Liz Roche, Managing partner, Customers Incorporated

Liz Roche is an industry-recognized CRM expert and was instrumental in evolving the customer relationship management (CRM) category and best practices. A leading authority on CRM business principles, enabling technologies, and related technology architectures, she is a frequent industry keynote speaker and author. Ms. Roche has 20 years of IT and business experience, working in the CRM field for the past 10 years. She is the co-founder and managing partner of Customers Incorporated, a research and consulting firm specializing in customer-facing business processes and technology.

Ms. Roche's work in the CRM domain includes extensive research and consulting around sales. Her philosophy is based on the customer as the CRM design point and she advocates a holistic approach to the customer lifecycle: looking across the entire sales ecosystem to see how it interacts with the extended selling team to identify weak links and opportunities. This approach enables facilitation of rapid change in sales effectiveness -- e.g., sales force automation, or SFA projects -- as opposed to generating six months of meetings, conference calls and WebEx sessions.

Ms. Roche is formerly a vice president of CRM and sell-side commerce with META Group, a technology research and advisory firm, acquired by Gartner in 2005. Prior to that, she was director of IT strategic planning with a St. Louis-based technology consultancy and also held positions with Alliance Blue Cross Blue Shield, specializing in data warehousing and emerging technology trend analysis, and Monsanto, where she specialized in managing enterprise-wide application implementations. Ms. Roche received a BA in public affairs from the George Washington University and an MBA from the University of Missouri in St. Louis.