Executive Team
Peter Heffring – CEO
Peter is a veteran of the software industry for 15 years and tech industry for 25 years. Graduating from Georgia Tech as an engineer, he rose through the ranks of IBM for 14 years; started and sold a successful Enterprise CRM company, Ceres Integrated Solutions in 2000; and then co-founded Expion in late 2009 and is currently the CEO. Peter’s CRM experience and analytical mindset keeps the Expion product direction keenly focused on maximizing customer relationships through social media to yield the highest financial returns for clients using Expion’s platform. His extensive engineering experience drives product development to build a highly scalable solution that can integrate into any Enterprise ECRM environment. Expion fulfills his desire as an entrepreneur to bring the principles of CRM and now ECRM to Enterprise Social Media Management. Heffring believes by doing so, clients can have greater market reach yet personalize their customer interactive experiences with their brand for better customer engagement and retention.
Prior to Expion, Peter was the founder, driving force, and CEO of Ceres. Ceres gained strong momentum and attention by winning CRM contracts from top-tier companies including Wal-Mart, Office Depot, JCPenney, Lowe’s, Neiman Marcus, and Wells Fargo. Ceres was bought by NCR for $90M in April 2000. As President of NCR Teradata CRM Division, Heffring and his team helped further expand and enrich its analytical solutions across all industries worldwide.
Prior to founding Ceres, Heffring rose through the IBM organization, taking on a series of leadership roles in research, marketing, manufacturing, finance, forecasting and international management – crossing many professional disciplines and residing in the U.S. and Europe.
Born in Canada, Heffring graduated from the Georgia Tech with a BS degree in Engineering. He is an auto-racing enthusiast and avid fitness nut. Heffring serves on the advisory board at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business Entrepreneur Center. Heffring resides with his wife and two children in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Tim Grant – COO
Over the past 12 years, Tim’s focus was to provide business solutions using the latest technologies available. Being a CRM expert means he is well versed in understanding customer requirements and building the technology to fulfill current and future needs. Tim’s agile development philosophy promotes client collaboration, attention to detail, broad range planning and immediate implementation of completed phases of a project. This mindset allows for successful and consistent deliveries of both small and large scale projects. His experience with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Wal-Mart, JCPenney, Office Depot, Lowes is invaluable. In addition, Tim has many years of customer support experience and is a master in the field of performance optimization to ensure a trackable success. Tim’s attention to detail in the most complex of situations differentiates him from the rest. His passion drives his development, and his fulfillment comes from seeing his customer’s success and bottom line growth.
Albert Chou – Chief Innovation Officer
Albert possesses over 10 years of Enterprise Software expertise serving as a consultant to Fortune 500 businesses and implementing products such as SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards, and SAS. Prior to Expion, he worked with clients such as ExxonMobil, BAE Systems, Covidien, Colgate-Palmolive, and the Federal Reserve Bank. At Expion, Albert started as Senior Account Manager learning the social/marketing processes of some of the top brands and agencies, discovering challenges using fit/gap analysis and assisting the development of Expion to fulfill those needs. His greatest strength lies in his ability to become a functional expert in software rapidly while linking software functions to actual business requirements and human needs. Albert has a history of serving as a Subject Matter Expert of numerous application projects where he entered without previous experience. He believes product success is achieved when the technology solves a pain point, coincides with natural behavior, and is sprinkled with a bit of convenience.
Erica McClenny – Vice President Client Services
Over 15 years of sales and management experience provided Erica a front row seat to the shift in local consumer habits online. After joining Expion in January 2010, she stepped into the role of implementation, daily client management and best practice training. Her input into the development of a simple local interface for the local user has been a crucial piece to Expion’s success. She is a firm believer in collaboration between the agency of record, corporate marketing teams, and the integration local employees to gain valuable insight and best practices for a successful local expansion. As Expion has grown, she’s moved into the role of building a team of Account Managers who are focused on solving how social media can integrate into siloed corporations and business processes to maximize the use of the Expion software and professional services. Her team has developed an extensive process to scale locally with Facebook, Google and other channels. Follow her on Twitter @ericamcclenny for some witty tweets about her family and fun travel adventures.
Zena Weist – Vice President Strategy
Zena Weist joins Expion from Edelman where she was the Vice President of Strategy with Edelman Digital Chicago. Zena is an integrated media strategist with over 17 years of executive leadership in online marketing on both the interactive agency and brand side, providing digital communications and social media strategic counsel across a portfolio of Fortune 500 companies.
Prior to Edelman, Zena was the Director of Social Media for H&R Block where she led a team who received national acclaim for integrated online marketing communication programs. In the spring of 2011, the H&R Block Corporate Twitter Account was chosen as one of only ten brands for Time Magazine’s Top 140 Twitter Feeds. Zena’s strategic leadership has been recognized by the National Social Advertising, Media and Marketing (SAMMY) Award for Best Social CRM from Digidaily and the National PRNews Platinum for Social Media Award. Her social media strategy work has been featured in five business books and highlighted in the Harvard Business Review.
In addition to Edelman and H&R Block, Zena led digital teams at Sprint, Hallmark and Embarq, providing leadership in online brand engagement, digital strategy, integrated marketing communications and website project management.
She is a founding member of the Kansas City Chapter of The Social Media Club and a DMA ECHO award winner. Zena graduated with a BSJ in Advertising from the University of Kansas and has an MBA in Direct Marketing from the University of Missouri. When her fingers aren’t on the keyboard, Zena is playing with her family of four active kids plus one adorable husband or trying to sneak in a run.
Travis Lewis – Vice President Product Marketing
Travis has a diverse creative background with 10 years of experience in corporate branding, creative design and marketing for fortune 500 companies. He has worked closely with some of the world’s largest digital agencies to develop interactive applications for digital and social media campaigns. Travis has a strong interest in digital strategy and optimizing campaigns using intelligent data. With degrees in both Graphic Design and Interactive Multimedia, he has a unique passion for both creative marketing and programming.
Today, Travis leads the product marketing strategy for Expion’s Social Software Platform including; SMMS, Reputation Management, Analysis Dashboards and Data Integration. His vision has been the driving force behind Expion’s branding, website and social presence as Expion emerges, as a software leader, in the social media management space.
Michael Heffring – Vice President Marketing
Heffring leveraged a strong academic pedigree based in marketing research to produce several successful ventures that combined theories on customer behavior with technologies that produce marketing results for businesses. He is an experienced speaker with a data-focused expertise on topics including how to analyze conversations to deliver higher ROI; and how to build integrated dashboards using social media data.
Heffring holds three advanced degrees in business, marketing and sociology, served as a tenured business professor for a decade and is a published author. His research focused on tracking consumer trends and values and determining the emotional connections created during the interaction between a brand and its customers. In his professional experience, Heffring used his academic background to power strategic roles at a range of marketing-focused enterprise and start-up companies. These roles produced successful market research, CRM/integrated dashboard and customer experience solutions and technologies that served the telecommunications, automotive, food, retail and energy industries.
Kevin Magee – Vice President Business Development
Kevin joined Expion in early 2011 and has been instrumental in helping the company grow its client base. He brings nearly two decades of enterprise sales management and marketing experience to the team, with executive leadership roles focused on revenue growth in competitive markets. Kevin’s experience as an executive strategist building C-suite relationships with enterprise accounts is key as Expion focuses it’s efforts on global expansion.
Prior to joining Expion, Kevin led global, national and regional sales efforts for Impact Fulfillment Services and Stephen Gould Inc, both rapidly growing privately held companies in the packaging industry. As sales and operational leader for each organization, Kevin had P&L and strategic development responsibilities for sales, account management and client development teams that won and serviced multi-million dollar accounts including Procter and Gamble, Revlon and Sony Ericsson. This tenure provides Kevin with unique insight into large-scale organizations that Expion serves as we expand globally to service Fortune 500 clients.
Born in NY and a graduate of SUNY Potsdam with a BA in Economics, Kevin proudly calls North Carolina home now. He is married with 3 children and enjoys competing in a variety of sporting activities including trail running, hockey and even the occasional marathon.
Liz Morgan – Global Director of Sales
Liz brings more than 20 years of sales, business development and social media experience to Expion. She leads our talented global sales team and is focused on sharing the value of Expion’s enterprise social software tools with business leaders. Liz possesses unique expertise in identifying cost effective business solutions for large scale problems. She has an impressive track record of developing and retaining long term and meaningful relationships with Fortune 500 clients by delivering relevant and targeted solutions. Liz has also established herself by building out key verticals and developing seasoned teams in the software industry.
Liz was previously the Senior Director of Business Development at INgage Networks and has held sales and leadership roles at Syntel, CBSi (Covansys), IBM, and GM. Born and raised in Michigan with a degree in marketing and communications from Michigan State University, Liz is now pleased to call North Carolina home. Follow Liz @lizmorgan5 to learn how a mid-west gal learns the ways of the south while traveling the world!