As marketing director at Jay Group, Natalia Golenkova leads all digital and traditional marketing functions with a strong focus on lead generation, marketing technology infrastructure, and data-driven decision-making.
Her day-to-day operates across three layers simultaneously: strategic (where she develops and presents marketing strategy to senior leadership, aligns marketing goals with sales and business development targets, evaluates market trends and competitive positioning, and makes budget allocation decisions based on real-time attribution data across all channels); tactical (where she manages the full marketing technology stack, including CRM automation, AI-powered visitor de-anonymization, automated outreach, meeting intelligence, and analytics platforms); and operational (where she debugs tracking pixels, reviews CRM workflows for misrouted leads, checks website page speed after new deploys, verifies ADA compliance, monitors backlink quality and spam scores, and builds landing pages with proper UTM parameters and attribution tagging).
A former practicing civil lawyer (Russian equivalent of a Juris Doctor, Summa Cum Laude), she evaluates every marketing initiative through a legal and regulatory lens: GDPR and privacy regulation, ADA website accessibility and copyright/IP protection. She manages a hybrid team model combining in-house talent, remote specialists, fractional consultants, and international third-party partners across the United States and Europe.
Golenkova arrived to the United States in 2015 with no American network, no U.S. credentials, and no safety net. Rather than spend years requalifying as a lawyer in the United States, she pivoted into digital marketing and management.
Previous to her current role, she worked at DCS as an SEO/PPC specialist, and later was promoted to marketing specialist, then account manager and eventually to senior account manager, managing the digital presence of 30-plus clients with strong focus on logistics and supply chain companies. There, she increased website traffic by 65% through SEO and content strategies, boosted ROI by 30% with high-performing campaigns, and drove revenue growth by onboarding major clients.
She was also recruited as senior marketing manager at Bergen Logistics, a subsidiary of Elanders Group, where she increased digital marketing's revenue share from 34% to 46% despite economic headwinds; brought PPC campaign management in-house (saving 15% on budget while improving agility); grew Domain Authority from 26 to 31; and ensured compliance with GDPR, Privacy, and ADA standards across all digital properties.
Golenkova was named a winner of this year’s Women in Supply Chain Forum™ award, presented by Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive, in the Trailblazers category.
Marina Mayer, editor-in-chief of Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive and co-founder of the Women in Supply Chain Forum™, sat down with Golenkova to discuss AI, marketing trends, and what it takes to measure success.
Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive: As marketing director, you lead all digital and traditional marketing functions across three layers simultaneously: strategic, tactical and operational. Walk me through what each of these entail and why all three are necessary.
Natalia Golenkova: Each layer only works if it is tied to a deliverable that separates success from noise. Without that, you fight fires all day and still lose, because the urgent steals your time from the important. So at every level I start with the same question: how will we measure success? And the answer has to be SMART, or it is a mood, not a target.
Strategic sets direction and budget: where we play, how we position, and what we agree to measure before we spend. That deliverable should be shared by the executive team.
Tactical is execution: the campaigns and channels that carry the strategy. That deliverable is for the marketing team, which plays we run and what each one has to return.
Operational is the daily machine: the stack, the data, the routing, the compliance. That deliverable is ground-level KPIs, whether the engine is running, clean and on time.
Each one fails alone. Strategy without tactics and operations is a wish list in the shape of a slide deck. Operations and tactics without strategy are a colossus with feet of clay. Impressive until it isn't, because there is no feedback loop. You never see what is going wrong, so you can never fix it. You need the detail and the system to catch it. In a business that runs on tight margins, every marketing dollar has to trace back to pipeline, so I own all three layers to keep direction, execution, and measurement connected. That is exactly how I doubled digital lead generation in my first year at Jay Group while transitioning every function in-house.
Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive: You arrived to the United States in 2015 with no American network, no U.S. credentials, and no safety net. What did you do? How did you get started?
Golenkova: I was not afraid to let go of my past and start from scratch. That is far easier to say than to do.
In Russia, I had been a successful civil lawyer. Coming here meant setting that identity down. My law degree did not transfer, and requalifying would have cost two years and study money I did not have, with two young children to feed. I already held a Master's in Management from the Open University in the UK, but a European degree focused on traditional management was not going to put food on the table by itself.
So I chose digital marketing. I was curious about it, I could see it was on the rise, and I knew almost nothing about it, which is a humbling place to start for someone who used to argue legal cases for a living. I earned a free Google certification and took my first role in the field. I learned the American market the only honest way, by doing the work full time while raising two kids, and I kept stacking skills and results until they spoke for themselves. Ten years later I went from that first specialist seat to marketing director.
Getting here was not simple. I had been persecuted for my political views as a regional leader of the opposition to Vladimir Putin. After my interviews ran in the international press, including The Times, the Guardian, and Politico, staying was no longer safe. I had days to decide. My whole life, and my two children's, fit into four suitcases. I paid an expensive price for my beliefs, but I will never regret it. I arrived with no friends, no network, no safety net, two small kids, and only basic English. I owe my first professional success to Richard Delaney, owner of DCS, who hired a girl with ambition, no experience, and a Russian accent.
Today, I am a U.S. citizen, granted political asylum, and I will be grateful to this country for the rest of my life for the chance to start over and build a career around what I love. I treasure every opportunity to contribute and to share what I have learned. You really can follow your dream here. I am one of many proofs of that.
Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive: In your current role, you maintain a strong focus on lead generation, marketing technology infrastructure, and data-driven decision-making. What marketing-focused trends are you seeing in the supply chain space? And what advice do you have for other supply chain organizations when it comes to marketing?
Golenkova: The biggest shift is AI. Not as a tool, but as a force reshaping how marketing departments are built. Marketing is no longer fluff. Today's marketer is part strategist, part martech engineer, part data analyst, and part compliance officer, because the job now runs on all four at once. What separates a professional from an amateur, and success from disaster, is 1,000 technical details most people never see.
That shift also moved lead generation itself. It no longer starts in sales. It starts in marketing, inside the martech stack and the lead engines that hunt, nurture, and route demand: visitor de-anonymization, intent data, AI-assisted nurturing, generative engine optimization for AI search, and attribution that is finally solvable instead of a guess. And online compliance matters more every quarter as regulation tightens at both national and international levels.
My advice is direct. Stop treating marketing as a brochure function and a cost center. Build attribution before you scale acquisition, so you can prove what works. Bring the core functions in-house where you can, so the data and the knowledge stay with you. Measure everything that matters, and build the compliance layer in early, not after something breaks. Most supply chain companies are underinvested in demand generation and overreliant on relationships that do not scale.
And keep marketing and sales as two functions, not one. In a strong company they work like checks and balances, each sharpening the other. The healthy version of that relationship reminds me of the old line about a good marriage: once in a while you think about killing your spouse, but you never think about divorcing. I hope my husband won't use it against me.
Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive: What supply chain trend do you think will have the biggest impact over the next five years?
Golenkova: AI is the trend, and it is bigger than a trend. It is a shift on the scale of the industrial revolution or the internet. It changes how business gets done, not just which tools we use.
The mistake is treating it as a binary. The debate today is stuck between two extremes: that AI can replace everyone, or that it can replace no one. Both are wrong. The real work of the next five years is the educated middle, deciding function by function what AI should do and what it must never do.
AI will absolutely take over the tedious work, the repetitive, high-volume tasks that used to eat a team's week. But that creates the next fight, and it is the one most companies are not ready for: finding the people who can actually excel with AI. When the routine work is automated, the scarce resource is judgment. The professionals who can think critically, ask the sharp question, and direct these tools well are in high demand right now, and that demand is only going up. The technology is becoming a commodity. The people who can wield it are not.
For marketing, the change is already drastic, and it will go further. The biggest commercial impact will not be AI in the warehouse or on the route, which is where most of the attention goes. It will be AI closing the gap between operational data and commercial decisions, turning the numbers a company already has into the choices it makes next. The organizations that win will pair that speed with a verification layer, because in regulated, high-trust logistics a fast wrong answer is a liability, not a shortcut.
That is why I work to a framework, not to the hype. One of them is the 4D approach to AI: delegation, description, discernment, and diligence. Decide what to hand to AI, tell it precisely what you need, judge the output critically, and verify before anything goes live. Euphoria says the machine replaces everything. Discipline says the machine accelerates the people who already know what good looks like. The companies that treat AI as an accelerator with guardrails will pull away from the ones that treat it as a replacement for judgment.
Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive: Please share a difficult supply chain disruption you managed and how you turned the challenge into an opportunity.
Golenkova: Supply chain has not had a quiet decade. COVID broke production and shipping in 2020. Then the chip shortage and the Suez blockage in 2021, the war in Ukraine and record inflation in 2022, the Red Sea shipping crisis into 2024, a new wave of tariffs in 2025, and the AI transformation running underneath all of it. Different shocks, one constant: each forces every function to prove it is worth its budget, and marketing is usually first in line and least able to answer.
That gap, between marketing and revenue, is the disruption I have made my work. It is one of the most common blind spots in this industry. Campaigns run, money goes out, and no one can say which spend produced pipeline. When budgets tighten, the function that cannot prove its contribution is the first one cut, exactly when the company needs it most. I rebuild that connection from the ground up: attribution that ties every dollar to revenue, core functions brought in-house to cut waste, and measurement that turns marketing from a cost center into a growth engine.
The sharpest edge of the AI transformation is software. Supply chain is becoming a SaaS business. When it comes to supply chain AI, agents cannot be bolted on at the top. They have to be woven into the system. The warehouse and order management systems that used to sit quietly in the back office are turning into AI-native platforms that companies buy, sell, and compete on, and I have marketed these products from zero. Selling them well takes the same discipline that keeps AI honest: automate what is repeatable and verifiable, the data, the research, the first drafts, the routing, and keep people on what carries judgment and risk, strategy, positioning, compliance, and the final call on anything that ships. Marketing an AI-driven SaaS product is not about promising the software does everything. It is about proving it does the right things, reliably, with a person accountable for the result. Delegate the volume, own the judgment.
Disruption rewards the teams that can measure and adapt, and punishes the ones that cannot. My job is to make sure marketing is the proof, not the guesswork, no matter what the market does next.
Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive: What can organizations do to attract, retain, and develop women in supply chain roles?
Golenkova: Hire for output, not pedigree. Some of the strongest people I have worked with came in through side doors: immigrants, career changers, mothers returning to work. Screen resumes with AI filters and you lose them before you ever meet them. That is why I hire with practical tests, not just resumes and screening apps. A test shows me what a person can actually deliver, not how many impressive words they can stack in a paragraph about themselves.
To keep good people, be flexible, and judge them by results instead of stereotypes. In my experience the most productive engineer on a team was an introvert who did his best work from home. A returning mother outperforms on a hybrid schedule what she ever could chained to a desk from nine to five. A younger hire repays tuition sponsorship with years of loyalty and hard-won knowledge. But flexibility is not charity, and it does not mean loose. I hold everyone accountable, which is exactly why I invest so heavily in KPIs that measure the quality of the work, not the hours in the chair. I run a team across the United States and Eastern Europe, in-house, remote, and fractional, and it works because I am flexible but always able to measure what people produce, not where they sit.
I work inside a woman-led company that has made the Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing private companies six times. Jay Group's CEO, Dana Chryst, built her way to leading and owning the business, long before “woman-led” was a phrase anyone printed in a press release. That is what real inspiration looks like to me. Not a diversity line in a report.
But this is a two-way road. Women have to walk through the career opportunities in front of them and win on the business battlefield, arguing from logic and data, never asking to be measured by a softer standard because we are women. I know the room is not always fair. The old boys' club is real, and in plenty of places the glass ceiling is still there. But whether I was treated fairly or not, I never wanted the allowance. I wanted the number that made the allowance irrelevant, because respect follows results, and results do not care about your gender.
Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive: If you could go back in time and talk to your younger self, what would you say to her?
Golenkova: Life is short, so find what you truly love, and follow it fiercely.
Two years ago I lost my mother to cancer. From the moment we learned of her illness to the moment she was gone, we had less than two months. I have always been tough, hard to shake. This shook me to a point I never expected. It brought not only pain that cannot be repaired, but a very simple clarity: nothing matters except what truly matters to you. So spend your time on what gives you butterflies. Not on chasing what excites other people, not on what others expect of you.
Whatever the dream you follow, professional or personal, you will stumble. Doors will not open. You will cry because life is unfair. But if you truly love what you do, none of that stops your passion. You will find your way to success, and real joy in the work itself. You will love solving puzzles and problems, and you will always want to learn more. It will feel natural. Overwhelming some days, the way peak season is overwhelming: you swear never again, and every year you sign up for it all over.
And do not forget balance. Balance is not a buzzword. It is what keeps you from burning out when you work this hard, year after year. To be genuinely successful in your career, you have to be successful in the rest of your life too, in your relationships and in the things you do just for yourself. So yes, some days I spend fifteen hours at work. But I always protect the balance between being a successful professional, a happy woman, a loving mother, a present wife, and a whole person.
Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive: If you could leave the audience with one piece of advice about being a woman in the supply chain, what would it be?
Golenkova: Bring numbers to every room and be ready to defend them. My CEO at Bergen Logistics, Charles Ickes, had a line that stuck with me: “In God we trust. Everyone else brings data.” This industry runs on pallets, not vibes. On top of that, it is still mostly run by men, so the fastest way to be taken seriously is to prove the path you are proposing with logic, frameworks, and evidence, delivered with full tact but zero apology. In a warehouse, people trust the scan, not the story. Bring that same standard to marketing: data-driven attribution no one can dispute, positioning built from real competitor analysis that surfaces the company's true unique selling proposition, and an AI transformation path you have already mapped, with the deliverables to back it. Opinions get debated. Solid ideas backed by KPIs get you the budget, the seat, and the next role.
CLICK HERE to learn more about the winners from this year's Women in Supply Chain Forum™ Award.
CLICK HERE to register, sponsor and/or learn more about this year’s Women in Supply Chain Forum™, Nov. 17-19 in Charleston, S.C.
