Mark Kilens

TACK

TACK ⛵️ is a media and go-to-market firm helping startups and scaleups match how they go-to-market to how people buy. Modernizing how businesses go-to-market to create, capture, and convert demand into revenue. 

Companies like Commsor, ZoomInfo, Swoogo, Coursera, Aiven, CloudBees, Audette, Terminus, and more partner with TACK to evolve how they go-to-market using a People-first GTM approach. 

Its mission is to match how companies go-to-market to how people buy by making every experience and interaction with a business more human.

TACK Network is a GTM media network of content and resources all about B2B go-to-market. We produce original shows and authentic stories giving some of the brightest people in B2B go-to-market the support they need to share stories and ideas.

TACK Insider is for marketers and entrepreneurs looking to learn how to go-to-market to match how people buy today. Members learn how to use seven different growth strategies that are all part of the People-first GTM Model.  The membership and community comes with hundreds of resources, weekly masterclasses, and personalized coaching.

TACK GTM is Uber for GTM Leaders. An on demand go-to-market services firm specializing in People-first GTM strategies and services that grow pipeline and revenue. We partner with CEOs, Founders, and Marketing Leaders to design and deploy People-first GTM strategies.

Chart your go-to-market with TACK.

CEO and Co-Founder

Stage 2 Capital

The Stage 2 Capital Catalyst supports early stage B2B software companies in scaling their businesses by combining Venture Capital and Go-To-Market, empowering founders with hands-on coaching from an unrivaled network of go-to-market leaders.

Limited Partner and Advisor

Airmeet

Airmeet helps marketers book more meetings and create pipeline faster using premium webinars and online events. 

Airmeet's Event Experience Cloud is an all-in-one premium webinar and event platform helping B2B businesses generate more pipeline and revenue.

I lead Airmeet’s global marketing team and are working to advance the event-led growth movement.

Chief Marketing Officer

Drift

Content and community are key ingredients to accelerating a business's revenue, delivering more customer value, and building an enduring brand.

My team's partner with Drift's marketing, sales, and customers success teams to develop the right content, programs, and experiences to accelerate revenue, deliver more value to our customers, and grow Drift’s brand.

Get your 100% free Drift Insider account. https://www.drift.com/insider/

Check out a couple of Drift's newest digital books. https://www.drift.com/books/

The Conversational Marketing Blueprint: https://www.drift.com/books/conversational-marketing-blueprint/

The Guide to Conversational ABM: https://www.drift.com/books/conversational-abm/

Learn something new on Drift's blog: https://www.drift.com/blog/

Vice President of Content and Community

HubSpot

I was the VP of Marketing and founder of HubSpot Academy.

HubSpot Academy is a global learning community and platform with millions of people in more than 200 countries.

It’s a tremendous growth driver of demand and interest - signing up and certifying tens of thousands of new HubSot users and community members every month.

We focused on converting free users into software revenue and helped retain and grow that revenue by building onboarding, expansion, and community programs.

I had the honor and privilege to lead a team of extremely passionate, motivated, and intelligent people. 

HubSpot Academy's purpose is to educate and inspire people so that we, together, transform the way the world does business.

We created content and education to teach people the inbound methodology and how to use the HubSpot platform to grow their business.

Vice President of HubSpot Academy

HubSpot Academy was launched in May 2012 after running it as an experiment for 18 months. 

I was responsible for creating the Inbound Methodology with Brain Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. 

I updated the original methodology in early 2018 to HubSpot's new Inbound flywheel model. 

We created content and education to teach people the inbound methodology and how to use the HubSpot platform to grow their business.

HubSpot Academy's purpose is to educate and inspire people so that we, together, transform the way the world does business.

Director of HubSpot Academy

I was a Senior Inbound Marketing Consultant at HubSpot. I worked with B2B and B2C businesses helping them create, execute, and measure their inbound marketing goals and strategies.

Senior Inbound Marketing Consultant

I joined HubSpot as an Inbound Marketing Consultant. I trained businesses how to use HubSpot to get found, convert leads, close leads into customers, and analyze their results.

Inbound Marketing Consultant

SalesQuest

I was responsible for email marketing campaigns, building prospect and customer databases, social media, inbound marketing, lead generation, the website, and helped create new products and services.

Director of Marketing

I managed a team of market research analysts that created and maintained a library of more than 850 Fortune 1000 and Global 500 company profiles. 

I was responsible for all inbound marketing activities, SEO, social media, and marketing campaigns.

Manager, Marketing and Operations

I performed research on Fortune 1000 companies which included investigating their technology implementations, org charts, budgets, financials, and operating models.

Research Analyst

CEO and Co-founder of TACK ⛵️ & ClubPF ⚓️ | People-first GTM Champion

Mark Kilens is the CEO and Co-founder of TACK, a media and go-to-market firm helping startups and scaleups match how they go-to-market to how people buy. TACK modernizes how businesses go-to-market to create, capture, and convert demand into revenue.

TACK helps B2B organizations transform how they grow using its proprietary People-first GTM model and approach. TACK'S mission is to make every experience and interaction with a business more human. Companies like Commsor, Swoogo, ZoomInfo, Casted, and UserGems partner with TACK to unite their go-to-market teams to grow more efficiently and effectively.

He previously was CMO of Airmeet, a leading virtual and hybrid event platform. He oversaw Airmeet’s global marketing team responsible for brand, demand, lifecycle, and product marketing.

Before that he was the VP of Content and Community at Drift where he led the brand, content, creative, and events teams. He oversaw Drift’s community, Drift Insider, which has 65,000+ members, and Drift’s FLASH, RevGrowth, and HYPERGROWTH events.

Prior to joining Drift, he served as VP of Marketing and founder of HubSpot Academy. As a former customer, Mark joined HubSpot in 2010 where he spent two years working with thousands of HubSpot customers to scale their inbound strategy. 

From there, he went on to build HubSpot Academy from the ground up, and in doing so, educated and certified millions of people and helped grow HubSpot to more than $600 million in revenue.

When he’s not building TACK, Mark enjoys plenty of steak and lobster, a round of golf or two, and loves being on snow or in the ocean.

Go fast, take chances!

Leading Airmeet’s global marketing team and working to advance the event-led growth movement across B2B.

Airmeet is the most customizable and immersive virtual and hybrid event platform for growing businesses. 

Here's how I almost failed scaling HubSpot Academy.

At the time, HubSpot was becoming a global company serving several different languages outside of just English. 

It was tricky. Do we create native content in each language? Do we translate some of the content but not all? Do we use automated translation solutions?

I can tell you this. The automated translation solutions we tried and used at the time were not very good. 

Globalization and localization. It’s hard. 

There were thousands of hours of video, transcripts, and website content. It was an immense undertaking. 

Here’s how we solved this complex problem. We implemented a tiered system for the localization and translation of all content assets. For some content we localized and translated the piece. For other assets we just translated the content. 

That tiered approach saved us a ton of time and money over the long run. 

Since then I’ve advised many companies on how to think about content localization and translation. In the last few years a lot has changed thanks to generative AI. 

Recently I came across a new solution to help solve this problem. Something I wish I had back in 2015. Weglot.

What’s Weglot? 

It’s a solution that simplifies website and content translation. Some of the things I faced when doing this ten years ago were manual translation, page duplication, complex SEO setup, and technical integrations. Painful and time consuming. 

The number one thing you should be doing today is speaking the language of ALL your customers. Did you know that more than 70% of people prefer to buy in their native language

It’s now easy to expand your international presence in just a few clicks. You can do it quickly thanks to automated translation that’s accurate and crisp. 

Increase your SEO visibility in every market that matters. More markets = more reach = more potential customers. 

And thanks to solutions like Weglot, it's easy to integrate with WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Wix, and more. In just a few minutes. No need to move to a different CMS. 

I recently decided to partner with Weglot to help businesses of any size create a more global footprint and make sure their content is speaking the language of their customers. 

It’s more important than ever to make sure your content is in the right language both for people and the bots. 

#WeglotPartner

p.s. still rocking my favorite HubSpot Academy custom Patagonia.

VP of Marketing at EasyLlama | People-first GTM Evangelist

Data is the lifeblood of a business today. Yet most businesses are missing two things. 

Clean data and actionable data. 

This problem costs businesses thousands, if not millions, of dollars in revenue.

What every leader should have are insights into revenue generation, customer health, competitors, and a whole lot more. 

Trust me, I have felt this pain at all of the businesses I’ve worked at. We're actually working on solving this problem at EasyLlama right now. Through a combination of hiring the right people, tech, and process changes. 

One solution that I’ve been trying out is Rows.com  

I’ve been able to upload CSVs and PDFs, connect GA4, and our paid media accounts.  Then I simply ask it questions in plain English.  Way easier than me trying to fumble around with Google Sheets or Excel. 

It organizes and understands the data without me needing to understand SQL or anything else. 

Things like, ‘tell me how many opportunities find us through paid search and also mention Google as how they heard about us.”

Simple prompts that can give me quick and impactful insights into how different channels, campaigns, offers, or messaging are driving results. 

It extracts, connects, analyzes, and keeps all the data fresh. 

Which means I get automated reporting and get insights and actionable recommendations on the regular. Exactly what a busy marketing leader needs. 


My point of view is every company should have at least one business analyst. But that’s not always possible due to the cost involved or other factors. So why not give that power to your founders, and other executives, heck your individual contributors too!?

It’s now possible for you to create your own business analyst copilot/agent helping you analyze and sift through data to find the golden nuggets. I’ve built my own business analyst at a fraction of the cost.

Rows is helping me flex my critical thinking skills and become an even more data empowered marketing leader. 

Helping me see around the next few corners and better plan and predict for the coming quarters. 

You can try it for free yourself. Rows dot com

Product launches are always exhilarating ... and stressful ... but so rewarding.  

Today, I'm proud to announce the third product pillar in EasyLlama's Compliance and Learning Platform. 

Security Awareness Training 🥳

Lots of small and medium businesses should be protecting their business and brand from cyber threats. 

Most don't becuase of two reasons, time and the cost.

We eliminate both reasons and give you a solution that's less than $2/month per employee. For a 150 person business, you can provide an important layer of protection from bad actors and cyber criminals for only $250/month.

It includes a powerful Phishing Simulator powered by AI.  

Giving you the ability to use pre-built phishing campaigns that can run automatically year-round.

You also get detailed ongoing reports so you can have a complete view of your organizational risk and how to better prepare employees to not be fooled.

It's time to: finally...

Prepare. Replace passive, one-off cybersecurity courses with interactive, scenario-based training that builds employee confidence and real-world readiness.

Produce. Demonstrate measurable results with dynamic risk reports and benchmarks that connect safer behaviors to stronger business outcomes.

Protect. Reinforce safe habits through continuous phishing simulations, instant feedback, and ongoing awareness campaigns that reduce risk all year long.

We now offer SMBs ONE platform to manage all of their compliance, security training, employee onboarding, and team training needs. 

All-in-one for the win. Finally one tool that employees need to use and one solution you need to manage and pay for. Nirvana, right?

A massive thank you to the team members behind this big launch. ❤️

From the folks on the product and engineering side, Lawrence Valenti, Michaël Devyver, and Merry Chin. To the people on the GTM teams, Alicia Falcon, PMMC®, Tan Tran, Katrine Reddin 🦕, Carmen Choi, Hana N., and Laura B..

A great product launch take an immense amount of coordination, planning, and execution. We use Asana, Google Doc/Sheets, and Slack to make it all happen. Of course Figma, Canva, and our CMS have something to say too.

Here's how to create the best possible webinar. 

I call it the webinar triple threat play. 

Yes, I did steal that from Bobby Flay's Triple Threat show. 🥓

Here's how to cook it up. 

By the way, I shared this playbook in my weekly marketing leadership mastermind group yesterday. Let me know if you are interested in joining. 

Start first by creating a webinar outline and agenda that has THREE distinct segments. 

1) A 20 or so minute conversation with a thought leader or subject matter expert focused around the webinar's topic. 

2) A ten minute product demo that ties what the thought leader spoke about with the use case of the product. Make sure at the end of this segment you ask the audience, using a poll in the webinar, if they would like to get a full demo of the product they just saw. I usually see about 5% to 20% of the attendees asking for a demo. 

3) A customer speaks for about ten minutes and shares their perspective on how they are using the product and the benefits value it's creating for them and their business. 

Make sure you have a DYNAMIC host. Their job is to host the entire webinar and to facilitate each segment. Getting the audience fired up, engaged, and keeping the webinar on track and managing the overall webinar experience. 

Use something like Wistia's webinar platform to make the webinar feel like a well produced show so what people are seeing is changing every couple of minutes. The key is making it not boring. 

Once the webinar is done, you now have three amazing pieces of content to repackage and reuse. 

One that's thought leadership centric, one that's very product focused, and one that is your customer proof and voice of customer segment. Wisita makes it super easy to create clips from each segment and for you to turn those clips into a format that's right for the right channel. 

So there you have it. My tasty Webinar Triple Threat Play™ 

We're run this playbook many times at EasyLlama and it never fails. 

Drop a note if you want me to share an example of one of our latest webinars using this format, or if you want to join the mastermind group. 

Happy Webinaring!

Don’t start your strategy by thinking of a tool first.

It never works. 

Always think about your STRATEGY first. 

For me it's, 'What is the best way to win the game I’m playing?'

For people in marketing and sales the answer is not AI. 

The answer is how can I best match how I’m marketing and selling to how they like to buy what I’m offering. 

For some businesses, it’s more a PLG motion. For others it’s PLG + Sales-assisted. And others use an enterprise-grade consultative GTM motion. 

But no matter what you’re trying to sell, using buying signals is a smart part of your strategy. 

Buyer signals are key to helping you understand what a buyer is doing so that you can match your approach to them. 

You can start really simple by first identifying what are your low, medium, and high intent buying signals. 

Low intent would be downloading a piece of content, going to an event that you hosted, or reading your newsletter. 

Medium intent would be checking out your pricing page, going to a webinar that includes a product demo, or researching competitors. 

High intent would be signing up for a fee trial or account, requesting a demo, or raising their hand for more info during a webinar. 

Signals can be at the contact or account level and include activity data from any first-, second-, or third-party data source.

Once you know your signals and where to find them. Don’t forget that part. :) You can then determine how to act on each signal. 

The easiest way to think about this is what signals are marketing-led, sales-led or a hybrid approach.  

Alright so we now let’s talk about tools. One of my favorite tools I’ve used to run a signal-based GTM strategy is Common Room.  They make it easy with their RoomieAI suite to find, organize, and act on all the buying signals. 

The key, IMO, is to try and keep the signal architecture in one centralized place. Much easier to manage and maintain. Helps streamline the prospecting motion of creating deals and using signals to close deals.

One of the most important things for your signal-based strategy to work is making sure the salespeople know where to see and how to use the signals. Sure, automation can help, but when a salesperson is given a power that they didn’t have before and knows how to use the power responsibility, great things can happen. Take a look at the image to see what a salesperson could get.

Things like faster lead follow up, meeting the buyer where they are, sending the right message at the right time, and reaching out to the right stakeholders to increase the likelihood a deal closes. 

The big takeaway is to please make sure you design your GTM to match how people buy today.

My new community and resource hub is open for business. 

It's called The GTM Library.

A hangout for founders, fractional folks, and marketers who wants to sharpen their go-to-market skills and execution.  

I'm an entrepreneur at heart which means I'm obsessed with all things go-to-market.  I've built a pretty big private collection of my favorite go-to-market resources, including a 100+ masterclasses from people in my network.

When you sign up you'll get access to the community and my regular masterclasses. I'm hosting a new one in a couple of weeks about my latest positioning and messaging framework that I've built. 

For a small one-time payment you can get your library card and access to my private collection of resources and masterclasses, including a private call with me. 

Hope you find it valuable. 

https://lnkd.in/eK27VGsG 

p.s. that's me with one of my favorite books about entrepreneurship and leading a business.

Volkie Yelkovan

Visa

Global product marketing lead for Risk and Identity Solutions within Visa’s $9B Value Added Services business (2020-Present):
•	Executed demand campaigns in all five regions and globally, influenced 45% sales pipeline and increased deal sizes by 64%. 
•	Rebranded the portfolio of 40 plus products as Visa Protect and created a new holistic narrative adopted globally. 
•	Created new webpages adopted in 77 markets and a new LinkedIn page with 15k followers in less than a year.
•	Created and maintained one of the highest performing sales enablement repositories within the company powered by Highspot
•	Supported go to market of key solutions such as Visa Protect for Account-to-Account Payments, and next generation risk scoring models such as Visa Deep Authorization and Visa Provisioning Intelligence

Global product marketing lead for Innovation and Digital Partnerships (2022-2024):
•	Created new fintech and crypto focused websites, landmark crypto focused research, and awareness campaigns resulting in 19k page views, 70 inbound inquiries, and 1,100 social engagements.
•	Supported 2 top 1% podcasts covering fintech and blockchain thought leadership
•	Launched Visa Creator and Creator Commerce programs, receiving thousand+ applications worldwide
•	Led inaugural Crypto Hackathon with 700 applications
•	Created sales content for crypto linked cards and CDBC helping business achieve 110% revenue targets and 96% issuing logos 
•	Guided fintech’s within Fintech Fast Track Program with go to market expertise, created demand with LinkedIn campaigns. 

Global product marketing lead for Data Solutions (2020-2023):
•	Supported 25% YoY revenue growth with $4M incremental AANR focusing on key products such as Visa Analytics Platform, Visa Destination Insights and Merchant Search API with demand gen campaigns, feature launches, case studies, thought leadership, newsletter and events

Senior Director of Global Product and B2B Marketing

Matterport

•	Managed product marketing and GTM for company’s most important launch to date, Matterport for iPhone, bringing immersive 3D to more than 1 billion iOS devices in a completely virtual, shelter in place environment.
•	Increased SaaS accounts by 500% following the launch in less than 1 year breaking every single growth record for the company including key marketing metrics.
•	Managed a core GTM team, packaged and launched Matterport's first enterprise focused products and website in less than 3 months, resulting in key account wins and expansions within 1.5 months.
•       Laid out the foundations for developer program and Matterport for Android, unlocking the next biggest growth levers for the company.
•	Established competitive intelligence platform and governance in less than 2 months across the company, created the first battle cards complete with a slack channel and reporting functionality.
•	Drove growth initiatives for key verticals such as residential real estate, travel, and hospitality with high impact marketing campaigns (email, landing page, segmentation) and partnerships.
•	Managed customer facing and internal product communications ensuring customer awareness and organizational alignment.

Director of GTM and Product Marketing

realtor.com

•	Managed go to market activities across key business partners (marketing, product, sales, sales ops, support, and engineering) for timely and successful introduction of key branding and advertising products, ensuring organizational readiness to market, sell, fulfill and support 
•	Significantly exceeded core KPIs: sales revenue target by 17% and customer acquisition target by 25%, in less than 6 months.
•	Trained inside, field, event sales and support teams of more than 100 participants in locations nationwide and online.
•	Created 4 different beta groups to define market requirements and positioning strategies for new products, and to gain feedback on Proofs of Concepts
•	Designed a comprehensive retention strategy resulting in 12% increase in retention at the end of 6 months.
•	Successfully guided key GTM functions with insightful MRDs and strategic GTM Plans.
•	Created positioning and messaging framework that resonated with customers resulting in record demand and customer waitlists in some regions. 
•	Delivered talk tracks, email templates, one pagers, and pitch decks for inside, field and event sales teams increasing sales velocity and funnel conversion rates.

•	Managed B2B go to market activities leveraging HP’s core technology into more than 40 new market verticals and new use cases representing 200% growth for the business unit
•	Led sales enablement supporting 3 regional sales teams of 15 members with B2B lead generation, content creation and training 
•	Managed the launch (market requirements, product requirements, pricing, positioning, promotion) of a flagship product, which resulted in TAM expansion by 30%
•	Led cross functional teams in business development, channel and partner marketing working with over 25 companies of different sizes at worldwide locations
•	Improved market intelligence significantly through advanced web research, primary and secondary research studies and industry event attendance

Senior GTM and Product Marketing Manager

•	Managed the key PC services product representing 80% annual revenue of the business
•	Successfully led strategic partnerships with market leading companies resulting in improved product portfolio and 10% upsell
•	Cross functional team leadership in designing new product service models such as OPP and subscription to improve PC attach 
•	Drove key competitive insights for improved senior management decision making 
•	Created business plans for doubling the business revenue in less than 2 years

Senior Product Manager

•	Cross functional management of consumables marketing within HP's $6.5B Inkjet Supplies Business
•	Marketing lead on new business models which are highly successful subscription program and managed services
•	Led team for consumables design strategy resulting in favorable customer reviews and better channel placement 
•	Improved marketing research focused on small and medium businesses gaining key segmentation insights, paving the road for HP’s successful market expansion

Product Marketing Manager

•Defined and managed end-to-end new product launch for Retail Publishing Solutions (hardware, software, photo products) a $240M HP business, whose customers are world’s largest retailers such as Wal-Mart and Meijer in the US, Tesco and Boots in Europe, Kmart and Ted’s in Asia Pacific. 
•Coordinated go to market deliverables (product plans, region intro plans, messaging, product briefing sessions, PR plan, linkage to window GTM activities).
•Created and managed sales tools (sell-in slides, brochures, datasheet, battle card, case study, etc) for WW partners.
•Managed Corporate Price List activities for improved accuracy and WW consistency

Go to Market Manager

•	Managed customer satisfaction, quality and experiences throughout the R&D development life cycle for 21 different products
•	Consistently beat warranty goals with more than $24,000,000 in savings for future products
•	Created and managed project teams to improve customer experiences and business performance
•	Conducted more than 15 user research studies at WW locations and successfully influenced management using customer insights
•	Trained WW regional partners throughout 16 sessions with more than 100 participants

Technical Marketing Customer Satisfaction Program Manager 

•	Achieved $27,5M warranty savings by identifying top software field issues and driving fixes
•	Developed solution requirements and use cases based on customer insights and analysis
•	Led a cross functional team for text mining tools, which improved reporting accuracy by 23% 
•	Lead current product reporting

Technical Marketing SW Program Manager

B2B Product Marketing leader with global experiences at all sizes of technology companies, launched hundreds of products and features covering SaaS, advertising, marketing, software, service, technology licensing, hardware, and payments solutions. Managed cross functional teams of marketing, product, sales, customer success, support, engineering and delivery at WW locations. Consistently influenced customer centric and innovative product solutions by using actionable, prioritized customer, market, competitive and internal insights. Created and delivered high impact, world class MRDs, GTM Plans, sales enablement and training materials. Certified ABM strategist with a passion for everything demand gen and revenue marketing. Operates with an excellent balance of thinking and doing with a bias for action, customer obsession, ownership, passion, and persistence. Lifelong learner with online degrees from Harvard, MIT, and Wharton.

Senior Director Product Marketing

Leading a team of product marketers to grow B2B revenue for Visa's Innovation, Digital Partnerships, Fintech, Crypto, Risk, Identity, and Data Solutions in close collaboration with global and regional teams of product, marketing, and sales.

taplio

The Battle

Mark Kilens

Volkie Yelkovan

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The Battle

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Volkie Yelkovan

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