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Building Marketing And Engineering Relationships With Hot Dogs: Insights From Alarm.com's Jay Kenny

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.

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