Background
Summary
My career has included working with Fortune 500 companies (BMC, SAP), expansion stage companies (Blazent Inc., Astoria Software), and start-ups (Metacode Technologies, Oomnitza).
Unlike most people who find their comfort zone and settle into a specific company type, I tend to move back and forth. There are significant advantages to doing this; Fortune 500 companies are strong on process and scalability, expansion-stage companies are all about operational alignment, and start-ups require getting hands-on with a genuine sense of urgency. Coming into a start-up with a Fortune 500 background gives them exactly what they need, process methodologies and expertise (for example, going from BMC to Blazent), and conversely, coming into a Fortune 500 company with a start-up background brings a sense of urgency not normally found in larger companies (for example, going from Astoria Software to Sybase/SAP).
My functional trajectory is technology marketing, and this covers the entire range of marketing focus areas, including Product Marketing, Demand Generation, Marketing Communications, Product Management, Corporate Marketing, Field Marketing, and Strategic Marketing. My background in all these areas is both broad and deep; I have multiple years of experience in every function, and this includes both direct management of specific functions, as well as second and third-tier management responsibility across all functional areas.
My subject matter expertise includes extensive work with analytics across a broad range of applications, including IT Service and Operations Management, Social Media Analytics, Business Intelligence and Predictive Analytics, as well as extensive experience with mobility technology (platforms, middleware, mobile device management and mobile applications management). With over twenty years of experience, I have extensive process knowledge across each subject area.
Significant accomplishments include:
- Driving a start-up with no initial products or customers to $200 million valuation in less than eighteen months (Metacode Technologies)
- Driving an expansion stage company from $10 million to $100 million in revenue in three years (Centigram Communications)
- Driving divisional revenues at a Fortune 500 company from zero to $200 million in revenues in less than eighteen months (SAP)
Specific software experience includes:
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Industry experience includes:
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Functional Expertise
Product Marketing: This is the core driver of my marketing experience, since technology companies are normally all about the product. Experience includes:
- Messaging and Positioning: defined competitive positioning and associated messaging driven by ecosystem analysis, targeting customers, channel partners, analysts, investors, and the media. The net result of this process has been a series of successful First-to-Market initiatives.
- Pricing and Packaging: defined and implemented packaging and pricing models as a competitive tool, my philosophy is that pricing and packaging should be designed around making the product easy to buy, not easy to sell. The revenue ramps I referenced earlier are proof that it works.
- Product Collateral: this covers a broad range of collateral (samples are available), including brochures (print and virtual), data sheets, product notes, product webinars, videos, and white papers.
- Competitive Analysis: This includes managing overall ecosystem analysis to identify direct and indirect competitors, channel partners, target verticals, and potential acquirers, and is an integral part of messaging and positioning.
- Sales Enablement: This includes Sales training, creating and maintaining sales guides, deploying product demos across multiple platforms, creating generic and verticalized sales decks and sales training videos, as well as delivering the actual sales training classes.
Demand Generation: Experience in creating and driving on and-off line demand generation initiatives (basic block and tackle, normally driven through Eloqua or Marketo), specifically:
- Outbound Marketing: I have created and implemented webinars, virtual events, direct marketing campaigns, and managing outbound telemarketing both in-house and through external agencies. As a specific example, I average close to 800 registrants per webinar, of whom 25% become opportunities and half of those become Sales Accepted Leads.
- Inbound Marketing: I have extensive experience in creating and managing web and print advertising, social media initiatives, search engine optimization/search engine marketing, and inbound telemarketing.
- Metrics and Analysis: I have established and implemented standardized metrics and procedures to track the performance of marketing initiatives via Eloqua and Marketo. I normally track leads through salesforce.com, but have also managed multiple separate agencies to integrate online lead-generation activity from blogs, media references, analyst coverage, as well as in/outbound marketing. This has always been a core driver of Demand Generation for me; if you can’t measure it, what’s the point?
Marketing Communications: Created and executed media and analyst tours for multiple global product launches. Experience includes:
- Advertising: Created, managed, and tracked campaigns for social media, television, radio, print, direct marketing, and web. This includes multiple global advertising campaigns, so I have extensive experience working with agencies in the U.S., Europe, Asia/Pac, and Latin America.
- Media Relations: Drove technology and business coverage from analysts and the media, created and managed corporate and product positioning targeting both audiences. I also have consistently played point on media tours.
- Tradeshows and Events: Managed tradeshows including pre-show marketing and awareness generation, on-site marketing incentive programs and post-show follow through, running product presentations and demos, as well as experience managing corporate/sales events and user group meetings ranging from dozens to over five thousand attendees.
- Branding: Developed complete collateral systems and branding guidelines in multiple languages, created and maintained blogs, wikis, and Twitter initiatives, and created press/investor kits. Metacode (as an example) was a complete rebrand, corporate, product, website, everything.
Strategic Marketing: Includes creating and driving Corporate and Product positioning initiatives. Experience includes:
- Corporate: Repositioned a start-up with no products or customers into a $200M acquisition target in less than 18 months. This included driving collaboration between the senior management team, the Board of Directors, external consultants, industry analysts, investors, and multiple marquee customers (Metacode Technologies).
- Product: Experience repositioning products from perpetual to an on-demand service offering, with a significant and immediate positive impact on sales, as well as repositioning products that took the company into an entirely new vertical market and drove the subsequent exit strategy (Astoria Software).
- International Marketing: Planned and executed multiple product launches throughout Europe, Asia/Pacific, Australia, Latin America, the Middle East, and the U.S. This covered Sales enablement, channel training, media campaigns, in addition to product localization, homologation, and type approval (Centigram Communications and SAP).
- Operations: drove international infrastructure requirements definition and implementation for entry into European and Japanese marketing, which was the core enabler that allowed the company to grow from $10M to $100M in revenue (Centigram Communications).
Product Management: Hands-on and managerial experience in product management for both software and hardware products. Experience includes:
- Documentation: Experience creating and managing Product Road Maps, Product Requirements Documentation, Market Requirements Documentation, Product Notes, Functional Specifications and Design Specifications.
- Product Development: Full PLM experience for both waterfall and Agile software development models, as well as defining Type Approval Requirements.
- Software as a Service: Extensive experience in migrating product architecture from perpetual to SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS delivery models.
Marketing Management: Experience building marketing departments from scratch, managing and integrating marketing departments through mergers and acquisitions, as well as managing large departments (75+) of experienced marketing professionals.
My specific management style is driven by transparency and continuous communications; it’s critical that there is strong internal alignment within the marketing team, since I require Marketing to play a strong leadership role in the company’s success.
I manage Marketing with an eighteen-month window (which normally maps to the outer edge of the product roadmap), with specific deliverables and objectives for the people working for me mapped to a twelve-month timeframe. There are annual goals, quarterly goals, and monthly reviews. I meet with each member of the team weekly, normally for thirty minutes, and the team as a whole meets weekly as well, normally for one hour. At the end of each quarter, I schedule a one-day offsite to review what worked and what did not and adjust the forward calendar accordingly.
I also make it a point to ask each member of the marketing team to define what they personally want to accomplish during the quarterly or annual review cycle (e.g. a product manager who wants to move to product marketing needs to be exposed to activities that are outside the scope of his normal focus, this becomes part of their objectives). The main intent is to create a strategic arc that can give their career a lift. This methodology has worked well in the past and is one of the more rewarding aspects of my work.
Experience
Click a company name below to read about my tenure there:
Vice President Marketing, Blazent Inc.
Senior Director Product Marketing, Sybase/SAP
Vice President Marketing, Astoria Software
Vice President Marketing, Prelytic Software
Vice President Marketing, Xamplify Technologies
Vice President Marketing, Metacode Technologies
Personal Info