Director, Brand & Growth StrategyChicago, IL
I’m Evan Addison Payne, and I run brand and growth strategy for Work Tech, HR tech, and SaaS companies. I dig through the decks, the positioning docs, and the sticky-note walls until I find the thing only you can say. Then I help you say it out loud, like you mean it, to buyers who’ve heard every version of “all-in-one platform” there is.
What I believe
When buyers can’t tell you apart, they go with whoever’s cheapest or whoever they heard of first, and you end up paying full price for marketing nobody remembers.
Every round of “can we soften this a little” sands off another edge, until you’re left with a message everyone signed off on and nobody can repeat.
I use it every day, and it’s brilliant at going faster. It’s useless at deciding where you should be going in the first place, which is still your job.
When pipeline goes soft, the instinct is to spend more. Usually the problem sits upstream, in a story that never gave anyone a reason to pick you.
Playing it safe feels responsible right up until you realize nobody noticed you were in the room.
The newsletterOn LinkedIn
A newsletter for anyone who’s sat through one too many messaging workshops. Each issue takes one thing that’s quietly wrong with B2B brands, pulls it apart on the table, and tells you what I’d actually do about it. No framework with a cute acronym required.
You’re not under-marketing. You’re under-differentiating.
Selected work
Three chapters: taking new software products to market for key accounts, coming back to move enterprise clients from search to AI-generated answers, and now directing brand and growth strategy across B2B SaaS and HR tech.
$1.72M ARR9.75 NPS9.5 NPS+$600K
Read the caseI led the SEO, paid media, and content team on weekly sprints.
$2.2M monthly targetBeat by 15 to 20%
Read the caseI ran marketing, communications, and digital engagement for AIDS/LifeCycle.
$10M budget$125K in 24 hours
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About
By day I’m Director of Brand & Growth Strategy at The Starr Conspiracy, an AI-native B2B agency. Most of my work is with Work Tech, HR tech, and SaaS companies that have a real product and a market that can’t tell them apart from the next vendor. I help them figure out why, then fix it.
Wrong out loudDiagnose, then spendI make the thing
Most of my time off goes to getting somewhere new. Twelve countries so far, and I’m nowhere near done. Back in Chicago, my favorite nights are the ones I host.
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