Natalee Roan

Current

Founder/Publisher at VJournal
Chief Devil's Advocate at Black Ink Consulting

Past

Chief Marketing Officer at Earth Class Mail
Chief Marketing Officer at Entellium, purchased by Intuit
Vice President, Sales Operations at Sprint

Sr. Director of Marketing at Nextel
Pricing Analyst at GTE Mobilnet (Now Verizon Wireless)
Financial Consultant at Coopers & Lybrand
Asset Manager at Equitec Financial Group
Instructor/Lecturer at University of California, Berkeley

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Education

University of California, Berkeley
City University of New York-Baruch College

Recommended

22 people have recommended Natalee

Connections

254 connections

Industry

Marketing and Advertising

Websites

Natalee Roan’s Summary

After being a chief-level executive for several companies ranging from Fortune 500 to start-ups, Natalee is now a consultant specializing in branding, product positioning, strategic planning, messaging, lead generation, distribution, social media and traditional media. She has worked with companies of every size, from New York City to Alaska, in telecommunications, software, cloud computing, real estate, green-tech, and retail.

Prior to consulting, Natalee had direct responsibility for marketing, sales, customer service, and operations at Sprint's wireless division where her responsibilities grew to include managing marketing programs for13,000 distribution points. Earlier, she was the 16th employee at Nextel Communications' headquarters when the product was literally still on the drawing board, where she guided pricing and distribution strategies and assisted with its national roll-out plan.

Her favorite projects are when she's working for the underdog. Of course, who that underdog is can be a matter of timing and capitalizing on opportunity (or not). For small companies, she turned her Fortune 500 product launch experience into a methodology for developing go-to-market strategies that successfully position clients against deep-pocketed competitors.

As an equal opportunity underdog champion, Natalee has also helped Fortune 500 companies "find their inner start-up", by developing streamlined processes to capitalize on new business models and attack market opportunities in order to fend off new entrants as well as reinvigorate tired or tarnished brands.

Natalee's leadership style won high praise in the 8-episode documentary series "Start-up Junkies" which has become required viewing for several University programs on entrepreneurship. (Episodes available on Hulu.com.)

Natalee is also the publisher of Vjournal.com, a blog dedicated to mentoring women in leadership, career management and money management.

Natalee Roan’s Specialties:

go-to-market strategies; business coach; executive coach; leadership development, entrepreneur; chief of staff; chief marketing officer; chief operations officer; generational and gender issues in the workplace, expert witness; marketing; pricing; go-to-market strategy; competitive positioning; social media planning; Net Promoter Score; SaaS hosted solutions; wireless; real estate; business-to-business; consumer; retail; for Fortune 500, start-ups

Natalee Roan’s Experience

Founder/Publisher

VJournal

(Publishing industry)

June 2008 — Present (1 year 6 months)

Vjournal (www.vjournal.com) is an online news resource dedicated to helping women become effective, confident, healthy, wealthy business leaders and bosses. With thousands of subscribers in 19 countries, our goal is to create a safe place for women to learn from and contribute to the success of other female executives.
Chief Devil's Advocate

Black Ink Consulting

(Management Consulting industry)

February 2000 — Present (9 years 10 months)

After being a chief-level executive for several companies ranging from Fortune 500 to start-ups, Natalee is now a consultant specializing in in new market development including product positioning, messaging, lead generation, branding, distribution, social media and traditional media. She has worked with companies of every size, from New York City to rural Alaska, in telecommunications, software, cloud computing, real estate, green-tech, and retail.

Prior to consulting, Natalee had direct responsibility for marketing, sales, customer service, and operations. She's managed programs for teams as large as 13,000 and budgets of $1 billion - and ones as small as 12 and $500k. Projects have included:

*Sprint Affiliate: Orchestrated the marketing launch which led to the sale of this affiliate to a much larger one only 18 months later.

*Telecommunications company owned by the Electric Company in Fairbanks, Alaska - Grew revenues from $196,000 to $2 million in 9 just months;

*Mobile platform company UI Evolution: Re-invented the company's positioning, marketing, and sales strategy which lead to the creation of partnerships with ESPN, Disney and other brand holders, significantly increasing company value. Company went from "running out of runway" to selling less than a year later for $53 million;

*CRM start-up Entellium: Brought Entellium from also-ran to the 4th largest CRM company competing head-to-head with Microsoft and Salesforce.com.
Chief Marketing Officer

Earth Class Mail

(Privately Held; Computer Software industry)

March 2007 — December 2007 (10 months)

Earth Class Mail is the first company to bring postal mail online so it can be read and managed from anywhere in the world. Customers include expats, frequent travelers, students, RVers, snowbirds and Fortune 500 companies with employees in far-flung locations. The company is also working with national posts to reduce physical mail delivery to protect the environment from the thousands of gallons of fuel used to transport mail from sender to receiver.

As Chief Marketing Officer for this cash-strapped startup that had only 6 months of cash remaining, created the Earth Class Mail brand (they were previously called Remote Control Mail) and moved their entire messaging platform from a lackluster mail company into an exciting Green Technology company.

The new brand, messaging, sales, and public relations efforts attracted interest from the New York Times, CNBC, Financial Times, Business Week, Fortune, Inc, and many others. Earth Class Mail “makeover” resonated so well that the company attracted $12 million in new investor financing, the Swiss Post office agreed to an 11-country pilot 2 years ahead of plan, and Sprint moved from a 250-employee pilot to a 17,000 employee roll-out a full year ahead of plan.

Chief Marketing Officer responsibilities included all marketing, sales and customer service functions: Built these functions from scratch as company expanded from 10 employees to 100. Managed the entire customer life-cycle from lead generation through to sale and customer loyalty.

Secured & managed Company's exclusive participation in the 8-episode hit TV docu-series "Startup Junkies", an exciting and unique marketing opportunity that helped launch the company into the national spotlight.

Left Earth Class Mail due to car accident in 2007.
Chief Marketing Officer

Entellium, purchased by Intuit

(Public Company; INTU; Computer Software industry)

January 2006 — January 2007 (1 year 1 month)

Purchased by Intuit (maker of QuickBooks and TurboTax) in 2008. Developed on-demand CRM software that helps front-line sales reps and managers streamline their workloads.

Brought 12-person startup from launch to 4th largest CRM brand in the US competing head to head with Salesforce.com and Microsoft. Company later sold to Intuit, the maker of QuickBooks and TurboTax. Highlights include:

*Created the new Rave brand, including an entirely new positioning by bringing video game developers into a business software company for the first time to create a truly user-friendly interface;

*Reduced total cost of customer acquisition by 40% while attaining Google's best performing business software sales conversion rates - 18% vs industry average of 6%.

*Managed relationships with press and analysts. Personally recognized as industry thought-leader and have been published in several industry journals.
Vice President, Sales Operations

Sprint

(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; S; Telecommunications industry)

1997 — 2000 (3 years )

Worked for Sprint's wireless division from launch with zero revenues to over $5 billion in revenues about 4 years later. Sprint had among the industry's highest new subscriber growth for 8 consecutive quarters.

*Responsible for sales operations for 13,000 points of distribution with 35,000 sales reps comprised of retail stores, 3rd party partners, and B2B sales staff;

*Developed scalable systems to reduce time to market for new promotions from 3 months to only 6 days, shocking competitors - Our first quarter with this new system caused Sprint to lead the industry in new subscribers by 127% versus AT&T;

*Responsible for developing $1 billion customer acquisition budget by managing sales channel alignment so that overall acquisition targets could be met;

*Built corporate Marketing plan and $500 million marketing budget including strategic targets, promotions and company positioning for 2000 consumer business plan.
Sr. Director of Marketing

Nextel

(Public Company; NXTL; Telecommunications industry)

1994 — 1997 (3 years )

3rd person into Nextel's corporate marketing group at start-up when product was literally on the drawing board and held a variety of responsibilities in corporate strategy, marketing & bus. dev.

*Requisite author of Nextel’s 1995 & 1996 Marketing Plans which were distributed to board members and potential large investors including Craig McCaw prior to his investment.

*Responsible for launch strategies including target market, pricing and competitive analysis, and partnership strategy. Helped land Nextel’s first corporate account, Xerox.

*In field position, responsible for all marketing activities related to the launch and ongoing management in 4th largest wireless market in the US: pricing/promotions, sales tool development, advertising, collateral development, direct mail programs, sales training, product mgt, media buys, customer application development, public relations, and competitive analysis.
Pricing Analyst

GTE Mobilnet (Now Verizon Wireless)

(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; vz; Telecommunications industry)

January 1991 — January 1994 (3 years 1 month)

Now part of Verizon Wireless, GTE Mobilnet was one of the first carriers in the United States to build and market cellular service when the technology was in its infancy.

Managed pricing & competitive analysis for the West Region as well as tariff filing process for the State of California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). My expertise with CPUC provided GTE Mobilnet with creative pricing plans that normally would have fallen outside of State regulations. During a 5-month absence of a Regulatory Manager, represented GTE Mobilnet at the California Public Utilities Commission in several industry investigations.
Financial Consultant

Coopers & Lybrand

(Privately Held; 1001-5000 employees; Management Consulting industry)

1989 — 1991 (2 years )

As a consultant in what was then one of the “big six” accounting firms, conducted the research and analysis for several high profile engagements:

*Responsible for determining extent and cost of several Savings & Loan failures to the Federal Government during the infamous 1980's S&L crisis;

*Designed computer program which models revenues and expenditures of municipalities to determine how various land-development alternatives impact their bottom lines, including all forms of taxes – sales tax, occupancy tax, payroll tax, property tax, cigarette tax, gasoline tax, etc.
Asset Manager

Equitec Financial Group

(Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Real Estate industry)

1988 — 1989 (1 year )

Recruited by senior management to recommend new strategies for handling an ailing national commercial real estate portfolio after changes in 1986 tax code severely impacted profitability of real estate limited partnerships. Developed strategic plan which demonstrated that the best strategy for Equitec would be to liquidate much of this portfolio and in the process save itself and its investors over $20 million in negative cash flows and property value depreciation in failing markets.
Instructor/Lecturer

University of California, Berkeley

(Educational Institution; 501-1000 employees; Education Management industry)

August 1985 — June 1989 (3 years 11 months)

As an instructor at U.C. Berkeley and the youngest faculty member in the department, designed, organized and taught classes ranging from 25 to 300 students. Lecture topics included statistics, business management, leadership, and organization design.