Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)

<p><i><strong>Patricia Clark loves musicals, New York, business and the world of Tech. 50inTech meets the new Director of Partnerships &amp; Partner Marketing at Brevo. We talk about technologies serving humanity, lessons learned and finding your voice.</strong></i></p><h2><br>Brevo’s Partnerships &amp; Partner Marketing Director: Building Big in the Big Apple</h2><p>Patricia Clark’s story begins in suburban California, close to the beach. She grew up a typical West Coast Girl, with a twist: in her dreams, this little girl’s heart beat to the rhythm of big cities. She always had a passion for art museums, musicals, Broadway… New York was calling and she was listening. One day, she’d make it there!</p><p>But for now, she was going to the University of California, Davis. There, she studied international relations, a mix of economics and politics. Her education also included business courses, and that’s when she knew: her professional future was in business and marketing. So, right after graduation, she began in investment banking in Silicon Valley, at the dawn of the DotCom boom. Clearly, these were exciting places and thrilling times to start a career in Tech! For several years, she worked in technology companies of all sizes and as a consultant to tiny firms.</p><p>At one point, she felt that it was time to start her own business. The green movement was still in its infancy, but Patricia sensed it would become a major concern in the coming years: with a partner, she founded a Green Tech news website. From electric cars to eco-friendly homes, from wind power to solar energy, the site covered all ecological innovations.</p><p>This experience changed the way she viewed business and accountability as a leader. While her partner ran the editorial side of the website, she controlled the entire business operations, from marketing to sales. She was on all fronts: raising funds, working with agencies and IT providers, pitching to large companies to convince them to support their small publication… All while taking charge of a whole team of people, with the responsibilities that come with it.</p><p>The website ended up a great success. Yet, the experience had been as exhilarating and enjoyable as it had been exhausting. Ultimately, she chose to sell her shares to her partner. That’s when, around ten years ago, she decided to take a leap of faith and rekindle her childhood dream. She was already halfway through in her career and she had the type of resume that would open the right doors for her. The time had come.</p><p>The California girl left for the Big Apple: a decision that, looking back, she has never regretted. Her life in New York turned out to be everything she’d always dreamed of, then some. In September 2023, she joined Brevo as Director of Partnerships &amp; Partner Marketing.</p><p>50inTech meets Patricia Clark, a Tech lady, lover of the arts and a tireless traveler, who found new goals in a French company with global ambitions and a name that sounds like applause at the end of a Broadway show.</p><h2>Finding Brevo</h2><p>At the time I first interviewed for Brevo, I actually had several job offers on the table. However, this one absolutely rose to the top, for so many reasons. Today, I’m extremely glad that I chose them and I honestly can’t imagine being anywhere else…</p><h3>A Business Is Only as Good as its People</h3><p>From the moment I discovered Brevo, even before speaking to the team and digging deeper, I really liked their mission and what I saw of their technology. But what sold me were the individuals I met during my interview: from the Chief Marketing Officer and Chief People and Impact Officer to the Chief Revenue Officer, they all were absolutely incredible. In my mind, people are a key reason to join a company and they can make or break your experience there. When you get up every day to go to work, you have to at least like the people you’re working with!</p><p>In this instance, the more I looked, the more I was convinced: I wanted to work with these people! When they made me their offer, I knew it was the right call and the next step in my career. I accepted on the spot, even though, or maybe because they were a French company!</p><h3>An American in Paris… And Around the World</h3><p>In my previous roles, notably at Facebook, I had worked extensively with global teams from Europe and Asia Pacific. I’m used to interacting with people from Argentina or Brazil. So, I can’t say that this new position has been a major challenge in this regard. Of course, differences do exist, but I was already expecting a lot of them. You don’t do business in Germany the same way as in the US or Canada and you don’t communicate about things in Brazil or in Singapore as you do in France, for instance. Yet, working closely with our teams in Europe and navigating our singularities, that’s a fascinating adventure!</p><p>Ultimately, I’ve always really liked French culture. I studied French in school as a child and after spending most of my career in American, albeit often global corporations, a French company, and a very strong one as that, felt more exciting than a cause for fear.&nbsp;</p><h2>Manager Coach and Team Leader First</h2><p>NY is a great location to work from when you lead global teams: I can usually talk with people everywhere regardless of their time zone, mostly at a reasonable hour of the day.</p><h3>What We Do, Why We Do It</h3><p>I’m Director of Partner Marketing and Partnerships. We work with different product marketing teams, so I put my experiences from past jobs to good use. I carry out three main activities:</p><ol><li>Marketing Programs with Third-Party Partners: I oversee global affiliate programs with businesses endorsing Brevo, driving customer referrals.</li><li>Expert and Agency Programs: I lead our strategic partnership program serving agencies, tech solutions providers, and consultancies that recommend Brevo to their clients and often manage campaigns on their behalf.&nbsp;</li><li>Tech Partners Program: I lead strategic marketing for plugins and integrations. With my team, we ensure mutual marketing benefits for both our partners and Brevo.&nbsp;</li></ol><p>When opportunity arises, I love hearing directly from our customers. It was always an important element in my thought process throughout my career and I believe it’s part of what has made me successful: being grounded in the customer experience. From a team perspective, we must continually ask ourselves: ‘are we listening to our experts, to our affiliates and to our technology partners?’</p><p>But first and foremost, I’m a manager, coach and leader to a pretty awesome and truly wonderful team, and I prioritize them, always. It’s my job to translate the vision of the company back to my people and to make it something they can relate to. What we do, why we do it… Because, ultimately, my team’s actions must serve the endgame. It’s like a dance, and I spend a lot of time strategizing, advocating and making sure that I’m educating both executives and peers as well as my own staff. I must work closely with other directors, VPs and C-Levels to ensure we’re aligned on our missions, objectives, and key expected results.</p><h3>Leading with an Entrepreneur’s Mindset&nbsp;</h3><p>I’ve worked for very large corporations. I was a leader of Product Marketing and Partnerships at Facebook for four years. I don’t think that I’d have succeeded in companies of this scale without the mindset of an entrepreneur!&nbsp;</p><p>When you own a business, you must keep on your toes constantly. You have to show up, jump in and get things done. It taught me what true leadership is. I learned to build strategies and to take on responsibilities. The entrepreneur in me always feels accountable for the company as a whole.</p><p>To this day, entrepreneurship remains one of the best experiences I can think of in my career, and certainly one of the most useful.&nbsp;</p><h3>Failure, a Direct Path to Success&nbsp;</h3><p>Looking back, working in Tech taught me one big lesson I didn’t learn in school: failure is a great mentor! We’re told to get good grades, to play by the rules and to fit within a pre-designed box. Technology is the opposite of that. Our world is about innovation and creativity, and always trying new things.&nbsp;</p><p>If I could time travel, I would, and I’d advise my young self not to be afraid to attempt at new things. It’s part of the tech community. If you’re willing to move forward and innovate, not everything you’re going to try is going to work! But when you’re in your early 20s, you simply don’t want to fail at anything, no matter your job or your position, or the project you’re working on. It took me years, and becoming an entrepreneur, to understand the concept of ‘Failing Fast’, and realize that you probably learn more from your failures than from your successes!</p><h2>At Brevo, a Culture of Listening, Finding Value in Diversity</h2><p>Brevo greatly values diversity, both in opinions and backgrounds. They have a real culture of listening to people and their point of view, then a desire to integrate the sum of these different experiences into the company’s processes moving forward.</p><h3>Diversity Fuels the Best Companies</h3><p>When it comes to diversity and inclusion, it’s always been dependent upon the company. I’ve worked for some who were, quite honestly, awful, but then I’ve worked for a few really fantastic ones… Facebook impressed me. I know that they get a lot of negative press for what they’re not doing. However, from an internal perspective, they were eager to listen. They wanted to understand and learn and build out programs that helped them to recruit more diverse talents, and ultimately, better serve their customers around the world.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p><p>Brevo has that same type of energy. Our CPIO is truly passionate about DEI and she’s placed bringing in women and diversity in general into Brevo at the heart of her mission. From a completely business-oriented perspective and also from what I’ve experienced during my own journey in Tech, it’s not only the right thing to do, it’s the wise thing to do! Letting diversity in makes you a better company.</p><p>There’s no denying that breaking into tech has never been easy for minorities, starting with women and people of color, period. This was particularly true in the early days of Tech, where the bigger businesses systematically recruited from the same universities, sourcing the same type of candidate. Things are changing for the better and I don’t see Tech reverting to where we were twenty years ago, especially when succeeding in a globalized world is at stake. Hiring the same profile … over and over again leads to a company where everybody thinks alike. That means that you will miss the weak signals or opportunities that you could have potentially perceived if you’d brought more diversities and points of view to the table.&nbsp;</p><h3>Have Your Voice Heard, Make It Count</h3><p>When you’re young, and a woman, people can be dismissive. I have certainly experienced it. We women are taught not to be too vocal, too assertive. Well, don’t wait for others to pat your back… Yes, it goes back to the company culture, but it also absolutely goes back to you: as a professional, you have to learn how to advocate for yourself and how to value your own achievements. You must be brave enough to stand up and say: ‘This is my project and I’m damn proud of it!’&nbsp;</p><p>I see women every day, even at VP level, shying away from taking center stage! You can’t do that, I mean, really, you just can’t! Don’t expect people to notice you’ve done a good job on their own. It’s on you, speak up!</p><p>You learn to … pick your moment… As I was moving farther into my career, I learned when, and how to speak up. I don’t want to be the loudest voice in the room all the time. I don’t need to be. Choose the right occasion to advocate for the topic you intend to push. It’s the best way to weigh in: when I’m making my point, I’m strategic; I’m backed with good data and clear reasoning, and people listen.&nbsp;</p><p>As minorities in Tech, whether we’re women or people of color, we have a voice and we have to make our voices heard. All that, I wish I had realized sooner in my twenties!</p><h2>Exciting Times in an Exciting Company</h2><p>Brevo stands at a truly interesting place in its evolution: it’s not your early-phase start-up, definitely more of a scale-up, and rising fast. The product is established, the company has done a lot of acquisitions to continue to fuel their growth. I love their journey and the stage they’re at, because the future is full of opportunities.</p><h3>Making North America the Next Frontier</h3><p>Brevo is already strongly positioned in Europe. For the last couple of years, they’ve been working to develop their business here, in North America. I’m extending my team: we’re actually quite small for a company of this size and I believe there’s plenty of room for expanding. In this industry, we could potentially be hundreds of people! Partnerships and Partner Marketing is a growth area.&nbsp;</p><p>My goal is to continue to play a leading part in Brevo North America. I sit in a global role and I very much enjoy working with my colleagues all around the world, but building the culture and the organization in the US and Canada matters to me. Here, we’re still new and still growing. We’re gonna be growing for a while and figuring things out as they come. The direction is great, the leaders are fantastic and it’s still early. We’re living exciting times in an exciting company!&nbsp;&nbsp;</p><h3>Brevo: User-friendly and Sustainable&nbsp;</h3><p>Throughout my career, I’ve done a lot of marketing, whether for my own business or as a consultant to modest companies and it’s a complex enough world. Brevo has built a software platform that is approachable, usable and accessible, a user-friendly product for small and medium-sized businesses. I love that.</p><p>But I may be even more impressed with Brevo’s deep commitment to sustainability and reducing their impact on the planet and the climate. I don’t think that I’ve ever worked in a company that was so involved and cared so much about these issues and put action behind words before.</p><p>Brevo is investing in initiatives around the world to help reduce their carbon footprint. They genuinely care. They understand the danger we all face and truly want to make a positive impact in tackling the challenges of climate change. As someone who started a green business, I’m grateful to be working in such a mission-driven organization that aligns with my beliefs. It feels, you know, just nice. Most companies make a lot of claims and display their support for the planet, diversity, and whatnot, very loudly. But then, they rarely turn their big words into anything really actionable. Brevo’s will to reduce their impact on the Earth is reflected in everything they do.</p><h3>A Bet on the Future</h3><p>Looking back at the start of my career in Silicon Valley, everyone was gloriously optimistic but no one gave a lot of thoughts, if any, to the end game: What impact would their very cool inventions have on the world? Online privacy, online safety and much more… We were so naive! Fast forward twenty years, some major players have learned the hard way that these were absolute priorities they should have cared about. Innovation had turned against us with a bite!</p><p>Still, I hope that we, the global Tech community, have learned from our naivety and gained experience on what it looks like when these technologies roll out and are made available to the public. I want to believe that we’ve internalized these lessons and ponder about them now, for instance, when we experiment with AI. As we cross this new frontier and move deeper into&nbsp;strange new worlds where no man has gone before,&nbsp;I can’t help but think that our era is tremendously exciting! The potential for many of the latest technologies to have a positive impact on our lives and businesses is immense. For this, overall, I will pick ‘optimistic’ as my word of choice for today’s Tech. It all goes back to human experience. What do we really need? Look at a lot of the technology that was created in the early days of DotCom. During the late ’90s and early 2000s, it was all about connecting with people. If I had to bet on the future, I think that there will be huge investments in climate change technologies. It’s already happening in the US, Europe and several other countries. This will become the focus, because as a world, we need and want to survive, so the money put into research and innovation is going to explode.</p><h2>Five Years From Now&nbsp;</h2><p>For me, it all started in California. Ten years ago, I moved to New York and right now, I can’t imagine living anywhere else in the world! But when it comes to projecting myself into the future, I’m always wrong! This has been the theme of my existence: if you’d asked me then where I’d be today, I couldn’t have predicted it and Brevo was nowhere to be found in my mind&nbsp;15 + years ago… However, even if I’ve never been right, I believe that it’s important to have direction, goals… I can envision my future at Brevo, that’s for sure. Brevo is exciting, fun and challenging, and I don’t think the thrill will be gone in five years.&nbsp;</p><p>In ten years…&nbsp;Well, I’ve absolutely no idea… I hope for many things in the future: I hope that my husband and I are still happily married, that we continue to travel the globe together. My family life is everything to me. I want to see more Broadway shows and visit museums worldwide. I paint, I draw, I enjoy the many aspects of my life!&nbsp;</p><p>Living in New York, working in Tech and in a job I love at a company I respect, these are very much dreams come true. I feel, in many ways, that I have fulfilled most of my adult ambitions and childhood fantasies. I took my life in the direction I wanted and that is an accomplishment in itself. What will be the next big breakthrough and when? Maybe I’ll live in Paris ten years from now, or in some other wonderful city? I can’t imagine it won’t be New York, but I was always wrong, in a good way. So, who knows what the future holds for me? We’ll see, let the future in…</p>

Patricia Clark at Brevo: Tech and the City

Team 50inTech