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

Pipeline crisis chatter is taking over my marketing LinkedIn feed. Here’s my observations and the tactical actions worth considering right now. 

1. Buyer behavior has shifted. Opp volume might be lower, but quality is higher.

Buyers are self-educating more than ever.
They are using AI tools, searching for ungated resources, watching interactive demos, talking to peers, and gathering context long before they show up in your CRM.

By the time they raise their hand, they already know what they want to learn.
If you make the shortlist, they are warm. They are in an active decision cycle. The question becomes how fast you can support them with clarity and zero friction.

About a month ago, Matt Green (CRO at Sales Assembly) shared something that confirmed this. He got off a call with HubSpot where they reviewed data across their customer base. Deal volume was down year over year, close rates were up, and net pipeline was holding steady. The intent is still there. Buyers are simply showing up later and more qualified.

I will drop his post in the comments because it is a great one for sales on how to act on this moment too.

ACTIONS TO TAKE:
→ Audit your content for real buyer self-service
→ Add an interactive product demo
→ Create zero click content that prioritizes distribution
→ Lean into creators, influencers, and referral programs
→ Review BDR outreach for quality, research, and context
→ Keep lessening the team’s dependency on attribution so you can run marketing that catches their attention and helps them. It should be 0 click, and won’t show in attribution, but that’s how you get in their head while they’re self educating
→ Tighten your hand raiser flow with instant booking and faster follow up
→ Bonus idea: send a deal room like Aligned so buyers have everything they need while they wait with a surprise + delight white glove service to project manage the process as a differentiator (special offer in comments)
→ Measure qualified pipeline with a 25% win rate instead of chasing raw opp creation

2. Most teams fixate on net new even though the fastest conversions are already in the system.

The moment pipeline dips, teams sprint toward new leads. But the highest quality and fastest moving revenue often comes from contacts and accounts you already touched. Most teams miss strong signals because they are only tracking new activity.

ACTIONS TO TAKE
→ Sit down with your favorite drink and manually review your CRM
→ Identify what automation is missing
→ Make notes on patterns and signals for outreach
→ Build follow-ups for these leads
→ Review closed lost and launch ongoing campaigns

& yes, it feels harder.

What worked 6 months ago has already aged.
Buyers are faster. Markets are noisier. AI has flooded every channel with more content than anyone can process.

When it feels chaotic, zoom out and use common sense. What would you want as a buyer.
Where is the friction.

Serve your audience, not your process.

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

Saw a post from a dad listing the majors he does not want his daughter to pursue.

→ Marketing
→ Communications
→ Design
→ Philosophy
→ Accounting
(& a few others)

His belief is that AI will take those jobs. (And can't fault him for wanting what's best for his kid!)

I was stunned, not because I'm a marketer and took it personally, but because that logic feels so upside down.

A few hours later, I saw a Brené Brown clip with a completely different perspective.

She said she has been fortunate to be in rooms with wildly successful people like founders and executives. She asked them what they study and what interests them.

Their answers:
→ Philosophy
→ Arts
→ History

Deep thinking, pattern recognition, human behavior
The exact fields that dad wants his daughter to avoid.

She mentioned tech legends like Steve Jobs whose kids did not have iPads, and how their dinner conversations were about art and ideas, not technology.

Lesson from this:
→ Your tools will change.
→ Your thinking will not.

And that is where this gets interesting.

Whether it's communications, marketing, design, philosophy… these are not “AI vulnerable” fields.

They are how people learn to:
→ think clearly
→ interpret nuance
→ understand humans
→ communicate ideas that land
→ navigate change
→ build meaning, not just output

These are the skills that guide AI, not the ones replaced by it.

I have been reminded of this through my brilliant coworker LeeRon Yahalomi. Her simple reminders about how to communicate more effectively for change have been some of the most valuable lessons I've had lately. Not a big AI deployment. Just foundational communication. (Lil' appreciation mention for you on simple exchanges that have been really up-leveling/reminding me!)

So if you are wondering where to upskill right now, here is my take:
→ do not only chase the tools
→ invest in the thinking behind them

AI will make technical skills cheaper.
Clear thinkers and clear communicators will only become more rare.
& more valuable.

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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