Halifax tech consultancy CloudKettle has announced the addition of a new executive, Eliot Harper.

Harper is a noted expert on Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud platform, having written several books on the topic and worked directly with Salesforce.

Marketing Cloud offers automation and analytics services for advertisers. CloudKettle provides consulting services to large SaaS companies, many of which have revenues in the billions of dollars.

“If you’d asked me a year ago if someone of Eliot’s calibre and cache would be joining CloudKettle, I would have been astounded,” said senior partner John McGinley. “But that being said, we’d always planned to grow our marketing cloud practice. We just didn’t think we’d get one of the world’s foremost experts.”

Harper’s previous positions include working for the British military as a telecommunications specialist, acting as Chief Innovation Officer at SEO house Digital Logic Marketing Solution and with Australian adtech consultancy Blended Digital as a non-executive partner.

His work with CloudKettle began on a contract basis about a year and a half ago, after he met the team at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.

Rather than relocating to Halifax, he will continue telecommuting from Australia. But with  Harper having substantial experience working with clients in California and elsewhere on the West Coast, McGinley said he is confident that the geographic distance will not pose a problem.

He added that the hire is part of a larger strategy to grow CloudKettle by attracting industry leaders as employees and partners, with the core of the firm’s value proposition being the quality of its experts.

“Anyone who does any significant amount of work in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud ecosystem would be aware of Eliot, simply because he has such good name recognition and he has worked so closely with Salesforce in the past,” said McGinley. He previously told Entrevestor that the company’s business model is to grow in a manner similar to law or accounting firms, with a gradually expanding group of equity-owning partners.

Harper is himself joining, not as a partner, but as the Senior Marketing Technology Architect. He will be CloudKettle’s 19th non-partner employee. The three current partners are McGinley, founder Greg Poirier and Dan Stratton.

According to McGinley, the firm’s strategy is to attract industry leaders by making CloudKettle’s work more interesting than that offered by larger consultancies.

“We don’t want to do work for people we don’t enjoy, and we don’t want to do what we consider uninteresting or ineffective work, and that tends to be a bit of a different approach than some larger professional services firms,” said McGinley.

“I’m really impressed with (CloudKettle’s) team, processes and experience,” added Harper in a video post on the company’s blog. “CloudKettle really understands how to effectively leverage marketing technology to drive customer engagement and revenue.”