Things that worked, and why they worked.

When I came on to own GTM Strategy for VMware's new Cloud Platform, the team had all its marketing focused on multi-cloud customers — because that's who the product solved problems best for. Reasonable assumption. Except that multi-cloud customers represented about 8% of the addressable market at that point.

I did a win-loss analysis and started digging into conversations with Sales. What I found was that highly regulated industries — financial services, healthcare, government — had just as strong a need for the product, because they couldn't easily refactor legacy applications for a single cloud provider. We pivoted. Messaging, targeting, the whole thing.

A growing infrastructure services company wanted to launch a new recurring revenue service. When they first described it to me, they called it "pool cleaning." That phrase was going to be a problem.

After digging into market data and talking to customers, I realized they were leading with the most commoditized part of their offering — the part any 18-year-old with a pool skimmer could replicate. What customers would actually pay a premium for was preventative maintenance on the sensitive, complicated aquatic systems underneath. Catch small problems early before they become expensive ones.

We rebuilt the messaging from scratch, created the sales materials, trained the team, and launched. The service was different enough from anything else in the industry that it hit a nerve immediately.

Launching VMware's Kubernetes product line meant going after Cloud Administrators. One problem: "Cloud Administrator" wasn't really a job title yet. People called themselves things like "Datacenter Admin" or, in one memorable case, "Cloud Monkey." Traditional targeting was not going to work.

So instead of trying to find people by title, we targeted by buyer intent. We identified the sites and resources people typically researched before making this kind of purchase, and bought advertising on their Kubernetes-specific articles. We found our buyers where their curiosity already was.

When I joined Dell's desktop virtualization effort, these solutions were deeply technical — engineers explaining them in engineering language to buyers who needed business language. I worked with our engineers to translate functionality into customer benefit and then identified the specific industries — healthcare, education, government — where these solutions solved real, expensive problems.

Messaging went from technical to relevant. We built vertical-specific materials, got pilot customers speaking for us, and fully enabled Sales. The business grew from customer #1 to $1 billion in four years.

I was asked to overhaul the user experience for SaaS demos, trials, and purchases across 12 VMware business units. Each had built their own process. The result was a confusing mess for customers and low conversion rates for everyone.

Getting 12 groups to give up autonomy required a business case they couldn't argue with. I built one, based on the conversion rate improvements we should see. Once they were on board, I built a shared dashboard that measured conversion through common gates by app, so everyone could see exactly where customers were dropping off. We made changes gate by gate, together.

A new service launch had the right messaging — I was confident in that from pilot customer conversations. But the pipeline wasn't moving. Something was wrong downstream.

I ran an AI-assisted analysis on the anonymized pipeline data and found a pattern: everything above a certain dollar threshold stopped dead at the same point in the sales process. Sales conversations revealed why: many customers were holding buildings for only five years before flipping them. Large maintenance investments were hard to justify when you weren't keeping the asset.

I built two tools: a tiered proposal framework (life & safety vs. value maintenance vs. nice-to-have) and a "cost of waiting" asset that quantified what small problems become when nobody catches them. The repair cost differential was up to 42x.

Trying to establish credibility in desktop virtualization as a new entrant meant reaching technical practitioners who hadn't heard of us and weren't looking for us. We had excellent white papers. Nobody was finding them.

I partnered with a well-known influencer in the space to produce a series of genuinely funny office-environment videos, then put them on a hub alongside our technical content. Practitioners came for the videos, stayed for the white papers. It sounds a little ridiculous and it worked extremely well.