Ron Shulkin is the Founder of Fractional CMO Group LLC. We offer Fractional Chief Marketing Officer services for emerging digital technology startups, providing go-to-market strategy guidance and transformational roadmaps to companies of all sizes. We architect and execute product launch campaigns.

We help bring new offerings to market, identify optimal markets, & enable buyers to hear and appreciate your story. If you're confident your emerging offering will appeal to the right customer, we can help you identify the best markets, refine the most appealing message, develop a compelling story and create your go-to-marketing plan. Our comprehensive marketing and sales services include:Message Refinement: Defining Your Products' Purpose & Breakthroughs Discovery of Optimal MarketsStory Telling Development, Framing to Appeal to Buyer’s InterestsCreating Market Awareness, Credibility & SalesWe enjoy being a part of the Chicago incubator ecosystem, mentoring start up teams. We also Monitor, Discover & Share Information about Chicago area digital technology startups we encounterDownload the brochure for details below

Best Practice Marketing GuidanceDirecting marketing and sales efforts including the new Go to Market strategy (research & development), articulating messaging, identifying optimal “goldilocks” markets, managing and guiding sales efforts, guiding the transition from inbound to outbound marketing, refining sales cycle elements, creating content, literature development, email campaigns, landing pages, social presence, DB marketing, personas, business development and sales; Driving revenue with initial beachhead clientsGroundBreaker: Real Estate Investor ManagementGroundBreaker helps real estate investment firms streamline their capital fundraising and investment administration. Our sponsor-branded platform offers simple, intuitive workflows for the modern professional real estate investor and enables customers to scale without adding to overhead. Clients experience higher levels of investor satisfaction, a growing average investment allocation, and a higher percentage of repeat investments from their limited partners and participating members. GroundBreaker is the most easy-to-use, comprehensive, cutting edge technology available for professional real estate investors. GroundBreaker BreakthroughsThe Groundbreaker team brings a remarkable legacy of real estate investment experience and a deep understanding of the regulatory and compliance ecosystem. As a result, our institutional-grade technology offers easy-to-use, intuitive, and affordable workflows to direct issuers, including real estate developers, hard money lenders, private equity firms and owner operators.

Chicago Financial Technology Incubator. Developed the Go-To-Marketing strategy, multi-channel communication effort, social presence, & tactical marketing program. Led the transformation from incubator to large event production sponsor. Created an iterative, scalable and portable revenue stream. Coordinated a group of senior FinTech experts from varying disciplines, channeling their energies toward a common purpose. Delivery of aggressive advocacy program for market visibility and credibility. New revenue $100K/event results FinTank is an incubator that helps startups partner with the larger global FinTech community. FinTank recruits innovative startups, works with sponsors, and provides investors with first look and deal flow opportunities. "If you're into FinTech you should be in the FinTank" I brought digital marketing strategies and tactical execution supporting the incubator's transition to live event marketing.

Best Practice Marketing & SalesSpearheading 3radical's launch into North America. Creating the US Go to Market Strategy. Building Partner and Direct Channels. Designing and executing the US lead generation marketing program and social presence. Content creation, webinar series launch, email campaign design, database marketing program, event enhancement, social presence. Identifying optimal vertical markets like Gaming, Restaurant Chains, Publishing & Technology. Driving revenue from initial beachhead US clients. 3radical’s Voco platform enables marketers to architect their consumer audience’s journey. Real-Time, Interactive Digital Marketing EngagementEach consumer is treated like an individual. Messaging is always individually tailored to the consumer, and contextually relevant to their segment and their location. This results in the brand’s tremendous influence over the audience’s engagement workflow. Brands can design the journey using story boards, prepare responses for any contingency and encourage engagement. All this while monitoring, responding and rewarding each consumer as they exhibit certain desirable behaviors. All in Real Time. This means they also can collect first party contact information & behavioral data in real time. And monitor consumer activity and locations in real time. 3radical’s Voco platform provides interesting calls-to-action, tapping into game mechanics, encouraging specific behaviors and engaging challenges.

It is my pleasure to introduce this exciting emerging technology to those tasked with creating audience engagement. EngageSciences offers an easy to use, remarkably flexible, platform enabling the creation of beautiful, socially infused, mobile enabled, integrated digital marketing experiences.

Spredfast provides a Social Relationship Platform that empowers enterprise brands to build lasting relationships by creating great social experiences. We enable engagement in social dialogs. I've thrived here in an ever changing landscape amidst growth, mergers and a dynamic product offering. I've focused on Chicago companies and more recently Not For Profit organizations in all of North America. My recent new clients include cars.com.

Vice President for Global Direct Sales and Channel Management. The CogniStreamer® Innovation Portal is an idea management software tool for the enterprise. It also serves as a Knowledge Management Portal and is, in fact, truly a social network supporting Innovation. Our offering enables internal collaboration, and with easily managed security, brings in feedback from partners, vendors, customers and the public.In the US I enjoyed working with new clients like Philip Morris International, Vesuvius, RainKing and many others. During my tenure we've grown the sales team. Our channel efforts have led to taking on productive partners in India, South America and innovation consulting leaders in the US. My marketing efforts, including publications with wide exposure, webcasts and web site refreshes have clearly made CogniStreamer a viable choice for large organizations when they select a technology backbone to support their innovation pursuits. Consistent sales growth and over achievement. Grew sales over 100% every year.The CogniStreamer® Innovation Portal has been used successfully by clients for over ten years. International companies like Bekaert, Cytec Industries, Doctors without Borders, Atlas Copco have benefited from adopting the software as their mechanism to nurture a culture of innovation. Considering that idea management (and collaborative tools in general) need to be global, The CogniStreamer® Innovation Portal is ideally positioned to manage multi lingual, multi cultural environments like no other software tool.

Leasing Software

I have sales responsibility internationally for this webcasting software company. It is very exciting helping organizations benefit from this new digital media suite of technologies including video, audio, slides and interactive attributes. I've enjoyed helping Austria Telekom, Cantos, Allen & Overy, IBM, Cisco, NEC, AT&T, EDS, Halliburton, Ernst & Young, Deloitte, Marist College and many others use multi-media to communicate their corporate communications, marketing and training messages.

During my tenure at Recognition Systems, later Protagona, eventually acquired by DoubleClick, I enjoyed helping organizations acquire and deploy customer relationship management (CRM) systems through out their enterprise. My team and I helped Sprint, Disabled American Veterans, Orbitz, Phillip Morris, Bertelsmann, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines and other groups use our software to manage large amounts of data to optimally market their offerings.

Protagona, later acquired by DoubleClick, sold a CRM system (a neural network pattern recognition software for marketing). My team was focused on creating new vertical markets for the company.

Selling Very Large computing devices to financial service companies in Chicago. Sales to the Chicago Board Of Trade, ABN AMRO and others. These systems supported large databases for mining. Coupled with professional service engagements, these were the industries first focus on data warehouses.