Paula Skokowski, CMO of Accellion, reveals how she moved from robotics to marketing and offers advice for aspiring female leaders
Q: Tell me a little bit about your role
I’m in charge of global marketing at Accellion. We focus on helping corporations and government agencies enable their mobile workforce. So we focus on making it easy to access and share enterprise information securely, this could be financial documents, contracts, designs and personal information.
Q: You used to be a robot engineer, how did you get from that into marketing?
To get from engineering into marketing isn’t that difficult. It depends what type of engineer you are. I started as an applications engineer programming robots for companies such as Ford Motor Company and in order for them buy and install a row of 20 robots they had to understand if it could do a particular application, so I did many demonstration and prototype applications. In the process what I was doing was telling stories. And marketing people tell stories. They describe how you’re going to use this technology to solve a problem or prove something. So I went from product management to product marketing and then on to all aspects of marketing.
It was a very smooth transition. It actually happened in conjunction with working on the very early efforts around the internet of things. It involved getting companies to build products that work together, which started off being just a technical discussion, but very quickly became about: ‘How we going to market that?’
Q: Should B2B marketers be thinking about wearable tech in 2015?
Absolutely, by 2018 there are probably going to be about 200 million wearables. It is already happening. These devises are both input and output, they can both capture information and display it. They have very little storage on them so a lot of technology has to be behind the scenes and if any of that data is sensitive you have to think about security.
Q: How can marketers help their CTOs and CIOs with implementing BYOD and wear your own device (WYOD)?
Wearables, BYOD and the internet of things offers a huge opportunity in terms of internal marketing. Part of what you market is your company, what it stands for and its attributes, so the use of technology by your employees is a reflection of what type of company you are. And so if you are selling technology solutions you should be using the latest technology. I think that is part of how to embrace it.
Q: What advice would you give to women in technology, who aspire to be in positions of leadership?
If they can bring some sort of technology background in with them, that will give them the credibility for any sort of role in a technology company. Women and men are definitely different in the workplace. And so I think it is important women actually don’t just think they have to behave like men in the workplace. I think that is an important part of moving forward in an organisation.
I was the first female engineer student my professor had ever taught but I felt the whole time in my career doors have been open. People talk about there not being enough women at the top, I think it’s true but I don’t feel the barriers are that substantial now, that’s my personal perspective.
