Lloyd Van Vliet | Experience

My Experience

I run global marketing at Datacolor, where our AI-powered color management software and instruments are used across the supply chains of brands and manufacturers worldwide. Before that, I stood up the North American business for Coloro, and I pioneered personalization strategies for B2B and financial services at Dynamic Yield.

A lot of what goes wrong in revenue engines happens in the gaps between siloed functions. I've spent enough time on different sides of those handoffs to know where those breakdowns occur.

A Year in Review

9,342
MQLs

2,530
opportunities

37.5%
win rate

$21K

avg deal

$20M
sourced revenue

on

$600K
program budget

Sourced means marketing created the opportunity on first touch. Over my tenure I reduced cost per MQL from $172 to $62.

"What impresses me most about Lloyd is his capacity to learn and adapt, looking beneath the surface of any situation and finding ways to improve the status quo. He is always thinking from the customers' perspective."

- Qian Eschbach, VP of Marketing, Datacolor

A GTM team of one

As an independent venture of WGSN, Coloro was a revolutionary color data provider with a SaaS platform for designers to test color palettes for feasibility and sustainability before production. I was the first hire for North America to build the business from the ground up.

With no existing infrastructure, I was able to take the business from zero to millions in revenue, building the sales, marketing, and operational capabilities for the organization; acquiring key global brands and their supply chains.

What that meant

Stood up HubSpot for sales and marketing

Engineered GTM outreach playbooks

Developed a B2B ecommerce portal for key accounts

Led field marketing; including conferences and trade show presence

Developed key partnerships with industrial organizations such as AATCC + MMODE

"Lloyd built our US go-to-market strategy from the ground up, implemented our commercial infrastructure, and developed key partnerships with major US brands. Any organization looking for someone who can think strategically and execute at the same time will find exactly that."

- Thorsten Traugott, VP and Managing Director, Coloro x WGSN

A catalog turned into a revenue engine

Datacolor's industrial division was becoming a different business. SaaS replacing perpetual licenses, acquisitions bringing in new technology, IoT-connected hardware, and software with complex integrations into a customer's PLM, ERP, and MES systems.

It's the difference between a copier salesperson and a solution consultant. Different buyer journey, different scope, different conversations. Marketing had to change with it, and what existed was built for the old world: printed catalogs, spec sheets, and trade show marketing, which produced a burst of leads a few times a year and nothing in between.

What Existed

Different ideas of who our customer was
Feature-dumping technical content with no way to convert
Costly and undependable reliance on trade shows and conferences
Focus on existing customers alone

What I Built

Defined ICPs and personas to target
Persona-driven buyer journeys and sales processes
Optimized demand generation channels
ABM programs with AI-powered intent data to find accounts already looking

And here's how deals closed faster

187
sales cycle

159
sales cycle

Our pipeline data was a mess. Reps opened opportunities whenever, opened/closed them in the same day they won, and left dead deals open so they wouldn't land on a lost deal report. Our sales process was more aligned to our order entry process than the customer journey.

Sales leadership and I rebuilt the stages around how customers actually buy, and made the system useful to sales before it was useful to marketing. A customer focused process enabled them to forecast, coach, and automate repeatable tasks with precision.

Sales Realignment to the Customer Journey

How I got that adopted →

"Scrappy, strategic, and knowledgeable. I have watched Lloyd build and motivate a global team to drive content, PR, social, ABM, demand gen and product marketing that the Datacolor sales team needs to create measurable results."

- Michelle Mundt Crawley, Senior Director of Public Relations, LUXID

Dynamic Yield had made a splash in B2C personalization but was largely unknown in B2B and Finance spaces.

I was tasked with breaking into these spaces, understanding their challenges, and leveraging our technology to identify high-impact use cases.

During my tenure, I helped acquire clients like Synchrony Financial. Additionally, Dynamic Yield was named furthest and farthest in Gartner's inaugural Magic Quadrant.

"Lloyd didn't wait for a roadmap, he helped create one. In a fast-paced startup environment where the ground is always shifting, Lloyd consistently turned ambiguity into action."

-Jessica Dearolf, Director, Enterprise & Strategic Accounts, Dynamic Yield by Mastercard

Markets that didn't know the name

An acquisition brought in a new AI color management platform, and it opened doors in industries where Datacolor had little presence. Plastics was the clearest fit.

Our sales team were mostly farmers, and good ones. Deep relationships with the accounts already on the books, which works until you need to open a market where nobody knows your name. So I built the go-to-market for the platform and started the BDR function, running on intent rather than cold lists. 6sense and Bombora surfaced accounts already researching the problem and the team worked prioritized intent signals instead of a list.

$1.5M

BDR-Sourced Revenue in Y1

Connected with customers who shaped the product and the message

Ask a customer what they want and you'll get a feature request. Ask about their actual job, and what makes it frustrating, and you'll find where the real value is.

At Datacolor that meant an annual advisory board of 10-15 customers, including brands like Tesla, Patagonia, and Under Armour, with workshops designed alongside our product team.

We assumed our customers wanted more capability. They wanted less expertise required to get the same result, because the person who owns color had picked up conformance, labeling, and packaging too.

That became a product. A platform to automate and simplify color approvals across the supply chain, pulling data from PLM, with a value proposition our customers had effectively written for us.