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

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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/

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