Facilitators From Our Previous Event

one of the first 50 books written on social media strategy. Borges is an IBM Futurist and recognized by Onalytica as a Top 100 Artificial Intelligence Influencer, as well as a Marketing Insider Group Top 60 Marketing Speaker. Borges is a regular contributor to Social Media Today and Business 2 Community.

By focusing on how marketing delivers on the end-to-end customer experience, her work has helped the marketing departments of small start-up companies, mid-sized growth firms and Fortune 500 firms alike achieve noticeable improvements in brand positioning, lead generation and revenue growth. Prior to joining Frost & Sullivan, she was the vice president of client services at the Bailiwick Company, where she led Avaya’s Unified Communications lead generation program for the product’s global launch, created a “center of excellence” in demand generation and earned the CMO’s ACE award. Achievements for other clients in the telecommunications, hi-tech, software and professional services sectors include leading an integrated marketing plan that increased customer retention from 85% to 98% in two years; enabling a high-tech software client to gain strategic marketing insights via survey research, as well as identify over 200 customers willing to advocate as references for the company; and directing a comprehensive communications and marketing plan following a three-company merger, resulting in 100% employee support and achievement of corporate sales goals. Nicole received a Masters in Business Administration in Management at New York University, Stern School of Business, and received a Bachelor of Science in Communications, with a concentration in Advertising and a double major in French from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She lives in Cranford, NJ with her husband and two children.

Most recently, Chris was the Chief Marketing Officer at Validic where he led global marketing, Business Developement and strategic partnership efforts growing Validic to the healthcare industry’s “de facto standard” for accessing data from mobile health devices, wearables, in-home devices and patient healthcare apps. He led the go-to-market initiatives generating 84% of total annual sales revenue.

Prior to that, Chris led Global Marketing at Allscripts, helping to drive dramatic growth ($225M to $1.2B) across several business solutions for physicians, hospitals and post-acute organizations (customer base: 180,000 physicians, 1,500 hospitals and over 10,000 post-acute organizations around the world). Additionally, Chris has led global Marketing & Strategy in Oral Care technology and Vision Care technology for PE portfolio companies; the work led to successful “event” transactions.

Chris was recently awarded the Chief Marketing Officer Growth Award among over 800 global CMOs, for “demonstrating leadership in new strategies and programs resulting in significant company growth.”

This past year, Chris was a featured thought leader speaker at several major health technology events: Digital Health Summit in Sydney, Australia (keynote), SAP’s Global Innovation Event in Silicon Valley, The Mobile Patient Summit in the Research Triangle Park, NC; Frost & Sullivan’s Digital Transformation Summit; MedTech Summit in Cannes, France; Digital Health Thought Leadership Summit in London.

Chris received a Bachelor’s degree in Economics & Business from Westmont College and excelled in the UNC-Chapel Hill Business School Accelerated Executive Program.  He enjoys basketball, golf and time with his wife and two children.

As leader of CMG’s Transformation Practice, Russ helps client marketing organizations create and maintain a laser focus on how, when, and where they create value for their customers and enterprises. Working with Fortune 500 CMOs and their teams, CMG brings the promise of agile marketing to life, unlocking the potential of the talent, technology, and capabilities embedded in all of our organizations, to break through the chaos and complexity of today’s markets.

Since cofounding CMG in 1998, Russ has combined his background in engineering and marketing to work with clients in the telecom, technology, healthcare, and financial services sectors effectively deal with their disrupted markets. The success drivers of this work led to the development of CMG’s agile marketing and transformation practice seven years ago. Built on the belief that people matter, because it is people, at all levels, who lead the transformation of business potential into reality. This belief governs everything we do in helping clients win with human-first solutions to their most pressing challenges and opportunities.

Russ and his team are excited to help people enjoy the work they do, collectively and individually, and the environments they work in. With our clients, we help create continuous cycles of improvement to enable work to grow more effective, meaningful, and efficient. Based in CMG’s headquarters in Durham, NC, Russ has a BS and MS in electrical engineering from Drexel University, a MBA from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is a Certified Agile Leader.

Lauren is a talented executive with a proven record of building business processes and scaling teams at high-growth organizations. She is focused on execution, building strong relationships with customers and colleagues, and creative marketing and communications. Lauren really enjoys problem-solving and finding creative, actionable solutions with customers and partners.

Lauren approaches life professionally and otherwise with a spirit of adventure and fun, whether it is finding new ways to optimize growth at businesses or learning how to whitewater kayak.

Rick has managed the strategic marketing direction of major B2B clients for the last six years at The Mx Group, a full service digital and demand agency located near Chicago. He’s currently leading the development and implementation of web, marketing and e-commerce initiatives for Zekelman Industries (and it’s ten operating divisions), Spraying Systems, Deublin Company, and Cox Automotive. His background includes more than 20 years of business marketing experience across multiple sectors, including business services, technology and industrial products.

Content marketing is an area Rick specializes in, having managed the creation of multiple, award-winning sales materials, videos, impactful interactive content tools, and websites. He greatly enjoys leading and participating in ideation sessions, expanding his knowledge base, and gaining new insights from fellow marketers. Rick holds a B.S. in advertising from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MBA from Purdue University. If he had more free time, Rick would build furniture or teach a blues guitar class at the School of Rock.

development and communications experience, with disciplined training in consumer packaged-goods. He brings curiosity and fresh thinking to spark positive change and deliver results, with strong track record of growing businesses and brands. John has extensive healthcare and consumer marketing experience with a variety of top brands, including: AT&T, Boston Scientific, Capella University, Delta Airlines, GlaxoSmithKline, Hefty, Kmart, Merck, the New Jersey Anti-Tobacco program, and Park Nicollet.

John joined Meridian in 2012 and oversees all marketing, branding, outreach, advocacy and corporate communication efforts. He has been a key leader at Meridian helping to grow and establish the brand as leading behavioral healthcare platform in the U.S. Meridian, today, has 8 brands in 5 states spanning over 30 acute psych, residential, outpatient and medication-assisted treatment programs.

In addition to his experience at Meridian, John established the NJ Anti-Tobacco program as leading social marketing program and managed the record-setting integrated Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) launch of Fosamax from Merck. He also led the successful turnaround of Capella University’s $60MM B2B program and achieved double-digit growth of a leading Glaxo over-the-counter brand in the highly competitive analgesic market.

In his current capacity as Vice President of Marketing at Meridian, John is passionately committed to closing the drug addiction “treatment gap.” Today, of those who need treatment, 89% go untreated. To help close this gap, John is utilizing digital marketing to engage prospective patients, and serve those in need.

John received his BA in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his MBA in Marketing and Strategic Management from the University of Minnesota Curtis L. Carlson School of Management.

John is a native Minnesotan and is married with two children. When not working, John is either ginning up a new house project, coaching his kid’s sports teams, or honing his tennis game.

Through a successful career in technology sales, Kurt learned what it takes to reach B2B decision makers. As a VP of Sales for a global software company, Kurt was the executive sponsor of a Salesforce.com rollout. That’s how he learned what it takes to get salespeople to adopt new tools and techniques. That knowledge led to him launch his own Salesforce consulting business in 2008. When LinkedIn went public in 2011, Kurt recognized that LinkedIn would be the next great sales technology and that it would require expert training. He pivoted his business and now has over 10,000 hours of experience training corporate sales teams like CenturyLink, Ericsson, and TelePacific Communications.

Kurt is the creator of the Social Selling Boot Camp and is a member of the National Speakers Association. He frequently speaks at corporate sales meetings and conferences like Dreamforce, Sales 2.0, and LinkedIn’s Sales Connect.

I enjoy learning about new technology and I enjoy meeting people that are passionate about what they do. It inspires me every day here in the Valley to meet young entrepreneurs, to learn what drove them to create new products and how it’s going to change the landscape of their industry.

BIO

Niraj is the Managing Director of Position2, an innovative digital marketing agency that accelerates demand using integrated content creation, digital advertising, web design/development, email marketing automation, social media, and analytics. Position2’s clients include B2B and B2C, VC funded startups, and Fortune 500 multinational firms.

After graduating with his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and from Chicago Booth with his MBA, Niraj began his marketing career in product marketing at Hewlett-Packard in California. He then moved to Sun Microsystems where he led teams in product marketing and market development. The world of start-ups beckoned and he moved on to lead marketing at startups – first as VP of WW Marketing at AccelGraphics, where he was part of the executive team that took the company public. In his next positon, he was VP Marketing at 3Dconnexion – a spinout from Logitech. Later, he decided to step into his first business development and sales role as Executive VP of Sales at Calsoft, an engineering services company. This introduction to services led him to start Accel2Market, a marketing strategy and demand acceleration services firm which focused on clients in the B2B space. Accel2Market joined forces with Position2 in 2011 to pursue clients together.

Recently, Niraj helped develop a new Digital Marketing and MarTech Lab course for MBA students at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and was a guest instructor for the debut class in the fall quarter of 2017. He is looking forward to continuing this in 2018.

Nathan is a Senior Product Specialist with a focus on great storytelling and video marketing. He has worked with hundreds of customers helping them formulate video production and marketing strategies with a focus using the data that video views generate to maximize ROI.
As a former Brightcove customer, Nathan sees the video marketing process through the customers’ eye having lived and breathed the same challenges and successes as them.