Outreach Expands Leadership Team, Adds Chief People Officer Leslie Pendergrast

Outreach, the number one sales engagement platform, announced hiring Leslie Pendergrast to the new role of Chief People Officer. Pendergrast brings more than 20 years of experience driving global technology growth and has held senior Human Resources leadership roles in both public and private companies.

“As Outreach grows its employee base and expands into new markets, we searched for a talented global human resources executive with a track record of bringing startup technology companies to scale, while ensuring employees have an outstanding experience and continuing Outreach’s reputation as the best place work,” said Manny Medina, co-founder, and CEO of Outreach. “I’m excited to welcome Leslie on board.”

Pendergrast has held numerous senior human resources leadership positions including Code42, Datalogix, Sourcefire, and Citrix Systems. At Citrix Systems, she played an integral role in growing the company from $24M to $1B in revenue and 100 to 4,000 employees. She was also instrumental in scaling Sourcefire’s global business from $75M to $223M in revenue and 200 to 700 employees, at which point the company sold to Cisco for $2.7B. Prior to joining Outreach, she was the Chief People Officer at Code42. Pendergrast has a proven track record advising CEOs and boards of technology companies on how to transform talent acquisition, talent development, culture and well-being, total rewards, and HR operations to scale operations and growth.

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“I am thrilled to be joining Outreach. From my first interview, even virtually, I could feel the enthusiasm for our customers, our product, and our company values. I thrive in a fast-paced, nimble environment that inspires rapid growth, and I am eager to help build people practices that allow us to scale quickly and effectively,” said Pendergrast.

Outreach also welcomed five strategic leadership hires:

• Victoria Grady, vice president of Product Marketing. Grady leads the growing product marketing team, working alongside engineering and sales leaders and their respective organizations. She is a proven tech industry executive who has led a broad range of international product marketing and management efforts throughout her two-decade career. She previously led product marketing for Microsoft Azure and multiple worldwide startup programs at Microsoft.
• Rajit Joseph, vice president of Product Management. Joseph brings deep expertise in sales engagement and enterprise product management to his role leading product strategy for Outreach’s knowledge graph, data insights, developer, and partner ecosystem. He previously worked at People.ai and XANT (formerly InsideSales.com) in lead product management roles. He also led product management at various enterprise companies, including Salesforce, Oracle, and GE.
• Min Zhu, vice president of Engineering. Zhu leads Outreach’s data platform and infrastructure team. He brings more than 22 years of experience building high performing teams that define, produce, and operate world-class software and services across many platforms and industries from some of the largest enterprise companies in the world, including Microsoft and Amazon.
• Ella Dillon, vice president of Customer Success Strategy & Support. Dillon leverages her experience scaling global teams that deliver excellent customer experience to her role. She joined Outreach from DocuSign, where she led customer success operations and global support, and previously held leadership roles at AT&T and Cingular Wireless (later acquired by AT&T).
• Kara Blumberg, vice president of Professional Services & Training. Blumberg now heads up the professional services arm of Outreach. She has more than 25 years of leadership experience across multiple talent-focused specialties including professional services, customer success, business execution consulting, and HR. Blumberg previously oversaw professional services and deployment at HireVue and worked at SAP for several years.

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“I’m thrilled to welcome Leslie, Victoria, Rajit, Min, Ella, and Kara to our team,” added Medina. “This group of leaders brings the expertise we need as Outreach continues to expand both in the types of customers we serve and the technology innovations we are bringing to market. These are crucial areas for Outreach’s further expansion.”

Outreach had a busy past few months, bringing home awards and industry recognition. The company took home two best place to work awards from the Puget Sound Business Journal and Seattle Business Magazine, as well as, The Next Tech Titan title at the GeekWire Awards. Most recently, Outreach was named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Sales Engagement, Q3 2020. The platform earned the highest scores possible in 11 criteria in the evaluation and received the highest score of any vendor in the current offering category. Forrester recognized Outreach as “a strong fit for organizations that value innovation and category leadership.”

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