Our experts

Mark Smith, PhD

Mark Smith

Mark has over 15 years of experience in applying analytical solutions to business problems, and he works directly with leading Financial Services, Retail and Telecommunications businesses, consulting on their use of customer data to drive increased business performance. Prior to Portrait Mark was a founder and President of Quadstone – a world leader in customer analytics. Mark’s most recent area of focus is “recession-busting marketing” – helping organizations meet the current marketer’s paradox of how to get improved marketing results from a depressed economic situation, on a greatly reduced marketing budget.

Mark holds a PhD in mathematics and statistics from the University of Edinburgh, where he worked with the University’s parallel computing center, and has spent his entire business career focused on the application of advanced statistical and computing techniques to solve real-world business problems.

Neil Skilling, PhD

Neil Skilling

Neil has worked in the analytical data mining/customer relationship management industry since 1995. He has worked across the financial services, telecommunications and retail industries addressing a whole raft of analytical problems from churn, up-sell, cross-sell and customer satisfaction analysis for a large number of B2C organisations including BT, Vodafone, Telenor, Lloyds-TSB, Sainsbury’s and Barclays Bank amongst others.

Neil has a proven record for using customer behaviour information to make the most informed and profitable decisions for every customer in every interaction. This has led to many millions of pounds of incremental revenue from sales and retention activities over the years for his clients.

Patrick Surry, PhD

Patrick Surry

Dr. Surry is an expert on uplift modeling, with a wealth of experience in real-world delivery of customer insight, predictive analytics and behavior modeling. One of the founders of Quadstone (acquired by Portrait Software), he has been responsible for many of our high profile success stories with blue-chip clients spanning applications such as response, risk, attrition, value, customer profitability, and targeting for direct marketing.  He is currently involved in guiding the development of our next generation of visual insight and analytics applications.

Patrick holds a PhD in mathematics and statistics from the University of Edinburgh where he studied optimization based on evolutionary algorithms, following an HBSc in continuum mechanics from the University of Western Ontario.

David Newberry

David Newberry

David held various senior marketing positions at British American Tobacco including a number of regional and global roles, before co-founding ProMost Inc., a web-enabled marketplace for the design and purchase of marketing goods & services. He then joined Marketing Supply Chain as a Senior Consultant where he advised international brand-orientated clients on various aspects of improving marketing efficiency including supply chain engineering, marketing procurement and technology enablement. This was followed by a stint as VP Commercial Operations at marketing operations management (MOM) specialist Capital ID, before joining Portrait Software in February 2009.

This background of twenty years embedded in the marketing discipline coupled with experience in technology and marketing consultancy has provided David with a unique perspective of having seen marketing from all sides and makes him well versed in offering a viewpoint to any questions on marketing operations, either from the client side or supplier side.

Jeff Nicholson

Jeff Nicholson

Jeff is responsible for the global product marketing strategy and vision for Portrait Software. Recognized as a thought leader, Jeff works closely with industry analysts including Gartner, Forrester and Aberdeen and is a frequent presenter upon topics including event-triggered marketing, marketing analytics, customer communications, campaign management, business process management and content management.

With more than 15 years experience in providing solutions to today’s leading B2C and B2B organizations, Jeff welcomes you to contact him to discuss customer segmentation strategies, event-triggered marketing, interaction management, customer listening platforms, customer engagement strategies, achieving “inbound/outbound fusion” and more.