Daniel Kraus – President, Master Duct Tape Marketing Consultant

With more than two decades of experience in sales, marketing, and go-to-market strategies, Dan Kraus has developed a deep portfolio of experiences that he now uses to help small businesses profitably grow their businesses.

As an entrepreneur, Dan understands the challenges of growing a business with limited capital and human resources. As a line of business manager in larger companies such as SAP America and Great Plains Software (now part of Microsoft), his experience launching new business ventures inside reputable organizations established his reputation as a creative and effective executive that could both plan and execute within corporate confines.

As a Master Duct Tape Marketing Consultant, Dan brings a unique blend of sales, marketing, business development and operational experience to his consulting engagements. He coaches numerous clients on both creating and executing marketing strategy and tactics and he is retained by a number of clients as a Vice President of Marketing on a fractional basis.

Dan is frequent and well regarded speaker at industry conferences and associations. He has spoken to groups such as the Association of Career Professions, The UNCW Business Week and the Global Matrix User Group as well as at conferences including Sage Software Summit, SugarCRM SugarCon and the SAP Partner Summit.

In addition to SAP and Great Plains Software, Dan has been employed by Allaire (Macromedia), ADP, Artisoft, Infinium Software and Continental Cable (Comcast). He is an active member of Buisness Networking International’s (BNI) Nashoba Chapter. Dan regularly posts to his sales and marketing blog on the rambling page.

Personal: Dan Kraus lives in Hudson, Massachusetts with his wife Ann and their two sons and daughter. He is a New England native who graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with a degree in marketing and is an active member of the UMASS alumni association.

Laura Brunton Lorenz – Marketing Evangelist, Duct Tape Marketing Consultant

Laura’s passion has always been to help organizations reach their goals.  Whether working as a sales and marketing coach with small technology companies selling Great Plains Software, or as a consultant developing fundraising strategies with foundations and organizations, Laura has been in the trenches working as a team member, hand in hand, to develop and implement strategies that drive results.

She brings her expertise to the forefront in the development and execution of:

• Marketing planning – pragmatic and practical strategies that are affordable and able to be implemented with the resources available.
• Strategic thinking – cross industry experience that allows for introduction of effective programs and strategies to new markets
• Fundraising – organizational establishment, grant oriented funding as well as grass–roots funding and support.
• Sales 2.0 – The integration of the sales and marketing processes in logical and meaningful ways
• Marketing tactics – dynamic interpersonal skills that drive accountable results.

Laura’s affiliation with long time colleague, Dan Kraus and the Duct Tape Marketing system gives her a platform to effectively leverage her passions and expertise.   Most business begin and end using marketing tactics void of a planned strategy.  Laura’s client engagements clearly demonstrate her ability put strategy before tactics in order to drive effective results.  In example, she has:

• Collaboratively built marketing and business kickoff plan for a technology start up that allowed for consistent year-over-year growth for 5+ years
• Created focus in helping a client refine their overall business strategy to focus on their profitable core competencies
• Coached a client’s executives to focus on their core business competencies, enabling them to clearly see improved process and results through delegation to current and new staff

Personal: Laura lives in West Chester, PA with husband Ken and two wonderful daughters.

Randy Aimone – Marketing Evangelist, Duct Tape Marketing Consultant

Randy Aimone got into consulting because he was getting tired of seeing small businesses run into trouble because the advice they often got was only suited to very large corporations.  However, small businesses have different needs, strategies and budgets than large businesses.  He has managed small divisions in large corporations like Dell and the US Army, and has started several small businesses of his own. In short, he’s created several great successes in business development and sales for many years .

Randy uses his MBA in Marketing and Entrepreneurship and 10 years of marketing and business development experience to help his clients install and run:

• Marketing Automation:  Set it and forget it marketing practices that drive loyalty and convert sales prospects into closed business.
• Business Plan creation and modeling:  Creation of robust interactive business simulations that let you test assumptions before spending money or time on them.
• Networking and referral tools and techniques for helping the rest of us network successfully
• Inbound lead generation- Making businesses findable for those who are looking for your organization but don’t know you are out there yet.

Randy’s life-long study of strategy and human behavior gives him the tools to quickly and effectively determine underlying problems with an organization and to solve them with a minimum of fuss.

Randy is frequent adjunct professor at Marist College, SCORE volunteer and authorized Duct Tape Marketing Consultant. He lectures frequently in New York City and the Hudson Valley region of NY on the Power of E-mail Marketing, Creating a Referral Engine and effective Small Business Marketing.

Personal:  Randy Aimone lives in the Hudson Valley region of New York State. Randy is an avid Akido practitioner, board game connoisseur & developer, and enjoys cooking, primarily in Chinese, Japanese and Indian styles.