Most B2B marketing teams could disappear for six months and nothing important would change. Is that true at CTI?
No. If a marketing team can disappear for six months and nobody feels it, I think you have to ask what role marketing is really playing in the business. For us, marketing touches lead generation, sales, partner programs, events, brand, and how we go to market. I’ve never viewed it as a department that just sits off to the side and makes things look good. It should be connected to growth and what the business is trying to accomplish.
You came into marketing through technical and sales roles rather than a traditional marketing path. How has that changed what you think marketing is actually for?
Coming through technical and sales roles probably made me more commercially minded about marketing from the beginning. I tend to ask pretty basic questions. Does the customer care? Does this help sales? Does it make us easier to understand? Does it help move the business forward? That has always been my filter. Marketing should make the company easier to understand, easier to buy from, and easier to grow.
By your own standard — the gap between what a company says, how it operates, and how it grows — where does CTI currently have the widest gap, and what are you doing about it?
I think any company that continues to grow and evolve is constantly working to keep the story, the customer experience, and the way the business operates aligned. CTI has grown significantly in both scale and capability, so naturally there is ongoing work around how we go to market, how we communicate what we do, and how we make sure the way we present the company reflects where the business is today. That alignment work never really stops.
In an industry with long, high-stakes sales cycles and technically sophisticated buyers, what's a tactic that looks good on paper but actually erodes trust?
We have more tools than ever to automate outreach, personalize messages, and reach people at scale. That can be incredibly useful, but it can also create a lot of noise very quickly. Experienced buyers are pretty good at knowing when something was built around what the marketer wants instead of what they actually need. In an industry like ours, where relationships matter and sales cycles can be long, relevance usually wins over volume. I’d rather reach fewer people with something useful than create a lot of activity that nobody really values.
CTI has grown through acquisition, including bringing Vistacom into the fold. What's the hardest part of aligning marketing and brand identity when integrating a new team into a legacy business?
One of the harder parts is deciding what should become consistent and what should retain some of its own identity. When you bring companies together, you’re also bringing together relationships, reputation, expertise, and culture. Those things are often a big part of what made the organization successful in the first place. You want the combined organization to feel connected without losing the things customers and employees already value.
Pro AV and mission-critical infrastructure aren't “exciting” categories the way AI or fintech are. How do you build a compelling market narrative in a category built on reliability, not novelty?
I actually think we sometimes make the category sound less interesting than it is because we spend too much time talking about the technology itself. The interesting part is what happens because it works. A team can make a decision faster. A hospital can communicate. A control room can respond. Thousands of employees can collaborate without ever thinking about the technology underneath it. The technology obviously matters, but most customers care a lot more about what it allows them to do than the box sitting in the room.
You've gone by “Chief Happiness Officer” on LinkedIn, half-joking. Is there a real philosophy behind that, or was it just a fun title?
It started as a joke, but there was definitely some strategy behind it too. LinkedIn is full of people with very similar titles saying very similar things. I used “Chief Happiness Officer” as a way to separate myself a little and broaden what I talked about. It gave me room to tell more stories, talk about recruiting, culture, and the parts of leadership that don’t always fit neatly into a regular title.
Give us one prediction about Pro AV or mission-critical marketing that you're confident will be true in two years — one most people in the industry would currently disagree with.
Right now, almost everyone in technology is trying to build AI into the story. I think that changes pretty quickly. In a couple of years, customers are probably just going to assume intelligence and automation are built into the technology they’re buying. Simply saying something has AI in it won’t mean much. The question will become whether you can actually use it to make something simpler, more reliable, or more useful for the customer. That’s the part that will matter.
