What People Are Saying

Brent is a person of utmost integrity, intelligence, and creativity. He has a true passion for identifying problems or opportunities for improvement and solving them by using objective analysis and interpretation of empirical data. Brent defines his success by assisting his clients in achieving their goals.

Jeff Susman
Senior Vice President

My Director of Business Development, Jennifer Martin, has worked directly with akaCRM principal, Karen Stock, and the production and effectiveness has impressed her and it translates into more success for my school. We look forward to more training and support.

-- Jill Kohler, President
Kohler Academy

Brent has the unique ability to design & implement the strategic vision - while also appreciating the value of day-to-day operational excellence. I learned something from him daily and would highly recommend Brent to any client or company looking for a results-oriented, focused, creative executive!

Jackie Chabot
Director of Client Services

Brent was a pleasure to work with: very straight-forward in business dealings, and always delivering as promised. He is a very intelligent business man, honest, direct and with an impressive focus on customer satisfaction. I highly recommend Brent to anyone looking to worth with a principled, focused, experienced and highly intelligent business leader.

Frederic Kerrest
President & Co-founder

A proven entrepreneur who has taken organizations from start-ups to successful ongoing enterprises. I can't recommend him highly enough. Put him on your board, get him on your management team or invest in one of his projects and expect great things to happen.

Phillip Brown
Principal

MHBT

Brent Mellow is a positively amazing individual. Professionally, he is insightful and strategically driven. Brent's ability to comprehend a situation and take effective action is among the best. He is adept at listening and developing solutions.

Gary Kerber
Critical Escalation Management Director

Leadership

The akaCRM leadership team is composed of industry veterans with decades of experience in the CRM and salesforce.com space. This team is backed by a group of equally talented individuals with a wide variety of constituency relationship management skills. Contact us to learn how you can become part of the akaCRM team.

Brent Mellow is the founder of akaCRM and a Principal of the company and has more than 20 years of experience in sales, marketing, partner management, business finance and infrastructure. Brent completed his initial salesforce.com partner training in 2003 after having been a customer of salesforce.com for the two prior years. Brent is a certified salesforce.com administrator with nearly a decade of experience with salesforce.com and the Force.com cloud platform.

Prior to akaCRM, Brent was co-founder of Astadia (and its predecessor MW Advisors), where he helped lead the company's rapid expansion in the U.S., Europe and Asia to achieve standing as the largest system integrator for a number of SaaS-based vendors including salesforce.com, Eloqua and Xactly. While at Astadia, Brent served as its President-US, Chief Marketing Officer and had oversight for the product development, IT and legal functions. Brent remains an Astadia shareholder.

Brent began his career in the financial services industry where he spent over a decade with a variety of commercial and investment banks and had roles including Senor Vice President and Managing Director in Bank of America's Global Corporate and Investment Banking Group. As a banker, Brent was trained in risk management including the practice of treating each loan like it was his own money. This practice developed his keen ability to ask good questions and conduct expert due diligence. Brent participated in the consolidation of the banking industry where he served on numerous merger and acquisition due diligence and integration teams and was an advocate for various customer relationship management (CRM) system deployments. Through his banking career, Brent had the opportunitunity to interact with senior executives of some of the most well-known companies in America and observe hundreds of businesses of all sizes across a wide variety of industiries. Brent's clients benefit from the lessons learned from these many relationships.

Following his banking career, Brent was CEO and co-founder of a web-based market research company where he deployed one of the first analytical engines for the high-end furniture industry. Brent was later hired by CompUSA to spin-off its multi-national Call Center Services outsourcing division. Following this successful engagement, Brent became VP/Chief Administrative Officer of the spin off, The Telvista Company, where he deployed salesforce.com as the company's CRM system and later became its VP of Sales & Marketing. The company grew globally to over $100 million with operations in the U.S. and Latin America.

Brent has been a featured presenter and panelist for UBS, Dreamforce, the Call Center Networking Group, and the Southwest Venture Forum. Brent currently resides in Colorado Springs, is happily married and has three wonderful children. Additional personal information can be found at www.brentmellow.com.

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Credentials

Salesforce.com Certified Administrator

Education

Southern Methodist University, MBA
The University of Texas, BBA

Recent Articles by Brent

Brian Connell is a Principal of akaCRM with more than 25 years of experience in sales, sales management, marketing and partner management. Brian completed his initial salesforce.com partner training in 2007. Brian is a certified salesforce.com consultant with more than a decade of direct experience with CRM and Marketing Automation solutions that includes salesforce.com.

Prior to joining akaCRM, Brian was a Senior Account Executive and Business Advisor with Astadia (and its predecessor MW Advisors), where he helped with the company's rapid expansion in the Southwest, Central and Midwestern sections of the U.S. where the company achieved standing as the largest system integrator for a number of SaaS-based vendors including salesforce.com, Eloqua and Xactly. Along the way, Brian helped launch or re-launch Salesforce.com User Groups in more than seven cities. Brian’s Salesforce.com clients have included Fortune 500 companies (First Data, Southwest Airlines, Fujitsu Networking, Sabre/Travelocity, Polycom), as well as many small and medium sized firms.

Brian began his career working for one of the premier sales, sales management, and leadership companies in the world, The Southwestern Company in Nashville, TN. After four years with Southwestern, Brian applied those sales, sales management and leadership skills to building a successful career with diversified media companies like Cox Media Group, Inc., Hearst Corporation, CapCities/ABC, The McClatchy Company and National Direct Media.

Changing gears Brian ventured into the financial services industry where he spent a number of years with software and consulting firms that were focused on helping banking organizations strengthen sales, marketing, finance and IT/operations to deliver exceptional client experiences that drive loyalty and increased profitability. During this time, Brian had the opportunity to present on a number of topics and at a wide range of financial services events that included these industry leading organizations: American Bankers Association (Marketing Conference), California Bankers Association (CFO Conference), Illinois Bankers Association (Annual Conference), Credit Union National Association (Marketing Conference), Texas Independent Bankers Association (Leadership Conference), Texas Credit Union League (Marketing Conference), Wisconsin Credit Union League (Marketing Conference), New England Financial Marketing Association.

Brian currently resides in Olathe, KS, is happily married and has two wonderful children.

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Credentials

Salesforce.com Certified Administrator
Salesforce.com Certified Consultant

Karen Stock is a Principal of akaCRM, a salesforce.com certified administrator, a salesforce.com certified consultant and a results driven CRM professional with over 16 years of consulting and project management experience delivering technology applications to her clients. She has a proven track record of successful project delivery demonstrated through her leadership, knowledge and experience with business process review, requirements definition, development and training. Karen has experience across marketing, sales and service functions and has deployed salesforce.com for clients in the technology, customer service, professional services, financial services, healthcare, real estate, energy, entertainment and non-profit sectors. Karen has extensive training experience and uses her business-focus to create excitement and increase user adoption of new technology.

Prior to joining akaCRM, Karen managed salesforce.com implementations for key clients of Astadia, a leading salesforce.com system integrator (and its predecessor MW Advisors). Karen partnered with her clients and provided consulting expertise and best practices knowledge throughout the business process review and project lifecycles. Karen's deployments included design and management of dozens of custom Force.com applications and salesforce.com integration solutions. Through her many project engagements, Karen has developed an expertise in strategy and implementation surrounding merging multiple salesforce.com instances.

Karen began her career in the human resource industry at Hewitt Associates where she was responsible for managing key client relationships, strategic benefits design, system design/development, communication, training and overall delivery of benefits administration technology services.

Karen currently resides in Dallas, Texas and enjoys spending time with her husband and two children.

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Credentials

Salesforce.com Certified Administrator
Salesforce.com Certified Consultant

Education

Northwestern University, Bachelor of Arts & Bachelor of Music

Recent Articles by Karen

Integrating Quickbooks with Salesforce.com