Megan Lueders, Chief Marketing Officer at Zenoss is nominated by Alison Guzzio

Years in Business: 20

Megan Lueders is redefining what it means to be a Chief Marketing Officer. She brings a global mindset to her role as a marketing leader and executive decision maker at Zenoss, applying strategic thinking and a keen business acumen to the interplay between technology, branding, sales, partner relationships, and company culture.

Megan is a firm believer in solving modern marketing challenges through continuous improvements in people, processes, and technology. She has implemented account-based marketing (ABM) initiatives, digital marketing strategies, and lead-generation campaigns to grow sales year-over-year and assisted in the company’s transition from a direct-sales-only business to a successful channel and direct sales model.

Joining Zenoss at its 12-year mark, Megan re-established the brand, helping the company shed its image as an outdated organization. She performed a significant brand refresh, overhauling the look & feel, tone, style, and instated new corporate messaging to define the company’s vision as the leader in Software Defined IT Operations (SDITO). As a result, every person within Zenoss is able to consistently express what the company does and the value the software delivers.
She focused on changing the external brand perception by re-architecting the Zenoss website, community platform and CMS platform, instituted SEO best practices to better position Zenoss on search engines and secured a Top 20 ranking as a Best Places to Work in Austin. Simultaneously, Megan modernized the demand-generation engine by optimizing their digital presence, scaling their campaigns and creating new sources of inbound leads via these updated platforms.

Under Megan’s direction, attendance at the annual GalaxZ user conference—a three-day conference where Zenoss customers share and communicate with one another—has grown by 30%. She raised the bar on keynotes, featuring speakers from Enterprise 500 companies, and has achieved 100% growth in GalaxZ sponsors year-over-year and a 200% increase in sponsorship revenue. The conference now generates an average of $5 million in yearly revenue.

Armed with a vision for how Marketing could extend further into the customer journey, Megan partnered closely with the executive team to strategically shift to an Account Based Marketing-Selling approach. She cultivated a strong alliance between the Sales and Customer Success teams and demonstrated her strategic prowess in presenting and then executing on the new strategy. Megan worked closely with the Channel Sales team to grow the partner base, generate new pipeline and further the Zenoss brand presence.

Most important to Megan is how she continuously serves as an engaged mentor in the community and provides career development opportunities for her team. She’s passionate about growing her team’s knowledge and creating an environment where they succeed. She established a marketing internship program to foster millennial career development and encourages her team to participate in giving back to the community each quarter.

Megan has earned the recognition of CRN Women of the Channel, CMO Club, Profiles in Power, and Martech Women to Watch. She is a regular speaker at The University of Texas at Austin, SXSWi and this year at SXSWedu.