Laura Bowers Email and Phone Number

Back at it and excited for my next chapter at Twilio! More information coming soon!

With the continual shift in business and after several RIFs, I found myself on the Flex Team (Contact Center Business Unit) and back to my roots! I was beyond excited to get started and hit the ground running. Fortunate for me, I found myself with the most supportive enablement and sales leadership teams! Within a month of the reorganization, we were tasked to put together a SKO in less than 5 weeks! It was exciting, challenging and rewarding! I presented SOAR leadership sessions and AE sessions for groups over 300! We accomplished a great task and scored greater than 85% NPS scores for every session at SKO23! We also completed our "kick off enablement track" on everything related to comp, forecasting and strategic account and opportunity planning. Our team also owned the complete revamp of our onboarding program. I also personally managed sales tools and enablement for Flex Sales including 6Sense, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Gong, LeadIQ, ZoomInfo,Outreach & Rattle. With the launch of these tools, we kicked off a prospecting excellence series which led to over 5Min pipeline in 30 days! I also built, designed and delivered two certification programs (Pitch/Positioning & Self-Guided Demo Delivery) to the global Flex Sales team through Gong which included submissions and scoring facilitated through Gong. I loved all the things we were working on and really felt like enablement was hitting the mark for the first time during my tenure at Twilio. After less than 9 months of spinning up the Flex Business Unit, the entire BU was eliminated in a RIF. I can't stress how much I loved working with the Flex Sales Team at Twilio! We did some really exciting stuff on a short runway and built many friendships along the way!

I supported the NAMER Growth Sales team with all enablement needs. I worked diligently with Sales Leaders and front line managers to uncover enablement opportunities through data and in return deliver high quality, revenue generating trainings and programs. Since my move to Twilio, I have led and executed & collaborated on many programs including the successful launch of 6Sense (driving +3M in the quarterly pilot), Quip for Account Planning, Social Selling, Onboarding, Gong, and Outreach. I also formally contributed to playbooks and HighSpot pages to make the training and resources easy for our sales team.

With my promotion to Director, I was ecstatic and ready to hit the ground running. With this role, I took my first, high level leadership function which required me to lead versus individually contribute. I acquired six direct reports and added additional programs to my portfolio including Social Selling, Gong, Voice of the Buyer, Account/Opportunity Planning, Demandbase (Engagio), Seismic and strategic sales process/playbook.I originally panicked thinking of everything that needed to be turned around, but quickly realized I had a great team and leader to help us reach new heights. In addition to my team, I remotely managed a group of 10 summer interns and strategically owned the entire program.For Social Selling, we continued to complete certifications, rewards and professional development opportunities ending 2020 with a 87% revenue influence rate.In addition, we moved from EveryoneSocial to Bambu for social advocacy. We launched a full-blown account & opportunity planning program with more plans created in one year than in the previous three years (over 1300 plans.) through Revegy. Our Voice of the Buyer completed more customer interviews than ever before to deliver insights and competitive intelligence back into Genesys. We also relaunched our sales process and playbook to the customer-centric/ pod model for our SaaS Transformation initiative. One of the most exciting things during this time was launching our first, global engagement/ABM Program for increased visibility & transparency via Demandbase, rolling out to 5 customer facing teams. This program played very well with our existing programs and processes.In the first two weeks of the pilot, 19 new opportunities were identified. All of these achievements, led me to be awarded 2020 President’s Club Achiever!While I loved my role, I felt it was time for me to move away from my comfortability at Genesys. In August of 2021, I decided to take an individual contributor role at Twilio to start building again.

With my promotion, I was tasked with operationalizing and reporting on the Global Social Selling Program and adding additional responsibilities to my role.I took on direct reports and responsibility over the Genesys Global Customer Advocacy and Reference programs, and our Global Customer Experience (CX) Centers.I loved every aspect of learning and leading these programs and helping my directs expand their skills and careers. Regarding our customer advocacy and reference programs, I worked closely with my team and marketing on integrations and ideas to reward customers for activities completed that drove immediate value for Genesys.I gained exposure into tools such as Influitive and Reference Edge to support these programs and scale globally.I organized SKO and Xperience for these programs to gain exposure and sign ups with customers, leading to 4X increase for signups to the customer advocacy program and over 1K customer references fulfilled without human intervention inside SFDC.These efforts gained me a CX Warrior award in 2018 for my contributions to the Genesys Reference and Customer Advocacy Programs. Genesys was identified as a finalist for the Advocamp 2018 Bammies in the category of Biggest Sales Impact from over 100 applications.Social Selling continued to improve and evolve under my leadership which resulted in more certifications and winning a CX Champion Award.In addition, Social Selling influenced closed won revenue at Genesys at 63% in 2018 and 64% in 2019.During this time, I also took on our Global CX Centers to help operationalize, improve, and redesign the spaces and program.These efforts gave me exposure to executive level meetings, organizing schedules and operationalizing intake forms, agendas, and briefing documents.All these experiences helped me grow and led me to win the 2018 Sales Operations Bar Setter Award and the 2019 Leadership Excellence Award, just as I was welcoming my second daughter, Presley. In 2020, I was promoted to director.

Genesys, the world’s #1 Customer Experience Platform, empowers companies to create exceptional omnichannel experiences, journeys and relationships. With my move to Genesys, through the acquisition of Interactive Intelligence, my role took an interesting and what turned out to be an exciting shift. My new role in 2017 was to solely focus on building a Social Selling Program. I hit the ground running to build something exciting and new and to become the subject matter expert of all things social. This included metrics, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Sales Navigator and EveryoneSocial. The result was a full blown, scalable Global Social Selling Certification Program built on the four pillars of Social Selling via LMS delivery and knowledge check points. We also incorporated incentives which included profile badges, swag, logo jackets, executive LinkedIn recommendations, SKO professional headshots and more. We certified over 100 account ececutives on the program in the first year. Through my efforts I earned the Q4 2017 Sales Ops MVP award and a CX Warrior award for my contributions in social selling, even while taking a leave of absence to welcome my beautiful daughter, Remington, into the world in May 2017. In 2018, I was promoted to manager and planned my next adventure to build more revenue driven, enablement programs.

Interactive Intelligence, acquired by Genesys in December 2016, was a global leader of cloud services for customer engagement, communications and collaboration designed to help businesses worldwide improve service, increase productivity and reduce costs. In my new role as a Sales Enablement Specialist, I was responsible for developing creative training that enabled the sales organization to be successful. With that, I learned so much regarding how to build LMS training, guides, classes and onboarding that was tailored and easily consumable to each adult learning style including visual, auditory and kinesthetic. In this role, I engrossed myself in learning from my peers and leadership to unlock creative skills I never knew existed within me. Some key learnings included how to develop highly visual and engaging training materials, how to be an effective presenter (never a top skill of mine) and how to utilize enablement tools and skills such as PowerPoint, Captivate, Snag-It, Word, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, CommercialTribe, white-boarding, classroom facilitation, Challenger Sales, process efficiency and much more. I was beyond lucky to have a peer/mentor that invested so much into my enablement learning. Some key achievements included redesigning/facilitating our global onboarding class, outlining our global sales process with guides/training courses, managing the global Social Selling Program and launching a video training tool for our global SE organization. I took all this knowledge with me when we were acquired by Genesys in 2016.

Interactive Intelligence, founded by entrepreneur, Don Brown, helped customers improve service, reduce costs and grow their business faster through its single-­platform, all-­in-­one architecture: its multiple delivery options for cloud, on-­premises and hybrid customer engagement and UC&C solutions. As a manager of the Demand Generation team, I managed a team of 10 Demand Generation Specialists in a blended call center environment that supported marketing initiatives for Interactive Intelligence by engaging with current and prospective customers through a variety inbound and outbound channels and tactics to generate qualified leads and meetings for sales. I quickly hit the ground running by building out an official training program, revised scripts, call scorecards/coaching 1 on 1’s, Salesforce.com standards/ dashboards, Salesvue cadence software and ways to keep the team engaged through contests, programs and professional development opportunities. These efforts led to reduced ramp time of specialists by 4 months and building over 200M in projected sales pipeline in 2014/2015. This was my first taste of people managing and I loved every aspect of developing people and watching them grow. I also learned the importance of leading by example. The words that come to mind when I think of this time period are fun and challenging. We had an immense amount of fun, but I also learned how challenging it can be to manage different personalities and how to motivate people differently. While I absolutely loved my team, I found training and coaching to be a true passion of mine. So, in 2015, I decided to start all over by taking a position in Sales Operations in Sales Enablement!

Interactive Intelligence was founded in 1994 by entrepreneur, Don Brown. ININ provided business communications solutions that unified every aspect of contact center and enterprise interactions for reduced costs, simplified management and improved customer service. Joining as a lead generation specialist/ sales development representative, I actively supported marketing initiatives by engaging with current and prospective customers through a variety of inbound and outbound channels and tactics to generate qualified leads and meetings for sales. This allowed me to connect individuals with valuable information on industry standards and trends, analyst reports, and contact center best practices. As a new employee, I made it my mission to understand every product and solution so I could have intelligent conversations through these efforts. I even went as far to create my own training guide for products, solutions and verticals as there was limited product training available when I joined outside of scripts. Little did I know at the time, that building effective training would become an incredible passion of mine. Through my efforts I was able to achieve many accomplishments. These included 2011 Lead Generation Rookie of the year, added as member of the Tradeshow Ambassador Program, 2012 Marketing Colleague of the Year, 2012 Lead Generation MVP, earned team lead on Insurance Vertical and Canadian Markets and closed over 20M in revenue. Sales Development is an incredibly hard and often thankless job in many companies. The experience I learned during this time has been so valuable to who I am as a professional today. Thanks to my efforts and the recognition from my incredible leadership, I was able to earn a management role on the team in just under three years! I was off to the races to build my first team, training program and management experience!

The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company was founded in 1857 and is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In this position, I supported the efforts of two, local managing directors that provided/ sold life insurance policies. As the overall Office Manager, I was responsible for scheduling client meetings, generating referrals, creating/sending out marketing mailers, ordering office supplies, organizing files, and helping facilitate internship rep training. While I was very grateful to get this job, I quickly realized I wanted more, and that insurance didn’t hit a spark in me. It did however provide the means for me to move out of my parents (FINALLY) and become a real adult. While I continued to work hard, I still was on the hunt and even signed up for a local recruiting company. This turned out to be one of the best, professional decisions of my life! One day, they called and asked if I was interested in contracting at a local tech company called Interactive Intelligence. I accepted the position not knowing the incredible ride I was about to embark on.

Lakehouse Tavern was previously a locally owned sports bar/restaurant with weekend live entertainment that operated out of Noblesville, Indiana. While I begrudgingly moved home and in with my parents, I hit the ground running on the job hunt. Again, this was a very difficult task during the great recession. I was able to secure a bar/service manager position locally while I tried to secure a long-term career choice. My hospitality experience helped me secure and be successful in the position. At Lakehouse Tavern, I had many responsibilities including managing and supervising the front of house. I was responsible for serving, preparing employee schedules, ordering inventory, generating end of shift reports, compiling daily deposits, creating in house media, updating website/social media, bartending and scheduling live entertainment. While I loved this position, I knew it was not the long-term career I wanted. I wanted to have normal hours and a social life outside of the tavern. I met many friends and co-workers during my time there and even started dating my future husband. I truly believe that everyone should have service experience to understand how hard the job can be and how to treat service employees while out. I still to this day refuse to go to dinner with rude patrons. I often find myself quick to judge character by a simple dinner. After a little over a year of searching, I was off to my first career job at Northwestern Mutual Insurance.

Entertainment Cruises, Inc. operates dining and sightseeing cruises in the United States. It offers a range of dining cruises, skyline tours, speedboat excursions, and wedding packages. While returning to Chicago for the summer was top of mind for me, I was able to secure another hospitality internship with Entertainment Cruises on the Mystic Blue on Navy Pier! During the internship, I rotated through various management and event planning positions including serving, bartending, private event planning, staffing/scheduling, group sales, marketing promotions, and fielding call center inquiries. This was my first true call center experience. Little did I know at the time that my future career path would be based around this industry. I loved this internship and had an incredible summer and decided to stay since I had already graduated from Purdue. I was in awe of the city, the people/friends I worked with and the lifestyle. However, I quickly learned how hard it can be to provide for yourself in a big city on minimal wages during a great recession. I came to the realization that it was time to go home to Indiana to save money and find my next career path. While this turned out to be the greatest decision on my life, there is nothing like a Chicago Summer!

U.S. Equities Realty, LLC provides commercial real estate services to property owners, government agencies, lenders, and tenants in the United States and South America. Through this company, I earned a summer internship living and working in the University Center of Chicago in the South Loop. The internship was focused around conference management and guest services. I was partnered and roomed with 17 interns across the USA. We were responsible for contracting yearly repeat reservations through group discounts and conference use, managing all areas of student living/conference management, and managing all guest services operations. This internship is where my love for the hospitality industry was set on fire. I loved every aspect of the program and fell in love with big city life. I am originally from a small town in Indiana, with a population just over 700. So the Chicago summer experience was a true eye opening and culture shocking experience for me. In addition to loving the job, my fellow interns and the city, we also become very close with other international students living at the University Center of Chicago. I would vote this summer as one of the top in my life both professionally and personally. I was ready to come back for another Chicago summer for sure!

Delphi Automotive Systems, LLC manufactures vehicle electronics, transportation components, integrated systems, and modules and other electronic technologies. This was first true professional experience, although I worked as a server throughout high school. I obtained the summer internship as I come from a long line of engineers that worked here. I worked as a manufacturing supervisor on the assembly floor where I supervised 32 labor, hourly employees on a daily basis. This included documenting downtime/time and attendance, supervising over -time, handling grievance/disciplinary procedures and monitoring/ recording standard work for my line. While I earned a very large check during the summer of 2007 and had a ton of fun with fellow interns, it opened my eyes to exactly what I did not want to do for a living as a professional. So I returned to school knowing I was ready to secure something new for the following summer, much to my families dismay.