Shelley Porter

I rebuild marketing functions that stopped scaling.

Four times now I've walked into an operation built for a smaller version of the business — fragmented channels, no visibility, a strategy nobody revisited — taken it apart, and rebuilt it into something that produces revenue.

Shelley Porter
60%Revenue growth in one year, CIEE
25%Growth on a stagnant product line, Frost & Sullivan
115%Of target in year one, built from zero
500+Institutional partners marketed to and segmented

The pattern

CIEEMarketing Manager
International education, 1,000+ employees

Channels ran independently. Nobody could say what was working. Five hundred institutional partners were marketed to as a single audience, because segmenting them properly meant rebuilding how the work got produced and no one had done it.

So I did. Rebuilt segmentation around how partners actually bought, then built the operating system underneath it — intake, dependencies, templates, approval routing, dashboards — running 60+ concurrent campaigns. Revenue up 60%. Cost per acquisition down 30%. Hired on a six-month maternity contract, offered permanent in two.

Frost & SullivanProduct Marketing Manager
Global research firm, $2B+ revenue

Brand & Demand Solutions wasn't a new line. It was a stagnant one — which is harder, because the buyers had already looked once and decided it wasn't for them. And those buyers were marketing leaders, who recognize every technique you'd use on them.

Repositioned it around what the buyer needed rather than what we happened to offer, and rebuilt the engine so sales got high-intent leads instead of a list. 25% growth year over year.

Advocates for Human PotentialMarketing Manager
Behavioral health consulting, $50M+

An eight-person team, a company in genuine turmoil, and a website quietly losing prospects nobody had diagnosed.

Brought in outside research to find out why people were bouncing, rebuilt the site around the findings, and reversed the decline. Beat every pipeline target during the worst stretch the company had. Built the ABM programs against 42 government accounts and wrote the marketing OKRs the C-suite planned against.

Market Me MaineFounder
Independent consultancy

No brand, no pipeline, no budget, no team. Just a target number and a list of local businesses that had never worked with a marketer.

Six clients in year one, all through referrals and direct outreach. $11,500 against a $10,000 target. Strategy, copy, design, and web execution on every engagement.

How I work

Strategic and hands-on, which usually means one of them is a stretch. Mine isn't.

I write the copy, design the assets, build the campaigns in HubSpot, and read the analytics myself. I've also built the systems underneath — the intake process, the dependencies, the dashboards that tell you what's actually happening.

I design. Logos, brand systems, decks, sites. That's unusual at this level and it matters enormously when the marketing team is three people.

I've sold study abroad programs to university deans and software to fire chiefs. I'd argue the fire chiefs were harder. Both taught me the same thing: skeptical buyers don't respond to cleverness, only to whether the thing actually works.

Most marketing measures what's easy to count. I care about pipeline contribution, cost per opportunity, and marketing-sourced revenue — and I'll tell you when something isn't working before you have to ask.

Something I made

Marketing Job Titles, Decoded

One company's Manager is another company's Senior Director. I got tired of guessing, so I mapped it — nine functions, sixty-plus titles, what each level is actually paid to own, and how to read scope out of a job description.

PDF · 9 functions · 60+ titles

The reference guide

Includes the verb test for reading a posting — a Manager role full of “supports” is a specialist job with a nicer title, and a Specialist posting full of “owns” hasn't been re-levelled or re-priced.

Download the guide

What I'm looking for

A function to own, and a number to be accountable for.

Role
Head of Marketing or Marketing Director — owning strategy and execution, not one without the other
Company
Roughly 50 to 300 people. Big enough to have a business, small enough that building still matters
Location
Remote, or Greater Portland, Maine
Sector
B2B SaaS, education, health, professional services. Mission-driven is a strong pull

Get in touch

Happy to talk about whether this is a fit.

Based in Saco, Maine. Fifteen years across B2B SaaS, education, healthcare, consulting, and government — in-house and agency.