The customer's problem came before our campaign category

I first encountered a market as a collection of orders that did not fit neatly into the categories used to describe it. After completing my business degree at Corlenden College in May 1992, I joined fictional Mardenvale Supply in Chicago as a research analyst. The distributor sold industrial maintenance products. I worked inside a nine-person marketing group without staff or spending authority. My early task was to classify purchase enquiries, and it made me notice how easily a useful internal category could conceal the customer's actual problem.

During that first appointment, I reviewed 720 historical enquiries and prepared twenty quarterly category summaries. Sixteen accompanied customer visits helped me understand the difference between the person placing an order and the person deciding whether a product belonged in the plant. Those were modest assignments. I did not set the company's strategy or own the sales they described. They gave me a habit that has remained useful: ask whose decision a piece of marketing is supposed to help before deciding what it should say.

In June 1997 I became segment marketing manager. Seven employees reported through two team leads, and my annual programme authority reached US$900,000 by May 2004. We reduced twelve overlapping campaign categories to seven buying situations, while preserving the underlying product information. Nine joint sessions with sales examined the change. I learned that simplifying a commercial story can create resistance for good reasons. Colleagues may use the old categories to organise stock, commissions or customer relationships. A better explanation does not automatically make those practical dependencies disappear.

I joined Selverton Freight in Milwaukee in June 2004 as head of proposition marketing. Moving from an industrial distributor to a brokerage changed what I needed to understand about the promise being made. Selverton arranged transportation through independent carriers; it did not operate the fleet. I could describe the arrangement and help select the customers we approached, but I could not speak as though marketing controlled the driver, equipment or every event during a shipment. Learning that boundary was more important than learning a new collection of promotional terms.

By May 2011, I led eleven employees through three direct reports with US$1.8 million annual authority. We developed six sector briefs, of which two were withheld from release while operating questions remained. Four went into use. This was my first sustained experience of a marketing decision that reduced what the sales organisation could immediately present. I had to explain what evidence would make the withheld briefs usable, rather than simply saying that they were insufficient. The experience made me value a specific route back into consideration after a refusal.

My next appointment, director of market development from June 2011, was a functional executive title rather than a board seat. I led sixteen employees through four reports and developed account-selection work with sales and operations. Three regional lists were brought into one reviewed account register, with forty-five accounts examined in the initial exercise. The register did not assign a permanent label of good or bad to a customer. It recorded the fit between a particular opportunity and the service proposition at that time. I wanted colleagues to be able to challenge the reason, not just accept a score.

As vice-president of commercial marketing from January 2016, I gained responsibility for comparing segment programmes and the materials used in larger buying discussions. Twenty-two employees and US$5.6 million annual authority were in scope by December 2019. Eight proposal packs became three audience-specific sets, and fourteen account discussions tested whether buyers could find the relevant material relevant to their own responsibilities. We retained a shared factual account. Different versions were intended to answer different questions, not to make incompatible promises to procurement and operations.

I became CMO in January 2020, reporting to chief executive Alden Norchester. The wider remit includes deciding where marketing effort belongs when attractive opportunities exceed the organisation's practical capacity to pursue them. In 2021, thirty-two of eighty-four tender invitations were declined before full submission work. I supported that choice while refusing to describe the prospective spend attached to those invitations as revenue saved or avoided. We could explain the decision without inventing the outcome of bids we never made.

The same discipline influenced a shipment-evidence review and a later exhibition allocation. COO Beatrice Calverden challenged the relevance of a delivery statistic; sales challenged my proposal to fund procurement materials from an event budget. Both disagreements improved the recommendation because they brought the cost of my preferred option into view. I lead by making those differences discussable early, with enough detail for another executive to disagree constructively. I am less interested in an elegant presentation that leaves the commercial dispute unresolved.

My current industrial-parts research remains unfinished. Fifteen of twenty-four planned interviews have taken place, and I have not recommended a launch. That open account belongs beside the completed decisions because it shows how I work before the result is known. A future executive role would need room for marketing to influence customer selection, not merely promote a choice already made elsewhere. In a board setting, I would bring questions about the relationship between ambition and the service proposition, while learning the wider responsibilities that executive presentation alone has not given me.