Mike Thornton Verified listing

Mike Thornton is Senior Account Executive at IW Technologies, where he works with retailers on hardware selection, deployment planning, and the ongoing support that keeps installed equipment running across a store estate.

He came to the work from the classroom. Thornton spent his early career in education, finishing a master's in educational leadership and administration at National Louis University in 2006 before joining IW that August. Nineteen years later, that background still shapes how he sells, which by his own account means making the tradeoffs clear and making sure a customer can defend the decision after he leaves the room. His accounts span the full width of retail, from national big box brands to single-location boutiques, and the work runs from refining deployment plans and troubleshooting installs to the less visible end of the lifecycle. Customers have also brought him in on surplus IT hardware liquidation at both small and large scale, which is the disposition side of IW's model rather than the procurement side.

He is based at IW's Elgin, Illinois headquarters and has represented the company on the floor at NRF. He writes for IW on why store deployment and lifecycle teams, rather than the people evaluating the platform, tend to determine whether an in-store technology program succeeds.

A retailer calling Thornton should expect the questions a teacher asks. What is actually installed today, who has to operate it, and what happens in the stores that do not look like the pilot.