Kara Callaway

She learned to sell before she learned to market

Kara Callaway's first day at Salesforce was in 2009. The product was CRM. The pitch was cloud. She was a sales rep, cold-calling and learning what actually makes a buyer move. Seventeen years later, she holds one of the most consequential marketing roles in enterprise software - VP of Company Marketing at ServiceNow, a company that spent 2024 repositioning itself as the defining AI platform for the modern enterprise.

That trajectory - from revenue-generating rep to brand-building VP - is not the typical Silicon Valley marketing career arc. Most VP-level marketers arrived through brand agencies, creative studios, or MBA programs. Callaway's apprenticeship was in the trenches: learning why deals stalled, why demos fell flat, and why technical precision without storytelling leaves a customer cold.

At Salesforce, she did not move sideways - she moved into technical product marketing after mastering sales engineering. The pivot from customer-facing demo machine to market-facing product marketer gave her a lens that most marketers never develop: the ability to inhabit the skeptical customer's chair while simultaneously building the message that fills it with confidence. She was eventually tapped to lead Salesforce's VP of Product Marketing function, where she ran marketing strategy for parts of one of the world's most valuable software portfolios.

In September 2024, she joined ServiceNow. The timing was deliberate. ServiceNow was in the middle of a fundamental identity shift - from "the company that digitizes workflows" to "the AI platform at the center of how enterprises run." That kind of narrative transformation requires someone who understands both the technical substance of what they are selling and the emotional architecture of how buyers make big decisions. Callaway's unusual background makes her a fit for exactly that problem.

Her role - VP of Company Marketing, not product marketing - is telling. Company marketing is about how an entire organization shows up: its brand voice, its public identity, the impression it leaves at trade shows and in boardrooms. When a Fortune 500 CIO thinks "ServiceNow," that thought is being shaped, at least in part, by the work Callaway oversees.

In May 2025, she took the stage at ServiceNow Knowledge 2025, the company's flagship annual conference, to anchor the AI narrative to tangible outcomes. The pitch was concrete where it could have been abstract - linking ServiceNow's agentic AI capabilities to the specific operational pain that enterprise buyers actually feel. It was, in short, a demo person's keynote: precise, outcome-oriented, and built around the customer's reality rather than the product roadmap.

She studied at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo - Cal Poly's famous "Learn by Doing" philosophy baked into an engineer's discipline. That ethos surfaces in how she approaches the market. Not the high-altitude brand strategist who never touches revenue. A practitioner who knows the product cold, has felt the pressure of a quarterly number, and still chooses the discipline of building something that lasts.

ServiceNow's position in the enterprise AI race is genuinely contested. SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft, and a growing pack of AI-native startups are all competing for the same budget cycles. In that fight, the ability to translate a platform's technical depth into a clear, urgent story - one that moves a CIO from "interesting" to "urgent" - is not a soft skill. It is the whole game. Kara Callaway is the person ServiceNow has bet that game on.