Skip to main content

About Derek


Derek F Martin is the Chief Technology Officer with Scare Your Soul, a startup focused on creating a practice of courage.  Derek also leads the Perform Solutions LLC team, consulting with small to medium sized clients to leverage CRM and database marketing to increase customer acquisition and retention. 

Prior industry roles include Director of CRM and Marketing Technology with the International Rescue Committee, supporting a 75+ platform marketing stack to help drive donor engagement and donations.  Other roles include Executive Director of Customer Relationship Management with Laureate, Director of CRM and Retention with Metlife, and Director of Sales with Velti, developing and selling mobile solutions for loyalty, advertising, application, and SMS.

Before Velti, Derek was Director of Relationship Care(SM) for American Express World Services where Derek led customer engagement, sales, and retention for the global consumer telephone centers in 24 countries. He defined and established Customer Relationship Management strategy, performance metrics, marketing offer management, rep incentives and new capabilities to drive sales revenue and NPS scores. 

Derek developed his appreciation for operations as a director in the American Express Service Network Strategy and Engineering team, where he managed a $50MM portfolio in annual CAPEX investment and generated $65MM in six sigma reengineering savings. It was an labor of love to facilitate a team of cross functional leaders to define and execute the Platinum and Centurion Servicing strategy and contribute to these iconic branded products.

Before joining American Express, Derek was a VP of Strategic Sourcing with Broadlane and strategy consultant with Mitchell Madison Group. Derek has traded coffee with Cargill in Peru and was a business volunteer with the Peace Corps in Senegal, West Africa. Derek holds his MBA from the University of Michigan.

Outside of work, Derek enjoys playing music, surfing, and writing. He has six sigma black belt training and is a first degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do.

Link to LinkedIn Profile:
Link to Personal Web Page:
Link to SlideShare Documents

Popular posts from this blog

Creating a Customer Experience Command Center

The concept of a using a dashboard of key performance indicators ( KPI’s ) to measure and manage a business is commonplace.  In boardrooms across the world executives are busy looking at detailed charts and graphs that outline their latest sales and operational metrics.  But in almost every case, those dashboards focus on business outcomes rather than the customer journey.  As business evolve to more customer-centric models, so too should their dashboards.  As obvious as this may sound, I hadn’t put the 2 together in quite as powerful way until I had the great fortune to see Jeanne Bliss present at a recent company event.  Author and Customer officer for 5 major US corporations, Jean is an amazingly energetic and straightforward leader who has a long track record of blazing the customer trail and making change happen.  Out of the many riveting topics Jean shared, I was most inspired by the concept of a Customer Command Center .  Here’s 5 points why this is the next step for c

4 Questions to Craft a Contact Management Strategy

Communication used to be limited by the challenges of the message transfer mechanism and cost.  Print, telegraph, telephone, all have limitations in terms of delivery regardless of the demand.  Today’s Marketing challenge is the reverse; unfettered and almost free delivery of communications to an audience with limited attention.  In this supersaturated environment, contact management is key to cutting through the noise to maximize the reach, impact, and cost of your communications .  When you finish this blog, you will have a 4 step formula to create a successful contact management strategy for your business.   Often coupled with a Customer Relationship Management ( CRM ) system, contact management focuses on the capture, storage and retrieval of customer contact details.  A more advanced interpretation supported by sophisticated CRM and marketing automation tools like Marketo or Eloqua , contact management is the systematic management of customer communications across all chann

So you need to integrate customer data

Got data? Of course you do. In today’s digital platform enabled world of marketing the challenge is often not what data you have but can and how you use it. With each new tool, custom field, and data warehouse, companies expand functionality but can also reduce their ability to deliver personalized engagement from a single view of the customer.  Why is this important?  According to Gartner, companies spend close to 30% of their total marketing budget on digital tools meant to deliver personalized communication at scale. While these tools generate, analyze and store rich data elements, the task of integrating the data to be stored and retrieved becomes increasingly complex. This creates several challenges including siloes, conflicts, costs, and compliance.  Why is this so hard? Escalating needs : As companies grow and elevate their  level of maturity , they often find the need to centralize data from diverse platforms to realize the personalization function