March 2020
All of my marketing experience has been with early- to mid-stage venture-backed startups or early-stage products within a larger organization. At Microsoft, I managed the commercial launch of their cloud computing product and built their demand gen engine from zero. Incidentally, this scenario isn’t unique to Microsoft and is one that I built my marketing career around: building organizations that are based on facts and data, not ones that rely on anecdotal opinions. That’s how marketing contributes to the bottom line.
One of the more complete examples of this was an engagement with Apptio. When I arrived there was barely a website; marketing contributed to 0% of total revenue; and, they had no way of measuring marketing’s contributions. When I left four years later, just prior to their initial public offering, marketing sourced 35% of all revenue and affected over 75% and, more importantly, we had the systems and processes in place to measure and improve upon our contributions.
I didn’t set out to make this my specialty, but nearly all of my experience in marketing has been at a similar place in time, organizationally: No senior marketing leadership and, in most cases, the only person on the marketing team was someone junior to manage the blog and social media. Scale can come in a number of ways, depending on appetite and budget. But finding good people is hard. So for expediency, I will often hire and work alongside temporary contractors to get the basics done. As workload and resources allow, we replace them with FTE.
My leadership philosophy is pretty simple:
You can find my complete resume here.