TL;DR
- Christina Freeman is a principal go-to-market systems engineer who has been with Expel for nearly four years
- She and one other person manage 30+ go-to-market systems—which she assures us is fine, they’re doing great
- She’s all in on sewing: she has four sewing machines, several bookshelves of fabric, and an 85-by-85-inch Lord of the Rings quilt to prove it
Christina Freeman lasted four days as an SDR. “I don’t do well with rejection. I cry very easily.” She figured out fast that the job wasn’t for her, and stumbled into go-to-market support—specifically in systems. Plus, systems don’t reject you (most of the time). That realization kicked off a 15-year career in go-to-market operations—and eventually landed her at Expel, where she’s been for nearly four years as a principal go-to-market systems engineer.
How she got here
Eight years. That’s how long Christina was at her previous company, a healthcare IT company, before she decided it was time to move on. “Hello, eight years is too long to be in any one place.” She found Expel on LinkedIn, applied, and went through the process.
What made her stay has been the people. Her previous company went through a lot of M&A activity over the years—new faces constantly coming and going. Expel is different in a way she says is hard to explain but easy to feel. “I don’t know how our recruiting team does it, but we really managed to find the best.” It’s the kind of thing you hear at every Expel all-hands when someone hits a seven- or eight-year anniversary and the whole company acts like it’s not unusual—because here, it kind of isn’t.
She also notes that after eight years at the healthcare company, she could still barely explain what they actually did. She knows exactly what Expel does. So there’s that.
What the job actually is
The title is a mouthful, but the job is pretty simple to describe: Christina and one other person keep all of Expel’s go-to-market systems running, integrated, and doing what everyone needs them to do. Sales, marketing, customer success. Somewhere north of 30 tools. Two people.
“We’re doing great,” she says with a saccharine smile. “It’s easy.” (It is not easy.)
No two days are the same. A chunk of every day is helping users and answering questions about why and how something works (or doesn’t). The rest of her time is dedicated to deeper work: the backlog of improvements and new builds that move the business forward. Right now that second category is getting harder to ignore.
“In this new AI realm, there’s a lot of opportunity for us to really build things for the enterprise at scale.”
The AI of it all
Christina is working on AI from two directions at once, and they’re pretty different problems.
The first is personal. Her role is getting more technical—less point-and-click admin work, more JavaScript, more working directly with APIs. She’s been using AI to help her prototype in real time, get unstuck on code, and move faster than a two-person team usually can. The prototypes go to her more technical counterpart for review before anything ships.
“I’m not a Salesforce developer. Anything I vibe code is absolutely not going into production for Salesforce.” Customer data is not a sandbox. But between the idea and the technical review, she can now cover a lot more ground on her own.
The second problem is an org-wide one. Across Expel’s go-to-market team—SDRs, account executives, CSMs—people have already been quietly building their own AI workflows. Daily briefings. Meeting prep. Pipeline review. Outbound messaging. Individuals have figured out what works for them. Christina’s job now is to find what’s actually working, where people are getting real replies and saving real time, and turn that into something the whole org can use.
She nearly typed “democratize” in a Slack message about this work, but reconsidered the corporate language—we didn’t get as lucky in this interview, but since she’s literally democratizing work, we’ll allow it.
“We’re not trying to take away from that, we’re not knocking it, we’d love that you’ve done it. But how do we start to take what they’ve learned and standardize that as a model the org can use?”
The quilts
Before the interview started, the sewing conversation had already happened. So when the hidden talent came up, fabric wasn’t the surprise. The scale of it was.
It started with skirts—specifically, the lack of pockets in women’s clothing. Christina’s solution was to make her own. That led to quilting. Quilting led to going, in her words, “all in.” She now has four sewing machines, two full bookshelves of fabric yardage, a cube storage unit visible in the background throughout the entire call, and a (quilted) partridge in a pear tree.
Her most recent project: an 85-by-85-inch Lord of the Rings quilt. Six months of work. Some of her work shown below are quilts made for other Expletives, which really hits on that whole “quality people” thing she talked about earlier.
On Saturdays she goes to a local quilt shop, takes a small project, and sews alongside a rotating group of women who range from her age to her grandmother’s age—people she’d have had no other reason to meet. She started an Instagram. She thought about selling her work and decided against it, because once a craft becomes work, it stops being fun.
A very important question
In true Expel fashion, we asked Christina, “What’s your most unpopular food opinion?” She didn’t hesitate to respond. “I am a big lover of red dyes.” Specifically Captain Crunch Crunch Berries, Fruity Pebbles, and Nerds gummy clusters. The palate of a nine-year-old, she acknowledges. She’s fine with that.
This quickly derailed into a conversation about candy, and Christina shared her true guilty pleasure: Riesens, a German dark chocolate caramel treat. The guilty part comes from going back to the dentist if she loses another tooth to one of these candies, but that isn’t hindering her love for Riesens—she swears anyone who hasn’t had one is missing out (but not on teeth).
