New Chief Revenue Officer for Kabbage, Inc. Speaks in Earnest for Clients' Best Interests
Tuesday, February 12th, 2019
Small business owners stand to earn and learn a lot from Laura Goldberg, the newly appointed Chief Revenue Officer for Kabbage, the Atlanta-headquartered, global financial services data and technology platform for small businesses. Even though she is certainly well educated with degrees from Carnegie-Mellon and Harvard Business School, she says her career path has inspired her to continue learning, and she’s willing to share her experiences with Kabbage’s clients.
Goldberg speaks in earnest when she states, “I purely fell in love with…marketing to small businesses. It’s a super exciting space because I think, at its heart, it’s consumer marketing. Entrepreneurs are just people—the person who owns the barbershop, or the electrician that you use, or the landscaper.” She continued, “They’re people who care deeply about their business and they need to make sure they’re making the right decisions for it, for the people who depend on them, and it’s really exciting space for a marketer and for sales. So, Kabbage is an opportunity to really take an analytical approach to revenue generation…and continue on this journey with small businesses.”
The Boston-area native’s career passage has physically taken her cross-country from Wall St. to the West Coast. There at Legal Zoom her position as Chief Marketing Officer morphed from an emphasis on brand advertising to an analytically driven job, driving the revenue side of the P&L, and looking at things such as ROI, media effectiveness, methods of acquiring partners and new distribution channels, all of which she said have prepared her for the new responsibilities at Kabbage.
After having spent a brief period in financial management in New York following graduation, she followed her passion for music and built one of the first digital-music subscription services at pressplay—a Universal Music Group-Sony Music joint venture. That experience later led to her role as Chief Operating Officer at Napster, where she launched its first subscription music platform and expanded the business internationally.
Before arriving in Los Angeles at Legal Zoom, Goldberg, a married mother of two teenage daughters, had also expanded her technical expertise with a stint at the NFL Online (she’s still a Patriots fan), where she oversaw digital properties and revenue growth.
It’s this unique ability and knowledge she has of technology, data, the Internet, etc., combined with her sales and marketing prowess, that makes her a great addition to Kabbage. “Laura brings invaluable experience to Kabbage as we endeavor to deliver small businesses the financial services needed to build thriving businesses," said Kabbage CEO, Rob Frohwein.
She believes her management style fits well with the company’s mission, which takes a position to “let the bakers bake,” that is, let clients run their business, while Kabbage does what they do best which is providing small businesses access to capital and credit lines—in real time—using more flexible lending criteria than traditional banks. It also has the largest international network of global bank partnerships.
Furthermore, her new position allows her to take that above-mentioned analytical approach to revenue generation with small businesses. Kabbage’s platform, in turn, helps clients become more technology enabled, efficient and productive.
On a personal note, Goldberg sits on a board of directors for a charity in California that serves the health care needs of the homeless. She is also a “proud member” of the CMO Club, a worldwide association of marketing executives. Here, again, Goldberg engages with charities and non-profits as the CMO organization assists them by finding solutions to their marketing challenges. In addition, she reinforced, “Kabbage’s commitment to volunteerism and social justice is very attractive to me.”
