Nominated By:
Alex Cohen

Why I nominated Maria:
Maria is a champion for inside sales professionals, educating both sales and marketing professionals on the importance of creating aligned revenue teams that enable fast growth organizations. More specifically, Maria is committed to creating and prioritizing leads so that inside sales professionals can focus their efforts on supporting buyers in their purchasing decisions. This not only leads to increased success for the inside sales team, but also leads to job satisfaction and low turnover for the inside sales professionals that benefit from her focus.

Currently VP of Marketing, Maria Pergolino helps lead strategy and execution of Apttus’ hyper-efficient marketing to help source and prioritize leads for the inside sales team. Maria has led the Apttus for nearly two years, after spending almost four years with the leader in marketing automation, Marketo, where she was responsible for all demand generation and inbound marketing programs that generated qualified leads for the inside sales team.

Over her impressive 10+ year sales and marketing career she has specialized in everything from CRM, content marketing, and lead generation & nurturing, as well as campaign optimization all to support and drive sales success. Several notable accomplishments include co-authorship of some of the most successful books created specifically for B2B Sales & Marketers, entitled The Definitive Guides to B2B Marketing. Since their creation over the last 3 years, over 25,000 sales and marketing professionals to date have collectively downloaded the Definitive Guides.

Maria is Salesforce.com Certified Administrator. She is also is a sought after speaker at numerous sales and marketing events (including speaking at a San Francisco area AA-ISP event), and has a Marketing Degree and MBA from the School of Business at Rutgers University.

Nominee’s Achievement in the Inside Sales:
• Winner: InsideView Sales and Marketing Influencers 2014
• Winner: Sales Lead Management 20 Women to Watch (2011, 2012)
• Winner: Sales Lead Management 50 Most Influential People (2010, 2011, 2012)
• Emerging Leader by Women’s Leadership Coaching
• Winner of several BMA B2 Awards and a SIIA CODiE Award Finalist.

What stand-out thing have they done?
Maria is constantly creating new ways to drive demand to enable sales success. She is always one step ahead of the competition and refuses to be a follower. She continually strives for excellence in everything she does, and measures herself not only by her own accomplishments, but by the accomplishments of those around her. She is a fearless leader and works every day to make herself, and those she works with, better marketers.

Apttus’ presence at Dreamforce 2014 is entirely the brainchild of Maria, and any attendee would testify to the prolific amount of ‘Apttus Green’ seen everywhere from their enormous main booth (largest outside of Dreamforce, and one of many pieces of Apttus real estate) to the signature green outfits Apttus employees sported.

Maria was selected as Apttus’ VP of Marketing after creating great success for another Salesforce partner, Marketo. At both Marketo and Apttus she is a champion for Salesforce users. She has world-class knowledge of the campaign and lead management functionality inside Salesforce, and does everything she can to support other marketing and sales professionals to improve their success by helping them make better use of Salesforce.

That said, Maria’s passion for Salesforce goes far beyond simply making good use of Salesforce functionality, Maria is very active in social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Quora. On these she has supported and promoted Salesforce, including sharing content from and blogging about Salesforce. She is also passionate about Salesforce offline, often wearing her Salesforce jacket or one of her Salesforce t-shirts. Recently when visiting her new home, I even noticed she had a huge (2 foot tall?) SaaSy doll prominently featured in her living room. Now that is support!

Over 40 people have endorsed Maria for her work with Salesforce on LinkedIn (via LinkedIn Endorsements) and Klout (the influence management tool) also recognizes her as an influencer on Salesforce.

Maria was one of the first 500 Salesforce Certified Professionals, and still has this certification active today (she displays the award trophy proudly on her desk). Maria has spoken at numerous Salesforce User Groups including San Deigo, Twin Cities, and the bay area and was also a speaker at a very popular Dreamforce session in 2012.

Their Company URL: http://www.apptus.com/

2014 Winner

About the Author: Susan Finch

Susan has been a web solutions provider since 1997 and combines it with her years of experience in Public Relations, Marketing and Advertising. In her own company, Susan Finch Solutions (http://www.susanfinch.com) Susan provides training, design, set up, strategies, and graphics for clients online and for print. Susan has been a director for the SLMA since 2008.