I’m a business development professional with more than 8 years of digital experience and millions managed in ad spend.
Through my experience as a salesman, a marketer, and also a business owner, I've developed a unique perspective of the digital marketing industry that can fuel my success in the digital marketing space.
I started my career in sales for young, promising startups, and was lucky enough to work alongside some awesome e-commerce and brick & mortar brands. After a few years of successfully setting meetings and closing deals, I decided to start my own e-commerce company.
Almost six years later, I've been able to generate over $7 million in revenue by solely leveraging Meta ads. I've developed advanced media buying strategies by spending $3 million of bootstrapped capital inside my own Meta Business Manager. Additionally, I have been lucky enough to manage over $10 million in ad spend for companies like HelloFresh, Thuma, Nutrisystem, and Fabletics.
I will be able to relate to the problems and opportunities businesses are facing, because I've dealt with similar issues in my own business. I can empathize with their pain when CPMs are rising and performance might be unsatisfactory. I can feel the joy they feel when hitting specific CPA or ROAS targets, and can help them to push on the gas pedal to take advantage of the opportunity.
I'm confident that by combining my sales experience with my background in advertising will help improve performance for any client I work with. This will lead to happy clients and increased revenue for - a win-win situation!
Master of Business Administration
Bachelor's, Business Management
Owner / Self-Employed, Manu Forti LLC
After working alongside some amazing clients at both Attentive and Zemanta, and learning a tremendous amount about how to run a business in the digital world, I decided to launch my own e-commerce portfolio company.
For the past few years I have been researching marketplace trends and launching "micro-brands," utilizing Meta ads to scale. Some of the brands include a men's sweater line, tactical goods, and kitchen knives.
I've bootstrapped my way to spending $3 million on Meta ads alone, optimizing for a profitable ROAS, and have generated over $7 million in sales. I've built an expertise around direct-response marketing and digital advertising to a point where the Meta ads dashboard and the Shopify admin feel like second homes to me.
I'm constantly researching platform updates, split testing campaign strategies, and launching new creative tests in order to profitably scale to higher volumes.
I've also been lucky enough to work with some amazing companies to help scale their media buying efforts (which has totaled around $10 million in spend). These clients include Thuma, Nutrisystem, HelloFresh, Talkspace, AlexFedotoff.com, and Fabletics Men
Account Executive / Sales Development Representative, Attentive
I joined this startup as a day 1 employee and the first sales hire (12th overall). I was tasked with creating the outreach strategy and qualification process to deliver quality leads for the CEO to close.
It was my job to define which companies where the best fit for the product, and identify the key decision makers to pass along through the pipeline.
Attentive's initial product was actually designed to be used for Human Resource departments at Fortune 500 companies. But after testing market demand, we decided to pivot and use the same technology to allow retailers and e-commerce business to utilize SMS for marketing to their customers.
Taking part of this 180° pivot was one of the most exciting and fulfilling chapters of my career.
After a year of successfully refining the outreach funnel, I was promoted to an Account Executive role where I was in a position to then close on the leads that I generated. Some of the companies I worked with are CB2, Blender Bottle, and Sprayground.
By flourishing in this role, I was able to help generate the initial revenue for a company that has now grown into a mutli-billion dollar unicorn.
Sales Development Representative, Zemanta (an Outbrain Company)
Zemanta is where I first began my career in the digital advertising industry. Zemanta provides a programmatic DSP software that helps companies scale spend across a variety of native advertising platforms like Outbrain, Yahoo, Taboola, TripleLift and more.
My job was to reach out to decision makers at companies and marketing agencies, conduct initial calls to quantify the quality of the opportunity.
In order to reach a quota of one qualified demo per day for the VP of sales, I sent a minimum of 100-150 emails and conducted 50 cold calls per day.
Generated (for my own business)
Ad Spend
Extensive experience planning, creating, and scaling campaigns across Meta, TikTok, Pinerest, Google, and native ad networks.
Experience creating outreach cadences, cold emailing, cold calling, lead sales pitches, and account management to extract the highest value from each client
Fundamental understanding of direct response marketing tactics such as copywriting, ad creation, and conversion rate optimization strategies
Background in utilizing platforms such as Google Analytics, Tableau, Wicked Reports, Cometly, Shopify Analytics, Hyros and Excel to help optimize paid advertising campaigns, measure sales, and improve LTV