Caroline Salen is a member of Spencer Stuart’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications and Technology and Digital Officer practices. She brings a depth of experience developing business and culture for technology services and software companies — traditional, SaaS, and cloud-native. She builds teams that make each other stronger and contribute to a more performant culture with key attributes in mind: authenticity, creativity, ambition, collaboration, respect, innovation and development. Caroline knows how to create the go-to-market approach the customer and market needs, and how to build leadership teams that are multi-generational, multicultural, growth and performance-driven. She has worked with tech giants including SAP, HP and Microsoft as well as small and medium-sized businesses.
Client-centricity and leadership vision as a professional compass
- Caroline transitioned to Spencer Stuart from several years at SAP, where she began as global client director in the insurance sector and ended her tenure as global head of GTM strategy and business development.
- At New Relic, a cloud native SaaS company, and Gartner, a leading market research and advisory company, she worked with small and medium businesses as well as Fortune 500 companies across Europe, leading teams that earned her multiple leadership awards as an individual and part of a team.
- In a decade of service at Gartner, Caroline logged an impressive track record and closed her time leading the Swiss team as area manager for the public and financial sector in Zurich, where qualified for a top achieving awards after a strong turnaround success.
- Early in her career, she was at HP Services where she worked with sales operations and improved sales forecasting accuracy.
Caroline has a B.A. in international business administration (minor in economics) from the University of Kristianstad in Sweden, where she also participated in exchange studies at City University of Hong Kong and LIUC University of Castellanza, Italy. Later, she studied corporate finance and strategy for senior executives at the London School of Economics, along with numerous additional courses and certifications. A native of Sweden, Caroline has also lived in Hong Kong, Italy, the UK and Switzerland and is multi fluent.