Moments of impact from Erin Phinney's career
Nava BenefitsWhen I joined Nava Benefits as the second marketing hire, the company was disrupting the traditional brokerage model by delivering higher-quality benefits without inflated costs. The challenge was significant: the industry was staunchly sales-led with no established inbound playbook, and we needed to build an entirely new pipeline function from scratch to find prospects open to rethinking their benefits approach through a modern lens. I launched a multi-channel testing strategy, starting with low-cost tactics like webinars, email marketing, and owned content to validate our approach. We sponsored and attended industry events to build trust, then expanded into lead magnets, paid advertising, and a field marketing program. Our strategy centered on adding value and educating prospects rather than hard selling. This helped us target decision-makers actively looking to modernize their benefits strategy. Throughout hundreds of experiments, I tracked cost per lead and lead-to-opportunity conversion rates. In true startup fashion, our tracking was messy but effective, and we constantly reevaluated why customers chose us to refine our messaging and targeting. This ground-up approach ultimately led the pipeline to double year over year. By year 4 we generated $20M in qualified pipeline. Beyond the pipeline number, we established repeatable acquisition channels and a testing framework that positioned Nava's growth team to scale sustainably as the company grew.
Trove · CMOTrove is a disruptor company, and like every disruptor, we started from zero. In the early days you're solving two problems at the same time: building something people need, and making sure anyone knows you exist. I knew early on our team would benefit from a different kind of opinion in the room based on our skillsets. We cared about the problem personally, but we needed people who deeply understand careers at a larger scale. Most often that's people leaders. They're practitioners inside real organizations. They see, nurture, and assess tens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of careers a year, on top of managing their own. So I set out to build a small group of advisors whose opinions we actually wanted. The board isn't complicated. We have five stellar people leaders with two jobs to be done: shape the product from the user side, and help us tell the story when we go to market. To build this board, we took a highly targeted approach. My team and I built a curated list of people we admired in the space, then pursued a mix of referrals, warm networking, and cold outreach to open conversations with potential fits. Rather than rushing to sign people up, we had in-depth conversations to assess whether our working styles and their bandwidth aligned with what we needed. We were explicit that we wanted advisors in it for the long haul, not just a logo on our website. The fantastic people who will be building alongside us: - Mike Gutner: Chief People Officer, Toast. Former astrophysicist, nine years at Google. - Tessa White: Founder, The Job Doctor. Author of "The Unspoken Truths for Career Success." Former Fortune 50 HR exec. - Claude Silver: Chief Heart Officer, VaynerX. The world's first Chief Heart Officer. Author of "Be Yourself at Work." - Sharon Pollard VP, Head of People & Culture, CloudZero. AI systems builder and organizational psychologist. - Andrew Stockwell: People leader, formerly Vendr. 20+ years scaling teams, including ZoomInfo.
ProfitWell · Senior Manager of Events & Experiential MarketingProfitWell was a SaaS company, but in 2020 we started a limited edition drop shop that included sneakers, hot sauce and t-shirts. Sounds like an insane idea as none of those have anything to do with SaaS, but the ethos and moment in time were right. At the time swag drops entering an all time high. Supreme was selling branded bricks for thousands of dollars. We know we could capitalize on this momentum. ProfitWell filled our pipeline through a media arm called Recur. We created cool and useful content and hosted events, and this drove subscribers. So we hatched up an idea to launch something so unexpected and creative that people would take notice. After much brainstorming we settled on 3 initial ideas that we could execute over a series of months. Custom sneakers, hot sauce and shirts. All required collaborating with external vendors and designers to bring our vision to life. Along with our internal team of creatives and myself who ran the project alongside Dan Callahan, ProfitWell's Creative Director. All of this hinged on the drops being cool enough (no sad corporate swag) and our promotion being striking enough (no sad b2b) that folks would actually want these items in their real life. We created tension leading up the launch with a hype site where we used a countdown timer to reveal drops. Hot Sauce: We custom designed a 3 hot sauce drop to align with our 3 product lines (subtly). Grant Sheply designed the labels. Brett Gifford is a true talent and made the most outstanding video from a literal whole foods order I had dropped at his door and bunch of slacks about "vibes". Sneakers: We worked with a designer in London to create custom air force ones that were a nod to ProfitWell, but were anything but company swag. T-Shirts: In a nod to the brand Off-White we designed custom long sleeve ts. The shirts and shoes were launched in a tandem drop video. This again was run by Brett Gifford and managed by Dan Callahan. Overall, the drop shop was a complex bet to take. We had to create 3 limited edition lines, all customized with external partners and launched with enough hype to create media attention. I'm writing this in 2026, so I don't have exact stats on impact to our subscriber base and ultimately revenue. We drove significant attention to ProfitWell, created an incredibly memorable campaign, and created swag people actually kept and wanted to wear/use.
Clockwork.ai · VP of MarketingThomson Reuters ran a formal, multi-month competitive evaluation of FP&A vendors to identify a partner it could confidently recommend to its advisory customers. Clockwork was selected out of that process, creating a high-stakes opportunity to prove the partnership's value in front of a major channel. We knew we needed a launch plan As VP of Marketing at Clockwork, I ran the launch plan for the partnership, with a hard deadline: everything needed to be live before the Synergy conference in November 2025. That meant building out dedicated landing pages, developing sales enablement materials to arm the team for conversations with Thomson Reuters' advisory network, and coordinating a co-branded content push to establish credibility and visibility around the new partnership ahead of the conference. I partnered with Clockwork's exec team and the Thomson Reuters partnerships team to align marketing assets, messaging, and timing across both organizations so the launch was ready to go live at Synergy.
Corinthian EventsI got to plan the VF Corporation Investor Day meeting alongside Elizabeth Trofatter, a spectacular event planner and one of my mentors while I was at Corinthian. She led the event and I supported her. The client was VF Corporation, the parent company behind the world's leading portfolio of active-lifestyle brands, including Vans, The North Face, and Timberland. Once a year, VF brings its investors together for an onsite meeting, and as such the stakes are high. It was the annual moment for investors to see the business up close vs just hearing about it in a bland meeting. Here's what made it particularly interesting for any planner. A normal investor meeting is general sessions, breakouts, staging, AV. This one was all that, but because VF's value is its portfolio of retail brands, each brand needed to show up as itself. So we had every brand build its own pop-up shop inside the event space. That meant six to eight individual storefronts, each with its own look, its own design language, its own actual merchandise on the floor. Vans had to feel like Vans. The North Face had to feel like The North Face. It also meant working with each brand's individual teams who felt the pressure of showing up well for investors. To add more complexity, the venue was a pure blank space. No power, no rigging, no lighting, no AV. Everything that made the room function, and everything that made six different brands feel like six different stores, had to be brought in and built from scratch. The event was a huge success. It won the ADMEI Excellence Award for Excellence in Meeting Services, recognition from the industry's own association for events built and run at the highest standard. Elizabeth led it and delivered, as she always did, and I got to learn from her which was a gift.
Trove · CMORan Trove's first in-person event at Boston Tech Week 2026: a 50-person, no-pitch morning panel on covering what happens to the top tech talent in the age of AI through the lens of Boston's top people leaders. Built to put Trove on the map as the serious, content-first voice in the post-AI career conversation. Trove is launching in Boston as part of a larger GTM strategy. At the time of writing this, we are still in beta. So when Boston hosted its first ever Tech Week, we knew we wanted to use that momentum and be part of the conversation. As a pre-seed startup, we were not going to outspend the larger players in the city. So we focused on the one thing we could do better than anyone else: content. The whole event hinged on landing a banging panel and asking useful, of the moment questions, which we did. The panel was comprised of: Mike Gutner, Chief People Officer at Toast. Sharon Pollard, VP of People and Culture at CloudZero. Kelley Morse, Chief People Officer at Bullhorn. Three different company stages, so the audience got real range instead of three versions of the same answer. From there, we just needed to pick a cool venue that already fit our brand, and limit the room so the experience stayed intimate. We called it "Where Does the Talent Go? Making Sense of Tech Careers in the AI Shakeup." The quick stats: - Over 150 RSVPs. Waitlist closed early. Attendance at capacity. - One panel, one room, one topic, one hour - 3 panelists plus a moderator. No exhibition table. No paid speaker slots. No company pitches. A few notes on the playbook: 1. Do less. And do less, better. Pick 2-3 things you can do better than everyone else and optimize for those. For this event the bet was content. The panel had to be worth the seat on its own merit, so every nice-to-have that did not serve the content got cut. 2. Pick a venue that already fits your brand. I love transforming a space, but transformation costs money you do not have at pre-seed. So pick a venue that is already a vibe. FPAC was a purposeful choice. 3. Let the speakers and attendees shape the content. I had an idea of what we would want to talk about, but to create magical content you need to listen. We asked our expert speakers and attendees what was top of mind for them. Then you know you are adding value, not guessing. Plus it's a great and authentic interaction point with your guests before the event (which also helps with attribution at a free event). 4. Hold the line on what your brand is not. I always say no to a few obvious moves. No sponsor logos front and center. No company demo at the front. No giant panel of seven people, even though more names would have meant more co-promotion. All worth it for the unprompted DMs like this one: "This was one of the best panel discussions I have been to in a long time. Thanks so much!" We had fantastic vendor partners in FPAC and the Coffee Trike. The Trove team was there throughout the entire planning process and day-of. Peter was a fantastic moderator. And the panelists themselves, who gave us their morning and showed up with real takes instead of the talking-points version. The favorite moments from the panel itself: - Kelley Morse on continuing to follow the ROI: "Keep your focus on solving valuable business problems. That is what the company will invest in at scale." - Sharon Pollard on why intellectual curiosity is key: "Don't let your ego get in the way of learning new things." - And the tough love from Mike Gutner: "Some people won't make it in the new way of work. We should be equitable in our upskilling, but not everyone will keep up. The quicker you can learn, the better."
TroveI'm currently a marketing team of one, and not a writer by trade. But I run marketing for a pre-seed startup, so I need to be writing. So this was the perfect time to test how AI can improve my content planning and efficiency. I built a content brief skill and scheduled prompt that lands in my inbox every Monday and Thursday at 8:07am. It pulls out the best ideas and themes from both the larger ecosystem and from within Trove's own channels. The workflow isn't overly complex. It scans my own meeting transcripts, Slack, Notion, and Gmail for thematic patterns in parallel with public news, LinkedIn, and X. It flags the moments where a recurring internal theme is converging with a public trend. Those convergences are the trends worth writing into this week. The workflow Internal: meeting transcripts, Slack, Notion, Gmail from the last 7 to 14 days, read for thematic patterns. External: news, LinkedIn, X over the same window. Cross-reference: for every external trend, is this a theme that's been recurring internally? When the two layers converge, that's the strongest signal. Before any of this, the skill runs a saturation check against my last 14 days of posts so it doesn't keep handing me the same hook. And before any trend makes it into the brief, the skill has to be able to articulate the angle cleanly. If it can't, the trend gets dropped. (Full sanitized skill file linked at the bottom. Fork it, swap in your themes, point it at your own sources.) A sample brief Sanitized excerpt from a recent Monday morning. Saturation · "career capital" fresh, last covered 24 days ago · "good friction" saturated, 3 posts in 14 days. Signal 1 - High-priority convergence Trend: Public coverage on AI-generated work samples in job applications is intensifying this week, with several major outlets framing it as a screening problem. Angle: Screening is the wrong lens. The category needs better signal, not better filters. Recurrence: This theme has appeared in 5 internal touch points over the last 14 days, intensifying. Sharp line from a customer call worth surfacing: "We keep buying better filters; what we actually need is work that can't be faked." [PERMISSION NEEDED -- customer call, May 22] Format: LinkedIn post · this week Theme: AI & trust (fresh) It should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway: anything with a quote needs permission before publishing. The skill flags every quote attributable to a real person, customer, partner, investor, teammate, with a "needs permission" tag. The brief is a draft for me. Anything that leaves the brief and lands in a post under an attributed name needs an explicit yes from that person first. A lot of AI content tooling treats source material as fair game by default, and a workflow built that way would be its own kind of joke for a company in the verification business. The scheduled layer: One-off prompts add more work and noise and that's a no go for me. For something to add continuous value, it needs to be scheduled. Mine runs every Monday and Thursday. The brief lands while I'm dropping my daughter at school. The other big benefit of scheduling: the prompt runs against your own data on a cadence, remembers what you've already covered, and surfaces converging trends. The outcomes here are still evolving, but the workflow has let me be faster to produce and publish, and has freed up hours per week. To be clear: this is not meant to read as "this skill replaces content teams," because it doesn't. I cannot wait to be able to hire a content team. It has helped me be a more focused and opportunistic writer. Supporting materials: full sanitized skill file & fillable prompt for any AI chat
Nava BenefitsBuilding evergreen lead gen by treating templates as tools, not billboards. Nava had a b2b sales motion and we were a lean start-up. We were already seeing lead gen success with both our in person and virtual events, but as anyone who runs those knows, it's laborious to keep things running. You can batch but at certain level you need to recreate the wheel each time. We sold mainly to HR so I set out to create something that 1) gave HR immediate value, and 2) tied back to Nava's offering (benefits). We started with an RFP template. RFPs are routine when a company goes to market for a new benefits broker, but the formatting is wildly inconsistent. If we built a clean, usable template, we'd help HR teams with real work AND quietly shape the RFPs landing in our own inbox. The same project served both sides of the table. My stipulations for this RFP template were as follows: 1. Make it actually useable. Downloading a PDF you cannot edit is a horrible experience. So we made this a google doc that you could copy and make your own in two clicks. 2. Make it unbranded. I HATE downloading something in someone else's branding. We made the template unbranded so the person who downloaded it didn't have to do the extra work of removing our branding. Both rules broke marketing convention, but were also key to the value being provided. After we got initial feedback and metrics that this was working for us we continued to iterate on other useable templates for HR including an employee benefits survey template (which I built alongside the talented Melissa Blackerby!!) and an open enrollment planning guide. All continued to pass the test of being unbranded and editable. I wish i was writing this earlier so I had stats on MQLs > pipeline > closed won, but largely at the time these worked for us from both an evergreen lead gen but also larger trust building with our prospects.
ProfitWellIn 2018, I joined ProfitWell as Events Manager, hired to build out their events and experiences program. The first big thing I built was Recur Boston, our flagship conference. At the time this was peak SaaS and in terms of events, SaaStr and SaaStock were the giants of the space. They were massive, sprawling events with sponsors, exhibition halls, ten tracks running at once, ten happy hours a day, etc. We sponsored and loved those events, but when it came to our own thing we knew we’d never outspend them. So with Recur Boston we knew we needed to go in the opposite direction to compete. We decided on a purposely small group of two hundred attendees, VP and exec level, one day, one track, one stage, in our home city, Boston. No exhibition hall. No pay-to-speak. We led with stellar content and made every other decision in service of that. We also knew the power of brand, and that for a start-up, perception is key. We understood that if we held a conference that was incredibly well done people would assume we were more established. The quick Recur Boston stats: - 200 or fewer attendees, exec level, one track - Top speakers including Rand Fishkin, Dan Martell, David Cancel, and Katie Burke with extra long 45-60 min slots to go deep on a topic. Speakers really needed to hold their own to speak for that duration. - Recouped event cost in ticket sales alone - Closed revenue more than 5x event cost - No exhibition hall, no paid speaker slots - Built and run inside a bootstrapped company The messy middle parts: 1. I came to ProfitWell from an events agency. I was great at my job, but I was trained to be a gun for hire. I was used to creating and presenting three options to a client and recommend the right one. The client made the call and then I executed. The first time I did this at ProfitWell, our CEO Patrick stopped me mid-recommendation and asked me "What do you think the right call is?" I told him. and his response was just "Okay, do it." I was the perfect person to own Recur at that time because in that moment I realized I had years of stuff that I wanted to do that I could just execute. I knew the right call and it was incredible to simply do it. 2. The standard playbook for a conference is theme-first. You decide what the show is about, then find speakers who fit. We went a different direction. We asked speakers what they were excited about, what they were working on, what they couldn’t shut up about with their teams. The themes then came out of the speakers, not the other way around. Speakers were pumped and often tried out new talks with us first. This was a key way for us to put content first, earn the speakers trust, and ensure that what our attendees were hearing was fresh instead of forced. 3. One thing I am unyielding on is the perfection of small stuff with events. Those small things can seem trivial, but when you add them up they can completely make or break the experience. It's knowing where to park or walk, wifi that connects, good lighting, water before you need to ask. It’s a thousand small things going right, all at once, that elevate the event. I would be remiss in the telling of this story if I did not mention my talented counterpart Dan Callahan. Dan was the Creative Director at ProfitWell, and was the brain behind much of the brand. He designed and I had the honor of bringing those designs into the physical world. I'll end with this - Recur became one of the things ProfitWell was known for and one of the best received and reviewed events in SaaS at the time. The brand we built around it punched at the level of competitors 10x our size. That positioning was a piece of ProfitWell's growth and ultimately acquisition.
Corinthian EventsThe New England Conservatory needed to showcase their newly built student performance building through an impressive springtime gala that would engage donors and reinforce their brand as a premier Boston institution. This gala needed to deliver a flawless experience for major donors and Board members while celebrating a significant capital investment. It was a logistical behemoth where we transformed the student playing space into a world class gala in 24 hours (yes, just 24 hours), because the student playing schedules could not be disturbed. Think moving trucks full of furniture circling Boston all day. The evening began with a full orchestra and opera performance, and then guests transitioned to 3 simultaneously stunning dinners. The dinners were held in student practice rooms that were entirely transformed through lighting, florals and decor. The transformation was jaw dropping. As the lead planner, I owned all the project including the design, vendor coordination, timeline management, and on-site logistics from load-in to load-out. Working closely with NEC's team on the guest list and program, I took full responsibility for the operational execution. I was greatly supported by Victoria Pache, my second in command. The gala was a resounding success. We welcomed hundreds of guests, exceeded the fundraising goal for the Conservatory, and received glowing feedback from the Board. The event demonstrated that with meticulous planning and flawless execution, even the most challenging logistical constraints can be overcome to deliver an exceptional experience.
ProfitWellBuilt the experiential growth strategy that enabled ProfitWell to procure the most leads out of any sponsor (at any level) at the largest industry events (SaaStr & SaaStock)