After 15+ years in payments, fintech, and SaaS, what do you understand about growth today that you didn’t when you started, and how does that shape the CMO you’re at Stax?
Earlier in my career, I thought about growth more linearly: marketing creates demand, sales converts that demand, and then you move on to the next opportunity. What I’ve learned is that sustainable growth is much more of a loop. The experience after someone becomes a customer is just as important to marketing as everything we do before the sale.
That has shaped how I approach my role at Stax. I want marketing to understand not just what brought a customer to us, but what happens next: How are they using our products? Where are they finding value? What are they asking for? Where are there opportunities to deepen that relationship? Those insights should feed back into our messaging, product priorities, customer experience and how we find the next customer with similar needs. Growth isn't just about generating more leads. It's about understanding the entire customer journey and using those insights to make every part of the business smarter.
Payments may be invisible to the customer, but they can make or break the experience. Where are businesses still getting it wrong?
Consumers have been trained by experiences like Uber and Starbucks to expect payments to be almost invisible. The payment isn't a separate event; it's simply part of the experience. That expectation increasingly carries over into every interaction, whether someone is shopping online, in-store or doing business with a service provider.
Where businesses still get it wrong is treating payments as a back-office utility instead of part of the customer experience. Merchants need optionality, but that doesn't mean adding complexity. They need to be able to accept the payment methods their customers want, across the channels where they want to engage, without creating unnecessary friction. The best payment experience is often the one the customer barely notices. Getting there requires businesses to think about payments as part of the broader experience they are designing rather than something that happens at the very end of it.
Stax brings payments, billing, processing, and surcharging together. Where do you see the biggest unmet customer need and how can Stax own that space?
The biggest unmet need is making a very complex industry feel simple for the customer.
Businesses don't necessarily want to become experts in processing, billing, interchange or surcharging. They want to understand what technology is right for their business, how it can support their growth and who they can turn to when their needs change. That's why optionality and partnership matter so much.
The opportunity for Stax is to combine the breadth of our technology with the people and expertise behind it. As we bring more of the payment experience together as an end-to-end processor, we can create a more connected experience while still meeting customers where they are. Different verticals and different businesses have very different requirements. Winning isn't about forcing all of them into the same model but about giving them the right combination of technology, flexibility and expertise to grow along with the support to succeed.
You’ve built your career around making marketing accountable to revenue. What signals carry the most weight when you decide whether a marketing strategy is actually working?
Revenue matters, but I look at performance across the full funnel and customer journey. Are we reaching the right audiences, creating qualified opportunities, and converting those opportunities into revenue? Then, what happens after acquisition? Are customers adopting our products and capabilities, are we solving the needs that brought them to us, and are they staying, expanding their relationship with us and seeing better business outcomes as a result?
I also pay close attention to what we’re learning about the buyer. How are decision-makers across our channels evaluating potential providers? What messages and capabilities resonate, and what ultimately influences their choice? That’s where alignment with sales is critical. Funnel performance tells us part of the story, but the conversations sales is having, and what we learn from both wins and losses, give us important context behind the numbers.
For me, the strongest signal is when those insights connect: market need, buyer engagement, pipeline and revenue performance, and ultimately customer adoption and growth.
In payments, winning a customer is only the beginning. How should marketing think about retention, expansion, and lifetime value differently from traditional acquisition-led models?
The customer journey doesn’t just end at conversion; it’s a continuous loop.
Historically, marketing had a tremendous amount of information about someone until they became a customer, and then much of that visibility shifted elsewhere in the organization, but I think that has to change. Post-sale insights should inform pre-sale marketing just as much as acquisition data does. Understanding how customers engage with the product, what additional capabilities they adopt, where they need support and what ultimately makes them successful can tell us an enormous amount about who our best future customers are.
It also makes marketing more valuable to existing customers. If we understand where a customer is in their journey, we can deliver education, content and solutions that are actually relevant instead of treating every interaction as an opportunity to sell them something. Retention and expansion are ultimately about continuing to demonstrate value. Marketing has a meaningful role in doing that throughout the relationship.
What’s one thing you want to prove at Stax that could change how the payments industry thinks about marketing?
I want to prove that in an industry as commoditized as payments, you don't have to win by being the loudest company or by constantly positioning yourself against competitors. You can win by understanding your customers better and showcasing the problems you're solving for them.
Payments companies spend a lot of time talking about technology, pricing and features. Those things matter, but customers ultimately want to know if the companies understand their business and how the companies can help them grow.
That's where I think marketing can have a much bigger impact. It shouldn't stop at generating demand. Marketing can connect the voice of the customer across product, sales and customer experience; turn those insights into better stories and experiences; and help the company build relationships that last beyond the initial sale. If we can demonstrate that a customer-first, storytelling-led approach drives measurable growth for Stax and our customers, I think that's a much more interesting model for payments marketing.
