Selling Ham and Other First Lessons
Most customer marketers can trace their instincts back to a job that had nothing to do with customer marketing. Kate's version of that story starts in London in the fall of 2008.
She'd graduated college in the Bay Area, applied for a student working visa within two months of finishing (the cutoff to still qualify), and moved to London with little more than a friend of a friend willing to vouch for her at Hill & Knowlton. She landed an internship on the Procter & Gamble account, working across the laundry detergent category. It was September 2008. The financial crisis was just getting started.
Three lessons came out of that year, and Kate says all three still hold true almost two decades later. First, she learned sales, because PR is selling a story every time you pick up the phone. Second, she learned the importance of a network, because when Hill & Knowlton put a hiring freeze on interns, it was a colleague's recommendation that got her to the next agency and onto the Microsoft account. Third, she learned client servicing, the discipline of understanding what someone else needs before they have to ask for it.
Sunny jumped in to point out that those are the same three lessons he'd give a new graduate in 2026, with AI reshaping everything around them. Kate agreed, and then added a fourth.
"One of my clients was a national grocery store chain. It was literally selling ham. Calling journalists. I'm not kidding, that's not a metaphor. I would call and ask, have you considered ham for your Christmas meal?"
She also called an editor at a prominent financial newspaper at 22, green and underprepared, and got told exactly what the editor thought of PR people. "Rightfully so, it was totally right to say it," Kate said. "But the lesson I learned was to know your audience and know your pitch and know who you're talking to."
She paused. "And I hope I never really have to sell ham again. That's a hard one."
Where Do You Want to Be on a Bad Day?
The best career advice Kate ever received came from a professor during her last term of college. He'd been a practicing attorney before becoming a teacher, and his advice was simple.
"You're always gonna have a bad day at work. The grass isn't greener. But figure out and pay attention to where you want to be on a bad day."
For him, the answer had been clear. On a bad day, he didn't want to be in a courtroom anymore. He wanted to be in a classroom. And so he made the switch.
Kate has carried that question through every chapter of her career. Not as a reason to leave, but as a check-in. A way to make sure the work still fits the person doing it.
"It's one of those kinds of check-in questions every few years. Where do I like to be and what am I doing? Even on the toughest days. And work isn't all of life."
Going Global, Then Going In-House
The first decade of Kate's career was agency work, and most of it was overseas. From London, she moved to the UAE, where HP was her client and the job was localizing campaigns across ten markets in the Middle East, Mediterranean, and Africa. Then to Hong Kong. Then back to the Bay Area, after almost nine years abroad.
Each move came back to two things: network and curiosity. Raising a hand. Saying yes to a market she didn't know yet.
But the most lasting lesson from that stretch wasn't tactical. It was a shift in perspective that Kate says shaped how she leads today.
"There was a real education there that America is not the center of the world. Once you're working overseas, you get that."
The takeaway, she said, is to seek to understand rather than impose.
"Just stopping and asking a question, understanding why things are done the way they're done. There's a lot you can get to more quickly when you're trying to understand rather than trying to impose your own doctrine."
When Kate came back to the Bay Area, it was a friend who had also been overseas that drew her to Splunk. "I noticed the way that she was talking about the company and talking about work. I hadn't kind of seen that in her before."
She'd spent years building strategies at agencies without always seeing them through. Splunk was where she wanted to go in-house, set a strategy, and actually watch it play out.
Finding a Leader Worth Following
At Splunk, Kate's career accelerated, and she credits a specific person for a lot of that growth: Jess Walker McFarland, who led customer advocacy and showcases at the time and who appeared on an earlier episode of the Peerbound Podcast.
"She's just the best," Kate said. "She's really smart. She's someone who is skilled at getting a seat at the table, communicating, managing up, managing across. She was someone I learned a ton from."
The advice here mirrors what Jess herself said on this podcast. If there's a leader you want to learn from, and they can support you, follow them. The role matters less than the person you're learning beside.
What Kate built under Jess, and then continued building on her own, was the ability to articulate the impact of customer marketing across the full lifecycle. Not as a single function, but as a thread that runs through every stage of how a company goes to market.
"When you're marketing to customers, with customers, you're really impacting the entirety of the lifecycle. You have a customer that you're getting media coverage for, so you're hitting awareness. You have customers talking to analysts. You have your product review program that's helping in that consideration phase. If you're having customers talk to a prospect, that's accelerating a deal. And then personalized content and campaigns that support adoption and expansion."
Every one of those stages has metrics attached to it. The skill, Kate said, is stitching them together into a single story that a CMO and a broader leadership team can actually act on.
"When you can stitch that together and tell that story, that's very powerful for the CMO and for the rest of the business."
Know Where the Capital Comes From
Kate went back to school for her MBA while at Splunk, and one class changed how she thinks about every company she's worked at since.
The class was private equity and venture capital. The lesson was deceptively simple: understand where the capital is coming from, because that tells you how to operate.
"Wherever you are in a company, know where that capital is coming from, because that comes with its own pressures. And as soon as you understand that, then you know how to operate, and communicate the value and set the right strategy and direct your team in the right way."
She broke it down. A public company is measured quarterly. Budgets set in Q1 might look different by Q3 because of pressure from the street. A private equity-backed company might not feel the quarterly shock, but it's working on a compressed timeline, focused on operating efficiencies. A venture-backed company needs you to know what funding cycle it's in. Are you at the start of a raise, with growth capital ahead? Or are you coming to the end, and the next round isn't certain?
Even a family-owned business has its own version of this. The pressure comes from different places, but it's still pressure, and knowing where it originates changes how you build your case, allocate your resources, and talk about what your team is doing.
Sunny tied it back to the current moment, where every company, regardless of its capital structure, is asking hard questions about where AI fits and what kind of business they're actually building. Kate agreed. In her view, the capital insight isn't just about budgets. It's about knowing which language to speak when you walk into a room with people two levels above you.
AI, Honestly
Sunny pointed out that they'd gone nearly thirty minutes without mentioning AI. Kate's response: "Check your bingo card."
Her take on AI is one of the most honest this podcast has heard. She started by describing an email exchange she'd had the week before with an economist she knows, someone who has lived through multiple cycles in the Bay Area and understands the macro view.
"What I love is that even an economist can say, I don't know. I think anyone who knows where it's going, sometimes I question."
She didn't try to resolve the uncertainty. Instead, she described how her team at Cisco actually uses AI today: identifying repetitive processes, turning call recordings into content more quickly, building out marketing assets for sales. The value comes from starting with the business problem, not from starting with the tool.
"If you are able to communicate the business outcome, what are you trying to do to impact something within the business, and AI has helped with that, great. But start with what's the problem you're trying to solve and how might you be able to do that more efficiently."
The challenge, she said, is that not everyone is starting with the right question. There's peer pressure to be an AI expert, to claim efficiency gains, to whitewash everything with AI. Kate's instinct is the opposite: show up with curiosity and openness, but don't over-invest in any one thing before you know what you're solving for.
"I think that's really what it is. Show up with a curiosity, openness, a willingness to learn, probably not over investing too much in one thing."
Peer Recommendations
Kate is reading Designing Your Life, a book that applies design thinking concepts to career and life planning. She loves the idea of prototyping and iterating on what comes next rather than making one big leap. "I'm a whole person. I don't just have a professional life. I have my health and relationships and family, a lot of things."
As for her favorite technology, Kate got Sunny with a setup. Her favorite app, she said, is the one on her phone that lets her pick it up and hear someone's voice (aka the phone app).
"Anyone in my life, I can hear their voice. It doesn't just write."
She's not being flippant. There's digital fatigue, she said, and she's being thoughtful right now about actually connecting with people. She described calling a friend on a whim while driving to the office a few weeks ago, just to catch up. "Think about an app on your phone where, if you're calling somebody you care about, have a relationship with, haven't talked to in a long time, that's probably the one app where you're walking away feeling good."
Hot Questions This Episode Answers
What are the most important early career lessons for customer marketers? Kate Mahon learned three lessons in her first year working in PR in London that still hold true: sales skills transfer directly (even pitching ham counts), your network will carry you through hiring freezes and career pivots, and understanding what a client needs before they ask is the foundation of client servicing. All three apply whether you're in an agency, a startup, or an enterprise.
How do you get promoted in customer marketing? Kate credits two things for her growth from customer PR lead to director at Splunk: finding a leader worth learning from (in her case, Jess Walker McFarland) and learning to articulate the impact of customer marketing across the full lifecycle. When you can connect customer stories to brand awareness, analyst influence, pipeline acceleration, and adoption and expansion, and attach metrics to each, the value becomes visible to leadership.
How does understanding your company's capital structure help your career? Kate's MBA professor taught her to understand where the capital comes from at any company she works for. Public companies face quarterly pressure. PE-backed companies work on compressed timelines focused on operating efficiency. VC-backed companies depend on funding cycles. Family-owned businesses have their own dynamics. Knowing which type you're in changes how you set strategy, allocate resources, and communicate value to leadership.
What's the most honest take on AI in marketing? Kate's position is to start with the business problem, not the tool. Her team at Cisco uses AI to turn call recordings into content and streamline repetitive processes, but she pushes back on using AI for the sake of using it. Her advice is to show up with curiosity and openness without over-investing before you know what you're solving for.
What career advice should every professional hear? Kate's college professor told her to figure out where she wants to be on a bad day. Not every day, just the bad ones. If the answer doesn't match where you are, that's worth paying attention to. She treats it as a periodic check-in question rather than a reason to make any single decision.
