The Fearless 50 and Elite 18 Lists Are In! Meet The Industry’s Fearless 50 and Elite 18 Customer-Led Marketing Leaders

for the first ever Elite 18 CMOs and Fearless 50 customer-led marketing leaders:

CHRISTINA KOSMOWSKI
Chief Executive Officer
LogicMonitor

NICK MEHTA
Chief Executive Officer
Gainsight

ERICA KUHL
Chief Executive Officer
Kuhl Consulting

CARRIE PALIN
Chief Marketing Officer
Cisco

LAURA HEISMAN
Chief Marketing Officer
VMware

JAY NATHAN
Chief Customer Officer
Higher Logic

Christina

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As CEO of LogicMonitor, Christina is responsible for accelerating the company’s hypergrowth and delivering on its brand promise of helping C-level executives and their teams thrive through transformation. Prior to assuming the role of CEO, Christina served as LogicMonitor’s President, leading go-to-market strategy, R&D, customer success, and operations. She has spent over two decades holding leadership positions in the enterprise software space and is passionate about discovering new ways to bring the worlds of technology and business together.

Christina came to LogicMonitor from Slack, where she spent four years building and leading Customer Success and Enterprise GTM Teams. Christina also spent 15 years at Salesforce, where she oversaw functions including renewals, consulting, support, and customer success. In both of these roles, she helped guide her respective organizations through pivots, disruptions and rapid periods of growth, while also being a pioneer of the Customer Success practice.

Outside of LogicMonitor, Christina serves on the board of Rapid7 (NASDAQ: RPD) and is a founding partner of Operator Collective, an organization that brings together tech’s most sought-after operators, investors, and founders from diverse backgrounds to invest in and accelerate the next generation of b2b tech.

Christina holds a BS in Industrial Engineering from Northwestern University, where she was Captain of the Varsity Soccer Team, and currently sits on the McCormick School of Engineering Advisory Board. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband and two teenage daughters.

CHRISTINA KOSMOWSKI
Chief Executive Officer
LogicMonitor

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Nick

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Nick Mehta (he/him), is the CEO of Gainsight, the platform that helps companies of all sizes and industries drive durable growth through customer-led and product-led strategies. 

Gainsight has been ranked by Glassdoor as the #1 Best Place To Work in 2023 and is a five-time Forbes Cloud 100 recipient. Nick has been named the #2 CEO by the Software Report, has a 99% approval rating on Glassdoor, and was named Entrepreneur Of The Year for Northern California Award. 
 
He is a member of the Board of Directors at F5 (NASDAQ:FFIV) and has co-authored two books—Customer Success and The Customer Success Economy. He is passionate about family, football, philosophy, physics, fashion, SaaS, parody music videos, and everything Taylor Swift. People told him it’s impossible to combine all of those interests, but Nick has made it his life’s mission to try.

NICK MEHTA
Chief Executive Officer
Gainsight

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Erica

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Erica has over 20 years of Enterprise community expertise. She spent 11 of those years as the VP of Community at Salesforce where she orchestrated the Trailblazer Community & MVP Program that set the industry standard for community-led growth. While at Salesforce she built everything from scratch including the strategy, programs, and ROI metrics. She understands running community programs on any size budget and with any size team from 1 to 35+ people. She’s also seen massive company growth from 176 to 49,000 employees allowing her to adapt strategies and deeply understand challenges at any company stage.

Erica has now ventured out on her own to help customers like Slack, Zendesk, Atlassian, Google Cloud, Workday, and Github build robust community strategies and programs with her extensive expertise, authentic approach, and trusted services.

ERICA KUHL
Chief Executive Officer
Kuhl Consulting

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Carrie

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Carrie Palin is the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Cisco. Palin and her team are responsible for strengthening Cisco’s brand and increasing demand for Cisco’s solutions. Her global responsibilities include defining the strategy and implementation of digital, industries, and partner marketing, brand strategy, events, campaigns, customer advocacy, and marketing insights and analytics as well as regional field marketing. Additionally, Carrie is the Cisco executive sponsor for the country of Singapore, as well as Cognizant, McKesson, and US Bank.

Prior to joining Cisco in June of 2021, Carrie had extensive experience leading enterprise marketing and brand building in the technology sector. Most recently, she served as the CMO of Splunk, where the team completely reimagined the brand in 2019. Prior to joining Splunk, Carrie served as CMO at SendGrid (acquired by Twilio), and as the first CMO at Box. She was also Vice President of Marketing for IBM’s Cloud Data Services/Analytics Division. Carrie began her career at Dell and spent more than 16 years honing her craft in global go-to-market strategy, and leading various marketing organizations across the data center portfolio.

When she’s not driving industry-defining marketing, Carrie enjoys being with her family outdoors. She and her husband Jesse are the proud parents of Jack (12) and Sloane (9). In alignment with Cisco’s mission of powering an inclusive future for all, Carrie is also a strong advocate for Women in Technology and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Originally from Austin, Texas, Carrie holds a B.S. from Texas Christian University and serves on the Board of NetApp.

CARRIE PALIN
Chief Marketing Officer
Cisco

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Jay

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Jay Nathan is a business executive best known as co-founder of the popular Gain Grow Retain customer success leadership community and cohost of the Gain Grow Retain podcast. He is EVP and Chief Customer Officer at Higher Logic, an online community software platform that helps companies engage, retain, and grow their customers. 
 
Jay has over 20 years of experience in the software industry and has held leadership roles at prominent technology companies such as Blackbaud and PeopleMatter. He is a recognized thought leader in customer success and has written and spoken extensively on the topic. 

JAY NATHAN
Chief Customer Officer
Higher Logic

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Laura

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Laura Heisman joined VMware in February 2022 as chief marketing officer. As CMO, Heisman is responsible for leading all aspects of the Global Marketing organization, which includes Corporate and Brand, Partner, Developer, Segment and Field Marketing.

Heisman is a marketing and communications executive with 25+ years of experience in reaching enterprise, developer, consumer and corporate audiences. Most recently, she was Vice President of Communications and Corporate Marketing and a member of the GitHub leadership team. There she elevated awareness and built developer fans of the largest and most advanced development platform in the world. Prior to joining GitHub, Heisman spent more than a decade at Citrix, serving as Vice President of Communications leading the worldwide communications and brand awareness program. She has also led marketing and communications roles for a variety of global brands and technology startups. 

Heisman holds a bachelor of arts in communications from San Diego State University. She has also served as executive sponsor for Women Employee Resource Groups and mentors women in technology.

LAURA HEISMAN
Chief Marketing Officer
VMware

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MEET THE ELITE 18 CUSTOMER-LED CMOs OF 2023

Allison Breeding
Chief Marketing Officer
Apptio

Aruna Ravichandran
SVP and CMO
WebEx

Brion O’Connor
Chief Marketing Officer
Gong

Chris Kozup
Chief Marketing Officer
Darktrace

Dara Treseder
Chief Marketing Officer
Autodesk

Latané Conan
Chief Marketing Officer
6sense

To See Who Made the First-Ever Fearless 50 Customer-Led Marketing Leaders List, Download the Full Winners’ eBook
Public Timeline
Feb 1 Judging Panel Selected
April 18 Nominations Open
April 28 Nominations Closed
May 3 Voting Opens
May 10 Voting Closes
May 16 Judging Opens
May 19 Judging Closes
June 6 Lists Are Live!
Learn How The Individual Judges Scored The Elite 18 CMOs
The Customer-Led Marketing Leaders of 2023

The Elite 18 CMOs & Fearless 50 customer-led marketing leaders highlights the value of customer-first initiatives during times of both economic stability and uncertainty. With the looming recession, mass layoffs in the tech sector, and budget freezes across the B2B space, it’s paramount to celebrate the customer-first leaders that are helping their organizations to continue to prosper and grow. The awards serve as a guidepost for hope and inspiration.


This list was generated by the community, for the community. It’s the people’s choice where the public nominated and voted on who would make the final list. This category was open to both executives and middle management who have pushed the boundaries of what’s possible when it comes to customer marketing, advocacy, community, and loyalty.


The Elite 18 list was voted on by a judging panel consisting of 6 executive leaders throughout the B2B space. The judges looked for CMOs who placed budget, headcount, and technology behind their customer-led programs, prioritized their customer-first strategies, and have openly shared how they are succeeding by putting their customers’ journeys at the center of their marketing efforts.


The Fearless Finalists list honors the contributions of the marketing leaders who are making an impact but fell just outside the scope of who was able to be included in Elite 18 or Fearless 50 lists. They were extremely close to making the cut this year.
Awards Methodology
The Elite 18 CMOs list was derived from a broad list of leaders nominated by the public to the judges for evaluation. The Fearless 50 is a list created by the community, for the community.

Nominees

Nominees for both lists were submitted during a 2-week proposal period. During this period, we recorded all nominations, who were then submitted for inclusion in the voting list. By opening nominations to the public, we allowed those who might fly under our radar to make it onto our list. The Top 200 nominees will make it to the voting period.

Fearless 50 Voting

Winners for the Fearless 50 list were determined by the marketing community during the 2-week voting period. All votes cast were tabulated, and the Fearless 50 were determined based on their total vote count and influence scores as determined by the community (including you). Nominees required a minimum role of Senior Director or above.

Elite 18 Judging

Winners for the Elite 18 list were determined by the judges over the same 2-week period. The top 50 nominees were reviewed by the judges. Winners were selected based on how each judge weighed the prioritization of their customer-first strategies, applied budget and headcount, and demonstrated tangible success.

FEARLESS FINALISTS SELECTION

The Fearless Finalists list honors the contributions of the marketing leaders who are making an impact but fell just outside the scope of who was able to be included in Elite 18 or Fearless 50 lists. They were extremely close to making the cut this year. Inclusion in the OTW was determined by their total vote count and influence scores as determined by the community. Nominees required a minimum role of Senior Director or above.

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