Available For Speaking

Lars Helgeson, GreenRope's Founder and CEO, is available as a speaker for conferences, networking organization meetings, and educational seminars.

The "Why"

There is a movement among advertising and marketing experts to more effectively harness the power of business intelligence.  The problem most marketing professionals face is how to gather and use that business intelligence wisely.  There are so many solutions on the market that address specific parts of managing sales, marketing, and operations, that it's easy for someone to be overwhelmed and bogged down in a nightmare of importing and exporting data and trying to keep various API's in synch with each other (e.g., if you run SalesForce + Constant Contact + BaseCamp + Google Analytics, you have 4 degrees of freedom all moving at their own pace and all storing separate, uncoordinated information).

The idea of an integrated platform to run a business, what we call "Complete CRM", opens the door to an organization to collect business intelligence from relevant sources and automatically combine the information so everyone who needs it can use it.  This goes beyond saving time (not having to import/export or mess with APIs), and money (not having to buy multiple subscriptions and pay for programmers).  Complete CRM means sales people can see when a prospect visits a website or opens an email, the email marketing team can target event attendees and set up drip campaigns based on contact behavior, and operations has instant access to who is doing what in realtime.  This is not a pipe dream.  There are ways to combine CRM, marketing automation, marketing tools (email marketing, mobile marketing, websites, landing pages, analytics), and operations (project management, ticketing systems, knowledge management) in new, elegant and comprehensive systems.

What attendees can learn

• How CRM plays a critical role as the centerpiece of marketing, sales, and operations
• How to streamline an organization around collecting and using business intelligence
• What marketing automation is and how it can be used to efficiently grow any business
• Different tools on the market for integrating all of these in to any organization

Speaking Experience

• Monthly training seminars to end users (classroom of 25)
• Monthly webinar to VIP and reseller clients (average attendance 50)
• Annual GreenRope Users Conference (average attendance 150)
• San Diego Chamber of Commerce Breakfast series (150 attending)
• Six Degrees panel on entrepreneurship (200 attending)
• Chapter meeting, American Society of Interior Designers (80 attending)
• Renaissance Executive Forums (several presentations, 10-20 attending)
• MIT Enterprise Forum, San Diego Chapter (200 attending)
• FORRETNINGSsystemer 2013, CRM/ERP Conference in Copenhagen (50 attending)
• San Diego American Marketing Association, Art of Marketing conference (30 attending)
• Arizona Computer Technology Conference (40 attending)
• SCORE mentors meeting (30 attending)

Speaker Bio

Lars Helgeson has been in the Internet marketing space since 2000, when he co-founded one of the world's first email service providers, CoolerEmail.  As a pioneer in responsible email marketing, he grew CoolerEmail to a global software company specializing in marketing communication with over 1,500 clients.  In 2010, after spending several years designing and implementing a more comprehensive way to meet the needs of small and mid-sized businesses, he launched GreenRope.  GreenRope is the world's first and only Business Operating System, a cloud-based platform that simplifies and consolidates a company's sales, marketing, and operations.  GreenRope currently provides technology solutions to over 3,000 companies worldwide.

Lars earned Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.  He also has an MBA from the Robert Anderson School at the University of New Mexico.  He served in the United States Air Force for 4 years, working in the Air Force's space test program, Air Force Research Laboratory, and Ballistic Missile Defense Organization.  He enjoys travel, stand-up paddleboarding, mountain biking, and ice hockey, and practices yoga whenever the forces of the universe are not aligned to keep him at his computer.

In the past several years, Lars has been a finalist in the San Diego Business Journal's Most Admired CEO and Information Technology Executive of the Year, and has been a recipient of San Diego Magazine's Top Tech Exec Award.

"You provided great material and showed our members how their clients must strive to have an integrated customer relationship management system if they are to compete in today’s changed landscape.  I received many unsolicited comments on how good your presentation was and how important the topic is." - B. Pope, SCORE