From advising marketers to spend time with Sales, to setting his own goals for stress management, Patrick J. Moorhead offers a sagacious insight into life as CMO at Pricefx.
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Please describe your job: What do you do?
Patrick J. Moorhead: I oversee global brand marketing for Pricefx – a leading cloud SaaS solution for pricing optimization and management for enterprise B2B. Brand marketing is inclusive of advertising, demand generation, public relations, event marketing, website and content marketing, social media, and anything and everything else that relates to brand awareness and market and revenue growth globally.
Whereabouts do you sit within the organization? Who do you report to?
Patrick J. Moorhead: I am an officer of the company, sitting in the executive leadership team and reporting to the global CEO.
What kind of skills do you need to be effective in your role?
Patrick J. Moorhead: I can name a few. Strong written and verbal communication is critical to my role. I also need to be agile and flexible to adapt to fast-changing needs and business situations. I also have a steady grounding in business fundamentals and the B2B business world in particular.
Much of my role is about digesting lots of information and making strategic decisions that align to both the business and brand strategy. Overall, I need the ability to articulate vision, build consensus, and maintain focus on that vision. With all that said, being relatively ego-less is a huge advantage when taking on this role.
Tell us about a typical working day…
Patrick J. Moorhead: With many stakeholders in Central Europe, my mornings are usually swamped with video calls as the overlap of working hours between them and me is from 8am to 12pm my time. Afternoons are usually for domestic meetings, and working through inbox, reading and writing. I try to work out of the office at least one or two afternoons a week to keep myself fresh and focused, and take advantage of our flexible workplace policy.
While each day is exciting and different, we always try to ground ourselves and come back to our values. We throw around f-words constantly over here (I love that our work days are filled with a good sense of humor and our culture strongly reflects this mindset). Pricefx lives by f-words – we’re a fast, flexible and friendly cloud solution by design. Ask our customers and the people we work with – these f-words are in our core and our customer and company growth proves pricing and the cloud is the future of the pricing industry.
What do you love about your job? What sucks?
Patrick J. Moorhead: I love being able to directly contribute to the growth of the business, and being able to define and shape the brand voice that the world sees about our team and our work. It’s very satisfying to do all the behind the scenes work on a campaign or an event, and then release it and watch it come to life.
The hardest part of the job is making decisions – I typically get left making tough ones because our talented team is really good at what they do – some days it can feel like all I do is deal with the problems, which isn’t true, but keeping all the pieces and parts moving in the right direction can be exhausting sometimes.
What kind of goals do you have? What are the most useful metrics and KPIs for measuring success?
Patrick J. Moorhead: I get measured on some quantitative goals – leads generated, attendees at events, website traffic, ad campaign response rates, and some binary qualitative goals like “launch the campaign by xyz date.” My evaluation is largely based around answering the question: “Did it work the way we wanted it to?” Personally I set goals around managing my time and stress levels between the job, family and personal development.
What are your favourite tools to help you to get the job done?
Patrick J. Moorhead: I’m a big fan of team chat tools – we use MSFT teams. I think I need a real time tool of some kind always to manage a team, especially with a team on multiple coasts and time zones.
How did you end up at Pricefx, and where might you go from here?
Patrick J. Moorhead: Pricefx and I found each other at a really great time for both of us, when I was looking for broader horizons from my previous leadership role, and they were looking for someone to really accelerate global marketing. In some ways it’s the natural culmination of my diverse career across agency and technology marketing, sales and advertising where I get to put all of my various experiences into practice in this one job.
I don’t know where I’ll go from here, right now I’m focused on building a world-class software company brand, and getting Pricefx set as the global default for pricing software.
What advice would you give a marketer starting out in 2019?
Patrick J. Moorhead: Learn the fundamentals of marketing, and find work that lets you get experience in the fundamentals. Don’t specialize in “social” – become a generalist marketer. Spend time in sales – even if you’re no good at it – being able to see the world through the eyes of sales is the key to becoming a great marketing person. Say yes to any assignment in marketing, even if it doesn’t seem interesting or glamorous – all work in marketing teaches valuable skills that will become useful later in your career.
The Convergence of Marketing and Sales
