Leadership Team

Executive Leadership

Blank Profile

Joanna Velarde

Executive Director

Joanna brings a diverse 20+ year background in media production, digital marketing, business development and nonprofit leadership. She is in charge of driving the mission of SES, overseeing strategic planning, streamlining operations, and leading initiatives for revenue growth, community engagement while spearheading all of SES’s digital marketing and communications efforts.  Joanna is a natural connector, partnership builder, and is passionate about people. She brings a storyteller and project management expertise as a film, tv, digital content and virtual Producer and Director, having produced compelling content for organizations including Apple, PBS, Univision, Discovery Communications, MotorTrend, Jay Leno's Garage, DNC and George W. Bush Presidential Center, among others. Joanna joined the Sales Enablement Society in 2020 as their first full time employee. 

Board of Directors

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Paul Butterfield

President

Paul's career spans 20 years in sales and sales leadership plus10 years of building and successfully executing enablement strategies with companies such as Microsoft, Intuit, NICE inContact and Vonage. His mission is to lead revenue teams through the transformation into truly customer-centric organizations that differentiate through how they sell rather than with price or product. Prior to joining the SES Board, Paul has been the Host and Producer of the SES podcast Stories From The Trenches.

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Bill Ball

Vice President

Bill joined the Sales Enablement Society shortly after its inception, became a founding member at the first national meeting in Palm Beach, FL, and continues to serve as an active member in the Washington, DC chapter. Prior to joining the Executive Board, Bill served on the SES Board of Advisors and has contributed to member engagement, the definition project and all SES conferences. As a practitioner, Bill is committed to SES's mission to elevate and drive a path forward for enablement, as well as the experience of its members.

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Sheevaun Thatcher

Member at Large

Sheevaun is a storyteller and guide, a leader and a learner. Her jungle gym career in sales, marketing, IT, solution engineering, and professional services, gave her all the relevant experience to create powerful sales enablement teams. Sheevaun builds sales enablement programs from the ground up based on her commitment to arming her organization’s sales force with access to the insights, experts, and data that will ultimately increase revenue. During her career working with enterprise sales teams and start-ups, she has learned that sales performance is dictated not only by innate talent but also by training, GTM messaging, and challenging the customer's vision of their future. She is a universal translator; she speaks the language of engineers, marketers, product, sales and executives. 

Today, Sheevaun is VP Slack Strategic Enablement at Salesforce.

Peter Ostrow

Member at Large

Peter capitalizes on 20+ years of revenue growth leadership in sales enablement, sales talent management, and operational expertise. Finding a better, faster way to help B2B sales teams beat quota drives just about every topic, company, rep, and channel partner he engages. Prior to joining Forrester SiriusDecisions in the Sales Enablement Strategy (SES) service, Peter was a VP/Research Group Director for the Aberdeen Group, where he founded and was Principal Analyst for the Sales Effectiveness Practice. Here, he covered the technology, service, and consulting enablers that enterprise sales forces deploy to become Best-in-Class organizations. He also managed researchers in marketing, customer success, field service, and human capital management disciplines.

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Gail Behun

Member at Large

Gail Behun is a high-performance Sales Enablement leader experienced in all facets of strategy, planning and program development. Prior to joining Juniper Square as the head of the growing revenue enablement practice, Gail held leadership roles in rapidly growing Saas companies across the spectrum. She brings a deep understanding of sales and marketing roles, process, methodology and business practices, along with comprehensive employee learning and development techniques. 

Leading global teams to increase productivity, profitability and stakeholder value, she achieves results that are dramatic while always keeping an onto scalability and repeatability. Gail connects the dots in powerful and innovative ways by pioneering new enablement, learning, sales and operational initiatives. Building positive employment cultures and coaching top performers from onboarding to leadership is Gail’s passion.

Chris Kingman

Member at Large 

Chris Kingman is currently the Global Head of Digital Enablement at TransUnion. A proven practitioner, Chris has accomplished a lot in his 12+ years in enablement, including being a founding member and board member for the Sales Enablement Society, an Evangelist for Sales Enablement Pro, an active member on AA-ISP Sales Transformation Board, as well as an accomplished writer, advisor, mentor, and freelance Enablement consultant. Chris’s expertise include inside sales strategy and support, training and development, sales technology and social media. Chris is based in South Florida, and when not immersed in all things Enablement, can be found at the beach, the gym or at the range.

Mary Beth Hanifer

Member at Large 

Mary Beth Hanifer is a skilled sales professional with over 20 years of experience in Sales Enablement, Marketing, Product Marketing, Product Development, and Sales Operations. A strategic and tactical thinker, she takes a data-driven approach to sales enablement, transforming raw data into actionable insights that drive revenue and program success.

Mary Beth has been an active member and volunteer with the Sales Enablement Society since 2017. She continuously works on the Conference Planning Committee and was Chair of the SES Member Onboarding Program. In addition, she served on the Leadership Council for the Washington DC Chapter and the Technology Infrastructure workgroup. She was also a Keynote Speaker at the 2017 SES Conference.

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Imogen McCourt

Member at Large

Imogen has worked in Sales Enablement since 2007, when perhaps the ‘term’ and key elements of enabling commercial organisations, were defined at her then employer, Forrester Research. In fact as Forrester’s Global Head of Sales Enablement she likes to claim that she may also have written the first ever Sales Enablement charter for Forrester.

Imogen co-founded the UK Chapter of the Sales Enablement Society in London in 2016; letting her passion for the mutually beneficial, strategic and value adding Sales Enablement approach take over her social time too! Imogen believes her ability to spot patterns and connections, and be a conduit to helping others succeed is what attracted her to SE and perhaps underpinned some of her career success; in-house at Forrester, Argus Media, and now The Economist Group, and with her own consultancy, helping companies (post-investment) simplify, scale and grow their commercial engines.