About

Marissa Wright, MBA

44 years in technology sales, marketing, and business advisory, 25 of them as VP Sales, VP Marketing, and CRO with go-to-market P&L ownership.

I am a business growth consultant. I find where revenue leaks between sales, marketing, partner channels, and customer success; design the process that closes the gap; and build it myself, from the systems and content to the team that runs it. I have been commercializing AI solutions since 2001.

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30 minutes · Free · Microsoft Teams · Pacific Time

Marissa Wright presenting at the SiFi Networks Smart Cities workshop in Placentia, CA
Presenting at the SiFi Networks Smart Cities workshop in Placentia, CA

$40M+

Client capital raised

75% to 90%+

Renewal rate, within the first year

$12M to $22M

Revenue growth over six years

36%

Revenue CAGR over four years

What I bring

What if the person who builds your strategy also designs your optimal processes, and builds and operationalizes your systems?

A growth plan often arrives as a document. Someone else has to adapt your processes to the strategy across your organization, and someone else has to build and deploy. Yet another person needs to onboard your teams into the new strategy, processes, and systems. Or is there a better way?

Commercialization and market intelligence

Strategic planning, market entry and expansion, and the market intelligence behind them.

Business process design

Process architecture across the customer lifecycle, from the first signal to renewal and referral.

RevOps systems design and build

Designing, building, and integrating the systems your revenue runs on: CRM, data, automation, and the AI tools that work inside and outside them.

Marketing systems and content

Website development, market messaging, and content, with SEO, AEO, and GEO measurement surfaced in the CRM and in your web analytics, search, and online store reporting.

Building the team

Sales and marketing management, and the hiring and coaching to run it.

End-to-end accountability for strategy, build, and execution.

Let's talk about your business

How I work

I diagnose first, then design, build, and measure the result

I start by finding where growth stalls, then design the fix, build it into your systems and your team, and measure it against success criteria we set at the start. In a CRM, that means separating sales process, sales methodology, and customer lifecycle before anything is encoded. The model I use is AISDALS/L, a nine stage lifecycle that merges sales, marketing, partner channel, services, and customer success workflows.

Ways to work together

  • Fractional CRO services
  • Growth diagnostics
  • Go-to-market strategy
  • Capital funding readiness
  • CRM implementation
  • Investor advisory

One resource

Domain experience across sales, marketing, partner channels, and customer success, plus the skill to build what I design.

  1. Step one

    Identify the problems

    Diagnostics across your business, markets, competitive position, messaging, and go-to-market process.

  2. Step two

    Make a plan

    The strategy, and the process design that carries it across sales, marketing, partners, and customer success.

  3. Step three

    Set the success criteria

    The measures the work will be judged by, agreed before it starts.

  4. Step four

    Execute the plan

    I build it: the systems, the content, and the team to run it.

  5. Step five

    Measure your success

    Results reported against those criteria, in your CRM and your analytics.

Career

Where the experience comes from

  1. 1979Began using desktop computers.
  2. 1982Began selling computer hardware and software, as a channel partner, distributor, manufacturer, and consultant.
  3. 2001Began commercializing AI solutions, and moved into executive leadership: 25 years as VP Sales, VP Marketing, and CRO with go-to-market P&L ownership in SaaS, cybersecurity, and Smart City IoT businesses.
  4. 2002Consulting on sales process and the systems that run it, 2002 to 2004.
  5. 2013MBA, Simon Fraser University. My thesis applied a strategic analysis framework to a CRM company where I was then VP of Sales: read the case study.
  6. 2018 to todayAuthgnosis: growth consulting, fractional CRO engagements, and advice to CEOs, boards, and investors on market entry, expansion, and scaling, with the systems to run it designed and built in house.

Market sectors

  • Large enterprise
  • Small and medium business
  • Municipal government
  • State government
  • Federal government
  • K-12 and higher education
  • Energy utilities

Systems

Systems I design, build, and integrate

Revenue systems

  • CRM design, build, and integrationSetting up your customer database (CRM) to match how you sell, and connecting it to your other tools.
  • Sales process and lifecycle automationThe CRM moves each deal and customer through set stages, from first contact to renewal, and prompts the next step.
  • Workflow automationRoutine steps, such as creating a follow-up task or a reminder, happen on their own instead of by hand.
  • Lead capture, scoring, and distributionEnquiries land in the CRM, get rated on how promising they are, and are shared out to salespeople in rotation (round robin) or first come, first served.
  • Campaign and nurture automationPlanned series of emails that go out on schedule, skip people who opted out, and never over-send.
  • Telephony and email integrationPhone calls, emails, and meetings are recorded on the right customer's record without retyping.
  • Pipeline dashboards and forecastingLive charts of deals in progress and the revenue they are likely to bring in.
  • Client and partner portalsPrivate web pages where clients or channel partners sign in to see their projects, deals, and shared materials.
  • Partner deal registrationChannel partners register the deals they find, so it is clear who owns each one and two partners never chase the same customer.

Marketing systems

  • Website design and developmentDesigning and building web pages from a consistent set of styles, so the whole site looks and behaves alike.
  • E-commerce storefrontsOnline stores: setting them up, organizing the product information, and removing what stops people buying.
  • Market messaging and contentWhat you say about your business and how: positioning, page copy, and articles in the words your buyers use.
  • SEO, AEO, and GEO strategy and KPIsBeing found on Google (SEO), in answer boxes (AEO), and by AI assistants like ChatGPT (GEO), with numbers to track it.
  • Web and behaviour analyticsReports on who visits your website, how they found it, and what they do once there.
  • Email marketing and deliverabilityNewsletters and campaigns, plus the setup that keeps your email out of spam folders.
  • Consent and privacy complianceAsking visitors' permission for cookies and recording who agreed to receive email, as privacy law requires.
  • Live web chatVisitors can type a question on the website and get a reply from a real person.

Data and market intelligence

  • Data enrichmentFilling in missing facts about companies and contacts, such as industry, size, and job title.
  • Competitive landscape monitoringKeeping track of what competitors offer, charge, and rank for, and how that changes.
  • Primary market researchOriginal research done first hand, such as analyzing thousands of job postings or online discussions.
  • Business intelligence dashboardsScreens that pull figures from sales, the website, and finance into one picture of the business.
  • Web intent signalsWith their permission, noting when known contacts come back to your website and what they read.
  • Keyword and search demand researchFinding the words buyers type into search engines, how often, and how hard it is to appear for them.
  • Prospect and account researchBackground research on a company before a first call: its market, offer, people, and position.
  • Data warehousing and integrationBringing information from separate systems into one place so it can be analyzed together.

AI systems

  • AI agent integrationLetting AI assistants work directly with your CRM, website, analytics, and accounting, within set limits.
  • Agentic AI workflowsAI that carries out a task in several steps on its own, pausing for a person to approve key decisions.
  • AI-generated reports and digestsRegular reports and email summaries that AI writes from your own data.
  • AI cost optimizationChoosing the right AI model and way of working so the monthly AI bill stays low.
  • AI-augmented web researchAI searches the web and gathers findings, with sources listed so each one can be checked.
  • Scheduled automation and monitoringAI jobs that run at set times, with an automatic check that flags any that fail.

Security and governance

  • Identity and access managementControlling who can sign in to each system, and what each person or app is allowed to do.
  • Least privilege service accountsAutomated tools get their own logins with only the access their job needs, and nothing more.
  • Secrets managementPasswords and access keys stored securely, never written into code or shared documents.
  • Email authenticationSettings that prove your email really comes from you, so it is trusted and impersonators are blocked.
  • Outbound send safeguardsBuilt-in checks that stop an automated system from emailing someone it should not.
  • Audit trails and change controlA record of every change made to a system: what changed, when, and why.
  • Backup and rollbackA saved copy before every change, so any change can be undone.
  • Security auditsReviewing systems for weak spots, such as loose access or exposed data, and fixing them.
  • Data retention controlsStored data is deleted automatically after a set period instead of piling up.

Development tools

  • AI-assisted developmentWriting software with help from AI coding tools, with every change reviewed before it is used.
  • Version control and code reviewEvery change to the code is saved with its history and checked before it goes live.
  • Scripting and automationSmall programs that do repetitive computer work in seconds instead of hours.
  • Containerized automationPackaging automated tools so they run the same way on any computer or server.
  • Cloud functions and storageSmall services that run on cloud servers, such as tracking links and storing data, without a server to maintain.
  • Scheduled jobs and monitoringTasks that run automatically at set times, with an alert if one fails.
  • Native macOS app developmentBuilding desktop applications for Apple Mac computers.
  • Test harnessesAutomated test runs that walk a whole process through before it goes live, to catch problems first.

The role of CRM systems in growth and scale

CRM systems play a critical role in cross-functional orchestration

The CRM is the hub of the front office. It holds the customer-facing processes, activities, and data of sales, marketing, partner channels, and customer success, and the analytics that turn them into decisions.

Many companies use it only to log contacts and calls. Built around the process, it guides each team through RevOps best practice, passes work from one function to the next without gaps, and records what happened at every step.

That record shows which campaigns, channels, and sales motions produce revenue and which do not, so you can do more of what works and less of what does not.

FAQ

Platforms and tools I have worked with

Which CRM platforms have you worked with?

Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, HubSpot, and Maximizer. On Dynamics I build with Microsoft Dataverse and Power Automate, including business process flows. Most mainstream CRMs cover the same core functions in different ways, so any CRM can be brought into my development environment. I have built lead scoring and lead distribution in several CRMs, including round robin and first come, first served assignment, and deal registration for channel partners.

Which sales and communication tools have you integrated with a CRM?

Five9 CX, RingCentral, Microsoft 365 and Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Bookings, and QuickBooks Online.

Which website and e-commerce platforms do you build on?

WordPress with Divi Builder 4 and 5, and Shopify. Around them I work with Yoast SEO, CookieYes consent management, WP Engine hosting, and Cloudflare.

Which analytics and search tools do you use to measure marketing?

Google Analytics (GA4), Google Search Console, Microsoft Clarity, Looker Studio, and DataForSEO, with the KPIs surfaced in the CRM as well as in the tools themselves.

Which email marketing and survey tools have you used?

Mailchimp, SurveyMonkey, and CRM-native email campaigns in Microsoft Dynamics and HubSpot, with address verification before contacts are loaded.

Which data enrichment and research tools have you used?

ZoomInfo, Apollo.io, Google BigQuery, and DataForSEO, plus custom data sets built for a specific market or client.

Which AI models and tools have you built with?

Today I build with Claude and the Anthropic API, Claude Code, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that connect AI agents to the CRM, the website, analytics, and accounting systems. Before I settled on Claude, I built with OpenAI's ChatGPT family and Google's Gemini family of models and tools.

Which development tools do you use?

Claude Code for AI-assisted development, GitHub for version control and code review, Python and JavaScript for scripting, Docker for containerized automation, Microsoft Azure for cloud functions and storage, and Swift and SwiftUI for native macOS apps.

Next step

Talk through your growth or go-to-market question

A 30 minute Teams call to talk through your question and whether working together makes sense. Times show in your own time zone, and the Teams link comes by email straight away.