Colm Ó Searcóid

I have built strong internal processes throughout my career. Good process speeds up work, builds efficiency, and improves collaboration and communication across teams. It gives structure to how work gets organised — which matters most for companies that are growing, since it lets them scale quickly without surprises.

These are just a few of the processes I've designed and implemented.

Case Study Sourcing, Writing & Approval

I built a process that lets anyone across the company — salespeople especially — submit case study ideas. From there, we work with the salesperson and the customer to fill out a standard template of case study questions. That questionnaire now serves as source material that we use to build a consistent, well-structured case study — one with real quotes, real numbers, and clear proof of the product's value.

Once drafted, the case study goes through an internal marketing approval process and a client approval process, before being finalised as a downloadable PDF for use in client emails, on the website, and in campaign materials (images, quote graphics, etc.), along with cross-promotion with the client.

On top of the written case study, I built a video layer to the process: where a client consents, we conduct an interview using the same underlying template and questions, producing a video case study alongside the written one. Using the same source material for both keeps the story and messaging consistent across formats.

I've used this process across multiple companies and have trained other marketers on it — it's a system I built and refined myself.

Marketing Request Intake

Marketing teams get a constant stream of ad hoc requests from across the company, on top of their own standing workload. I built an intake process to manage this: anyone in the company can submit a request — for example, to promote an event or need — and it's routed through a structured workflow that creates the relevant Trello tickets and tasks.

The process asks for the right information up front, so the team gets rich, useful context instead of vague requests. It also gives initial time estimates for the work, helping everyone plan realistically.

Event Planning & ROI Calculator

For event requests specifically, the process captures budget information up front, which feeds automatically into our overall marketing budget as a potential line item. This lets us evaluate whether a given event is worth investing in.

We ask stakeholders what ROI they're expecting and what their targets are, and run that through an event ROI calculator alongside estimated costs. That tells us whether the target is realistic and whether the event is likely to deliver a return — before we commit budget to it.

After the event (and the related sales cycle), we track whether we hit the target, which informs which events are worth attending again the following year.

This became a strong cross-functional process for choosing which events to prioritise across different countries — something the central marketing team, based in Finland, wouldn't otherwise have visibility into — and it created a consistent way to measure event ROI over time.

Reference Customers & Quotes Tool

I noticed that salespeople weren't making full use of existing case studies — quotes and proof points were hard to find and rarely made it into outreach. So, alongside the standard case-study slides and PowerPoint templates I also built, I created a searchable tool that lets salespeople quickly find customer quotes by industry, use case, or keyword — surfacing the right quote, from the right customer, linked to the relevant case study, in seconds.

Built into the same tool is consent tracking: whether a customer's quote can still be used, and whether that consent needs renewing. This was important to me — a quote is a record of a specific point in time, and a customer moving on doesn't necessarily mean they were dissatisfied. Consent tracking meant we could keep using strong quotes from former customers wherever appropriate, while clearly flagging any companies that could never be referenced.

Although in the company, we had implied consent based on the Terms of Service, I built on top of that, creating more consent categories rather than relying on blanket terms-of-service language, because I preferred getting clear, explicit consent — it protects the customer relationship and avoids hiding behind fine print.

Reporting Process

I built a structured process for weekly, monthly, and yearly reporting shared with the wider company, management, and the board — bringing everything into a single, consistent presentation format.

The template combines quantitative data (analytics pulled in automatically) with qualitative updates — what got done, how it went, and who deserves recognition. I specifically built in a cross-team kudos element, so each team highlights someone outside their own group to thank — helping build camaraderie across the company. It also includes a running view of key metrics and monthly progress.

Go-to-Market (GTM) Process

When working within central marketing — which didn't have a dedicated product marketing function — I effectively built that role and, with it, a company-wide GTM template. Whenever a new product or feature was coming, this template structured a working session with product managers to build a value-based document: why the product matters to customers, how to communicate it, what assets are needed, and on what timeline.

This became the central reference for every product or feature launch, aligning marketing and product far more closely and helping establish product marketing as a function in its own right, which I later moved into. It sharpened communication across the company — from sales reps to the C-suite — and let us ship marketing materials on time and proactively, instead of scrambling to catch up after being looped in too late, which had been the previous pattern.