News & Events

MarketSphere Enterprise Marketing Practice Welcomes Ian Michiels

Monday, March 15, 2010

Chicago, IL – March 10, 2010 –MarketSphere is pleased to announce Ian Michiels has joined its Enterprise Marketing practice as a director. Ian comes to MarketSphere from Aberdeen Group, where he was the Research Director of the Customer Management research group. His research focus included CRM, sales and marketing automation and emerging marketing technologies and practices.

Lonnie Janecek and Thomas Manders, Enterprise Marketing co-managing partners, said, “We welcome Ian, and are excited to bring aboard someone with Ian’s experience and fresh insights about how marketers can improve efficiency and effectiveness. Our clients will benefit from Ian’s firsthand experience uncovering best practices that help organizations outperform competitors through automation and faster, leaner marketing practices.”

As practice leader, Ian was instrumental in growing the Aberdeen Customer Management group into a premier source of thought leadership in marketing and sales; establishing exactly how marketing must improve processes to remain competitive and adopt new technologies to better serve customers in this highly mobile and engaged economy. In addition to his research on marketing automation technologies, Michiels is an accomplished expert of customer engagement strategies and lead management.

Michiels has a rich background in creative and analytical marketing at Fortune 500 organizations including Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Applied Materials and Oracle/Hyperion. He earned an MBA from Santa Clara University with concentrations in marketing management, ecommerce and managing innovation.

Michiels responded, “This is a natural transition for me, from pure research to a more ‘hands on’ role with MarketSphere, a firm at the forefront of implementing new marketing technology solutions for complex, global companies. I look forward to working with MarketSphere clients to improve their overall competitiveness through highly optimized marketing operations.”

Michiels lives in California with his family and will be based there. Ian will provide support to the firm’s growing list of clients headquartered on the west coast.

MarketSphere is among the few consultancies with a practice focused specifically on marketing operations, the function within marketing responsible for governance, project management, marketing finance, shared services and technology support. When the “business of marketing” is highly optimized, the marketing function creates a strong competitive advantage for a company through its ability to respond more quickly to market changes, and deliver better results at the same or lower level of investment.