Former Microsoft CRM wiz Brad Wilson was named CEO of Emailvision in a surprise announcement made today by founder and outgoing CEO Nick Heys. The company’s leading shareholder, Heys will remain on board as a strategic advisor to Wilson.
Widely recognized as a thought leader in the CRM space, Wilson spent six and a half years at Microsoft Dynamics as general manager of CRM. During his tenure there Wilson helped launch CRM as Microsoft’s first commercial cloud service, establishing it as a player among enterprise and midsize companies.
Prior to Microsoft, Wilson was VP of worldwide CRM marketing for Peoplesoft and VP of product marketing for marketing vendor Epiphany.
“Marketing departments thrive on data, but the sheer volume of data you have to go through makes it difficult to derive the best insights,” Wilson told Direct Marketing News from Emailvision’s Paris office, where he was attending transition meetings. “Emailvision has long provided customer intelligence as part of its package for customers. We have a broad vision as a cloud provider that allows us to see what’s happening in different regions and different businesses. We leverage those assets to provide clients solutions across several channels.”
Wilson sees Emailvision’s experience in South America, where desktops are fewer than in the United States and mobile marketing is more mature, as a valuable attribute. “Some marketers are dealing with mobile in a vacuum, and that’s a mistake,” he said. “You have to align mobile as part of an overall strategy for dealing with customers.”
Wilson will work out of Emailvision’s London and Paris offices and plans a tour of the company’s 22 global offices to meet with customers, partners, and employees. The company, a provider of cloud-based marketing automation and analytics, claims to deliver some 600,000 marketing campaigns for 3,000-plus clients each month.
“I’m very pleased to welcome Brad Wilson into the company as the new CEO,” Heys said in a statement. “His depth of industry experience and his track record in building and running global businesses makes him the right person to lead the next wave of Emailvision’s growth.”
