Ann Perreault

Ann Perreault did not come up through the water industry, and that turns out to be the interesting part. She spent roughly two decades in product management and marketing across energy and connected hardware, at Honeywell, Eaton, Xcel Energy, ecobee and Best Buy, building and selling things like demand-response programs and connected-home systems, before she joined Evoqua Water Technologies in 2021. Her pull toward water is older than any of that, though, and she traces it back to growing up in Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes, where, as she puts it, water is a very important and accessible resource, and the appreciation of what you have there stays with you.

Ann Perreault came on (don’t) Waste Water in 2023 as Evoqua's Vice President for Strategic Marketing and Growth, to walk through how a century-old water company had taught itself to grow like a startup. Her half of that job is market intelligence, and she frames it plainly: the work is to understand the market well, to know the trends and the emerging contaminants and the things driving customers to think differently, and then to prioritize where the company invests, much more on purpose than opportunistically. The growth itself runs on open innovation, scouting technology the company does not yet have and bringing it in through partnerships that, as her co-guest Joshua Griffis described, run the whole range from a simple channel deal up to a full acquisition, with many shades in between.

Ann Perreault keeps score with a metric called the Product Vitality Index, and this is where her marketer's discipline shows. The Product Vitality Index, PVI for short, is the share of a company's revenue that comes from recently launched new products, a way of checking whether all that innovation spending is actually producing things customers buy. The honest version is harder than it looks, and she is pointed about it: some companies, she says, count acquisition revenue inside their Product Vitality Index, which inflates the number, whereas Evoqua stayed true to genuinely new product. For a marketing leader to argue for the less flattering version of her own scoreboard tells you most of what you need to know about how she works.

Ann Perreault talks about acquisitions the way someone who has lived through a few of them does. When a deal closes it is very much a growth play, she says, about taking the best of both companies, but the real discipline is making sure you do not break anything, because the learnings from past acquisitions are exactly what determine whether the next one works. That framing landed with unusual timing, because by the time this episode published in September 2023, Evoqua itself had just been acquired by Xylem in a roughly $7.5 billion all-stock deal that closed that May, creating the largest pure-play water-technology company in the world.

Ann Perreault stayed through that integration rather than around it, leading product management, marketing and innovation at Evoqua and then moving up into Xylem, where she is now a Vice President working on vertical strategy, sustainability, growth and innovation across the combined company's biggest markets. The through-line from the woman who grew up by the lakes is consistent: she runs a globally distributed team she has built for diversity of thought, almost entirely international in origin and at gender parity, and she will tell you she is always in the office, it is just a different office every week.

“Some companies will count acquisition revenue in their Product Vitality Index, and so then you have a higher number. We've been very true to our NPI, to where we're investing on new product.”

That instinct, to measure the harder, truer thing rather than the flattering one, is what makes Ann Perreault worth listening to on how an incumbent actually grows, and it is most of why the Evoqua template is one other companies keep trying to copy.