Salesforce Taps Cisco Veteran Smoot for Executive Vice President Slot

Salesforce.com has a new executive vice president. Daniel Smoot, who spent a dozen years as a sales exec at networking giant Cisco Systems, joined Salesforce last month as EVP for customer readiness. He’ll report directly to President and Vice Chairman Keith Block. He started at Salesforce late last month.

Smoot’s most recent gig was at VMware, the cloud software unit of storage giant EMC, where he was VP for global customer operations. He started in 1999 as director of sales, rose further through the sales ranks, and in 2010 took over sales, operations and marketing for Cisco Capital, the company’s $6 billion customer financing arm.

In reporting to Block, Smoot will be working for the person who has emerged in the last year as CEO Marc Benioff’s top lieutenant. A former Oracle exec, Block was Salesforce’s highest-profile executive hire last year, running its global sales, customer support and consulting services operations.

Block immediately shook things up at Salesforce and within two months, two presidents, Hilarie Koplow-McAdams and Blair Crump, were out the door. Koplow-McAdams turned up at New Relic as chief revenue officer. Crump is now the COO at Pros, a software company devoted to mining data to help close sales.

Smoot is being described by sources inside Salesforce as a “Swiss Army knife” of an executive and will have a fairly broad portfolio of responsibilities.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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