Trust your gut – always, especially in regard to hiring and retention decisions. Negotiate – and know your worth.

These are a few of the lessons Michelle Burrows, CMO, Splashtop (https://www.splashtop.com/), shared with Daniel Burstein in Episode #3 of the How I Made It In Marketing podcast.

We discussed:

• Make sure you have the right partner for what you want to do: Why a test direct marketing campaign of 500 dimensional mailers went awry
• Trust your gut always…especially regarding hiring and retention decisions: The chief marketing officer shares what she learned from leading teams ranging in size from three to 130, including the hiring decision that she realized was a mistake after only three weeks. “What you’ll tolerate speaks volumes to the rest of the organization,” she said.
• Negotiate, and know your worth: A tactic she overlooked for the first 10 years of her career

Burrows also shared lessons she gained from the people she collaborated with in her career:

• Dick Schulte, Executive Coach, Services, Optiv Security: how to work in a different country, when a move to Europe that was supposed to last six weeks to three months (max) turned into a five-year stay
• Denise Persson, CMO, Snowflake: humility from a leader who went on to help launch one of the most successful IPOs ever
• Mariann McDonagh, CMO, WorkFusion: heart-centered leadership

Articles (and a webinar replay) mentioned in this episode:

B2B Social Media Marketing: DocuSign's targeted LinkedIn InMail strategy creates 3 large pipeline opportunities (https://www.marketingsherpa.com/video/webinar/successful-b2b-linkedin-inmail-strategy) – interview with Meagen Eisenberg

What are the most valuable marketing skills? (with free resources to improve those skills) (https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/career-climber/the-5-essential-marketing-skills-you-need-to-be-successful) – includes advice on an interview question to discover how well the candidate understood customers in their previous role

14 Strategies for Hiring and Retaining Marketing Professionals (https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/case-study/marketing-hiring) – discusses some ways to attract employees beyond salary, such as sabbaticals, four-day workweeks, extra paid time off, and more

The De-Branding Campaign: When customers make fun of your new product launch (Episode #2) (https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/debranding) – Everyone in the organization has an opinion on marketing

To receive future episodes of how I Made It In Marketing, sign up to the MarketingSherpa email newsletter at https://marketingsherpa.com/newsletters

This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher free digital marketing course –  https://meclabs.com/course/

Apply to be a guest
If you would like to apply to be a guest on How I Made It In Marketing, here is the podcast guest application – https://www.marketingsherpa.com/page/podcast-guest-application

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Daniel Burstein Podcaster

Daniel Burstein is the Senior Director of Content and Marketing at MarketingSherpa and the host of the ‘How I Made It In Marketing’ podcast, where he talks to marketing leaders about the lessons learned through their careers.

He also reports on successful marketing campaigns and industry data in MarketingSherpa articles, and helps facilitate the AI Guild from MarketingSherpa's parent organization, MECLABS Institute.

Daniel has 23 years of experience in copywriting, content writing, interviewing, speaking, business journalism, content marketing, sales enablement, and field marketing communications.