Scott Barghaan
Scott Barghaan is an Adjunct Professor at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He also advises startups and established companies on go-to-market strategy, sales transformation, and how to apply AI to improve sales productivity and customer outcomes.
Mr. Barghaan has more than 25 years of experience leading large-scale business transformation for global technology companies and their customers. He has built and led organizations of hundreds of customer-facing professionals, managed enterprise-wide initiative budgets, and delivered measurable growth and efficiency gains across industries including travel, hospitality, retail, manufacturing, and financial services.
Mr. Barghaan spent a decade at Salesforce, where he most recently served as Senior Vice President, Global Seller Experience. In that role, he led a 275+ person organization across research, program management, process design, product design, software development, and change management to simplify how sales teams work and improve access to data and tools across a global field organization. He sponsored Salesforce’s multi-year sales transformation (Project Lotus) and drove more than 100 initiatives focused on seller productivity. He also co-owned Salesforce’s “Customer Zero” program, translating internal operating learnings into practical methods customers could apply.
Earlier at Salesforce, Mr. Barghaan was responsible for standing up Salesforce’s Travel, Transportation, and Hospitality industry vertical across the Americas, helping grow the business to $480M in annual revenue while maintaining 95% renewals. He earned the trust of customers including Marriott, Southwest, and Airbnb, and built a customer-success-first operating model that improved adoption and renewal outcomes.
Across his commercial career, Mr. Barghaan carried a quota for 23 years, serving as both a sales executive and sales leader at Salesforce and EMC. He and his teams helped drive billions of dollars in revenue across professional services, hardware, and software during a period of major change in enterprise technology. Surpassing their annual revenue target in 21 of 23 years, his teams were known for a consistent track record of execution and customer impact. Earlier in his career, Mr. Barghaan spent 14 years as an enterprise sales executive selling into Fortune 200 organizations across financial services, healthcare, and telecommunications.
Known for a practical, customer-focused leadership style, Mr. Barghaan brings cross-functional experience across sales, strategy, operating model design, and change management. His work focuses on building repeatable go-to-market systems that help teams execute consistently and deliver what customers were promised.
Mr. Barghaan currently serves as a Board Advisor to three AI startups backed by leading venture capital firms, including Bessemer Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. He is a Limited Partner at Stage 2 Capital. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Leadership Studies from the University of Richmond (2000).
