Episode Summary
Half a year doesn’t seem like much time to take a marketing department from idling to racing ahead, but Mary Ford moves fast.
Mary recently became the Chief Marketing Officer of CENTEGIX, an internet of things (IoT) company making emergency alert software. Its main clients are K-12 schools and hotels.
School safety is a potentially heavy subject, but Mary focuses on the positives of what CENTEGIX’s product can do.
“My job as a marketer is to help people understand the day-to-day value the solution brings to those who feel more protected because they’re empowered to get help when they need it,” she says.
Although Mary only joined this year, she’s been busy improving CENTEGIX’s brand awareness and profile. When she first came onboard, the company had a website — and not much else.
“We needed to build some basic marketing competencies and fundamentals,” Mary says. Under her watch, the CENTEGIX marketing team launched a social media program and started producing white papers and email campaigns, improving internal communications (especially with sales) and hosting webinars.
Fortunately, working at four startups in the past has given Mary a taste for juggling lots of projects at once.
“I like to build things, and it’s fun to see how our marketing function has evolved over the past six months.”
Guest Profile
- Name: Mary Ford
- What she does: Mary is Chief Marketing Officer at CENTEGIX, a tech company that develops and sells software that allows users to call for help with the click of a button. Since joining earlier in 2020, Mary has been focused on improving internal communications and raising brand awareness through social media, white papers and sponsorships.
- Company: CENTEGIX
- Noteworthy: "Revenue is king. Closing deals is king. How do we support that? … How do we go about supporting the sales organization in a way that helps them close deals? Our whole team is very closely aligned on that concept of success and those deals being closed regardless of who gets credit."
Key Insights
- Everyone has an opinion about marketing. Most departments don’t find themselves receiving unasked-for input on their work from random colleagues. But marketing, as Mary diplomatically puts it, “is the place that you get a lot of feedback.” Ultimately, the marketing team’s job is to bring in revenue, so keep your focus on that and tune out unhelpful noise.
- Don’t get distracted by overambitious goals. One of Mary’s favorite phrases is “perfect is the enemy of good.” She says that her biggest challenge is keeping her team’s collective eye on small but important goals they can achieve, rather than chasing lofty ambitions that don’t align with the team’s size and budget.
- Marketing must support sales. Having worked in sales, Mary has an above average level of empathy for that department. She even calls herself a “sales-oriented marketer.” Improving the sales and marketing relationship was one of her first goals when she arrived at CENTEGIX. “[As marketers], if we're not doing something to help a sales team succeed, we really need to look at what we're doing,” she says.
Episode Highlights
- Providing security not just in times of crisis, but every single day
- Bracing for more rockiness with the back-to-school transition
- The importance of establishing partnerships in education
- Getting sold on sales
- Showing a united front between marketing and sales
- Do your leadership homework
“When I think about reading that I do to educate myself as a leader and an executive and a marketer, I tend to focus more on leadership materials. There’s a great book by Michael Watkins called ‘The First 90 Days’ — it’s an excellent tool for any leadership transition, whether it’s marketing or not. And ‘Radical Candor’ by Kim Scott is a favorite one that we’ve been talking about lately.”
