I Like Marketers More than I Like Marketing

Summary

After years of running marketing teams, building software for marketers, and sitting in the CMO seat, I realized I care more about making marketers’ lives better than I do about marketing itself. That’s what brought me to Heinz Marketing as President and COO.

By Jenn Steele,COO and President at Heinz Marketing

“I like marketers more than I like marketing.”

I was sitting at breakfast with a couple of fellow CMOs when I said that. They had flown up from Austin the day before to get together with some Seattle members of CMO Coffee Talk. I had just sold Kissmetrics after coming in as a turnaround CEO, but my heart belonged to marketing…or so I thought. Saying that sentence made me realize that the work itself wasn’t the point; I cared more about the people trying to do it.

I’ve come at most of my career a bit sideways. I got a biology degree from MIT and somehow wound up an IT executive at Boston law firms. Then I got into blogging and social media, burned out of IT, and in 2009 joined HubSpot as employee ~80 and an Inbound Marketing Consultant. I’ll admit that I was better at helping our customers set up their DNS than I was at helping them figure out what keywords to target at first, but I grew into it.

From there, I spent most of my career in B2B marketing: running marketing teams, sitting in the CMO seat, dealing with boards and investors, turning around and selling a company, and eventually founding a software company built for marketers. But it turns out there’s only so much you can do for marketers from inside software companies.

The problems I kept wanting to help with were the messy ones. How do you make the team function better? How do you build something the company can actually execute? How do you get better work out without adding five more tools, three consultants, and a ceremonial spreadsheet? How do you help a CMO succeed in a job where the average day can feel like twelve competing priorities wearing a trench coat? (I know. I couldn’t resist)

That’s why I kept writing and speaking, usually some version of, “Here’s how I messed this up. Please learn from it and make new and more interesting mistakes.”

Along the way, I met Matt Heinz (as do most B2B marketing execs!), attended CMO breakfasts, and got involved with CMO Coffee Talk. I partnered with Heinz Marketing, subcontracted for them when I was between roles (as most of us are at times), and hired them to build out my demand generation function when I was a CMO. I fell in love with the whole team.

So I always looked for opportunities to work with Heinz Marketing. When AI agents came on the scene as more than just hype, I jumped at the opportunity to put Heinz Marketing’s IP into agents for the consultants to use. That pulled me even closer to the team and the work. And when I heard that my friend Maria, Heinz Marketing’s longtime COO, was retiring, I made sure I kept in touch.

That created an opportunity I hadn’t been actively looking for, but that made a crazy amount of sense. Because while there’s only so much I could do for marketers at software companies, there’s quite a bit I can do for them here.

• I can work with marketing teams to bring in AI in a way that won’t suck.
• I can help our consultants solve harder operating problems with clients, not just hand over recommendations and hope everyone finds time to implement them.
• I can help CMOs find ways to extend their tenure…or help them find ways out.
• I can take more of the company off Matt’s plate so he can spend more of his time helping the B2B marketing community.

Heinz Marketing’s mission is to “Positively impact careers and lives by empowering ownership in driving results that matter,” and that’s pretty darn close to what my personal mission has become. And I already knew I loved working with the people here.

That’s why I joined Heinz Marketing as President and COO. I’ve spent a lot of my career trying to make marketing work better. Here, I get to make marketers’ lives better, too.

(Jenn is the one in the middle in the picture)