Shannon Russell

Led a team of analysts to provide data-driven insights and strategic recommendations to the marketing and operational teams supporting a $58MM long term care insurance sales channel.

• Drove deeper analytical insights across digital and offline programs by implementing a new TIBCO Spotfire business intelligence (BI) tool. Turned cumbersome Excel-based reports into automated, user-friendly self-service reports.
• Recovered $1.0MM per year in lost sales and reduced lead acquisition cost by 12% by identifying drop-off of sales leads between initial response and agent distribution.
• Developed a detailed cost benefit analysis to secure $1.2MM in capital funding to 1) build a digital consumer demand generation process and 2) establish a new telesales channel to capitalize on leads that were not being worked by traditional agents. Both projects approved and funded.
• Developed a detailed 5-year pro forma sales and profitability model for a fully funded marketing portfolio, consumer demand generation support team and sales channel strategy. Growth primarily driven by digital marketing efforts including paid search and targeted display coupled with retargeting, interrupter and exit strategies.
• Reduced the production time of key marketing profitability reports from one week to two hours by leading a project to streamline and automate reporting processes. Improved reporting frequency to daily versus monthly or weekly.
• Hired, developed and mentored onsite analysts, effectively establishing a cohesive and pro-active analytics team who successfully supported internal customers with insights to drive sales growth and cost reductions.
• Engaged with and presented to senior leaders, setting strategy and driving multi-year planning and financial forecasting. 

Led direct marketing analytics for the consumer marketing team responsible for managing up to $24MM of direct mail and digital marketing to generate long term care insurance sales leads.

• Pro-actively redesigned the core marketing data infrastructure by centralizing and integrating data from 10+ disparate internal and external sources (e.g. salesforce.com, digital activity, direct mail) to support improved reporting accuracy, report production time, views across campaigns types, and the resulting key business insights.
• Supported the growth of paid digital lead sales from $50K/year to $5.5MM/year and reduced cost per lead by 85% from $650 to $100 over a four-year period. Performed detailed analysis of digital sales funnel drivers and collaborated with the digital marketing team to achieve results. 
• Boosted the performance of offshore data analysts to create a critical analytics support team by closely guiding their work, communicating the business context for end user needs and establishing explicit requirements for deliverables and timelines.  
• Partnered with marketing managers to develop strategies and performance reporting to measure results. Created key metrics around geographical variations in lead sales conversion and agent lead demand to optimize paid search and direct mail campaign targeting.  
• Created quantitative financial planning models to guide strategic decisions around the viability of new initiatives and the performance of ongoing initiatives.
• Increased lead volume by 8% and annual sales premium by $3.0MM after conducting system-wide data quality and operational audits that identified two lead processing errors causing lead fall-out. 
• Enhanced the direct mail testing program by implementing a statistically valid test and control methodology. 
• Managed key external vendors and strategic partner relationships to ensure high-quality service to support Genworth’s business goals (e.g. Acxiom, Genpact).

Evaluated and quantified the sales impact and profitability of a variety of marketing programs.

• Created a dynamic sales forecasting model that enabled leaders to manage to annual revenue/expense goals and easily perform sensitivity analysis.
• Created and published a weekly metrics package to drive understanding of the marketing programs, facilitate strategic conversations with stakeholders and provide the springboard for deeper analyses.
• Established a new lead-to-sales attribution methodology critical to multi-channel marketing performance measurement and strategic decision making by leaders at all levels.
• Increased marketing ROI by $1MM on $20MM of direct mail spend after convincing marketing leadership to change the direct mail selection strategy from a response-only basis to an overall profitability basis.

Worked with sales managers to develop user-friendly planning tools to help them manage their business. Simplified, automated and improved data integrity of key senior management reports and dashboards.

• Partnered with marketing to develop their vision and build a 5-year financial forecasting model showing fixed and variable marketing spend components.

Provided financial forecasting and actual reporting to US and global management, balance sheet, cash flow and operations reporting, SAP general ledger management, inter-company charging, budgeting, third party A/P, vendor management, business opportunity forecasting and reporting. 

Created financial forecasts outlining global business trends and variances under strict deadlines for global executive-level manager decision-making.

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/excel-mysql

Finance & Marketing

French Minor