms. Baker spent the next 10 years, from 2005 to 2015, as the senior vice president of SAP America, Inc., having been brought on to create and manage a global pursuit team. During this time, she also designed several new commercial models to meet customer demands regarding transitioning to the cloud. She then briefly served in the office of the chief executive officer for Apttus, now Conga, in 2016, lending her skills to the global accounts program. Since 2016, Ms. Baker has brought her expertise in team management and customer education to Amazon Web Services, Inc. as the vice president of global deal strategy and programs.

In this role, Ms. Baker is responsible for managing three teams. The first is the strategic customer engagements team, a global high-performance pursuit team with 600 members across 27 different countries that works with customers on transformational, strategic, complex and highly competitive opportunities. The remaining two teams comprise the private pricing program, which sees roughly 70% of the business that comes through Amazon Web Services. Attributing much of her success to hard work, Ms. Baker has made a name for herself as someone who does her utmost to learn from the people around her, noting that it doesn’t matter where you are on the corporate ladder, you still need to interface with and listen to your peers.

Likewise, Ms. Baker is continually motivated by the incredible skill and achievements of the people she works with. At Amazon Web Services, she truly feels like she’s working for “Willy Wonka and the infrastructure factory” due to the vast array of available options when it comes to building and working creatively on different projects. Beyond that, she is grateful to the leaders she has had who have shown her that she is not limited in what she can do. Having not received much guidance or mentorship when she first started in the field, Ms. Baker places high importance on mentoring others, particularly women, and paying forward all she has learned.  

With numerous accomplishments to her credit, Ms. Baker considers her greatest professional achievement to be the flywheel approach to customer requests that she developed with her team at Amazon. The flywheel concept involves listening closely to customers and then working backward from their request to find the best solution that is both cost-efficient and meets the customers’ needs. For her excellence, she has received multiple awards for her leadership, impact, designs and creativity, and partnering, having been recognized as a Best Business Partner. As she looks toward the future, Ms. Baker intends to continue working with her teams at Amazon Web Services to improve revenue and customer experiences.

Ms. Baker has been married to her husband, Greg Ryan, for many happy years. Together they are the proud parents of three children, Preston, Marshall and Shelby. Preston works in commercial real estate, Marshall is in the process of becoming a lawyer, and Shelby recently started college. Ms. Baker is incredibly proud of her children and is grateful to have found a husband who supports and encourages her in her own career. To young and aspiring professionals, she would offer the advice, “Be bold and make a positive, memorable impact in everything you do.”

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Archives
Categories

Most Popular:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *