Tina McNulty Wants Marketing to Ask a Better Question

The leader reached the last slide before Tina McNulty had properly begun. Her presentation was 47 slides long, dense with data and context, the kind of deck that announces how much work went into it. McNulty was proud of the thing. Then came the question: “What’s the ask?”

She had buried it. Forty-five slides of explanation sat between the room and the decision she needed. The moment is funny now because the lesson is so clean. McNulty still tells the story as the day she learned that clarity is a form of respect. An audience gives you time. The courteous move is to know what you want them to do with it.

Today, McNulty is the chief marketing officer of Presidio, the technology services and solutions company. She leads its global marketing from Greater Boston, working in a business whose catalog runs across AI, cloud, security, networking and digital transformation. The nouns multiply quickly. Her job is to keep the point from disappearing beneath them.

“Your audience’s time is the most valuable thing in the room, which is why now, I always start with the ask.”Tina McNulty

The technology translator

McNulty did not begin her career with “CMO” written on the destination board. She came up through the technology side of the industry, spending time at EMC, Cisco and BMC Software. Those were useful places to learn the machinery: infrastructure, large sales organizations, channels, product portfolios and the partner relationships that make enterprise technology move.

Somewhere inside that machinery, she noticed what held her attention. It was not the technology by itself. It was the story behind it. How could somebody take a difficult system and explain it so a customer felt it had been built with their particular problem in mind? The question nudged her from technical ecosystems toward marketing, where translation is not a soft afterthought. It is part of how a complicated product gets chosen.

Her subsequent roles moved through different corners of B2B technology. At BMC, she handled strategic marketing work that included corporate positioning, thought leadership, customer experience programs and global events. At Continuum, a Boston SaaS platform serving managed service providers, she led a corporate rebrand, reset the integrated marketing strategy and expanded events globally. The event program doubled its customer reach. Then came a chief marketing officer role at SMS Assist, followed by senior leadership work at BitSight and ECI.

At ScienceLogic, McNulty led marketing for an IT operations and observability company. She moderated the founders’ conversation marking the company’s twentieth anniversary and spoke publicly about the customers, employees and partners behind its second consecutive Inc. Power Partner recognition in 2024. By the time Presidio appointed her in 2025, the common thread was visible: she knew the technical terrain, and she had spent years learning how to turn it into a customer journey and a revenue conversation.

A campaign can be polished and still be wrong

One of McNulty’s more useful stories is about a cloud campaign that did not work as planned. On paper, it was formidable: four tiers, a journey-based structure, careful targeting, strong creative and considered messaging. The post-mortem exposed a quiet flaw. The campaign had been organized around the way the company thought about its cloud portfolio. Its language came from inside the building.

Customers described their problems differently. The team had designed a good map of its own territory and handed it to people who were trying to navigate somewhere else. McNulty’s response was procedural. Customer interviews now come before the campaign architecture. The phrases buyers use, the pressures they name and the problems that keep recurring become raw material for the message.

“The best campaign in the world will fail if it doesn’t meet people where they are.”Tina McNulty

That lesson also changed how she thinks about brand awareness. Visibility by itself once carried an easy promise: make enough people aware, and demand will arrive. Her view now is more exacting. In B2B technology services, awareness without precision becomes noise. Brand and pipeline need to be designed together. During a brand decision, she asks how it will show up in an account Presidio is trying to win. “Does this look good?” is still a legitimate creative question. It no longer gets to be the only one.

The same standard governs measurement. McNulty returns to a basic test: does a metric connect to a decision somebody will make? Impressions, open rates and page views can provide context, but they rarely explain the business on their own. She gives priority to pipeline influence, sourced revenue, engagement among target accounts and the return on partner development funds. These are numbers a chief revenue officer or chief financial officer can use. For McNulty, the analytics function is not an appendix to marketing. It is infrastructure.

Out-coordinate the field

Presidio sits inside a broad technology ecosystem, working alongside companies such as Cisco, Dell and AWS. McNulty saw friction in the conventional arrangement, where alliance work and marketing often live apart. If partners shape a large share of how the company reaches customers, a marketing organization that operates independently from them leaves leverage unused.

Her unusual move was to bring partner go-to-market under marketing. The design put message, alliance and activation closer to one another. Presidio launched Amplify as a formal partner program, with Dell as its inaugural pilot. McNulty’s principle is concise: a B2B technology company may not outspend the largest players, but it can out-coordinate them.

The insight is organizational rather than theatrical. A partner logo on a slide has little power. Shared priorities, a common cadence and accountable execution can change distribution. It is a recurring McNulty pattern: when complexity starts to look like progress, return to the operating model. Who owns the decision? Which signal changes it? What does the customer call the problem?

AI is a people question

McNulty’s filter for new marketing trends is “signal or noise.” A useful trend changes how buyers make decisions. A noisier one may simply create another place to run an ad. She places AI in the first category because it is changing both the production of marketing and the way customers research vendors.

At Presidio, that means treating generative-engine discoverability as a channel alongside traditional search. If a buyer asks an AI tool to assemble a shortlist, the company has to be legible in that environment. It also means resisting the urge to reduce AI adoption to tool licenses. McNulty expects the larger change to be a talent transformation. Teams need skills, confidence and judgment. They need room to experiment and guardrails that make the room safe.

The goal is better work, not merely more output. McNulty wants AI inside the team’s operating rhythm, where it can improve questions, speed learning and help people interpret signals. A side project will not do that. Neither will a software rollout that ignores training and accountability. Her formulation makes talent part of the strategy itself. A bright plan without a team equipped to run it remains a document.

The story worth preserving

There is a revealing coda to all the talk of systems, attribution and AI. Asked what movement she would start if she could, McNulty did not choose a marketing cause. She thought about a veterans’ oral-history project involving her son at a local VFW. Young people sat down with people whose lives were radically different from their own and listened without an agenda.

She calls the possibility intergenerational listening. It is not exactly mentorship. The point is exchange: elders carry stories that can disappear, while young people arrive with energy and curiosity. When the two meet, she has seen something shift. She would like to see more of it, protected from the impulse to automate every encounter.

It also completes the portrait. The executive who wants a campaign to begin with customer interviews is drawn to the simple act of hearing another person. The CMO who spent a career translating complex technology is wary of letting the human story get buried. The lesson of the 47 slides travels farther than the meeting room. Decide what matters. Clear away the noise. Then give the other person enough attention to find the ask.