Find out how Natalie Scherer, the youngest person in the history of Rise to be promoted to an executive role, won out for ‘Young B2B marketer of the year’.
About the candidate
Natalie Scherer is the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Rise Interactive and is responsible for the vision, strategy, and execution of all marketing activity and communications. She is focused on identifying and building relationships with the
right brands that would most benefit from partnering with Rise to achieve their business goals through digital marketing. She leads a team of 6 and oversees all outbound marketing and demand generation, analyst relations, brand positioning, pipeline growth, and is responsible for the overall ROI of the marketing organization.
Natalie has been with Rise for 7.5 years, and prior to leading Rise’s marketing team, she spent four years as an Account Director, driving client strategy for both eCommerce and lead generation brands. She worked across a variety of verticals in both B2B and B2C marketing including retail, healthcare, and finance. She has a proven track record of leveraging data to help brands drive better results from their marketing investments. Natalie also brings a background of management consulting from her prior role at Oliver Wyman.
Natalie holds a bachelor of science in Marketing and Management from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
The brand they work for
Rise Interactive is a full-service digital marketing agency that consistently competes against larger holding company agencies with more access to capital for initiatives such as marketing, sales, and innovation. (Rise is the smallest performance marketing agency recognized by Forrester’s 2019 Performance Marketing Wave.) Rise differentiates from competitors by demonstrating through its talent and technology that it is the most data-driven agency in the digital marketing industry with a proven approach to multichannel media management and customer experience.
With aggressive annual agency growth goals relying heavily on new business, Rise’s marketing and sales strategy must be ROI positive and directly contribute to the bottom line. Rise’s business model is based on annual contracts of $350K – $1.5MM, coupled with a long, hyper-competitive, and high consideration buying process that includes multiple milestones across a variety of stakeholders. With limited budget overall, marketing strategies need to find and target decision makers with compelling messaging that positions Rise as the clear leader amongst the competition.
Significant career achievements
- Natalie led and launched Rise’s most ambitious outbound account-based marketing program, targeting over 10,000 decision makers across three core audiences that Natalie strategically defined based on the agency’s growth goals. Through digital media, virtual events, email automation, content marketing, and other account-based marketing strategies, Natalie grew new business revenue 23% YoY without incremental budget.
- Natalie is the youngest person in the history of Rise to be promoted to SVP, serving as the second female on the Rise executive team and contributing directly to company-wide initiatives including training, thought leadership, and mentorship.
- Natalie managed a portfolio of over a dozen clients with a renewal rate of over 90% in her last two years on the account team.
Achievements in the last 12 months
2020 was Natalie’s most ambitious and accomplished year in her career, evidenced by the completion of a number of strategic projects that contributed to a 23% increase in new business revenue YoY (despite a global pandemic)
- Overhaul of Rise’s target audiences and outbound strategy based on an in-depth analysis of the competitive landscape, Rise’s win rate and differentiators by vertical, and industry-specific trends in light of new macro realities
- Repositioning of Rise’s proprietary technology and agency differentiator, Connex, complete with press releases, website changes, and sales narratives
- Updated agency positioning and differentiators for stronger go-to-market messaging
- Each of the above initiatives culminated in a brand refresh and website relaunch which was completed in just 8 months
- Pivoted $300K of spend intended for events to an ambitious account-based marketing digital media campaign with audience-specific sales enablement and assets digitally surrounding key decision-makers at target accounts
Strategic vision and/or impact on the business
Natalie played a key role in the re-articulation of how Rise achieves its mission of driving superior results and remarkable experiences for Rise’s clients. The overhauled Rise website narrative is a demonstration of Natalie’s keen understanding of the challenges that marketers face today (proliferation of marketing channels, siloed technology, pressure to prove ROI), and how Rise is uniquely positioned to solve those challenges. Natalie has tackled Rise’s key challenge–being a smaller digital agency relative to a competitive set of agencies backed by holding-company capital–with a fiercely data-driven approach to all marketing tactics and investments. By crafting a marketing plan that specifically targeted groups of accounts with messaging specific to their pain points, she was able to take a meager 8% increase in budget and drive 23% more new business revenue in 2020.
Impact on other employees and departments
Natalie is considered throughout Rise to be one of the most collaborative team members in the organization. Natalie transformed what had previously been a tense relationship between the marketing and sales teams to what is now the most productive and results-generating new business group in Rise history. Natalie also champions cross-company knowledge and learning. She frequently presents Rise’s marketing strategies to the entire agency in company-wide meetings, and launched a weekly marketing digest that summarizes learnings from Rise’s own B2B marketing efforts. Under Natalie’s leadership, the volume of activity and energy towards participating in marketing initiatives from departments throughout the organization has skyrocketed.
"As the SVP of Marketing for Rise, Natalie serves as my partner in exceeding Rise's aggressive growth goals year over year. With confidence, grace, and a remarkable level of intellect, she not only leads her team through data-driven marketing campaigns, but inspires the 250+ employees at Rise to become part of the company's growth plan. She proactively drives Rise's marketing strategy with a smart balance between today's KPIs and the company's longer-term growth initiatives. She has become an irreplaceable component of our company's DNA and a mentor to the dozens of burgeoning marketing talent looking up to her. I know I speak for many of her colleagues when I assert her undeniable merit of this award."
