Kick Off Keynote Address

Sierra Towers

Vice President, Go to Market & Operations, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Speaker bio

Sierra Towers, Vice President of Go to Market & Operations at Boehringer Ingelheim, has over 13 years of experience in the healthcare/pharmaceutical industry. Sierra spent most of her time in pharma in the US — in leadership roles in brand marketing, with a focus on enhancing digital engagement opportunities. For three years, however, Sierra worked out of BI’s corporate office in Germany as the Global Head of Omnichannel Excellence, leading the team responsible for identifying and building platforms and technologies to support omnichannel orchestration across all customer groups and markets.

Sierra has contributed to the customer-focused development and training of her teams across the organization by promoting initiatives within her scope of influence at Boehringer Ingelheim. These include extended business trips (EBTs), in which employee participants can increase their responsibility in the company by developing skills for specific, special projects. In pursuit of employee enrichment and focusing on the next generation of leaders, Sierra has also led experiments with job-swap/project programs. These differ from traditional rotation plans because she puts a specific focus on developing and empowering her teams to bring their authentic self to work, which helps to fuel diversity of thought, break down silos, and accelerate solutions.

Combat Leadership: Build High Performance, Winning Teams

Dave Berke

Chief Officer of Development and Curriculum, Echelon Front

Speaker bio

Dave Berke is a retired U.S. Marine Corps officer, fighter pilot, ground combat leader, and now a leadership instructor and speaker with Echelon Front, where he serves as Chief Officer of Development and Curriculum. As a F/A-18 pilot, he deployed twice from the USS John C Stennis in support of combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He spent three years as an Instructor Pilot at TOPGUN where he served as the Training Officer, the senior staff pilot responsible for the conduct of the TOPGUN course.

He then served as an ANGLICO Forward Air Controller supporting the Army’s 1st Armored Division during extensive urban combat operations on the ground in Ramadi, Iraq in 2006. Dave led his supporting arms liaison team on scores of combat missions into the most dangerous neighborhoods and accompanied SEAL Task Unit Bruiser on virtually every major operation in the Battle of Ramadi. He was the only Marine selected to fly the F-22 Raptor having served as an exchange officer at the Air Force’s 422nd Test and Evaluation Squadron as the Division Commander. He became the first operational pilot ever to fly and be qualified in the F-35B, serving as the Commanding Officer of the Marine Corps’ first F-35 squadron from 2012-2014.

Upon his retirement from the Marine Corps, Dave joined Echelon Front providing unmatched experience and a unique perspective on combat leadership, analytical decision making, risk mitigation, and creating winning teams. He serves as Echelon Front’s Chief Officer of Development and Curriculum, as well as a leadership instructor, speaker, and strategic advisor.

The Experience Mindset

Tiffani Bova

Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist, Salesforce

Speaker bio

Tiffani Bova is the global growth evangelist at Salesforce and the author of the new book The Experience Mindset: Changing the Way You Think About Growth.

Her previous book Growth IQ was a Wall Street Journal bestseller and has been translated into 10 languages. Bova is ranked on the current Thinkers 50’s list of the world’s top management thinkers and has appeared on MSNBC, Bloomberg, BNN Bloomberg, Cheddar News and Yahoo! Finance. She also contributes her thoughts to publications including Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Diginomica, Quora, Thrive, Rotman Journal and Duke Dialogue Review. 

As host of the podcast What’s Next! with Tiffani Bova, top ranked by Top Sales Magazine and in Management by iTunes, Bova has interviewed thought leaders including Arianna Huffington, Dan Pink, Seth Godin Tom Peters, Marshall Goldsmith, Roger Martin, Keith Ferrazzi, Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly, Ritz Carlton CEO Horst Schulze, Square co-founder Jim McKelvey, and Medtronic CEO Bill George, among others.

Bova is a top Twitter influencer in the categories Business Growth, Customer Experience, Digital Transformation, the Future of Work, and Sales. On LinkedIn, she has over 43,000 followers, and was identified as a LinkedIn Top Sales Expert to follow in 2018-2022.

She was named one of Inc. Magazine’s 37 Sales Experts You Need to Follow on Twitter, a Top 100 Women in Tech, a Brand Quarterly Magazine Top 50 Marketing Thought Leader, and one of the most Powerful and Influential Women in California according to the National Diversity Council.

Additionally, she was ranked as one of the top 25 B2B women influencers by Top Rank Marketing, and one of the top 10 influencers in the future of work, customer experience, digital transformation, and women in tech by Onalytica in 2022. Growth IQ was one of Porchlight’s top 5 recommended strategy and leadership books of 2018 and continues to be on their bestseller list. The book was also featured in best of lists from Inc and Thrive Global. 

Having delivered over 750 keynote presentations on sales transformation and business model innovation to over 550,000 people on six continents, Bova is a highly sought-after keynote speaker. Prior to working with Salesforce, she was a sales, marketing and customer service executive for startups and Fortune 500 companies, where she was recognized as one of the first to develop a robust go-to-market model for cloud-based solutions, and indirect channel strategies to accommodate changes in buying behavior. She left the corporate world and joined Gartner becoming a Distinguished Analyst and Research Fellow where she won the Thought Leadership award and earned accolades from the best leaders in the technology world for her cutting-edge analysis and her skill in architecting bold new strategies for sales and growth.

Bova’s experience on the front lines of sales, marketing, customer service and innovation, combined with her insightful candor, has resulted in a unique perspective that continues to inspire businesses and individuals to get smarter about the choices they make, think forward and increase their Growth IQ and now their Experience Mindset too.