A machine can be perfectly configured and still be terribly explained. Lori McInerney works in the narrow passage between those two conditions. As Global Chief Marketing Officer at Tacton, she markets software that helps manufacturers decide which product can be built, what it should cost, and how to quote it without turning the sales process into an oral examination in engineering.
The category is called configure, price, quote, or CPQ. The acronym is tidy. The reality is not. A customer may want a specialized pump, vehicle, packaging line, or piece of factory equipment. Every choice changes another choice. Materials affect price. Dimensions affect performance. Regulations affect what can ship where. A pleasing buying experience must somehow carry the weight of thousands of rules.
McInerney's work is to give that complexity a public shape. Her current brief includes demand generation, account-based marketing, content, product marketing, sales enablement, public relations, and customer engagement. That is less a list of channels than a chain of promises. Each link must agree on what the product does and why a buyer should care.
The career is varied. The assignment is constant.
Read McInerney's resume quickly and it resembles a channel scan of Chicago technology. She spent more than a decade at CareerBuilder in sales and marketing leadership. Then came Shiftgig, where an on-demand platform matched hourly workers with shifts. She moved to Visibly in 2018, then to Hunt Club, UPshow, QualSights, and finally Tacton. She has marketed employment, recruiting, screens, consumer insight, and enterprise software.
The products differ, but the central act does not. Each company sits between a person who wants something and a system that can provide it. The marketing task is to make the match legible.
In a 2018 talk about introducing a new chief executive at Shiftgig, McInerney described the platform in a pair of human outcomes: flexibility and choice for workers, agility for companies. It was an efficient translation. She did not begin with infrastructure or algorithms. She began with what each side of the marketplace could do next.
That habit matters in industrial software, where expertise can become a barricade. The person buying a configurable product needs confidence, not a guided tour of every constraint in the model. Yet simplicity cannot come at the expense of truth. If the elegant digital experience promises something production cannot make, the charm expires at the factory door.
The go-to-market machine has to agree with itself
When QualSights appointed McInerney as CMO in December 2022, it credited her with more than 22 years across demand generation, public relations, content, and product marketing. She described the next job as building a world-class go-to-market team and bringing value to customers and partners. The language was revealingly operational. The ambition was not merely to make campaigns. It was to make a system.
At UPshow, that system included corporate marketing, content and search, product marketing, events, inbound programs, customer intelligence, and sales enablement. At Hunt Club, it involved product strategy, brand, public relations, content, and lead generation. At Tacton, the pattern grew global and entered the manufacturing floor.
This is where the CMO becomes an interpreter among functions. Product teams know the rules. Sales teams know the objections. Customers know the friction. Marketing has to listen to all three and produce a story that survives contact with each one. A clever phrase that sales cannot use is ornamental. A lead-generation claim that product cannot support is debt.
McInerney's public messaging tends to distribute credit across that system. When she celebrated Tacton's fourth consecutive recognition as a Leader in Gartner's CPQ evaluation, she pointed to teams pushing on innovation, clarity, and customer value. She also credited customers who challenge Tacton to become a better partner. The microphone belonged to the CMO; the achievement belonged to the network.
Selling the thread, not just the tool
Tacton's category story widened in 2025 when it acquired Variantum, a Finnish software company, and Serenytics, a French analytics company. McInerney presented the two deals as pieces of a connected platform reaching from engineering through sales to operations. The phrase at the center was “single source of truth,” a familiar software promise with unusually physical consequences. In manufacturing, two teams disagreeing about configuration is not an abstract data problem. It can become the wrong component, the wrong margin, or the wrong machine.
Her framing moved Tacton beyond the mechanics of generating a quote. The larger idea was a buyer-centric smart factory: customer requirements, configuration rules, commercial decisions, and production data moving along one thread. It is a more ambitious story, and therefore a more demanding one. Every expansion of the platform creates more value to explain and more opportunities to lose the listener.
One story, several operating muscles
Editorial illustration of the interconnected functions in her remit, not performance data. The point is coordination: none of these disciplines works alone.
The useful move is to keep returning to the buyer's next decision. What are they trying to configure? Which options are possible? Can they trust the price? Will the factory make what the screen promised? Complexity becomes tolerable when it arrives in the order a person needs it.
McInerney's latest product messaging follows that logic. In 2026, she introduced Tacton's AI Product Modeling Assistant as a way to shorten the path to CPQ value, turning structured or unstructured product information into substantially completed models. The artificial intelligence is not treated as a stage act. It is attached to a bottleneck: the slow work of building the configuration model before anyone can benefit from it.
The story starts before the announcement
McInerney's 2018 Shiftgig presentation offers a small window into her method. The occasion was a change at the top: a new chief executive had to be introduced. Executive announcements are usually written as if a title alone creates momentum. Her account focused instead on the work around the moment. The company had to decide what the arrival meant, which audiences needed to hear it, and how public relations could make the leadership change useful to the larger business story.
That distinction is easy to miss. An announcement reports an event. A go-to-market narrative explains why the event changes something for a customer, employee, partner, or prospect. The first can be completed with a press release. The second requires product context, timing, internal agreement, and enough restraint to resist claiming a revolution before breakfast.
Her later appointments show the same range of responsibilities accumulating. At Hunt Club, the remit combined brand and public relations with product strategy, content, and lead generation. At UPshow, it expanded across marketing and revenue operations. The 2025 Tacton announcement named demand generation, account-based marketing, product marketing, sales enablement, public relations, and customer engagement in one integrated strategy. The list matters because it reveals where modern B2B marketing actually lives: between the public sentence and the revenue process behind it.
It also explains why buyer-centricity is more than an adjective in this setting. Account-based marketing selects the companies. Product marketing clarifies the value. Content gives the buyer a way to learn. Sales enablement carries the argument into a live conversation. Customer engagement tests whether the original promise remains recognizable after purchase. If those functions disagree, the buyer experiences the organizational chart as friction.
McInerney's career progression reads like a steady widening of that field of view. Sales experience sits underneath marketing leadership. Brand work sits beside demand. Customer intelligence sits beside enablement. By the time the product reaches a factory, the marketer has learned to ask not only whether a message earns attention, but whether the company can keep it.
A Chicago operator with a global brief
McInerney studied Business Management at the University of Iowa and built the visible portion of her career around Chicago's technology scene. The geography offers its own education. Chicago software often grows close to industries that move people, hire workers, sell services, and make physical things. The problems are rarely weightless. They come with shifts, quotas, customers, inventory, factories, and consequences.
Her 2026 calendar reflects the scale change. Tacton lists her among the speakers for its Chicago summit, where manufacturing executives are gathering around a theme called the digital thread. The event promises discussions about artificial intelligence, analytics, buyer experience, and the connection between sales and the factory. McInerney's place in that program is logical: the thread needs a narrator.
There is also a career lesson hiding in the variety. A marketer does not need to spend a lifetime in one narrow category to develop depth. McInerney's depth is the go-to-market system itself: position the product, create demand, equip sales, listen to customers, and keep every function honest about the promise. Categories change. The operating questions travel.
Industrial software will never be mistaken for light reading. Nor should it be. The machinery is complicated because the work is complicated. McInerney's approach suggests a better editorial standard for B2B technology: preserve the intelligence, remove the fog, and let the buyer see the next move.