Promoted as a proven leader driving global marketing strategy and execution across diverse regions, with a track record of fostering cross-functional collaboration and delivering exceptional business outcomes. As a strategic partner to sales, I lead a team that generated over $300M in pipeline across three years, directly contributing to and leading marketing's GTM for our global growth strategy. My approach focuses on data-driven decisions, innovative marketing programs, and building strong relationships across the organization. I’m passionate about empowering my team, enhancing our marketing impact, and aligning efforts with corporate objectives to drive sustained success.

As the head of marketing for Field, Partner, Events and Global Demand, Digital, Content, and Social functions, I lead a remote, worldwide team that directly supports sales organizations across North America, Latin America, Europe, Middle East, and APAC. My team develops strategies and executes on plans to enable sales’ achievement of budget targets. Marketing disciplines within my organization include direct field and channel partner marketing, social and content marketing, event marketing (spanning hosted User Conferences, roadshows, and industry conferences), and regional demand generation. Select accomplishments include:● My organization’s campaigns delivered >$125M in pipeline impact, accelerated >$10M in deals closed, and grew social engagements by >400% in a growing market● Reinvigorated support strategy for sales teams that closed the gap between sales and marketing orgs, including a launch of Voice of Sales and integration into sales enablement functions● Embraced the distributed team and established the first team charter, clarified roles/responsibilities, managed upward to champion and receive resource support● Effectively managed organization through change (multiple executive changes within short timeframe), retaining top talent and developing individuals for career growth● Completed Vista Consulting Group’s Marketing Leadership Accelerate program, a highly selective and competitive recognition by both Ellucian and Vista executives

The Kephart Agency provides consulting services for businesses in need of marketing expertise across concentrations, who are looking to streamline and scale operations, and those focused on driving business development. For individuals, The Kephart Agency will help you define and create your brand then consult on these essentials: your resume, LinkedIn profile optimization, and interview prep.

Led diverse workforce of six with local and remote employees. Directed redevelopment of corporate approach to field marketing, webinars, and sponsorship programs to support demand generation and sales. Set three-year vision for the department and aligned priorities: 1) deliver scaled support models, 2) align operations to reduce operational overhead, improve reporting, and develop best practices to increase lead acquisition and conversion, and 3) deliver sponsorship program to add revenue streams. Select achievements include: ● Re-envisioned event marketer role. Drove marketing training to increase impact on demand generation and field sales goals, achieved alignment and reorganization of task ownership, increased team accountability, and saw associate engagement increase within six months to top-three marketing wide by investments in personnel development.● Owned flagship events sponsorship program. Refocused efforts to center on sponsor-as-customer experience that improved partner relations, drove mind-shift around sponsorship approach to account for costs, revenue and margins, streamlined operations, and realigned the go-to-market and selling approach. Efforts culminated in +$70K YoY in gross revenue in the first year.● Drove vendor relationships and agreement negotiations across event technology, service providers, and third-party partnerships. Spearheaded negotiation of webinar tech agreement (On24), reduced costs by 20% annually and maintained current functionality. ● Reinvented relationship with Association of Fundraising Professionals to reduce spend yet increase presence across membership base through launching net-new scholarship programs, support for emerging leader program, and continued premier engagement level at annual events.● Effectively managed upward to increase departmental visibility at Executive level through creation and delivery of weekly executive-level impact readouts, and direct influence and contributions to AOP/LRP planning cycles.

Managed the Alexa event marketing the team (two FTEs) who drove event marketing campaigns including the creation of Alexa Dev Days, a worldwide educational series that teaches developers to code for Alexa. Developed strategies for Alexa’s immersive experiential event marketing approach to the smarthome focused CEDIA tradeshow, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and Europe's Consumer Electronics tradeshow (IFA) then owned cross-business execution of the plan including orchestration of multiple Amazon businesses including international teams, business development, product-specific developers, and more. This work earned press headlines of "Alexa wins show" and introduced Alexa to hundreds of thousands of customers. Established centralized process to scale management of incoming speaking and sponsorship requests which enabled the management of 300% request growth year over year. Owned strategy and execution for paid-sponsorship of industry conferences to increase thought leadership position within the voice market segment and managed vendors to enable delivery of Alexa activations worldwide.

Developed end-to-end product marketing campaigns to drive increased book sales for Amazon Encore, Kindle Worlds, & Kindle Scout. Created the program marketing strategy for customer acquisition and product sales then led tactical execution for emerging Amazon Publishing programs. With limited budget resources, increased author awareness and acquisition for the platforms through automated campaigns across Amazon.com and Kindle Direct Publishing, through social media, and via strategic paid-sponsorship investments. In parallel, consulted with editorial and design teams to influence book selection and packing in a way that would resonate with the target audience while maximizing Amazon.com merchandising placements. Last, secured dedicated merchandise campaigns for book releases and mass-market advertising for titles published under the three programs and reported the overall health of marketing activities weekly.

Managed go-to-market strategies and execution of plans for books published under the Montlake romance, and Lake Union contemporary and historical fiction imprints. Instituted forward-thinking marketing strategies and long-lead development of holiday promotional campaigns which increased unit sales for the romance imprint by tens of thousands of units. Represented authors to the respective imprint which improved the annual NPS from 6.82 to 8.26. Influenced editorial leaders to adopt a long-term author branding view vs. individual products with unique packaging traits and streamlined workflows. Reduced production cycle time by 12 business days which created downstream efficiency gains for editorial and production teams.

Established and executed the Community Marketing function within the independent publishing organization including Kindle Direct Publishing and CreateSpace. Led author community outreach strategy that increased top of funnel author acquisition and brand awareness for the self-publishing brands of Amazon. Owned six marketing functions. Expanded a sponsorship program to develop business opportunities that drove over 10% of new memberships. Established event marketing activations that garnered media attention (incl. Guardian, NYTimes, etc.) and directly influenced self-publishing’s growth into a mainstream publishing opportunity for authors. Evangelized Amazon’s self-publishing services at over 90 events to thousands of authors. Drove market research that established baseline metrics to measure yearly awareness growth. Developed a speaker training program to scale evangelism reach resulting in over 20 trained presenters worldwide. Product managed and enhanced the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award that resulted in submission growth from 5K to 20K, improved customer feedback from judges and subsequent customer survey ratings, and directly improved the ability of editors to identify the highest quality submissions which led to the discovery of multiple Amazon bestselling books.

Added scope to previous role that included management of five direct reports (local and remote based), management of variable labor (two individuals), and institution of KPIs to measure business health and employee performance. Increased consultation to leadership and across business development teams to raise the bar on new-to-market services, wrote and edited customer facing messages (website text, marketing emails, standard customer service blurbs), and coordinated with Community Engagement team to manage escalations in forums. Oversaw the creation of a standard content review process and managed the remote team of content reviewers who processed tens-of-thousands of titles to ensure the books met content guidelines.

Established the department that managed customer relationships for those who experienced difficulties with CreateSpace resulting in escalations to corporate VPs, Jeff Bezos, the Better Business Bureau, or which resulted in litigation. Built systematic escalation paths based on Amazon retail best practices within Salesforce CRM tools. Managed communications with escalated customers, investigated and reported root cause to senior management, and drove projects to ensure the issue was resolved for all customers. Data-mined surveys to identify improvement opportunities, led projects to address, trained and coached employees on customer communication best practices, and advised leadership on business operations and the impact of proposed changes including the rebrand of Booksurge to CreateSpace.

Created standard operating procedures to enable scalable order fulfillment for editorial service products that enabled rapid capacity growth. This became the foundation for automated workflows used at CreateSpace. Wrote press releases and marketing copy for author book launches, managed a team of vendors who completed editorial services, and established a communication model to keep customers informed while their services were being completed.