The interesting thing about Brooke Brockman's climb to the C-suite is where it began: close enough to the customer to hear the unpolished version. Before the global brand brief, before the rebrand, before Chief Marketing Officer appeared beside her name, there were sales conversations, account relationships and customer-success work. The sequence gave her a durable advantage. She learned what companies promise, then watched what customers actually experience.
Brockman now leads marketing at Karbon, the practice-management software company for accounting firms. Her assignment spans global strategy, market presence, customer advocacy and a complicated new story about artificial intelligence. But the underlying problem is familiar. Accountants, like builders, do consequential work while wrestling with crowded inboxes, scattered tasks and demanding client relationships. Software can remove some of that friction. Marketing has to make the benefit feel true before it sounds impressive.
That is the thread running through a career that has crossed Target, UPS, technology, agency work, small-business ownership and two species of vertical software. The settings changed. The fascination with the customer journey did not.
A career with the seams left in
Brockman earned a Bachelor of Science in Business from Iowa State University in 1999. Campus life already contained a clue: alongside Pi Beta Phi leadership and the VEISHEA committee, she served as a public-relations co-chair for Dance Marathon. The early professional stops widened the view. She began at techies.com, then worked in revenue-focused roles at UPS and Target. Later came small-business ownership and client-service work at an Omaha advertising agency.
It is a less tidy résumé than a straight march through marketing departments, which is exactly why it is useful. Sales makes a person confront the price of ambiguity. Account management teaches the long memory of a customer. Agency work requires translating between the client's vocabulary and the audience's. Owning a small business adds the bracing discovery that every elegant idea eventually meets a budget.
In 2018, Brockman joined Buildertrend, which makes business-management software for residential contractors. She entered through customer success. Then she transferred into a marketing team that was still being formed. Over the next several years she moved through senior lifecycle marketing manager, director, vice president and executive vice president roles. In January 2024, Buildertrend appointed her as its first CMO.
The promotions tell only half the story. Brockman helped assemble the function she eventually led: demand generation, content marketing, brand strategy and the end-to-end digital customer journey. In other words, she was not handed a finished orchestra. She helped choose the sections, then learned to conduct them.
“We believe the future of construction is our customers - and how we can empower them to strengthen their businesses.”Brooke Brockman, on Buildertrend's 2023 rebrand
The customer is not a decorative noun
Companies adore the phrase “customer-first.” It fits on lobby walls and strategy slides with equal ease. Brockman's work at Buildertrend made the phrase more operational. Lifecycle marketing asks what happens before, during and after a sale. Customer success sees where that sequence breaks. Brand strategy gives the whole experience a memorable promise. The useful move is to connect the departments, so a campaign does not write checks the product and service teams cannot cash.
Buildertrend's 2023 rebrand condensed a broadening software platform into two words: “Work Simpler.” The company had evolved beyond a project-management tool toward a more complete operating system for residential contractors. The new identity, positioning and website promised directness rather than digital ornament. Builders already manage costs, schedules, crews, suppliers and anxious homeowners. They did not need a software brand to add another layer of theater.
The phrase also gave the marketing team a filter. In 2024, seven of its eight entries in the PRSA Nebraska Paper Anvil Awards received recognition. The honors covered a striking range: podcast, video, blog, events, B2B marketing, editorial work and the in-house rebrand campaign. Variety is usually where a brand frays. Here, it suggested one organizing idea traveling across formats.
Brockman's description of the team was revealing. She praised its appetite for solving problems, generating value for customers and delivering results. No misty speech about “magic.” The romance was in the workmanship.
First the producer, then the guest
One small episode in the Buildertrend years captures Brockman's working style better than a title can. She was the first producer of The Building Code, the company's podcast, helping its original hosts bring the show to life. Years later, after moving into senior leadership, she appeared on another industry show, Modern Craftsman, to discuss Buildertrend's evolution, customer experience and brand.
There is a pleasant symmetry in that path. Podcast production is intimate, practical labor: find the angle, prepare the conversation, watch the clock, make other people sound coherent. Executive marketing is the same puzzle with more microphones. Brockman has repeatedly worked behind the story before becoming part of it.
Her public-facing role grew alongside the team. At the International Builders' Show in 2022, she spoke about the value of connecting with professional builders from around the world. In 2024, she moderated a panel on women's innovations in construction. In 2025, she was scheduled to lead a conversation about turning complex builds into success stories with smarter project management. The topics kept circling the same territory: relationships, shared knowledge and the systems that help people do intricate work without losing the plot.
A new profession, the same human problem
After nearly eight years at Buildertrend, Brockman announced in late 2025 that she was leaving for Karbon. Her farewell was notably affectionate. Buildertrend was “such a special place,” she wrote, and her pride in the team would continue after her departure. The move did not read like a repudiation. It read like an operator taking a tested set of questions into a new room.
Karbon's room is full of accountants. The company's cloud platform connects workflow, email, tasks, teams and client communication. Its newer brief includes automation, AI and what it calls connected firm intelligence. These phrases can float away quickly unless anchored in a workday: the overdue document, the shared inbox, the client waiting for an answer, the partner wondering whether the month will close on time.
“Karbon has redefined what's possible for accounting firms by combining innovation with a deep understanding of how teams actually work.”Brooke Brockman, November 2025
That line contains her marketing philosophy in miniature. Innovation alone is a laboratory result. Understanding how teams work gives it a destination. Brockman's remit at Karbon is to deepen market presence, amplify customer advocacy and make the brand reflect the company's role in AI adoption. The temptation will be to market the future in gleaming abstractions. Her career suggests she will keep returning to the stubbornly specific present.
Karbon CEO Mary Delaney described Brockman as a leader who builds trusted brands around customer impact. She also credited Brockman's Buildertrend tenure with a customer-retention increase of more than 25 percent. Retention is an unfashionably honest marketing metric. It asks whether the story remained persuasive after the contract was signed.
What the rest of us can steal
Brockman's career offers no theatrical secret. It offers a sequence. Get close to the customer. Learn the revenue mechanics. Notice where the journey fragments. Build a team that can connect those pieces. Give the company a promise simple enough to test against everyday behavior. Then let customer outcomes carry more of the story.
This is harder than inventing a clever campaign because it requires marketing to surrender its favorite alibi: that perception can be managed separately from experience. In vertical software, the buyer usually knows the work better than the marketer. A contractor can spot borrowed language. An accountant can smell a frictionless demo from three spreadsheets away.
Brockman's advantage is not that she has spent her whole career in one industry. It is that she has kept working at the border between what a company means to say and what a customer has time to hear. She crossed that border in sales, in account management, in customer success, behind a podcast microphone and in the C-suite.
Now comes the Karbon chapter. The tools are more intelligent, the market is global and the language of AI changes by lunchtime. The old discipline may become more valuable precisely because the technology is moving so quickly: listen before declaring, connect before amplifying, and make sure the people doing the work can still recognize themselves in the future being sold to them.