Krista is a Board Director and Customer Success executive with 20 years of experience building and scaling success solutions at the leading edge of the SaaS market boom. Her leadership has been critical to the success of Salesforce and Okta, two of the world’s most innovative, category-creating app and infrastructure businesses. At both companies, Krista delivered first-of-kind, record-breaking lines of revenue, propelled differentiated, lasting customer growth, and built industry-defining customer success organizations within high-pressure hypergrowth environments.
As Chief Customer Officer at Okta, Krista transformed the company’s customer success culture into a competitive differentiator, helping to scale the business from $20M to $586M and through a successful IPO in 2017. Key accomplishments include growing Okta’s customer success team from 20 people to an organization of 400, delivering 120% net retention, building a wildly successful, first-of-its-kind success product portfolio, and establishing the company’s “Love our Customers” culture.
Before joining Okta, Krista spent 14 years at Salesforce writing the SaaS industry playbook for customer success, renewals, and growth. She helped the business scale from $5M to $4.7B in revenue, from 200 to 13,000 employees, and through its 2004 IPO. As Senior Vice President of Customers for Life and Senior Vice President Customer Success and Support, Krista launched and sold Salesforce’s first dedicated success products and built the first technical support and CSM operating models for SaaS across support, success, education, and professional services. She began her career at the company in 2000 as a Customer Support Representative.
Krista now uses her immense experience to help businesses insulate themselves from risk, see around corners, and swiftly identify and address pitfalls across the enterprise. She is a Board Director at Benchling, a cloud-based software platform for biology researchers and R&D organizations, and at Drift, the world's leading conversational marketing and sales platform. She is also a Board Director at nonprofit The Advocates for Survivors of Domestic Abuse and an advisor to Gainsight, which builds technology solutions to enable customer success.