I build and rebuild marketing organizations.
I'm Tom Clemens, a marketing leader in Minneapolis. I've led marketing inside organizations from a 23-person startup to a $500 million public company, and at nearly every one of them the job was the same: take a function that had outgrown how it was run, rebuild the team, reset the operating rhythm, and connect the work to revenue.
EdTech, healthcare, nonprofit, SaaS, and professional services. Founder-led, PE-backed, and mission-driven organizations.
How I lead
With the team
Marketing teams today are faster and more tool-fluent than ever, and often more reactive and less connected to business outcomes. My job is to turn a group of order-takers into a function the CEO trusts with the plan: clear priorities, sprint-based execution, people who know what they own and why. I keep the people worth keeping, and I'm honest about the rest.
With the CEO and the board
I run marketing as a revenue function. Pipeline sourced and influenced, cost to acquire, and what marketing contributed, in a form a board will believe. Not impressions or followers. I'd rather bring a plain assessment of what isn't working than a deck that says everything is.
With AI
Discipline over experimentation. Most teams are running random acts of AI: lots of trying, little compounding. I've integrated AI platforms into marketing teams and built the operating structure that makes them a reliable part of how the work gets done, with judgment about where experience still has to lead.
Ask me about
- Taking a marketing team from order-takers to a function the CEO trusts with the plan, and reorganizing one without losing the people worth keeping
- Rebuilding an agency portfolio: who stays, who goes, and how to keep the work moving
- Demand generation, direct to consumer and enterprise, and why the two need different machines
- Building a B2B sales motion inside a company that had only ever sold to consumers
- Brand: building awareness that turns into people searching for your name, and renaming an organization while limiting the hit to equity and search traffic
- Organic traffic, and how to show up in AI-generated answers, not just page one
- Executive thought leadership, social, and when influencers are worth the money
- Events that pay for themselves, from one conference sponsorship to an organization that runs hundreds a year
- Lifecycle programs that turn a one-time customer into recurring revenue
- Standing up a business segment that didn't exist, and the marketing that made it real
- Measurement that ties marketing to pipeline, in a form a board will believe
- Making AI part of how a team works instead of a side project
Where I've done it
- 2025 to presentHead of Marketing, Scrum AllianceGlobal professional certification body. Brand, demand, and the team, through a period of enourmous change.
- 2021 to 2025Director of Channel Marketing, Colibri GroupPE-backed education company. Rebuilt the demand engine, ran the affiliate channel, and designed the post-purchase lifecycle the organization still runs on.
- 2020 to 2025Outside Chief Marketing Officer, CocoRetained for five years as the company's fractional head of marketing, in parallel with my full-time roles: brand, demand, lifecycle, and the team.
- 2014 to 2019Vice President of Marketing, NMDP$450 million national healthcare nonprofit. Reshaped the marketing function while launching an international expansion, a biotech revenue category, and a clinical trials search program.
- 2014 to 2016Director of Marketing and Conferences, MentorMateGlobal software company. Led marketing and the conference program across mobile development and digital healthcare markets.
- 2000 to 2014Director of Marketing and Events, Capella UniversityFourteen years, from 23 employees and $3 million in revenue to a public company at $500 million. Built the events organization from nothing and led marketing through the IPO.
About
Lifelong Twin Cities native, based in Northeast Minneapolis. BA in Business, Organizational Management and Leadership, Concordia University, St. Paul. Agentic AI Intensive Certification, Harvard Data Science Initiative. Certified ScrumMaster®, Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and Certified Agile Leader®.
Full background on LinkedIn.