How RJ Young's CMO Turned Marketing Into a Sales Partner

The Front Lines

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Kamron Kunce.

Results-oriented sales and marketing professional with extensive experience in corporate and creative ideation settings. Highly regarded for establishing partnerships, generating revenue, and creating innovative solutions to complex business problems.

Location:

Nashville, Tennessee, United States

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In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Kamron Kunce, the first-ever CMO in the 70-year history of RJ Young, a Southeast-based leader in print and technology solutions. Kamron was brought in to do something no one had done before: transform a sales-driven organization's marketing function from a silo into a genuine revenue growth partner. He shares how he's built a lean, high-ownership marketing team, how he approaches pipeline attribution in a company that runs on field sales, why he owns NPS as a marketing metric, and how RJ Young's COVID-era pivot to tech solutions became the foundation for an entirely new national brand — VelocityOne.

Topics Discussed:

How RJ Young doubled from $100M to $200M in revenue by launching new tech solutions post-COVID
The genesis and strategy behind the soft launch of VelocityOne, RJ Young's new national managed services brand
What it looks like to be the first CMO in a 70-year-old sales-first company
How Kamron builds and structures a small marketing team with broad ownership
Why he favors generalists and "hardcore passionate problem solvers" over specialists
How marketing earns trust from sales by speaking their language and bringing data to every conversation
Using campaign IDs in Salesforce to build genuine pipeline attribution
Why Kamron owns NPS as a marketing metric — and how RJ Young scores above 90
Using AI-powered call transcripts to close the customer feedback loop
The three-pronged framework: data, customer conversations, and the human element
Why the best campaigns start with a real conversation, not a spreadsheet

Six takeaways from this conversation.

Actionable for Sales & Marketing Tech Builders founders

Earn the sales team's trust before you earn their cooperation.
Kamron inherited 70 years of marketing being treated as a cost center. His approach wasn't to rebrand the marketing function — it was to show up with data, clear asks, and direct answers to the question every sales leader is already thinking: "What's in it for us?" That shift, done consistently, is what converts marketing from a creative group with big ideas to an actual growth partner.
Pipeline influence is only measurable if you build the infrastructure for it.
Kamron's team creates campaign IDs directly in Salesforce at the start of every initiative, then does regular check-ins with sales reps to keep attribution intact across the deal journey. This requires building real relationships with salespeople — because salespeople don't update CRMs unless someone they trust asks them to. The data doesn't track itself.
Own NPS even when you didn't build it.
Kamron treats NPS as a marketing metric, not just a customer success metric. His reasoning: the score tells you whether marketing is making promises the company can actually deliver on. At RJ Young, NPS sits above 90 — a number he attributes to the DNA of the company, not any single campaign or team.
Use AI to close the customer listening loop, not to replace it.
RJ Young runs AI agents on inbound customer calls to generate transcripts and analyze sentiment. That data doesn't stay in a dashboard — it flows back into marketing decisions, from FAQ content on the website to identifying product-level friction points. The technology is useful specifically because someone is responsible for acting on what it surfaces.
Test small, cut fast, scale what works.
Kamron's team runs constant small-scale tests and has a firm cultural rule: when something isn't working, they cut it and move on. When pitching internally, he always presents pros and cons together — not to undersell the idea, but to protect credibility when things evolve or don't go as expected.
The best campaigns start with a conversation, not a spreadsheet.
Kamron's top priority for 2026: getting closer to the customer before getting closer to the data. Numbers tell you what happened. Customers tell you why. Every high-impact campaign he's been part of started with a real conversation — with a customer, a prospect, or a sales rep who knew the territory.

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