After overcoming her own fears about speaking up in a country where English isn’t her first language, impact.com’s Helena Barroso Zarco is using her experience to empower other women to find their confidence. The B&T 2026 Women Leading Tech Awards winner tells B&T why celebrating success, stepping outside your comfort zone and making room for others matters.
Impact.com is a platform helping brands connect with, track, and scale relationships with affiliates, influencers, content publishers, and customer advocates.
Barroso Zarco, who has been with the company for five years, knows what it feels like to question whether you belong.
Originally from Spain, and later moving to the UK, then Australia, the impact.com customer success leader found herself navigating a professional environment where she was often conscious of being different – particularly when it came to her accent.
But rather than allowing that insecurity to hold her back, Barroso Zarco has made it her mission to encourage other women to speak up, take on opportunities that scare them and recognise the value they bring to the industry.
It’s a philosophy that helped earn her the Customer Success category award at B&T’s 2026 Women Leading Tech Awards, recognising her contribution to the industry and her commitment to supporting and empowering others.
With entries now open for the 2027 Women Leading Tech Awards, B&T sat down with her ahead of next year’s big awards night to reflect on her journey leading up to the win.
‘People would give me faces’
Barroso Zarco said when she first moved to Australia she came face to face with an “unexpected challenge.”
Having previously worked in the UK, where she was accustomed to hearing a mix of accents in professional environments, she found the experience of working in Australia quite different.
“When I open my mouth, I’m the odd one in the sense that I’m not the majority. Most people are English speakers, English being their mother tongue, and then I’m not,” she said. “Sometimes you even get faces when you’re sharing what you have done or not because it’s like, ‘Oh, you have an accent. Oh, where are you from?’”
She even has a rather unusual way of describing how it can feel.
“When I open my mouth, I just feel like these little monkeys that have the plates and they bamg the plates,” she told B&T.
She’s referring to those cymbal-banging mechanical monkeys, furiously smashing their little brass plates together.
It’s a funny comparison, but one that speaks to a much more vulnerable experience: feeling self-conscious about how you sound, worrying about how others perceive you and questioning whether your voice carries the same weight as everyone else’s.
But she hasn’t let those experiences keep her quiet.
‘I was completely shocked’
If anything, she’s become increasingly determined to put herself forward – something that was evident when she was named the winner of the Customer Success category at the 2026 Women Leading Tech Awards.
Barroso Zarco admits the win came as a complete surprise.
“I never thought I would be a winner going up against those amazing women, so it was a massive surprise,” she said.
With 12 finalists in her category, compared with around six or seven in most others, she had already convinced herself her chances were slim.
In fact, she only entered after colleagues and the company’s PR agency encouraged her to put her name forward.
“It’s one of those things where you never believe that you’re good enough,” she said. “One of my colleagues and our PR agency were actually the ones to tell me to submit and see what happens. I was like, ‘Okay, if you tell me that, then I’m going to do it.’”
The nerves didn’t exactly disappear when her name was called, either.
Entries for B&T’s 2027 Women Leading Tech Awards are now open!
While other finalists had their acceptance speeches ready, Barroso Zarco was suddenly faced with the prospect of addressing the room without a plan.
“Everyone around me had their speeches ready, but when they said my name I just thought, ‘Well, what am I going to say?’”
Fortunately, sitting towards the back of the room gave her a little time to pull herself together.
“I took those two minutes of walking to the stage to just get my shit together and say a couple of things,” she laughed. “Looking back, I couldn’t even tell you what I said on the night because I was just on a high and my voice felt a bit broken because of how nervous I was.”
‘I feel like a really proud mum’
One of the big ways Barroso Zarco is putting her philosophy into practice is by getting other women in front of an audience.
In fact, her own first major speaking opportunity in Australia came at Impact.com’s IPX event, the company’s first major live event following COVID, where she was asked to moderate a panel.
Despite her nerves, she was determined not to let the other women on the panel feel they had to tackle theirs alone.
“I basically convinced them to be there with me, and I was like, ‘We can do this together, we’ll be fine’,” she recalled.
Rather than treating the panel like a formal presentation, she encouraged them to approach it as a conversation and an opportunity to share their experiences.
One woman was particularly nervous, but went on to secure a promotion after the experience.
“She was super grateful that I pushed her out of her comfort zone, even if she said she was petrified,” Barroso Zarco said.
It was a moment that encouraged her to keep doing the same with her own team.
After getting on stage herself, she began pushing colleagues to take on fireside chats and customer presentations, offering to support them through the experience.
“I was also being vulnerable, sharing my story and how I felt about it, and I told them all of that,” she said. “I’m here. I will help you, and I will be there on the day. I will tell you to do it. You will be fine.”
Barroso Zarco said it’s particularly important that people who don’t speak English as their first language can see someone like them taking up space.
“I have people in my team who are not Australian or English is not their mother tongue, and they have told me they feel empowered by seeing me talking on stage with an accent and talking so well,” she said. “It makes them feel like there’s going to be a space for them to do the same, even if they’re not native English speakers.”
And watching those colleagues go from terrified to triumphant is now one of her favourite parts of the job.
“It’s great to be sitting there and just looking at them. I just feel like a really proud mum,” she laughed.
“You look at them and you’re like, ‘You did great. How good was that?’ And then they’re like, ‘Thank you for pushing me with something that I was petrified of, but actually, how good that I did it?’”
And for those struggling to find the confidence, or see what they have achieved over the course of her.
And if you’re still struggling to see what you’ve achieved?
“Talk to your colleagues, because they will probably be seeing you more clearly than you see yourself.”
Entries for B&T’s 2027 Women Leading Tech Awards are now open!
