Adriel Sanchez
Head of Marketing, Americas, CommVault
Winning ways: Sanchez is a man in a hurry. He was a marketing practitioner while still in school. Addressing email phishing concerns at Citibank early in his career, he created the Email Security Zone, a simple tool that appears in all Citi Cards emails to this day. And in just the past year at SAP he swelled the company’s social media following from 10,000 to 180,000 and created an inbound marketing demand generation engine that tripled the number of sales-accepted leads. “Adriel epitomizes the modern marketer,” says Christopher Powell, SVP of the Worldwide Marketing Initiatives Office at SAP, where Sanchez was VP of demand generation before joining CommVault. “Classically trained in direct response, he’s constantly evolving himself to changing customer preferences, while never forgetting his foundations in delivering business results.”
Defining moment: Holding down a full-time marketing job during his last two years of college and gaining early access to global accounts “gave me an excellent perspective on how to engage across cultural boundaries and helped round me out as a professional.”
Words to live by: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” –Albert Einstein
Head swivel: A report released by MIT Sloan Management Review and Cap Gemini last year altered Sanchez’s perspective on driving digital transformation in large organizations. “Companies have connected digital transformation to soft incentives such as recognition and personal advancement rather than to financial rewards. This caused me to step back from traditional quantitative metrics and consider more qualitative drivers when motivating behavior change.”
Good advice: “When you hear hoof beats, don’t think zebras. Look for the simplest, most obvious explanation to a problem first.”
First job: Cold calling high-net-worth individuals for a large investment bank. “It taught me an incredible amount about direct marketing before I knew what direct marketing was, like the importance of a good quality list and a good, concise hook. It also taught me that, even if only three percent of the people you contact buy something, you can make a lot of money.”
On your nightstand: The J-Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall by Ian Bremmer. “To move from a closed society to an open society, a period of intense instability is required. You don’t have to stretch your mind very far to apply this principle to the state of marketing today.”
Favorite app: Flipboard. “Incredible breadth of content and a beautiful presentation.”
Click or tap here to read the stories behind the successes of the other Direct Marketing News 2014 40 Under 40 winners.
