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How Attentive’s CMO Rebuilt Marketing for Multi-Product Growth — and What She’d Do Differently

Most B2B companies spend years trying to manufacture customer love. Attentive started with it.

Brands like Crate & Barrel, Carter’s, and Dick’s Sporting Goods weren’t just running SMS campaigns through the platform — they were trusting it with their biggest revenue days. Black Friday. Cyber Monday. The moments where a technical failure translates directly to millions in lost sales.

“When you talked to the brands that use us… they love Attentive because they treat them and their teams as an extension of their team,” said Keri McGhee, CMO at Attentive, in a recent episode of Unicorn Marketers.

That trust was real. The question Keri had to answer when she stepped into the CMO role was how to build a growth engine on top of it — without destroying what made it worth protecting.

The Function Nobody Owned

When Keri joined Attentive in 2022, the marketing org had a clear center of gravity: serve the field. Brand was the priority. Outbound was the motion. Performance marketing was just getting off the ground.

“Marketing really at that time was in service of making sure the field had what they needed from an enablement perspective more than a true growth engine.”

That model works cleanly for a single-product, sales-led company. It breaks down the moment you need existing customers to expand into new products — because nobody owns that motion.

Her first move as CMO wasn’t a brand campaign or a new channel strategy. It was building a customer marketing function from scratch and attaching it directly to a GRR number. The distinction matters: a comms mandate produces newsletters and incident alerts; a revenue mandate produces expansion pipeline.

The person she put in charge was already inside the company — seven years in, deeply embedded in the customer base, and ready for more scope. Today that person is VP overseeing acquisition pipeline, web development, and customer marketing. The lesson isn’t just to build the function. It’s that the function needs a number, an owner, and real organizational weight — or it stays a support role indefinitely.

Convincing Marketers to Let Go

When Keri moved into the CMO seat, Attentive had just launched email publicly and was simultaneously bringing three AI products to market. The timing was early 2023 — before most B2B companies had anything credible to show in AI.

The core sales challenge wasn’t feature parity. It was psychology.

“Trying to convince marketers that it was time to take their hands off the wheel and let the technology help them — it was a challenge and it still is to this day.”

Attentive’s service-led brand became an unexpected asset here. Customers who already trusted the team implicitly — who’d watched Attentive show up on their highest-stakes days — were more willing to extend that trust to new technology. The relationship was the distribution channel.

The Soft Launch That Wasn’t Worth It

For much of 2025, Attentive took a measured approach to marketing their expanded product portfolio. The instinct was reasonable: let the product mature, build internal confidence, then go to market with a story that holds up under scrutiny.

Keri’s post-mortem is direct.

“I wish we would have just gone full volume up, blasters on and kind of take the risks on the product and go bigger for awareness earlier.”

The assumption behind a cautious multi-product launch is that you can control the timing of market education. You can’t. The Shopify ecosystem — a critical segment for Attentive — kept moving, and a measured rollout meant ceding awareness to competitors while Attentive waited. “We left a really important group behind,” she said. The back half of the year was spent making up ground that didn’t need to be lost.

The C-Suite Signal That Forced a Rebrand

Attentive’s original brand was purpose-built for its earliest and most loyal buyer: the day-to-day CRM practitioner. The visual identity was illustrative and whimsical — warm, approachable, distinctly not-enterprise.

Then the deal dynamics shifted. Enterprise contracts started involving new stakeholders. “It’s no longer the person that uses us every day and trusts us. It’s their manager and their CFO, their CTO and their CMO.”

Keri personally nurtures relationships with around 20 C-suite customers. The signal came from those rooms — not a vague sense that the brand felt dated, but a specific observation that the story wasn’t landing with the executives now controlling budget. “We were telling a story and it was fun, but we kind of didn’t land the message on — it’s about the people, it’s about the team that you get. It’s about the results we deliver.”

The rebrand — anchored around the positioning “marketing made personal” — is designed to hold credibility in a room that includes a CFO, without alienating the practitioners who remain the product’s most vocal advocates. “We’re not doing this huge left turn, but we’re leaning into what makes us different.”

Three Communities, Not One

Attentive’s community strategy for 2026 is built around a simple observation: the Shopify founder, the enterprise CRM manager, and the C-suite executive have nothing in common in terms of how they want to engage with a vendor.

So Attentive built three distinct communities for three distinct buyer profiles. The newest — the Attentive Commerce Council — targets the D2C and Shopify segment specifically. It runs on WhatsApp, because that’s where those founders actually communicate. The value exchange is made explicit from the start: members create content, participate in thought leadership, and generate referrals; in return, Attentive provides PR placement, podcast placement, investor introductions, and speaker coaching.

There is a full-time employee whose sole job is owning it.

“It can’t be like an afterthought of ‘here’s your Slack community, go for it.’ It’s way beyond that as far as the value we’re adding.”

The C-suite tier operates on entirely different terms — a retreat once a year, select events — because demanding monthly participation from that group is how you lose them entirely.

AI Adoption as a Performance Standard

Attentive’s 60-person marketing team has a stated commitment: 100% adoption of AI tools — NotebookLM, Claude, ChatGPT, and custom internal products their engineering team built — by end of year. It’s embedded in performance reviews. Standout use cases get recognized publicly. And when someone makes a headcount request, the default response is now a question: what could be built on the agent side first?

“You have to hire for it and then you have to lead and put it in practice — you have to hold people accountable.”

The mindset shift Keri is pushing — stop being an operator, become an architect — applies equally to her team and to the customers Attentive serves. In both cases, the transition from executing work to designing the systems that do it is where the real leverage lives.