There is a peculiar kind of luck that only becomes visible after years of work. Alison Biggan was building a career in sports marketing in Vancouver and meant to keep it that way. She worked around a local PGA Tour event, with the Vancouver Canuck Foundation and the BC Lions. Then somebody she knew heard that Crystal Decisions needed a global event manager and made an introduction. The referral looked like a door. It turned out to be a railway switch.
Crystal Decisions put her inside the business-intelligence industry, where databases had sturdy names and software arrived with binders. The company moved into Business Objects; Business Objects moved into SAP. Biggan moved with the work. By the time she left SAP in the summer of 2022, she had spent about 15 years there and touched almost every surface of a global marketing organization: communications, analyst relations, public relations, field and partner marketing, product marketing, events, brand and sponsorship.
Careers are usually polished into straight lines after the fact. Hers is more useful in its original shape. A network introduced her to a job she had not planned. Acquisitions enlarged the arena. Curiosity kept enlarging the job. She did not merely climb through marketing; she learned how the machinery around it worked.
The event manager enters the engine room
In 2010 and 2011, Biggan joined the team bringing SAP HANA to market. Her remit spilled beyond familiar communications work into strategy, pricing, go-to-market decisions and a measure of revenue accountability. It gave her a view of the business from somewhere other than the marketing balcony. She could see how product choices, commercial design and customer adoption met one another on the ground.
One introduction, four chapters
sports
Business Objects
at SAP
CMO
She later led platform and technology product marketing, then broader product and field teams. For a period she served as chief operating officer of SAP's global marketing organization. In her final role, President of Corporate Marketing, the scope stretched across digital, brand, events, customers and partners for the full SAP portfolio. Each move added another dialect: product, operations, sales, finance.
“The message matters. How you show up matters.”Alison Biggan
Those two sentences contain her productive contradiction. Biggan likes the ledger, but she has not mistaken it for the story. Metrics can reveal whether people moved, converted or bought. They cannot, by themselves, give anyone a reason to lean closer. The craft creates interest; measurement tells the team whether interest became action.
The old colleague and the new assignment
Biggan met Steve Lucas at Crystal Decisions, when she was the global event manager and he led strategic pre-sales. He says they go back 30 years; she prefers 20; she has cheerfully placed the truth somewhere in the middle. They worked together intermittently, then watched one another's careers from a distance while Lucas led Marketo and iCIMS.
When Lucas became chief executive of Boomi, the integration and automation company, he asked Biggan to join him. She became chief marketing officer in February 2023. Their shared history mattered. Mutual trust removed the ceremonial months in which new executives learn how each other thinks. The leadership group also included other former colleagues, allowing it to decide and move with a shorthand earned elsewhere.
Boomi presented a neat strategic puzzle. Its products connect applications, data and workflows. Its marketing also needed to connect: brand to demand, demand to sales development, sales development to revenue. Biggan's remit included the sales-development organization, an arrangement that gave the CMO's office a direct view of what happened after somebody clicked, downloaded or raised a hand.
Her marketing team carries pipeline and bookings targets. It studies conversion rates, average contract value and sales-cycle length, not just website visits or lead totals. Marketing, sales development and sales are expected to agree on the audience and the commercial objective. The poetry has to reconcile.
One of the team's practical devices is the blitz day. Salespeople and sales-development representatives work from targeted lists, shared messages and competitive intelligence. The immediate aim is demand, but Biggan sees a second return: rehearsal. The people making calls become better able to explain the company's differences because they are working through the same argument together. Alignment ceases to be a handsome word in a slide deck and becomes the quality of the next conversation.
The surrounding technology is meant to reduce delay without making the exchange generic. Intent data can indicate which accounts are actively looking. Propensity models can identify prospects that resemble valuable customers. When the signals overlap, a sales-development team can respond within minutes or an hour, equipped with the context of what a person read or downloaded. Biggan's caveat is important: speed alone is not the prize. Relevance and personalization determine whether the quick response feels useful or merely quick.
A brand has to survive the handoff
Biggan argues that brand remains one of the central influences on purchase consideration. A prospect must know a company, see its relevance and feel positively about it before a funnel diagram becomes interesting. But the public promise cannot evaporate when the prospect meets an SDR or a salesperson. The message, the behavior and the experience should belong to the same company.
This is where her range becomes an operating advantage. The former event manager understands theatre. The former marketing COO understands the invoice. The product marketer understands the temptation to describe every feature. The executive understands that buyers are less interested in a company's self-portrait than in the problem sitting on their desk.
In May 2025, she said Boomi's brand awareness had risen by about 40 percent. Her explanation was strikingly unromantic. The company had been “specific and surgical” about audiences and the messages that mattered to them. Attention did not come from talking more loudly about Boomi. It came from explaining why Boomi could solve the audience's problem.
The bars are not relative performance figures. They show the chain of measures she has said the organization watches, ending with the outcome it owns. It is a modest but consequential distinction. Marketing is not excused after delivery of a lead. It stays for the result.
Use case first, champagne later
Enterprise AI has produced enough grand language to heat a conference hall. Biggan's vocabulary is more domestic: better, faster, easier, sometimes cheaper. In 2026, she described Boomi's internal progress from isolated experiments to a more methodical strategy. The team was connecting AI to existing CRM and marketing systems, using it in market segmentation and applying product data to predict expansion opportunities and churn risk.
The sequence matters. Begin with a good use case. Decide what value it should create. Ask whether the data is ready. Keep a human in the loop. Put governance and safeguards around who can see what. Only then does velocity become an advantage. A machine that accelerates confusion is still mostly a machine for arriving at confusion sooner.
“We believe there will always be and should always be a human in the loop.”Alison Biggan
This is also a marketer's view of AI. She sells the possibility while living with the implementation. The useful test is whether the technology can improve the business function she already runs. When an interviewer teased Boomi about using its own connective products, Biggan offered a less dusty version of the corporate cliché: “We will drink our own champagne.”
Her external message follows the same logic. Boomi's history in integration gives it a reason to speak about agentic systems because agents need access to connected, governed data. In Biggan's account, innovation does not require the company to disown its earlier work. The heritage is the foundation that makes the new promise credible.
Trust moves faster when it has a memory
By May 2026, Biggan said Boomi's customer count had grown about 50 percent in three years and its community had passed 330,000 members. The audience now contained two constituencies: long-standing customers who knew the integration platform, and newer customers arriving partly because of AI innovation. Marketing had to invite the second group without making the first feel that the company had changed the locks.
Her answer was continuity. The strategy, product roadmap and promises to customers should remain connected. The company can move quickly, but it must deliver what it says. Community then becomes more than a mailing list. Customers can compare use cases, teach one another and supply the peer evidence that no campaign can manufacture.
There is a pleasing symmetry here. Biggan's career began turning because a person in one professional circle carried her name into another. At Boomi, she works on a larger version of the same phenomenon: useful connections, maintained long enough to produce trust. Software may automate the route. Someone still has to make the introduction worth following.