Attentive pioneered SMS marketing for enterprise retail brands — Crate & Barrel, Carter's, Dick's Sporting Goods — before evolving into a multi-channel platform spanning SMS, email, and AI-powered personalization. In this episode of Unicorn Marketers, we sat down with Keri McGhee, CMO at Attentive, to unpack how she transformed a brand-and-outbound-centric marketing org into a growth engine, created a customer marketing function tied directly to GRR, and navigated the company through a critical multi-product narrative shift — all while driving 100% AI adoption across a 60-person team.

Topics Discussed:

• How Attentive's marketing operated as field enablement — and what Keri changed when she became CMO

• Building a customer marketing function from zero and attaching it to a GRR number

• The first 90 days as CMO: launching email and three AI products simultaneously into a skeptical market

• How Attentive operationalizes customer centricity using Gong and custom AI tooling — beyond the talking point

• The rebrand trigger: when C-suite buyers entered the deal and the whimsical brand stopped landing

• Structuring three distinct communities for three distinct buyer profiles

• The Attentive Commerce Council: a value-exchange D2C community running on WhatsApp

• AI adoption as a performance review metric — and how Keri is handling headcount requests with an agent-first answer

• What the first marketing hire should actually look like for early-stage founders

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• 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.

• 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.

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Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io

The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co

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