California State University San Marcos

Creating impact for mission-driven organizations and conscientious enterprises through powerful marketing.

As experienced marketing experts we at Root & Leaf have the knowledge and skills to make an impact for every company, brand, and organization who partners with us. The idea behind our agency is simple: What if we used our passion and experience in marketing and focused on helping organizations doing good?

Root & Leaf

Co-Founder

My role, as part of the go-to-market team, was to raise awareness for the ZenHub brand while driving new user acquisition through demand generation, content marketing, public relations, field marketing, and partner marketing.

ZenHub

VP of Marketing

Leading the end-to-end marketing efforts for BrandVerity, a provider of brand protection software to hundreds of brands including several Fortune 500 companies. Hired to establish the company’s first marketing department and create a repeatable and scalable marketing process. This included building a team with dedicated roles for demand generation, content creation, and design. 

Responsible for positioning, messaging, demand generation, product marketing, PR, advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), marketing automation, sales enablement, events, email marketing, social media marketing and day-to-day operations of the team.

• Architected the company’s first sales and marketing funnel which defined the optimal lead success path, established lead stages, instituted lead scoring and multi-channel lead nurture programs and created commits for leads, pipeline, and revenue.

• Launched the demand generation function from scratch including the establishment of lead commits, pipeline and revenue targets. Achieved 130% of marketing attributed revenue goal in 2017.

• Created an email list building methodology that delivered 28,000 highly targeted new contacts to our sales team at a cost of less than $.30 per lead. Email quickly became a top performing channel for new Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) generation.

• Responsible for full revenue stack reporting to the executive team including sales, marketing, and extension revenue. Interim leader of the sales team while company searches for it’s first Vice President of Sales.

• Instituted a metrics-driven approach to marketing including detailed reporting to the executive team of unit economics such as Monthly Recurring Revenue, Annual Recurring Revenue, Lifetime Value, Customer Acquisition Cost, payback period and more.

• Led business operations initiatives including improved metrics reporting, adoption of the OKR goal framework, establishing an explicit decision framework (RAPID), and company culture activities.

BrandVerity

Led the overall strategy, tactics, and programs to drive awareness, demand, and revenue for HelloSign, a leading Y Combinator SaaS software company backed by Google Ventures. Responsible for all aspects of marketing, including positioning, messaging, demand generation, brand marketing, product marketing, PR, events, advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), marketing automation, social media marketing as well as building and leading the marketing team.  

• Work closely with Product, Sales, Engineering and Customer Support teams to define go-to-market strategies, product positioning, pricing and promotion.

• Define and track key performance indicators and SaaS revenue metrics to measure marketing success.

• Own all inbound lead generation activity, conversion funnel, and hand-over to sales.

• Built the marketing team from scratch with dedicated functions for demand generation, public relations, content, online marketing, marketing operations and developer evangelism.

• Implemented Marketing Automation strategy with newly established Marketo instance including email marketing, lead scoring, lead nurturing, landing pages, lead flow and revenue analytics.

HelloSign

Head of Marketing

Served as Director of Marketing at Dynamic Signal, a social media advocacy platform start-up. Responsibilities included marketing team leadership, strategic planning, brand development, demand generation, content marketing, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), online advertising and marketing automation.

• Hired and trained marketing team to execute multi-channel marketing plan that delivered 310 marketing qualified leads in the first 90 days resulting in several new customer wins.

• Built in-house marketing function including marketing automation, sales enablement, content marketing, demand generation, online advertising, SEO/SEM, and tradeshow management.

• Authored and executed a comprehensive content marketing plan that doubled relevant web traffic during Q4 of 2013.

Dynamic Signal

Director of Marketing

Consulting and advising several start-ups including Apiary (acquired by Oracle) and PowerAssure on topics ranging from product marketing, go-to-market strategy, demand generation, content marketing, and how to hire exceptional marketing teams.

During this time, I also designed and coded www.getfirebrand.com, a Python/Django software app for quickly building Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) demand generation plans that automatically calculate MMR, ARR, CAC targets and more.

Various

Interim VP of Marketing

Director of Marketing at PubNub, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) start-up. Responsibilities included building and managing the marketing team, demand generation, marketing automation, marketing and brand strategy, online advertising, community building, event marketing and social outreach.

• Increased new freemium customer sign-ups by establishing a marketing automation system to actively manage and measure over 20 landing pages, email nurturing programs, display, retargeting, and Adwords campaigns.

• Worked with the Developer Evangelist Team on content strategy and execution which resulted in an increase in organic website traffic.

• Led the executive team’s effort to create the “Real-Time Network” brand, establishing a clear and concise market position for the company.

PubNub

Served as Director of Marketing at Acacia, Inc. (acquired by Medela, Inc.), a leading medical device company selling neonatology products to hospitals and group purchasing organizations through direct sales representatives and national distributors.

• Responsible for Product Marketing including building a new brand architecture across a 500 SKU product portfolio. Duties included customer research, product naming, establishing a clear value proposition and product messaging resulting in an increase in private label sales.

• Managed online marketing efforts including the development and search engine optimization (SEO / SEM) for three web properties, leading to first page listings for 83% of the targeted keywords through organic search and an increase of 152% in unique visitors in just 8 weeks after launch. 

• Developed a marketing funnel and sales process map to improve tracking of leads, appointments, product evaluations and conversions throughout the sales cycle. 

• Wrote and executed an annual strategic marketing plan leading to 32% gain in market share across several product categories in the brand portfolio during my tenure. 

• Developed marketing metrics and analytics to improve marketing spend efficiencies that saved the company $83,000 while growing market share by 32%.

Acacia, Inc. (Acquired by Medela)

Founder of LiveWire Marketing, an award-winning marketing agency – responsibilities included developing strategic marketing plans for over sixty companies over an eleven-year period in such industries as technology, online services, medical device, manufacturing, business services, education and solar power. 

Client Work Highlights: 

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA EDISON
2008 - 2010 Devised a strategic marketing plan and created a winning brand for a ground breaking $874 million solar rooftop program resulting in the program reaching its five year sales goal in just its second year, saving the company $75,000 in marketing expenses. 

INSTITUTE OF REAL ESTATE MANAGEMENT (IREM)
2006 – 2009 Developed marketing programs and provided show management for Conference and Tradeshow with a $500,000 budget. Took over marketing duties in 2006, immediately boosting attendance by 15% to over 600 attendees after 3 consecutive years of decline under previous marketing leadership.

LiveWire Marketing

Vice President of Marketing

Served as Senior Art Director at Foote, Cone & Belding (Since merged into DraftFCB) and was responsible for visual design, web design and development for several high profile medical clients including Toshiba Healthcare, WebMD and Genentech. 

• Pioneered a new category of marketing tactic called “e-mericals” – Flash based web applications used in email marketing, growing this business segment from $0 to $450,000 in six months. 

• Managed agency and contractor resources, ensuring strategic alignment on brand, art direction, time lines and feasibility for implementation.

Foote, Cone & Belding

Senior Art Director

Served as Associate Marketing Manager for Mallinckrodt. 

Responsibilities included leading work groups within the marketing department in research, creative execution, launch campaign materials, event management and coordination of new marketing initiatives.

Dan LaBelle