Marketing at Riverbed | Growth leader | Global demand strategist

Cristina Daroca

Marketing at Riverbed | Demandbase Top 20 Marketer for 2023 | Global Demand Leader

I'm a growth leader with a passion for building and developing winning go-to-market teams. I'm a marketer at heart, and I have extensive experience leading marketing for SaaS start-ups and medium-sized companies. I love helping develop other marketers to reach their full potential. 

I care deeply about the people I work with. My favorite part of the job is helping my team grow and navigate the chaos that often comes with high-growth tech.

Outside of work, you’ll find me enjoying time with my husband and 3 kids, skiing, visiting family in Spain (where I'm originally from!), or reading a good novel. 

Areas of expertise: GTM, demand generation, ABM, digital strategy, customer marketing, community building, marketing operations, marketing analytics.

Senior Director, Head of Americas Marketing

• Grew YoY marketing-sourced pipeline by 27% in 2022 and 95% in 2023 by implementing a
multi-channel campaign and field marketing strategy, including events, digital, content
development, and customer community building
• Integral member of marketing leadership team through the Riverbed-Aternity merger. Led
a team of 8 marketers through the transition period, focusing on developing people,
building for scale, and implementing exceptional culture
• Managed a $5M annual budget for global demand and Americas marketing, consistently
delivering 30x ROI
• Led the global campaigns function as we entered a new category, Unified Observability,
resulting in 30% YoY sales growth
• Nominated for the 2022 MVP Award (top 3 team members across all non-sales teams,
based on biggest impact to sales team)

Richard F. Purcell

Build better businesses by taking action on lifetime value

Richard Purcell's Leadership Purpose:

"Build and maintain meaningful, long-lasting relationships that help individuals live up to their full potential."

+++

In 2014 Richard Purcell came to Silicon Valley from North Carolina to follow the 21st-century gold rush with nothing but his car and his clothes. 

Richard has turned his experience leading GTM at venture-backed SaaS startups into systematic processes to scale efficient growth.

His creative approach to sales & marketing has closed new business with Fortune 500 companies and some of the most valuable private companies in the world: AXA, Expedia, Square, Comcast, Verizon, WeWork, Priceline, Air Canada, RingCentral, Airbnb, Bally's, Live Nation, Affinity Gaming, and more.

Founder

"Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true." 
- Zero to One

Just as your product is constantly tested and updated, your distribution strategies should too.

Go-To-Market (GTM) tactics aren't meant to last forever. GTM has evolved from “dialing for dollars” off of printed spreadsheets to the automated personalization we see today.

The democratization of knowledge, channel over-saturation, and the rise of automation inevitably depreciates even the best strategies.

Most companies struggle to objectively test, validate, and scale GTM experiments due to the lack of creativity and unnecessary complexity.

Think about the resources needed for experimentation:

1. Marketer for crafting messages

2. Sales engineer for testing against a control group using objective success criteria

3. SDR for outbound efforts

4. New tools to facilitate campaigns

5. Sales Ops to put all the pieces together

For more mature companies, redirecting these resources from core functions poses uncertain risks many aren't willing to take. 

For less mature companies, these resources are sparse.

It's time for a new era of GTM.

GTM 3.0

If you're seeing depreciating performance in your Go To Market tactics or if you're not sure if you're ready to scale, we are here to help.

🚀 We help you know when & how to scale by objectively measuring Product-Market fit as a spectrum

🚀 We manage unconventional GTM experiments from end-to-end through strategy, messaging, technologies, outbound efforts, and measurement.

Sign up for the weekly newsletter to get step-by-step instructions on how to run unconventional experiments that will supercharge your GTM.

https://moxiegtm.substack.com/

7 months ago, I wrote about Kade Hinkle, an 18-year-old SDR at Common Room who went from 4,000 to 4,500 followers in a week and pulled 350k impressions in 7 days. My paper napkin math projected a 9X ROI on his salary.

Time for an update.



Kade just crossed 10,000 followers. His 6-month impression count from Sep 2025 to Mar 2026: 2,871,608. That's nearly 3 million eyeballs (or 6 million eyeballs if you use Kade's math 🤠 ).

That's ~478,000 impressions per month. 

The average LinkedIn user with 5-10k followers gets maybe 10-20k/month. 

Kade is doing 25-50X that. At 19 years old, with no degree, and outperforming people who've been in B2B sales for a decade (like me!).

So what's the business impact?

I asked Kade if he could attribute any revenue (or pipeline) to his brand. 

His answer: "It's too hard to track that sorta thing 🥲"

Nobody can fully attribute a personal brand to pipeline in 2026. LinkedIn is hoarding the engagement data and recently restricted API access for third-party tools. 

So we're back to paper napkin math.



💲 The funnel (using industry benchmarks):

--> 2,871,608 impressions 
--> × 0.05% visit website 
= 1,436 website visits

--> × 5% convert to trial 
= 72 trials

--> × 15% close rate 
= ~11 deals 

--> × $15k ACV 
= ~$160k revenue (6 months)

.....ROI on his $37.5k in comp: 4.3X

But 4.3X is the conservative floor. 



The napkin doesn't capture:

---Dark social (people Google "Common Room" weeks after seeing a Kade post) 

---Outbound reply rate lift (prospects already know his name before the first DM) 

---Rapid message testing (100k+ people in 48 hours = free A/B tests on hooks, offers, and pain points. Posts that pop become outbound messaging. Posts that flop get killed before they hit a sequence.)


And here's another way to think about it: buying 2.87M LinkedIn impressions at $10-$20 CPM would cost $30k-$57k. 

Kade's organic reach nearly covers his entire salary in ad-equivalent value alone, before you count a single deal.


Factor in dark social, outbound lift, and message testing, and the real ROI is probably closer to the original 9X estimate.



Full breakdown with benchmark sources on my Substack (click link in my profile header to subscribe).

👨‍🔬 Richard F. Purcell

Five companies from Zero to One (4 exits) | Scale GTM systems w/o scaling headcount & tech stack

taplio

The Battle

Cristina Daroca

Richard F. Purcell

Followers

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Performance ScoreRichard F. Purcell's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Cristina Daroca

Richard F. Purcell

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Richard F. Purcell's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreRichard F. Purcell's LinkedIn Performance