Zarina Lam Stanford

A seasoned global CMO, a record-setting seller, 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 global sales and marketing background, Zarina adopts a customer-centric, insights-driven, outcome-based approach in everything she does.

As CMO of Syniti, Zarina oversees all aspects of marketing from strategy, brand and communications to direct and in-direct go-to-market, performance and portfolio marketing, and customer advocacy. Through her leadership and partnership with the Board of Directors and leadership team, Stanford re-named, re-branded, and debuted the new experiential Syniti, formerly BackOffice Associates, at SAPPHIRENOW, SAP’s global user conference on May 8th, 2019, four months to the day upon her arrival at Syniti.

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 advancing 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 delivered consecutive quarters of revenue, business and market growth, spearheaded market-making branding initiatives, company-wide ground-breaking marketing transformation, championed brand and category marketing, customer loyalty programs. Zarina joined IBM in Sales where she delivered the largest software deal in IBM AP history.

A champion for diversity and inclusion initiative, Zarina serves on the Board of BD Foundation @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 a Marketing Academy CMO Fellow, a Southern Methodist University MBA, and a graduate of the Asian Advanced Leadership Program at Stanford University, Graduate School of Business. She also holds a BA in Journalism from the University of North Texas.

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Zarina is a global traveler and resides in Austin, Texas, and Boston, MA. She is also authoring a self-leadership book, #DareToGrow, to be published in 2020.