Simon Data Welcomes Anita Absey as Chief Revenue Officer

As Simon Data continues to grow, we are thrilled to welcome Anita Absey as our new Chief Revenue Officer. Anita will oversee sales, customer service, and marketing in response to overwhelming demand and growth. 

After a brief stint on Wall Street, Anita went on to spend the rest of her career scaling B2B SaaS businesses that combine data and technology to help marketers make better decisions. Anita brings more than two decades of experience in the B2B SaaS space, specializing in the intersection of data, technology, and marketing. Her overarching goal for her new role is to unify the go-to-market teams and push all of Simon Data to commit to deeply knowing our customers and single-mindedly solving their biggest data-related challenges. 

Anita’s longest tenure was in the email deliverability space at a company called ReturnPath. When Anita arrived, ReturnPath was generating “a sloppy $2 million” (read: without clean, repeatable sales processes) with offices in Boulder and New York City. Over the course of her time there, with Anita’s guidance, ReturnPath grew — both through sales and acquisitions — to $80 million in annual global revenue and with offices in the UK, France, Australia, and Brazil.

“Being part of the Executive Team at ReturnPath gave me the opportunity to think strategically about the business, its people, their career development, and the overall culture. It also let me execute tactically, so I could be in the game as in the early days. As my career matured, and as the business got bigger, I focused on hiring people, creating teams, and being that mentor, coach, and leader to find success by working through others. The end result was to create an environment where people’s contributions were valued but no one had the power to take credit for the sun rising.”

More recently, Anita worked at EdTech company Voxy for two years. When she started, Voxy was right where Anita likes to start: a product-led growth company with no scalable or repeatable sales processes. In her two years there, she injected the sales org with methodology, process, and the mantra, “Is it repeatable? Is it scalable? Does it put the customer first?”

Anita was attracted to Simon Data because it’s a promising company that has found product-market fit in a growing industry, but the missing pieces that Anita sees lies in storytelling, scalable processes, and alignment across marketing, sales, and customer success. 

“I love working with entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs. I think I can best serve Simon Data as a business partner to everyone else on the executive team and as the practical, rolled-up sleeves that streamline processes to make vision reality.

“Simon Data is on an aggressive growth path, and my first big goal is to align sales and marketing around a cohesive vision, a set of transparent goals, and a coordinated positioning so that as the company scales, we scale from a place of unity. That’s really the first step in moving from a product-led company to a customer-led company.” 

The next step is to shift from product-led growth to customer-led growth. The customer may not always know what will solve their problems, nor do they necessarily even know that they have a problem. Who thought that having spreadsheets act as one’s entire customer relationship management system was a problem? No one until the first CRM solutions came along. But the customer’s voice must infuse the entire roadmap, and we couldn’t be more excited to welcome Anita Absey to help us do just that.