Kate Nettenstrom

“If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?”

T.S. Eliot

As Senior Vice President, Client Services, Kate leads a team of talented account management and project management professionals who serve as our clients’ bridge to agency services and trusted partner in achieving their marketing and business objectives. As the head of the Client Services department, Kate collaborates with other department leaders to ensure our services, account operations model and marketing strategies best suit our clients’ needs.

Across the agency’s client portfolio, Kate’s goal is to be a trusted advisor to marketing leaders – helping them assess new opportunities across their marketing functions and creating efficiencies in collaborating with the agency’s account teams. Kate’s vision for service delivery and what she sees as most impactful is when clients see their agency team as an extension of their internal marketing function, embedded in the ins and outs of their business and its goals in order to drive meaningful results.

To support this vision, Kate oversees department VPs and directors to define Walker Sands’ standards for account and project management excellence, maintain consistent execution, evolve our approach to meet client and agency needs, and measure our efficacy on an ongoing basis.

This includes ongoing education and training for account management and project management staff, sourcing formal feedback on a bi-annual basis from client stakeholders, and surveying services team members on Client Services’ performance and areas for growth.

With a background in public relations and journalism, Kate is passionate about uncovering engaging client stories that will resonate with their customers, prospects and industry peers. Her current and prior client roster includes commercetools, Priority, Elastic Path, Formation, InMoment, Semrush and OpenX. Her work has been recognized by the Publicity Club of Chicago, the Public Relations Society of America, the MarCom Awards, The Shorty Awards, PRSA Puget Sound and the Hermes Creative Awards. She has happily been a part of the growing Walker Sands team since 2014.

Kate graduated with a Bachelor of Science in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. Kate spends her weekends rehabbing her very old home, trying out local breweries and seeing as many concerts as possible.

Specialties

• Messaging
• Client relationship development
• PR strategy and planning
• Integrated marketing
• Account and project management

Skills

• Media relations
• Editing
• Coaching and development
• Storytelling
• Getting sh*t done

Interests

• Grimey rock shows
• Crushable lagers
• Really big dogs
• Sunday print editions