Allison Pickens
fmr COO, Gainsight
Allison Pickens is one of the world’s top experts on how to grow recurring revenue. She is a thought leader on go-to-market strategy for SaaS companies, having coached thousands of CEOs and executives at both Fortune 500 companies and born-in-the-cloud SaaS ventures. She has experience as an independent board director, COO, P&L owner, and investor.
As the former COO at Gainsight, a $1B unicorn and top customer success software company, Allison scaled the company from infancy to a multi-product platform, creating the category of customer success software. Along the way, Allison and her team developed industry-recognized best practices on how the shift to subscription business models has precipitated a new focus on customer centricity and necessitated significant changes in go-to-market strategy and company organization.
Allison was named one of the Top Women in SaaS and Top 50 People in Sales and Business Development. She is part of the Fortune Most Powerful Women community, which recognized the ideas she has shared in hundreds of conferences, blog posts, and podcasts, including The Customer Success Podcast that she hosted. She co-authored a book called The Customer Success Economy, published by Wiley in April 2020.
Allison is an independent Board Director at dbt Labs ($4B valuation backed by Sequoia, a16z, and others) and Commvault (NASDAQ: CVLT), making her one of the youngest public board directors. She has served on four boards in total. She is a Senior Advisor to BCG regarding their clients’ digital transformations and was an Executive-in-Residence at Bessemer Venture Partners, where she has advised dozens of portfolio company CEOs. Currently Allison is Founder & General Partner at The New Normal Fund, which allows her to formalize advisory relationships as a go-to-market partner to B2B SaaS CEOs across company stages.
Allison started her career in management consulting for Fortune 500 companies while at BCG and later worked in private equity investing at Bain Capital. She has degrees from Yale University and Stanford University. On weekends you can find Allison having fun with her husband, daughter, and close-knit extended family.
