How does a marketing leader help transform an engineering-focused company into a product and marketing-driven firm to accelerate growth? That was the quest Microsoft veteran Jay Kenny signed up for when he took the roll leading the Marketing organization as VP of Marketing at Alarm.com. His formula included hot dogs, margaritas and metrics. Here are the highlights of my recent conversation with Kenny, where he elaborated on the elements of his strategy to grow the company.
JOHN ELLETT: As a new VP of Marketing coming in as a change agent for your company, what was your mandate? What mission were you asked to accomplish?
JAY KENNY: The simple mission was to accelerate the growth of the company. One of the great things about Alarm.com is it has a phenomenal product. The technology is great and we had a channel in place that was driving business for Alarm.com. But I think the goal of marketing is to help shape and drive the demand line, to really increase awareness for the service. So we focused on how to make the business grow faster than it otherwise would.
JOHN ELLETT: What lessons did you learn while working at Microsoft that you are applying in your new role at Alarm.com?
JAY KENNY: Microsoft really is a technology company. Obviously it's matured and grown up and has a lot of facets, but it really is culturally built around engineering. How can you be an effective marketing leader in a technology organization? That's something that I think I've learned.
JOHN ELLETT: Marketers and engineers can sometimes be oil and water. What have you done that's helped you build the bridge between marketing and engineering?
JAY KENNY: I think there are a couple of things. For one, even though my background is in marketing, I have a passion for technology. So I think having that shared passion really helps build credibility. And it's finding a common language, and the common language has been metrics. Being able to prove the effectiveness of the different things we do is pretty critical. You build trust over time and then you have the flexibility to take more risk and do more interesting things. It really comes down to building good relationships through the common passion for your product. And then making sure that you have results to back up what you're trying to do.
JOHN ELLETT: Looking back on your arrival at Alarm.com, what's the most effective thing you did on Day One?
JAY KENNY: I'd say it was listening. We have a unique culture and it was coming in and trying to understand that culture. I certainly came in with some ideas but the thing I think that really helped the most was to come in and listen, get to know the culture, the company and the technology before performing any specific actions.
JOHN ELLETT: Were there specific things that you did in the first month to help build relationships with your C-suite peers?
JAY KENNY: Our company was relatively small when I joined so there was an opportunity to get to know a lot of people. I sat down and met with people face-to-face to understand their experience, what they'd done with the company, where they were personally invested, what they were passionate about and what they contributed.
As I looked to make changes I wanted to understand where I needed to invest the time to build relationships further. If somebody had something that they were very passionate about, I didn't want to go in and rip that out right away. You work with them to change it to the way it needs to be changed and form a shared vision of what it could be going forward.
JOHN ELLETT: Any margaritas involved in the relationship building?
JAY KENNY: Yeah there actually were a few margaritas now that you mention it. I've learned that if you can sit down and have a meal with your peers and business associates you can get to a better place. I started right before Halloween, so one of my first introductions to the company was a massive Halloween party and I think that involved some margaritas. We also have something at the company called the Roll Off, where every month or so we get these hot dog rollers that you see at 7-11 and we make hundreds and hundreds of hot dogs for the company. So margaritas and hot dogs went a long way to helping build relationships.
JOHN ELLETT: There you go. When you first got started, how explicit were your marching orders from your CEO or did they evolve over time?
JAY KENNY: They evolved. I think the marching orders were we needed to build some marketing expertise within the company, so it was a very, very broad marching order. The real effort was to go out and define what the strategic elements were, what success looked like and what we expected to accomplish. The real transformation was transforming what had been a pure engineering company into a company that was a product and marketing company. So it was an intellectual shift as well as a strategic shift about where we were investing.
JOHN ELLETT: You walked into a relatively ambiguous role that can be intimidating for a lot of people. How did you deal with the ambiguity and then help turn that to your advantage?
JAY KENNY: Personally, I like those types of environments. Prior to Microsoft I spent a lot of time in the startup world. And even within Microsoft, I was attracted to more ambiguous kinds of tough problems. So personally speaking, I'm oriented that way and the ambiguity presents a lot of opportunities to define something. For me it was coming in and understanding the opportunities in the business, the opportunities in the industry and the things coming up that were driving change.
Our business is founded on our distribution channel. So one of the foundational strategies was to go out and drive deeper and deeper engagement and activation within our partners and our distribution centers. That meant tactically making an online resource where people can come and get educated about our product and selling tools and all those things. It's really investing in the channel.
Second, we had a product that had the ability to interact with your home in a whole new way and there was a lot of untapped interest in that market. So we went out and invested a lot in technology and then in a lead handling platform that allowed us to tap into that customer interest and then direct potential customers to our channel partners.
Third, with that changing market, our space had grown quickly. Alarm.com has been around since 2000 and it really has been the only player in this interactive services category up until a few years ago. With market changes like the explosion of smartphones, the ability to interact remotely and the affordability that's driven through the cloud, these services have really taken off. So now we see new interest from big cable companies and telecom companies trying to get into the space. They recognize the business opportunity. We saw that competition coming and that's where the investment in our brand really mattered. So our core strategy is really driven out of what we need to do for our business, what's going on in our customer base, and what's going on in the competitive set.