Directory of Analysts

Todd Berkowitz is a managing vice president at Gartner focusing on B2B technology marketing and sales. He advises product marketing leaders, CMOs, and sales enablement leaders on how to improve the effectiveness of their demand generation, sales enablement, account-based marketing, and upsell/cross-sell efforts. He also looks at how data, analytics, content, and tools can improve marketing-sales alignment and overall effectiveness.

Before joining Gartner, Todd performed a wide range of product marketing and management activities, including sales enablement, product launch and lifecycle, new market entry and expansion, mergers and acquisitions, and competitive intelligence for new and existing products. He has more than 15 years of high-technology marketing experience for enterprise software and service vendors and holds leadership positions with market leaders such as Oracle, TriZetto, and Aprimo/Teradata. He has significant experience in marketing technology services, including application outsourcing, professional services, and customer support. He has also marketed products with a diverse range of deployment options, including on-premise, hosted, SaaS, and mobile.

During his career, Todd led the entire marketing function for NewsGator, a high-profile, venture-backed social media startup. He was also an early employee of Nuance, which went public in 2000. He began his career in public and analyst relations working for several technology public relations firms.

John helps eBusiness and channel strategy professionals assess, improve, and optimise B2B and B2B2C eCommerce and configure price quote (CPQ) technologies and strategies. As the lead author of Forrester’s 2018 B2B eCommerce playbook, John provides a unique lens for businesses to learn how to improve sales outcomes in today’s digital age. He is an advisor to many Fortune 1000 companies, is widely quoted in major industry publications, and frequently speaks at conferences on customer engagement strategies, channel partner enablement, and digital transformation.

Prior to his role in B2B eCommerce, John served application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals. His previous coverage area focused on supporting the complexities of B2B sales through sales enablement technologies, including core sales force automation, CPQ, and other solutions spanning processes from pre-sales through customer success management.

Before becoming an analyst, John was an advisor on Forrester’s AD&D leadership board. In that role, John worked with senior executives in the software delivery space to define and implement customer-obsessed software strategies. Before joining Forrester, John worked for technology companies like Pegasystems and Apple and was a consultant in Booz Allen Hamilton’s federal strategy practice.

John earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with a double major in economics and philosophy from Boston College.

Heather brings more than 20 years of hands-on B2B experience in a variety of disciplines including sales enablement, sales operations, field marketing, and sales leadership. She has a passion for helping organisations define and execute on effective sales enablement strategies and has hands-on expertise in developing sales learning, asset management, and communications programmes for global B2B organisations.

Prior to joining SiriusDecisions in the Sales Enablement Strategy (SES) service, Heather was the director of sales learning and enablement for Wolters Kluwer, where she led the enterprise sales effectiveness strategy focused on generating defined business results from enablement activities. Her focus included role-based learning programmes, onboarding, asset development, field enablement support centere management, messaging, field communication, as well as their annual kickoff meeting and leadership summits. Heather also led several sales and marketing functions in the document technology industry in director roles at Ricoh, IKON, and Pitney Bowes.

Jim Dickie is a co-founder and independent research fellow at CSO Insights with more than 29 years of sales and marketing management experience. Jim began his career with IBM and Sterling Software and then went on to launch two successful software companies.

Jim is a contributing editor for CRM Magazine, CustomerThink, and SoftwareMag.com, and a contributing author for the Harvard Business Review. He wrote The Chief Sales Officer’s Guide to CRM: Insights into High Tech Sales and Marketing and co-authored The Sales and Marketing Excellence Challenge and The Information Technology Challenge.

Jim has served as an advisor to Baylor University’s Center for Professional Selling and William Patterson University’s Russ Berry Institute for Professional Selling, and as a lecturer at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business.

Melissa Hilbert is a director at Gartner. She is responsible for the Sales Performance Management (SPM) agenda within the CRM for sales research agenda, including the SPM Magic Quadrant. Melissa has extensive knowledge of SPM systems and processes, including sales incentive compensation, quota management, and territory management. She has additional expertise in sales enablement processes, sales enablement tools, and sales analytics.

Melissa has more than 21 years of experience in the IT industry. Prior to joining Gartner, she served as the WW director of sales enablement for sales and presales at IBM where she educated direct and indirect sellers and presales resources, guiding them with best practices for sales execution, industry knowledge, and best practices. Prior to IBM, she worked as a solutions consultant and managed the presales process with several ICM vendors. Melissa has directed the enablement efforts worldwide for sales performance management for sales and tech sales including face-to-face, one-on-one, and virtual training. The education she imparted encompassed industry knowledge and best practices as well as a focus on sales execution.

Jim Lundy is the founder and CEO of Aragon Research. Jim also serves as the lead analyst for collaboration, mobile, social, content management, user interface, and knowledge. Jim has more than 29 years of technology and management experience as a vendor, user, and analyst. Jim spent 12 years at Gartner, where he formed and led the collaboration and social software research team and also served as lead analyst for enterprise content management and corporate learning. Jim has extensive experience in product strategy, development, and go-to-market plans.

Prior to founding Aragon Research, Jim was the VP/General Manager of the collaboration business unit at Saba Software. Jim also spent 15 years at Xerox Corporation in a variety of software and hardware sales and marketing positions.

Jim has a Bachelor of Science in Finance from Penn State University.

Nancy infuses the SiriusDecisions team with a passion for improving sales productivity, honed during her 25 years of practitioner experience with organisations such as NCR, Avaya, and Sonus. Her diverse background includes leadership roles in not only sales enablement but also sales, marketing, product management, and entrepreneurial ventures.

Prior to joining SiriusDecisions, Nancy helped clients target, nurture, and hire top talent. In addition, she worked as an executive coach with business leaders to optimise their personal ability to be successful. As the general manager and business unit leader of communication applications at Sonus Networks, she drove the development of new offerings to enable companies to leverage IP technology for cloud-based communications. Nancy honed her core marketing skills as VP of Unified Communications Marketing at Avaya, working closely with corporate marketing and product management to drive revenue through the introduction of new solutions.

Previously at Avaya, Nancy was instrumental in driving sales productivity through the creation of the global sales enablement function. In this role, she was responsible for sales training; sales launch management; sales communications (sales portal, sales newsletter, competitive response); and sales content management, including creation of cross-portfolio solution selling and thought leadership messaging. She managed the worldwide briefing centers and a hosted technical demonstration platform, where she drove a shift from product-centric to “day in the life” based demonstrations.

Earlier in her career, Nancy sold over $500MM in technical and service-oriented solutions. In her years at NCR, Nancy held roles in sales, industry marketing, services readiness, and customer service. Nancy is committed to lifelong learning and holds an MBA from the Wharton School and a BS in computer science, and will soon be certified as an executive coach.

Peter Ostrow is a senior research director within the sales enablement practice at SiriusDecisions, working with end-user leaders to improve sales rep productivity through enablement strategies. Peter’s approach includes identifying and sharing best practices and providing advice and consultation through data-driven research, advisory services, webcasts, in-person forums and workshops, consulting, and e-learning. The service coverage for the enablement space covers enablement structure, function, measurement, sales talent management and learning, sales asset management, sales communication, and other topics relevant to driving the effectiveness and efficiency of sales roles.

Peter holds a Bachelor of Arts in History and Political Science from Brown University.

Laura Ramos serves B2B marketing professionals at Forrester Research. She is a leading expert in B2B marketing with hands-on senior management experience in corporate, industry, and product marketing; demand management; and social media. She helps Forrester’s B2B Marketing clients plan, build, and deliver marketing programs that combine traditional and digital approaches that lead with business issues, create thought leadership, and fuel their company’s top line growth. Her research addresses the skills, technology, process, and customer experience concerns that top B2B marketers need to understand and integrate into programs that address the ongoing evolution in buyer behavior, markets, channels, and competition.

Laura previously worked at Forrester from 2001 to 2010, where she pioneered its B2B Marketing practice, wrote leading research, and advised clients on integrated B2B marketing, demand generation, lead management automation, social media best practices, digital marketing strategy, and customer engagement.

Scott Santucci created the sales enablement practice at Forrester Research in 2008, where he published the first official definition to scope the role. While at Forrester, Scott and his team conducted groundbreaking research that highlighted the massive expense of “random acts of sales support,” the growing gap between buyers and sellers, and identified the characteristics of organisations that achieve outlier performance from their peers.

Scott has advised investment firms, CEOs, CFOs, and other executive teams about the strategic importance of sales enablement in the changing business environment.

Scott is also the founder and leader of the Sales Enablement Society, a volunteer organisation dedicated to promoting and elevating the role of sales enablement. He is a proud graduate of Virginia Tech, where he attended on an athletic scholarship and currently resides in Northern Virginia with his four children.

Tamara Schenk serves as a research director for CSO Insights, a division of Miller Heiman Group.

Her personal blog, Sales Enablement Perspectives, is dedicated to a topic she’s passionate about — sales enablement, sales force enablement, customer-core enablement. Her focus is to establish a strategic and holistic perspective to drive sustainable sales results and sales force transformation. Even if transformation may be a scary word for some, it is essential to unlearn pushing and pitching sales behaviors and to (re)learn value-creating activities and behaviors that are relevant and timely for prospects and customers.

Tamara’s expertise is knowledge, understanding, and experience coming from the real world. She had the responsibility for enablement in a large corporation where she could evolve the discipline from zero to a program, then to a function, and then to a strategic discipline at a VP level. Furthermore, she walked in sales shoes along her 20+ years of professional experience in different roles and industries.

Mary Shea is a principal analyst at Forrester Research serving B2B marketing professionals. In this role, she writes about and advises clients on sales enablement strategies, execution, and technologies and how to address change in the age of the customer. Mary’s research specifically looks at the evolving buyer and seller journeys; how marketing organisations can prioritise and maximise their sales enablement investments; how to arm client-facing personnel with content, tools, and systems to have more impactful conversations in the marketplace; and how new constructs, designed to increase collaboration and alignment across marketing and sales organisations, can be leveraged to maximise revenue.

As a senior executive with experience in general management, commercial leadership, marketing, and direct selling, Mary has led global sales and marketing organisations at companies ranging from high-growth startups to publicly traded firms. She has an exciting track record of building, developing, and leading teams and driving significant growth across domestic and international markets.

Barry Trailer is a co-founder and research principal of CSO Insights, now a division of the Miller Heiman Group. In addition to more than thirty years of professional selling experience, Barry has also been president of Miller Heiman, Sales Mastery, and CRM application Goldmine. He also served as Vice President, Strategic Initiatives of FrontRange Solutions and Vice President of North American Sales for Goldmine and has been a member of the Marketo board of advisors since July 2008.

Barry is a nationally recognised expert in salesforce automation and CRM and has been a keynote speaker at dozens of sales events. He has presented to more than 10,000 sales reps and executives at more than 100 companies, including HP, Corning, Oracle, and Hitachi Data Systems.

Barry is also a published author. His writing includes The Sales and Marketing Excellence Challenge: Changing How the Game is Played, which was co-authored with Jim Dickie. He has also written Sales Mastery: A Novel and served as a contributing editor with the monthly column, “Can We Talk?” for Sales and Field Force Automation (now CRM).

Tad Travis is a director at Gartner. He is responsible for the Sales CRM research agenda, which includes the sales force automation (SFA) and the sales performance management (SPM) Magic Quadrants. Tad has extensive knowledge of SFA systems, sales enablement processes, sales enablement tools, sales incentive compensation, quota management, and sales analytics. He has additional expertise in CRM governance, end-user adoption programs, end-user training, customer success programs, IT governance, and change management.

Tad has more than 15 years of experience in the IT industry. Prior to joining Gartner, he served as a customer success manager and application architect at Salesforce, where he guided more than 100 clients with their Salesforce implementations and governance programs. He owned post-sales business relationships with executives of enterprise-level Salesforce clients and provided valuable strategic advice on vision definition, adoption metrics, governance processes, roadmap planning, ROI analysis, and business process best practices. Prior to Salesforce, he managed the CRM and BI sales operations processes at Solvay Pharmaceuticals and served as a CRM consultant at several CRM vendors.

Peter is a driven research analyst for the Sales Enablement Strategies (SES) service at SiriusDecisions. As an analyst, he works with clients to implement best-in-class research and frameworks that pertain to sales enablement organisations across a wide spectrum of industries.

Prior to joining SiriusDecisions, Peter was the Associate Vice President of Sales Enablement at Distinguished Programs, a national insurance program manager with more than $250 million in written premium that covered more than 70,000 hospitality and real estate risks nationwide. As a client leveraging SiriusDecisions research, Peter revamped the sales hiring process, launched an activity enablement initiative, and built a sales onboarding program from scratch during a heavy acquisition period. Before starting the sales enablement function, he was the top quota producing sales executive in the company.

Peter also served as a signals intelligence officer in the United States Army, where he fulfilled a variety of roles including commanding a company of more than 65 soldiers that supported deployed operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Peter holds a BS in Political Science from the United States Military Academy at West Point. He currently resides in Charleston, South Carolina, where he enjoys sailing, ballroom dancing, and volunteering with several local nonprofit organisations.