Artico Search Recruits Chief Customer Officer for Showpad
November 16, 2022 – Customers matter. It sounds simple. But these days, companies are coming to better accept and understand that concept and weave it into their strategic vision. So it is that businesses of all kinds are increasingly bringing aboard chief customer officers (CCO), the most effective of whom wield influence across an organization and into the C-suite. And though the titles can vary from place to place, the customer-drive mission of the role remains the same. Mercedes Chatfield-Taylor and Brian Ippolito of Artico Search recently placed Virginia Miracle as chief customer officer of Showpad.
Ms. Miracle spent the past two years at Upland Software (UPLD) to further evolve their customer success motions across a diverse portfolio of software products. Prior to that, she spent the previous 15 years exploring word of mouth from various perspectives – recently leading customer success and professional services for social media software provider Khoros (a Vista Equity Partners company that combined Spredfast + Lithium Technologies). Prior to Spredfast, she spent four years growing the North American arm of Ogilvy & Mather’s social practice.
Showpad drives rapid deployment and adoption with best-in-class technology and practices based on its use of more than 1,200 customers in over 50 countries. GE Healthcare, Bridgestone, Honeywell, and Merck, among others, rely on Showpad’s sales enablement platform. Founded in 2011, Showpad has experienced explosive growth in recent years and has now raised a total of $185 million in funding. Its team of 450 people work from the company’s headquarters in Ghent, Belgium as well as Chicago and regional offices in London, Munich, San Francisco, and Wroclaw, Poland.
Related: Artico Search Recruits CEO for Pingboard
Artico also recently placed Doug Grigg as the new chief revenue officer of Showpad. Mr. Grigg is an accomplished and results-driven executive leader with 20-plus years of proven performance in customer facing roles. He is skilled and experienced at delivering aggressive growth targets; leading and building teams; driving organizational transformation; developing sales organizations; entering new markets; creating high performance cultures; and establishing operational systems, processes, and rigor to deliver business value, merger and acquisition integration. Mr. Grigg previously served as chief sales officer of Khoros, where he was responsible for a global sales team of about 225 people tasked to sell the company’s customer engagement platform.
Proven Recruiters
With offices in San Francisco, New York, and Austin, TX, Artico is off to one of the fastest starts among boutique search firms in recent memory. Ms. Chatfield-Taylor co-founded Artico with Matt Comyns, a cybersecurity leadership expert, to lead the firm’s rapidly expanding growth executive search team. Given the billions of dollars flowing into venture capital and private equity investments these days, as well as the ever-present threat of cybersecurity breaches, the founders expect big growth acceleration ahead. Ms. Chatfield-Taylor has completed over 75 CEO searches as well as partner, principal, and other CXO level assignments.
Ms. Chatfield-Taylor’s team focuses on executive-level search for scaleup venture capital and private equity-backed technology companies. The team has deep expertise in global enterprise software, data and consumer internet businesses. Ms. Chatfield-Taylor is deeply passionate about the importance of diversifying the industry, with a full 53 percent of her placements tracked since 2019 being underrepresented executives.
Specializing in management and go to market leaders, and people leadership search, Mr. Ippolito is a partner on Artico’s growth team. Previously, he was a consultant and key member of Caldwell Partner’s private equity and venture capital practice, focused on executive level search for high-growth technology companies.
Related: Artico Search Recruits Chief Revenue Officer for Labster
Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief; Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor; and Stephen Sawicki, Managing Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
