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Hire 20 CRM Experts for Your Business

crm experts - Hire 20 CRM Experts for Your Business

This global list of CRM experts highlights the developer-founders, open-source advocates, hands-on CTOs, and engineering leaders who’ve not only built and scaled CRM platforms, but have actively shaped the way millions of businesses manage relationships.

From the creators of Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho to the architects of open-source solutions like ERPNext and SuiteCRM, each individual on this list has made a lasting technical impact on the CRM landscape.

  1. Clara Shih
  2. Yoav Kutner
  3. Bret Taylor
  4. Oleksii Avramenko
  5. Richard Socher
  6. Jason VandeBoom
  7. Brad Birnbaum
  8. David K. Liu
  9. Charles Lamanna
  10. Andrew Fawcett
  11. Jon Ferrara
  12. Girish Mathrubootham
  13. Sreenivas Kanumuru
  14. Dale Murray
  15. David Cancel
  16. Martin Tajur
  17. George Doubinski
  18. Dan Appleman
  19. Alexander Aghassipour
  20. Thomas “Tom” Siebel

Now, let’s delve deeper into their achievements and contributions:

Clara Shih

YouTube Video

Nationality: American

Clara is a rare combination of technical engineer and successful enterprise founder.

A Stanford computer science grad (#1 in her class), she developed the first social CRM application on Facebook in 2007, pioneering social media integration in CRM. Clara founded Hearsay Systems in 2009 to bring social selling and digital engagement to finance/insurance CRM, scaling it globally as CEO. She later joined Salesforce as CEO of Service Cloud and then AI, applying her technical expertise to product innovation at scale. Clara has authored a bestseller (The Facebook Era) and sits on the Starbucks board.

Recognized among Fortune’s “40 Under 40,” she exemplifies a technical leader blending engineering and business savvy in CRM.

Yoav Kutner

Nationality: Israeli

Yoav is a prominent open-source software leader who applied his e-commerce expertise to CRM.

He was the co-founder and CTO of Magento, where he led product development for the famous open-source e-commerce platform. After Magento’s success, in 2012 Yoav founded Oro, Inc. and launched OroCRM, an open-source CRM focused on B2B e-commerce use cases. Under Yoav’s guidance as CEO, OroCRM (now part of Oro’s commerce platform) gained a strong following among retailers needing 360° customer views. He kept OroCRM open-source and developer-friendly, leveraging his Magento community know-how. OroCRM’s ability to integrate commerce and CRM data has been a differentiator.

Yoav’s track record in building two major open-source platforms (Magento and OroCRM) solidifies his status as one of the top technical founders in CRM-related software.

Bret Taylor

Bret Taylor - Hire 20 CRM Experts for Your Business

Nationality: American

Bret is a celebrated technologist who brought consumer-grade innovation to CRM.

In his 20s, he co-created Google Maps and the “Like” button at Facebook, then turned to enterprise software by co-founding Quip (a collaborative CRM-linked docs app acquired by Salesforce). Rising to President and Co-CEO of Salesforce (2021–2022), Bret kept coding even in the C-suite – “I self-identify as an engineer…even when I was co-CEO, I was still coding on weekends,” he famously said. He led Salesforce’s product direction (including the Slack acquisition) with an engineer’s eye for simplicity and scale.

A former competitive programmer in college, Bret shows that world-class coding skills combined with product vision can drive CRM platforms used by millions.

Oleksii Avramenko

Nationality: Ukrainian

Oleksii is a young open-source entrepreneur who co-founded EspoCRM in 2014, a modern web-based CRM that is both free and commercially successful.

With partner Yuri Kuznetsov, he built EspoCRM from Ukraine to serve small businesses seeking a lightweight, self-hostable CRM. Oleksii’s technical leadership yielded a feature-rich system (sales, marketing, support modules) with 16,000+ downloads per year. By 2020, EspoCRM reached $30K/month in revenue while staying true to its open-source roots. Oleksii is very hands-on – he still commits code (PHP/JavaScript) and interacts with the community forum regularly. His story (bootstrapping from student to profitable founder) was featured on StarterStory.

Oleksii shows that in 2025’s CRM landscape, even a small distributed team can create a globally adopted open-source CRM through passion and programming skill.

Richard Socher

Nationality: American

Richard brought cutting-edge AI into the CRM world. A Stanford PhD and NLP expert, he joined Salesforce in 2016 when his deep learning startup MetaMind was acquired.

As Salesforce’s Chief Scientist, Richard “led teams working on fundamental research, applied research, product incubation, CRM search, and more,” integrating state-of-the-art AI (vision, NLP) into the Salesforce platform. He was the key mind behind Salesforce Einstein, the AI layer that now delivers millions of predictions in Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. Richard also ensured ethical AI practices and started the Salesforce Research division, publishing prolifically in top conferences.

He left Salesforce in 2020 to found You.com, but his legacy lives on – every Salesforce CRM user benefiting from AI-driven features (like lead scoring or case routing) can thank Socher’s work. Few individuals have done more to marry AI research with CRM product development.

Jason VandeBoom

Jason VandeBoom - Hire 20 CRM Experts for Your Business

Nationality: American

Jason is a developer-founder who coded the first version of ActiveCampaign in 2003 and bootstrapped it into a global customer experience automation (CXA) platform.

An artist-turned-programmer, he built ActiveCampaign’s early CRM and marketing tools single-handedly, focusing on small business needs. Under Jason’s technical leadership, ActiveCampaign’s platform grew to serve 180,000+ customers and attained “unicorn” status. Remarkably, he scaled without major VC until late, prioritizing sustainable engineering and customer-driven features. Jason remains hands-on with product strategy and is known to review code and product designs even as CEO.

His 20+ year journey shows how one developer’s vision can create a top global CRM/marketing automation company.

Brad Birnbaum

Nationality: American

Brad has been “shaking up the enterprise tech world for over 20 years” with innovative customer support CRM platforms.

In 2009 he co-founded Assistly, a modern support CRM that caught fire and was acquired by Salesforce in just 18 months, becoming Desk.com. Not content, Brad (with Jeremy Suriel) left Salesforce in 2015 to build Kustomer from scratch – a next-gen, AI-infused CRM that treats customers “as people, not tickets.” His technical vision for an omnichannel, data-rich CRM proved prescient: Facebook/Meta acquired Kustomer for $1B in 2020.

A coder early in his career, Brad has held CTO roles and remains deeply involved in product engineering. He’s a trailblazer whose CRM platforms (Assistly, Desk, Kustomer) have influenced how companies deliver customer service.

David K. Liu

The best developers aren’t born—they’re built. One tutorial, one bug, one late night at a time.

Nationality: American

David is a self-taught developer who became a Salesforce MVP Hall of Famer and one of the most influential teachers in the CRM dev community.

He created SFDC99.com, the most famous Salesforce coding blog, which has helped hundreds of thousands of admins learn Apex programming. Formerly a Salesforce engineer and now Lead Salesforce Architect at Google, David has led implementations of multi-billion-dollar Salesforce orgs. His personal story (from marketing analyst to coder) inspires many “non-coders” to break into CRM development. At Dreamforce, he even won the coveted Golden Hoodie award for his community impact.

David continues to share tutorials, books, and answers, making advanced CRM development accessible to all.

Charles Lamanna

Charles Lamanna - Hire 20 CRM Experts for Your Business

Nationality: American

Charles is the engineering leader driving Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 and Power Platform (which includes CRM applications).

A coding prodigy who sold his first startup to Microsoft at age 20, Charles now leads design and development for Microsoft’s intelligent business apps, including the Dynamics 365 Sales & Service CRM suite. He spearheaded the Power Platform’s low-code revolution and the infusion of AI (Copilot) into Microsoft’s CRM offerings. Under his direction, Microsoft’s CRM has embraced automation and next-gen app development, empowering millions of “citizen developers.” Charles is known for his technical blogs and keynotes showcasing how AI + low-code transform CRM.

His blend of hardcore coding background and product leadership at Microsoft put him among the top CRM tech executives today.

Andrew Fawcett

Nationality: American

Andy is revered in the Salesforce developer community as the author of “Force.com Enterprise Architecture” and creator of widely used open-source libraries.

As CTO of FinancialForce (an ERP built on Salesforce) and later a Salesforce Product Architect, he developed the Apex Enterprise Patterns and the Apex Common open-source framework, which many Salesforce devs utilize for best practices. Andy’s libraries (published on GitHub) and blog “Andy in the Cloud” educated a generation of Salesforce engineers on writing scalable, modular CRM code. A Salesforce MVP, he demonstrated how an engineer can shape platform standards through community contributions. Today he leads product for Salesforce Platform and Heroku, continuing to advocate for developer experience.

Andy’s code and patterns have become de facto standards in the Salesforce CRM ecosystem.

Jon Ferrara

Nationality: American

Jon is often called the “godfather of CRM.” In 1989 he co-founded GoldMine, one of the earliest successful PC-based contact management softwares, which he coded and grew to millions of users (long before “CRM” was a term).

After selling GoldMine for $125 million, Jon later launched Nimble in 2010, a social CRM for the cloud era. A programmer by training, Jon built Nimble’s initial product to integrate contacts, social media, and sales intelligence, pioneering “social CRM.” He’s been recognized in the CRM Hall of Fame and continues to innovate around relationship management for small businesses. Surviving a health battle with cancer, Jon mentors entrepreneurs and speaks passionately about building authentic customer relationships.

His 30+ year career – from DOS software to SaaS – charts the evolution of CRM itself.

Girish Mathrubootham

Girish Mathrubootham - Hire 20 CRM Experts for Your Business

Nationality: Indian

Girish is an inspirational product visionary who built Freshworks into a global SaaS powerhouse from India.

With a background in engineering and product support, he founded Freshdesk in 2010 (later Freshworks) to simplify helpdesk and CRM for SMBs. Under Girish’s leadership as CEO (and de facto product architect), Freshworks’ customer engagement suite (Freshsales CRM, etc.) scaled to $600M+ ARR and became India’s first SaaS unicorn to list on NASDAQ. Girish is highly technical – he often speaks about product design and has a hand in Freshworks’ UX innovations. He championed a developer-friendly platform and AI features across the CRM. Now Executive Chairman, he focuses on strategy and mentoring Indian SaaS startups.

Girish’s journey from a rented warehouse in Chennai to a $5B+ global CRM company underscores the impact of product-driven engineering in CRM.

Sreenivas Kanumuru

Nationality: Indian

Sreenivas is the technical leader behind Vtiger CRM, one of the first open-source CRM forks of SugarCRM and now a successful standalone SaaS.

In 2004, he joined the effort to create Vtiger at AdventNet (Zoho’s parent company) and spun it out as an independent open-source CRM by 2007. He has served as CEO/CTO since 2008, guiding Vtiger’s evolution from a SugarCRM fork into a fully featured CRM platform serving 300k+ companies. A hands-on coder early in his career (with a stint at University of Delaware), Sreenivas ensured Vtiger remained committed to open architecture while adding innovations in sales automation and customer support.

Gartner has recognized Vtiger as a niche player in SFA Magic Quadrants. Sreenivas’s two decades of steady technical leadership kept Vtiger thriving in the competitive CRM market.

Dale Murray

Nationality: British

Dale is the driving technical force behind SuiteCRM, the popular open-source CRM that forked from SugarCRM in 2013.

Starting as a software engineer at SalesAgility (the UK firm behind SuiteCRM), Dale rose to lead the development of SuiteCRM’s first release and beyond. He guided SuiteCRM’s growth into a viable open-source alternative after SugarCRM went commercial, overseeing contributions from a global community. Dale later became CEO of SalesAgility, focusing on product and community strategy. Under his tenure, SuiteCRM won “Best Open-Source CRM” awards and gained hundreds of thousands of users. In 2020 Dale stepped back from operations, but his original engineering templates still underpin SuiteCRM’s flexible, extensible design.

He remains an advocate for open-source in business applications.

David Cancel

David Cancel - Hire 20 CRM Experts for Your Business

Nationality: American

David is a serial technical founder who has repeatedly delivered breakthrough products in marketing and CRM.

He has founded five software companies, notably Performable (marketing automation acquired by HubSpot) where he became HubSpot’s Chief Product Officer, helping shape the HubSpot CRM’s early development. In 2015 he co-founded Drift, a conversational marketing and sales platform (live chat + CRM) that pioneered chatbots for B2B sales. As Drift’s CEO (and former CTO), David remained close to the tech – he’s been a software engineer and “serial CTO” earlier in his career. Under his guidance, Drift reached over 50k customers and coined the term “Revenue Acceleration” by integrating conversational AI with CRM. David also actively blogs and hosts podcasts to share product and leadership lessons.

Few people have David’s 25+ years of hands-on experience building CRM-related products across multiple successful exits.

Martin Tajur

Nationality: Estonian

Martin is the technical co-founder who architected Pipedrive, one of the most beloved sales CRM tools for small businesses globally.

A full-stack developer, Martin designed Pipedrive’s initial product in 2010 and led engineering as CTO, scaling the platform to 90,000+ customers and $80M+ ARR by the time he stepped down. He personally coded core features in Pipedrive’s early years (having been a senior dev at Skype prior) and set the standards for its famously easy UI. Martin’s role was pivotal in Pipedrive’s growth from a 5-person Estonian startup to a $1.5B company – he oversaw everything from technical stack choices to infrastructure as they acquired tens of thousands of users. Now an angel investor, Martin exemplifies the modern CTO founder who brings a product from concept to global scale through excellent engineering.

George Doubinski

Nationality: Ukrainian

George is a legend in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM world, known both for his expertise and his wit.

A Microsoft MVP since 2007, he co-founded the CRM Tip of the Day blog/podcast, sharing daily bite-sized tips that have reached countless Dynamics 365 professionals. George is a prolific developer and architect (Technical Director at AlexaCRM) with over 20 years in CRM consulting. He’s built various open-source tools and client solutions on the Dynamics platform, earning him admiration as a “CRM guru extraordinaire.” His community contributions – from answering forum questions to speaking at conferences – have earned him multiple MVP renewals and the nickname “King of CRM Tips.” Beyond tips, George often mentors other MVPs and pushes Microsoft to simplify the developer experience.

His long-standing influence makes him one of the most impactful community technical leaders in CRM.

Dan Appleman

Dan Appleman - Hire 20 CRM Experts for Your Business

Nationality: American

Dan is a veteran software engineer turned Salesforce expert who has made enormous contributions through education.

Famous in the ’90s for his books on VB and Windows API, Dan later embraced the Salesforce platform and wrote “Advanced Apex Programming,” the definitive design patterns book for Salesforce developers. He became a multi-year Salesforce MVP and founded PluralSight’s first Salesforce courses, bringing rigorous software engineering principles to CRM development. Dan also co-founded Full Circle Insights (a Salesforce ISV) and has built popular AppExchange packages. Developers laud his ability to explain complex Apex coding concepts clearly, and many consider his book a must-read.

Now semi-retired, Dan still mentors and occasionally blogs on architectural topics. His cross-generational impact – from Windows to cloud CRM – shows his adaptability and technical depth.

Alexander Aghassipour

Nationality: Danish

Alex is the technical product brain behind Zendesk, the customer support CRM platform he co-founded in 2007.

An engineer from Denmark’s DTU, he coded early versions of Zendesk’s helpdesk software alongside his co-founders Mikkel Svane and Morten Primdahl. As Chief Product Officer for over a decade, Alex ensured Zendesk’s tools were beautifully simple and developer-friendly, pioneering the modern SaaS UX in customer service. He kept a strong say in technical decisions as the company scaled to support 160k+ businesses. Under his guidance, Zendesk expanded from ticketing into a full CRM (with Suite, Sunshine platform, etc.). Though he’s now “Founder Emeritus,” Alex remains involved in product strategy.

His influence on making enterprise software as easy as consumer apps can be seen across today’s CRM interfaces.

Thomas “Tom” Siebel

Nationality: American

Tom Siebel is a visionary software entrepreneur who built Siebel Systems, the dominant CRM of the 1990s, and thereby defined an industry.

After working at Oracle, he started Siebel Systems in 1993 and rapidly became the global leader in enterprise CRM software – at its peak, more than 50% of Fortune 500 companies ran their sales on Siebel. Known for its comprehensive sales force automation, Siebel Systems was a pioneer in large-scale CRM deployments. Tom’s insistence on product quality and aggressive sales strategy paid off as he grew Siebel to a multi-billion-dollar company, which he sold to Oracle for $5.8B in 2006. A programmer in his early career, Tom fostered a culture of engineering excellence mixed with business rigor.

He has since founded C3.ai, focusing on AI – but in CRM history, Siebel’s name (and Tom Siebel’s legacy) stands alongside “CRM” itself.

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top talent. However, if you believe a correction or addition is needed, feel free to reach out. We’ll gladly review and update the page.

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