What do today’s most successful brands have in common?
They build the best experiences.
This year at Activate Live, we’re bringing the brands that make those memorable experiences to the virtual stage. You’ll learn from the curators of today’s strongest consumer connections to find out how your business can foster long-term loyalty.
Like Sara Varni, Chief Marketing Officer of Twilio.
Introducing Sara Varni
Sara started her career as an equities trader in New York on the Nasdaq desk. But it never felt quite right or creative enough. So Sara went to the Anderson School of Management (UCLA) and got her MBA. She landed at Salesforce in 2007 and kicked off her journey in the wild west of cloud platforms.
In her 11 years at Salesforce, she worked on three product lines: the AppExchange ecosystem, a small business product for contact center management, and the flagship Sales Cloud product. We would safely say she’s a verified martech and cloud tech expert.
So when George Hu, the former COO of Salesforce and the current COO of Twilio, reached out to Sara with the opportunity to join a growing communications and customer engagement company, Sara couldn’t resist! When she made the jump to Twilio as CMO in 2017, it was the exact same size as Salesforce was when she started—1,100 employees and $400M in revenue.
Sara’s Work as CMO
Sara Varni is the CMO of Twilio, a cloud communications platform that empowers companies to better engage with their customers by giving them a platform to build voice, text, chat, video and email communications.
If you receive a notification from a restaurant confirming your reservation, that’s normally Twilio behind the scenes. If you’re a company like Medtronic that needs to send alerts and notifications to diabetes patients about the levels of glucose in their bloodstream, that’s powered by Twilio. Odds are you’ve interacted with Twilio technology without even knowing it.
As CMO, Sara is responsible for growing Twilio’s community while simultaneously bringing Twilio into the enterprise market. She’s manages two different funnels:
- Developer-centric: How can a tool like Twilio make a developer’s life easier? Sara’s team is responsible for providing useful documentation, the right content and the right access to developers in the community.
- Business-focused: Sara communicates to the line of business management to show how Twilio will have an impact on their core business metrics.
Sara’s work to find a unifying metric between developers and the business at Twilio bridged the gap between the two funnels, which drove substantial growth for the company.
She’s a cloud technology icon with a robust background in marketing and go-to-market strategy, and she’s ready to share her expertise with the Activate audience.
Talking Technology With Sara Varni at Activate
Today’s customers want more from brands. They demand experiences that are personal, emotional and data-driven. The only way to deliver on these demands is by adopting a customer-first mindset and a data-driven methodology.
In her keynote address, “How to Achieve Human-Centric Customer Experiences Through Technology”, Sara will invite the audience to embrace digital transformation. She’ll showcase the opportunities available to brands that leverage technology to augment consumer experiences.
Restrictions to movement during COVID-19 resulted in changed consumer shopping behaviors and brand interactions, further intensifying the bond of tech and CX. Sara’s keynote will shed light on how today’s leading companies approach building out a memorable customer journey, from technology to messaging touchpoints, to set their brands up for success.
An Amazing Speaker Lineup at Activate Live
We’re ecstatic that Sara will be at Activate, but that’s not all. Introducing the dreamers, builders and makers of today’s most compelling customer experiences and the speakers that will be joining Sara on the virtual stage at Activate Live:
- Bozoma Saint John, CMO of Netflix
- Gina Igwe, Sr. Director, CRM at DoorDash
- Alexandra Farrar, Retention Marketing Manager at Cars.com
- Imelda Skinder, Listener Lifecycle Manager at Stitcher
- Indi Pollard, Email Marketing Lead at Blockchain
- Guilhaum Ceccaldi, Head of Growth at Prose
- Boris Savoie-Doyer, Head of CRM at Aspiration
- Oriana Wen, Director of Data and Innovation at Blue Bottle Coffee
- Brian Balfour, Founder and CEO of Reforge
- Adam Knight, Director of Engagement at Zoopla
- Chris Frost, Senior Product Manager at Zoopla
No matter where you are in the world, you can join our community of dreamers, builders and makers at Activate. We’ll be updating the agenda and adding more speakers as we get closer to the event. Stay up-to-date and in-the-know on everything Activate—by registering for free today.
