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David Wade

Founder, CEO @Marvelous | Revenue Operations & Sales Development

David Wade is a highly accomplished professional with a background in Biology from Appalachian State University. David has held various key roles in organizations, showcasing his expertise and leadership skills. He has a rich history of founding and leading companies such as Marvelous.works and Marvelous Advisors Inc. Additionally, he has experience as a Co-Founder and President at Popdust, further highlighting his entrepreneurial spirit. David has also contributed his talents as a Consultant at Myspace and held significant positions in advertising sales at imeem, Condé Nast Publications, and Dennis. His diverse experience includes roles such as Associate Publisher, National Advertising Director for Maxim Magazine, and Eastern Sales Manager for Maxim Digital at Dennis, as well as a Digital Sales Planner at Discovery Communications.

Highlights

Aug 22 · linkedin

The Partnerships Manager position at Marvelous.works is a high resolution preview of what the media sales job will look like in 2025 and beyond. After years of optimization, our PM’s create pipeline and do 80% of the work of sales using the outbound channel and a hybrid of gift for sales and specialized technology.

A Marvelous PM deeply understands our partner’s pitch, can articulate opportunities when the right person at a brand engages, but they are building awareness and favorability at scale using technology so they have a leveraged advantage over full-cycle sellers (who don’t prospect or outbound consistently) or traditional SDR’s (using old SaaS methodology to ask an email list for meetings.)

Media sellers of the future will fuse tech proficiency with deep knowledge of customer and value propositions. Evolved tech and processes already mean that revenue orgs require fewer full-cycle senior direct sellers, and can lean on an increased proficiency in high effort / tech-enabled communications. The future is here, just unevenly distributed. Our stellar PM team is growing, if you have anyone to recommend please do! Michaela Giesecke Ben Kieswetter Emerson Krull Shelby Meksto Daven Hall Bethany Chen Sinead Donnelly Ava Jackson Elya Avalyan Jasinda Priest

Aug 19 · linkedin

Having a few external conversations lately with sales leaders who are experimenting with the SDR function in house, or having sellers do themselves. When we look under the hood they are sending a high number of auto-send emails to a non-discriminate list of brand prospects and in some cases doing harm to themselves without realizing. They’re often doing a couple of other things we wouldn’t advise, aside from just sending too many messages; sharing here in case helps shine a light:

📌 Not managing for deliverability, i.e. not aware of basic gmail configs, sender rep at IP address and domain or what triggers spam (tech or human flagged) 📌 Sending to a “list” of email addresses as if they were doing an email blast, instead of confirming rationale for each brand and person and setting variables accordingly 📌 Using mass outreach services like Mixmax or Outreach incorrectly and destroying sender reputation for primary domain 📌 Using a meeting-driven CTA instead of seeking to first communicate value and establish fit / trust 📌 Under-researching potential brand targets, using one data source instead of triangulating from several and applying signal or triggers 📌 Not using some form of structured ideal customer profile to inform brand target selection and copy

Some media companies are still using the same tools and processes as SaaS, which is a missed opportunity. Media investment is higher deal size, requires more precisely targeted language in copy and response management, and multithreading across orgs. When done well, cold email is one smaller piece of a holistic account-based marketing practice and helps to do the work of sales in the channel. Start with lower send volume and higher precision, and ditch AI for copy and robosend platforms for sequencing. 💥

David Wade
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Location

Los Angeles Metropolitan Area