Asana has announced two significant appointments of experienced female leaders who were previously at Salesforce. Shannon Sullivan Duffy has been hired as Chief Marketing Officer. She replaces Dave King, who departed the organisation in August 2022.
Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh joins as the Head of Customer Experience. Asana’s gain is Salesforce’s loss. That they have chosen to join the work management platform indicates the opportunity that Asana has.
Anne Raimondi, Chief Operating Officer and Head of Business at Asana, commented, “Both Shannon and Neeracha bring impressive enterprise experience and proven track records delivering for customers and driving business growth. At Asana, we have a people-centric leadership style which both Shannon and Neeracha exemplify. We’re excited to see their combined impact on our enterprise focus in 2023 and beyond.”
A new CMO
Shannon Sullivan Duffy will lead the global marketing strategy as CMO. Before joining Asana, Duffy spent more than twelve years at Salesforce, with a brief nine-month interlude at Facebook. She led various marketing functions at Salesforce, including leading Pardot, Marketing Cloud and Commerce cloud marketing.
From May 2021, she was EVP of Cloud & Industry Marketing, leading the marketing function for Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Platform, Tableau and all Industry Products.
Before Salesforce, she was Director of Marketing at Jigsaw and SourceForge, beginning her career in product marketing.
Duffy commented, “Starting the next chapter of my career at Asana is not only a great achievement but one I can be truly proud of. Working with Asana allows me to sit right in the centre of the future of work and opens up a world of exciting new opportunities. I’m looking forward to building upon the already impressive enterprise messaging and to lead this accomplished team.”
Head of Customer Experience
One of the surprises about Taychakhoonavudh’s appointment is that she is not the Chief Customer Officer, but the Head of Customer Experience. Taychakhoonavudh spent fourteen years at Salesforce in a variety of leadership roles, most recently as Executive Vice Preseindt, Global Customer Success. She also led the industries go-to-market team as EVP, Industries, and before that, led the global partner programs. Prior to Salesforce, she spent thirteen years at Oracle.
Taychakhoonavudh, commented, “Asana has a reputation as a customer-first organization which is reflected in its inspiring roster of global customers from enterprise players to non-profits. I am eager to help continue and build on the great work that has been done to drive value and successful outcomes for customers of all sizes, create more advocates, and help teams achieve high performance through the Asana platform when collaboration and accountability are more important than ever.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Asana has managed to lure two impressive names from Salesforce. Seeing how they evolve the customer success teams and messaging within Asana will be interesting. For Salesforce, losing two significant female leaders is a blow, but one it will recover from, though with more than two decades of experience between them, they will be missed.
