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. You may also want to review our Careers page.
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
Business Process and Social Media Thought Leader
Ida Lau has more than 17 years of start up and executive management experience and works with clients in a variety of verticals including retail, logistics, manufacturing, real estate and settlement services. Her experience with business process efficiencies and her eye for recommending effective technologies make her a valuable resource in crafting best-in-class, robust and right-sized solutions to meet client needs within the Salesforce.com ecosystem.
Ida is actively engaged in the Colorado technology community and has served on the steering committees for CSIA since 2008. Ida also co-hosts a podcast, IfThenRadio.com, which highlights technology in business. Ida is also a leader in Social Media and conducts workshops on how to leverage social media to client business objectives. Previously, Ida played a key role in executing strategic initiatives at Countrywide Home Loans where she provided operational and IT development vision in the creation of four business units, where she applied technology to automate, streamline, and validate the entire business process.
Certified Salesforce.com Administrator
Ed Schlesinger has been a member of the Salesforce.com ecosystem since 2005 and has partnered with akaCRM CEO, Brent Mellow, in various capacities for more than six years. Ed is an akaCRM affiliate based in East Brunswick, NJ who provides salesforce.com and business process consulting for select akaCRM clients in a wide variety of industries. Ed is also a well known personality in the industry for his passion with enabling Software-as-a-Service and Cloud applications for the Higher Education industry.
Ed has worked with dozens of enterprise-wide Salesforce CRM implementations through his current practice and in his previous roles with one of the leading salesforce.com partners. Ed's previous experience also includes various sales and business development roles including with PeopleSoft. He is a graduate of CUNY, Brooklyn College.
Technical & System Architect, Business Intelligence and Platform Development Expert
Fred Seyffert has been involved in the technology industry for over 27 years. His breadth of experience includes the design, implementation and management of large application platforms in the investment banking, telematics, asset management, retail, hospitality and health care sectors. He designed a number of successful operational systems in both traditional and distributed environments over the first fifteen years of his career. He then took part as an early adopter of the SaaS approach to application development and deployment as a senior development manager at RealPage. These experiences led him to recognize that traditional approaches to both analytics and application development could not address the fundamental challenges facing business today.
After selling his previous company, Summit Technologies, he financed and founded VeriPoint in 2002 with the express goal of creating an industry leading analytic solution for SaaS platforms. His visionary approach resulted in the architecture of VeriPoint's e.Mergent platform that transforms the SaaS Business Intelligence space and continues to lead as the solution of choice for true real-time analytics. Fred's keen insights into business trends and market shifts continue to steer and position VeriPoint's technology platform to be at the right place at the right time.
Active in the Java, .Net and SaaS spaces, Fred brings wide architectural and management experience to large projects involving system integration and platform development. With direct experience across virtually every database platform (Database.com, Oracle, SQL Server, etc.), leading deployment and development mechanisms (salesforce.com's VisualForce/APEX, ASP.NET, JSP, etc.), and leading integration toolsets (BizTalk, ETL technologies, ESB/SOA monitoring/correlation), Fred brings deep and broad experience to major development and deployment efforts.
Susan Thayer has been helping companies large and small improve workflow processes through CRM applications for nearly ten years. She is passionate about developing CRM programs that make employees more efficient and organizations more effective.
Some of Susan's areas of expertise include process improvement, integrating traditional and social media marketing campaigns, improving CRM adoption by sales reps and developing reports for busy executives.
Susan is active in the Salesforce.com community where she serves as the User Group Leader for the state of Nebraska. As the leader, she organizes and presents training and best practices programs for other Salesforce.com admins. As a Salesforce.com expert with an MBA and extensive business analyst experience, she helps businesses work smarter.
