Aligned

Head of Marketing

Clay

Content Creator

Lewin Investments, LLC

Managing Partner: Derick Lewin
Partner: Ashley Lewin

- Managing and growing an investment portfolio of properties in the Omaha, NE area
- 6 single-family residential units 100% owned
- 10 additional residential units owned jointly in partnerships 
- 8 commercial buildings totaling over 130,000 SF of office & retail space

Partner

Wix Studio

Advisory Board Member

Refine Labs

‣ Revenue Performance Strategy: Designed and led Revenue Performance Assessments for enterprise clients, auditing $1 billion+ in pipeline across eight companies and creating actionable plans to optimize revenue sources for efficient growth. Delivered tailored GTM execution roadmaps that drove profitable funnel improvements for clients, including Recorded Future, Criteo, Workiva, Checkr, Amperity, Cylindo, Beamery, New Store, and Axonius.

‣ Demand Generation Consulting: Partnered as a strategic advisor to VP+ executives at 20+ organizations, transforming demand generation strategies through in-depth GTM analysis, marketing operations optimization, ABM frameworks, digital advertising, and lead handoff audits. Key outcomes include a 46% increase in hand-raisers and 59% growth in qualified pipeline for one of the clients within one year. Additional clients include Blackline, Syndio, Algolia, Cognism, Canva, Hopin, IBM Instana, Typeform, and Braze.

‣ Helped develop and launch a new offering: The Vault. Contributed to ICP refinement, messaging, and go-to-market strategies. Played a key role in product development, marketing, and customer advisory for the product. Today, The Vault supports 5,000+ B2B marketers by delivering essential resources, playbooks, and templates to streamline growth and reduce customer acquisition costs.

‣ People Management & Team Mentoring: Led, coached, and fostered growth within a team of high-performing performance marketing managers. Focused on developing strategic thinking and executional skills through hands-on coaching in demand gen best practices, data-driven decision-making, and campaign optimization. Built a collaborative and growth-oriented environment, enabling team members to exceed performance targets while aligning with organizational goals.

Sr. Director of Demand Generation

Director of Demand Generation

Consult with small businesses on how their marketing strategies, specifically technical paid media management, are being managed to increase leads/conversions, reduce CAC, and gain more revenue

Marketing Advisor

WP Engine

Demand Generation Manager

Flywheel

Growth Lead

- Built and implemented a digital advertising program that heavily impacted all revenue streams
- Owned Flywheel’s website optimization, marketing automation, lead generation program, and digital advertising efforts
- Continuously brainstormed, tested, and executed optimization experiments to improve channel performance and drive profitable growth 
- Worked with the sales team to create lead generation strategies and support the sales pipeline with marketing resources
- Analyzed marketing campaign data and ran A/B tests to regularly assess ongoing value of acquisition efforts
- Helped the content and design teams create targeted campaigns.

Marketing Strategist

Social Media Specialist

SKAR Advertising

•	Strategized retail, government and healthcare clients' social media accounts
•	Project managed all digital projects, such as website and mobile applications, from start to completion

Digital Content Manager

Scooter's Coffee

Held a variety of roles including public relations, social media, advertising, copywriting, project management, web strategy, and print design to help grow a national franchise and distribution company go from seven states and under 100 stores to 40 states with 150+ stores

Social Media Specialist & Graphic Design Coordinator

Marketing Intern

Demand Generation Leader | Marketing | Growth | SaaS | B2B

Modern growth marketer with a proven track record of growing inbound revenue through proper demand generation for SaaS and B2B models. Constantly challenging traditional marketing tactics, and is data-inspired, not data-driven. Experienced with helping to build revenue, go-to-market, marketing, and digital advertising plans that drive real results.

I’ve seen a lot of really talented B2B SaaS/tech marketers unable to move up in their career because they haven’t mastered this yet:

👉 Understanding (and being comfortable inside) a CRM.
Primarily HubSpot or SFDC.

Here’s why it matters so much:

1. Reporting lives there.
→ You don’t have to be the resident expert, but you do need to be self-sufficient. The higher you go in your career, the more you’re expected to pull your own data.

2. Insights live there too.
→ Reporting is one thing — but understanding the fields you track (or should be tracking) is how you uncover ideas, diagnose issues, and build stronger campaigns. Every company’s setup is unique.

3. Leads, opportunities, and revenue all sit in the CRM.
→ If you want to speak confidently about pipeline and performance, you have to understand the system behind it.

I stumbled into becoming the marketing HubSpot admin in my first tech role.
No formal training. No courses. Just a lot of trial, error, and curiosity.
And once you learn one CRM, picking up others becomes easier.
(Except Pardot — I still don’t fully understand you 😆. And Marketo… why are you like this?)

With AI now, there’s truly no excuse not to teach yourself.

If I didn’t feel confident navigating a CRM, here’s exactly what I’d do:

→ Dedicate 1–2 hours a week to clicking around in contacts, deals, accounts, fields, workflows — all of it. Get familiar with what exists.

→ Schedule learning time with the CRM-savvy person on your team.
Come prepared. Use the time wisely. Bring very specific questions.

→Read up on objects and how they relate.
This alone clears up 50% of confusion.

→ Use AI as your tutor.
Ask it to explain fields, objects, logic, and reporting. 
(Pre-AI, I lived on Google and community forums.)

→ Start building simple reports.
You learn fastest by doing. 

Learning these systems isn’t glamorous. It requires time, curiosity, and a lot of questions. But like it or not, it’s a core skill for climbing the marketing leadership ladder in B2B SaaS.

Ashley Lewin

Head of Marketing at Aligned

In June I outlined an experiment I used to roll my eyes at: webinars. 🫣
6 months later, they’ve proven their impact. Not the fluffy, talk-at-you kind of webinars, but the deeply tactical, helpful, well-prepared ones.

Whenever I run a new experiment, I want strong signals before investing time or resources.
So we approached webinars with an MVP mindset: prove it out first, then scale.

Full transparency: I used to be semi-allergic to the word “webinar.”
(Okay, dramatic. But still true.)

What changed was how we approached them — in a way that fit our 3 core marketing principles:

1. Teach, don’t fluff
Practical, tactical education buyers can use right away.

2. Help GTM teams win
We want GTM and sales teams to crush quotas and get paid more.
We’re just one piece of that puzzle.

3. Be human (with a 😉)
Relatable, engaging, encouraging — we talk with GTM teams, not at them.

So instead of broad, theoretical webinars, we narrowed every session to a specific problem.
We partnered with an expert.
We built a meaty, tactical deck you could basically turn into a guide.
And we spent the session walking through it, leaving plenty of time for questions.
Our chat is lively every single time.

The results?
We’re still building out the right reporting, but the qualitative signals are strong:
→ 700–800+ registrants with minimal promotion
→ ~30% attendance rate
→ Consistent market feedback about how tactical and “actually helpful” they are
→ Showing great patterns of great attendees/companies, showing up in sign ups, pipeline, open opps, current customers, and even a correlation with self-serve purchases

This is great for the live experience.
But I'll let you in on where we're not doing so great:

Our post-event workflow has been… meh.
(Small team. Lots of priorities. The usual.)

Here’s what we currently do:
→ Create a post-event Aligned deal room with the recording, deck, resources, and a promo
→ Send a simple follow-up email from me
→ BDRs action the right accounts (somewhat generically)

It works, but it’s nowhere near what this content could be doing.
We haven’t been fully repurposing the content gold we’re creating — and I want to change that as this becomes an always-on program.

This is where tools like Tofu help teams like mine turn a one-time moment into a content machine, without adding a ton of more hours to your already packed schedule.

With Tofu you can:
→ Upload your recording and generate deep account + contact intelligence with Tofu’s research agent
→ Identify pain points from the session
→ Craft unique, 1:1 nurture that actually speaks to the contact 
→ Extract highlights, quotes, stats, timestamps
→ Turn one webinar into: blog posts, social content, attendee follow-up, nurture for no-shows, ads for on-demand content, and more

Talk about a time saver (!).

We’re still early in maturing this program, but I’m excited — because tools like Tofu help small teams do what they actually want to do, not just what they have time for.

#TofuPartner

Brand partnership • Head of Marketing at Aligned

Is Demand Gen just paid and new business? A CMO asked me this when I was in the interview circuit. After our conversation, I left the team with a little “leave-behind” doc to unpack it.

Because honestly… the role is so fuzzy.

And I’ll admit: I got burnt out on it for a while.
Not from the work, but from all the debates.
What counts, what doesn’t count, who owns what, and being cornered into only paid, only capture demand, only new acquisition. 
(Nobody puts baby in the corner, let me have more fun! (I hope others catch that movie quote))

But here’s what I’ve landed on:

The role is defined by you and the company, not the internet.
Once I embraced that, I got a much needed reset.

So after that interview, I put together a doc for the marketing team, the leader, and the CEO to make the role a little less fuzzy, and define it my way. 

It included:
→ how I define demand gen
→ the metrics I’d own
→ how it fits across Sales, CS, PMM, and RevOps → what roles would report into it
→ the balance of always-on work + special campaigns
→ and one special campaign example based on a real expansion gap they had

(Attached that section of the doc here if it’s helpful. It isn’t polished as if I were executing it. I find those imperfect examples are the most useful to flip through to spark inspo.)

I talked about my idea of Focus Cycles last week, and this is a perfect example of putting them into motion.

Because this is the kind of DG work that gets me excited.
Not just channels.
Not just “fill the funnel.”

But spotting strategic opportunities → framing them → and turning them into cross-functional special projects that move the business forward.

And sure, you could argue this work lives in campaigns, growth, or general marketing leadership.
Maybe in your company it does.

That’s the whole point.

Demand Gen can be more than paid, more than new business, and more than capture demand. it’s shaped by your team size, structure, and the revenue gaps that actually matter.

Attached the example if you want to skim it.

Where do you think DG’s scope tends to get limited the most? Are you running special campaigns like this, and who owns them? 

(PS - If you’re interviewing, this type of additional effort will make you stand out!)

Special Campaigns Brief Example

Marilyn Reidy

Great work doesn't speak for itself. It speaks through how you present it.
& that’s where the soft skills no one talks about come in.

We spend hours on LinkedIn trying to get better at our jobs:
→ What experiments should I run next?
→ What tweaks can I make to my ads?
→ What messaging frameworks are people using?

All helpful — but the quiet skills?
The ones that determine how your work is received, approved, and understood (& help you with internal politics)?
Those barely get mentioned.

Probably because:
1. No one loves acknowledging internal politics
2. These skills feel “too simple” (but even I need the "duh!" reminders)
3. Most don't like to say the quiet ladder climbing moves out loud 

These soft skills shape your career more than people realize.

Here’s one I had to remind myself of recently:
How you present your work matters. A lot.

You can check this as a recent experiment I did (as I know many want to hear about marketing experiments here!).

I was working on a big copy + messaging project (can’t share more yet 😉).
I knew this would spark a thoughtful discussion — which is a good thing, it means he’s invested in marketing.
But we're on a tight deadline, so I took a walk to think about how to collaborate on this better from my behalf, especially since we have a big time zone difference for actual collaboration.

So instead of dropping a raw Google Copy Doc, I redesigned the entire review experience in the Doc:

1. I led with context
I started with a section context as to what the project was and started with all the research: a Wynter messaging test, ICP insights, and a deep ChatGPT research dive he values. This is where knowing who you're presenting to and what they prefer matters, and I knew he valued research and data. Marketing can be very subjective and around taste, so this anchored it before we had differences in taste.

2. I explained my reasoning
Step-by-step thinking behind every angle and choice.

3. I visualized it
Figma mockups so he could see the copy in context — not floating on a page. I truly think work needs to be mocked up as so many have a hard time visualizing. 

4. I created a dedicated section for edits
This keeps feedback focused instead of everywhere. It was at the end of the doc so you had to go through the reasoning first.

Did I still get feedback? Of course.
But it was strategic, not subjective.
Refinement… not rewriting.

It reminded me of something a coworker once said:
“When I put work in a slide deck instead of a doc, I get fewer edits. It just looks more done. A doc signals that it's in draft mode.”

It sounds silly… but it’s true.
Aesthetics shape perception.
(Whether we love or hate to admit it)

So if you want smoother approvals, clearer conversations, and less chaos, try this:
→ Format your docs beautifully
→ Mock up your creative
→ Polish your slides
→ Tailor the presentation to how your reviewer thinks

Should I share more of these type of tips no one really talks about?

A client once asked me to 3x their paid media budget overnight. I said no.
Wild, I know. Especially coming from the person *overseeing* their paid.

Here’s the truth:
Most teams think about budget in tiny buckets… instead of one ecosystem.
Paid. Creative. Software. Headcount. Outside help.
It all ladders up to the same line item in the financial model. 

We get stuck in “program spend = paid channels.” This creates black and white thinking, instead of looking at it creatively to really make it work for you. 

When I looked at their data, two things were obvious:

1. Scaling spend that fast is risky 
You hit diminishing returns before you hit efficiency. It can also shock the system. You should scale overtime. 

2. They were trying to break into a new market, and weren't landing. 
Performance deep-dives showed the real issue wasn't just paid. 
It was messaging. They were speaking in a different market's pain. Pouring more spend on the wrong story just burns cash faster.

So instead of 3x-ing ads, I built them a spreadsheet of where to put the money. Most of which we didn’t own:
→ Channel diversity experimentation: podcast sponsorships to expand reach (move out of just LinkedIn/Meta/Google) 
→ Wynter messaging tests in a cascading order: homepage → demo page → product pages, etc. 
→ More creative variation 
(Side note: in general, the market focuses so much on the amount we spend on ads, but not on what we're actually paying to promote. That sounds SO silly, right?!) 

They ran with it. (One of my favorite clients ever. Not just because they listened 😉, I swear.)

The results?
 → A Wynter test results that the used to rewrite their H1 & H2 that improved homepage → demo conversions by 40% in the first 2 weeks. 

You could run so many hypothetical scenarios of what that impact is. Same amount of traffic, spend, etc., and your getting SO many more high-intent submissions. 

They didn’t deploy the budget in a “traditional” way.
 But it did exactly what they wanted: drive more results.
 And that’s the whole point of increasing paid spend in the first place.

This is why I'm more of a fan of reporting on marketing impact via Marketing CAC or on variable/program CAC. It allows marketing to become an ecosystem for the end goal you're trying to achieve. 

As we're all deep in 2026 planning, it's important to remember to think about the budget creatively, what it's meant for, and to not think in siloes.

’Tis the (planning) season — everyone’s buried in forecasts and spreadsheet math, wondering if we accidentally became full-time analysts overnight.
Pipeline targets. Budget models. The usual.

But there are a few non-numeric ingredients that quietly determine how strong your team operates next year — and they’re easy to overlook.

If you’re in planning mode, here are a few ideas worth considering (I know I am!): 

1. Building Space for Ongoing Learning
Skill growth doesn’t happen by accident. Planning for it ensures your team levels up in ways that compound over the year. You're being intentional vs. letting the workload take over. 

Potential goals:
→  Publish on LinkedIn X times
→  Guest on X podcasts
→  Build basic CRM reports
→  Deepen HubSpot/SFDC knowledge
→  Advance expertise in a specific craft area

2. Treating AI Execution as a Core Capability
AI is becoming part of day-to-day execution — not an optional add-on. But it takes time, reps, and structure to operationalize it well. We also can't expect employees to be AI-savvy without taking the time to teach them. 

Potential goals:
→  Each team member owns one AI workflow
→  Ship X new workflows each quarter
→  Monthly “AI learnings” or teardown sessions

3. Strengthening Product & Customer Knowledge
Everything gets sharper when marketers deeply understand what they’re marketing — and who they’re marketing to. Messaging. Content. Creativity. Decision-making. But not enough teams *truly* understand the product as deeply as our sales friends (brutal honesty here). 

Potential goals:
→  Listen to one sales demo per week
→  Everyone able to give a product demo by mid-year
→  Speak with X customers per quarter
→  Refresh ICP documentation 

4. Creating Room for Experimentation
Experimentation isn’t a culture that magically appears. It needs structure, expectations, and space to run.

Potential goals:
→  Launch X experiments by X quarter
→  Create a simple experiment template (these need to structured, and everyone deeply understands the importance of each piece (hypotheses, testing sizes, data, etc.) 
→  Build post-mortems into the process so you stack learnings from the experiments 

Annual planning will always revolve around numbers.
But the things that move those numbers?
They’re usually the pieces no spreadsheet can capture.

What “invisible” elements are you planning for this year?

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