People
Think Smart is a group of highly experienced and extremely capable Strategic Directors
Think Smart is a team of highly experienced and extremely capable Sales Specialists, Marketing Directors and Vertical Subject Matter experts. Each member of the team has built a wealth of knowledge and expertise from holding senior and executive positions in industry.
The breadth and depth of our expertise is significant. We can provide current, relevant experience and in-depth knowledge and expertise in a wide range of industry sectors – for example; IT, Telco, Pharmaceuticals and Healthcare (including NHS), Transport and Logistics, Defence (MOD), Media, Financial Services, Automotive, FMCG and Retail. In addition, we have impressive credentials in more horizontal industries such as BPO, Offshoring, Outsourcing, Customer Experience, Brand, CRM, Sales, Marketing and Procurement (Purchasing) Strategy.
Our Strategic Directors are supported in their engagements by long term partnerships with industry leading analysts and research bodies such as; Enders Analysis (Telco and Media), IDC (IT), Bloor Research (IT), OOTLD (Off shoring/Outsourcing), Verdict Research (Retail) and the Global Futures Foundation, by our robust and proven execution processes (The Stack, Account Based Marketing and The Big Picture) and by our team of highly experienced project managers.
Andy
Strategic Director
Andy works with some of our key clients to bring a clarity and coherence to their proposition and to help their sales teams develop more consultative and strategic approaches to finding, winning and developing new business. He has 25 years management experience of which the last 12 have been focused on marketing in complex and competitive environments. During that time he has established an impressive reputation in the technology sector as an accomplished strategist.
His former roles have taken him across the globe and led to him holding a World Wide Marketing Director role for Unisys. Andy brings an unparalleled breadth and depth of experience to any client engagement.
He is an accomplished writer and an entertaining and engaging speaker. He is a very welcome addition to our team.
Debbie
Strategic Consultant
Debbie Sorrell FCIPS is one of our expert consultants and specialises not just in marketing but in procurement and business consultancy too. Debbie has six years' senior management experience in sales, marketing and business development and almost twenty-five years' experience in sourcing, procurement and supply chain management. Eleven of these years were spent at director and board level and her experience spans both the public and private sectors.
More recently Debbie has worked with corporate customers such as Nationwide, Barclaycard, Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (CIPS) and public sector clients such as The Home Office, Criminal Justice IT, National Offender Management Service (NOMS), the NHS, UK Border Agency and the National Policing Improvement agency (NPIA).
Debbie is also a tutor for CIPS, Chair of the CIPS Supply Chain Policy Group and a member of the Professional Advisory Network.
Gerry
Strategic Director
Gerry is a pragmatic marketer with strategic and tactical, International B2B marketing experience in the IT sector. She has extensive experience in developing and implementing integrated go-to-market strategies targeting C-suite decision makers. Passionate about applying the user/buyer experience to determine and affect marketing strategy, she has successfully delivered insight programs designed to reveal a firms' unique messaging attributes. Working with internal stakeholders, industry influencers and customer decision makers, Gerry helps organisations to differentiate their company with a unique and compelling story.
Previously, Gerry was co-founder of influencer marketing firm, Tiger Lily, where she helped key technology service providers to tell their story to influencer communities, specifically industry analysts and sourcing advisors. Prior to this she was a Marketing Director in the Global Finance Industry Group, Unisys, responsible for the delivery of all internal and external communications worldwide.
Joan
Strategic Director
Joan Spindel brings over 20 years of experience in marketing business-to-business solutions and services. She is an experienced marketing executive strategist who specialises in information technology, internet and services-oriented solutions. With a keen understanding of diverse technologies and the impact they have on business, Joan positions product and service-led companies to address market requirements, grow channels and revenue, build brand awareness and drive market penetration – all with an eye toward increasing bottom line results.
Joan works with clients to energise their go to market strategies, branding and positioning. She can galvanise new business and channel development increasing channel productivity and creating a more compelling product portfolio roadmap and launch effort. Her skills with relationship marketing and marketing communication planning and execution have realised breakthrough results. Joan creatively integrates a better understanding of customer and partner needs into the overall marketing process.
Her client list includes companies such as Experian, Level 3 and Unisys as well as dozens of venture-backed technology firms. Joan has held senior marketing positions at EMC Corporation, Lotus Development, Lucent/Avaya, Voxware and dynamicsoft (purchased by Cisco). She holds a BA from Hamilton College and completed her coursework toward her M.S. in Marketing at Boston University. She has held several board positions for organisations such as Artworks and the New Jersey Communications and Marketing Association (NJCAMA).
Joan lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Lynda Chambers
Strategic Director
Lynda works with organisations to build and execute marketing strategies that are pragmatic, measurable and deliver real benefit to the business. As a main board director at Steria for 8 years, she was responsible for marketing and strategy. In this role, she built and delivered strategies for business consulting, systems integration and outsourcing as well as developing a strategic business planning process that has since been adopted by the whole group.
She has experience of acquisitions, divestments and pan-European branding projects. Lynda also has strong P&L management experience, as Director of Steria’s Private Sector business for over 3 years. In this time she achieved profitable growth through the development of new capabilities, a focus on consulting led selling and the development of key accounts, moving the relationship from IT to the board level.
Having managed a P&L as well as running a large marketing team, Lynda believes that the role of marketing is to deliver value to the business and is a strong advocate of measuring the value of marketing against a set of clearly agreed business metrics.
Michael
Strategic Director
Michael Sauber has brought creative energy and focus to companies large and small, sharpening strategy and growing market share and profitability. He helps organisations gain a deeper understanding of their markets and competitors to create a value proposition that attracts new business and deepens the loyalty of existing customers.
Over the course of his career, Mike has led the global launch of over 30 new products and services. Drawing on insights derived from thoughtfully-designed market research, he has recast product and service portfolios to drive more innovative, focused and profitable businesses. And as a sales leader, Mike has driven a consultative approach to selling that raised sales effectiveness and drove repeat customer business.
Mike has built and led marketing teams and programs at IBM, Unisys, and Data General, to name a few. He holds an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania (The Wharton School), and an undergraduate degree in architecture from the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Mike is based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Paul
Strategic Director
Paul has three main areas of focus: financial services, outsourcing and offshoring, and business development, both in Europe and the rest of the world. He managed two major financial services accounts in the UK for two different companies, taking the first from zero to recurring revenues of £14m plus and developing an innovative outsourcing contract for the latter, saving the company more than £5m per annum. As Managing Director for an IT and services company in India and Business Development Director for Southern Africa, the Gulf and India, he developed an approach to offshoring and outsourcing that is demonstrated in his highly successful book What’s this India Business? He subsequently wrote New Business in India which shows companies how to establish themselves in the still growing market in India.
His business development work ranges from strategy development for companies focused on selling into the financial services market in Europe, through developing and implementing the strategy for a major online company in Asia and China, creating and implementing the outsourcing strategy in Mauritius, centralising and offshoring the finance and accounting functions of a European manufacturing company, and managing a highly creative technology and graphics company from imminent bankruptcy. The latter was achieved by identifying the strengths in the company – creativity and technology, then imposing business disciplines on the creatives and technologists, establishing a product set with reusable and repeatable services, and selling this into a challenging market place, made more challenging by the emergence of the credit crunch.
With experience of working in the US, Asia, India, Africa and Europe and a solid grounding in business realities across cultural barriers, Paul sees his role as drawing out the existing strengths of a company by looking at everything from a fresh perspective and focusing on those strengths to produce solid returns for all his clients.
Paul
Strategic Director
Paul brings over 30 years of sales and marketing experience to bear on customers' requirements with enthusiasm and an openness to new ideas. Whilst most of those 30 years was spent working for IT and logistics companies he has also built up great knowledge and awareness of the business issues and drivers within sectors as diverse as financial services, telecommunications and local authorities.
Working at director level in marketing Paul has seen how marketing works as both a seller and buyer. He has practical experience of all the elements of the marketing mix and has a particularly keen eye on identifying and describing the value of what you are trying to sell, who you should be selling to and what makes you different. But with several years direct sales experience he knows this is all for nothing if you can't align with sales and execute.
Peter
Strategic Director
Peter is a senior consumer marketing professional with over 15 years experience in UK and international consumer goods businesses including Unilever, Cadbury Schweppes and Carlsberg.
Most recently Brand Director on the Carbonates portfolio at Britvic soft drinks he launched Pepsi Raw, the first mainstream natural cola, in cooperation with PepsiCo. He is passionate about consumer insight-driven innovation and brand 'rescue' with a commercial orientation.
Tim
Strategic Director
Tim has worked in the third sector (Diabetes UK), pharmaceutical industry (Schering-Plough, AstraZeneca, Sanofi Pasteur MSD) and honed his consultancy skills as Director of Business Development at Saatchi & Saatchi Healthcare.
He has considerable NHS and health payer marketing experience having managed brands at all stages of the life-cycle. His therapeutic knowledge embraces CVD, dermatology, oncology, respiratory, endocrinology, female health, urology and vaccines.
Tim won the Pharmaceutical Marketer of the Year award (2002), been part of three PMEA winning teams (2002, 2006) and won a Communiqué Award (2007).
As a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Tim holds the CIM Postgraduate Marketing Diploma and a Masters Degree in Marketing. He is ABPI qualified and holds the Wellard’s NHS Diploma.
He's also a Member of Hertfordshire Partnership NHS Trust Co-operative, (since 2007) and a member of UK Advisory Council of Diabetes UK (elected 2004).
Tony
Strategic Director
Tony has 20+ years experience within B2B Technology marketing combined with many years in sales / business management positions. Previous roles have included Head of Marketing for Information Systems at Hitachi Europe, Managing Director of Densitron Computer Solutions and VP of Marketing at IVIS Group, a leading e-commerce consultancy and technology provider. /p>
He has extensive experience in the Retail sector with a particular focus on how eRetail is impacting customer relationships and driving change in the supply change. His background also covers the Travel & Transport, Financial Services and Telecommunications markets.
Tony is passionate about how the online world is revolutionising the way organisations need to communicate with their business partners, customers and employees. He has a particular focus on how online marketing techniques can be combined with traditional methods to strengthen customer interaction and market communication.
Owen
Director
Owen heads up our team of talented and experienced Strategic Directors. Although his responsibilities include our own marketing initiatives and business development strategies, he is still very often actively involved with client projects.
One of the three founding directors of Think Smart Group, Owen has over 15 years experience in marketing strategy, marketing communications, strategy and sales integration. His background and experience comes predominantly from working "client side" in the IT industry. He brings his depth and breadth of knowledge, experience and expertise to every client project in just about every industry sector.
Andrea
Director
Andrea is another of the three founding directors of Think Smart Group. She has more than 10 years’ experience of managing large and complex marketing projects for multi-nationals. At Think Smart she manages the Operations team. Her "obsession" with quality and passion for detail ensures the highest of standards for all client projects.
Mark
Director
Mark is one of the three founding directors of Think Smart Group. As well as taking a leading and active interest in developing our technical solutions, Mark has responsibility for all commercial and financial planning activities. He spent more than 20 years in operational, commercial and general management roles in both corporate and small business environments in a broad range of sectors.
Dave
Project Director
Having specialised in IT services for over 10 years, Dave has worked for organisations including Atos Origin (Sema), Bull Information Systems and most recently, Steria. During his career he has gained valuable B2B marketing expertise and his experience includes developing compelling sales propositions, running Customer Advisory Boards and even managing one of the biggest crisis situations in his career, when an oil terminal exploded just 200 yards from the HQ of the company he was working at!
As an experienced communicator, Dave has worked in all aspects of Marketing including Offer Development, Change Communications, Industry Marketing and also as Head of Communications. In addition he has supported businesses at Board Level to define both business and marketing strategies which support the strategic aspirations of an organisation.
Before joining Think Smart, Dave spent five years as a Think Smart client. His love of Think Smart’s “no ego” culture, the close working relationships built and the high-quality of deliverables made Think Smart an obvious choice for the next stage of his career.
Today Dave heads up the Technology team as Project Director.
Jo
Project Director
Jo brings practical knowledge of a wide range of marketing disciplines acquired with heavyweight industrial and service companies. At Nissan she managed new-vehicle launch campaigns, developed communications programmes and managed their CRM strategy.
As Whitbread’s Brand Manager she managed the delivery of cross-media campaigns, moving to set up a central CRM team to develop group and brand strategies.
Today Jo manages some of our key clients as Project Director.
Aileen
Senior Project Executive
With over 5 years experience of B2B and B2C marketing, Aileen brings a tremendous amount of skill and know-how to Think Smart including a sound knowledge of print production and finishing processes.
Having started out her career in the busy marketing department of Newcastle Building Society Aileen soon moved agency side, where she specialised in healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. During this time she worked closely with a number of large clients including Procter and Gamble, Intervet/Schering-Plough and Daiichi Sankyo, developing complex high profile campaigns and project managing each one from initial concepts right through to production and review.
Prior to joining Think Smart Aileen worked on a number of large high profile campaigns, including a £200,000 web-based encyclopaedia project and a £500,000 project to develop and print animal breed books to promote a breed specific dog food from Eukanuba. She now considers herself a bit of an expert when it comes to dogs!
Andrea
Finance Assistant
Andrea confesses to having spent a lot of time in some of the most notorious pubs in Bedford. That was the result of leaving her job in customer services at Granada TV Rentals to become a trainee manager for Charles Wells. After six months she and husband Craig were given an inn to run in Cambridge where they lost four merry years.
Before joining Think Smart in 2005, Andrea spent four years in sales admin and now enjoys a busy finance role at Think Smart.
