As organizations face increasing pressure to stay competitive, process improvement has become a critical tool for streamlining operations, optimizing efficiency, and driving growth by reducing costs, optimizing employee time and, improving customer satisfaction, Executives like Kristina Linehan play a pivotal role in guiding businesses towards success within this critical domain.
With over 15 years of experience helping organizations improve their business processes, Kristina brings a unique blend of expertise to her role. Her career has been characterized by a steadfast dedication to collaborative partnerships. She has worked closely with customer-partners to implement tailored solutions for their business challenges.
Kristina’s approach is marked by a results-driven mindset. She helps customer-partners achieve success through process innovation solutions. Drawing from her diverse skill set, which encompasses account management, consultative vision engineering, marketing, and communications, she consistently delivers substantial value to organizations across various industries.
As Vice President of Sales at ImageSource, Inc., Kristina leads the charge of driving the company’s mission forward. ImageSource is the manufacturer of the world’s most flexible process improvement platform – ILINX. Under Kristina’s guidance, the sales team at ImageSource is empowered to forge meaningful connections with customer-partners, understanding their unique needs to deliver solutions that exceed expectations.
Let’s join in the narrative of forward-thinking leadership, driving tangible results and fostering long-term partnerships to navigate the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow!
A Career Aligned
As the Vice President of Sales at ImageSource, Kristina reflects on her journey from an intern to a pivotal role within the company. She reflects on the transformation of ImageSource into the creator of the ILINX platform, a shift that paralleled her career growth. Specializing in government solutions, Kristina has been instrumental in aiding numerous Washington State agencies modernize and improve operations through ILINX business process automation solutions.
“My career here has developed in lockstep with ImageSource’s evolution,” Kristina notes. “Each successful project I’ve led reinforces my belief in the power of process automation.”
Her dedication lies in helping customer-partners enhance their efficiency and foster innovation. Kristina’s journey underscores the impact of commitment and adaptability in navigating the realm of modern business solutions.
Transforming Sales Mindsets
As the Vice President of Sales at ImageSource, Kristina is responsible for guiding the enterprise account executives to becoming trusted advisors with customers and potential customers. She emphasizes the importance of shifting their perspective from merely selling to becoming adept problem-solvers and process innovators.
“My goal is to break them out of a ‘sales‘ mindset,” Kristina explains. “Our ILINX platform has the flexibility to address almost any business challenge.” Her focus lies in empowering the team to recognize the vast potential of the ILINX platform and to assist customer-partners in implementing effective solutions.
Kristina’s tenure has seen the challenge of assembling a new team from scratch, which prompted the development of a comprehensive training curriculum. This initiative is supported by the entire leadership team, fostering cohesion and effectiveness among the sales force and throughout the company culture. Teams like Marketing and Project Management are trained on the same sales process steps.
“Our training covers the history of ImageSource to our methodology behind our 97% customer retention,” Kristina shares. The emphasis on consultative sales ensures that customer-partners benefit from a well-prepared team, capable of facing technical challenges and tailoring solutions to meet their objectives.
“We focus on our customer-partners’ business process challenges and their objectives and build a relationship based on their expertise and our experience solving problems for organizations like theirs,” Kristina emphasizes. This approach has tangible business outcomes and measurable return on investment reflecting the collaborative efforts between ImageSource and its valued customer-partners.
Navigating Crisis
Kristina recounts one of her most challenging situations, helping the Washington State Employment Security Department (ESD) during the unprecedented surge in unemployment claims triggered by the pandemic. “Our solution streamlined onboarding content from multiple sources,” Kristina explains, “while transforming how cases were distributed among the agency’s case managers.”
With the sudden influx of claims, prompt action was imperative. The solution had to circumvent reliance on onsite staff or infrastructure, presenting an added layer of complexity. Fortunately, Kristina and her team devised a strategy that addressed these challenges by leveraging the existing ILINX platform.
“We were able to augment and eventually migrate their operations to a completely cloud-based SaaS solution,” Kristina elaborates.
This transition expedited claims processing and further paved the way for enhanced efficiency and scalability. By clearing bottlenecks and resolving backlogs, the ESD now operates with renewed agility, thanks to the innovative approach by ImageSource.
Success Through Active Listening
Kristina emphasizes the importance of active listening in the role of an account executive. “Without question, active listening is the most important skill,” she asserts. “We have to start by learning everything we can about the process problems our customer-partners face.”
Understanding that organizations are intimately acquainted with their own processes and challenges, Kristina underscores the value of soliciting insights from the right stakeholders. “If you get the right users and business leaders talking, you will get the big picture,” she affirms.
Setting a leadership example, Kristina prioritizes active listening within her team, fostering a culture of problem-solving rather than mere transactional interactions. This approach ensures that solutions are tailored to address the specific needs of each customer-partner, ultimately enhancing satisfaction and driving success.
Scalability and Versatility
Kristina acknowledges the pivotal role the ImageSource development team plays in tailoring solutions to meet client needs. She explains, “Our ILINX platform is comprised of modular components that allow us to design solutions targeted to specific challenges without obligating customer-partners to license functions that are not relevant to their needs.”
This flexibility enables seamless scaling of solutions to match the unique requirements of each business problem or organization. “It is amazing to tell a customer-partner that, yes, they can have a unique solution that targets their exact requirements while also being extensible to future challenges,” Kristina enthuses.
Furthermore, the cloud readiness of the ILINX platform facilitates the swift deployment of solutions. Clients can quickly access essential features while adding functionality such as workflow and AI-enabled intelligence. These can be introduced in accordance with priorities or evolving needs. This adaptability ensures that ImageSource remains at the forefront of providing innovative and tailored solutions to its valued customer-partners.
Shared Vision, Shared Success
ImageSource fosters a collaborative approach with its customer-partners to develop a long-term technology vision. Kristina shares, “We document that collaboration in a living document that encompasses business problems, process solutions and a roadmap for future engagements along with a log of completed projects with document return on investment.”
Regular updates to this document during meetings with customer-partners ensure alignment around a strategic roadmap and reinforce the relationship as a trusted technology partner. “Many times, the dialogue reveals new opportunities for innovation that we can help with,” Kristina notes.
Recognizing the value of personal connection, ImageSource prioritizes in-person meetings held on-site with involved stakeholders. This commitment to collaboration and communication underscores ImageSource’s dedication to delivering tailored solutions and driving mutual success with its customer-partners.
Driving Results
ImageSource starts each week with a Sales Collaboration meeting, fostering knowledge exchange, sharing best practices, and providing feedback and advice. Kristina says, “Our CEO—Terry Sutherland, and our senior staff set the tone by being generous with their time and expertise.”
This supportive environment ensures that less experienced account executives receive guidance in various aspects, from crafting emails to refining pitch decks and rehearsing presentations. Kristina emphasizes, “We are invested in each other’s success from the origin of a lead that marketing hands off to sales to the final customer acceptance.”
Moreover, each sales engagement benefits from an executive sponsor facilitating navigation within the customer-partner’s organization, ensuring the clearest path to the best outcome. This collaborative approach highlights ImageSource’s commitment to achieving success at every stage of the customer journey.
The Power of Anticipation
ImageSource prides itself on leading rather than following the market. “We never want to follow the market; we want to lead it,” Kristina asserts.
With a focus on hyper-automation solutions such as intelligent document processing and workflow automation, ImageSource stays ahead of the competition. Their AI-driven platform ensures a seamless user experience powered by comprehensive content understanding and business intelligence.
Kristina recounts, “We are always watching the innovation landscape to recognize the emerging trends that will shape tomorrow’s solutions.”
Pride in Progress
Being the Vice President of Sales, Kristina takes immense pride in facilitating the implementation of technology solutions for organizations. “I’m incredibly proud to help organizations implement solutions that make their processes easier, more secure, and more rewarding for customers and constituents,” she shares.
Her motivation stems from ensuring her team experiences the same sense of accomplishment in reaching these milestones. Kristina explains, “Here, we believe that each individual win is a win for everyone because every employee here plays a vital role in our success. When one of us shines, we all shine.” This collective ethos fosters a culture of mutual support and celebration, where each success contributes to the team’s overall success at ImageSource.
SaaS Success Secrets
Kristina offers valuable advice to aspiring sales leaders aiming to excel in the SaaS industry. “This is a great time to work in SaaS,” she remarks. “With its advantages in support, real-time updates, cybersecurity, and predictable costs, SaaS enables organizations to fully leverage innovation more rapidly than ever.”
SaaS environments enable solutions, even early iterations, to be shared quickly and allow potential users to interact with technology quickly, building confidence that the solutions are the right match. She highlights the significance of customer-centricity in sales endeavors. “If SaaS sales leaders center their activities on their customer needs, they can be successful in this industry,” Kristina emphasizes. By prioritizing customer needs and fostering confidence through rapid solution sharing and interaction, sales leaders can thrive in the robust landscape of the SaaS industry.
