Industry: SaaS search solutions
Role: Director of Marketing (the role that became the foundation for fractional CMO work)
Duration: 2017–2021
Note: Director of Marketing was the senior marketing seat, in Australian usage. The CEO’s title was Managing Director, not CEO, which is the usual source of confusion. This was a full-time role, years before Cedar Collaborative existed, not a Cedar Collaborative engagement.
The starting point
When I joined Funnelback, marketing barely existed. A partner had once helped craft a core brand and some collateral, but the effort was brief and dated. Sales carried most of the weight: a talented salesperson moonlighted as a copywriter, but without design or marketing support, her work had no chance to scale.
Leadership was skeptical that marketing could drive revenue. It was seen as a cost center, if it was seen at all. Still, the mandate was clear. Australia was increasingly saturated, the UK team was faltering, and North America was the real bet. Success meant proving marketing could create focus, credibility, and growth.
Building it from scratch
I stepped into a hybrid role: strategist, operator, team builder. I was the first US-based marketing hire, joining a tiny Seattle office full of good ideas shipped over from Australia that didn’t quite fit the American market. Positioning, sales collateral, and the partner approach all needed rethinking.
Higher ed became the breakout vertical. We pitched the product team in Canberra on building a higher-ed template, cutting implementation time and giving sales a running start. Around that same push, targeted account-based campaigns made Funnelback look far bigger than it was: enough that one sales engineer came back from a prospect meeting convinced we had billboards in Minnesota. There were no billboards. The account had simply been hit with ads, email, and content everywhere it turned.
Instead of spending heavily, Funnelback invested in trust with higher-ed associations like HighEdWeb, showing up every year even on a small budget, which earned the credibility to outlast better-funded competitors. Underneath it, we migrated off a patchwork of SugarCRM, Mailchimp, and spreadsheets and onto Salesforce and Marketo, so sales and marketing could both actually see what was happening instead of walking into prospect calls blind.
The team itself was built the same way: generalists first, specialists added only when the work actually demanded it, with enough shared ownership that designers, copywriters, and martech staff covered for each other rather than working in separate lanes.
When the pandemic hit, the technology got repositioned as a crisis-communication channel. Customers moved to all-digital fast, industry partners got support, and the company doubled down on community at exactly the moment competitors pulled back.
What it produced
The higher-ed template became a repeatable engine for new business. The ABM approach gave a small company outsized visibility and credibility it hadn’t earned through size alone. Customers and partners stayed loyal through a genuinely disruptive stretch. And the growth was real and attributable to the work, not just to a good market.
The merger
Funnelback was acquired by Squiz during this period, which was both validation and a real trial. It proved the marketing had built something worth acquiring. It also meant colliding with a different culture and a different system, at a moment when teammates were anxious, leaders were stretched thin, and pandemic uncertainty made everything harder than it needed to be.
As the de facto senior marketing leader through the transition, the job became keeping communication open, steadying morale, and making sure what Funnelback had built actually carried into Squiz rather than getting lost in the integration. Messy as the transition was, the practices held up well enough to strengthen Squiz’s North American business afterward.
What carried forward
Scrappy ABM works: smart targeting can make a small brand look much larger than it is. Tool sprawl is worth avoiding on principle, not just for cost, since a stack that scales with the team beats one that needs replacing every eighteen months. Credibility comes from steering strategy and still showing up on the conference floor, not one or the other. And in a crisis or a leadership inflection point, retention and credibility are what buy you the time to figure out what’s next.
Funnelback was the training ground for what I bring to Cedar Collaborative clients now: building marketing where none exists, standing up systems under real pressure, running ABM that punches above its actual size, and getting leaders and teams through turbulence without losing what they built.