Shelley Porter
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.
The pattern
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
What I'm looking for
Get in touch
Based in Saco, Maine. Fifteen years across B2B SaaS, education, healthcare, consulting, and government — in-house and agency.