Who Will Be Crowned Our
B2B Innovators Of The Year?
We’ve narrowed down hundreds of submissions to bring you 30 B2B innovators who have been leading the charge in creative revenue generation. Now it’s up to you to choose who will be crowned as an Innovator of the Year at the B2B Sales & Marketing Exchange event on October 26-28.
Who should you vote for?
Below you’ll find a short snippet detailing the coveted success and innovation these marketing and sales professionals have accomplished. Check them out below and cast your vote before the October 23 deadline! Demand Gen Report will then spotlight the top five winners as Innovators of the Year at our Best In B2B awards ceremony at the event.
The 2020 B2B Innovators
Click to learn more about each B2B innovator.
Amanda DePaul
Conversica
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Amanda DePaul, Sr. Director, Conversica
In her most recent position at Conversica, Amanda DePaul re-developed and launched both a new lead management and marketing reporting strategy and a tiered account-based marketing strategy in her first 30 days. This not only involved developing the operational mechanisms to make these things possible but educating the sales and executive teams on what to expect and how to leverage the new processes and programs. Amanda not only is focused on developing best-in-class demand generation and marketing operations strategies but is also passionate about developing demand gen and marketing operations pros into rock stars.
Ben Staley
Rackspace Technology
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Ben Staley, Rackspace Technology
Ben Staley envisioned what marketing operations could do and drive at Rackspace when he was asked to take on the function as part of his demand gen leadership team role in September 2019. Due to attrition, he had to staff the team from the ground up. Nevertheless, Ben and the team put together a roadmap of what they wanted to accomplish and, in less than a year,
delivered some impressive achievements that drove tangible business impact: YoY increases in sales-accepted leads (+23%), marketing-sourced revenue (+42%) and average deal size (+26%), a greater than 30% increase in SDR productivity, and more than 40X time savings for marketers to make data- and AI-driven account-based targeting decisions.
Beth McCluskey
RAIN Group
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Beth McCluskey, RAIN Group
As the Director of Marketing at RAIN Group, Beth McCluskey is a true “Jane of all trades.” She plays a crucial role in leading the B2B strategy for the Top 20 Sales Training Company. Her strategy and vision are anything but ordinary, and she has a laser-like focus for executing plans that produce impactful results. Beyond strategy development, she’s an award-winning graphic designer, web developer, and manages RAIN Group’s martech stack.
Brandee Sanders
Appetize Technologies
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Brandee Sanders, Appetize Technologies
Brandee Sanders has 10+ years of experience in leading technology, digital marketing, data science-driven and demand gen orgs, including dynamic roles with Sony Music, BlackLine, Etsy and more. In her first year as Sr Director of Marketing Operations at Appetize Technologies, she built the overall MOPS strategy, processes and structures that have positioned Appetize as the post-COVID point-of-sale industry leader and premium Cloud-based Enterprise Commerce Platform for Food, Beverage and Retail. Her work has positively impacted the market SOV and brand awareness, while she has also simultaneously scaled lead models, reporting analysis, complex demand generation, modern BDR enablement and organizational data/CRM literacy. Under her roll-up-the-sleeves ownership, the Marketing Ops and BDR teams she manages generate measurable efficacy and results YOY, including 3X lift in overall lead generation, 48% time savings for lead ingestion/database enrichment cycles, 25% increase in CQL’s, 189% lift in overall AI personalized chatbot conversations via her hands-on playbook editing management and strong ABM targeting, as well as her consistent alignment with sales, product marketing and content partnerships which led to a 216% increase in demo requests/downloads and 2X average time on site for website visitors.
Breezy Beaumont
Alation
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Breezy Beaumont, Alation
Breezy Beaumont joined Alation as the Senior Manager of Growth Marketing in February 2020, just a few short weeks before all events would come to a halt and a strong digital strategy would become more crucial than ever. Stepping up to the challenge, she launched a series of ad campaigns across search and social, created a company-wide SEO strategy for higher visibility, and implemented a chatbot on the company website to handle increased traffic. Breezy is an incredibly motivated full-stack marketer with tons of hands-on experience in multiple hyper-growth software companies. She’s always bringing in best practices and new technologies to improve processes through data-driven marketing with the motto “work smarter, not harder.”
Brian Finnerty
Demandbase
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Brian Finnerty, Demandbase
With over 20 years of experience, Brian Finnerty has been a contributing member of the marketing community and has worked to grow numerous organizations over his career. He has now been with Demandbase for just over a year and is passionate about helping the company to reach the next stage of growth. Through the past six months, he’s led his growth marketing team in this dramatic pivot while also merging teams through the Engagio acquisition. Additionally, he’s set a clear vision for the team of celebrating customer use cases and growing their value through strategic customer marketing. Under his leadership, Demandbase’s marketers have invested in content marketing, social media, case studies, testimonials, refining their NPS process and CSAT scores — and beyond.
Carmen Simon
Corporate Visions
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Carmen Simon, Corporate Visions
Dr. Carmen Simon is Chief Science Officer at Corporate Visions, Inc. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur, cognitive neuroscientist, and highly sought-after keynote speaker, Dr. Simon pioneered a groundbreaking approach to creating memorable messages that are easy to process, hard to forget, and impossible to ignore―using the latest in brain science. She works with some of America’s most recognized brands to help them use science-based principles to develop the best type of content marketing: content that audiences actually remember.
Chelsey Axline
PFL
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Chelsey Axline, PFL
Chelsey Axline, Senior Manager of Channel and Customer Marketing at PFL, is a dynamic innovator who has evolved several key functions of PFL’s demand generation strategy, including event processes, channel marketing and customer journey programs. In the wake of events being cancelled, Chelsey quickly charted a new path for success by creating scalable channel and customer marketing programs. She established herself as an extension of the Strategic Alliances team and its partners, spearheading opportunities for co-marketing and bringing data-driven decision-making to new campaigns.
Christopher Willis
Acrolinx
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Christopher Willis, Acrolinx
When Christopher Willis took the role of CMO at Acrolinx in 2017, Marketing contribution to pipeline was 3%. Working with a new demand team, the contribution grew to 38% in 2018 and upward to 78% across 2019. Partnering with the front-office leadership, he brought and instituted the company’s sales methodology, as well as a detailed Value Framework that aligned teams on a set of value drivers, proof points and differentiators. The combination of these initiatives, along with the hard work of management and staff throughout the front-office team has increased the velocity of the sales funnel and helped sales leadership onboard faster and forecast more accurately.
Deanna Ransom
Televerde
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Deanna Ransom, Televerde
Deanna Ransom, head of Marketing and Marketing Services at Televerde, has more than 25 years’ experience in sales and marketing. Previously, she held the role of Senior Director of Global Demand Strategy for Clarivate Analytics, where she pushed the bounds of shifting from campaigns to conversations to enable a better experience for customers and prospects across channels – leading her team and business unit to a 249% increase in global demand generation year-over-year. Deanna loves technology and driving great integrated experiences. She is also passionate about helping people with an emphasis on women. This is demonstrated in her role at Televerde, through her volunteer work with shelters, and other support organizations.
As a purpose-driven organization with a unique business model, Deanna has the opportunity to mentor and lead a team of marketing professionals who happen to be mostly incarcerated women. Deanna’s day-to-day requires her to consistently coach and teach her team about the ins and outs of content marketing, ensuring that these women will have the professional skills they need for successful reentry after incarceration.
Dustin Dewberry
LiveRamp B2B
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Dustin Dewberry, LiveRamp B2B
In his role as Head of Data Science for LiveRamp B2B, Dustin Dewberry led his team to leverage rich account-level data, client pipeline data and data science expertise to tie revenue from long sales cycle deals to funnel activities that drive each stage of a B2B marketer’s pipeline. Dustin brings extensive experience as a marketer, technologist and data scientist, consistently driving best practices and innovation in the marketing and advertising industry leading to unique and highly specialized measurement solutions for the B2B vertical.
Harry Battu
Procore Technologies
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Harry Battu, Procore Technologies
Harry Battu is your ultimate sales ally and marketing executive whose outstanding track record speaks louder than words. His go-to-market strategy and partnership with the entire revenue organization, his ability to move fast with limited resources, and his commitment to exceeding targets has enabled him to bring success for Procore’s marketing team in new regional markets. But he isn’t just great at what he does, he empowers his team to be even greater. He removes all barriers that come their way, he’s a behind-the-scenes champion and advocates for their growth, he continues to find ways to give them more visibility in front of other teams and leadership. Above all, he’s a rare combination of a great leader, responsible mentor, enjoyable colleague, and a thoughtful human being.
Jennifer Fields
Plex Systems
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Jennifer Fields, Plex Systems
Jennifer Fields has led the Plex demand generation marketing strategy to launch into the food & beverage (F&B) industry. She began just as the pandemic hit and automotive manufacturers were shutting down. With the rise of the pandemic, Jennifer had to quickly reform existing events schedules for 2020 and strategize a play into the F&B industry to diversify Plex business interests. Jennifer prides herself on having a mix of creative and analytical marketing skill sets. She is passionate about aligning and partnering with internal stakeholders to surpass pipeline and opportunity goals.
Jorge Granada
SAP
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Jorge Granada, SAP
Jorge Granada has over 20 years’ experience helping businesses at all stages accelerate their growth through creative storytelling deeply embedded in the design, build-out and execution of demand engine and demand transformation strategies. He is an agile marketer who brings both hands-on and executive experience in Digital, Social, B2B, B2C, and more. Jorge’s strategy allowed SAP to really listen and hear what their customers were reacting to. The company was able to serve more content to target accounts, see the results in real-time, and use that to either confirm their findings or correct their methods.
Katie Kelley
Udemy
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Katie Kelley, Udemy
Katie Kelley has a clear passion to build high-impact, data-driven ABM campaigns. With her extensive background and advancement within fast-growing SaaS organizations, she has established herself as not only a leader in the B2B marketing space, but also as an influential woman in tech. As Senior Manager of Account-Based Marketing at Udemy, Katie is pioneering new tactile marketing programs to target prospects at home, as well as enhance virtual events.
Kevin Sides
ShipMonk
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Kevin Sides, ShipMonk
Kevin Sides sees the bigger picture. Since 2015, he’s diligently worked from the ground up to create fecund soil for long-term lead generation and meaningful business partnerships. With a meticulous eye for detail, Kevin has crafted a high-quality, memorable brand that stands out with a mix of engaging content and targeted SEO. From the minutiae of choosing the perfect font to run sparse paid ads, Kevin has overseen the incubation of one of logistics’ most riveting industry leaders — all with little to no overhead.
Kirsten Boileau
SAP
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Kirsten Boileau, SAP
Kirsten is the marketing leader driving the world’s largest social selling initiative. With foundations built on research conducted together with the Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins University, the SAP Digital Selling program has grown to a massive scale and tremendous impact. Kirsten and her global team have trained more than 22,000 SAP employees and partners around the world on how to establish subject matter expertise, build relationships, and spark business-building conversations on LinkedIn and other social and digital channels. She helped build the content strategy and global enablement program that supports digital selling.
Kirsten Markson
LeadMD
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Kirsten Markson, LeadMD
LeadMD’s Kirsten Markson takes a unique approach, focusing on macro trends in the market, gaining a deep understanding of competitive landscapes and placing high emphasis on hyper-personalized campaigns and change management. In other words, thinking like a B2C marketer. Kirsten emphasizes what every company needs but too few invest in: Change management. She creates assets and experiences with internal and external stakeholders in mind, knowing for campaigns to succeed, internal stakeholders need to become advocates. Armed with the tools B2C marketers use, Kirsten is bringing a fresh take into the B2B space.
Kristin Oelke
Ignite Technologies
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Kristin Oelke, Ignite Technologies
Kristin Oelke spearheaded Ignite’s “The Netflix of Business Software Concept,” enabling customers to drive digital transformation with Ignite’s binge-worthy Prime program. Within four months of activating the Netflix strategy, more than 50% of all Ignite customer accounts have engaged in a Prime discovery conversation, with 28% of all Ignite accounts contractually signing up for the program. As a result, the team has better “defended” the existing ARR of all the engaged accounts, as well as generated increased implementation, managed and professional services sales.
Lisa Christiansen
Poly
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Lisa Christiansen, Poly
Lisa Christiansen came into a new company, Poly, created from the merger of Plantronics and Polycom. She has helped to expand Poly’s use of relevant content across the buyer’s journey using market research and insights, combined with the new Poly voice. She has also expanded the company’s use of relevant content to convey thought leadership and audience value across the buyer’s journey. Lisa is a focused leader who embraces change and aims high. Poly now boosts strong buyer value content instead of a library of self-promotion. They have developed strong ties between sales and marketing to address audience needs and challenges.
Lisa Maxwell
Mastercard
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Lisa Maxwell, Mastercard
Lisa Maxwell pioneered and designed Mastercard’s Case Studies Discipline about a year ago. These case studies are used to validate the products and benefits that Mastercard offers and can provide valuable data and insights in a digestible format to our customers and partners. In developing this Discipline, Lisa formed a team and spearheaded the creation of long-form and short-form templates, a best-practices guide for implementing these case studies, and a foundational intake brief to consolidate the formatting and content of case studies across Mastercard’s business units and regions. Today, these materials are being used across Mastercard including teams in Loyalty & Engagement, Cyber & Intelligence, Data & Services, Core, Digital Commerce, and more.
Madeline Maguire
Grubhub
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Madeline Maguire, Grubhub
Madeline Maguire leads the Corporate Marketing group at Grubhub. Since joining the business in 2016, Madeline has led the charge in transforming the Corporate Marketing & Sales strategy. In 2020, she was faced with the task of leading her team through the unprecedented challenges of COVID-19, when widespread office closures had a dramatic impact on the Grubhub Corporate business, which is largely geared toward catering meal programs. Through identifying an opportunity for feeding virtual events and moving quickly to take this to market in March, Madeline’s team was able to find a new use case and vertical market for the existing product. Their initiative and quick action drove record-breaking growth for the business, with new business sales growing 109% YoY.
Melissa Doerksen
Hitachi
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Melissa Doerksen, Hitachi
Melissa Doerksen is a savvy marketer that knows how to tackle tough projects. She is an expert in wrangling the internal and external resources needed to drive pipeline impact. She is a true marketing innovator who is always learning, growing, testing, and optimizing in her program execution.
Michael Phelan
Go-to-Market Pros
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Michael Phelan, Go-to-Market Pros
Michael Phelan is responsible for conducting ongoing research with hundreds of B2B buyers and leading B2B reps to facilitate the development and optimization of a new demand generation category: NNPM Programs (Net New Prospect Meeting Programs). These programs are designed to directly drive meetings, not downloads. The top 20 NNPM programs enable his clients to cut through the clutter, boost meetings, increase meeting hold rates, elevate the prospect conversation, prioritize new segments and close deals.
Rachel Cain
Eastman Chemical Company
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Rachel Cain, Eastman Chemical Company
Rachel Cain has been with Eastman for nine years and has been an advocate for growth and improvement during her entire tenure. She was integral in gaining buy-in to invest the time, funds and resources necessary into a digital transformation of unheard-of proportions. And even more importantly, in helping them succeed with it. Rachel led the charge on the marketing transformation and has driven some impressive results. The company has specifically seen marked improvements in ROI.
Sunniya Saleem
Quick Base
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Sunniya Saleem, Quick Base
Sunniya Saleem is the head of demand center and digital experience at Quick Base. She has led her team to expand their strategy from a heavy transactional use case model, to thinking about marketing around the problems people are looking to solve with low code software solutions. As COVID hit, this strategy proved to be extremely successful — the team saw ~50% increase in new logo pipe generation efforts when other companies
saw a decline.
Tessa Barron
ON24
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Tessa Barron, ON24
ON24’s Tessa Barron led the charge in partnering with Heinz Marketing to reframe the panic felt by marketing and sales leaders from a feeling of great uncertainty into a catalyst for growth and predictability. ON24 saw this as an opportunity to re-educate their buyers on the basic building blocks of the predictable pipeline. In collaboration with ON24, Heinz Marketing developed a comprehensive set of materials – including an 80-page workbook and a 3-hour hands-on, interactive workshop – that follows a fool-proof methodology to create a Predictable Pipeline. Together, they created a unique way to keep their audience engaged with a truly immersive, interactive experience. The numbers speak for themselves: 1066 total registrants, 416 total attendees and a 39% conversion rate. Average time viewed was 101 minutes out of a 180-minute virtual workshop.
Tina O'dell
Juniper Networks
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Tina O'dell, Juniper Networks
As Head of Global Channel Marketing at Juniper Networks, Tina O’dell is responsible for developing global partner programs to accelerate partner growth and Juniper market share, as well as fostering business development and revenue acceleration through awareness, thought leadership and demand creation. She also leads GTM enablement programs across Juniper product lines in collaboration with cross-functional teams and field team execution. She is responsible for maintaining consistent messaging and execution while leveraging massive amounts of data more efficiently to improve marketing and sales effectiveness.
Vanessa Porter
VMware
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Vanessa Porter, VMware
The VMware Security Demand Gen team, led by Vanessa Porter, aims to become predictable and scalable in their efforts. By executing against clearly defined campaign themes, the team worked to develop smarter programs, become a systematic machine, think creatively, leverage the scale of VMware, and re-engage its marketable audience. In addition, Vanessa serves as a mentor to women within VMware and makes D&I hiring a team priority.
Vat Tann
Papa & Barkley
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Vat Tann, Papa & Barkley
Vat Tann is an award-winning content developer and marketing executive who oversees Papa & Barkley’s customer experience. Since he joined Papa & Barkley in January of 2019, Vat has crafted inspiring and elevated programs that won the hearts and minds of customers in a highly regulated and volatile sector. He accomplished this by empowering his high-performing teams and takes an education-first approach to support retailers and engage with consumers. Vat hopes to demystify and destigmatize the cannabis plant, enabling consumers to make informed choices about their cannabis consumption and unlock the plant’s true healing potential.
Hilary Headlee
Zoom Video Communications
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Hilary Headlee, Zoom Video Communications
Hilary Headlee is the Head of Sales Ops and Enablement at Zoom Video Communications. She adopted LeanData’s solution for lead-to-account matching and routing that was foundational to the team’s success in meeting unprecedented demand for its services, and allowed them to scale their lead-management systems and processes with the speed and agility needed to respond quickly to the businesses, schools and individuals when they needed them most. As Zoom continues to experience unprecedented growth, the confidence, scalability and agility that automating lead management provides the organization will remain integral to success.
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