The most revealing line in Ron McMurtrie's résumé is not a company or a title. It is the turn he made near the beginning. He studied managerial economics at the University of California, Davis and started his working life with a finance focus. About five years in, he raised his hand for an assignment in front of a CEO and an executive team. He has said he was not quite ready. They gave him the chance anyway.
Within a year, he was running a product line. A few years later, he was leading product marketing for a major telecommunications company. Finance did not disappear from his career; it became the skeleton underneath the marketing. Revenue, recurring growth, pipeline, customer sentiment and colleague engagement belonged in the same conversation. Marketing, in this view, was not where a business went to decorate a decision. It was one of the places where the business decided what to do.
That operating instinct has followed him across an unusually broad run of B2B companies: MCI and Verizon in telecom, First Data in payments, VCE in converged infrastructure, TEXbase in compliance software, Recall in information management, Sage in business software and Honeywell in industrial technology. The products changed. The central puzzle did not. A complicated company knows many things about itself. A customer needs to know which of those things will make life better.
The first useful simplification
Early in his B2B telecom career, the industry sold local service, long-distance service and digital products through separate lanes. Customers faced different transactions, contracts and management streams. Internally, the arrangement made sense because each offering had its own machinery. Externally, it felt like work being exported to the buyer.
The response was not a clever advertisement. Sales, legal, accounting and leadership began asking two questions: What does the customer want? How do we make it easier? The company bundled services into a simpler purchase. McMurtrie later used this episode to explain customer obsession, a phrase that becomes concrete only when a company is willing to rearrange itself around the answer.
The episode also explains his habit of describing marketing in verbs: listen, align, co-create, measure, enable. In his writing, customer obsession is not a statement over a doorway. It reaches hiring, product design, advisory boards, contracts, metrics and the way a company defines mutual success. The customer is not the last person to see the work. The customer belongs in the room while the work is taking shape.
A global system with local ears
At Sage, the scale of the translation problem grew. McMurtrie arrived to lead customer marketing across 23 markets and eight regions, then took responsibility for global marketing as the company moved from perpetual desktop software toward subscription and cloud services. Sage had roughly three million customers. They did not all live in the same regulatory environment, use the same technology stack or want to migrate at the same speed.
His organizational answer was a balance between the center and the field. Shared systems such as parts of the digital and marketing technology stack could be standardized. Regions could test competing tools, compare results and bring the useful choice into a common platform. Brand and common services could gain from scale. Customer judgment stayed close to the market.
“The buck stops where the customer sits,” he said. It was difficult for someone in Atlanta to persuade a team in Sydney that headquarters understood Sydney better. The useful center enabled. It did not confuse proximity to the org chart with proximity to the buyer.
This is the quiet economics of global marketing. Centralize too little and every team pays to solve the same problem. Centralize too much and the system stops hearing differences that matter. McMurtrie treated the correct setting like a dial rather than a doctrine. Each function could sit at a different point, and the point could move.
The career is a series of translations
Finance, product, sales and marketing experience formed an operating view of the customer.
Infrastructure, compliance and information management added new kinds of technical complexity.
Global marketing helped customers navigate a large software company's move toward cloud subscriptions.
Connected enterprise leadership expanded into the company-wide chief marketing officer role.
At Recall, he was hired in 2014 to shape long-term and go-to-market strategy across global service lines. At Sage, his remit connected product, brand, digital marketing, communications and customer acquisition. He helped lead launches that included Sage Business Cloud, the Ambition Ambassador program and Sage Sessions. At Honeywell, he first led marketing for Honeywell Connected Enterprise, then served as its chief commercial officer before becoming Honeywell's chief marketing officer.
One piece of that Honeywell work was the digital experience and brand launch for Honeywell Forge, the company's cloud-native industrial IoT platform. The name had to sit above software that could connect data from operations, assets and people across buildings, aviation and industry. The marketing task was not to recite every technical capability. It was to create a door into the system.
Honeywell itself is a translation challenge at corporate scale. It works across automation, aviation and energy transition, with technologies that live inside factories, buildings and aircraft. Much of what it sells is consequential but invisible to the ordinary observer. McMurtrie's language keeps returning to outcomes: uptime, predictability, productivity, safety and energy performance. The feature matters because of the work it changes.
The team around the answer
McMurtrie describes talent as a carefully constructed cocktail. Global teams need specialists deep in data, operations or craft. They also need generalists who can connect those disciplines. At Sage, he used mentoring, cross-training and movement between geographies to spread expertise. Regional test beds let teams work together and compete a little before a technology was standardized.
His own stretch assignment became the advice he gives others: take risks, be bold, keep learning. In a 2025 interview at the Georgia Technology Summit, he added a local version. Get involved. Experiment. Volunteer. Find a community where you can contribute and develop a skill. McMurtrie credited his involvement with the Technology Association of Georgia with creating chances in his career, then used his position to help colleagues find board and committee roles of their own.
That community work now includes chairing GeorgiaCMO, a peer group he helped found, as well as leadership with the Technology Association of Georgia and an advisory role for Wake Forest University's Master of AI Strategy and Innovation program. The repeated idea is that leadership develops through use. A title can identify a leader. A room full of real problems gives one practice.
Stretch work arrives before complete confidence. Preparation continues after the opportunity.
Shared platforms scale. Local teams still hold customer context that the center cannot manufacture.
Cross-training, mentoring and geographic movement turn individual knowledge into an organizational asset.
Marketing earns operating authority when its scorecard connects to revenue, customers and colleagues.
AI enters the operating model
McMurtrie was talking about AI layers in marketing automation and audience profiling while at Sage. At the 2025 Georgia Technology Summit, the discussion had moved to agents, products with AI built into them and work changing across legal, finance and marketing. He described marketers learning to use AI for content, graphics and demand generation. Technical colleagues would still review automated work. Routine tasks could move to machines while people took on higher-order activity.
His comparison was historical rather than theatrical. Workplaces were not ready when the internet arrived, when servers became virtualized or when telecom networks changed. People learned new tools, industries formed and the work moved. AI is another phase, though a broad one. The leadership requirement is to give people a way to adapt instead of presenting change as a finished announcement.
This is where finance, marketing and community leadership converge. Finance asks whether the system creates value. Marketing asks whether a customer can recognize that value. Leadership asks whether a team can deliver it repeatedly. Community creates a place to compare notes before every answer is settled.
McMurtrie's career does not offer a secret formula. It offers something more portable: a set of settings. Put the customer closer. Turn the headquarters volume down when local knowledge matters. Build the common platform when repetition adds no value. Let teams test. Attach the scorecard to an outcome. Use technology to remove labor, then give people a larger problem worthy of their judgment.
And when the larger problem arrives a little early, raise a hand.
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