SundaySky Appoints Marc Zionts as CEO to Accelerate Next Phase of Enterprise Video Platform Growth
New leadership builds on significant company momentum to take personalized video creation to more businesses than ever
NEW YORK – February 28, 2024 – SundaySky, the leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for efficient enterprise video creation and personalization, announced today that it has appointed Marc Zionts as chief executive officer. With significant experience leading software and technology businesses to superior outcomes, Zionts will lead SundaySky through its next phase of growth and innovation.
“I’m delighted to welcome Marc to SundaySky as CEO. Since Clearhaven’s investment in the company, we’ve been continually impressed with the innovation and ingenuity coming from the SundaySky team. Marc’s leadership will ensure those traits are maximized to the success of the company’s employees, customers, and shareholders,” said Michelle Noon, founder and managing partner of Clearhaven Partners. “Marc’s proven track record of efficient growth and market expansion, coupled with his strong cultural fit with Clearhaven and SundaySky, support our confidence in his leadership for the next stage.”
Throughout his technology career, Zionts has helped companies expand product offerings and develop new market opportunities while accelerating SaaS product adoption and increasing company revenue. “I’m thrilled to join SundaySky. I’m drawn to the mission to transform scaled, efficient, and personalized business communication through video. My experience leading companies from a startup founder to a multinational public company provides me perspective to apply to SundaySky as it scales,” Zionts said. “My journey has equipped me with insights from artificial intelligence (AI) to video optimization and from navigating founder-led, VC-backed startups to private equity-owned businesses. I am excited to lead SundaySky through its continued transformation, creating value for our customers and all shareholders.”
In addition to Zionts, several new leaders have joined SundaySky for its next growth phase, including:
- Larry Murff, CFO: As SundaySky’s chief financial officer, Larry Murff brings more than 30 years of financial and operational experience in financial services, technology, advertising, and logistics in both public and private equity sectors, including successful tenures in executive finance and operations roles at companies such as Bazaarvoice, Quantcast, and Impel. Larry maintains a proven track record of delivering optimal results in high-growth environments and successful exits, including an IPO.
- Barbara Dischner, SVP of Marketing: As senior vice president of marketing at SundaySky, Barbara Dischner plays an integral role in accelerating growth at software companies. With extensive experience helping B2B SaaS companies develop go-to-market plans that accelerate revenue while building, nurturing, and scaling high-powered marketing teams – serving in executive positions at SAP, Dell, BlueJeans, and Coveo – Dischner is an expert at building sales pipeline, accelerating sales velocity, and ensuring branded touch points across the customer journey.
- Phil Leininger, Strategic Advisory Board: As the newest member of SundaySky’s strategic advisory board, Phil Leininger brings extensive experience in driving customer growth, satisfaction, and loyalty by creating seamless and engaging digital experiences across multiple channels and platforms – most recently at Verizon and Fidelity Investments. In his role at Fidelity Investments, Leininger gained experience driving the digital business and experience for retail clients. At Verizon, he owned the E2E customer journey across all Verizon consumer customers as the head of omnichannel customer experience and digital channels. Leininger’s impressive track record will help SundaySky bring personalized video creation to more customers across more channels.
With an expanded leadership team, SundaySky is entering a new year with significant growth momentum from 2023. Highlights include:
- Strong financial momentum in 2023
- Despite macroeconomic headwinds during the year, SundaySky had its strongest-ever new bookings quarter in company history in Q4 2023.
- The company realized significant wins, including:
- A 43% deal win rate.
- Increased pipeline velocity by a 52% reduction in the sales cycle duration.
- Increased multi-year contracts, signaling long-term commitment and greater investment in video strategy by SundaySky customers.
- New SundaySky customers across all categories, including IntouchCX, People First Federal Credit Union, Nexamp, WebMD Health Services, and many more.
- New customer wins across new and evergreen markets, including credit unions (in partnership with Allied Solutions) and financial services, technology, e-commerce, energy and utilities, healthcare insurers, business services, and higher education institutions.
- Increased product usage and adoption
- SundaySky launched its generative AI Copilot assistant in beta in 2023; with significant adoption, speed to video production and ease of use, AI Copilot will be generally available in Q2 2024.
- Based on the beta launch:
- Nearly half of customer accounts utilized AI Copilot.
- On average, AI Copilot helped users create a video in just 22 minutes – a fraction of the time (18%) it would take to create a video in SundaySky’s platform without AI Copilot.
- AI Copilot is now the leading method of video generation for SundaySky platform users, signaling a high level of acceptance of businesses to use AI-generated videos in market.
- Based on the beta launch:
- Today, more than 50% of SundaySky’s customers’ videos are personalized, underscoring our customer’s desire for data-driven content engagement.
- SundaySky continues to prioritize product development focused on making data-driven personalization in video easier than ever with the launch of its Data Connectors Marketplace, which provides out-of-the-box data integrations for Salesforce, Hubspot, and Google Sheets – with an Adobe Marketo data connector targeted to launch in April of 2024.
- SundaySky launched its generative AI Copilot assistant in beta in 2023; with significant adoption, speed to video production and ease of use, AI Copilot will be generally available in Q2 2024.
In the recent report “Reduce Technical Debt By Understanding Enterprise Video Platform Capabilities Before RFP,” Forrester outlined a unique market opportunity for enterprise video platforms like SundaySky to “unlock new tiers of enterprise value.” As SundaySky combines significant company momentum with exciting new leadership capabilities, the company is poised to deliver easier, more cost-effective personalized video capabilities to more customers than ever before.
Additional resources:
- Download the Forrester report
- View SundaySky’s leadership team
- See SundaySky customers
- Learn more about the SundaySky video platform and video AI capabilities
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About SundaySky
SundaySky empowers businesses to create videos faster, easier, and more personalized. Our AI-powered video platform features expertly-crafted templates, extensive libraries of assets, and a marketplace of data connectors, all to enable users without video know-how to deliver high-quality, on-brand, highly relevant video experiences to their customers, prospects, and employees. 1000Bulbs.com, 1-800 Contacts, Bank of America, iTHINK Financial, Okta, Staples, UnitedHealthcare, and many others have adopted SundaySky to modernize video production, improve audience engagement, drive efficient business growth, and reduce reliance on resource-intensive production models that incur significant costs, time, and require specialized skills. Learn more at www.sundaysky.com.
