About Me3 Jun 20262 min read

Hello, world. Welcome to my site ๐Ÿ‘‹

Who I am, what I do, and why I created this site.

Reuben O'ConnellMarketing technologist

Introducing myself

My demand gen philosphy

I'm a hands-on growth marketer with 7+ years of experience helping B2B SaaS companies start and scale demand generation. I'm comfortable across the data, the tooling, the creatives and the code, which means I can define strategy and execute it without relying on a larger team around me.

I run demand gen in a way that's joined up with your sales motions, and crucially, pipeline-focused. My approach to demand gen starts with closing the gap between what a buyer is actively trying to solve and what we're saying to them. That means being disciplined about keyword intent before committing paid budget, writing copy around outcomes rather than features, and designing conversion paths around buyer type rather than a single generic funnel. Prospects don't care what the product does, they care what changes for them.

A passion for technology

I've always been passionate about tech. When I was 12, I wanted a gaming PC that would run The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. We couldn't buy one, but I was still desperate to play it. My Dad bought me a book on how to build a gaming PC and I saved up my pocket money. I purchased a cheap motherboard, an AMD Sempron 2 processor (I think) and an AMD Radeon Graphics card amongst other parts, and put it together piece by piece. I finally had something capable of running my favourite game. I also think learning computers piece by piece has translated to how I build marketing campaigns.

That was the start. The in-between is a longer journey, but in my first startup role, I found myself fascinated by the ins and outs of the engineering teams work. I had some basic coding skills anyway, but never built on or applied them. Working in marketing gave me the chance to use some of them, whether that was adjusting CSS classes to make landing pages look better, or writing snippets for analytics events to help track users better on our website.

In 2023, I took the plunge to formalise my learning by joining Codecademy. Around a similar time, I thought that it'd be great to enhance my freelance work with a website. I really should have used Squarespace or similar, but I decided to build my own site using every piece of knowledge from my frontend course.

So now we have this site, which has been iterated on constantly, when I could have launched it in 2 weeks. But that wouldn't have been fun!

Marketing and sales are one motion - optimise for pipeline not leads, and keep the conversation consistent across both