Blake Wetzel
Blake Wetzel was appointed to vice president of Sales for CenturyLink Business in August 2009. He oversees the CenturyLink Channel Alliance program, an industry-leading sales channel within CenturyLink. It is comprised of more than 200 partners who have thousands of agents and sub-agents offering CenturyLink’s high-quality voice, data and IP services to business customers across the country.
Prior to his current role, Wetzel served as the director of National Customer Care and Sales Support for Qwest BMG from Jan. 2007 to Aug. 2009. In this position he was responsible for sales support, account management, billing services, order management, credit and collection.
Between April 2005 and Dec. 2006, Wetzel served as the chief financial officer for Qwest BMG where he was responsible for accounting, strategy, financial planning and operational management of more than $4 billion in revenue. He has also served in several director roles responsible for business analysis and profitability, and network cost and optimization at Qwest.
Prior to joining Qwest in 1999, Wetzel worked for MCI Communications leading financial analyst teams for several years and he spent six years in the securities industry managing high net worth portfolios.
Wetzel has a bachelor of arts degree in economics from the University of Maryland. He, his wife and two sons reside in the Denver area.
Chris Ancell
Executive Vice President - Business Markets Group
Christopher K. Ancell was named executive vice president of CenturyLink Business Markets in August 2009. In this role, Ancell oversees sales, marketing, product development, and delivery of voice and data communications services to Qwest's business and government customers. Ancell's team of approximately 3,700 employees, located throughout the United States, generates more than $4 billion in annual revenues and delivers a comprehensive portfolio of data and voice networking communications solutions to enterprises, government agencies and educational institutions of all sizes.
Prior to his current role, Ancell was vice president of sales, western region, for the Business Markets Group, a position he had held since 2004. From 2002 to 2004, he served as vice president of sales support for BMG; in that position, he was responsible for a national team of sales engineers, service managers, project managers, post-sale account managers and a specialized product sales group.
Ancell joined Qwest in 2000 as a vice president in the product organization and later became vice president of hosting sales. From 1999 to 2000, Ancell was vice president of professional services at Service Metrics, Inc., an Exodus Communications Company. He also has held management positions at PricewaterhouseCoopers and with Oracle's Telecommunications Consulting Practice.
Ancell holds a bachelor of science degree in economics from the University of Denver.
He lives in the Denver area.
Cindy Humphrey
Vice President - Product and Marketing
Cindy Humphrey, a seasoned professional with more than 25 years of experience in the telecommunications industry, serves as vice president of product and marketing for CenturyLink Business Markets. In this role, she handles a broad scope of responsibility in reaching all segments of the business market, including medium- to large-size businesses, government and education accounts.
Before joining Business Markets, Humphrey was a regional vice president for Qwest Wholesale, responsible for sales to wireless carriers. Her group, serving accounts from the smallest wireless customers to the very largest, achieved increased sales levels in a declining market in multiple years.
Humphrey began her career as a network manager and, since then, has held a variety of positions in Qwest and its predecessor companies, including product manager and director for multiple product lines; market manager and channel manager. Additionally, she holds a patent for work completed in a product development position.
Humphrey is a graduate of Purdue University with a bachelor of science degree in engineering and holds a master's of business administration with an emphasis in marketing from the University of Denver.
She and her husband Craig reside in Denver and are the parents of two children.
Eric Bozich
Vice President - Product and Marketing, Wholesale
Eric Bozich became CenturyLink vice president of Product Management for business markets in 1998 and oversaw the product development and delivery of voice and data communications services to business and government customers.
Bozich has led the roll-out of a wide range of converged voice and data services including Qwest Integrated Access VoIP, iQ Networking (MPLS WAN), IP Contact Center, Metro and Long Haul Ethernet and Managed IP Communications.
Previously, he was executive director of the U S WEST Internet product development team for !NTERPRISE which was created to address the advanced data and network integration needs of customers. Bozich began his career at U S WEST in 1994 as a data applications consultant for !NTERPRISE. Later, he served as the director of Core Services Development in the Internet Services group. In that position, Bozich lead the development of many new services and applications, which included U S WEST.net, Dedicated Internet Access (DIA), Internet access solutions for DSL and a variety of business oriented remote access and virtual private network (VPN) solutions.
Before joining U S WEST, Bozich was with the University of Utah as a technical services manager for five years. Bozich also developed a business plan for @Home in their @Work division and helped launch several "first of its kind" technical trials with Fortune 100 companies using cable infrastructure to deliver data services to remote employees. Bozich has also served as a systems engineer with several systems and network integration businesses.
He graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in business from the University of Utah and received an MBA from Westminster College in Salt Lake City.
Bozich and his wife, Cobie, live in the Denver area with their three children.
Jeff Waters
Vice President - Sales for Government and Education Solutions
Jeff Waters is Vice President of Sales for CenturyLink's Government and Education Sales Division (GES). The GES team of more than 300 sales and service professionals is focused on providing Qwest’s superior suite of communications solutions to state and local governments, higher education institutions and K-12 schools.
Prior to his current role, Waters was Vice President of Sales for Qwest’s Mid-Markets organization, where he oversaw the organization focused on sales and service for small- to mid-sized businesses. Waters joined Qwest from Verizon in 2002, where he held multiple roles of increasing responsibility across his six years of tenure. Waters launched his career at IBM where he spent two years in IBM's Service Division.
Waters received his Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from William Jewell College. He also is an alumnus of Harvard Business School's High Potential's Development Program.
Ken Smith
Vice President - Business Markets
With 20 years of sales leadership experience in the telecommunications/data solutions industry, Ken Smith currently serves as vice president of West Region sales in Business Markets at CenturyLink.
In this role, Smith is responsible for the strategy and management of Qwest's enterprise sales organization in 12 Western states, comprised of 525 employees who serve larger business customers in a wide range of industries and vertical markets.
Smith joined Qwest in May 2004 as director of sales for BMG in Arizona and New Mexico. He was promoted to vice president of BMG's Mid Markets Group in August 2006 and took on his current role in August 2009.
Before coming to Qwest, Smith was general manager of ICG Communications, where he spearheaded the company's aggressive re-entry into the telecommunications industry. He also led business sales and retention teams at AT&T, Broadwing Communications and MCI WorldCom Inc.
Smith attended the University of Utah. He and his family live in Littleton, Colorado.
Suzanne Dove
Vice President - Sales Effectiveness
Suzanne Dove, CenturyLink Business Markets vice president of Sales Effectiveness, has been with CenturyLink for the past 12 years and in the communications industry for 18 years. In her current role, Dove has responsibility for product, system and process training; strategic sales opportunities; and sales tool development. Dove and her team also act as the primary partner with Human Resources to develop programs focused on recruitment and employee and organizational development.
From 2007 to 2010, Dove was a director of Engineering in Qwest's Network organization, where she had responsibility for pre-sales engineering for Business Markets and Wholesale sales opportunities. The projects she managed, which supported deployment of Qwest's strategic Internet, Ethernet and private line services, had an annual capital budget of approximately $200 million.
Dove began her career at Qwest in various sales and sales support positions in Qwest's corporate offices in Denver, Colorado. In 2000, she relocated to the Northern California/Walnut Creek sales branch, where she provided engineering and account management support for several of Qwest's largest global accounts, including AOL and Microsoft. In 2003, Dove was named to lead the Project Management organization, a team of project managers across the country supporting complex network builds and large multi-node network deployments. The next year, she moved back to Denver and added responsibility for sales engineering and account consultant support for the eastern half of the country. In 2005, she was asked to become chief of staff for BMG's East Region.
Dove's experience also includes six years at MCI, where she held various management and project management positions in that company's engineering organization. Before joining the telecommunications industry, she spent several years working as a production assistant and finance analyst at CBS News, Washington, D.C.
Dove holds a bachelor of arts degree from Towson State University in Baltimore, Maryland. She, her husband and two children live in the Denver area.
