Halifax, Nova Scotia · The long view
Brian Hartlen began working with computers when the phrase “working with computers” carried the romance of a locked room and the inconvenience of punch cards. It was 1976. The machines were mainframes. The products handled basic accounting. Hartlen, newly inside Comshare in the United Kingdom, tried writing code because he thought building the thing might be his thing. Then he tried selling it. Neither quite fit.
Product marketing did. Here was the hinge between the machine and the market: understand what software does, understand why somebody might care, and translate one into the language of the other. Hartlen has stayed near that hinge for almost five decades. His route has crossed Comshare, Geac, Varicent, Dash Hudson, Verafin and a collection of companies he has advised. His current public profile points to Avantegy in Halifax. The logos changed, sometimes spectacularly. The work kept asking the same questions.
A career built in the translation department
Long tenure can calcify a person. Hartlen’s 28 years at Comshare did something more useful: it let him see a technology business from several chairs. Development taught him the product’s innards. Sales put him close to objections. Product management and marketing turned that mixed apprenticeship into a vocation. By the late 1990s he was a senior director, then vice president of product marketing, vice president of promotional marketing and, finally, senior vice president of marketing.
When Geac acquired Comshare, Hartlen continued into global marketing leadership. In 2003, he joined Michael Coveney, Dennis Ganster and Dave King in writing The Strategy Gap, a Wiley book about connecting corporate plans to operational execution with technology. The title has aged rather well. Software companies still live in the space between an elegant plan and the noisy facts of Tuesday afternoon.
That period also fixed his public reputation around performance management. He explained closed-loop business systems, spoke to finance leaders about sales compensation, and argued that data should travel through a company, not merely upward toward a decision maker. In 2009 and 2010, as Varicent’s vice president of marketing, he was presenting research on finance’s role in sales performance management. The topic sounds narrow until one remembers that commissions can be among a company’s largest variable expenses. Then it sounds like management.
“The how we do everything has changed, but the idea of marketing is: what’s the most efficient way we can get products to market?”Brian Hartlen, 2025
Three jobs, no costume changes
Hartlen’s theory of marketing is almost suspiciously free of decoration. First, create awareness among the people who could plausibly buy. He has no interest in being known by the entire planet. Fame outside the market is expensive applause. Second, generate interest when a buyer is ready to engage. Third, make the trip from interest to purchase easier by giving sales the evidence it needs: pricing, competitive context, customer stories and credible returns.
“Awareness, generate interest and improve sales effectiveness,” is how he compresses it. The verbs survived direct mail, websites, marketing automation, CRM and now generative AI. Each wave supplied new instruments. None supplied a new reason for the orchestra to exist.
His impatience begins when instruments are mistaken for outcomes. Ask a marketing and sales team how many leads arrived last year, he says, and the answers can be absurdly far apart. A call that ends with “I can’t talk right now” may technically be a conversation. It did not advance much. Hartlen prefers “quality conversations,” moments in which someone learns enough to move a sale forward. His cleaner north star is adds to pipeline: a salesperson has seen an opportunity and decided to pursue it.
The buyer arrives after doing the homework
The largest change Hartlen has watched is not a channel. It is a reversal of who knows what, and when. Earlier in his career, a prospective customer would call near the beginning of the journey. A vendor could send a team to a day-long workshop, eat lunch across the table and learn the problem while explaining the product. The company enjoyed long stretches of direct attention.
Now a buyer appears much later, after reading pages, comparing alternatives and collecting a private bundle of assumptions. Marketing has already been happening for weeks without the marketing team knowing the buyer exists. The website, the customer story, the review and the search result have done the talking. The first meeting may be the twentieth encounter.
Hartlen’s answer is focus rather than an indiscriminate content flood. Begin with the customers who already receive unusual value. Ask what they share beyond a tidy industry label, then find another group that recognizes itself in the same story. His comic example is a hidden cluster of left-handed customers in Minnesota. The joke keeps the analytical point from wearing a lab coat: a real pattern among twenty satisfied customers is often more useful than dreaming about one percent of an enormous theoretical market.
Personalization, in this sense, starts before software. It starts with curiosity specific enough to notice why a small group bought, stayed and succeeded.
The office with nobody in it
On March 11, 2020, Hartlen stood at the window of Verafin’s Toronto satellite office. Every surrounding desk was empty as employees worked remotely. A television carried split-screen faces. Hand sanitizer and disinfecting wipes sat among the monitors. The photograph catches a software executive in an odd new tableau: one person, an entire office and a city outside continuing at urban scale.
Verafin was a particularly revealing chapter. The Newfoundland financial-crime software company had begun with technical founders working on predictive analytics, then chose a sharply defined market: credit unions, first close to home in Eastern Canada. Hartlen describes the approach as Geoffrey Moore’s bowling-pin strategy taken to an extreme. Serve one segment until it becomes a position of strength, then move outward with purpose.
His first visit supplied the cultural version of the same lesson. There were no private offices. Desks could be moved into pods around a project and rearranged when the work changed. Meeting spaces were open. The physical office made collaboration less ceremonial. Verafin grew to serve thousands of financial institutions, and Nasdaq agreed to acquire it for US$2.75 billion in late 2020. Hartlen, then vice president of product marketing, was the company’s media contact on the announcement.
What he remembers is not merely the cheque. A focused technology company in Newfoundland created experience, capital and confidence that could circulate into more local startups. Success had an afterlife.
The funnel belongs to everyone
Hartlen’s most useful diagram may be one that refuses a departmental border. Near the top of a sales funnel, he figures marketing might carry 90 percent of the work and sales 10 percent. Near the bottom, the ratio reverses. Between those ends, responsibility slides. Nobody throws a bundle of leads over a wall and declares victory.
This makes alignment concrete. If an enterprise salesperson plans to concentrate on Southern California, marketing can concentrate attention there too. The same market, the same accounts, the same quarter. Hartlen has worked with roughly 50 SaaS companies and keeps returning to a single operating unit: go-to-market. Sales and marketing win together because the buyer never agreed to experience them separately.
The idea extends to budgeting. Growth teams, Hartlen observes, are commonly funded on last year’s performance while being asked to deliver next year’s expansion. They begin under-resourced by definition. So when a colleague suggests a conference, a book or a fresh case study, “Is this a good idea?” is the wrong test. Plenty of ideas are good alone. The real test is whether the proposal is better than the work already planned, and what will be stopped to make room.
He sorts activity into three buckets: the work that keeps the lights on, special projects attached to a goal, and experiments. The charm lies in its refusal to pretend capacity is elastic. Strategy becomes visible in the things a team declines.
“I don’t believe that AI will take a marketer’s job. But another marketer using AI will.”Brian Hartlen, on professional leverage
AI, with the bunting removed
Hartlen’s AI position is neither doomsday nor parade. Use it, he says, much as any competent marketer now uses the internet or CRM. The most interesting promise is personalization at scale. Content generation is obvious. The deeper opportunity is to find real patterns in customer data and spot pockets of demand a team did not know it owned.
There is a catch with the proportions of a trapdoor: bad data lets a company make bad decisions faster. AI can search a CRM for a promising cluster, but the discovery means little if the underlying records are neglected. The old product marketer’s discipline remains underneath the new machine. Know the product. Know the customer’s problem. Make the complex simple. Add judgment about where the market is going, because a model trained on the past does not automatically possess a view of the future.
Hartlen’s own appetite is still pointed forward. He talks about the next two or three years, the next market and the next best use of a precious resource. It gets him up in the morning. After fifty years, this is perhaps the most convincing argument for a career in marketing: the tools keep changing just often enough to make the permanent questions interesting.