Sales first, then enterprise partnerships, then nearly seven years at Contentful on accounts like Amazon, Intuit, Lyft, TELUS, and Yum! Brands.
That start taught me how to ask for things. The difficult skill is knowing when not to, because the deal you skip today is why they trust you with the bigger one later. Enterprise accounts need both, sometimes in the same meeting.
"I had the pleasure of working with Rusty for five years at Contentful. We visited several key enterprise customers together. His colorful, calm, and collected personality and exemplary professionalism make it seamless and easy to collaborate with and produce remarkable and long-lasting results."
"These can be challenging and technical conversations, and Rusty helped guide the engagements to ensure alignment. I really appreciated Rusty's commitment to security and compliance, and more broadly, consistent customer discovery."
An early Customer Success hire. Helped set how the team handled renewals, expansion, and the executive relationship, plus mentoring and training CSMs on sales qualification.
across a $5 to 6.5M portfolio of 25 to 30 global enterprise accounts as Senior Enterprise CSM.
on the largest account in my book. Inherited at high risk, recovered cross-functionally, renewed and expanded the same year.
from a standardized enterprise onboarding process adopted across the CS organization.
aligned across Sales, Product, Engineering, Marketing, and Finance during high-risk escalations.
The book: 25 to 30 enterprise accounts across telecom, media, retail, and tech. Individual expansions from $20K to over $250K ARR. QBRs with C-suite sponsors, renewals owned end to end, expansion mapped early.
Expanded 8X from $50K to $400K ARR over four years. Land-and-expand, white space analysis, and QBRs tied to value the customer could see, which drove expansions across teams.
Started as a small proof of concept. Five years of consistent executive engagement, white space analysis across business units, and QBRs tied to measurable adoption. They started as a customer who was a doubter, then became a true believer.
In 2018, I dug through those tickets by hand and spreadsheets. Today I would put an agent on it and have the answer in a few hours.
Partner marketing spend was scattered across one-off, multi-touch projects. A standardized tracking process plus a menu of prenegotiated options brought it under control and saved $300K.
Built a marketing campaign aimed squarely at CIOs. The $20K spend turned into roughly $400K in closed enterprise deals.
Built a global roadshow to launch a new business intelligence tool. It proved so valuable that sales and field marketing took the format and scaled it across the company.
I learn by building, and the building has not stopped. The work moved past writing prompts a long time ago. It is agentic and context engineering now: giving an agent enough of the right context to do real Customer Success work, and do it the correct way every time. It has made me a sharper CSM and a better judge of what AI can actually do today, and what it still cannot.
still not an engineer, just a domain expert who ships
Two recommendations from the Microsoft years.
"Managing internal Microsoft relationships and Global ISV relationships at the same time was very demanding, and Rusty never fell short in consistent delivery and achievement."
"I would recommend Rusty for any role that he pursues. He will exceed your expectations, and do it with a smile."
Selected roles before Contentful.
IBM alliance. Co-sell and post-sale across the IBM WebSphere network.
140% NRR across joint IBM accounts. 50+ qualified leads and $3M in pipeline from one WebSphere conference, planned and executed in six weeks. 30% lift in IBM co-sell velocity through targeted seller training.
ECM partner channel and field enablement.
98% partner retention. 25% lift in co-sell and cross-sell through a repeatable partner go-to-market program.
40+ global ISV partnerships including Cisco, Adobe, Autodesk, and Citrix.
$600K Cisco-Microsoft partnership relaunch. 400% ROI on co-marketing spend. $300K saved in year one through standardized partner marketing.