Demand generation leader and growth engineer. Over ten years building the engines that turn marketing budgets into pipeline.
The climb runs the whole career, 2014 to now. A / D or the arrow keys to run, SPACE to jump.
More than ten years building the engines that turn marketing budgets into pipeline, across B2B SaaS, agency, and enterprise ad tech. I own the full stack: paid media, SEO and AEO, lifecycle, attribution, and the AI tooling that runs on top of it.
Before marketing there was music. I was playing clubs in lower Manhattan and not making any money, selling $20 tickets to friends who never came to watch. So I asked the hard question: keep doing that, or spend every waking hour in the studio trying to sell a $2 track to a stranger on the internet? I took the studio. Multiple European labels signed my tracks, headliners supported them at major festivals, SiriusXM played them on the radio. Still broke. I wanted to start a life with my girlfriend, so I took everything I had learned marketing an artist called me, and took the plunge.
Lower Manhattan, small stages, late nights. I was selling $20 tickets to friends who never showed up. The math was brutal: keep playing for a room that was not listening, or build something a stranger would actually buy.
So I chose the studio, every waking hour of it, trying to sell a $2 track to someone I would never meet. It worked, sort of. Multiple European labels signed my music. Headliners dropped my tracks at major festivals. SiriusXM put them on the radio.
And I still was not making money. I wanted to start a life with my girlfriend, and a truth landed: I had spent years running promo, positioning, and audience-building for an artist called me. Personal branding was my first funnel. Time to get paid for it.
My first real marketing job: healthcare clients at a Long Island agency. The personal brand I had built as an artist got me through the door; the work kept me there. I learned SEO by moving actual rankings, earned media by pitching real editors, and social by running the calendars myself. Organic visibility climbed, lead volume followed, and I was hooked.
Melville, Long Island, 2016. A healthcare marketing agency took a chance on a PR grad. My job: get doctors found online. SEO, local search, content calendars, and my first taste of watching a ranking climb because of something I shipped.
I pitched outreach campaigns and landed placements in high-authority digital and print publications. The first lesson of my career stuck: distribution is earned, not assumed.
“What sets me apart isn't just experience. It's perspective.”FROM MY COVER LETTER
A year and a half in, I jumped from agency SEO to enterprise ad tech in Manhattan, optimizing out-of-network ad accounts through native advertising for some of the biggest consumer brands in the world. I learned the lesson that still runs everything I do: numbers only matter when the person in the room understands them.
Manhattan, 2017. I traded agency SEO for enterprise ad tech, optimizing out-of-network ad spend through native advertising for some of the biggest consumer brands in the world. The budgets got real, fast.
Enterprise clients meant enterprise stakes. I read Omniture, Kenshoo, and Kochava before every Friday call and built QBR decks executives actually read: one clear story per slide, one decision per story. Data nobody understands is data nobody acts on.
“I operate with ownership and full accountability for the outcome.”FROM MY COVER LETTER
Two agency years taught me speed. Paid search, display, and social across a stack of client accounts at once, with full-funnel tracking in GTM, HubSpot, and Salesforce. The story I still tell: a massive robotics trade show at McCormick Place where the marketing simply was not working. I diagnosed it, found the solution, and optimized relentlessly. We finished 22% up, the first growth in the event's history, with more than 20,000 registrations.
Then came the agency years. A dozen industrial clients, all urgent, all at once. The biggest test was a massive robotics trade show at McCormick Place in Chicago: campaigns were live, money was moving, and registrations still were not.
I dug into what was broken, came up with the solution, and optimized relentlessly: paid search, display, social, all wired into full-funnel tracking. We finished 22% ahead, the first growth in the event’s history, with more than 20,000 registrations.
The owner wanted something nobody there had pulled off: full attribution on every touchpoint, first touch through closed deal. I built it inside my first year at the agency. Ship fast, measure honestly, fix faster became permanent muscle.
“I've built and scaled demand across B2B and B2C, SaaS and services, startups and enterprise. That range was deliberate.”FROM MY COVER LETTER
Three and a half years, three brands, one budget: $100K a month. This is where I stopped being a channel operator and became a portfolio manager. Paid programs scaled to 4x ROAS, pipeline grew 200% quarter over quarter, and I led the CRM migration that finally made attribution honest.
In 2020 I went in-house at a global security workforce company. Three brands under one roof, a $100K monthly budget under my name. Allocation became the job: every dollar had three possible homes and only one right answer.
Discipline paid. Paid programs scaled to 4x return on ad spend and pipeline grew 200% quarter over quarter, because budgets were managed to ROI instead of vanity metrics.
The unglamorous work mattered most: a full CRM migration and attribution overhaul. Nobody wanted it, everybody needed it. When it shipped, leadership finally trusted the numbers on the screen.
“His gumption, grit, work ethic, and intelligence helped create a culture of accountability and action.”Director of Demand Generation, Enterprise B2B SaaS
meshIQ had no inbound engine. None. I built the first one: positioning, content, SEO, attribution, dashboards leadership could actually trust. Lead volume grew 111% in a year and organic traffic 43%. Building from zero shaped me more than any playbook ever did.
meshIQ hired me into a company with no inbound engine at all. No demand program, no attribution, no dashboards. A good product and a blank page. Building from zero is the fastest way to find out what you actually know.
Positioning, content, SEO, lifecycle, measurement. Piece by piece the machine came together: lead volume up 111% in a year, organic traffic up 43%, and every lead traceable to its source.
The dashboards became the company’s shared source of truth. GA4 and HubSpot wired together, so leadership stopped debating whose numbers were right and started debating what to do next.
“His ability to align marketing with all other departments through data-driven insights and optimized operations has been invaluable.”VP of Marketing, Mid-Market B2B SaaS
Hired to run paid media. Within a year I had rebuilt the paid media demand funnel and put up the record quarter: 3,200+ leads on barely incremental budget. Across the year, that funnel influenced $10M+ in pipeline. Then I started building AI agents to run the reporting and optimization themselves, cutting time-to-insight by 70%.
In 2025 Cockroach Labs brought me in to run paid media for a database built to survive anything. I rebuilt the paid media demand funnel: channels, attribution, and the strategy tying spend to revenue.
May through July became the record quarter, the highest paid-media demand generation period in company history: 3,200+ leads on barely incremental budget, and $10M+ in influenced pipeline across the year.
Then I built what I had been working toward for years: AI agents on live APIs running the reporting and optimization themselves. Time-to-insight dropped 70%. The engine started improving itself.
“James has a strategic mindset that goes beyond just running paid campaigns.”VP of Marketing, Enterprise B2B SaaS
This is where I am now: the marketer who builds the engine and the automation that runs it. The future of marketing isn't more hands, it's better engines. If that's what your team needs, let's talk.
Full-funnel demand generation · pipeline strategy and forecasting · paid media P&L · SEO and SEM/AEO · CRO and experimentation · attribution and analytics (GA4, GTM, HubSpot, Salesforce) · marketing automation · growth engineering with APIs and AI agents · cross-functional leadership with sales, RevOps, and product.
Hofstra University, BA Public Relations. Certified in Google Ads (Search, Display, Shopping), HubSpot Inbound, and Google Analytics (GA4).