Dean Cruse is an Internet and Enterprise software executive with 25 years of experience leading marketing, sales, business development, product development and fund raising efforts for business-to-business companies ranging in size from startups to Global 2000 organizations. Cruse is particularly effective at defining and executing go-to-market strategy for early stage technology companies, driving awareness and demand and accelerating them to critical mass.
Having served as the top marketing and sales executive for seven different companies, Cruse has consistently and successfully led the launch of new products and markets, including a variety of vertical markets such as financial services, consumer Internet, SMB retail, open source development, government and energy management. Concurrent with his role at Chief Outsiders, Cruse is Founder and CEO of DC Marketing, where he provides executive-level business development, marketing and sales consulting to early stage technology businesses such as Appozite, Spanning, NovusEdge, Infochimps and Zenoss. He also served as Vice President of Marketing and directed inbound and outbound marketing for the latter company, an open-source systems management software provider. Before fulfilling these positions, Cruse's marketing, product management, sales, and business development skills were put to good use in his role as Vice President of Marketing & Sales for FiveRuns, a provider of SaaS systems management tools, technologies and services.
Prior to his tenure at FiveRuns, Cruse was Executive Vice President of Sales & Marketing at PerformanceRetail, overseeing the SaaS business intelligence software company's sales, marketing and business development. He had arrived at this post directly from that of Vice President of Marketing at Troux Technologies. Here Cruse helped the early-stage software provider expand the sales and marketing of its IT management solutions to Global 2000 customers. He had previously worked with Troux while providing operational assistance to Austin Ventures, where he evaluated business plans and made investment recommendations for seed-stage funding, acting as an interim Vice President of Marketing or CEO for several startups along the way.
From 1997 to 1999, Cruse played a critical role in the business development, public relations, marketing communications and strategy, product marketing/management and consumer awareness of ichat, Inc., the name of which he changed to Acuity Corporation. His efforts culminated in the successful sale of the company to Quintas before it finally went public. Cruse's wealth of executive marketing experience also includes earlier successes as Vice President of Marketing & Delivery Services at CSC Financial Services Groups and as Vice President of Marketing at Plexus Software.
Cruse holds a BBA degree in Marketing from Texas A&M University. He has also studied at the Graduate School of Management MBA program at the University of Dallas, the Michael Porter Executive Program in Competitive Strategy at Harvard Business School, and the Marketing Management Executive Education Program at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
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