"As services are getting more and more mobile, service needs to get mobile as well," said Helpshift VP Tushar Makhija. "If you look at customer service over the last 10 to 15 years, first it was all about average handling time. If you grew quickly as a business, you needed to stack up a call center. The next five to six years were all about self-service, so technology started building up."

"I was always interested in analyzing the data," said LogicHub Chief Product Officer Monica Jain. "I was introduced to a company that was a pioneer in the market, and that's where my career in security started. I fell in love with security because it's all about finding and analyzing the data, and about crunching the data. That's how I started with security. I've never left it since then."

"Coding is one of the most in-demand skills. There's a myth out there that you need to have this skill only if you work with computers, but as society develops, you're going to see coding in every field. This is a skill that's needed in all job sectors," said Rachel Décoste, director of the Congressional App Challenge. "The jobs of tomorrow will require, if not coding, at least an understanding of how it works."

"Channel data management is about providing high-tech companies with all the data and information they need to effectively manage their distribution channels, sales and marketing," said Zyme CCO Ted Dimbero. "Traditionally, companies have relied on managing the channel fairly blindly. They may get monthly data, but a lot of the data is incomplete or too late to make important decisions."

"I care about helping more women get into technology, so I spend a lot of time teaching girls from sixth grade to high school so that they're more educated about STEM fields," said Heather Wilde, CTO of ROCeteer and TWIP. "I'm also chair of the engineering school's advisory board at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, to help steer the school toward new directions."

Analytics is "about having a sense of curiosity -- the ability to look at data and say, 'what is it telling me?'" said Olivia Duane Adams, chief customer officer at Alteryx. "I define analytics as 'the ability to ingest any and all relevant sources of data that might help answer a question being asked.' Analytics is the ability to use all the data you have to answer a question."

"When you provide service, it can be either completely general, or contextual -- which means it's different for different demographics," said Nanorep CTO Amit Ben. "Personalized service means that you get to the most fine-grained resolution possible. It's self-service that can be catered and adjusted dynamically to each person experiencing that service."

"My team has always, from day one, been 70 percent female," said Trustify President Jennifer Mellon. "You know, we're not a flower delivery service -- we're doing private investigation. It's not a space women often lead in, so I'm really proud of that. ... Over 45 percent of my team identified with a protected minority population -- including LGBT, race, ethnic and religious minorities."

"There are groups within companies that don't want to interact with a full-blown CRM application," said Swiftpage CEO John Oechsle. "They want to access it based on the functions they want it to perform. These small purpose-built apps are going to continue to evolve. Also, people want to interact with software using voice ... . They don't want to sit there and type."

"I've helped shape the conversation," said Debbie Berebichez, chief data scientist at Metis. "It's empowered me to mentor young women and also to shape policy. At Metis, we offer a scholarship to women and minorities, so we do things actively to bring women in. I also try to recruit and hire women. Even though it's a tech company, over 60 percent of the employees at Metis are women."

"We think of 'subscription' broadly," said Matt Darrow, VP and general manager of product at Zuora. "It's when companies do business with customers with whom they have a known relationship, and those relationships are sticky. The subscription model is great for engagement because companies know that in order to be successful they need to deliver ongoing services that keep providing value."

"We saw that there was a lack of kindness, a lack of empathy ... and we thought it would be nice if we could use technology to do something about it," said MarySue Hansell, president of A Better World. "We thought Facebook offered a wonderful opportunity to use a large technical platform to create a virtual world that would have a big impact, with a game that emphasizes positive thinking."

"CRM was originally created for the managers and bosses to report on the pipeline, and it was sold as a value proposition to the manager," noted Nutshell CTO Andy Fowler. "What's changing now is that CRM is becoming much more about supporting the rep -- giving them the tools they need to improve their performance. It's no longer just a tool for the boss to check in on the salespeople."

"If there's anything true about B2B service, you have to do it in the context of the customers themselves in order to be successful. That's our philosophy," said CloudCraze EVP Andrew Witherspoon. "What is the purpose of CRM and marketing? It's to reach out, find and engage prospects, and to move them through a buying cycle. All those capabilities are on a CRM platform.

Lexi Palmer is CEO of EquiSeq, a biotech firm that does genetic testing of horses. Palmer met the company's founder, genetic researcher Paul Szauter, in 2015. "I was just finishing up my degree in interpersonal communications ... and he told me about the company he'd started," Palmer recalled. "I told him I knew everything about horses and said I could learn everything he did and market it."

Making sales account-based is "the ability to take an account and use a holistic approach when dealing with it," said Manny Medina, CEO of Outreach. "You use a combination of marketing and sales to get to that account. It's giving a name to something people already do, and it creates an alignment between sales and marketing. You [target] top companies that you know for a fact are open to you."

Prior to founding Girls in Tech, Adriana Gascoigne was one of very few women working at a startup. "I'd look around the room every day and see that there was a huge problem of representation. I knew we needed to change the culture of the company to recruit more women and benefit more women, but we also needed diversity in product development ... to make a better product," she recalled.

Beena Ammanath is VP for data and analytics at GE Digital. She has worked in the data analytics field for more than 20 years and serves as board director at ChickTech, a nonprofit dedicated to recruiting girls and women into the tech workforce and retaining them once they're there. Ammanath also serves on the Cal Poly Computer Engineering Program Industrial Advisory Board.

One of the most noticeable recent trends in CRM is that "there are a lot more companies looking for tools to centralize data," noted Oro CEO Yoav Kutner. "We're seeing multichannel businesses that interact with customers both through a brick-and-mortar and through multiple touchpoints. That data has to be collected someplace so they understand how they're doing with their customers.

Twenty years ago, CRM "was more of an inside-out technology," recalled Sandeep Kadam, director of CRM at Eagle Creek Software Services. "It was about making sales calls more efficient, and giving salespeople all the tools they needed so they could achieve their numbers. From there it has become more of an outside-in technology, where the customer is impacting how CRM is going to evolve."

"Traditional demand-based, lead-based marketing is like fishing with a net," said Engagio CEO Jon Miller. "You run campaigns and marketing programs, and stuff comes out the other end. What the account-based world is all about is that you have a list of names, but you don't wait around to see if those big fish swim into your net. Instead, you go fishing with spears."

"One of the interesting things about CRM and marketing automation is that most of these systems have poor data quality," said Radius CEO Darian Shirazi. "Typically, customers buy data lists or get inbound leads, and the information associated with those accounts, opportunities and leads ends up decaying quickly and being inaccurate. The problem is keeping that information up-to-date."

There are three significant trends in CRM right now, according to Matt Keenan, SVP of Aptean's product group. "The first is the rapid evolution of human-system interaction. Gone are the days of sitting in front of a laptop and interacting with CRM. Customers are looking for multiple channels. The way people are interacting with applications and data is evolving radically."

"Account-based marketing is really about marketing to the accounts that are aligned with your sales team," said Demandbase CEO Chris Golec. It's been done for years, but today there's a whole technology and practice around being able to market to accounts at scale, and this wasn't possible until about four or five years ago. It's a focused, targeted marketing approach."

"Account-based marketing is all about targeting key accounts. It's a strategy for marketers to focus most of their efforts on key accounts," said Mike Telem, vice president of product marketing at Marketo. "In most B2B businesses, you have a small number of accounts that are the most valuable. So it makes perfect sense that focusing on those accounts provides a better return on investment."

The latest CRM trends "are part of the whole movement toward digitization of the workforce," said AvePoint CEO TJ Jiang. "We see much more integration and automation in the CRM space. We've been working, for instance, to digitize a social welfare organization, where caseworkers will go in the field to service underprivileged children. ... Historically, it's all been paper-based."

"CRM is a mature industry, but it's fundamentally not moving the needle for the user, for the subscriber -- the sales rep or manager. It's fundamentally recording your activities, but it doesn't really let you commit with confidence to drive the right outcomes," said Aviso CEO K.V. Rao. Predictive analytics "can help you find the right content faster. That's what the state-of-the art is for sales.

"I dare you to find a sales person or account manager who enjoys spending the last 45 minutes of the day inputting data into the CRM system," said Bullhorn CMO Gordon Burnes. "A lot of companies are facing the CRM adoption challenge. Why is it that this account record doesn't have much data in it? When was it that the account manager last visited? That information just doesn't get into CRM.

It's surprising how much inaccurate data lives in many CRM systems, observed Eric Esfahanian, SVP of Gryphon Networks. "CRM is naturally a good source for analytics and sales intelligence if the data that lives within your CRM is automated, accurate, and something that you can reliably make decisions from," he said, and the key to accuracy is automation.

Customers may not understand the processes that drive their experiences, and they're not eager to look under the hood, suggested Don Schuerman, CTO of Pegasystems. "The contemporary customer doesn't really care about CRM. They care about the experience they have, and in most cases they know little or nothing about the fact that there's a technology behind the scenes called CRM.