Alexi Hatch likes marketing for the same reason a certain sort of person likes a difficult old house: the work is never finished, the wiring is suspicious, and every improvement reveals another room. She has called the discipline “completely annoying” and, in nearly the same breath, said she genuinely loves it. The contradiction sounds less like a complaint than a job description.
Now Chief Marketing Officer at Acoustic, Hatch oversees brand, communications, growth, demand, product marketing, and go-to-market strategy. It is a large collection of nouns attached to a simple concern: what does the customer want at this moment, and can the company respond before the moment vanishes?
Her answer begins with a clock. Customer intent, she argues, has a half-life. A person compares products, revisits a page, saves an item, or reads a guide. The signal appears. Then it begins to decay while systems collect it, package it, move it, sell it, score it, and hold a meeting about it. By the time the machinery produces certainty, the customer may have produced a receipt - possibly for a competitor.
“I don't necessarily think that we have a data problem. I think we have a timing problem.”Alexi Hatch
A designer walks into a funnel
Hatch did not set out with a tidy ambition to become a software CMO. Her first vocabulary was architecture and interior design. At Westminster College, and in the beginning of her working life, she learned to think about form, function, movement, and the behavior of people inside a designed space. She later described the pivot into marketing as a discovery of the same appealing mixture: art, science, and math.
The analogy is better than it first appears. Architecture asks where a person enters, what they see, where they hesitate, and whether the place helps them do what they came to do. Marketing asks much the same, though it has more dashboards and fewer attractive lamps. Hatch's career has been an extended translation between those worlds.
She began as a marketing coordinator at EDA in 2013 while also serving on the communications committee of SMPS Utah. Then came media planning at MRM, paid media at Clearlink, and campaign work at Workfront. Each role moved her closer to the measurable edge of the business: spend, response, attribution, pipeline. At Integrate she led demand marketing. At Quantum Metric she advanced from senior director of integrated marketing to vice president of global growth marketing. The titles grew, but so did the size of the systems she was expected to understand.
Marketing begins at EDA, alongside volunteer communications work for SMPS Utah.
Media, paid acquisition, and integrated campaign roles at MRM, Clearlink, and Workfront.
Demand at Integrate, then integrated and global growth leadership at Quantum Metric.
Joins Acoustic as Chief Marketing Officer.
This is not the familiar story of a creative person surrendering to spreadsheets. Hatch kept the design instinct and added instruments. Her official Acoustic biography calls her design-trained and data-driven, a pairing that explains her fondness for both experience and proof. A campaign can be elegant and still fail. A model can be exact and still arrive too late to matter. The useful work sits between them.
The useful impatience of 85 percent
Attribution is one of Hatch's favorite provocations. She says every problem is an attribution problem, then immediately complicates the idea. Marketing leaders have spent years being asked to prove the past: which touch, channel, or message caused the conversion? Imagine, she suggests, that the perfect multi-touch model finally existed. Could the company reproduce the journey it described? The consumer, annoyingly, has agency.
Her preferred bargain is to make a decision with 85 percent of the data today instead of waiting three weeks for the immaculate answer. This is not an invitation to guess. It is a demand that measurement earn its keep. Evidence should alter a choice while the choice remains available.
Quantum Metric provided a vivid test. In 2023 the company retired its North American sales development team and shifted inbound follow-up to account executives. Deal sizes increased, but the top of the funnel thinned. The website still held intent; the organization lacked a scalable way to engage it. The team brought in Piper, an AI sales development agent from Qualified. Qualified's case study later reported 101 times return on investment and an average deal size that nearly doubled.
Vendor case studies deserve the same clear eye as any marketing claim. The more revealing point is the operating decision. Hatch did not begin with “Where can we put AI?” She began with idle intent and a broken handoff. The technology had a job before it had a headline.
Her build-or-buy rule is pleasingly compact. If an agent creates a genuine differentiator, build it. If it multiplies something that already works, buy it. Speed, integration, maintenance, compliance, and a credible path to return all belong in the decision. A clever internal tool that nobody adopts is merely an expensive anecdote.
When the signal is still warm
The language of “more” has worn out its welcome in Hatch's recent thinking. More contacts. More enrichment. More content. More AI. She prefers liveness: how recently the database changed, whether customers return, what fresh first-party behavior they share, and how that behavior connects to retention and lifetime value.
The half-life problem
Conceptual, not to scale. Hatch's point is organizational: every transfer and delay makes a behavioral signal less actionable.
This is where her critique of personalization becomes sharp. Artificial intelligence has made personalized content cheap. A team can generate hundreds of subject lines, product descriptions, and messages with unnerving ease. But personalized content and a personalized experience are not synonyms. The experience requires the company to recognize meaningful behavior, connect data across systems, choose a relevant response, and deliver it in time.
“It is the personalized experience that is [the advantage].”Alexi Hatch
In her telling, the best brands are the ones whose customers never feel like strangers. That sentence carries the designer's sensitivity to how a place feels and the operator's suspicion of ornamental metrics. It also sets an awkwardly high bar. Many organizations can address you by name while demonstrating, one message later, that they have no idea who you are.
Hatch's recent phrase for the opposite condition is “signal debt”: the accumulation of borrowed, static intelligence that looks rich but says little about present desire. A job title collected last quarter is not the same as behavior observed today. Enrichment can create the appearance of knowledge without the responsibility of attention.
The people around her describe the same preference for substance over display. In one recommendation, a former colleague recalled a hand-picked, 14-person project spanning sales, presales, marketing, customer success, and executive coaching. Nobody had been assigned to lead it. Hatch, the colleague wrote, simply emerged as the leader, setting the altitude of the discussion and keeping the work moving. Another former colleague called her tactical, data-driven, and forward-looking, with a particularly sharp view of agentic workflows and their effect on customer acquisition costs. A mentee remembered something quieter: a kind and thoughtful leader at the start of her career.
Those accounts matter because growth marketing can make leadership sound like a branch of plumbing. Leads enter here. Pipeline exits there. Hatch's work depends on the pipes, but it also depends on getting product, sales, customer success, and marketing to recognize the same customer at the same time. Cross-functional work is often praised in theory and resisted by calendars. Her reputation suggests an operator willing to live inside that inconvenience.
Recognition followed. Workfront named her to its President's Club in 2021, and she received a B2B Game Changers award in 2019. In 2025, Qualified included her among 30 agentic marketers to watch. The awards trace the changing vocabulary of her field: campaigns, performance, agents. Her recurring subject underneath them is less fashionable and more durable - how a team turns attention into a decision.
A grounded move, then another build
The path to Acoustic also has a personal coordinate. Hatch moved to Nashville a few years before taking the role, explaining that she wanted to be closer to family and build a life that felt grounded and full. Her announcement of the CMO job was reflective rather than triumphal. She wrote about work that would challenge her, a team she wanted to join, and the opportunity to build something meaningful.
Build is the operative verb. Acoustic has more than two decades in marketing technology and serves 1,800-plus customers, according to the company. It sells the kind of customer-engagement machinery Hatch has spent years interrogating from the buyer's side. Now she is responsible for explaining its purpose while helping shape the organization around it.
Her latest public arguments extend beyond the next campaign. She expects AI agents to become buyers themselves, creating an audience that may evaluate brands differently from people. The prospect produces fascinating questions: How does a brand become legible to a machine? What counts as relevance when software conducts the comparison? Which parts of a customer relationship can be delegated, and which become more valuable precisely because they cannot?
There is no finished blueprint yet. Hatch seems comfortable with that. Her career has rewarded a taste for changing systems, provided the change can be measured and the person inside the system remains visible. Marketing, after all, is never boring. Neither is a structure whose occupants keep moving the walls.