Sarah Gavin

Sarah Gavin

Enterprise Leader · Chief Communications & Marketing Officer

Sarah builds the business case for communications and marketing — and then she delivers it. She operates at the intersection of strategy, narrative, and organizational transformation, partnering with CEOs, boards, and go-to-market teams to make companies compete better.

About Sarah

As a seasoned communications and marketing executive, Sarah blends narrative clarity with rigorous execution. Her work is defined by deeply aligned teams, measurable transformation, and a point of view that moves markets.

About Sarah in action

What She Does

Communications and marketing are most powerful when they're deeply connected to how the business actually goes to market. Sarah doesn't run these functions alongside the business — she runs them in service of it. That means owning the narrative, aligning the organization, and driving the kind of outcomes that show up in market cap, pipeline, and analyst rankings.

Executive Strengths

Sarah brings a rare combination of enterprise strategy, team activation, and data-informed decision making. She moves big organizations forward by building alignment, shaping the story, and measuring what matters.

  • Enterprise & team transformation Aligns strategy, narrative, and operating rhythm across large organizations.
  • Data-driven leadership Uses metrics and insight to focus decisions and investment.
  • Narrative craftsmanship Shapes clear stories that connect strategy to market results.
  • C-suite & board partnership Builds the alignment and trust needed to move enterprise agendas.
  • Growth execution Turns marketing and comms into measurable business momentum.
Executive strengths

Enterprise Transformation

A consistent thread across Sarah's career has been enterprise-wide transformation — not just transforming the function, but using communications and marketing as the mechanism to shift how entire companies operate, position themselves, and move. At Expedia Group, that meant leading the shift from holding company to technology platform, changing not just the narrative but the organizational identity. At Zendesk, it meant owning the AI strategy story at a moment when the whole company needed to move faster and more cohesively than it ever had. These weren't communications projects. They were business transformation efforts, and communications and marketing were the engine.

Enterprise transformation session

Building the Bridges That Matter

Building the Bridges That Matter

Sarah is known for building the bridges that make companies execute better — between marketing and sales, between narrative and product, between what a company says and how it actually shows up in the market. At Zendesk, she rebuilt the marketing-sales relationship from a position of significant friction into one the CRO describes as one of the strongest GTM partnerships he has experienced. At Google Cloud, she built the competitive narrative and content infrastructure that gave sales teams what they needed to compete and close in enterprise accounts.

Marketing AI. Leading With It.

Across Zendesk, Google Cloud, and Expedia Group, Sarah has been at the center of how companies articulate and operationalize their AI strategies. At Zendesk, she built and operationalized the company's AI-first narrative — differentiating a legacy brand in a crowded market where every competitor was making the same claim — and doubled the marketing-qualified AI pipeline in the process. At Google Cloud, she drove the repositioning that shifted market perception of Google Cloud from a distant third to a serious enterprise contender in AI. She also leads with AI: embedding tools and workflows into her teams not as an experiment, but as a genuine operating model shift that enables faster, more effective work.

AI team workshop

Building Teams That Lead

Sarah inherits fragmented organizations and turns them into high-performing teams. She sets an exceptionally high bar — for thinking, for execution, for what great looks like — and creates the conditions for people to actually meet it. That means genuine psychological safety, real clarity about what matters, and a culture where taking smart risks and tearing down silos is expected, not exceptional. The teams she leads consistently deliver the strongest engagement scores in their organizations and, more importantly, become partners the business can't imagine working without.

Building Teams That Lead Team collaboration

Impact in Motion

In every role, Sarah brings an active, coaching-inspired leadership stance; she balances strategic purpose with sharp operational cadence. These moments are both narrative-focused and built around measurable results.

Market capitalization increase contributed during tenure at Expedia Group
Marketing-qualified AI pipeline doubled at Zendesk
20% Boost in industry influencer recognition through repositioned AI narrative and brand at Zendesk

Where She's Led

Zendesk

Chief Communications Officer & Interim Chief Marketing Officer

Led a 400-person global marketing and communications organization through the company's most critical AI transformation, simultaneously holding both roles for one year.

Google Cloud

Head of Storytelling & Competitive Positioning, Product Marketing

Built the global "Why Google Cloud" narrative and GTM content infrastructure, leading the largest team in Google Cloud product marketing.

Expedia Group

Senior Vice President, Global Communications & Corporate Brand

Eleven years building and leading the global communications and brand function, serving as a strategic advisor to the CEO, CMO, CHRO, and Board.

Community Impact

Sarah serves as Board Chairman of the YMCA of Greater Seattle, a $100M nonprofit serving communities across the region. In that role she leads the Board of Directors, supports the CEO and executive team through governance and strategic oversight, and stewards an institution she believes deeply in.

Community impact Community impact leadership

Let's Talk

Sarah is always interested in conversations with leaders who believe communications and marketing can be genuine drivers of business outcomes — and who want to build organizations where that's actually true.

Connect on LinkedIn

Using Claude

Created using Claude Code's executive page workflow, this site brings disciplined structure, refined visuals, and responsive layout together to present Sarah's leadership story with clarity and strategic impact.