Patrick Blair

Chief Revenue Officer Workday

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Patrick Blair is Chief Revenue Officer of Workday, the enterprise cloud company whose finance and human-resources applications run the back office of a large share of the Fortune 500. He leads Workday’s sales teams worldwide. He arrived with more than 25 years in enterprise cloud software and sales management, and with an unusually varied set of categories behind him: customer relationship management at C3.ai, digital presence software at Yext, cybersecurity at Palo Alto Networks, and more than a decade at Salesforce, the company that largely defined how enterprise software is sold as a subscription. That range matters at Workday, whose selling motion has had to stretch from very large enterprise deals into the mid-market — a stretch he has fronted publicly, introducing Workday GO, the company’s packaged offering for medium-sized enterprises, under his own byline.

Career Highlights

• Serves as Chief Revenue Officer of Workday, leading the company’s sales organisation worldwide.
• Introduced Workday GO, the company’s packaged offering aimed at medium-sized enterprises, in a signed post on Workday’s corporate blog — placing the mid-market push under the revenue chief’s name rather than a product leader’s.
• Served as President of CRM at C3.ai, running the enterprise AI company’s customer relationship management business.
• Was Chief Revenue Officer of Yext, Inc., the publicly listed digital presence and search software company.
• Ran sales at Palo Alto Networks as Senior Vice President of Sales, during the period in which the company became one of the largest independent cybersecurity vendors.
• Spent more than ten years at Salesforce across a succession of sales leadership roles, the last of them as Executive Vice President of Sales.

Professional Journey

Blair’s career was built at Salesforce, where he spent more than a decade moving through sales leadership roles and finished as executive vice president of sales. That is a long apprenticeship in a specific discipline: Salesforce in those years was the company most other enterprise software vendors copied when designing a selling organisation, from territory structure to the annual kickoff to the mechanics of a land-and-expand account plan.

He left to run sales at Palo Alto Networks as senior vice president, moving from applications into cybersecurity — a market with a different buyer, a different urgency and a far more technical evaluation. From there he became Chief Revenue Officer of Yext, Inc., a public company selling digital presence and search software, which gave him his first full chief revenue officer seat and with it responsibility for the whole revenue line rather than a sales region. He then joined C3.ai as President of its CRM business, a product line the enterprise AI company built in partnership with Baker Hughes and Microsoft, taking him back into customer relationship management but from the vendor side of an AI-first product rather than an incumbent suite.

At Workday he leads the worldwide sales organisation. The company’s own description of his brief is plain — chief revenue officer, leading the sales teams worldwide — but the work visible from outside has centred on extending Workday’s reach beyond the very large enterprises that were its original market. His byline on the introduction of Workday GO, a packaged offering pitched at medium-sized enterprises that are ready to scale, is a signal of where the revenue organisation’s growth is expected to come from: not only from larger deals with larger companies, but from a faster, more standardised motion further down the market.

Education

Cornell University

Bachelor of Science