Built by an operator, for companies that need more than advice.

  • 15+ years as a hands-on marketing and digital executive. Managed $300M+ budgets. Led global teams of 80+. Sat in the seat — as de facto CMO, Chief Digital Officer, Chief of Staff to the CMO.

  • Cetera Financial Group (2nd-largest independent BD — $1.73B pipeline, largest in company history). Petco ($4B to $5.3B revenue scaling). Aflac (Chief of Staff to CMO, Head of Marketing & Sales Operations). Franklin Templeton Investments.

  • Founded the Enterprise Demand Center. Pioneered AI-powered marketing ($84M+ pipeline). Architected complete MarTech stacks. Modernized brand architectures across 7+ sub-brands. Deployed CDP and headless CMS ecosystems. Built enterprise VoC programs.

  • $1.73B pipeline. +266% web traffic. 38% lead conversion (from 28%). Award-winning campaigns. 2.28x ROAS improvement. 125% increase in lead capture.

  • Built enterprise VoC programs. Every strategy starts with the customer, not the org chart. Customer intelligence drives capital allocation, not gut instinct.

  • Founded Revenue Operators to close the gap between what companies need and what the consulting market delivers. Companies don’t need another strategy deck. They need someone who can operate.

  • Wharton School of Business (Securities Industry Institute, Excellence in Leadership Development). MBA, Florida Atlantic University (Accounting). BA Economics, SUNY Albany.

Meet the Founder

Merrill Varghese is Managing Partner & Chief Marketing Officer of Revenue Strategy Partners, a revenue architecture and fractional CMO practice serving growth-stage and enterprise companies navigating commercial transformation.

His career spans some of the most data-intensive marketing environments in financial services and consumer markets — including Cetera Financial Group, where he led global marketing organizations as SVP & Chief Digital and Performance Marketing Officer, building AI-driven MarTech infrastructure that generated over $1.7 billion in attributable pipeline and earned recognition as 2025 Wealthies Digital Campaign of the Year and a ThinkAdvisor LUMINARIES Award winner. Previously, he held senior marketing and operations roles at Petco, Aflac, and Franklin Templeton, with consistent focus on the intersection of data architecture, customer acquisition, and commercial performance.

Merrill has operated at the front edge of marketing's transition from brand-controlled discovery to algorithmically mediated engagement — deploying real-time customer data platforms, journey orchestration systems, and full-funnel demand infrastructure at enterprise scale. His perspective on the agentic economy is grounded in that operational reality: the gap between what marketing organizations publish and what agents can actually read and evaluate is not a technology problem. It is a structural failure of how brands have thought about data ownership.

He is a sought-after voice on AI-driven marketing transformation and the evolving role of the CMO as a commercial architect.

Work With Us

Core Operating Principles

Customer-First, Always: Every strategy starts with the customer. Not the product. Not the investor.

Operate, Don’t Advise: We embed. We own outcomes. We work alongside your team, not above them.

Own the Stack: Strategy without technology is a PowerPoint. We own both.

Build to Outlast Us: We build teams, systems, and capabilities that sustain after we leave.

Intellectual Honesty: We’ll tell you what’s not working. We’ll challenge assumptions. We won’t sugarcoat.

Enterprise Rigor, Startup Speed: Fortune 500 discipline with growth-stage urgency.

Ready to stop advising and start operating?

Contact us to get started.