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.
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.
Mindy Powers
Vice President Business Markets Sales - West Region
Mindy Powers is Business Markets Sales Vice President for the West Region and has more than 25 years of telecommunications industry experience.
Powers has responsibility for accelerating customer acquisition while developing a world-class organization. With the emergence of virtualization, her key focus will be to evolve the region to be best positioned to drive value to customers’ current and future business needs.
Prior to being named Vice President Sales, Powers was Director of Sales (West Region) for the CenturyLink Channel Alliance. In this role, she maintained and grew partnerships with 70 Alliance Members with an extensive depth of frontline selling resources. Powers was successful in delivering year-over-year improvements in both sales and revenue. In 2010, Powers was named Channel Executive Woman of the Year by CRN magazine.
Before Qwest, Powers gained experience and produced strong results at leading nationwide sales channel organizations in the IXC and CLEC segments. She was consistently recognized as an innovator for alternate channel sales.
Powers is a long-time supporter and advocate of the Susan Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.
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.
