Career Day: Peter Mahoney // Plannuh

Quotes

• “I got into marketing by accident and I think this happens a lot. If you look at marketers and the arc of their career, some of the most interesting marketers came from a slightly different place of practice.” -Peter“What happened with IBM is that IBM uses its own lingo. When they told me that it was a marketing job, they didn’t tell me inside IBM when you say marketing, it actually means sales.” -Peter“Literally my first job at marketing was heading marketing for a division of public company at the time, which is a little bit scary but that’s how it happened.” -Peter “One of the things I found that was really helpful in my career is I took the risks where sometimes I went from a managerial job to an individual contributor job again because it was a non-direct path to learn something that I thought was really useful for strategically building my career.” -Peter “And then I decided that what I really wanted was more product experience. So I ended up taking a role as the head of product development for this company called PictureTell. The opportunity I had, was to really get my hands around how products get built and I figured there’s no better waythan to actually do it. I found that going and figuring out how to do things was an incredibly valuable way to learn.” -Peter“I find that some of the best CMOs have spent a significant amount of time marketing. Product marketing is one of the strategic areas of marketing because you need to go figure out what the market needs, what the message is to communicate to the market, what the market size is, what the opportunity is so it is of high business relationship with the market.” -Peter“I have less of an engineering background and more of a science background and the difference is that a background in science tells you that you’re actually about running experiments and seeking the truth, even if the truth isn’t what you like. I find thatincredibly helpful in marketing as well as all elements to the business.” -Peter“A lot of marketers make the mistake of trying to spin things and say that it worked. But if you take a more scientific approach, you’d say, this is the experiment I ran and these are the results and the answer is, it didn’t work and that is actually super useful.” -Peter“The most important thing is just understanding the truth. Encouraging that out of your team is one of the most important things that you can do to get people to share exactly what’s going on and don’t punish them for telling you bad news because sometimes bad news is the most important.” -Peter“I found the times when I grew most in a company is when I spent a significant chunk of time within a company enough so that you could build a hopefully positive reputation. And then as things change inevitable with a company, you get an opportunity to fill in a box and try something new.” -Peter“After talking to customers, I found this incredibly loyal customer base but they were frustrated with some things. They were frustrated with the support model, as an example. We found out that by simply doing a better job advocating for more supportive customers, you can turn these annoyed customers into super fans and they become super incredible amplifiers of your message. You take those amplifiers combined with a little bit of investment and demand creation and all of a sudden you can build up a pretty interesting growth business from that.” -Peter“A product peopleoften think about, in the software world especially, the ones and zeros. But the reality is, it is often the whole experience that matters. The good news is, as the world has grown to embrace SaaS as a business model, you’ve seen much better behavior fromsoftware companies who have to keep satisfying the customers so they keep the revenue coming.” -Jordan “It was an interesting transition because I was an independent, small-ish unit of a large company, about 100 million dollars business and as a GM, you have broad authority to make changes and a fairly constrained set of products, and messages and market.”-Jordan “The thing that was different was I had a lot of control as a GM. You can turn on the knobs and leverages yourself to being in a role whereI have to influence a very broad and complicated organization to get things done.” -Jordan“My role as CMO required a lot of one-on-one and heart-to-heart conversations and trust-building with each of the executives to get to the point where they believe that by shifting our approach to marketing, we could create a rising tide that was helpful for all parts of the company.” -Jordan “It’s interesting because I had been an executive at a public company and at a company that paid really well largely because it was a difficult place to work and there’s often a lot of hazard pay involved, so the good news is, I had a nice war chest that I had developed.” -Jordan “I decided that there was a big opportunity and further thought by taking some of the modernsoftware techniques we learned at Nuance or on build intelligent systems that leverage AI kinds of things, you ought to be able to make things faster, easier, and better. That’s why we built with Plannuh to be an integrated platform that connects your planning, budgeting, your performance tracking and gives you a single integrated view of your marketing.” -Jordan “The issue is that there are a lot of great tools for marketers. In fact, the marketing landscape now has somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 tools out there. It’s a big number but the reality is, most of them are point solutions and most of them are designed for things like the delivery of a message.” -Jordan “Most of the marketing tools have very little to do with what marketing leaders do which is manage marketing leadership. So we think of Plannuh as an intelligent marketing leadership platform, so it’s the platform you use to build and execute your plans and track the money.” -Jordan “First of all, there’s no path. I am going to use a sailing analogy. I think when you sail, you pick a destination but you don’t especially go on a straight path. There’s tacking involved because you have to move around based on the weather conditions and adjust your path keeping in mind that there is some future goal.” -Jordan“It’s also incredibly important to have a holistic view of a business when you’re trying to build a marketing career. When you’re really diving deep, I think it makes you a better marketer because you start to understand what is driving the business, whereare the good and bad parts, where are the areas for optimization and you make decisions a bit differently as you understand the business holistically.” -Jordan