@clarkbk
About Me
I grew up in Atlanta, GA. I graduated high school in 2004 having successfully learned how to read, write, and do math. Those things got me into Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. I graduated in 2008 with bachelor's degrees in Economics & East Asian Studies.
In Fall 2006, I participated in a language immersion program in Beijing, China organized by CET Academic Programs. I lived on the campus of the Beijing Institute of Education (北京教育学园) and attended Mandarin Chinese classes 5 days a week.
After graduation, I relocated to New York City to accept a job at Yelp. I eventually moved with Yelp to Phoenix, AZ, and then back to New York to accept a job with an early-stage startup called Clover.
When Clover dissolved, I found a spot at Buddy Media, which was acquired a year later by Salesforce.com. After the acquisition, I accepted a position as Director of Customer Acquisition at SeatGeek, where I work today. For more information on my work background, click around the Work section above.
I joined Yelp in 2008 in their first round of hiring for their new New York sales office. For the next year and a half I made high-volume outbound sales calls and signed local business owners up for Yelp's subscription advertising product. In Jan 2010, I relocated to Arizona with about 20 other Yelpers from the east & west coasts to found Yelp's third sales office in Scottsdale. I moved from sales to sales operations, filling in the second spot of a two-person team. As the team began to grow, my role transitioned (unofficially) into oversight of the local sales/ad operations team, and then (officially) into full-time Salesforce.com administration for the entire sales organization — another two-person effort.
In the latter role I contributed to the redesign and development of several high visibility projects for the sales org, including:
- re-drawing Yelp's sales territories
- overhauling Yelp's sales performance dashboards
- developing custom VisualForce & Apex pages & controllers to integrate Yelp's account data with the Google Maps API
In April 2011, I left Yelp to return to New York. Between my arrival in 2010 and my departure in 2011, the Scottsdale sales operations headcount had grown from 2 to 10. The entire sales organization had doubled in size — thanks to the addition of over 200 new AEs in Scottsdale in that short time.
Skills:
- Google Apps Scripts
- Salesforce.com administration
- SOQL (Salesforce Object Query Language)
- Apex/VisualForce development
In early 2011, I joined a stealth-stage startup called Clover, headquartered in Mountain View, CA and funded by Andreessen Horowitz. Four other former Yelp employees and I organized in New York to found Clover's first sales office. I began building out the infrastructure to support our sales organization. This included:
- Salesforce.com administration
- Working with sales management to define & implement sales processes & compensation rules
- Designing client-facing sales collateral
- Building a sales intranet for training material, collateral, etc.
- Google Apps administration
- Administration of network, desktop, & VoIP systems
- Managing third-party vendor relationships
Thanks in part to frictionless sales tools, our first class of 14 AEs successfully closed 120 transactions in their first three weeks. But in spite of the success of the sales team, in August 2011 the decision was made to take Clover in a different direction due to poor performance of the product. We laid off our AEs and only stayed on ourselves to tie up loose ends, close down the NYC office, and work ourselves out of our own jobs.
Skills:
- MS Excel & Powerpoint
- MySQL
- Web development (HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery, PHP, JSON/XML, etc.)
- Various data APIs (Google Maps, Groupon, Yipit, etc.)
In late 2011 I began working at a social media marketing startup called Buddy Media as a business intelligence analyst. I belonged to the Analytics & Insights team, a group of 4-5 other analysts who were primarily concerned with delivering custom client reports (a la professional services) and producing 'deep dive' analyses used for thought leadership positioning and demand generation. I oversaw all internal reporting, and especially anything to do with customer usage data. My two main focuses were:
- predicting customer retention/attrition
- understanding feature adoption & overall product health
This entailed designing, executing, and iterating on a few high-profile reports that met the needs of a fairly broad audience within the organization. Producing these reports was a major undertaking that involved:
- leading discussion with report consumers to guide them towards meaningful KPIs
- working closely with Buddy Media's core, systems, and data warehouse developers to design scalable tracking & reporting systems
- conducting detailed QA of incoming data
- designing functional and attractive reports & dashboards
- templatizing reports for efficient periodic delivery
- presenting reports to report consumers, along with related analysis/commentary
In mid-2012, rumors that Buddy Media would be acquired by salesforce.com turned out to be true; the acquisition closed in August. My post-acquisition work is detailed in the Salesforce section above.
