Virginia Sharma named chief marketing officer of Salesforce’s Missionforce

VIRGINIA: Some careers read like a CV. Virginia Sharma’s reads like a world tour. From New York to Tokyo, Singapore to Mumbai, Reston to Hyderabad, she has spent more than 25 years selling technology to the people who matter. Now she has landed a big one. In September 2026 Sharma became chief marketing officer of Missionforce at Salesforce, where she leads the global public sector marketing team from McLean, Virginia.

The brief is clear. Her team spans product marketing and field marketing, and its job is to tell the story of Missionforce and how it helps the world’s most important institutions deliver on their missions. Sharma says she is thrilled to start the new role.

She arrives with a record that is hard to argue with. Before Salesforce, she was head of brand and product marketing at Google Public Sector from January 2024. There she led a team that designed integrated campaigns, including brand campaigns, the Public Sector blog, and social and content-led campaigns for Cloud, Workspace and AI. She also led tentpole events for government and higher education audiences in the US, including the Google Public Sector Summit and public sector programming at Next. Her time at Google totalled four years and seven months.

Her first Google job was head of marketing for Google Cloud India, from March 2022. She led brand, demand (direct and partner) and developer marketing for Google Cloud and Google Workspace. The results showed. Sharma won the global “Jammies” award two years running at the annual Google Cloud Marketing Jam, first for the #humbanayenge brand film and social campaign, then for I/O Connect, the flagship One Google developer event. The business more than doubled in two years and won hundreds of new logos.

The India chapter did not begin there. At JioSaavn, from May 2020 to January 2022, Sharma was vice-president of brand solutions, a profit-and-loss role. She drove the adoption of the company’s advertising solutions for brands, oversaw agency and client relationships, and scaled up its global digital ad monetisation engine. Her team of sales, customer success, brand strategists and product marketers delivered double-digit revenue growth and award-winning sonic branding campaigns through the pandemic. It did so as a 100 per cent remote sales and servicing team.

Before that came nearly six years at LinkedIn. As sales director for marketing solutions in India from April 2016 to April 2020, she led a digital media-savvy sales team across three locations. She guided marketers on content strategy and on reaching the right professional audiences. She qualified for Super Club in 2019, and finished on a high by overachieving sales targets. She became one of the top 10 per cent of LinkedIn’s sales leaders in just three years, in her first sales leadership role. Earlier, as marketing director for talent solutions in Asia Pacific, based in Singapore from June 2014 to March 2016, she built a marketing team tightly aligned with sales. She introduced persona-based marketing and full-funnel campaigns that LinkedIn adopted globally. Marketing-qualified leads grew 84 per cent year on year, and marketing’s contribution to the business rose to 34 per cent from 28 per cent when she joined.

The foundation was laid at IBM, where she spent 15 years from June 1999. She joined in New York after graduation as a marketing specialist for the east region, focused on events. Her programme targeting “net gen” start-ups in the first dotcom boom won her the 2001 “Marketing Professional of the Year” award, the highest honour given to any marketing professional at the annual IBM Software Sales kickoff. She later led the launch of IBM “Express” middleware in Asia Pacific from Tokyo, winning the Bravo Award for a successful Express product launch in May 2004. Other roles followed: global market management for the SMB portfolio, and director of WebSphere software marketing in Somers, New York, where her team ran more than 10 worldwide event series, averaging about 150 events a quarter. She then served as director of marketing and communications for software in India and South Asia, and as vice-president of marketing and communications for India, managing the IBM India brand and demand for products and services. She finished as vice-president of marketing for North America systems and technology group, based in New York.

Beyond the day job, Sharma is an independent director on the board of Pennar Industries Limited, a public Indian engineering and manufacturing company, since November 2022. She sits on the global advisory board of the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce. She has chaired the Marketing Society India chapter and the IAMAI Digital Transformation Council.

The honours keep coming. Exchange4media ranked her 92nd among the top 100 Indian business leaders in 2020. She won the Economic Times Women Ahead award in 2018, and made the Impact Top 50 Women in Marketing, Media and Advertising list three years running: 38th in 2018, then 35th in both 2019 and 2020. She became a Marketing Society fellow in July 2018, holds the DMAI “Knight” distinction, and is the first Indian leader to become a Marketing Academy fellow, a programme delivered by McKinsey and Co for high-performing marketing leaders on the CEO or board track.

Sharma is also a LinkedIn Top Voice with more than 65,000 followers, using her posts to discuss issues facing women in leadership, advertising and technology. A regular keynote speaker at industry and customer forums and business schools, she gave the commencement speech at McIntire’s final exercises in Charlottesville in 2019 and spoke at its centennial celebration in 2022. In late February 2022 she successfully defended her doctoral thesis on crisis leadership and gender identity, and she plans to publish her findings with her academic mentors from ISB.