Here at B2B Marketing, we decided to pool together a selection of standout marketers to identify the top 10 most influential women in the field.
We looked for women making outstanding contributions to the industry; ones undertaking pivotal roles, inspiring others and challenging the traditionally male-dominated status quo.
Only when we started compiling this list did we get a true sense of the enormity of the task; identifying a mere 10 people from such a vast professional landscape as martech is no mean feat. And we can say with near certainty that we’ve missed out some truly exceptional marketing talent, but such is the nature of a top-10 list that all worthy candidates cannot be acknowledged. Nonetheless, here are the 10 most influential women in martech as we see them.
1. Tamara McCleary, founder, CEO and brand ambassador of Thulium LLC
Tamara is an internationally-recognised expert on branding influence and social business. As well as being in the top 1% of social influencers, Tamara has ranked in the top 50 for big data and in the top 100 IoT influencers in 2015 and 2016. Her repertoire spans an incredible array of topics from branding and social Influence to women’s empowerment, marketing to millennials and women. Watch her dispel the myth of work-life balance in this awesome keynote speech for the CMO Club at the Conrad Hotel in New York City.

2. Caroline Taylor, VP of global marketing and communications for IBM
Caroline is a truly global authority on software marketing. Based in London, she leads a teams responsible for marcomms strategy and execution across seven geographical regions of the world: North America, Latin America, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Japan, China and Asia Pacific. Not only a marketing connoisseur, Caroline worked in fine wine retail and established her own mail-order wine business prior to her exceedingly successful career in independent software.

3. Sylvia Jensen, senior director, EMEA marketing at Oracle Marketing Cloud and member of The CMO Club
Sylvia’s responsible for creating and executing the marketing strategy for Oracle Marketing Cloud in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Originally from the San Francisco Bay area, Sylvia has headed up marketing teams at tech companies like Oracle, WebEx, Palm and Coremetrics. Adroit in marketing personas, inbound, social and demand generation, this martech authority is also a prolific writer and speaker on topics too numerous to mention, but you can check out the latest on her profile.

4. Maria Pergolino, SVP, global marketing at Apttus
As well as contributing demonstrable excellence to category-defining software company, Maria is another avid writer. Her compelling style and unique insight typically attracts tens of thousands of people to her regular whitepapers and webcasts – we’d recommend watching or reading anything she produces on improving the perception of marketing inside organisations and best practices in target account marketing.

5. Nishma Robb, head of marketing at Google
When it comes to big achievements, Nishma is quite a force to be reckoned with. When she isn’t heading up marketing for a little-known search engine, Nisha leads the community women@iprospect which endeavours to inspire girls and women entrepreneurs with the magic of technology.

6. Nico Lutkins, director of marketing, EMEA at LinkedIn
Fifteen years of industry experience may sound like a long time, but most would struggle to fit in the amount that Nico’s achieved into two decades. Her expertise have been deployed across Fortune 500, medium-sized and pre-IPO organisations; she’s implemented programmes at a global and regional level, leading geographically dispersed teams.

7. Lynn Vojvodich, executive VP and CMO at salesforce.com
Lynn began her career wearing a hard hat, working on the design and construction of Gulfstream Jets and offshore oil structures. Now, 20 years on, she’s a globally recognised marketing leader with a unapologetic passion for technology. Not only the CMO of the world’s number one CRM company, Lynn is also the founder and chair of the board for Take3, a marketing strategy and implementation firm.

8. Margaret Molloy, global CMO and head of business development at Siegel+Gale
A breakthrough marketer with the ability to grow company profile, profit and team pride, Margaret is a respected thought leader having been published in the Harvard Business Review and Forbes. Her status as a social media heavyweight is also recognised, making Forbes‘ most influential CMO on Twitter list. Also a member of the top 50 power women of Irish America, Margaret is another heavily decorated member of this list.

9. Dr Chris Bailey, director, marketing, EMEA, global/EMEAR co-lead for Connected Women at Cisco and Russia at Cisco Systems
Chris is a truly pioneering leader with a 25-year track record for excellence in B2B technology and services. She has earned her status as an influential thought leader through regular speaking slots and contributions to TEDx and Forbes, respectively, and as well as leading a pan-EMEAR team, Chris is the global lead of Connected Women at Cisco, attesting to her commitment to inclusion and diversity.

10. Felicity Carson, marketing VP, demand generation at IBM Analytics
Felicity is in the big data and analytics vanguard. She has demonstrated excellence in IT marketing ranging from communications, digital marketing, product launches, large scale conferences, event strategy, brand awareness and channel marketing. And for this reason is consistently rated as a top achiever with a strong record of leading high performance teams and delivering outstanding results.