The Front Lines
SubscribeContent Studio
Keri McGhee.
Chief Marketing Officer · Attentive
Guest
Keri McGhee
Chief Marketing Officer
Company:
Attentive
Location:
Seattle, Washington, United States
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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.

Seven takeaways from this conversation.

Actionable for Marketing Unicorns marketers

  1. Build the customer marketing function before you think you need it — and tie it to a number.
    When Keri stepped into the CMO role, Attentive had no customer marketing team. Lifecycle comms existed, but only for incident alerts and basic promotions — no expansion motion, no advisory boards, no voice-of-customer loops. Her first move was building that function and attaching it directly to a GRR number. The person she put in charge came from the internal growth team, knew the customers deeply, and has since been promoted to VP overseeing acquisition pipeline, web, and customer marketing. For any company moving from single-product to multi-product, the existing customer base is often the fastest expansion lever — but only if someone owns it with a revenue mandate, not a comms mandate.
  2. Operationalizing customer centricity requires accountability structures, not culture statements.
    Attentive uses Gong as the baseline, but their engineering team built custom AI products on top of it — giving Keri the ability to surface win/loss trends, call patterns, and competitive signals in roughly two seconds. But the harder part, as she put it, is making sure people actually use it: product marketers listening to beta calls, field marketers tracking what objections are surfacing. Her approach is to hire for customer obsession, model it visibly, and then make it a performance expectation — not an aspiration. If you don't hold people accountable for the minutes spent listening to customers, they'll default to servicing internal stakeholders.
  3. Don't soft-launch a multi-product narrative.
    In 2025, Attentive took a measured approach to rolling out their email story. Keri's candid post-mortem: she wishes they'd gone "full volume up, blasters on" much earlier. The "best-kept secret" mentality — waiting for product maturity before making noise — let competitors fill the awareness gap. In markets this crowded, you cannot differentiate on features for long. Get the story out, build credibility in parallel, and don't let perfect be the enemy of pipeline.
  4. Rebrand triggers should be structural, not cosmetic.
    Keri didn't pursue a rebrand because the brand felt stale. The signal was specific: she was sitting in enterprise annual planning reviews with senior executives — about 20 C-suite customers she personally nurtures — and the whimsical, illustrative brand wasn't landing with CFOs, CTOs, and CMOs who had entered the buying process. The existing brand had been built for the day-to-day practitioner who loved Attentive for its people and service. The rebrand — anchored around "marketing made personal" and a more sophisticated, data-forward visual identity — is designed to speak to that expanded buyer group without alienating the practitioners who are already advocates. The diagnosis: you need a rebrand when your positioning can't hold the room with a new buyer profile, not when you're bored with the look.
  5. Community only works as a genuine value exchange — and you have to live where they live.
    Attentive built three distinct communities for three buyer profiles: the Shopify/D2C founder-led brand, the day-to-day CRM account owner at a mid-market or enterprise brand, and the C-suite executive. The newest — the Attentive Commerce Council — targets the D2C/Shopify segment. It runs on WhatsApp because that's where those founders actually are. The exchange is explicit: members post on social, drive content collaborations, and generate thought leadership for Attentive; in return, Attentive promotes their brands, facilitates PR and podcast placements, connects them to investors, and provides speaker coaching. There is a full-time employee owning it. The success metric isn't engagement — it's when those members start proactively referring customers without being asked.
  6. AI adoption needs teeth, not just tooling.
    Attentive's marketing team has a stated commitment: 100% of the 60-person org will be actively using AI tools — NotebookLM, Claude, ChatGPT, and custom-built internal products — by end of year. It's in performance reviews. They run a cross-level internal council that does monthly syncs and runs a constant presence in Slack channels. Standout use cases get publicly recognized — one example Keri highlighted: a team member mined their entire case study library using AI to surface new competitive claims and build a model others could access. On headcount: Keri has reduced the team meaningfully over time and her default answer to "I need more people" is now "what could we build on the agent side instead?" The mental model she's pushing: stop being an operator, become an architect.
  7. The first marketing hire should be a generalist, not a specialist.
    Keri's direct advice to founders: resist the pull toward hiring a product marketer as your first marketing leader. The instinct is understandable — positioning feels like the urgent problem — but what you actually need is someone who can cover brand and product, hold their own in strategic debates with you, and build from scratch without a playbook. Her three non-negotiables: critical thinker, curious, self-starter. She's seen strong generalists come up through agency environments and early full-scope marketing roles — people who haven't over-indexed on one function. Those traits outperform narrow functional depth at the stage where you're still figuring out what marketing even means for your business.

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