Kyle Coleman

Global VP of Marketing at ClickUp

Kyle Coleman is global vice president of marketing at ClickUp, where, according to the company's author profile, he oversees go-to-market strategy and execution. ClickUp announced the appointment on April 29, 2025, saying he would lead marketing strategy focused on positioning, pipeline generation and the evolution of the company's go-to-market motions. ClickUp chief executive Zeb Evans said in the release that Coleman's track record speaks for itself.^[1][2]

ClickUp describes itself as an all-in-one productivity platform, founded in 2017 and based in San Diego. In the April 2025 release it reported more than 14 million users and 3 million teams, and listed recent AI launches including AI Notetaker, Connected Search and ClickUp Brain. Those figures come from the company's own press release.^[1]

Copy.ai and Clari: two CMO roles

Immediately before ClickUp, Coleman was chief marketing officer of Copy.ai, which he described on his Forrester speaker page as the first go-to-market AI platform. He told the Exit Five podcast in March 2024 that he had started as Copy.ai's CMO on January 2, 2024. ClickUp's release credits him with helping drive an eightfold revenue increase there in one year.^[1][3][4]

Before that he spent about five years at Clari, the revenue-operations software company. He told Exit Five that he joined in April 2019, took over demand generation that summer after the vice president left, and then also oversaw event marketing and marketing operations before becoming CMO. ClickUp's release says that he rebuilt Clari's go-to-market engine, contributing to eightfold revenue growth over five years, and the Forrester page describes him as head of growth and CMO there. The eightfold figures are the company's description of results during his tenure rather than an audited attribution to him.^[1][3][4]

Looker: from sales development to leadership

Coleman began his business-to-business technology career at Looker, the business-intelligence company. He joined in 2013 as the sixth employee, starting in sales development, according to Forrester and Exit Five, and he spent about six years there, reporting to the CMO for the first four and later running sales development. ClickUp's release calls him Looker's first sales development representative and says he scaled the team to 70 people globally before Google acquired Looker for $2.6 billion.^[1][3][4]

Before technology

In the Exit Five conversation he said he studied marketing and psychology in college and worked in a series of sales roles before Looker, including as a financial advisor, as a fundraiser for U.S. Senate campaigns and as an account executive at a business-to-business advertising agency in San Francisco.^[4]

How he approaches marketing

On Exit Five, Coleman argued that good demand generation depends on tight alignment with sales, and that marketing should be judged on qualified opportunities and their pipeline value rather than raw lead counts. Qualification, he said, should be defined with sales at the intersection of the ideal customer company and the ideal customer title. He described the chief revenue officer and chief financial officer as a CMO's closest partners, and suggested following the CRO when priorities conflict because revenue is the shared goal.^[4]

He also favors account-based territories to avoid fights over attribution, since everyone can celebrate meetings with named accounts, and category design for giving a company a long-term direction; he credited Looker's addition of the word cloud to business intelligence with helping differentiate it. Marketing calendars, he said, should be built around the product roadmap and a few major lightning-strike moments each year.^[4]

Sales development and AI

On the RevOps FM podcast in March 2024, Coleman argued that sales development representatives are not disappearing but that the role needs to change: instead of high volumes of lightly personalized emails and calls, he envisioned a strategic representative who handles fewer, higher-value activities and works as a co-pilot to account executives. That requires business acumen and executive-level conversations, he said, and account plans that connect prospect data to the seller's value proposition, which AI can help build. He named curiosity, passion channeled into selling and a process-oriented approach as the traits of top representatives.^[5]

His ClickUp posts focus largely on AI in marketing and work: building AI workflows in a marketing organization, capturing top performers' expertise so AI change takes hold, contextual AI and the problem of tool fragmentation the company calls work sprawl, plus ClickUp product announcements and campaign execution. He is also listed as a speaker at Forrester's B2B Summit North America, held March 31 to April 3, 2025 in Phoenix and online.^[2][3]

Why he matters in go-to-market

Coleman is a rare example of a marketing executive who rose directly from sales development to CMO, and his public commentary reflects that route: he treats marketing as accountable to pipeline and to sales rather than to brand awareness alone. His move to ClickUp adds a third company, after Looker and Clari, where his work sits close to the intersection of product-led growth, sales and AI-assisted selling.^[1][4][5]

On The Executive List

Kyle Coleman is ranked No. 81 on The Executive List (October 2026) in the Chief Marketing Officers discipline. The list row predates his April 2025 move from CMO of Copy.ai to Global VP of Marketing at ClickUp. The ranking reflects The Executive Review's own editorial Trending Score; it is not an outside award, and placement on the list is never sold. View the October 2026 edition.