Before Elyssa Steiner became a chief marketing officer, she learned the useful indignity of selling something people did not yet know they wanted. The thing was a kiosk. The setting was the young micro-market business, a corner of unattended retail that promised to turn the sad office vending alcove into something closer to a small shop. Operators had to understand a different machine, a different payment habit and a different way of stocking the break room. A clever pitch could open the door. Education kept it open.
In 2013, three years after entering the industry, Steiner explained her approach with a line that now reads like the first draft of her executive philosophy: “For me, it’s not about selling a kiosk. It’s a lot of educating and teaching operators. I make sure I give them all the tools to succeed.” The product categories have changed since then. The teaching instinct has not.
Today she is Chief Marketing Officer at Kahua, an enterprise platform used to manage construction projects and capital programs. This is software with many buyers, long decisions and consequences measured in years. Owners, contractors, project teams and public agencies do not need another shower of adjectives. They need to see how a platform behaves when a permit changes, a payment application moves, a document travels or an asset passes from construction into operations.
The inheritanceAn industry in the family
Steiner did not discover vending by accident. Her father, Chris Allahyar, had worked in the business for 39 years by 2015. She grew up near the industry, then entered it on her own terms after the University of Washington and a retail chapter at Nordstrom. At Avanti Markets, she moved from sales representative to vice president of sales and marketing. The daughter of an industry veteran became one of the people explaining its next format.
The family connection produced a telling photograph in July 2015. Father and daughter were on a flight to Washington, D.C., headed to a National Automatic Merchandising Association advocacy event. He represented decades of vending experience. She represented an emerging generation, and they were going to Capitol Hill to make the case for the same trade. Steiner described the trip as a chance to step out of the daily grind and become immersed in issues that could shape everyone’s business. Her takeaway arrived in capital letters: get involved.
By then, she had already won Automatic Merchandiser’s Manufacturer Representative of the Year award and a NAMA advocacy honor. In 2016 she became chair of NAMA’s Emerging Leaders Network, a group of nearly 100 professionals under 40. The work was part network, part classroom, part civic muscle. It also foreshadowed the way she would practice marketing: learn the system, convene the people inside it, then translate its stakes for everyone else.
“For me, it’s not about selling a kiosk. It’s a lot of educating and teaching operators.”Elyssa Steiner, 2013
The climbFrom the kiosk to the C-suite
Avanti was startup school. Steiner helped introduce micro markets to operators who knew traditional vending, and her executive biography credits her with helping increase annual revenue by $20 million across four years. It is a useful detail because it joins persuasion to arithmetic. The story mattered. So did the till.
Cantaloupe Systems hired her to lead marketing in 2017 after six years at Avanti. Acquisition pulled the business into USA Technologies. A later corporate rebrand brought the Cantaloupe name back. Steiner advanced from director to vice president and, in 2023, chief marketing officer. Her remit grew across demand, communications, product launches, brand integration and a portfolio serving businesses from small operators to enterprises.
That middle stretch is where her public playbook became explicit. Marketing, in Steiner’s formulation, is not a decorative department called after the strategy is finished. “I firmly believe that marketing drives the growth of the business by taking the lead and really aligning every department to a shared goal,” she said in a 2025 interview. The method she described had five parts: understand the audience, research the total addressable market, prioritize high-value products, build reusable playbooks and keep gathering feedback.
The five-move growth loop
There is no novelty costume on that framework. Its value is operational. A company with many products and many personas can easily produce a fog of campaigns. The five moves force decisions in sequence. They also give sales, product and marketing a common document to argue over, improve and use.
The moveNew hard hats, same hard question
Steiner joined Kahua on November 4, 2025. She arrived from self-service retail with experience spanning startups, acquisitions and a publicly traded company. Construction technology was a different vocabulary, but the central problem was recognizable. People buy change only after they can picture themselves living with it.
Her first 60 days supplied the clearest expression of that principle. Kahua serves nine core verticals. Rather than collapse them into a generic “construction buyer,” Steiner built ideal-customer-profile frameworks for each. She listened to sales calls. She studied how teams spoke about their work. She made sure a marketer attended every trade show where Kahua exhibited. The physical distance between the marketing team and the buyer had to shrink before the campaign could expand.
This is the unfashionable half of modern marketing: the plane, the booth, the notebook and the call where a prospect uses a phrase no persona document predicted. AI can sort and recombine that knowledge. It cannot retroactively attend the conversation.
Once the inputs were grounded, the scale arrived. Kahua’s marketing operation moved from basic custom GPTs toward purpose-built AI skills and an account-based marketing agent. A program once limited to a “Magic 18” list grew to more than 400 one-to-one and one-to-few accounts. Repetitive execution moved toward the machine. Marketers recovered time for strategy.
Steiner’s most interesting job specification for that future is not “prompt engineer.” It is editor. A good editor knows the market well enough to spot the polished sentence that is subtly wrong. She can hear when software language has replaced customer language. She can remove the extra promise, preserve the useful detail and ask whether the draft would survive a room full of operators.
The critical AI-era skill is being a really good editor, not a really fast prompter.Steiner’s modern marketing rule
The practiceClarity earns its steel toes
Recent customer visits show the practice at work. In meetings about Kahua’s configurable tools, project teams asked whether a change would be theirs to make or Kahua’s. The answer mattered because every capital program has its own approvals, reports and habits. When a team could design a payment application or permitting manager quickly, an abstract promise became an ordinary act. The demo was not theater. It was proof of control.
On a University of Tennessee visit, Steiner watched new users register small workflow wins, then toured campus projects from a football stadium to residence halls. Her observation moved beyond construction closeout: project data becomes part of how an owner maintains and improves an asset for decades. That is the sort of sentence marketing earns by walking the site.
She applies the same practical test to AI. For project teams, the strongest use cases are not necessarily the loudest. Summarizing records, surfacing insight and reducing manual friction can matter more than a futuristic flourish. In regulated environments, usefulness also requires governance, security and an auditable place inside the systems where work already happens.
The office-art test
Steiner once joked to two Kahua summer interns that her office needed art. They returned with a handwritten note and pieces for her wall. She told the story as a reminder that small gestures leave a large impression, then turned the attention back to their curiosity and willingness to challenge assumptions.
That anecdote offers a quieter view of her leadership. Steiner has described a team culture that balances empathy with clear expectations, collaboration with accountability. Her advice to interns is plain: stay curious, contribute your ideas and accept opportunities. The future, she told them, rarely unfolds as expected. Her own route from retail buying to startup sales, then public-company CMO and construction-tech executive, makes the point without embroidery.
Her sharper private compass has also become public: “Hard choices, easy life; easy choices, hard life.” Leaving a comfortable category for a new one is a hard choice. Listening to another sales call when a summary is available is a hard choice. Sending the marketer into the field costs more than opening a dashboard. Editing a fast AI draft can be harder than admiring it.
But complexity has always been Steiner’s raw material. First it was a self-checkout kiosk in an office break room. Now it is a low-code platform coordinating money, documents, schedules and assets across capital programs. Her task is not to make either technology sound magical. It is to make the next decision feel informed.
That is the advantage of leaving the desk. The market gets less abstract. The language gets less grand. The story gets more useful. Then, and only then, the machine can help it travel.