About the Speaker

Lisa Dennis, President of Knowledgence Associates

Lisa Dennis brings over twenty-five years of marketing and sales to client engagements. She has hands-on experience with both the marketing and selling of business-to-business and business-to-consumer products and services. She also has system enhancement and design experience for marketing and sales applications. Her consulting firm serves clients in high technology, insurance, manufacturing, healthcare, and professional services.

The focus of Knowledgence Associates is the transforming of marketing, sales, and customer service information into customer knowledge. That transformation enables clients to truly “see the world through the customers’ eyes.” The firm’s consulting practice includes marketing strategy, value proposition development, positioning, customer service assessment programs, sales effectiveness assessments, and sales & service training. Prior to founding Knowledgence Associates in 1997, she held publishing, product management and marketing/sales roles at Bolt Beranek and Newman, Thomson & Thomson (a member company of The Thomson Corporation), The Center for Business Intelligence, and World Congress.

Samples of past projects have included:

• Create marketing strategy, for both print and web, for a high-end winery focusing on the baby boomer market, including internet strategy, event strategy and marketing execution of programs and campaigns.

• Redesign sales process, scripting and messaging for sales representatives selling health insurance direct to consumers – including positioning, sales training, and coaching.

• Design and development of an extensive Partner Readiness Program for the channel alliance organization for one of the largest Internet infrastructure companies in the U.S – rolled out to 650 sales people and 20 Fortune 500 partners.

• Development of a product plan for the Canadian marketplace for a Montreal-based subsidiary of a U.S. information provider. Project included surveying current product array, identifying strengths and weaknesses, competitive product analysis, review of U.S. versus Canadian market impressions, and providing a recommendation for product strategy.

• Creation of a Value Proposition Handbook for a high tech company with a national sales force utilizing partners. Created a print and electronic manual that delivered joint value propositions sales prompters for every partner. Partners included IBM, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Microsoft, BroadVision, Ariba, Lante, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, CISCO, EMC, Sapient, Nortel, and Sun Microsystems.

Lisa has served on the boards of the YWCA of Cambridge, fundraising for Hinge for Hope, a welfare-to-work-to-profession program; Positive Directions, a human services organization assisting those living with or affected by HIV/AIDS; and The Children’s Room, an agency focusing on the needs of children who have lost a parent. She is a member of the New England Direct Marketing Association, The New England Technology Sales, Marketing, & Business Development Executives Association, the American Marketing Association, the American Society of Training and Development, and founder of the Boston Cell of Fast Company magazine’s Company of Friends network. She has a B.A in Writing from Wheaton College, and an MBA in Marketing from Babson College.