Our Team

About Us

Renaissance is a seasoned team of senior level marketing professionals focused at helping organizations drive rapid, measurable and predictable deal flow. For over twenty years, many of the largest and fastest growing companies have brought Renaissance their toughest marketing challenges.

Over recent months, and years, a multitude of new marketing and sales mediums, disciplines, technologies, and requisite processes, have arrived in the marketplace, making the job of developing and harvesting revenue pipeline considerably more complex. In addition, the balance of power between customer and sales has irrevocably shifted. Renaissance helps organizations successfully navigate these ever evolving paradigms and measurably deliver insights, solutions and initiatives to meet your goals.

Two of the company's principals, Bill Stone and J Tormey, met while working for Mullen Advertising's Direct Marketing division. Thor Johnson (X-CMO of Eloqua), and Brian Gramer (Founder of Vtrenz - now Siliverpop) are participating Board Members developing and delivering innovative revenue solutions for clients in this changing and complex marketplace. More recently, Peter Pappas of 8Beacon, and Sherri Collins (formerly of Progress Software) have also joined ranks to flesh out the intellectual and creative capital to help our clients optimize their sales engines. Renaissance remains focused at helping clients drive more sales, faster, and with better margins.

In addition to the core management and strategic demand generation teams of Renaissance, are offered the combined resources of an extensive capability for organizations desiring to Realize the Revenue Promise of Marketing Automaiton through our sister company RenaissanceOPTI.

Bill Stone

Bill Stone

Bill founded Renaissance Direct in 1989 to deliver practical demand generation and drive sales growth. For over twenty years, many of the largest and fastest growing companies have brought Bill and his team their toughest marketing challenges. Bill recently co-founded the new practice, RenaissanceOPTI, to supply organizations with the skills, processes and knowledge necessary to deliver on the Revenue Promise of Marketing Automation. Prior to creating RenaissanceDirect, Bill was a Sr. Account Executive at Mullen Advertising. He also had an early equity interest at Database Marketing Corporation, one of the first and fastest growing B2B database marketing agencies in the country. Remarkably, his internship as a financial analyst at E.F. Hutton, and then as the ship’s captain of a Hinckley 47 sail yacht, started him out in the direct marketing business at CPS; a progenitor of the first B2B direct marketing agencies.

Bill’s formidable depth of experience in demand generation, DR advertising, and DB marketing offers a unique holistic perspective on any organization’s customer buy-cycle. Leveraging this experience with a proven capacity to define and knit together strategy, analytics, creativity, tactics and technology into integrated and measurable initiatives keeps clients revenue, and Bill, growing.  BA, St. Lawrence University.
 

Bill Stone

Thor Johnson

Thor has pioneered B2B and online marketing for over two decades. As chief marketer for Eloqua, the leader in B2B marketing automation software, Thor’s team helped define the industry and drove explosive growth. He led Agency.com’s New York and Boston business units, the company’s largest and most successful offices. As CFO and head of operations at Juno Online services, now part of NetZero, Thor grew the ad-supported service to support six million subscribers. Thor earned an MBA from Harvard and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Brown University.

Bill Stone

Brian Gramer

Brian Gramer founded Vtrenz in 1999 and served as CEO until 2007. He is a visionary in the field of Marketing Automation. With fifteen years of sales and marketing experience, Gramer is considered a foremost marketing strategist and has an impressive track record of success in business start-up, market development, and sales. He is a valued contributor to the growth of Renaissance and sits on its Board.

Gramer shares his expertise with the industry through outreach activities, most notably teaching a marketing automation course at the University of Notre Dame and serving as a guest lecturer at MIT. Brian is CEO of Avenue Right and chairman of the Board of Directors.

Bill Stone

J Tormey

J's forte is highly targeted, message-driven integrated marketing communications.  He's written for every type of media there is --TV, radio, print, outdoor, circulars, brochures, data sheets, training tapes, websites, multimedia, corporate events, guerilla marketing, you name it. He's quickly able to grok what a company has to offer, and then see things from your customers' point of view to get a feel for what's important to them. (Is what you want to say really what they need to hear?) His craft is developing the right message, distilling that message to its essence, and then delivering it with maximum dramatic impact to generate interest, awareness and action. J's even written questions for Trivial Pursuit. (And if that doesn't impress you, I don't know what will.)

J began his career at Canton Advertising, the in-house agency for Hills Department Stores. This was followed by a stint at Bombaci + Mitchell Advertising in Wellesley Hills, MA (one of the earliest direct shops). J then moved on to Mullen where he became senior-writer-at-large for a variety of Direct Marketing, PR and General Advertising accounts. He left Mullen to join forces with Bill In 1993.  Education: MIT.

 

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