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Women in Information Management: Angela Losacco

By FSFP

Angela Losacco is the Vice President of Sales for North America at Collibra, a data intelligence company that utilizes a cloud-based platform to build a data-driven culture for the digital enterprise.

We recently connected with Angela – our first executive sales Women in Information Management (WIIFM) profile – to talk about her role and unique industry experience. She shares her thoughts and insights on being a woman carving a career path in sales and information management, and joins other game-changing women we’ve previously featured on this WIIFM blog series.

Role at Collibra

Angela Losacco

Angela Losacco, Vice President of Sales for North America at Collibra

As Collibra’s Vice President of Sales in the North American region, Angela has advanced and grown with the company for the past three and a half years. In her current role, she leads a team of Regional Vice Presidents in the United States and Canada, working in a cross functional collaborative environment to best serve clients and help them make data meaningful for their organizations.

Her work and results at Collibra has led to a positive reputation among colleagues as someone who is not only driven and client-focused, but a great leader, too. As a long-time partner of Collibra, we’ve seen Angela in action enough times in several joint presentations, user groups and strategic sales meetings to know those sentiments ring true.

Collaboration and consistent results are very important to Angela, and one of her favorite things about her job is the strong team she gets to work with.

“There are a lot of things I love about my job,” she says. “First and foremost, I really love building a team and I really love the team that I work with.”

Path to Sales

Ever the mold breaker, Angela didn’t get her professional start in sales or data. Her first job was actually as a classical ballerina, although her parents always encouraged her to have a backup plan. One lesson she learned from her years in ballet that she carries through her career pivot is discipline, learning from failure and teamwork.

Since she had family members who worked in technology, she eventually decided to explore that path. Her technology stint began on the support side, which she quickly realized wasn’t a fit, leading her to shift toward sales and marketing.

Having been in the world of technology for nearly 30 years now, Angela is certainly no stranger to data management and analytics. “I saw Collibra and what they were doing as being a really important platform to help companies because data was going to continue to explode and Collibra helps to make sense of it,” she says of her decision to work at Collibra.

Staying Current in an Evolving Industry

As part of mastering her craft, she invests in staying conversant in driving technologies and keeping her pulse on the industry. She keeps up with the fast pace of data by staying up to date on industry trends, learning from data management experts and recommended best practices, and perhaps most importantly – listening to her clients.

“I talk to customers often because I learn a lot about the data challenges in certain industry sectors, how they plan to address challenges and how Collibra is helping them.” Often, those challenges are strategic opportunities and part of Angela’s role is identifying Collibra’s potential to help solve those challenges and unlock those opportunities.

She also turns a lens to what women in data are doing, and makes sure to be a proactive participant and advocate. She is also an avid reader and is currently diving into Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez.

“I’m always looking for ways to learn.”

Working in a Male-Dominated Industry

Angela provides a positive outlook on women’s impact in the workplace. While there is still a way to go for  women in this space, she’s been encouraged to see women’s voices getting stronger.

She notes that women may often lead and approach things differently from men, and that diversity in thought can be essential in the world of data. Angela also mentions that recent studies show having diversity in the workplace can also lead to greater profitability and success. A 2017 Mckinsey report showed strong correlations with profitability and value creation for companies with gender diverse executive teams.

“If we as women really support each other, and by that I mean do what men do, we hire each other, we give each other opportunities, we advocate for each other, we promote women into leadership roles…that is going to really give organizations a competitive advantage but also help women in technology.”

Female mentorship can also play a critical role. For Angela, it was her stepmother, Eva, who was one of her strongest influences. She credits Eva for empowering her to forge her own path and realize what she wanted out of her career. Seeing her stepmother as a CEO and mother made Angela realize that as a woman, she could have a career and a family.

When it comes to success, Angela strongly advocates for women to achieve an education and to be financially independent, and personally measures herself by this.

In these uncertain times and especially in the midst of the current pandemic, she stresses that health is the most important thing, as other achievements can be impossible if health is not intact. Family is also very import to Angela, and she values their health and happiness, too.

She approaches her life with the attitude that, “you can’t get hung up on things, you have to find a way to move forward.”

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