Everyone's prompting. Almost no one is operating.
I am a marketing executive who runs the function as a self-improving system: briefs written as rubrics, proof required before anything publishes, standards that compound run to run. This page is the short version of who I am and where the work lives.
Why you would talk to me.
Positioning.
I have positioned B2B software brands for twenty years, three times with my name on the outcome.
I know what a reposition costs before it pays, because I have lived the eighteen months where the brand goes backwards.
Executing the go-to-market.
A position only counts when the go-to-market executes it. I came up through presales, ten years standing in front of finance buyers translating what the product does into what they actually need. Marketing that ignores how selling actually works does not survive contact with a pipeline, and I have carried both sides.
The office of the CFO.
Marketing and finance meet in everything I have sold and run. I sold marketing resource management at Orbis and Infor, connected sales and operational planning at Anaplan, and have run marketing performance management at Planful since 2019, where the buyer is the CFO and the job is to run marketing in the language finance respects. I understand budgets, forecasts, and what a finance leader needs to see before they believe a marketing number.
Operating the function.
And I operate this way in the open, on the same three rules this page opened with. The engine further down this page is that method pointed at positioning itself.
The receipts.
Host Analytics to Planful.
CMO · the reposition ran 2019 to 2022
I repositioned and renamed the company as CMO. Branded search up 50% in eighteen months off a zero base. Unaided recall up 30 points. New logos tripled.
And the honest part: the brand went backwards for eighteen months before it went forwards. Anyone who tells you a rebrand pays off on launch day is selling you a launch party.
MapD to OmniSci.
Repositioned an open-source database company upmarket into an enterprise motion, from eight reps and no ICP to named Fortune 500 accounts.
Anaplan.
Moved the argument from territory planning, where the product story was tidiest, to incentive compensation, where the buyer's pain was sharpest. That wedge produced the company's first Magic Quadrant leadership position.
Orbis, then Infor.
Nine years in presales, selling marketing resource management software, through Orbis's acquisition by Infor in 2012. This is where the twenty years started.
What I am building.
The positioning engine is a system that explores every route a business could take, tries to kill each one, and shows the work, including the bets it rejected and why. The engine runs the search. I make the call, and it is signed.
The engine, the method, and the advisory built on it live on their own site.
The bottleneck is never the words. It is the proof.
Where to find me.
The day-to-day thinking is on LinkedIn. Longer arguments run in my Diginomica byline. For the positioning work itself, start at positioningengine.com. Email works too: rowan.tonkin@gmail.com.