“Engineering Marketing for Growth”

Sabrina Donley is a powerhouse B2B marketing executive whose 25+ year career has been defined by a singular ability to translate business complexity into brand clarity and measurable growth. As Vice President of Marketing, she has consistently transformed marketing from a cost center into a strategic growth engine across the manufacturing, infrastructure, and technology sectors. Sabrina blends the precision of an engineer with the creativity of a brand strategist, delivering data-driven, high-impact programs that elevate market share, pipeline value, and organizational influence.

Sabrina’s most recent chapter at Porex Corporation, a $300M filtration component manufacturer under the Filtration Group and Madison Industries private equity umbrella, showcases her exceptional breadth of leadership. There, she redefined the role of marketing, shifting the function from traditional sales-driven reactive marketing to strategic digital-centric marketing that tripled ROI. Reporting directly to the CEO, Sabrina led enterprise-wide initiatives including digital transformation across sales, marketing and customer care, AI transformation and sustainability, while increasing marketing-sourced pipeline contribution from 5% to 60% and doubling year-over-year pipeline growth. She crafted multi-channel strategies spanning 10 business units and over 20 vertical markets in the life sciences and industrial spaces, and her alignment with sales enabled a 40% increase in funnel velocity and a 24% gain in price capture. Beyond performance metrics, she shaped a compelling internal culture, developing a global employee engagement program that boosted eNPS by 25% across 1000+ employees at 9 different global sites.

Sabrina is particularly gifted at building and scaling marketing capabilities in complex, matrixed organizations. Her earlier tenure at Cyxtera Technologies (divested from CenturyLink, now CenterSquare) is a prime example. After leading marketing during the $2.1B PE-backed divestiture of the data center business from CenturyLink, she launched the new Cyxtera brand across 25 international markets, while ensuring seamless marketing and sales operations amid the separation. The results: an 18% pipeline lift and a 27% increase in cross-sell revenue through targeted ABM and enablement.

During her years at Lumen and CenturyLink, Sabrina held multiple senior roles where she was instrumental in carving out the data center services business for a $2.15B sale to BC Partners. She built new marketing and sales enablement processes, consolidated disparate global teams, and optimized usage of tools while driving all integrated acquisition and retention campaigns—helping to drive efficiency and increase pipeline contributions by 30%. In addition to driving demand generation, she oversaw a strategic brand repositioning that raised awareness by over 160%.

Earlier in her career at Emerson—a $24.7B Fortune 150 industrial powerhouse—Sabrina served as Director & Global Brand Officer of the Network Power group, where she created the group marketing function, restructured 12 industry-leading product brands under a new brand architecture, consolidated over 15 websites into one user-friendly website with multiple cultural variations, led marketing integration for over 10 acquisitions, and launched one of the company’s first cross-business software platforms.

Her intellectual foundation is as multidimensional as her career. Sabrina holds three degrees from Northwestern University: a Master’s in Integrated Marketing Communications, and dual Bachelor of Science degrees in Biomedical Engineering and Journalism. This rare combination fuels her balanced approach—left-brain analytical rigor paired with right-brain storytelling mastery.

Fluent in German and proficient in French, and a dual citizen of the U.S. and Canada, Sabrina is an agile global executive and an enthusiastic contributor to professional communities including the American Marketing Association, CMO Huddles, ISBM, and Pavilion. She is equally comfortable in boardrooms and manufacturing floors, always pushing organizations forward with empathy, clarity, and purpose.

Whether scaling global teams, transforming digital ecosystems, building shared services capabilities, or elevating brand narratives, Sabrina Donley stands out as a pragmatic visionary who leads with both heart and precision. She is open to new opportunities and willing to relocate or travel—ready to bring her strategic firepower and marketing excellence to the next transformative challenge.

Character

Sabrina Donley is a values-driven leader who brings authenticity, empathy, and positivity to every role she takes on, consistently fostering strong cross-functional collaboration and building high-performing teams that thrive in complex, resource-constrained environments. Her ability to unite people around a shared vision, while navigating ambiguity with confidence and integrity, has made her a trusted partner to executives, employees, and stakeholders alike.

Knowledge

With a rare trifecta of academic grounding in engineering, journalism, and marketing from Northwestern University, Sabrina brings deep expertise across the full marketing spectrum and a nuanced understanding of both technical and customer-centric disciplines. Her deep expertise in digital transformation and commercial excellence makes her an ideal partner to any business looking to upgrade or build their digital sales and marketing ecosystem to drive efficiency and growth. Her decades of experience across manufacturing, infrastructure, and data center tech sectors have equipped her with the insights and agility needed to drive results across global markets and diverse industries.

Strategic

Sabrina is a transformative strategist who repositions marketing as a core business growth function, using data-driven insights to identify opportunity gaps and develop scalable, ROI-driven programs that align with broader enterprise growth goals. From leading multi-vertical initiatives to spearheading AI and sustainability councils, she consistently leverages market intelligence and cross-silo planning to deliver measurable impact.

Communication

A master of brand storytelling and executive messaging, Sabrina excels at crafting compelling narratives that resonate with both internal and external audiences, increasing engagement, loyalty, and market visibility. Whether launching a new brand across 25 global markets or driving cultural alignment across 1,000+ employees, she communicates with clarity, intention, and purpose.