KnowledgeBase Marketing announced on August 5 it is expanding both its business development and client relations divisions. The Richardson, TX-based database company said the move is driven by the need to better serve its growing base of enterprise-level accounts and drive its sales development efforts.
“We’ve been extremely successful as an organization at not only retaining our client base, but also expanding the scope of services we provide to these Fortune 500 companies,” said Dennis Kooker, president and COO for KnowledgeBase Marketing. “We need to staff appropriately for that.” He said many of these accounts have gone from a seven-figure annual engagement to eight-figure engagements.
As part of the changes, KnowledgeBase has hired Skip Balch to lead business development as executive vice president of sales. Balch was previously VP of strategic accounts program at Iconoculture. The company also named four new account directors: Derrick Campbell, Ben Dellavedova, Mojgan Soheili, and Hassina Wakman-Firuz. Campbell was previously account director at Targetbase; Dellavedova was most recently senior relationship manager with Experian’s Prediction Analytics; Soheili was previously director of strategy and enablement at Rapp Collins Worldwide; and Wakman-Firuz was formerly senior account manager at InfoGroup
Kooker said the account director strategy is a recent development for KnowledgeBase. “The idea behind [the AD appointments] is that is we’ve done such a good job expanding business within the existing client base that we ended up getting our salespeople caught up in continuing to service those accounts,” he explained. “We needed to bring in people on a more strategic, higher level to manage those clients.”
The account servicing end of the business was historically handled at KnowledgeBase by “an engagement manager title” as well as the salespeople. “We’ve been amongst the organizations that have continued to keep our sales execs involved in current accounts but we’re trying to offload more of that [to account directors] on these enterprise accounts to better serve the clients,” Kooker said.
