A coffee with… Deb Smith, VP marketing, Jitterbit

UK-based New Yorker Deb Smith is the vice president of marketing at automation specialist Jitterbit. With a career spanning 40 years, she has led business transformation and growth in some of the world’s biggest enterprise SaaS companies – and three years ago, beat breast cancer.

One of Smith’s career constants is as a European marketing hire for US head quartered tech companies, including MuleSoft, Tibco and Fujitsu.

What’s your zone of genius?

Knowing how to scale tech and enterprise companies. If you boil it down, that’s the ultimate purpose of marketing. It starts with a focus on the company’s leadership’s plans. As a marketer, you must know where your north star is. Mapping priorities is key to success, and understanding what people need to achieve in the business, where and when.

It helps if you are someone who really gets people. It’s easy when you’re in an enterprise company to over index the tech. Clearly that’s mission critical – but so are your people.

What are the biggest mistakes companies make with digital marketing?

An overreliance on digital marketing to nurture and expand business relationships. This was accelerated during the pandemic. But now that’s thankfully behind us, we need to reassess the role of digital in creating new business relationships.

People buy from people even when it’s technology they are buying. As a marketer who’s seen seismic changes in the way companies go-to-market and the pendulum swing this way and that way, I believe what’s needed now is reinvestment in the customer journey and customer relationship. That includes creating opportunities to meet your customer or your prospect face-to-face.

In-person interaction is powerful, and it’s core to what makes us human. It informs decisions. It creates trust and loyalty. I worry that early and mid-career marketers might not know marketing’s potential to create real human connections and how that can drive business.

What’s the most challenging aspect of being a European VP of marketing for big, US-based tech firms?

A culture disconnect. As a native New Yorker (albeit one who’s adopted London for the last thirty years), I know how easy it is to forget when you’re on that side of the Atlantic that Europe is not ‘one’ market. There are 44 countries in Europe, and each of them have different requirements to go-to-market. Different languages. Different cultures. Different industries and ways of doing business.

Many US-based tech firms and enterprises need specific support services for those regions, such as PR, because media channels are unique to each different region. They might also need to leverage local company voices because media in many regions don’t exactly warm to the big-titled US executive who’s parachuting in with little knowledge of the local lie of the land.

Do you think that the advent of hybrid working is a help or a hindrance to women’s tech careers?

One of the benefits of hybrid that’s not discussed enough is that it creates a more level playing field. Childcare and caring responsibilities are more equally shared, partly because hybrid has allowed male colleagues to be at home more.

We all have a little Zoom window into each other’s homes these days – ten years ago, even five, that really wasn’t the case. In this way, hybrid working has normalised that there is life outside of work and that it equally applies to both men and women. Now a man will say, “Right, I’ve got to go and pick up the kids.” It’s normalised – and that’s made balancing work and life more acceptable for their female colleagues too.

What achievement are you most proud of?

Probably moving across the world to live and work in a different country and making a success of it. Raising a family here too and seeing my kids grow up to be successful and happy. Being as happy as you can, that is fundamental for me.

If you had to choose a side, Team Musk or Team Bezos?

Team Musk – his vision of a world not one hundred percent powered by fossil fuels has without doubt turbo-charged the sustainability trend and demand for greener products.

Besides caffeine, how do you recharge your batteries during the working day?

Going to the gym or a walk with my dog Monty. Feel those endorphins!

Read TI’s coffee with Lenovo’s Graham Thomas to find out about the challenges of working remotely and the senior technologist’s love for 3D printers!