In our latest episode, Imogen Broomhead, Senior Director, Global Executive Experience Program, shares how she and her team built ServiceNow’s global program strategy, with a focus on Location and Investment Strategy. From defining primary pillars and KPIs with executive leadership to establishing a six-element infrastructure, Imogen outlines the consistent, data-driven methodologies behind their approach. She explains new center eligibility criteria, her partnership with Workplace Services (WPS) to create Global Playbooks for new builds, and how red/amber/green assessments give executives a clear view of Innovation Center health and upgrade needs. The result is a scalable model for building and managing a global program that showcases ServiceNow’s value to current and prospective customers.

Highlights

• Growth from 3 Centers/4 team members to 10 Centers/50 team members by December 2026
• Developing a Global Program Strategy
  • 3 Pillars (set with CMO)
    • Program: Immersive Storytelling
    • Place: World-Class Experiences
    • People: Elite Team
      • Must have: team member onboarding program - 6 months
• Location and Investment Strategy
  • Innovation Center Global Map
  • Alignment
    • Marketing does not decide innovation center locations
    • Work with Execs in Sales and Go-to-Market teams
    • Complex RACI model
    • Don’t open centers too fast
  • New Center Eligibility Criteria
    • Pipeline/TAM data in region - opps, industries, etc.
    • Success metrics - capacity targets per location
    • KPIs for Areas - High volume accounts
    • Budget, Ops Resourcing, SMEs, etc.
  • Specs Overview
    • WPS Global Playbook - templatized
    • Define ‘Apple Store’ look & feel
    • Set consistent specs for architects to work from
  • Center Upgrades / Business Case Process
    • Map capital works plans with WPS Teams
    • Red/Amber/Green assessments - clear picture for executives
    • Process to seek funding to insert centers into capital works plan
  • Retiring Centers + Supporting the Field
    • Sunsetting strategy
    • Out of Center offerings “Beyond the Briefing”
• Global Non-Negotiables
  • Program, Place and People
  • Deliver elite experiences w/storytelling & technology
  • EBC - in service of customers
• Capturing Impact
  • Quality not quantity - influence most strategic accounts
  • Host C-Suite only
  • Focus on closing business, not pipeline in the room
• Be ‘Yes’ People, Be Creative and Customer-focused
  • AI Networking Breakfast, Wine Club, etc.

Guest Thought Leader

Imogen Broomhead, Senior Director, Global Executive Experience Program, Servicenow

Imogen is a dynamic technology leader and customer experience champion with over eight years at ServiceNow. She leads the vision and execution of the company’s global Innovation Centers, transforming them into strategic programs that help customers, account teams, and executives innovate faster.

Recognized as a CXO empath, SaaS marketer, and technology specialist, Imogen blends strategic thinking with strong execution. Her leadership is rooted in empathy, collaboration, and delivering measurable outcomes that align executive experiences with business goals and drive meaningful transformation.

In our first episode of 2026, Spencer Waldron, CEO of Cenrox, shares a deeply personal story that led him to uncover ways of managing difficult situations with new behaviors and choices. He walks through many elements that contributed to creating his Resilience Roadmap. From understanding neuroscience and the power of our eight emotions to identifying new habits that offer self care that we need in challenging situations, Spencer offers ways to navigate these situations, i.e. driving our boat while not focusing on the river. He also reinforces the fact that resiliency is not about having it all together. It’s about moving forward anyways and making a daily impact. As he says, ‘we are capable of handling more than we think we can’.

Highlights

• Neuroscience and Emotions
  • Thousands of ‘Feelings’, only 8 ‘Emotions’ which are physical
  • 5 are negative, 2 are attachments: Love/Trust and Joy/Excitement
  • Only 1 other emotion can flip negative to positive
  • Offer ‘Surprise’ early in presentation to establish emotional attachment
  • Aristotle: Emotion + Trust = Persuasion
• Think of presenting as a gift = ‘a present’
• Resiliency from Spencer’s son’s accident
  • Buddhist book: ‘Living a Life With Heart’
    • The river: cannot control where it goes
    • The boat: control what you do
    • In each situation, ask yourself, “Is it the River or Boat?”
• The Resilience Roadmap
  • Resilience is a choice
  • Steps taken to get through - not about perfection, self care and daily impact
  • Put yourself in challenging situations
• PTSD & Psychological Safety
  • Remove from the trauma (i.e. at work: operationalize, relationships, self care)
• Comedy Improv Example
  • Challenging, humor and a form of therapy

Resources

• Resilience Keynote
• Speaking of Success Podcast

Guest Thought Leader

Spencer Waldron, CEO, Cenrox

As the founder of Cenrox, Spencer helps people show up as the best version of themselves when it matters most. He’s best known for his work in Conversational Presenting, helping leaders and teams move away from one-way slide decks and toward clearer, more engaging, audience-led conversations.

Spencer’s work isn’t just based on theory or technique. In the past year, his perspective on communication and leadership has been shaped by navigating a serious family crisis, which led him to explore what resilience really looks like under pressure.

Today, he brings those lessons into his work with organisations, combining clarity, presence, and human connection in high-stakes moments. He’s also a LinkedIn Learning instructor, a TEDx speaker, and a student of improv comedy.

In our final episode of 2025, Liat Scheffer Ben Yakov, Founder of Masters Academy and the CEO of Masters Creation Group LTD, shares the key elements of her Masters of Creation Method including examining the 4 realms, addressing our life purpose, embracing our core values and setting daily intentions that allow us to live our life as the Masters that we are. The perfect guide for evaluating our current path while looking ahead to the New Year!

Highlights

• The body / mind connection - Masters of Creation Method for manifestation
• Importance of duality - positive vs negative gives us choice
• Evaluate our life, what is working, choose to continue to not
• Manifestation - 4 realms:
  • Physical - habits, rewiring our nervous system
  • Emotional - from fear to happiness, influences changes we can make
  • Mental - beliefs, paradigms, what is possible
  • Spiritual - energy, the method starts here
• Get started:
  • Life purpose: Who am I? Why am I here?
  • Core values: What is important to me?
  • Letting go: Trust yourself
• Managing our day to day lives:
  • Know your purpose and what you bring to the room
  • Prioritize your core values, nurture yourself with daily anchors (i.e. morning coffee, breathing, meditation, afternoon break, gym, etc.)
  • Set your intention:
    • For connection but know it has “nothing to do with me”
    • What you want others you interact with to feel
• Embracing AI
  • Shifting to the next era of being paid for our energy / vibration
  • Will not take over, will allow us to decide what we do to be fulfilled
• ‘Live your life as the Master that you are’

Guest Thought Leader

Liat Scheffer Ben Yakov, Founder of Masters Academy and, CEO of Masters Creation Group LTD.

Liat holds an MBA and a BA in Economics, alongside advanced studies in holistic psychotherapy, and brings more than 20 years of experience consulting with CEOs, senior executives, and entrepreneurs around the world - including leaders in Silicon Valley. She’s a best-selling author, an international speaker, and the host of a long-running podcast now in its fifth year. Throughout her career, Liat has helped thousands of people break through limitations, achieve their goals, and create the life they truly want.

She is also the creator of the Masters of Creation Method, a 12-step framework for conscious reality creation which has grown into a global movement. What began as Masters Academy is now expanding into a larger, bolder, international group with a clear mission: to empower millions with the knowledge, tools, and practical pathways to become the leaders and masters of their own lives. Liat’s work is dedicated to deep personal transformation, global impact, and elevating human potential.

In this episode, Michael Herren, Director, Global Customer Engagement Program at Illumina, shares strategies to deepen partnerships with sales teams and create strong evangelists. He advises to understand sales structures, motivations and pain points, then prioritize the desired outcomes of the partnership. Whether it’s the guidance you provide, tools you offer or ‘rules-of-engagement’ you define, make working with your team as frictionless as possible. Sales engagement must be earned!

Highlights

• Embrace Challenges to Achieve Measurable Successes
• Define Clear Sales Engagement Outcomes
• Understand Sales Structure, Motivations and Pain Points
• 7 Key Sales Engagement Strategies
• Share Key Tools and Collateral
• Develop an Effective Communication Plan
• Define Clear Rules of Engagement

Resources

• 7 Engagement Strategies & Rules of Engagement
• “The Power of Moments” by Chip & Dan Heath
• “The Art of Gathering” by Priya Parker
• A Bit of Optimism - Simon Sinek
• A Good Hang - Amy Poehler

Guest Thought Leader

Michael Herren, Director, Global Customer Engagement Program, Illumina

Michael leads a world-class team dedicated to delivering strategic, story-driven experiences that strengthen partnerships and drive business growth. With over 18 years of experience in the biotechnology, life science, and diagnostics industries, Michael brings a unique combination of technical expertise, operational excellence, and customer engagement strategy to his leadership role.

In our latest episode, Emre Ozbek, Executive Managing Director at BICEP Solutions, shares how customer-facing programs can build repeatable, intelligent systems that free up their best talent to focus on what truly matters: creativity, strategy, and connection. He digs deeper into his ‘touch it once philosophy’ and the ‘lazy approach’, a principle of profound efficiency rooted in automation. Emre advises teams to avoid ‘managing what you measure’, and instead ask ‘why’ to ‘eliminate’ unnecessary metrics and ‘illuminate’ your data. He also suggests how to change our mindset related to AI including the practical step of selecting one small process, then ask ‘why’, and either eliminate or automate. An important takeaway for listeners is the realization that the process of leveraging business intelligence is more accessible than we may have imagined.

Highlights

• The ‘touch it once philosophy' and the ‘lazy approach’
  • A long term strategy, take time to ‘sharpen the saw’
• Auditors review past data, strategists use the data to look to the future
• ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’ - understand the data before you automate
  • Leading vs lagging indicators
• Avoid ‘Manage What You Measure’ - ‘vanity vs actionable’ metrics
• Ask ‘WHY’ and ‘ELIMINATE’ unnecessary metrics
• Utilize data across customer facing programs: Executive Sponsorship, briefings, meetings at events, CABs, etc.
• Build in processes to keep systems up to date and reliable (i.e. integrate HR employee database into scheduling and CRM tools)
• Automate to spend time for relationship building, critical thinking and creativity
• AI: how to shift from a ‘Fear mindset' to a ‘Partner mindset'
• Start small, start now - strive for clarity over quantity

Resources

• Book: Measure What Matters by John Doerr
• TED Talk: The Beauty of Data Visualization by David McCandless
• HBR Article: Ensure High-Quality Data Powers Your AI by Thomas C. Redman

Guest Thought Leader

Emre Ozbek, Executive Managing Director, BICEP Solutions

Emre is a business and data strategist with a simple but powerful philosophy: if you have to do something more than once, it should be automated. He calls it his "lazy" approach, but it's a principle of profound efficiency that has guided his 30-year, multi-national career helping some of the world's top companies solve their most complex operational challenges.

His journey has taken him through enterprise architecture, business consulting, and innovation leadership across a range of industries. This unique cross-sectional view revealed a universal truth: most businesses are stuck solving the same problems over and over, wasting valuable time and frustrating both employees and customers.

Today, Emre channels this passion through his new company, BICEP Solutions, providing Business Intelligence for Customer Engagement Programs. He now helps program leaders apply the lessons learned from running a world-class customer engagement program, complete with briefing centers, innovation labs, and executive sponsorship, to their own organizations.

In our latest episode, Bryan Hobbs, Executive Briefing Manager at Zoom, provides lessons learned from his years of designing and implementing technical demonstrations for industry leading companies like Cisco, Symantec, Google Cloud and Microsoft. From identifying viable spaces and deciding who to partner with, to confirming what products/services to showcase, it is important to build for the short term and plan for the long term. Bryan also shares best practices for overcoming the unique challenges faced when installing in regional locations.

Highlights

• Visioning, the Art of the Possible
• Designing technical demo spaces for a variety of visitors
• Demo elements: wow factors, humor, addressing challenges
• Build in flexibility, see products/services working, leads to faster decision making
• Consult with Internal and External teams including industry partners
• Elements to consider: budget, size of space, content, exec involvement, roadmap
• Define scope and work with partners for alternatives (budget)
• Lessons learned for regional demos

Resources

• ‘Career Mapping: Charting Your Course in the New World of Work’ by Ginny Clarke
• ‘REVOLOGY’ by Todd N Williams about Tom Scapello
• ‘From Good to Great’ by Jim Collins

Guest Thought Leader

Bryan Hobbs, Executive Briefing Manager, Zoom

Bryan is a dynamic leader with over 25 years of experience at the intersection of technology, people management, and business processes. Bryan consults with businesses to refine their processes and harness the power of strategic partnerships. His career began at Cisco where his love for technology and customer engagement was established. Fostering strong partnerships has been key to his repeated successes during his leadership at Symantec’s Experience Center and to building groundbreaking hybrid experiences at Google Cloud’s Executive Briefing Center. Recently, as Director of Immersive Experiences at Microsoft, Bryan led teams in creating interactive, immersive customer experiences while mentoring high-performing individuals.

In our latest episode, John Morley, Principal of John Morley Co and CEP Innovation Coach with GoProBriefings.com, shares how EBCs/CEPs are the ultimate innovation engines within organizations, driving new value through fresh insights. From his years managing the EMC EBC Program and work in Design and Innovation, John outlines numerous ways to position and deliver EBC-as-a-Service, seen as a business and the complete value differentiator it is.

Highlights

• Design Thinking - desirable, feasible, viable
• Value Proposition Canvas - customer wants to achieve, what’s in their way?
• “Brokering” experiences - framework designed within EMC Program
• EBC-as-a-Business - program intention, business model canvas, innovation
• EBCs/CEPs are Innovators - new value from new insights (example: VCE)
• 3 Types (Horizons) - revenue, transformation, futures
• EBCs/CEPs - reduce cost and complexity for sales teams
• Design - identify, codify, make repeatable
• Codify: 5 elements of strategy, design offering, streamline operations

Resources

• ‘Move Fast, Break Shit, Burn Out’
• ‘Design a Better Business: New Tools, Skills, and Mindset for Strategy and Innovation’
• ‘Innovation Accounting: A Practical Guide For Measuring Your Innovation Ecosystem's Performance’
• Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs

Guest Thought Leader

John Morley, Principal of John Morley Com, CEP Innovation Coach with GoProBriefings.com

John helps forward-looking leaders and organizations rapidly realize exponential value through the investments they have already made – in their existing people and resources. He focuses on generating net new value by looking beyond problems to reimagine the impact we can create when we reframe challenges as opportunities. John’s expertise lies in being an intrapreneur and program leader, where he leverages his skills in innovation, design, data science, and AI to resolve complex challenges. He credits what he works on now to the skills and the relationships he learned to value and grow while working in CEPs.

In our latest episode, Mary Stratton, Senior Manager of CXO Experiences at Rubrik, shares how she set her vision for her small program and through data-driven reporting solidified executive support and expanded her program. From setting clear parameters like requiring VP-level and above attendees, and requests be tied to SFDC Opportunities, to developing an all inclusive reporting dashboard to address executive level care-abouts, she has been laser focused on improving deal closure and driving pipeline. Mary partnered with Marketing Operations to build this dashboard using data from multiple platform tools which helped justify her HQ center upgrade and the addition of a new team member. She also highlights her latest adventure of taking on executive meetings at trade shows and conferences as well as ‘EBCs on the Road’. Mary is an inspiration in our industry and happy to meet with those who seek her council on demonstrating value through reporting.

Highlights

• Rubrik’s CXO Experiences - 3 modalities
  • Briefing Program
  • Meetings at Industry Shows / Events
  • EBCs on the Road
• Challenges faced while launching the Briefing Program
  • Build network, connect with resources
  • Leadership buy-in
  • Build trust, create sales champions
• Building Executive Support
  • Critical: Articulate your program's impact on the business
  • Using tools/integrations: BriefingSource, Salesforce, Tableau
• How to collect data needed for Reports
  • Leverage Briefing Management Platform
  • Work with Marketing Ops Team
• What metrics to build into Dashboard to showcase impact
  • Address Marketing and Sales organizations careabouts
  • Target metrics for C Level Personages: CEO, CRO, CSO, etc.
  • Individual win rate percentage for opps using briefings vs not
  • Account Type Breakdown (existing customers vs prospects vs partners)
  • Closed Won vs Closed Lost opportunities
• Reporting allowed for program expansion
  • Headcount, Center upgrades, tools, etc.

Resources

• “We Can Do Hard Things” Podcast
• “We Can Do Hard Things: Answers to Life's 20 Questions” by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, Amanda Doyle

Guest Thought Leader

Mary Stratton, Senior Manager of CXO Experiences, Rubrik

Having led the Rubrik Executive Briefing Program for more than 2 years by herself, Mary has worked extremely hard to build upon the foundational aspects she inherited when joining the company in 2022. From finishing an ‘in-progress’ physical Center to rebuilding a program that was dormant for more than a year, she’s demonstrated the value that her executives and sales team have come to rely on to support them in closing more business.

Prior to Rubrik, Mary cut her teeth in the briefing world at the Rackspace Technology and AppDynamics Briefing Programs where she learned from strong mentors about the importance of both the strategic and tactical aspects of managing a program and reporting on every metric possible. Today, Mary has expanded her program to support global briefings beyond her Palo Alto headquarters and has added executive meetings at top tier tradeshows/conferences to her plate. She is married and mom to 3.5 year old twins.