Andra Sas
Verified Expert in Marketing
Marketing Expert
Barcelona, Spain
Toptal member since October 13, 2023
Andra is a seasoned marketing expert with 12 years of experience, specializing in crafting global integrated marketing strategies aligned with core business goals. Her expertise spans digital marketing, partner marketing, customer journey management, events, and PR across the tech, oil and gas, and real estate sectors. With an entrepreneurial mindset, strong work ethic, and a passion for collaboration, Andra delivers measurable results through innovative marketing strategies.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Brand Building
- Content Marketing Strategy
- Funnel Marketing
- Go-to-market Strategy
- Integrated Campaigns
- Marketing Leadership
- Marketing Mix
- Team Management
Work Experience
Head of Global Marketing
Starmind
- Led the company rebrand and relaunch in collaboration with the CEO and founder and following the strategic direction pivot. Successfully captured the company's brand purpose and connected closely to the needs of its core target audience.
- Updated the marketing infrastructure and team to support scalability goals. Aligned with GTM teams, integrating the strategy marketing channel mix launch, lead scoring model launch, funnel reporting, and multi-touchpoint lead conversion.
- Orchestrated and executed a successful growth strategy that resulted in over 170% YoY growth, establishing a strong presence in new markets while meeting demand-generation goals in target markets.
- Achieved a 40% increase in MQL to SQL conversion rates through strategic focus, a unique value proposition, and targeted core solutions.
- Led quality optimization efforts resulting in over 70% top-of-funnel conversion rates (NNL-MQL-SAL) by refining targeting in paid channels and implementing effective nurturing strategies.
- Streamlined cross-functional team collaboration across marketing, sales development representatives, sales, and customer success to achieve end-to-end visibility, trackability, and accountability, ensuring consistent and impactful results.
- Cultivated valuable relationships with industry analyst leaders like Gartner, IDC, and Forrester to enhance market presence and credibility.
- Implemented a highly scalable digital engine that consistently generated a marketing pipeline, boosting the company's consistent growth through marketing channels.
Director of Global Digital Marketing & Campaigns
Starmind
- Spearheaded the development of a robust digital infrastructure, enabling the launch of a highly effective awareness and demand generation strategy.
- Revitalized the company's messaging and positioning to target a focused market, persona, and industry, creating a new market category.
- Designed and executed an integrated marketing awareness and lead generation strategy aligned with sales goals, overdelivering on MQL and SQL targets.
- Launched successful PR and communication initiatives at both global and regional levels, cementing the company's reputation as a leader in the industry.
- Managed relationships with marketing vendors, including inbound marketing agency partner selection, PR agency, event and content vendors, global analysts, and market influencers.
- Established streamlined campaign processes, critical promotional assets, and digital marketing KPIs, ensuring effective measurement of results.
- Coordinated partner, industry, and internal events and joint customer content creation to enhance brand recognition and generate demand.
Global Head of Customer Lifecycle Marketing
IWG
- Led the transformation of the end-to-end customer journey for key audiences, resulting in a more relevant and engaging experience across all touchpoints.
- Optimized the automated touchpoints journey by implementing personalized customer actions and integrating marketing automation into a new CRM, improving results tracking and visibility.
- Fostered cross-functional collaboration between marketing, sales, and operations teams to align priorities, goals, and actions toward an integrated customer-centric approach.
- Led the marketing efforts of a joint marketing and sales pilot project directly overseen by the CSO and CEO, resulting in a potential monthly revenue impact of €11 million. It is currently the global way of selling across IWG.
Head of Marketing for Brokers & Corporate Accounts
IWG
- Designed and executed an integrated global marketing strategy targeting brokers and corporate accounts, collaborating with sales, field marketing, and regional leadership teams to drive lead generation and revenue growth.
- Led the IWG Global Workspace Survey campaign, generating the largest flexible workspace report in the industry based on over 16,000 business leaders' responses. It led to significant media coverage and thought leadership positioning.
- Incorporated the company's multi-brand strategy into all marketing efforts, increasing brand recognition among customers, prospects, and partners.
- Optimized cross-audience touchpoints to gain insights into promotion performance and improve targeting for all engaged marketing channels, leading to increased efficiency and ROI.
- Created sales enablement content tailored to decision-makers globally, equipping sales teams with the necessary tools to close deals and drive revenue growth.
- Secured a strategic global partnership with key business organizations to expand the company's brand and service visibility among C-level financial executives, increasing enterprise-level opportunities and revenue growth.
Senior Manager | Cloud & SMB Global Campaigns
Veeam
- Led a team of 30+ employees as the local site manager in Bucharest. Simultaneously managed global cloud campaigns and a team of three marketing professionals focused on SMB and cross-segment campaigns, social media, and IT professional communities.
- Developed, executed, and optimized cross-audience and cross-segment digital marketing campaigns. It comprised end-to-end campaign implementation that aligned global and regional goals and tracked outcomes based on defined KPIs and budget allocation.
- Collaborated with regional marketing teams and partner and customer campaign managers to customize messaging and expand reach to all targeted audiences through geo-targeted campaigns for globally renowned events, such as AWS Summits.
- Built strategic cross-segment campaigns focused on lead generation, awareness, education, and product and feature adoption. Managed a quarterly budget of over $150,000 and created campaign personas based on market research and business targets.
- Headed Veeam's cloud marketing campaign, promoting cloud alliance partner solutions from Microsoft, AWS, IBM, and managed cloud service providers. Generated 135,000 net new domains through cloud campaigns in 2018 and achieved a 213% YoY growth.
- Developed and implemented the company's employer branding strategy and campaign in Romania, leading to employee growth from 20 to over 350 in less than two years.
- Spearheaded demand generation and awareness building for the largest backup and recovery industry conference, achieving 2,541 participants and a 3.5 million reach.
Marketing & Communications Manager
Prospectiuni
- Defined the marketing and communications strategy based on C-level expectations and built a high-performing team to support its success.
- Led a nationwide awareness and educational campaign on seismic prospecting for hydrocarbons, resulting in unblocking three seismic projects amounting to €44 million, each with an average crew size of over 400 employees in the field.
- Managed the planning, development, and implementation of marketing, communications, and PR strategies and activities for Prospectiuni Group and Tender Group.
- Developed and implemented communication plans for crisis management to overcome the challenges of the shale gas crisis.
- Managed the annual marketing budget and established vendor relationships for conferences, promotional materials, and media.
- Established a digital presence and developed marketing materials for Prospectiuni Group and Tender Group companies.
Project History
Starmind Brand Relaunch
Relaunched the Starmind brand in line with the company's strategic solution pivot to evolve its perception from a vitamin to a pain killer.
The brand relaunch aimed to capture the brand essence, purpose, competitive advantage, and personality while also clearly communicating the value it can deliver to enterprise companies in its target markets.
Done in close collaboration with the company's CEO and founder, the relaunch encompassed a company-wide collaboration, external stakeholder interviews, and an iterative approach to defining an identity that would position Starmind in the knowledge collaboration category, increase the understanding of its solution from 10 to 80% (website-based), and unify brand elements to communicate a cohesive story.
Customer Journey Update
Redefined the IWG way of working with a customer-centric focus to boost sales conversions and customer retention.
The company's leadership brought together critical sales, marketing, and customer success representatives to lead an initial audit of these interactions and drive its transformation.
Taking the lead from the marketing side, I collaborated closely with the head of sales and the company's CSO to map, optimize, and update all touchpoints across the customer journey. Success was measured daily at the individual touchpoint level, emphasizing sales call conversion to site visits and agreement signing. Call listening, sales team training, call transcript development, and supporting asset development were required to achieve the desired results.
While the project was initially launched as a sales pilot across one call center, it had a potential monthly revenue of €11 million. The new working method was adopted within a few months across the entire company.
Scalable Marketing Team and Structure Setup
Revitalized the marketing function into a vital contributor to the company's revenue objectives, resulting in an impressive 40% enhancement in MQL to SQL conversion rates.
To optimize marketing resources and maximize output, our approach involved building a marketing team across key pillars of our strategy while leveraging external services as needed. We restructured the marketing strategy, incorporating new channel activations, such as paid advertising, SEO, nurturing, and automation. We achieved real-time campaign tracking and personalized nurturing by implementing a lead scoring model and CRM nomenclature, resulting in improved conversion rates. Additionally, we aligned marketing and SDR handover, emphasizing transparency and proactive communication to seamlessly transition leads from MQL to SQL stages in the conversion funnel.
Our strategic approach, unique value proposition, and targeted core solutions led to a remarkable 40% increase in MQL to SQL conversion rates. The quality optimization efforts also led to top-of-funnel conversion rates above 70% (NNL-MQL-SAL) by fine-tuning targeting across paid channels and implementing effective nurturing strategies.
Education
Bachelor of Business Administration Degree in Finance and Entrepreneurial Studies
University of New Mexico, Anderson School of Management - Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
Certifications
How to Create an Effective Marketing Strategy
Semrush Academy
Inbound Certified
HubSpot
Skills
Core
Marketing Mix, Brand Marketing, Digital Marketing, Product Marketing, Public Relations (PR), Funnel Marketing, Marketing Budgeting, Content Marketing Strategy, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Go-to-market Strategy, Campaign Strategy, Digital Marketing Strategy, Digital Marketing Best Practices, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), Brand Strategy, Marketing Leadership, Sales, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Account-based Marketing (ABM), Marketing, Social Media Marketing (SMM), Marketing Communications (MarCom), Organic Social Media, Content Marketing, Content Creation, Google Ads, Google SEO, Performance Marketing, Marketing Operations, Customer Success
Platforms & Tools
HubSpot, Salesloft, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Business Models
SaaS
Technical
SQL
Other
Integrated Campaigns, Startups, Business Administration, Entrepreneurship, Project Management, Finance, Team Management, Distributed Team Management, Rebranding, Demand Generation, Team Leadership, Communication, Sales Funnel, Digital Agencies, Event Marketing, Website Redesign, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Revenue & Expense Projections, Brand Building, Partnerships, Stakeholder Management, Thought Leadership, Revenue Modeling, Sales Support, Customer Service, Customer Journeys, Sales Strategy, Integrated Marketing, Sales Operations, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Jira, Miro, Business Strategy, Marketing Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Server Message Block (SMB), IT, Production, Awareness Campaigns, Crisis Management, Category Management, Sales Enablement, Data Analytics, Strategic Planning & Execution, People Management, Key Performance Metrics, Channel Management, Lifecycle Marketing, SEO Consultant, Post Sales Consulting
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