• Led Inside Sales team generating $100 million in new business opportunities for ecommerce, web, data, messaging, identity resolution, and analytics. This is often in partnership with strategic alliances Adobe, AWS, Google, Salesforce, Snowflake, and Qualtrics.• Managed Pursuit Management team handling 10-15 RFPs per month, each worth at least $1 million in TCV.• Spearheaded the launch of a new global GTM strategy focused on solving client problems through CXM.I was promoted to this role to lead sales strategy for new business. Merkle, a dentsu company, is a 12,000-person global business with net revenue of $1.3 billion, servicing clients in retail and consumer goods, financial services, health and non-profit, high-tech, B2B, entertainment, hospitality, auto, more.

DEG integrated into Merkle as part of the dentsu network in 2020.I led Foundational partners across Data, Analytics, Creative and Messaging at Merkle by ensuring we and our partner meet goals to grow the relationship and our collective businesses. To meet these goals I work with stakeholders across our organization including strategy, delivery, client services, marketing and support. My strong relationships within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud network gave me a solid foundation to build upon by growing our partnerships across the Salesforce ecosystem including Mulesoft, Datorama, Tableau, Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and more. I expanded to manage partnerships beyond Salesforce including ActionIQ, Amperity, Braze, Clinch, mparticle, Oracle (Eloqua), Sitecore, Snowflake, Qualtrics, and Tealium. I also have experience with ISV-type partners including Attentive Mobile, Bluecore, Coherent Path, Digioh, MovableInk, Ordergroove, and more.

In this role I established a framework to evaluate and score potential partnerships to prioritize among the many alliances that desired to partner with DEG. I also created a framework to measure the agency and the partner on a quarterly basis to determine success. The criteria in both of these removed personal bias towards favoring any one partner and provided direction to the company. DEG officially merged into the Merkle organization where I continued this role. At DEG I managed partnerships across all practice areas including Commerce and CX for partners such as Contentful, Coveo, Mirakl, and Sitecore.

In this role I was able to flex my entrepreneurial skills in an intrapreneurial way, by creating a businesses within a business to establish a practice area from scratch.I created and led a team globally recognized for our thought leadership and work in one-to-one marketing. The Relationship Marketing practice area was one of the largest at DEG, specializing in digital database marketing, specifically email marketing and text messaging, for major brands including AMC Theaters, Noodles World Kitchen, Crocs, the Gap brands, AMC Theatres, Hallmark, Gamestop, Party City and hundreds more. Established in 2007, we originally partnered with ExactTarget who was later acquired by Salesforce. The practice began as only me and grew to around $25M in annual revenues. I led the vision for the practice and worked with leaders across our delivery teams for implementation and migrations, campaign management, support and training, as well as ongoing projects for clients. I assisted in significant sales opportunities, acted as a point of escalation and oversight when needed, and mentored and managed a large team.My strategic team was responsible for continuous growth within client accounts by collaborating with our analytics team to deliver insightful and relevant recommendations. In addition, our team ensured clients were maximizing their investment in the Salesforce technology stack. Our team worked to ensure cross-cloud collaboration with other practice areas including commerce, service, sales, web, and more, to create results for our clients.Under my leadership DEG was a Salesforce Marketing Cloud (aka ExactTarget) partner for more than a decade and is one of the largest SFMC service provider teams in North America. I led a team that resulted in DEG being named ExactTarget Partner of the Year three times (2016, 2011, 2008) and ExactTarget Consulting Partner of the Year (2013).

I joined DEG as employee number 7 and wore many hats in this role. I served as the primary client contact during the entire lifecycle of the project and ultimately responsible for the success of the project. I would lead discovery meetings with clients to determine requirements, assess current processes, recommend developments to streamline work-flows, and write documentation including site maps, creative briefs, timelines, and project plan documentation.I provided direction to a graphic design team to develop concepts for web sites, intranets, extranets, dashboards. I communicated with engineers to architect projects, create use-case scenarios and work-flow diagrams. I performed testing of our projects, created planned work grids to resolve modifications, fixes and enhancements. I would oversee the launch of projects including coordination for domains, emails, SSL certificates, hosting. I succeeded in this role because of my ability to multi-task and prioritize between ongoing projects and short-notice items, delivering successful projects for satisfied clients.

Monthly column contributor for Marketing Land regarding email.http://marketingland.com/author/cara-olson

We designed and built web sites for small businesses in Kansas City. I used technologies including Adobe Photoshop to design the creative and technologies such as Macromedia Dreamweaver and Coldfusion to code HTML by hand.After buying out my business partner (late in 2003), who chose to pursue other career opportunities with a family run business, I sold my company to DEG at the beginning of 2004. While it was one of the most difficult decisions I have ever made it also turned out to be one of the best.

After starting here as the receptionist out of college I worked my way up to a graphic design position. I created websites for community banks in this role. However, this experience was much like the movie Office Space and not the right fit for me with clients that were overly conservative. I later found the speed of an agency was a better fit for me.