I developed this site to tell the story of me, share ideas, successes and failures related to my work in B2B sales and marketing. It is also a chance for me to geek out and use the site as my own personal content and engagement playground. Who knows what it might evolve into…..

Note: All the photos on this site were taken by me and my wife – so hope you enjoy them!

In the beginning…

For me the journey to being a tech and data driven business executive started back in high school. I loved math and science, in fact I graduated from Avon Old Farms with honors, including several AP college credits in Calculus and Physics. It was only natural that I was going to pursue a career in engineering, so I focused on getting into a top engineering program: Clemson University. Clemson was a major culture shock for me, I had classes that were bigger than my entire high school graduating class. I got lost in the shuffle and had way too much fun with ACC Football, Basketball and parties that seemed to start on Thursday and last until Sunday. But it was a good experience for me, because I learned that engineering was not my path – it didn’t inspire me enough to focus. So I shifted gears and moved closer to my family in CT and transferred to University of Hartford. There I got into the Business Communications program and learned I had a passion for media, communications and story telling. I loved creating original videos and images, telling stories that informed and engaged people in an interactive and entertaining way. So as I entered the workplace I put my resume out to PR and Advertising agencies across the Boston and New York City. That lead to the opportunity to join The Weber Group (which is now Weber Shandwick) in Cambridge, MA and my first taste of business-to-business (B2B) marketing.

The early years of my career…

The most interesting thing that happened to me while at The Weber Group, besides having some of the best mentors to this day (Patty Stone and Mark Sullivan), was I got my first taste for B2B technology marketing. The Weber Group had a pretty diverse set of clients, but one of their focus markets was B2B technology. I started out on the Sybase account (Sybase has since be acquired by SAP and is part of their enterprise and mobile database solutions). The science and math geek that I thought had left behind was brought back to the surface. This time I used it to connect the dots between technology specifications and the business use case it was designed to solve. I became effective at translating the features and functions my client’s developed and translated them into value propositions the average person could appreciate and understand. This in turn helped me craft messaging that appealed to editors, writers and event managers looking to grab the attention of business executives trying to solve business issues with technology. I had a great run at Weber working in the tech industry right in the middle of the dot-com boom 1997-2002. In addition to Sybase I also had the opportunity to work on the 3Com and Avaya accounts. However, in 2002 there was a bursting of the technology bubble and as a result PR agencies working in B2B technology got their budgets cut.

What happened next however was critical to developing my sales and customer engagement skills. In 2002 there was not much out there in B2B marketing, in fact I came very close to taking a job a Mt. Sunapee in NH doing customer relations, which paid less than unemployment, but it did come with all the free skiing I wanted and a pretty cool jacket. To this day I think about “what if” on that one. However, instead of become an underpaid ski bum, a friend of mine was working at company called IKON Office Solutions (which is now owned by Ricoh). My buddy sold me on the idea that I could make huge money selling fax machines and copiers, and since there was little else out there, I went for it. The sales training at IKON was great. They teach you how to craft sales presentations, deliver product demos and it was the first place I learned how the buying process really works. When I got into the field, I learned my first lesson in cold calling. No, I am not talking about on the phone, but rather what was called in the industry “pulling handles.” Imagine walking into an office and introducing yourself and your product cold, in person. You learn the art of customer engagement real quick! But more importantly you learn the art of rejection, which was the more valuable lesson. What I realized is”pulling handles” was inefficient for both me and the buyer. I could only cover so many prospects per hour and when I was engaging the buyer I was interrupting their already busy day. I shifted my effort to using the phone and email and learned they are more efficient and effective at reaching buyers. It was also more efficient and effective for my buyers to response to me when the time was best for them. I quickly realized that using the phone to gain access and permission, enabled me to establish communication using email, which allowed me to nurture customer relationships until they had new demand or were frustrated with the current supplier. Even though my boss insisted on going out on “ride-alongs” to “pull handles,” I was able exceed my quota targets and became the only territory rep in the New England to sell a high volume color machine. I learned a lot about customer engagement and selling in 2003, but selling copiers and fax machines was not my passion nor did it pay out as much as my buddy said (I think he was just looking for the referral bonus). So I quickly pivoted my first sales job into my next sales job, which was with a niche B2B demand generation agency called MarketOne in Maynard, MA.

IKON got me in the door at MarketOne, the head of sales (and co-founder) Spencer Harvey told me that anyone who can sell copiers and fax machines successfully can sell just about anything in B2B. Spencer became my next great mentor. He taught me all about how to source, qualify, nurture and close business with executives in large B2B organizations. And since the service we were selling was account-based cold calling for B2B technology companies, I learned a lot about methods and metrics to create a business development operations at scale, and across multiple regions. Spencer also taught me about how to be a consultant and prescribe solutions to my buyers to gain trust, which led to investment not only in MarketOne, but me. MarketOne gave me an opportunity to sell and deliver services to some of the biggest brands in the world like Sprint, BEA Systems and Motorola.

But, I wanted more, I was learning from my clients that there were more channels, that demand generations and business development took months or even years of nurturing to realize revenue. So, I had my first mutual break up with MarketOne and went corporate side to join BEA Systems (who also happened to be one my clients). That is where I met my next set of key mentors and learned how to create sales and marketing alignment through the use of people, process and technology.

My time at BEA Systems…

At BEA I was hired by Mary Wells and Jason Fiorotto in the Americas Field Marketing organization. Jason was my direct boss and Mary was the VP of Americas Marketing. Mary and Jason taught me all about how marketing can add value to sales. We were doing ABM (Account Based Marketing) before it was call ABM – because it was called, well….B2B Field Marketing – Duh! Anyway, I got to spread my wings and really dig into how to design and deliver cross channel marketing programs that had direct impact on target accounts and customer relationships; mainly because the sales team I supported sat right next to me and we became business partners. It was also where I met one of the smartest, and to this day one of my most trusted advisers in my career – Andy Carelli. Andy and I would spend hours talking about how we were going to transform sales and marketing. Sometimes we had those conversations over a heated game of ping pong. We had grand ideas for what really worked in terms of customer engagement and how to scale it. In fact to this day I will always recall one of Andy’s stories about how he landed key meeting with a CIO at a Fortune 100 company. Like any good sales rep/marketer Andy knew that engagement was all about knowing your audience, prescribing ideas/solutions that add value and helping them make decisions. Instead of trying to cold call or email with a bunch of buzzed up value prop mumbo jumbo, Andy took a newly published Gartner report, read through it, bookmarked and highlight key parts of the report that he knew the CIO would care about. He mailed it to the CIO as a priority FedEx and suggested that if the CIO wanted to learn more about how BEA could help, to go ahead and give Andy a call. This technique had over an 80% success rate to get qualified meetings with Sr. IT leadership. I always think about that strategy when designing programs for my clients today – I ask how will this email, phone call, social post, Web page add value to someone’s day and help them make a purchase decision?

Working on regional customer events and some limited mailing programs with reps like Andy was as great step in my career, but there was an opportunity to pitch an idea that I had for the business to the head of sales operations. It so happened the stars were moving into alignment as the head of Sales Operations at BEA – Patrick Quigley was thinking in similar terms. Patrick was actively looking to invest in a new layer of inside sales/marketing. Patrick had a vision to create a BDR (business development rep) team that would focus on top of funnel activity, which would then feed into either a inside sales or field sales team depending on the customer/prospect. I was thinking in the exact same terms after seeing a gap in the buying process working with the field sales team. Patrick was looking for someone with marketing experience that also understood how to sell and close. I was the perfect fit.

Creating the Americas Demand Center @ BEA

My role started out as an operations overlay to the newly formed BDR team in Dallas, TX and drive orchestration of the process, technology adoption and measurement. BEA happened to be one of the early adopters of Eloqua back when I started this position in 2006 and one of my primary goals was to integrate Eloqua with the BDR team using Siebel OnPrem as its CRM. The first hurdle was Eloqua being a new cloud-based tool did not have native integration for BEA’s instance of Siebel. So I gathered my business requirements and made a pitch to have the BDR team running on Salesforce.com and then integrate a more straightforward CRM-to-CRM workflow into Siebel. As I documented the requirements, I focused on the advantage of enabling the BDR team to use the wealth of data being generated by Eloqua to target and nurture over a long buying processes. I outlined that an integration between Eloqua and Siebel would limit this business requirement and there was more ability to replicate information with Eloqua and Salesforce. This is when I learned my first lesson of working directly with IT decision making, specifically a team that just invested in a huge upgrade of Siebel OnPrem. Even though I convinced my boss to sponsor the purchase of SFDC for the BDR team, the CIO said no more tools in the stack. Instead of giving up, I used this as an opportunity to do something that in the end become a more valuable lesson in my career. I developed a viable working model with the hand I was dealt. So we focused on enabling Siebel with Eloqua and that required some good old home cooking in the form of BEA WebLogic. I also negotiated with the CIO to provide dedicated resources to implement a more optimized user interface for the BDRs. It took about 6 months, but we got it done.

The BDRs at BEA were fully aligned with an automated lead management process that flowed from Web and Events, into Eloqua, and then into the BDR buyer management interface in Siebel. That interface optimized time finding and entering data vs. the classic tab view in Siebel (those who know Siebel, know what I am talking about). This drove a promotion for me to not only overlay and support the BDR team, but now I was given direct ownership of the entire Americas BDR team and also on a new global committee to expand and align this new sales and marketing alignment across all regions.

One if the biggest highlight from this newly optimized team, came from a lead at an account called JTV (Jewelry Television). This new shopping channel was in startup mode and was not on any sales reps territory plan. But thanks to the process we created, a qualified buyer made their way from downloading some content on the Website, into Eloqua, which then triggered a new lead in the BDR lead queue where we qualified, nurtured and converted one of the largest deals ever from a non-named account ($500K, compared to average first deal of $30K). Previous to this, Website visitors were manually sent to the sales team in spreadsheets to sort out and manually enter updates into CRM. For a solid year we had closed loop visibility into the lead management process coming out of marketing and into sales as qualified pipeline. We provided the regional sales managers with a growing and more reliable revenue pipeline. We also began the process of analyzing region by region what marketing efforts were working vs. where we were falling short or had activity gaps. It was a great time at BEA, but like the old cliche says all good things must come to an end. In came Oracle to buy BEA and that was the start of a 6 month dismantling of everything we had accomplished – thanks Larry!

The biggest Irony of the whole acquisition by Oracle is the management team at Oracle “killed” the Eloqua investment at BEA, they were using old school home grown database marketing techniques (why not they are a database company after all – so I could not question the decision). But that left me with few options as the dust began to settle. There was no concept of demand center orchestration working across sales and marketing teams, so there was essentially no team for me to join that would keep my career on the path I was on. I had to either take a step back in marketing or move to a traditional inside sales management role. I decided to take the severance package and roll the dice on the next opportunity. That next move happened to be back with MarketOne and developing a whole new service line from the ground up.

Back to MarketOne

Since leaving MarketOne in 2005, they had invested in a new service called EMS or Eloqua Managed Services. When I saw they had diversified their services, I reached out to my old mentor Spencer Harvey and pitched the idea of adding consulting to the current tactical service model. The concept was to enable planning, design, project management and lead management strategies to its portfolio. This opportunity gave me the chance to not only prove I can scale revenue operations within a single organization, but now I was pulling together delivery teams and creating operating models that can scale across dozens of clients, all operating at different stages of maturity.

It is important to understand that the opportunity to rejoin MarketOne was not met with 100% agreement from all the managers. But MarketOne’s CEO Fred Ewald saw potential in what I was proposing, and decided to give it a try, but I had to start off selling it myself. What happened next was the hardest, most exciting time of my career. My theory about customers needing help with lead management planning and design was spot on. Companies were investing in Marketing Automation Platforms (MAP) at an accelerated rate and that was changing the game for lead management processes and how marketing and sales were trying to align through the use of technology. Needless to say my time at BEA integrating sales and marketing around MAP and CRM was in high demand. I got to deliver consulting projects for Blue Coat, PTC, American Express, IntraLinks, Kimberly-Clark, AT&T, to name a few. More importantly, the other members of the MarketOne business development team saw the opportunity to sell my new service, so I began to enable them to pitch an integrated lead management service vs. the standalone MarketOne Tele and Eloqua services. That allowed me to take step back from selling what I was doing and focus on the strategy and services we were delivering. The consulting practice began to drive MarketOne’s Eloqua services revenue and opened up opportunities to add to our partner ecosystems and expertise in Salesforce, Marketo and others. I had had the privilege of working with some of the world’s top B2B brands to install a lead management framework, which has evolved into an integrated buyer management operations model (image below).

My final chapter at MarketOne included installing elements of the framework to turn around the sales and marketing engine at MarketOne. As a result MarketOne I showed how a revenue operation across sales, marketing and consulting could put them back on a rapid growth track. But it required more than just a sales engine, there needed to be whole sales changes to the entire MarketOne structure. Changes that the partnership was not ready to invest in and so myself and the partners at MarketOne decided to move in different directions and separate.

2019 and moving forward…

2019 is now become a transition year for me, I have decided to take the years of experience across sales and marketing and apply it back into the corporate world. 10 years in the agency world has been a great run and I can’t think of an environment where I would have learned more about how to create great customer experience across sales, marketing and services.

I look forward to coming back and updating my career journey very soon. I also look forward to spending some time this summer with my wife, three children, dog and sure the cat too. Thanks for taking the time to read the story of me, and hopefully you will enjoy some of the other content on the site and feel free to reach out on LinkedIn as I love to connect with those that have a passion for B2B customer experience.