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 Salesforce.com Certified Administrator, Salesforce.com Certified Sales Cloud Consultant and Salesforce.com Certified Force.com Developer 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 Senior 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 opportunity 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 industries. 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
- Salesforce.com Certified Sales Cloud Consultant
- Salesforce.com Certified Developer
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 Developer and a salesforce.com Certified Sales Cloud Consultant. Karen is a results driven CRM professional with over 17 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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- Salesforce.com Certified Administrator
- Salesforce.com Certified Consultant
- Salesforce.com Certified Sales Cloud Consultant
- Salesforce.com Certified Developer
Education
- Northwestern University, Bachelor of Arts & Bachelor of Music
Recent Articles by Karen
Experienced Force.com System Architect & Salesforce.com Certified Developer
Jeremy Ross is a principal of akaCRM and has participated in the Salesforce.com ecosystem since 2003. Jeremy is based in Texas and provides system architecture consulting, Force.com development, custom integration services and general salesforce.com implementation consulting for select 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.
Credentials
- Salesforce.com Certified Developer
Adam Braxton is a Principal of akaCRM with more than 14 years of experience working with a wide variety of customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Adam has worked with the Salesforce.com and Force.com cloud platform since 2004 and is a Salesforce.com Certified Administrator, Salesforce.com Certified Sales Cloud Consultant and Salesforce.com Certified Service Cloud Consultant. Adam joined akaCRM from Deloitte Consulting, bringing large account management and multi-division business integration management skills to akaCRM clients.
Previously, Adam was employed by Thomson Reuters as a Marketing Manager and Marketing Analytics Manager and used Salesforce.com to monitor and measure campaign effectiveness. While at Thomson Reuters, Adam was also responsible for the successful integration of newly acquired businesses into Thomson’s Salesforce.com deployment as a result of his ability to understand the need to design and customize the solution to meet the unique needs of each business unit.
Education:
- University of Georgia, MBA, concentration in Marketing and Entrepreneurship
- University of Georgia, BA Philosophy
Credentials
- Salesforce.com Certified Sales Cloud Consultant
- Salesforce.com Certified Service Cloud Consultant
- Salesforce.com Certified Administrator
