Nobody investigates a number that's going up.

That's how an API quietly generated duplicate records in our marketing database for months. Our mailable audience grew beautifully — right up until it blew past our account limit and tripped an alarm. I got handed the question. The integration wasn't matching on email address, and the duplicates turned out to be the start of a long journey.

I'm a marketing operations and CRM analyst, which mostly means I'm the person who finds out why the number is wrong. Broken data points can try to run - but I'm faster.

Over the past decade I've successfully owned Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE/Pardot) environments, lead pipeline architecture, segmentation and suppression logic, and email deliverability. My favorite work sits at the seam between tools — where the CRM says one thing, the marketing platform says another, and someone has to determine which system is lying.

Some of my favorite challenges have been:

The CRM stopped receiving qualified leads from MCAE

Action: I took ownership and traced the failure across four source systems. I discovered that 99.6% of incoming prospect records missing a single field that blocked qualification entirely. I collaborated with the Dev team to close the data gap, designed a research pipeline with Sales leadership, and got sign off from Business on the new qualification process.

Result: The inside sales team received leads again and everyone was happy.

A new business unit's dedicated IP address needed to be warmed during an active promotion season

Action: I designed an eight-stage IP warming program using engagement-tiered audience expansion with provider-specific tracks, defined growth rates per stage, and tapering cadence, scaling toward 100,000 daily recipients. Executed the program and tracked performance in MCAE, Everest, and Google Postmaster Tools and established a decision checkpoint to fall back to a secondary sending platform — rather than relying on open-ended monitoring.

Result: I ran the program under significant constraints — no subject matter expert available, concurrent live campaign load, and creative with no prior send history — and documented the negative authentication and reputation issues that resulted. The effort was not successful but I include it as a favorite challenge because I learned so much from the project and am confident my next IP Warming efforts will end with success.

Marketing wanted a lifecycle nurture program that could provide relevant product messaging to new prospects

Action: I engineered a lifecycle nurture that spanned across six different engagement programs and used first-party click behavior to route each prospect into the right specialization track. The participant's engagement in the main branch determined which of five engagement programs they were routed towards then I used action rules to remove them from the general welcome program to prevent overlap. Sales reps would regularly source their own leads so I included built static ad-hoc suppression and enrollment lists allowing them to dictate whether specific prospects be added to or excluded from the journey.

Result: In its first month live — with only two of five branches launched — the program generated dozens of leads, cleared over 1K long-inactive prospects from Pardot, had 14.15% open rate, and 801 unique clicks across its emails. My pièce de résistance was taking the initiative and documenting the full program birds eye view in a color-coded flow diagram to explain the full system to my colleagues.

What do I enjoy?

I'm equally at home authoring requirements for developers, running UAT across sandbox and production, and working with a vendor to reconcile their dashboard — with three months of screenshots in my back pocket should I need it.

What I'm after: a remote CRM, marketing operations, or marketing systems analyst role, owning the unglamorous infrastructure everything else depends on. Bonus points if messy data is involved. I like a mess.

Outside of work, I restore antique furniture and run a small shop selling Geegaws, Trinkets, Tchotchkes — you can find it on Etsy.