Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Roshni Wijayasinha. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Roshni thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

Startups and small businesses often face budget constraints, being unable to afford or not requiring a full-time head of marketing. They need to scale rapidly but must do so with junior marketers such as interns or marketing coordinators, as this is usually what their budgets can afford. The recognition of this gap led us to introduce part-time marketing leadership (Fractional CMOs), this model aligned with what customers wanted and the flexibility they required. Our approach of offering guidance and implementing marketing strategies allowed us to achieve success by doing things differently from the industry standard.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

About myself: A marketer, An artist and a Mentor

My name is Roshni and I am a marketer, a leader, an artist, an investor, and a mentor. With over 17 years of marketing experience, I’ve had the opportunity to work on global tech brands like Microsoft and Sony, as well as growing startups like Kobo, JUICE Mobile, Thinking Capital, Foxquilt, SnapAP, goPeer, and HeroX. Over my career, I’ve launched over 100 brands, companies, and products to over 20 global markets worldwide, and some of these companies have received funding or exited, totaling approximately $232M.

The most recent part of my career has been focused on launching Prosh Marketing, a marketing consulting practice that provides Fractional CMO work (or part-time marketing leadership) for tech startups (though we help with a number of other verticals as well, like CPG, professional services and Web3). Here, we have marketers and clients in Canada, the US, Europe, and even New Zealand.

I am also an artist (you can find my work at http://www.instagram.com/roshnisart) who creates large-scale abstract paintings both on canvas and through street art. With pieces across Toronto, I am to bring energy and happiness to local neighborhoods with my pieces.

Finally, supporting my community is an important part of my life. Not only do I teach Startup Marketing at York University’s Schulich School of Business’s Masters of Management program, but I also mentor several business incubators and accelerators, helping growing businesses build their marketing practices. I also write for the Forbes Communications Council in hopes of sharing my knowledge and learnings with other marketers and businesses.

Finally, it’s also important to me to directly support entrepreneurship and those who are underrepresented so I’ve joined The Firehood, a group of angel investors who invest in women founders.

The journey into the marketing field

I always wanted to get into a creative field, and I found that Marketing was the perfect blend of flexing my creative muscle plus leaning into my entrepreneurial nature. I was inspired by two professors in my undergraduate business degree, who piqued my interest in customer behavior and integrated marketing communications, and from there, I aspired to get into a marketing agency. My first opportunity was at Cossette Communications Group, one of the largest agencies in Canada at the time. I had the opportunity to work on some pretty fun accounts, like the Toronto Film Festival, and from there, my love of marketing grew.

More about Prosh Marketing

At Prosh Marketing, we provide fractional or part-time marketing leadership for companies who can’t afford or don’t need a full-time head of marketing. This is called a Fractional CMO model. We integrate with teams fully and implement marketing infrastructure in-house, coaching and training the team while building processes, systems, tools and partners to help execute our marketing plans.

The way we solve the problems for clients and set us apart

Apart from implementing marketing in these organizations (which is different than most senior-level strategists or consultants who only stick to high-level strategy deliverables), we also help coach and train senior leadership on how to effectively lead and collaborate with marketing. This includes helping understand what KPIs to drive, how to structure marketing teams, and how to approach corporate planning to support marketing planning. This leadership guidance is vital, especially for leaders who are new to building a marketing practice within their organization.

We also build internal marketing functions for our clients including designing a team around their strengths, weaknesses, and needs, implementing tools and systems to help manage channels, campaigns, and data across multiple platforms as well as be more efficient with limited resources. This is different from most agencies who usually produce all the work for you. This can seem advantageous because, at early stages, most companies don’t have the expertise to manage these activities, but this can also be detrimental long term. This is because through implementation, skills, expertise, data, and knowledge get built in the agency and not the company. When the company is finally ready to build its own marketing engine, this approach usually requires them to start almost from scratch.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

For us, our best sources of new clients are referrals, partners, and word of mouth. We take pride in delivering exceptional service, being flexible enough to mold our services to what our clients want and need, and driving results efficiently while training teams on how to deliver and implement systems that can make businesses self-sufficient over time. This builds an incredible amount of trust and goodwill between us and the clients we choose to work with.

Our entrepreneurs also have deep networks within their communities and based on being highly satisfied with our services combined with the trust we have built, many have referred other entrepreneurs and even their incubator and accelerator partners. Partners have also directly seen us enable strong growth from their startups and based on their satisfaction, they have also continued to introduce us to their portfolio companies to help with marketing strategy and implementation.

As with all referrals, these leads are self-identified as needing our services and therefore are almost always qualified leads for us. Also, since these referrals come from a place of trust and with a positive endorsement, these leads are much more open to conversations and are much more likely to convert. This trust also allows us to integrate more seamlessly with their teams and therefore provide an even better customer experience.

Have you ever had to pivot?

When I started Prosh Marketing, we offered the vast gamut of marketing services, from marketing communications to digital marketing, to marketing strategy, to any client who would be interested. Quickly, I realized that there was nothing differentiating our offering from other marketing agencies so I focused on marketing strategy with startups since I had a track record there.

Strategy work at the time was reserved for consultants and therefore I positioned the services as Marketing consulting. Based on market feedback, I found out that consultants were seen as unhelpful, high-level strategy people who would provide PowerPoint decks and leave companies in the lurch on implementation, afraid to get their hands dirty.

This was actually the opposite of how I liked to approach my marketing leadership work. A strategy is useless if it only exists on paper – it needs to be implemented and so part of a strategist’s job is strategizing implementation as well. The strategist is also likely the best person to lead implementation as it reduces the broken telephone effect between the visionary and the team that is launching the marketing activities. Finally, a good leader leads by example. This means a marketing leader can’t be afraid to write copy and dive into the details if they want their marketing team to be successful.

This evolved my role as a consultant into a part-time marketing leader, fully integrated with the teams and leading not only strategy but coaching implementation as well. This is what we now call our Fractional CMO services and what we position our whole business around, based on the need for part-time marketing leadership for companies who can’t afford or don’t need a full-time head of marketing but appreciate a bit of experience that can help.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://proshmarketing.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/proshmarketing/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/proshmarketing/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ProshMarketing