About Me

CMO Leadership for SaaS Companies

My name is Tory and I’ve been helping B2B companies with their digital marketing initiatives for over 20 years.

10 years ago, I co-founded one of the first SaaS growth agencies in Texas and have been fortunate to work with innovative startups as well as larger companies such as Intuit and Kabbage.

I chose a career in marketing because I love the creativity side, the analytics side, combined with the competitive spirit of attracting potential buyers with sellers (not to mention the psychology behind it all).

I enjoy helping SaaS CEOs and founders free up their precious time and guiding marketing teams to overcome tough challenges they’re facing by assessing what’s broken and using a proven marketing framework to help them overcome those obstacles.

End result? More qualified leads (and more “high fives”). Goals met. Happier marketing & sales colleagues (plus more smiles from the CEO and board members).

Today's Marketing Department Challenges

Many challenges I see today across Marketing departments in SaaS Companies include:

Complacency – leaving campaigns on “auto-pilot” which hemorrhages ad spend and allows competitors to take advantage, happens more often than it should.
Poor attribution – the old adage goes “you can’t fix what you don’t know is broken”. Too often, SaaS companies aren’t identifying their lead source properly or understand what the lead costs are by channel.
Bad hires – even though they aced the interview, many times marketers “on paper” lack the experience, mental toughness, or competency to deliver high performing campaigns that lead to a rich pipeline.
Lack of loyalty – today we’re seeing a lot of marketing folks hopping from one job to the next with less than two years of service (often times a morale issue). The knowledge they take with them combined with the time to ramp up new resources is slowing down your growth.

How To Overcome Those Challenges

With a Fractional CMO, turn those challenges into opportunities:

Never “set and forget” – keep a careful eye on campaign performance weekly to identify trends, what’s working vs what’s not and test different ingredients of the campaign (e.g. audience, offer, design) to find the sweet spots.
Reliable reports you can confidently make decisions with – Use modern marketing analytics tools and dashboards with proper attribution in place . Know where your best leads come from and their costs. Be alerted when campaigns start to plummet so you can course-correct quickly.
Hire “A” players and let go of “B (and below)” players. Those showing potential can ramp up with training but if particular resources (internal and/or via an agency) continually underperform, then, a Fractional CMO can spot that and put a plan to resolve it quickly.
Improve marketing team morale with a proven framework that leads to more wins, combined with a marketing leader who celebrates high performers and gives credit when credit is due.

What You Can Expect When Working Together

Collaborative

After working in marketing for over two decades, I can relate to all levels of marketing expertise.

Speaking the same marketing language allows me to empathize with fellow team members, fostering a positive and
collaborative environment within your
marketing team.

Team members will know what’s expected of them as we focus on their strengths and keep morale as high as possible.

Focus

Too often marketing teams start a campaign that is half-baked and left unfinished or not thought-through.

This approach causes poor return on ad spend (ROAS) and profit leakage – but most of all, it’s slowing down your growth.

As your organization’s marketing leader, I will bring focus, clarity, and accountability to your Marketing Department that will yield stronger results.

Reliability

As a Fractional CMO, I am 100% responsible for all your
marketing outcomes.

I will show up to meetings on time, with a set agenda, and communicate what is expected of everyone on the call, eliminating any guesswork.

You will receive clear reports every quarter on money making marketing activities and see what’s planned for the next quarter.

Case Studies

Case Study

Acctivate

Challenges:

Sales & Marketing worked in silos
Lack of visibility of pipeline and understanding status of leads
Lack of lead magnets, downloadable content and email drip campaigns to push insightful content to prospects

Solutions:

Led efforts to Implement a modern CRM that tracked lifecycle stages of leads along with marketing automation
Tripled the amount of downloadable content, segmented by industry
Launched industry-specific lead nurturing campaigns, applied automation

Results:

24% increase of renewed opportunities, leading to over $61,000 in incremental revenue in three months
Doubled sales of one target industry within one year
Shrunk the time it took to connect with the prospects by over 50%

“Our guys used to be able to juggle 25-35 active opportunities each in a month. After Tory helped us roll out marketing automation tied to a CRM, we can now keep up with 40-60 a month. This has allowed us to close more deals in the same amount of time.”
– Dakota May, Sales & Marketing Director

Still reading? You really are dedicated to have scrolled down this far! Looks like you just encountered an “Easter egg”.

So if you’re still wondering what Tory is really like, he is a child of the 80s and loves 80s music. So much so, he started one of the coolest 80s cover bands in Texas called 80s Gadgets and plays nearly every weekend somewhere in the Dallas / Fort Worth area.

Here’s another real, albeit very different, bio of Tory when he’s not in a conference room or a Zoom call guiding SaaS marketing teams.