Affiliates

akaCRM develops affiliate relationships with some of the top thought-leaders in the salesforce.com ecosystem. akaCRM and affiliated individuals collaborate on a number of projects and exchange best-practices and services. This program allows affiliated individuals and akaCRM to maintain additional scalability for certain types of projects and skill sets. akaCRM also offers affiliated individuals certain overhead resources should they be required (e.g., billing, marketing, project management, etc.). Our affiliates have a minimum of 5 years of experience in the salesforce.com ecosystem as a salesforce.com employee or a salesforce.com system integration partner. Want to learn about becoming an affiliate? Contact us.

Stewart Ball is the CEO/Owner of Lucid World Consulting and veteran of the Beer, Wine & Spirits industry. Stewart is an affiliate of akaCRM where he partners with akaCRM to deliver CRM consulting and sales & marketing training to the Beer, Wine & Spirits industry. Through this relationship, Stewart and akaCRM bring together industry, CRM and sales & marketing expertise to take on voluminous amounts of data, relationships, tiers, channels and products and reduce it to manageable, measurable processes and steps. Overall, Stewart is focused on sales force performance in Beer, Wine & Spirits industry, including integration with CRM and social media solutions.

Since 1999, Stewart has earned direct experience with:

ALL channels of Beer, Wine & Spirit sales (on-sale; off-sale; chains, clubs & grocery;
All marketing tiers from broad market to boutique brands;
Beer, Wine & Spirits importing;
National and regional distribution;
Beer, Wine & Spirit sales organization development and training;
Consulting with large, multi-product Beer, Wine & Spirits sales organizations; and
Boutique Beer, Wine & Spirits sales organizations.

When Stewart is not busy with his clients in the Beer, Wine & Spirits industry, he coaches endurance athletes and other athletes who are focused on improving their training protocol and performance in competition.

Certified Salesforce.com Administrator
Certified Force.com Developer

Jodi Hrbek is a long-time member of the Salesforce.com ecosystem who has partnered with akaCRM CEO, Brent Mellow, in various capacities for more than six years. Jodi is an akaCRM affiliate based in Texas who provides CRM success coaching and training for akaCRM clients.

Jodi is passionate about helping companies use Salesforce CRM to improve sales productivity and measure marketing effectiveness. She helps companies new to salesforce.com get up and running quickly and helps customers with an existing salesforce.com deployment maximize their investment and level of success. With more than eight years experience on the salesforce.com platform, Jodi is a functional expert specializing in identifying business requirements, configuring and optimizing salesforce.com functionality and ensuring sales organizations realize the benefits of CRM. Her area of expertise is Sales Management Effectiveness packages that include dashboard design and custom workshops to help frontline sales managers fully leverage salesforce.com as a proactive management and coaching tool.

Jodi has worked with dozens of enterprise-wide Salesforce CRM implementations through her current practice and in her previous roles as both a Salesforce.com customer manager and client.

As a salesforce.com employee: During her four-year tenure with salesforce.com, Jodi served various roles on the enterprise sales team, including Customer Success Manager, where she was responsible for distributing best practices, providing CRM coaching, and delivering product training for strategic customers including Alltel, Air Liquide, Bank of Oklahoma, Bell Helicopter, CompuCom, Chase Paymentech and FedEx Kinko’s. She assisted clients in developing strategies critical for CRM success including data quality, business process integration, application governance and user adoption.

As a salesforce.com client: Jodi was an early adopter of Software-as-a-Service for both CRM and other business processes, having led an enterprise implementation in 2003 at Protiviti, a global professional services firm. Jodi was brought in by the executive management team to help develop sales culture and infrastructure. She facilitated sales training sessions and led new business development efforts while leading the global Salesforce CRM deployment and managing the team responsible for ongoing application support and change management. She also leveraged the Force.com platform to build and deploy Protiviti’s national recruiting application in less than thirty days.

Jodi's previous experience includes various sales and business development roles, including imc2, an internet services firm, and Walt Disney/ABC Cable. She is a graduate of Northwestern University.

Recent Articles by Jodi

Quick Tips & Free Apps for Greater Pipeline Visibility in 2010

Experienced Force.com System Architect & Developer

Jeremy Ross has participated in the Salesforce.com ecosystem since 2003 and has partnered with akaCRM CEO, Brent Mellow, in various capacities for more than seven years. Jeremy is an akaCRM affiliate based in Texas who provides system architecture consulting, Force.com development and custom integration services for a number of akaCRM clients.

Jeremy has extensive experience in designing and developing a wide range of interactive and non-interactive solutions. Since 2003, Jeremy's work has been focused on data and application integration around the Salesforce CRM and Force.com cloud platforms where he has participated in more than 100 salesforce.com-related projects. Jeremy also has experience in IT management and business process improvement. Jeremy is a Six Sigma Black Belt and developed Six Sigma Green Belt training curriculum and served as a teacher in the Green Belt training program.

Since 2001, Jeremy continually plays roles as both an individual contributor and as a leader of design and development teams for salesforce.com projects. Jeremy's expertise includes database and data migration where he has worked with data from a wide variety of systems including Act!, Goldmine, Salesforce.com, Siebel, Remedy, SAP, Macola, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Lotus Notes,and SharePoint. Jeremy also brings experience with projects in a wide array of industries across a number of business functions including eCommerce, quoting and configuration, order entry, survey and order-to-cash.

Jeremy's previous experience includes various IT and product development roles at companies including Evergreen Computer Systems and Red River Technologies. He is a graduate of Excelsior College in Albany, NY.