Five years ago, in late February, 2021, I was working for Forrester (formerly SiriusDecisions). While I still enjoyed the work, the culture had shifted, as it often does after a larger organization acquires a smaller one. It wasn’t the same fit for me, or the same level of enjoyment, because my role at the new company was shifting toward more pure analyst work. Forrester also decided to implement a reduction-in-force. I was one of the casualties.
I was forced away from a steady corporate paycheck. I had no safety net other than my savings. One saving grace was that my wife, Wendy, had a health plan from Wellesley College that I could go under.
At that moment, I had 2 choices: I could spend the next 12+ months searching for a new corporate CMO role, or I could strike out on my own.
I chose the latter. It was a decision influenced by my passion and my expertise in marketing. That’s when I started Demand Revenue, which began with my first two clients five days per week on April 1st, 2021, right in the middle of Covid. :-).
At the time, I wasn’t thinking about building a brand or a business that would last five years. I was thinking about one thing:
Can I actually make this work?
I didn’t go the independent route completely blind.
I started my career in finance before making the pivot into marketing leadership and general management. I also carried a bag in sales for a couple of years at Xerox and served as a P&L GM at a few companies, responsible for GTM functions. Those cross-functional foundations never left me.
I’ve held Full-time CMO roles at companies ranging from Panasonic, AT&T Capital, GE Healthcare Financial Services, Straumann, Independent Health, and Lifeline Systems, and then spent six years at SiriusDecisions (now Forrester) advising 100+ CMOs on how to build marketing organizations that accelerated alignment and revenue through intelligent growth.
It’s safe to say, I knew the landscape of the corporate world really well. I knew the problems companies faced; while every company is different, patterns tend to emerge across them over a long enough timeline. As someone passionate about this field, I had strong opinions about how to fix them. During my six years at SiriusDecisions and Forrester, I helped over 100 CMOs and companies address similar problems.
But knowing something and betting your livelihood on it are two different things.
I will say that one of the reasons I was able to find success quickly after starting Demand Revenue was the huge network I had cultivated throughout my career. In fact, after I landed my first two engagements as an Interim CMO and CMO Coach within weeks of leaving Forrester, Wendy asked me why I wasn’t looking for another full-time corporate job, “a real job.” But then I told her I was making more than I did in my corporate job, and over time, through multiple engagements, she just smiled and stopped asking.
My wife, Wendy, and my two daughters, Rachel and Sarah, have been my rocks through this journey, and I could never have done this without their love and support.
Five years later, as scary as it was at the time, I’m still glad I made that bet on myself through all that I’ve accomplished and look forward to accomplishing. In retrospect, I regret not taking this path sooner. The downsizing in 2021 turned out to be a true blessing in disguise.
The Problem I Set Out to Solve
Private equity portfolio companies are a fascinating and underserved category. They face extreme pressure to grow from investors, boards, and timelines. GTM functions (e.g., Marketing, Sales, Product, and Customer Success) in these companies can be so out of sync with each other that they quietly destroy momentum.
For example, Marketing chases leads while Sales pushes deals at any cost. Product builds features disconnected from customer priorities. Customer success fights churn after the fact. Everyone within the organization may be working really hard, but often not rowing in the same direction. I saw that with literally hundreds of companies during my time at SiriusDecisions and Forrester. And I loved helping so many CMOs through silo busting to drive intelligent growth.
The negative impact of cross-functional silos: wasted spend, slower growth, and customer churn that compounds over time.
I’d seen it too many times to count. Research of 400 B2B firms from SiriusDecisions (now Forrester) had long shown that companies with aligned GTM functions grow 19% faster and are 15% more profitable. The gap between knowing that and actually fixing it is where most organizations struggle.
Wanting to help fix that alignment gap within companies is exactly why I went out on my own and started Demand Revenue. I knew I could make a bigger difference to more people and companies this way.
Through my coaching role, I get to work directly with CMOs and VPs or Marketing who are in the middle of the alignment gap, helping them think differently to solve issues within their organizations, communicate more effectively with their peers in the C-suite, boards, investors, etc, and operate with the kind of confidence that earns full organizational trust at the executive level.
Through four fractional and interim CMO roles at private equity portfolio companies over the last five years, I get to step into the company itself, diagnose what’s actually happening from top to bottom, and help leadership teams get on the same page, fast.
That combination is what makes Demand Revenue what it is.
What the Work Actually Looks Like
Over the past five years, I’ve worked with PE-backed companies across B2B SaaS, healthcare technology, and enterprise software, serving as interim CMO, fractional CMO, CMO executive advisor and coach, and GTM strategist.
One Interim CMO project I had after starting Demand Revenue was working with Brightly Software, a $200 million dollar SaaS (software-as-a-service) global business now owned by Siemens Infrastructure.
When I came on board, I was tasked with helping grow the demand engine and helping Brightly integrate into Siemens’ after the acquisition. The goal when I arrived was to stabilize the 25-plus-member marketing team and get the metrics moving in the right direction. We were able to do this within six months, and it showed in the resulting numbers: we were up 57% in MQLs (marketing-qualified leads), 41% in SQLs (sales-qualified leads), and 37% in marketing-sourced ARR (annual recurring revenue). I also led the team that launched the new Brightly brand under Siemens Infrastructure, including its mission, vision, and employer brand.
At FinThrive, a $450M SaaS Health IT carveout, I served as both Interim CMO and, later, CMO Executive Advisor and coach.
I helped rebuild the demand engine and martech stack, launched an integrated campaign framework, sharpened their value proposition and rebrand, and helped onboard and mentor the full-time CMO who followed me over the next 14 months. Working with the Chief Customer Officer and his team, I also led a company-wide NPS 3.0 customer experience initiative that improved KLAS rankings and lowered churn, metrics that matter enormously in health IT.
At Precisely, a $900M data software firm in the Clearlake Capital portfolio, I worked with the CMO and leadership team to sharpen their ICP, realign the GTM strategy, improve cross-functional collaboration among marketing, sales, and customer success, and drive measurable demand performance.
At Quest Software, a $1B data management and cybersecurity firm, I served as Interim CMO for six months, helping the team integrate AI into their value proposition, improve the customer journey, and reposition the overall brand.
Alongside these engagements, I’ve served as executive advisor and coach to CMOs at Paysafe, Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence, Korber Supply Chain Software, Cornerstone OnDemand, Tungsten Automation, Linus Health, Finalsite, GoodLeap, and others.
Earlier in my advisory career, I also worked with global organizations, including Philips Healthcare, where I supported the global CMO on a product-to-audience transformation of their global marketing organizations and presented to the CEO in Amsterdam, and Vocera (now a Stryker company), where I helped a new VP of Marketing build toward the CMO role while expanding internationally.
The coaching work is some of the most meaningful I do, helping marketing leaders find their footing, earn their seat at the table, and build the confidence to drive impact.
The Model That Emerged
What Demand Revenue brings to portfolio companies is an operator-plus-coach-plus-investor-translator model.
It’s all three combined, with a specific focus on the metrics investors actually care about: CAC payback, GRR, NRR, LTV/CAC, and MOIC (Multiple on Invested Capital). That means I can sit with a CEO, a CRO, a CFO, and a PE sponsor in the same room and speak their language. And because I’ve now coached more than 150 B2B CMOs through their hardest challenges, I bring pattern recognition that’s hard to replicate.
In late 2025, I also became a GTM Certified Partner through GTM Partners. That’s worth explaining, because it adds a meaningful layer to how I work. Over 25 years of my career, I’ve developed my own frameworks for the problems I see most often in PE-backed companies: demand generation, marketing org design, ICP definition and segmentation, customer experience and NPS 3.0, cross-functional GTM alignment, and CMO coaching and development.
The GTM Partners certification now puts the full GTM Operating System at my disposal as well, a structured, proven framework that helps portfolio companies build GTM alignment as a durable systems capability across market, operations, velocity, and expansion, on top of my own personal frameworks. This framework is extremely valuable to CEOs and C-suites facing GTM alignment challenges.
Those combined frameworks provide a unique foundation that enables me to quickly accelerate intelligent growth performance for my corporate and CMO clients.
I’ve also remained an active member of the advisory board at Fractionals United, the largest global community of fractional CXO leaders, contributing to best practices and knowledge-sharing across the fractional executive ecosystem.
My favorite networking groups where I’m most active include CMO Coffee Talk, CMO Huddles, GTM Partners, and Virtual Advisory Board. These are excellent communities of CMOs, GTM and Board Advisors, and Fractional CXOs that I’m very proud to be active in and love giving back to the members.
What I’ve Learned
If I could go back and talk to myself on April 1, 2021, here’s what I’d say.
The niche finds you if you let it. I showed up, did the work, built relationships, and over time, it became clear that PE-backed B2B SaaS, enterprise software, and health technology companies were going through transitions, scaling under pressure, or needing GTM alignment where I could add the most value. Follow the passion and work that energizes you, and the pattern reveals itself.
Clients don’t want someone who has only advised from the outside. They want someone who has sat in the seat as an operator, who has led a marketing team through a merger, launched a rebrand under a new corporate parent, and rebuilt a pipeline in a down market, and has been on both sides of M&As. The credibility that comes from having done the job is irreplaceable.
Relationships compound. Every client I’ve served, every CMO I’ve coached, every peer connection in communities like CMO Coffee Talk, CMO Huddles, and GTM Partners: those relationships compound over time in ways that are hard to predict and impossible to easily manufacture.
Mainly, I’ve learned to show up consistently, always try to be useful, pay it forward without expecting anything, and trust the long game.
What’s Next
Earlier this week, I hit 20,000 followers on LinkedIn, a milestone I don’t take lightly. I’ll continue making new friends and connections on LinkedIn. You can find me here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alangonsenhauser
I started The Private Equity CMO Advisor newsletter on LinkedIn in January, 2025. The newsletter, after 1 year of consistent weekly publishing, now has over 3,100 subscribers: CEOs, CMOs, CFOs, PE investors, and people who care about the same problems I care about.
Writing every week is a discipline that forces me to evaluate, question, and articulate my knowledge, and that process helps make me a better coach and advisor. I will continue doing that.
If you’d like to check it out, you can find it here:
https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/the-private-equity-cmo-advisor-7282504441830727680
Those numbers from LinkedIn aren’t vanity metrics to me. They represent a community of people wrestling with the same GTM challenges I think about every day.
In May, I launched a new monthly LinkedIn Live series focused squarely on the GTM problems limiting growth in PE portfolio companies.
The first session, on May 12th, covered one of the most commonly missed opportunities I see in the field: ICP definition and segmentation.
Five years in, I’m more convinced than ever that the work I’m doing truly matters. PE portfolio companies don’t fail because their market is too small. They underperform because their GTM functions aren’t aligned.
That’s a fixable problem, and Demand Revenue is built to fix it. And alongside the PE work, I continue to coach CMOs and marketing leaders one-on-one, helping them navigate the hardest parts of the job, from earning a seat at the executive table to building organizations that drive measurable growth.
If you’d like to chat about how my skills could be helpful to you, your organization, or someone you know, feel free to schedule a chat.
If you’re a CMO or other marketing professional and have been contemplating striking out on your own as a fractional and interim CMO, I would be glad to talk it through with you. I found that, with confidence in yourself and a little experience under your belt, you can monetize your skills. I’d love to chat with you in more depth about the pros and cons. Reach out to me at the link above.
I also enjoy “talking shop” on podcasts. If you have a podcast and think I’d be a good fit as a guest, feel free to reach out via the link above. If you are a enjoy podcasts about marketing and PE, you can check out my podcast appearances here:
Lastly, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has been part of my journey for the past five years and throughout my career. There are too many people to name directly, and I dare not even attempt it, as I wouldn’t have the time or space.
Also, I need to say a heartfelt thanks to everyone who has supported me by connecting on LinkedIn and across my various platforms.
Alan Gonsenhauser is the Founder and CEO of Demand Revenue, LLC, a GTM advisory, interim CMO, and CMO Coaching firm focused on PE-backed B2B SaaS, enterprise software, and healthcare technology companies. He’s a 12x CMO, P&L GM, and has coached 150+ Chief Marketing Officers and executives over the past decade.
