Episode 23 - Courtney Austermehle, Crystal Clear Communicator

Courtney Austermehle is the newly minted CMO of Constructor and a data-driven communications badass. A Philly native, she now calls Boston home, where she lives with her 13-year-old dog Roscoe. Courtney is no stranger to the tech space, having served previously as VP of marketing revenue and bd for Salsify, where she was instrumental in scaling the company’s marketing team from five to forty employees, all while increasing revenue to $100M+ and reaching a valuation above $2B. Clearly, she’s very good at her job. Always audience-focused, from her early days of wanting to be a sports broadcaster to starting up a TV lab and being a local network reporter during college, she always supports her can-do attitude with drive and data. It is one of the things that made her unique in her approach to sales and marketing early in her career.Her successful sales career was relatively short-lived thanks to a desire to do more on the operations side of the business, coinciding with being recruited for a marketing leadership role. At the McGraw Hill job, she saw the company through a new lens of operations. Self-taught on so many fronts, Courtney knows when and how to ask for help when she needs it. Thankful, she knows how fortunate she is to have had senior leaders willing to answer those asks.Courtney knows she hasn’t always been so enlightened. Rough around the edges (her words) when she was younger, she has come to recognize how vital empathy and good communications are in everything she does. Today she works hard on speaking with people with more interest and empathy and takes the time to understand the why of what is being said or asked.Constructor is proving to be just as exciting as she thought it would be. Smaller and nimbler than her previous gigs, it embraces change and collaboration as an inherent part of the culture. Her focus as the company’s first CMO; is efficiency everywhere. She seeks to make things easier and better for her team and Constructor’s external audiences through marketing, training, and audience engagement. Open and aligned with the organization’s goals, she is excited about what the next few years will bring.She is aware of the challenges and biases in a typically male-led industry. Still, she is ready to lean into it and make real strides forward by communicating clearly and building trust with her team, peers, and leadership. Realizing that the more clarity she can bring to communications, the more she can accomplish, the more trust she can build, and the more success for everyone will result.Courtney on LinkedInContructor.io