Academic Degrees
- MBA, DePaul University of Chicago, 2015
- BA, Political Economy, University of California Berkeley, 1983
Biography
Geoff Nyheim brings to students, alumni, clients, business partners, and mentees more than 40 years of successful experience in sales, channel development, organization leadership, teaching, and career coaching. Since 2021, Nyheim has been a full-time faculty member at DePaul Universities Driehaus College of Business teaching marketing and sales courses to undergraduate, MBA, and Executive Education students. Beyond the classroom, Nyheim impacts the success of DePaul students, alumni, and stakeholders through college and university committee and board assignments, as faculty advisor, and resulting from his recurring career workshops and coaching.
Prior to rejoining DePaul, Nyheim was the US Central Area Director for Amazon Web Services responsible for hyper-growth and organizational capability across seventeen US states. Nyheim led the strategy, operating plan, and orchestration of 1,000+ AWS #OneTeam resources across 17 US Central states including sales, solution architect, customer success, specialist, professional services, support, training, marketing, and partner to accelerate customer business outcomes through technical debt elimination and digital transformation. AWS Central Area revenue grew 8.6 times during Nyheim's four-year tenure.
Prior to joining Amazon in 2017, Nyheim was, for three academic years, a full-time faculty member at DePaul University in an Executive-in-Residence role while also serving as Director of Business Development for the Driehaus College of Business' Center for Sales Leadership. During this period, Nyheim also served as board member for Orion Systems Integrators and consulted in the areas of strategy, marketing, and sales.
Nyheim was Microsoft's Vice-President of WW Corporate Accounts and Partner Sales responsible for leading the people and the performance of this $11 billion enterprise segment of 75,000 organizations. In this Redmond, WA based role, Geoff led global strategy, execution, operations and a multi-thousand seller field community as well as Microsoft's $30 billion Large Account Reseller program and integrated co-selling with the company's top 2,000 managed Solutions Partners.
Nyheim was previously responsible globally for Office 365 sales and channel development in the enterprise customer segment. Prior to that, he spent six years as the Regional Vice-President for the multi-billion dollar U.S. Central Region Enterprise business. His tenure in Chicago began in 2000 as Midwest District GM focused on customers and partners in the states of Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin.
Nyheim was GM of Microsoft's Global Partners leading an organization directly responsible for worldwide alliances with global original-equipment-manufacture technology providers, independent-software-vendors, business integration consultancies and outsourcers. Nyheim personally led Microsoft's billion-dollar alliance with Accenture, including start-up of the joint venture Avanade. Before this post, Geoff was the Enterprise Business Process Manager where he focused on sales strategy, customer intelligence, field communications, and executive business reviews. Nyheim joined Microsoft in 1991 and during the next several years he held a number of field sales management positions in the Silicon Valley and Kansas City markets.
Before joining Microsoft, Nyheim spent eight years in San Francisco Bay Area based sales positions at Hewlett-Packard and Unisys where he received numerous awards for business performance.
Nyheim holds a BA in Political Economy from the University of California, Berkeley and an MBA from DePaul University's Kellstadt Graduate School of Business. A native Californian, Nyheim now lives in La Grange, IL and Holland, MI with his wife Nancy. The Nyheim's are proud parents, in-laws, and grandparents.