Rob Burns’ Skills and Experience Diversity – Client Relationships

Without Rob’s significant digital skills and expertise, and his tenured business experience of over 20 years in sales, management, business development across numerous client’s projects and relationships, having this business-first approach would be very difficult to offer or accomplish.

Rob’s combination of a robust business experience along with sales and digital marketing experience and expertise allow him to offer unique insights (on-line and off-line) and perspectives and a unique value based mindset to his clients.

Rob has worked extensively on a wide range of industry sectors, clients and projects. In addition to having business relationships at all levels and providing ongoing services with small, mid-sized and global organizations and firms, including:

  • Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC)
  • Cara Operations
  • EDS, Electronic Data Systems (Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Services)
  • KPMG
  • General Electric
  • IBM
  • Falconbridge Limited (Xstrata, Glencore)
  • General Motors
  • INCO Limited (Vale Canada Limited)
  • Livingston International
  • MicroAge Canada
  • Motorola Communications
  • Motorola Information Systems
  • Prime Restaurants
  • Professional Engineers of Ontario (PEO)
  • Quaker Oats
  • Scotiabank
  • Toronto Dominion Bank
  • United Parcel Service Logistics

Rob’s experience and knowledge have spanned many different industry segments, across companies of all sizes, including many small and mid-sized companies.

  • Associations
  • Banking
  • Consumer Packages Goods (CPG)
  • Engineering
  • Entertainment
  • Finance
  • Health Care
  • Hospitality
  • Legal
  • Logistics
  • Management Consulting
  • Manufacturing
  • Mining
  • Retail
  • Small and Mid-Sized Companies
  • Staffing and Recruiting
  • Technology
  • Transportation

Unique Business Development Codes Unlocked

Whether Rob was in sales, business development, management, or running his own company, understanding the business development lifecycle was always top-of-mind.

Rob remembers the countless cold calls he made over the years, and the work effort and energy those activities required. Although, he performed these activities manually, Rob was intrigued by the business development success metrics, including the ratios of calls he made at all steps of a cold calling campaign, and the processes and optimization required to fine tune those success ratios.

What Rob discovered is that every company has unique business culture, approaches, strategy, intellectual property, resources, services/product environment, leadership, and more and that every company has a different approach to sales, marketing, operations, finance etc., This means that every company has a unique business development code that needs to be deciphered.

Deciphering this code has been a passion of Rob’s since the beginning of his career, and continues to this very day. This business development code is top-of-mind with each company that Rob does business with and deciphering that business code is his passion. 

Expertise and Partner Diversification

Rob Burns has diverse and specialized business and digital marketing expertise; however, he doesn’t work in a silo or a vacuum and knows when in-depth and specialized skills are required or necessary.

When a specialized situation or client need arises, he partners and specializes his solutions based upon those client needs. Rob’s business and digital marketing network is quite diverse and includes many well-known digital marketing specialists. This may include website design, website development, search marketing, social media management or marketing technology initiatives.

Although Rob will always manage and lead his client’s initiatives, including oversight, he will also select the appropriate digital business partner, subject matter experts or specialists to help him in implementing where or when required. This is beneficial to his client’s because they have a single source to work with, who is the project or relationship lead, and who offers diverse expertise and experience. Rob’s experience and expertise offers unique insights from other clients, industries, projects, what worked and what didn’t work, the more experience, the more information and insights to share.

Extensive Network of Experts and Digital Practitioners

One of Rob’s formidable differentiators and uniqueness is his network size and quality. In addition to a selective and diverse client relationship network, and an equally valuable and diverse network in the management consulting, consumer packaged goods, mining, manufacturing, transportation and technology sectors, Rob also has a very valuable network of peers and influencers in the digital marketing space.

Rob developed this specific network over many years in the digital realm, developing relationships with peers and subject matter experts during his many conferences, courses and certifications. Relationships with conference speakers, conference attendees, digital practitioners, Ivy league adjunct professors and university and college professors, all of whom have continued to mentor Rob in one way or another over the years. Many of whom are available to complement Rob’s digital service and solution offerings at gnooko digital marketing.

Rob has become recognized by his peers and by leading influencers in the digital marketing and business development sectors, evidenced by the quantity and quality of LinkedIn Recommendations. Many of Rob’s recommenders are listed on the Forbes Top Influencers list themselves.

Audience and Persona Insights

Once Rob understands a client’s business, their objectives and requirements in greater detail and the desired business outcomes, Rob will transition the discussions, strategy, and planning to the client’s audience, target market and preferred clients.

This will include the development of detailed client and preferred client profile and personas. Including detailed research, discovery and interviews with his client’s clients, their lost business contacts, and others to identify insights related to their entire market research, buyers journey, decision making criteria and buying stages.

Essentially Rob wants to know what a client’s priorities are, their mandates and objectives, their definition of success and the factors leading to that success. What obstacles or barriers they have in their role and much more. What are your clients and prospective clients typing into Google at the different stages of their market research and buying journey? What are they typing in Google when they have a problem or a business symptom, often before they identify they have a business issue? And when they want to mitigate or avoid risk. And of course, when those clients identify and research opportunities as well.

Having a diverse and tenured business background is a critical and essential component of these interviews, vital information can be discovered when asking, probing and asking the person interviews, the more business background the interviewer has the more he can identify and ask the interviewee to expand upon, very difficult to accomplish when you have limited business experience.

All of this information becomes very valuable when developing content for a company’s audience at the different stages of their entire digital business development lifecycle and buying journey.

Select Digital Marketing and Marketing Technology Projects

Rob Burns’ clients can be assured that he has the business, management, oversight expertise and capabilities to manage their digital marketing projects and requirements. He has worked on many small, medium and large technology and digital based projects for many different sized companies over the years. The experience, expertise and insights that Rob has developed over these years on these projects continue to benefit and complement his digital business development and digital marketing efforts.

These projects had varying levels of complexities and had influence and impact at all levels of organizations and most, if not all lines of business. The following projects are a fraction of the many projects Rob Burns has managed and provided oversight on.

  • Digital Marketing Business Case Development, including numerous stakeholder presentations, CXO and executive project justification (Small and Medium-Sized Businesses)
  • Executive - CXO Return on Investment (ROI) exercises (Small and Medium-Sized Businesses)
  • Digital marketing team development and mentoring
  • Digital Marketing Profit and Loss Management
  • Application selection, certification, set-up, integration and implementation
  • Account Based Marketing (ABM) Initiatives (Small and Medium-Sized Businesses)
  • Content strategy and development (Small and Medium-Sized Businesses)
  • Dynamic insights based persona development (internal/external stakeholder based interviews)
  • Digital Marketing, Social Business and Inbound Marketing Strategy
  • Website framework design, website oversight, creation, development and Implementation
  • Medium-Sized Marketing Automation and Inbound Marketing Project
  • Digital marketing executive workshops
  • Digital marketing internal stakeholder’s advocacy presentations