Chief Marketing Officer, Syniti
A seasoned global CMO, a record-setting sales leader, and a global citizen, Zarina Lam Stanford is a recognized change agent and a frequent industry speaker who spearheads business and transformational initiatives through her #DareToGrow principle. With her unique sales and marketing background, Zarina adopts a customer-centric, insights-driven, outcome-based approach in everything she does.
An industry veteran, Zarina held various sales and marketing executive positions in North America and Asia. Zarina joined SAP in 2015 as CMO for Asia Pacific & Japan. During her 3-year tenure, Stanford transformed the digital end-to-end customer experience and crafted the award-winning Super Awesome People (SAP) initiative, delivering high double-digit revenue growth and operationalizing ONE SAP in budget, GTM, branding, and employee engagement. Zarina is also instrumental in creating the current SAP Purpose-Driven initiative and served on the Senior Executive Team (SET) and Global Marketing Council.
Prior to joining SAP, she held a celebrated career at IBM where she was Global VP of Marketing in Software and Systems business units and VP of Marketing for North America, Growth Markets (BRIC), and APAC. During her IBM tenure, Stanford led market-making branding initiatives, company-wide ground-breaking marketing transformation, championed brand and category marketing, customer loyalty programs as well as delivering consecutive quarters of revenue, business and market growth. Zarina joined IBM in Sales where she created the largest software deal in IBM AP history.
A champion for diversity and inclusion initiative, Zarina serves on the Board of BeyonDiversity @beyondiversity. She was named Women Worth Watching by Diversity Journal in the US and the Women of the Decade in Technology & Innovation at the Women Economic Forum in New Delhi, India, in 2016 and 2018, respectively. Zarina is one of the CMO Fellows named by the Marketing Academy and a graduate of the Marketing Academy Executive Fellowship Programme in 2018.
Zarina holds an MBA from Southern Methodist University and attended the Asian Advanced Leadership Program at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. She also holds a BA in Journalism from the University of North Texas.
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Zarina has just recently repatriated from Singapore back to the US. She is also authoring a book, #DareToGrow, to be published in 2019.
