Top Leaders in CRM: The 2019 CRM Influential Leader Awards

Our Influential Leader awards honor industry figures who show what it takes to innovate in today’s sales and marketing realms, and our three winners ably demonstrate that quality. Here we have a new CEO who’s reinventing a venerable CRM brand with smart acquisitions and product expansions; the leader of a marketing technology company making it his mission to simplify the playing field for small and midsize firms; and the founder of a “solution selling” provider who’s helped steer the CRM industry away from siloed solutions to a single platform for marketing, operations, and sales professionals. Join us in celebrating their achievements.

SugarCRM in February appointed Craig Charlton as CEO, succeeding Larry Augustin, who served as CEO for 10 years and will remain with the company as chairman of the board of directors. “Craig is going to take SugarCRM to the next level,” Augustin said in a statement at the time. Charlton came to SugarCRM with a strategy of acquisition, product portfolio expansion, and organic growth, and he immediately got to work toward those goals. Read on to see how.

As CEO of Nashville-based CM Group, Wellford Dillard has been on a mission to simplify today’s convoluted marketing technology landscape, which has been especially difficult for small and midsize businesses to navigate. A big part of his efforts included a major corporate rebranding that merged email marketing platform providers Campaign Monitor, Delivra, and Emma under one corporate identity. The three companies in the original brand portfolio had been operated by Insight Venture Partners, a New York investment firm, and were merged under the Campaign Monitor corporate identity in June 2018. And these moves were only the beginning.

Harbinder Khera founded Mindmatrix in February 1998 with a focus on “solution selling” for manufacturers and their channel partners and direct sales forces. Today, the Pittsburgh, Pa.-based company is a leading partner relationship management, marketing automation, and channel and sales enablement service provider and one of the few companies in the marketplace to offer a single, fully integrated platform with complete sales and marketing enablement for direct and indirect channels. Read on for more on Khera's impact.