Marco Fontebasso

Kairos AI grew from zero to approximately €300,000 in sales pipeline in six months. I build and run its marketing and lead-generation system, from advertising and webinar sign-ups to qualified contacts for sales. With no dedicated marketing team, I use AI agents to research prospects, create content and sales materials, and update the CRM. I also prepare proposals and call guides and organise customer onboarding and offers for additional purchases.

In two months, I generated 200 leads from decision-makers at Northern Italian companies with €20M–€1B in revenue. Each had expressed interest and was passed to sales. Response rates were up to 5x those of manual outreach. I built the AI-assisted prospecting system and created the sales guide, proposals and presentations for a startup without a marketing team.

I launched a new education brand with the CEO and grew its following to 100,000 on Instagram, 100,000 on TikTok and 30,000 on Facebook in under one year. I defined positioning, brand identity and campaign messages and managed advertising budgets of several thousand euros per day on Meta and Google. I increased webinar attendance from 40% to 60% with automated reminders and follow-up, and set up the CRM so sales could identify and contact qualified prospects.

Grew revenue 20x and professional customers and advertisers 24x in seven years, taking the marketplace from break-even to profitability. Led an international team of 16: 12 in marketing and four in product, BI and data. Reached 6M monthly active users in Italy and 1M in Spain; branded searches grew 10x and 5x. Improved registration and payment flows and increased repeat purchases from 20% to 60%. Led the German pre-launch to 100,000 monthly active users and doubled branded searches.

My lead-generation campaigns increased qualified sales opportunities by 40–120%. I set up CRM qualification and follow-up so sales teams could identify interested prospects and contact them, reducing sales cycles by up to 30%. Clients included industrial, healthcare, automotive, retail, publishing and business-services companies, with projects in B2B SaaS. I also created campaigns for repeat purchases and guides for client sales teams.

I co-founded Kerios Group with three partners and grew it to 30 people in total and more than €5M in annual revenue. Our agency became Italy's largest independent Google Ads agency in three years, serving Google, Technogym, L’Oréal, TUI and Bottega Verde. I helped TUI reach third place among Italian online travel portals by transaction value. The agency and web software company were later sold. I also grew an SME lead-generation business to about 1,000 customers before transferring it to my partners.

I generated more than €1M in consulting revenue by launching the search marketing service and building a team of five consultants. Clients included Dell, Hotels.com, Renault and lastminute.com.

The Italian business became one of AltaVista's best-performing European markets for advertising sales. I managed advertising sales, partnerships and digital marketing.

I increased revenue from my client accounts by 30% year over year through online advertising sales. I used DoubleClick and negotiated co-branding agreements and commercial partnerships.