Career Path of an Account Based Marketing Manager at a Leading Technology Company

In college, I managed a couple of jobs. This was shortly after the recession in 2006-2008.

I worked an on-campus job throughout college and started internships my junior year. I had to take an unpaid internship, so I was pretty busy during my last couple years of school.

I interned at a Harley Davidson dealership, doing event and digital marketing. Even though it wasn't paid, it was a cool first experience. I was able to get them to make it a paid role that summer.

After that, I transitioned to a paid internship with a mortgage company in my last year. It wasn't as fun, but it helped pay the bills and I got to wear many hats. There, I managed social media, their website, and email marketing.

This also became my first job, where I moved into a coordinator role. I wanted to move to Chicago, away from Milwaukee, so I took an adjacent role at Rand McNally. They're known for their maps and road atlases, but they were also doing RV and truck-specific navigation systems.

I did digital marketing for them and really switched to a B2B role there. I also managed an e-commerce site for them. I was with them for about a year and a half, moving up to an associate manager role, and then unfortunately, I was laid off.

Through that experience, I learned that anyone can get laid off in their career, no matter their work caliber. Luckily, I was able to get a job with a brand or agency, which I had always been curious about.

I worked with Oracle Marketing Cloud, doing account management and client services for some big financial clients. I set them up on the platform and executed their programs. However, I discovered I don't love client services and was there for about six months.

I had an opportunity to reconnect with my manager from Rand McNally at a startup she was part of. I switched back to the brand side of marketing and went back to managing everything digital and events for that startup. We were about 50 people when I started.

This was a manager role again, where I wore all the hats in marketing. I really developed my skills in demand generation there, which is about getting new leads into the funnel and turning them into opportunities for the sales team. We were acquired by another company, which decided to keep me on.

I then focused on new name generation and digital marketing through advertising and managing our website. I traveled about 25% of my time for events or to visit our corporate headquarters in New York, as I was still based in Chicago.

I got used to a really fast-paced atmosphere from that startup growth stage. However, the travel started to get to me. I advanced to senior manager of digital marketing there and then took a job as director of Demand Generation for Business Talent Group, a project-based consulting firm in Chicago.

They were really starting their marketing arm when I joined. The team grew from two people to about six by the time I left, about three years later. I really developed my skillset with digital and demand generation and built up a team.

I also started piloting account-based marketing, which was new back then. This involves focusing on a specific set of accounts with sales and product to grow relationships with those accounts.

I then missed marketing to marketers, which I was doing at the startup. I went to do demand generation again at the director level for a local ad tech company in Chicago. I did that for about a year and a half.

They were getting acquired by a competitor, and I was loving everything about account-based marketing and scaling it. I wanted to focus my efforts more on marketing, which led me to my current role.