Exclusives

"I've helped shape the conversation," said Debbie Berebichez, chief data scientist at Metis. "It's empowered me to mentor young women and also to shape policy. At Metis, we offer a scholarship to women and minorities, so we do things actively to bring women in. I also try to recruit and hire women.

"We think of 'subscription' broadly," said Matt Darrow, VP and general manager of product at Zuora. "It's when companies do business with customers with whom they have a known relationship, and those relationships are sticky. The subscription model is great for engagement because companies know that...

"We saw that there was a lack of kindness, a lack of empathy ... and we thought it would be nice if we could use technology to do something about it," said A Better World President MarySue Hansell. "We thought Facebook offered a wonderful opportunity to use a large technical platform to create a vir...

"CRM was originally created for the managers and bosses to report on the pipeline, and it was sold as a value proposition to the manager," noted Nutshell CTO Andy Fowler. "What's changing now is that CRM is becoming much more about supporting the rep -- giving them the tools they need to improve the...

"If there's anything true about B2B service, you have to do it in the context of the customers themselves in order to be successful. That's our philosophy," said CloudCraze EVP Andrew Witherspoon. "What is the purpose of CRM and marketing? It's to reach out, find and engage prospects, and to move th...

Lexi Palmer is CEO of EquiSeq, a biotech firm that does genetic testing of horses. Palmer was brought on as CEO by the company's founder, genetic researcher Paul Szauter, in 2015. "I was just finishing up my degree in interpersonal communications, and he told me about the company he'd started," Palm...

Making sales account-based is "the ability to take an account and use a holistic approach when dealing with it," said Manny Medina, CEO of Outreach. "You use a combination of marketing and sales to get to that account," he continued. "It's giving a name to something people already do, and it creates...

Prior to founding Girls in Tech, Adriana Gascoigne was one of very few women working at a startup. "I'd look around the room every day and see that there was a huge problem of representation. I knew we needed to change the culture of the company to recruit more women and benefit more women, but we a...

Beena Ammanath is VP for data and analytics at GE Digital. She has worked in the data analytics field for more than 20 years and serves as board director at ChickTech, a nonprofit dedicated to recruiting girls and women into the tech workforce and retaining them once they're there. Ammanath also ser...

Twenty years ago, CRM "was more of an inside-out technology," recalled Sandeep Kadam, director of CRM at Eagle Creek Software Services. "It was about making sales calls more efficient, and giving salespeople all the tools they needed so they could achieve their numbers. From there it has become more...

"Traditional demand-based, lead-based marketing is like fishing with a net," said Engagio CEO Jon Miller. "You run campaigns and marketing programs, and stuff comes out the other end. What the account-based world is all about is that you have a list of names, but you don't wait around to see if thos...

"One of the interesting things about CRM and marketing automation is that most of these systems have poor data quality," said Radius CEO Darian Shirazi. "Typically, customers buy data lists or get inbound leads, and the information associated with those accounts, opportunities and leads ends up deca...

There are three significant trends in CRM right now, according to Matt Keenan, SVP of Aptean's product group. "The first is the rapid evolution of human-system interaction. Gone are the days of sitting in front of a laptop and interacting with CRM. Customers are looking for multiple channels. The wa...

"Account-based marketing is really about marketing to the accounts that are aligned with your sales team," said Demandbase CEO Chris Golec. It's been done for years, but today there's a whole technology and practice around being able to market to accounts at scale, and this wasn't possible until abo...