Heather Adkins had been at Trimble for four weeks when her new job carried her from Talladega Superspeedway to a planning room at the company's Colorado headquarters. The sequence had a certain mechanical neatness: spend time where customers and partners feel speed in their bones, then return to a table and map the next fiscal year. She wrote that she was still in a learning sprint. Soon, she hoped, she could count her tenure in months instead of weeks.
That early note contains most of what makes Adkins interesting as an operator. She likes motion, but she also likes the diagram behind it. She is comfortable around spectacle, but her attention returns to systems: who sits in the room, what gets measured, which words help a customer navigate and where information stalls. Marketing, in her telling, is not the decorative hoarding around the construction site. It is part of the structure.
Now Trimble's chief marketing officer, Adkins leads a broad global brief spanning brand, demand, product marketing, customer lifecycle marketing, marketing technology, pricing and communications. The company itself is gloriously hard to compress. Its positioning, modeling and data systems appear across construction, surveying, transportation and the built world. It makes digital tools for physical consequences. A road is graded. A building model becomes a building. A load finds its route.
The marketing challenge is equally physical: turn a collection of products, acquired brands and specialist communities into one intelligible company without sanding away the expertise that made each useful. Adkins has approached it like a general contractor who happens to carry a pipeline dashboard.
01 / Pour first, pose later
The invisible season
At a sales kickoff, Adkins explained the company's marketing transformation using the native language of construction. Before a building goes vertical, she said, a great deal happens out of sight: bidding, design, structural engineering, the foundation. Someone passing on the street might conclude that nothing is happening. The conclusion would be understandable and wrong.
Trimble's marketing organization had been living through that invisible season. Roughly 300 people, many gathered through acquisitions around the world, needed a shared strategy. People, process, data and technology had to line up. The output was not yet where she believed it should be for a multi-billion-dollar company operating across more than 155 countries. The foundation, however, was setting. Adkins declared 2026 the year to “go vertical.”
Marketing exists to generate pipeline alongside sales, not to hand off leads and disappear.Heather Adkins, on the operating agreement she wants
Her crucial move was to make marketing accept the same plot line as sales. When she arrived, she saw two functions operating separately. She made a public commitment to change it. Both teams should measure the same number, sit in the same room and experience wins and losses together. It was a wager of credibility, and she knew it. A leader can promise support and preserve an escape hatch. Shared accountability closes the hatch.
The shared-growth blueprint
02 / The account is the unit
A marketer small enough to sit at one table
Adkins arrived at Trimble after four years at KPMG US, where she served as managing director of Marketing, Growth & Strategy. There she oversaw 160 marketers, including about 50 account-based marketers. The scale could have encouraged abstraction. Her answer was to get closer.
For KPMG's most important accounts, a marketer was embedded with the account team and expected to understand the client's industry, goals, history, service experience and open opportunities. Adkins told these marketers to act as the CMO of the account. The phrase shrinks a sprawling global program to a useful human size. One person owns the quality of the marketing judgment around one relationship.
The broader system used four account tiers. At the top sat dedicated marketers, rich insight and bespoke experiences. Further down, portfolios of accounts could be clustered around common conditions. Account plans supplied the raw material: where the client is, where it wants to go and how KPMG might help. Technology could synthesize those plans, find shared themes and give the scaled work some of the relevance of the one-to-one tier.
The personalization continuum
The transferable lesson is not merely that accounts should be tiered. It is that scale requires a point of view about what must remain intimate. You can automate synthesis. You can group recurring needs. You cannot outsource the responsibility to understand why a particular executive should care today.
03 / A machine with an editor
AI gets the repetition. People keep the relationship.
At KPMG, Adkins described the firm as “client zero” for its own AI ideas. Marketing teams experimented quickly and asked practical questions. Did a tool save time? Did it remove or accelerate part of a workflow? Could it preserve brand quality? The work included technology that organized account intelligence into “Insights to Action Packs,” helping marketers decide what a client might find useful.
Her enthusiasm has a firm boundary. Asked whether technology or people would become the differentiator in account-based marketing, she chose the human touch without hesitation. Technology can enter every workflow, she argued, while the work still needs a person to make it resonate. In 2026 she sharpened the point for fellow CMOs: using AI principally to shrink a team misses the opportunity. Her preferred question is how it expands what the team can do.
Prioritization. We can't be everything to everyone, but if we follow the company North Star and prioritize, we see success.Adkins, on her central ABM lesson
This is a less theatrical view of AI than the market often rewards. It treats the technology as machinery inside the system, not the story's protagonist. The model spots a pattern. The marketer decides whether the pattern deserves a conversation. The distinction is small enough to disappear in a software demo and large enough to determine whether the customer feels observed or understood.
04 / The mercy of plain nouns
Make the product name do some work
There is another construction site inside Trimble: the product portfolio. Companies that grow by acquisition accumulate names the way old workshops accumulate drawers. Some honor an acquired company. Some preserve an internal program. A few describe the actual capability. Customers are left to perform the archaeology.
Adkins has pushed for capability-driven naming. If software manages projects, she argues, project management should appear in the name. The idea is almost comically plain, which is its charm. A product name is a tiny interface. It can shorten the route from a customer's question to a credible answer, or it can insist on being decoded.
Her concern for clarity extends to who tells the story. Trimble employs specialists who already have standing in architecture, design and other technical communities. Adkins has written about building an internal voice program around such people. An executive post and a brand budget cannot manufacture the trust that an expert earns by sharing a profession with the audience. The institution's job is to recognize that authority and give it room.
05 / Take the brand outside
An Airstream leaves headquarters
In June, Trimble launched “Everywhere you turn,” a cross-country road trip built around a custom Airstream trailer. It is a mobile studio, traveling to infrastructure, stadiums, job sites and events. The team is producing interviews, social dispatches and a video series about the people using Trimble technology in the physical world. One installment follows a mission to remeasure Colorado mountain summits. Others visit major projects and examine how design data becomes a place where people can stand.
Adkins introduced the idea with a disarming claim: her team had made a marketing plan that did not try to sell anything. The campaign's first subject is the customer's work. Trimble's products become the connective tissue, visible through consequences rather than recited through features. The trailer is both studio and editorial device. It forces a complicated corporation to leave its categories behind and look at what actually happens.
This is also a shrewd answer to the problem of industrial technology. Much of it is essential and almost deliberately inconspicuous. Precision is most successful when the machine ends up where it should. Logistics works when the goods arrive. A model matters when thousands of decisions remain coordinated. The brand story hides inside competent outcomes. Adkins's team goes to find the people responsible and turns on the camera.
06 / Going vertical
The operator behind the campaigns
Adkins earned both a bachelor's degree in marketing and an MBA in marketing from Florida State University. Before KPMG, she was global chief marketing officer for automotive at TE Connectivity, and her career has crossed technology, software, financial services, telecom and professional services. The industries change. The operational questions recur.
How does a large organization know the customer closely enough to be useful? How does brand create permission for a sales conversation without becoming a decorative prelude to it? How can technology increase capacity without bleaching the life from the work? And who owns the result after the handoff?
Her answers are not mystical. Build account plans. Put the people closest to the customer in the room early. Give specialists a public voice. Name products for the jobs they perform. Ask sales and marketing to share the number. Use AI for pattern and speed, then let a person make the call. These ideas are easy to list and difficult to institutionalize, which is precisely why an operator matters.
The playfulness comes in the vehicles and metaphors: Talladega, an Airstream, a building going vertical. Underneath sits a sober understanding of credibility. A transformation earns belief when colleagues see the leader accept the same stakes they do. A campaign earns attention when it notices the customer's craft. A product earns comprehension when its name stops showing off.
Adkins arrived at Trimble saying she came to build. The phrase can sound grand until you inspect her materials. They are account lists, product nouns, shared metrics, specialist voices and carefully chosen constraints. Mortar, in other words. The tower may get photographed. The operator is still checking the foundation.