Marketing Work That Actually
Moved the Number

They gave me a pen and a yellow pad and told me to create a marketing department. They started with a seed round of $2.5 million. By the time I left they had been given an additional $32 million in funding. I took a sales-only organization and built a marketing juggernaut — Marketo as the hub, connected to CRM, with scoring, nurture, and attribution all wired together. Pipeline became predictable. The team stopped flying blind.

This agency ran almost exclusively on Eloqua — good at it, but leaving real money on the table by not offering anything else. I proposed adding Marketo to their services. Convinced the first client, established the trust, trained the team members who'd deliver it. That bet paid off: the Marketo division grew until it represented 50% of our entire client base.

Large manufacturer, multiple product lines, regional reps who each had their own idea of what "follow-up" meant. I built a centralized pre-show and post-show program in Marketo that gave reps a consistent playbook while still letting them personalize for their accounts. Lead handoff to CRM was automatic. The ops team stopped chasing people for follow-up notes.

This one was a gut renovation. The existing setup had evolved organically — which is a polite way of saying nobody really knew what was talking to what. I mapped the whole thing, rebuilt the data model, rewrote the scoring, and reoriented the nurture programs around actual buyer behavior instead of just calendar cadences. Sales stopped complaining about lead quality. That's usually a good sign.

Legal is a different animal — long consideration cycles, high intent signals matter a lot, and the compliance requirements are real. I built a demand generation program that pulled in leads at volume while filtering for quality. At peak it was producing six figures of revenue per month. Marketo handled the nurture and routing; the team handled the close.

After Marketo wraps a link for click tracking, Outlook Bookings URLs break — the booking page either 404s or the redirect chain chokes on the encoded parameters. This is a known edge case that Marketo's documentation doesn't cover well. I traced the failure to the token encoding layer and rebuilt the link structure so tracking persisted without corrupting the downstream URL.

The ask was simple in theory: every marketing email should look like it came from the prospect's actual rep — name, title, signature, the works. The reality was that the existing setup had no clean way to pull that data at send time. I migrated the token architecture to use PMCF (Program Member Custom Fields), which let us resolve rep data per-record inside each program without polluting the lead database.

The instance had been live for two years but nobody trusted it. Campaigns were going out with bad data, scoring wasn't reflecting real intent, and the CRM sync was dropping records. I audited the full setup, rebuilt the data hygiene flows, rewrote the contact washing machine, and got scoring calibrated against actual closed-won patterns. Within a quarter the sales team was using the scores again.

A Fortune 500 financial services company — their Eloqua instance was generating leads, but nobody trusted the queue. The scoring model was generic at best — leads weren't being prioritized by actual buying signals, so the sales team was digging through noise to find anything worth calling. I came in, proposed a more targeted model built around their actual customer patterns, and rebuilt the scoring logic from the ground up. They got to their best leads faster. Sales stopped ignoring the list.