Meagen Eisenberg, CMO of TripActions, on Digging In and Problem Solving

Ask Meagen Eisenberg – CMO of TripActions and world-class marketer – where she learned the ins and outs of business, and her answer might surprise you. “As kids, my sisters and I were exposed to business through our grandparents’ retail store, farms, and funeral home. I look back on that time fondly,” she says.Between summers spent with relatives in Iowa, learning to fly Cessnas and going to work with her manufacturing-exec Dad, Meagen was raised to be independent and adventurous. Perhaps that’s what sparked her early interest in a career that allowed her to pursue big opportunities and build great things.In addition to recently helping her Dad bring back to life a 1970 Ford F250 as a pandemic project, Meagen has built great teams and success at numerous global enterprise and SaaS tech companies. Now 20+ years into her career, she’s held executive marketing positions at MongoDB, DocuSign, IBM, and HP, among others. And it all started at Cisco, where her degree in management information science and computer science landed her a job as an engineer.

Understanding what sales needs to do in order to sell is key to your success as a B2B marketer.

Interestingly, that experience paved the way for her to streamline key processes that underpin every successful marketing organization. As a programmer, she spent time with her target audience to understand how to better address their needs. And she also earned the certification they held so she could truly understand the problems they were trying to solve.“I’ve carried that experience with me throughout my career. I look at a situation and solve problems and bottlenecks to make things more efficient. It’s the same approach for creating a predictable, scalable system to build pipeline as a marketer.”Meagen pivoted into marketing while earning her MBA at Yale School of Management. In her first marketing job – at a company that had been acquired by IBM – she learned the importance of building a partnership with sales. “Understanding what sales needs to do in order to sell is key to your success as a B2B marketer,” she says.In her next marketing role – at TRIRIGA – she started digging into the technologies available to marketers and getting excited about the potential. “I picked up new technology at each company I joined. I now use 46 pieces of tech for marketing, and that gives me a competitive edge as a demand gen marketer.”Some of Meagen’s other keys to success:

• Avoiding techno sprawl. By ensuring a champion for all technologies she adopts, regularly reviewing ROI, and continually re-evaluating the tech stack, Meagen keeps her technology in check.
• Quickly scaling startups. Meagen calls upon a tried-and-true formula of bringing in the right leaders and people for all the marketing domains, calling upon the right technologies, and putting in place the right process to enable efficiency.
• Picking good companies. When selecting where to make her mark next, Meagen looks for a large market ready for disruption, a strong product-market fit, a hard-working team with grit, and the opportunity to add value while having fun.