Hayden Stafford

President & Chief Revenue Officer Seismic

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Hayden Stafford is President and Chief Revenue Officer of Seismic, the San Diego-headquartered enablement platform that more than 2,000 organizations use to manage sales content, coach sellers and measure buyer engagement. He joined in March 2022 with the Sales and Customer Success organizations under him, brought in to tighten the alignment of a go-to-market machine that had just grown 50 per cent in a year. His background is unusual among enablement-software executives in that he has run the revenue side of three of the largest enterprise software franchises in the world before this — Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 business, a senior sales organization at Salesforce, and all global client-facing functions at Pegasystems — after more than a decade at IBM. That is a career built almost entirely on selling complex software to large enterprises, which is precisely the buyer Seismic targets.

Career Highlights

• Joined Seismic as President and Chief Revenue Officer in March 2022, reporting to then-chief executive and co-founder Doug Winter, with responsibility for the Sales and Customer Success teams and for driving efficiency and alignment in the company’s go-to-market strategy.
• Arrived on the back of Seismic’s strongest year to that point: the company had just closed fiscal 2022 above $280 million in annual revenue run rate, up 50 per cent year over year, having tripled its customer base and doubled engaged users.
• As President of Global Client Engagement at Pegasystems, held responsibility for every global go-to-market function — sales, customer success, marketing, strategy and operations, and channel partners.
• As Corporate Vice President of Global Microsoft Business Applications, was accountable for the worldwide sales, operations, strategy and enablement of Microsoft Dynamics 365.
• Served as a Senior Vice President at Salesforce, and spent more than ten years at IBM before that.
• Contributes to Forbes Business Development Council expert panels on quota pressure, modern buyer behaviour and value-based selling, with pieces published through August 2026.

Professional Journey

Stafford’s career began at IBM, where he spent more than ten years — the grounding in large-account enterprise selling that shaped everything after it. He moved to Salesforce as a Senior Vice President, then to Microsoft as Corporate Vice President of Global Microsoft Business Applications, the unit that sells Dynamics 365. That job carried global accountability not just for the sales number but for operations, strategy and the enablement function itself, which is a useful detail given where he ended up: he was a buyer and an operator of enablement programmes before he became a vendor of them.

From Microsoft he went to Pegasystems as President of Global Client Engagement, a role that consolidated sales, customer success, marketing, strategy and operations, and the channel under a single leader. It was the closest analogue to the job he would take next.

Seismic recruited him in March 2022. The announcement made the logic explicit: co-founder and then-chief executive Doug Winter cited his record of “leading strong teams and expanding channel ecosystems at some of the most successful public software companies in the world” and pointed to his experience driving international growth. Stafford arrived immediately after a record fiscal year and took on both the Sales and the Customer Success organizations — a combination that puts new bookings and retention under one owner rather than setting them against each other.

He has held the role for four and a half years. Seismic’s leadership page continues to list him as President and Chief Revenue Officer, now serving under chief executive Rob Tarkoff rather than Winter, alongside a senior team that includes a chief business officer and a managing director for India. Because Seismic is privately held, there is no filing record against which to check any of this independently; the company’s own page and his Forbes Councils profile are the current evidence, and both are self-published.

Education

Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University

MBA

Saint Lawrence University

Bachelor of Science