Kate Mahon is Director of Customer Lifecycle Marketing at Cisco, where she leads customer marketing after Cisco's acquisition of Splunk. She spent close to seven years at Splunk, growing from customer PR lead to director of global customer marketing, and before going in-house she built her career at agencies like Edelman and Hill & Knowlton across the Middle East and Asia Pacific.
Description:
In this episode, Kate and Sunny talk about what it really means to understand the business you're operating in and how that changes the way you do customer marketing. Kate shares lessons from starting her career during the Great Recession in London, localizing campaigns across 10 markets in the Middle East for HP, and eventually going in-house at Splunk where she learned how to communicate the full lifecycle value of customer marketing to the CMO. She breaks down why knowing where your company's capital comes from (public, PE, venture, family-owned) changes how you set strategy, allocate resources, and tell the story of your impact. They also get into the current state of AI in marketing, why starting with the business problem matters more than the tool, and the advice that has guided her career since college: figure out where you want to be on a bad day.
Topics covered:
→ Starting a career in PR during the Great Recession in London
→ What selling ham and pitching journalists teaches you about sales and knowing your audience
→ Why working internationally forces you to seek to understand before imposing your own playbook
→ Going in-house at Splunk after nearly a decade in agencies
→ How customer marketing impacts the entire lifecycle, from awareness to expansion, and how to communicate that value
→ Why understanding your company's capital structure changes how you operate
→ AI as a tool, not a strategy, and why starting with the business problem matters
→ The career advice that stuck: know where you want to be on a bad day
Chapters:
00:00 Know Your Capital Source
00:29 Meet Kate Mahon
01:15 First Job in London PR
03:49 Early Career Lessons and Ham Pitches
07:48 Where to Be on a Bad Day
09:37 Going Global and Going In House
13:34 Splunk Promotions and Proving Value
17:15 MBA Insight Capital Pressures
20:17 AI Tools and Peerbound Favorites