The marketing movement. Why refine labs? I'm happy to be on the marketing movement podcast again. My name is Sydney Waterfall.
I am a VP of demand here at refine labs and my guest today is my Grossman. I got so much value out of reading her book earlier this year right when I started my journey at refine labs that I thought she'd be the perfect person to chat through leveling up your career and just all things marketing career driven. So that's kind of where we're going to talk about today. But I'd love to have you introduce yourself and I have to listen.
Well first of all, thank you for having me and I'm excited to be here. You know I'm a huge fan of you. We had the pleasure of working together and I got to learn for you as well. So pretty awesome relationship with you.
So a little bit about me. I spent the last 15 years of my career in marketing was a two time VP of marketing where companies like Microsoft and Google so kind of pretty much leveled up in my career and was able to hit a place where I felt you know this is what success means to me and in the process really realized you know what it's not just about the doing and the marketing actually really enjoy helping other people do the same. I was giving free advice all over the place. My employees, friends, colleagues and at some point they were like, I should write this down.
And that turned into a book invaluable and now I'm also turning it into an online course. So very soon more people can really learn how to level up in their career. I see I love the tactical advice that you gave in your book and it's a couple chapters I could always go back to if I'm like experiencing something where I'm like I need a refresher on this or I'm not really sure how best to handle this. Obviously you know moving throughout your career there's a lot of different obstacles and things that you encounter but I thought today we can definitely talk about you know what are some of the steps just in general that you've seen for building a successful career.
Obviously this is a little bit more marketing focused but probably could have lied to like anybody as well. Yeah well let me start with a story. So I actually did not start my career marketing. For the first seven years of my career I was a travel agent.
And it was just a job that kind of fell into and it was convenient and you know I was working 24 seven and I kind of made progress right. So seven years into the role I was promoted twice. But I was climbing the role matter because I didn't even stop to ask myself is this what I really wanted. And I had to figure out how am I going to do that.
And I had to figure out how am I going to pivot into marketing how am I going to get started. So if you fresh out of college if you don't really have any work experience this is what I would do right now. I would first try and figure out okay what type of discipline within marketing do I actually want to go into and there are a lot of different options these days when I started you can do marketing comms, events and maybe a little bit of copywriting but like that was it. So today it's a little bit more complex.
Go and Google it seriously just go and Google it or look for job descriptions and see what makes you excited right. Choose one. I know you're going to choose five. Choose one.
Go a little bit deeper. What does that mean? Go and interview a few people who are actually doing this work right now because you do not want to take a job like I did and six months into it to figure out oh I hate doing this. So I was super excited to get into digital marketing at some point in my career but then I realized I actually have to spend a lot of time in front of spreadsheets.
I don't like that. So do yourself a favorite talk to people. Learn from them what the job really is. What are you going to do day to day?
And then you want to immerse yourself in that specific discipline. So you don't need to learn about everything in marketing. You want to double down on one specific topic. You really want to know about demand.
Listen to the demand and podcast right. You want to know more about product marketing. Go join the product marketing alliance. Surround yourself with the knowledge and information and invest 30, 50 hours of learning.
That's going to get you a really good place but learning and doing not the same thing and you want to get some experience. So you want to make a project and with everything that's available today you don't actually need to have a job to gain the experience. You can build your own website. You can start your own podcast.
And then you can start your podcast. And then you can start your podcast and then teach yourself how to do them. And when you have some of that experience and what I actually ended up doing I went to the travel agency and I said hey there's a new thing. It's called Facebook.
And it's really exciting. I think it's going to be really helpful for us to get more clients. Do you modify do some work on my spare time and I'm going to open a Facebook page and manage it for the company. And they said no problem.
I was there for seven years and they knew me and they trusted me and I still did my day job but I spent another hour two hours every day working on Facebook and six months later I actually had results. And so I was like what's really behind all of this is there are three things you need to do when you want to level up in your career. First and foremost, it's about your mindset. You need to believe that you can actually do it.
Number two is a strategy. If you're just going to walk around aimlessly or if you're just going to work really really hard and hope for someone to give you a chance you're going to be waiting for a really one time. And lastly you want to have a system because it is so hard to sit down and tell yourself today I'm going to work on my career. If you don't have a system if you don't have something that constantly reminds you're doing this or automates some of the work you're going to give you're going to be able to work really quickly.
So that was a very long answer to say if you want to level up in your career, mindset, strategy, and systems. I love the framework that you kind of put around that. And I think when I think about earlier in my career, I kind of fell into this campaign manager role. And I was like, okay, I like certain parts of it.
I naturally gravitated to other parts of like have to do on the job but not my favorite. So I think pulling out things that you like about your current role and don't like about your current role is key. Also, I naturally gravitated towards data. And so for me in that company, I'm going to start a little bit of a really good job.
And I'm going to be able to actually gravitated towards data. And so for me in that company, I was able to do some one off data projects with the operations team and really learn way more than I would have if I said, oh, I'm not going to do that project. But that's return dividends for me in my career as well. So I like I think that's super actionable for people to take away and to be able to do.
And then with everything, if you don't just like you need a marketing strategy, a go to market strategy, you're going to need a strategy for your own career and what you want to do. So I love those three elements that you broke into. I'm going to be able to make the first one, which is the mindset. What does that mean to you?
And how do you think about that? Yeah. So I had the opportunity to talk to quite a few marketers in the last couple of years. And I think there are a few different things that are actually stopping people from leveling up.
And I think the first one, which is actually probably the baseline, they don't realize that they have the power to drive their career forward in the direction that they want. So they're very much stuck in the belief that progression will only come from their manager, some more senior at the company, the economy. I don't know. I don't know.
But they don't think they actually have an impact on the ability to take their career in the direction that they want to go. So that's step number one. You actually need to understand that it's all about you. Every single thing I decided I wanted to do in my career, I put together a plan.
I was able to achieve it. It doesn't mean it's easy. It doesn't mean you're just going to think about it and it's going to happen. But you actually have the power to do it.
I think another stepping stone is believing in yourself and self-doubt and poster syndrome. Trust me, we all feel that. And it doesn't matter how senior you are, right? But I stepped into my first VP role.
I was terrified. I mean, I kind of knew I could get the job. I mean, technically I got it right, but I've never done that before. And every time you step into something a little bit new or different, we have those feelings.
But our thoughts are not facts. Just because we think something, it doesn't mean it's true. So a lot of the work that I try to do with people is to really sit down and think about what you're thinking, even write it down and then ask yourself, is this true? Do I have proof?
And more often than not, you're going to find out that it's just a story that you're are telling yourself in your head. So you really need to believe that you have the power to make a difference in your career in your career. And you really need to believe that you have the power to make a change in your career forward. And you need to trust yourself that you're going to figure it out and feel confident in your ability to actually make it happen.
I think everyone has self-doubt. Like when I, you know, even took this new role at Refine Labs, or even when I was interviewing, I was like, oh, am I good enough? Am I going to make it through? And then, I know for me personally, what I do is I just kind of like slap myself in the face and I'm like, all right, you got this, you can do it, but it takes a lot of practice to get there and to kind of pull yourself recognized when you're having those thoughts and those doubts and those thoughts and like pull yourself out of it.
It does take a lot of training, but I'd say that's one of my go-tos is like, not fake it until you make it, but really kind of get that confidence going and, you know, believe in yourself that you can figure it out, you can do it, you've figured out stuff before, you've achieved milestones that you didn't think that you could before in your career. And so that's just a personal thing that I do. I'm like, channel someone else or like, oh, what would someone else do in this, in this situation? If I'm doubting myself, I think of someone that I admire from a career perspective or a career perspective.
And I'm like, how would they handle this? I'm going to channel that energy and I'm going to let that energy like really power me, but it does take a lot of practice for sure. So, and it's a hard thing to kind of overcome. So once you work on your mindset and you're, you know, kind of getting self-realizing some of that stuff, writing stuff down, kind of what do you recommend next to think about?
Yeah. Well, then you want to have a strategy. And when I say a strategy, you just need to understand what's the direction or the destination you're going towards because if you're just going to get into your car, it's not going to take you anywhere unless there's a destination in my case, in Uber because I don't like to drive. You have to put something in the app.
You have to tell the driver where you want to go. And what I see happen for a lot of people is maybe at the beginning of the year, they have a vision, they're like, I had a goal, I want to do that, and then life happens. And you just, like up in the morning and you go into your job and suddenly you wake up in December and you're exactly where you started the year. So you really need to have a destination in mind of where you want to go.
And that can be the next role. That can be 10 years ahead. It really depends on your own vision and how you prefer to kind of think about your future. And then when you have a new experience, you can ask yourself, okay, noble shit, what is it going to take to get from where I am today to where I want to go?
And if you don't know immediately, and most of us don't, one, you can Google it like everything else. But the best thing I found is just go and talk to people once again, where doing the role you want to get to. So when I was a director, I spoke to a lot of EP's because I really wanted to know what's the difference. What is it going to take for me to actually get there?
And you need to talk to a few people. You can just talk to one person and assume whatever their experience was, it's going to apply to you. You need to talk to a few of them and you'll start seeing trends, the same type of experience or the same skills will come up over and over again. And then you're going to have to figure out how to create opportunities for yourself to gain those skills.
And once again, you can do that probably with the company you're at right now. You don't necessarily have to leave, you know, to get more experience. You just have to be really cognizant and look for those opportunities. And when you have a destination, and especially if you are, if you have a system that's the next step that reminds you, every month, you need to take some sort of action to move towards your goal, then your mind is going to start finding those opportunities for you.
And you have to be able to get a little bit more experience because you're already out there. You're just not paying attention. So if I knew that I really wanted to gain more strategic experience, right? I want to spend more time building strategy.
If I know that and my brain thinks about it, then when my manager tells me, hey, I'm going to be working on the strategy for the next week, I can actually ask, hey, can I help? Right? If I want more leadership experience and you know what? I don't have the head count right now.
I can't actually hire someone. But I hear someone in a different team is super junior. They just joined the company and they actually live in a different way. It's just an opportunity to really build those skills.
And if you have a destination, you'll start finding those opportunities. And then the next step would be to find systems to remind you to actually do the work. Doing the work. That's the actual hard part and actually makes you the magic happen, right?
I would say this is actually the easiest part because doing if you know what you need to do, the actual execution is not necessarily so hard. The figuring out what you need to do or more specifically what you shouldn't spend time on. Okay. And then actually ignoring the 100,000 different things that are going on in your life and setting up time to work on your career.
The actual doing is not that difficult because what I usually recommend that people do don't really focus on really big audacious goals. Those are just so overwhelming that you're never going to get down to actually doing them, right? So one of my goals was to do public speaking. I wasn't the best at it.
I wanted to gain more experience. And for years I had, you know, do more public speaking. I had to do more public speaking. That looked so scary.
And what I ended up doing eventually is I broke it down to a really small task. I'm like, okay, I want to do more public speaking. What do I need to do? Well, I need to find events to speak.
Okay, create a list of events. What else do I need to actually have a speech? Okay, figure out what I want to talk about, right? The speech.
So I broke it down for like 20 tasks. And then every week I just did one. I just spent 30 minutes doing one thing. And yeah, it took about two months.
But at the end I actually had a plan. I knew what I wanted to talk about. I was like, I'm not going to talk about that. I was like, what do you want to talk about?
What are you thinking about? Can I be a speaker? And that landed me a few speaking opportunities. But if I just completely ignored it and I was just like one day someone magically will come to me and ask me to speak because I'm amazing.
I would still be waiting. It just doesn't happen that way. Yeah. The short actionable items has to get make progress on those larger goals.
I love your point too about talking to multiple people. When you're either not sure what you want your There's so many more tools available to us these days than five, 10 years ago, communities, even if you're just active in communities, if you connect with other peers, you can ask for people's time that you see our experts and what you might be interested or what you want to be interested in. And you'd be shocked at how many people will meet with you, will talk with you, will help you. People love sharing their expertise and their help.
And so you can gain a lot of access throughout that, um, to help define your destination and help help you with that if you're struggling with that. But then also on creating an action plan too. There's, there's a lot of different steps that you can take there. Okay.
So we got that part and say the next part, what's the next part of the process that you would recommend? Okay. So I think a lot of people sometimes make it to the place that I'm going to write down my goals. So they have goals and they skip the breaking it down.
So if you actually broke it down, there are a lot less barriers for you to get started, but I really like to almost automate things because one, I forget, uh, and two, I don't always feel like actually doing the work. So, you know, you need a bit of a reminder. So one system that I have, for example, is a weekly reminder to work on my career goals and the reminder already has a link to the list of tasks. And all I have to do every Sunday is to just pick one task and plug it into my calendar.
That's it. Like a calendar reminder, a Siri reminding you what it, what does that look like? Yeah. It's just a calendar reminder to look at my tasks and then I look at them.
I pick one randomly because they all take about 30 minutes. Right. And then I just plug it into my calendar. So when I plan the week, I know that I have 30 minutes that I have to spend on my career.
And I already know what the task is. So I don't have to figure it out. And I don't have a reason to procrastinate because it's already there. Um, I also try and have like a monthly reminder about really big opportunities, right?
So yes, you have small tasks, but sometimes you really need to just keep your mind open to new opportunities or to ask yourself, Hey, you know, is there a problem I can fix? Or, um, is there a new skill that I can bring to the table? So I usually try and have like a monthly check in with myself to see, okay, how much progress have I made? Is this actually moving in the right direction?
And I'll be honest, sometimes I skip that because I don't really have the time, but I think spending 30 minutes a week is something that most people can can probably do. Um, and that makes it just a little bit more simple. Another thing that I do. I try to remind myself why I'm doing this.
And it's a little bit of a heck, but what I do is I try to, I want to show you just why I'm looking down. Um, I try to put reminders in places that I would actually see them. For example, my phone, I have my goal. I am building the career of my dreams.
So in the 256 times every single day that I open or unlock my phone, I get to see it and I remind myself why I'm doing that. So I just like to find little hacks and little things that can really help me get more motivated. Um, and I really like using a tracker. So it's almost like a to do list, but I like colors.
And every time I do something, it turns green. And I'm just like, yeah, and every time I open a spreadsheet, I see a lot of greens and I'm like, like, damn, I'm really moving forward. And I think that little hit of men just keeps you going because you want to see more of that. And it's something that you need to practice.
This is not how it worked for me the first year. The first year I was lucky if I did something once a month, maybe every other month. But you really learn because the minute you get results, the first time you see what happens when you're intentional and you're trying to get something and you actually get it, that's when you really believe that you can make it happen. And then you're addicted.
You just want to continue doing more and more because you know everything is possible. And I know that it sounds like a very inspirational fluff, but it's true. I mean, I had a 10 year plan and 10 years ago, I wasn't working near actually achieving my goals. I mean, I was living in a different country.
I was not an executive and I wanted to be a VP at a startup. Um, I wasn't married. I wasn't working out at a very different life, but I made a plan and I stuck to the destination because they had to get there, changed all the time. I tried a bunch of stuff and they did not work out.
So I had to try and find a different way to get there. But then I ended up checking every single box on my list, everything. And when you look back, it's just there's no way I would be where I am today. If I haven't had that plan.
Well, just like, um, you know, stacking habits and we talk about, you know, habit building in like your personal life and then you could look back and you're like, whoa, I created good habits and then a year later, those led to better habits and better habits. Like also kind of reminds me of like growth packing, you know, anything in like, I know, I was really everything in marketing because I'm a marketer, but anything, you know, you're trying to build a content engine. You're trying to build a goal for you to hit a certain revenue target. If you don't have a plan that's broken down very similar to, you know, small tasks, your small tasks are going to change along the way to that big goal of how you're going to hit revenue or whatever is the goal for you at that time.
But it's essentially applying very similar tactics, but only to like your own career. So almost like a career strategy, if you will kind of think about it. Yeah. And there's a compounding effect because the more you do it, the bigger the results that you're actually going to see and you're building skills.
So the more you have those skills, the more opportunities that are going to open up for you. And, you know, I'm sure that some people listening, okay, but for marketers or, you know, what discipline within marketing I should go into. And I actually want to say this is going to sound that it doesn't matter because you should do what you love, right? And you want to choose something that you're good at and get too excited.
But it really depends on where you want to go. And, you know, you can be a superstar, which is usually someone who just wants to move up the ladder. They really want to be more in leadership role. They want to be a people's manager and there are some people who are rock stars.
So they want to get really, really good at their own discipline and they may still be doing the work, but they will be the best in the world doing that work. And it doesn't matter which one you want because you define what success is for you. But if you don't know where you're going, you might be climbing their own ladder, right? I mean, my brother, who is a genius engineer, was really good at his job and kept getting promoted.
And at some point he was miserable because he said, I love coding. I don't necessarily enjoy managing other people. I understand that's, you know, the way to kind of move up, but it's just not what I want to do. But it took him three years of managing people to understand he doesn't want to manage people.
So you just have to ask yourself what you actually want to do. And if you don't know, which is perfectly fine, talk to your boss. Do you want your boss to job? Maybe that's the direction you want to move into or talk to someone who's an expert in your field.
Do you want their job? Just explore and don't. And yes, you can Google a lot of things, but you're going to get so much more information if you actually talk to people. And I know that it's a little bit intimidating.
So let me tell you a secret or the most part. People really enjoy talking about themselves. So when you give them an opportunity to talk about themselves, I would say seven times out of 10, you will probably get the yes. Yes, completely agree.
I think all of this is such good advice. We could go on and on for we could have you on the podcast for every little section of your new course that you're working on. But if you're not already following Maya on LinkedIn, she posts a ton of great content on LinkedIn. But where else can people kind of get some follow up resources if they can't get enough of what they heard today?
Yeah, obviously you can go to mygrossman.com and you can read more about what I do. The course and the book, if you're interested in valuable master, the tensile you need to skyrocket through your career. And soon I'll have an online course or anyone who really wants to grow their career and faster. Awesome.
And I can I give 10 out of 10 from the book. It's a great, great actionable book and not a super long read, but very compact. And very great to level up your career. So I hope a lot of people got something great out of this, something new to try.
And I hope they actually put some of these tactics into play in their career.