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Sharon Osen
CEO - C Suite Advisor - Growth Driver - Value Creator - Branding Expert - Innovator - Transformative Leader - Coach and Mentor
Professional Background
Sharon Osen is a highly accomplished and customer-focused business leader recognized for her ability to generate growth and build brand value across a diverse range of multinational corporations, mid-stage companies, and startups. With a wealth of experience in various leadership roles, including Chief Marketing Officer at Perricone MD and Senior Vice President of Global Marketing at La Prairie, Sharon epitomizes what it means to be a trusted advisor in the business world. Her career trajectory is marked by significant positions at globally recognized firms such as Colgate Palmolive, L’Oreal, and Gillette, where she has played pivotal roles in driving brand strategies and executing marketing initiatives that create lasting impact.
Sharon’s extensive knowledge spans a multitude of sectors and brands, allowing her to connect deeply with industries ranging from beauty and wellness to finance and hospitality. Her diverse experience includes esteemed brands such as Estée Lauder, HBO, JPMorgan Chase, and Unilever. This broad spectrum of exposure has cultivated Sharon's keen ability to act as a change agent; she has the innate talent for knowing when and how to pivot strategies to revitalize brands, inspire her teams, boost sales, and enhance profitability. By swiftly determining key strategic priorities and identifying critical business drivers, she has consistently led organizations to achieve ambitious goals.
Education and Achievements
Sharon Osen boasts an impressive educational background, having earned her MBA in Marketing and International Business from the renowned Columbia Business School. Prior to this, she received her Bachelor of Science in Communications from the esteemed Cornell University. This robust academic foundation has been instrumental in shaping her strategic marketing mindset and approach to brand leadership.
In addition to her formal education, Sharon is a prominent speaker on various platforms, including the Beauty & Money Summit and The Luxury Interactive Conference, where she shares her insights on marketing innovation and brand strategy. She has also graced events such as the CMO Club Innovation Conference and discussions at the Luxury Marketing Council, establishing herself as a thought leader in the marketing domain.
Her expertise has attracted the attention of prestigious media outlets like The Harvard Business Review, where she has been interviewed on her unique insights into the dynamic field of marketing. Beyond her speaking engagements, Sharon's commitment to fostering the next generation of leaders is evident as she serves as a mentor for The Ember Company. Furthermore, her affiliation with organizations such as CEW (Cosmetic Executive Women) and Content Evolution speaks to her active engagement and leadership within the marketing community.
Notable Career Roles and Contributions
Sharon has held several influential positions throughout her career, each allowing her to leave an indelible mark on the brands and organizations she has worked with. As the CMO at Perricone MD, she was instrumental in redefining the brand's marketing strategy and enhancing customer engagement. Her role as Senior Vice President of Global Marketing at La Prairie further showcased her ability to manage high-stakes projects and execute luxury brand strategies effectively.
Earlier in her career, Sharon cultivated her skills at prominent companies where she held various titles, such as Worldwide Director of Marketing at Colgate Palmolive and Vice President at Desgrippes Gobe. Her expertise also extended to consultancy roles, where she provided strategic insights for branding initiatives at firms like Jackson Hole Group and Siegel & Gale. As the CEO of BRANDIFFERENCE, a consultancy focused on helping brands establish a distinctive market presence, Sharon continues to influence the marketing landscape positively, implementing innovative solutions for businesses.
Sharon's diverse brand experience includes impactful collaborations with leading organizations such as American Eagle, Credit Suisse, Malin+Goetz, and the Ritz Carlton. This array of professional experiences positions her uniquely to understand the nuances of various markets and customer demographics.
Leadership and Vision
As a leader, Sharon Osen embodies a results-driven approach, emphasizing the importance of strategic thinking and brand authenticity. Her leadership style not only inspires her teams but also encourages collaboration and creative thinking. Sharon consistently seeks to understand market trends and customer needs, paving the way for innovative marketing solutions that resonate with audiences across different sectors.
Her track record speaks volumes about her capability as a marketing leader who can effectively maneuver through the challenges of today’s rapidly changing business landscape. With a firm commitment to enhancing brand visibility and engagement, she drives initiatives that align with both the company's values and market demands, positioning brands for sustained success in the competitive marketplace.
Contributions to the Community
Sharon's contributions extend beyond her corporate achievements. By engaging with the community through her mentorship, speaking engagements, and leadership roles in various organizations, she plays a critical role in empowering others. She is invested in nurturing talent and fostering an environment that supports growth and innovation within the industry. Her initiatives strive to inspire upcoming leaders, providing them with the tools and insights they need to succeed in their marketing endeavors.
In summary, Sharon Osen is a distinguished business leader whose career is characterized by her unwavering commitment to excellence, brand growth, and customer satisfaction. With her extensive experience in marketing, her educational background, and her leadership roles across various sectors, she continues to leave a remarkable footprint in the business world, ensuring that brands not only thrive but also resonate meaningfully with consumers.
Achievements
Tags
Customer Focused Leadership, Business Growth, Brand Value Creation, Marketing Expertise, Strategic Brand Management, Luxury Marketing, Global Marketing Leaders, Change Agent, Mentor in Marketing, Innovative Business Strategies, Marketing Education, Columbia Business School Graduate, Cornell University Graduate, Beauty Industry Leader, Experienced CMO, Marketing and Creative Services Partner, Senior Director Marketing, Marketing Executive,
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Clay is a relationship management platform that serves as a personal CRM, helping you organize and deepen both personal and professional relationships. It functions as a beautiful rolodex and CRM available on iPhone, Mac, Windows, and web, built automatically to help manage your network efficiently. Unlike traditional address books, Clay centralizes all your contacts in one place while enriching them with additional context and features to help you stay thoughtful and connected.
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:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
- Network Strength: Visualizes the strength of your relationships relative to others in your network
- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
- Smart Search: Allows you to search using natural language like "People I know at the NYT" or "Designers I've met in London"
- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- 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.
Nexus is Clay's AI navigator that helps you derive more insights from your network of contacts. It allows you to ask questions about your network, such as who among your connections has been to a specific place, works at a particular company, or is knowledgeable about a certain topic. Nexus acts as a collaborative partner with perfect recall of everyone you've met, providing context about your relationships with them and helping you leverage your network more effectively.
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.
Clay isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Clay instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Clay is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Clay can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
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.
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