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Laura Sheard
Marketing & Innovation Director at Noble Foods Ltd
Professional Background
Laura Sheard is a highly accomplished marketing business leader with extensive experience in the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) and Leisure/Tourism sectors across the UK, Europe, AIME, and APAC. With a career marked by her passion for people leadership, Laura has a proven track record in developing talent and building highly engaged teams that strive for excellence. Her strategic approach centers around analyzing market and brand performance while setting clear and compelling strategies designed to either turnaround declining performance or drive accelerated growth.
A key aspect of Laura’s success stems from her ability to blend creative disciplines with commercial acumen. She excels in areas such as brand identity, positioning, architecture, and communication, effectively pairing these skills with commercial levers like pricing strategies and meticulous return on investment analysis. This holistic approach enables her to deliver exceptional results and maintain a healthy Profit and Loss (P&L) for the organizations she has been part of.
Education and Achievements
Laura Sheard holds a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Food Marketing Economics from the esteemed University of Reading, where she graduated with a First-Class degree. This solid educational foundation has equipped her with the analytical and practical skills needed to excel in her marketing career, particularly in the food and beverage sector.
Throughout her career, Laura has held several senior roles that demonstrate her leadership capabilities and marketing expertise. She is currently the Marketing & Innovation Director at Noble Foods Ltd, where she has significantly impacted the company's marketing strategies and innovation initiatives. Prior to this, Laura was the Sales & Marketing Director for Australia and New Zealand at Merlin Entertainments. Her contributions in this role helped enhance brand visibility and integration across diverse markets.
Previously, Laura held the position of Sales & Marketing Director at Legoland Windsor, also part of Merlin Entertainments, where she was instrumental in driving visitor engagement and developing targeted marketing campaigns. Her experience at Dairy Crest as Head of Marketing and R&D for Dairies saw her leading cross-functional teams to innovate and enhance product offerings. Moreover, she held several positions within Coca-Cola and Mars, two globally recognized brands, where she honed her skills in brand management and marketing communications.
Achievements
Laura's career is characterized by her relentless drive for excellence and her ability to achieve and exceed business objectives. Some of her notable achievements include:
- Successfully leading brand revitalization efforts at Merlin Entertainments, significantly boosting customer intrinsics and overall visitor satisfaction.
- At Noble Foods Ltd, Laura spearheaded innovative marketing initiatives that successfully grew market share in a highly competitive sector.
- Throughout her time at Dairy Crest, her strategies resulted in a remarkable turnaround in brand performance and heightened market presence.
- During her tenure at The Coca-Cola Company, she managed significant brand portfolios and was pivotal in launching successful marketing campaigns that contributed to the brand's strong positioning in the beverage market.
- At Mars, she managed multiple high-profile brands including Galaxy and Twix, consistently driving growth and profitability through strategic marketing and innovative product positioning.
But it's not just her professional achievements that stand out; Laura is also known for her dedication to developing talent within her teams. Her commitment to coaching and mentoring the next generation of leaders has cultivated an environment where creativity and collaboration thrive. Her approach fosters a culture of continuous improvement, ensuring that her teams not only meet but exceed their goals.
In summary, Laura Sheard embodies a blend of creativity, strategic insight, and commercial acumen that makes her a standout leader in the marketing industry. Her impressive background in various senior roles across prominent companies highlights her versatility and depth within the marketing realm, ensuring she is well-positioned for ongoing success in the ever-evolving marketplace. Her commitment to excellence in both her work and her team’s development ensures that she will continue to make significant contributions to the sectors in which she operates.
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Clay works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Clay offers several powerful features including:
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- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
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- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Clay is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Clay is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Clay as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Clay offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Clay takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Clay encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Clay work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Clay is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Clay is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Clay is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Clay offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Clay offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Clay for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Clay accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Clay offers extensive integration capabilities. Clay introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Clay supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Clay also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
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Clay makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Clay's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Clay is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Clay stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Clay excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Clay is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Clay offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Clay is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Clay's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Clay has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Clay is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Clay beneficial.
Clay offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Clay offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Clay's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Clay offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Clay focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Clay also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Clay offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
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Clay is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Clay helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Clay's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Clay has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Clay a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Clay's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Clay's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Clay has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Clay's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Clay as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Clay eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.