Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Listen on Google PodcastsLorena Morales is the VP of Marketing at Go Nimbly, a San Francisco-based Revenue Operations company with approximately 15 million ARR and 50 plus headcount. In this episode, Lorena tells us all about how to lead a happy team, plus how you can own your mistakes and overcome challenges.
Lorena Morales is the VP of Marketing at Go Nimbly, a San Francisco-based Revenue Operations company with approximately 15 million ARR and 50 plus headcount.
As a Mexican immigrant, she worked tirelessly to build a successful career and life in the US.
Lorena and Todd discuss her journey from studying in San Francisco, sharpening her skills and leaning into her personality traits to ultimately, her current role at Go Nimbly. What’s really cool is, even though she ended up managing things by coincidence, she realised she was really good at championing people.
Next, they dive into the role of speed & adaptability in marketing, how self-awareness and your personality type can influence your leadership, justifying spend on brand, why she thinks branding success can be quantified and how to ensure as a manager you don’t lose executional sharpness.
The surprise of this episode? Sleep. There’s a lot of overlap with what Lorena does and what we think about this topic, so if you’re a fan, then you’ll enjoy this one.
Love the show? Please review us on Apple or Google podcasts.
Quick bio
Name: Lorena Morales
Profile: VP of Marketing at Go Nimbly, host of the leadership track of The Revenue Podcast.
Lorena on the web: LinkedIn | Twitter | Email
Top tips from this episode
Identify the traits that help you carry yourself with conviction
How do you turn your traits into superpowers?
If you consider yourself as an introvert or stubborn individual, you might be reluctant to add these traits to your list of strengths. The truth is, both can be turned into positive traits, with a little introspection in your behaviour and thinking approach.
As a kid, Lorena was always very solitary. Later on, this made it easy for her to lean into visualisation tools or psychology tools, that helped her picture the life she wanted to pursue.
The second thing was the stubbornness. As a Mexican immigrant studying in the US, Lorena knew that her dream of living and working in Silicon Valley wasn’t going to be an easy task. But her stubbornness helped her see this go through and persist.
The third trait? Curiosity. This and other bits and pieces of her characteristics contributed to Lorena’s personality and way of approaching challenges. In her case, it’s as if she “put a chip in her mind”, that guided her inner confidence and empowered her to take on any challenge that comes in her life.
How to take ownership of your role as Manager or Leader
First, identify your weaknesses. While having a weakness in a certain skillset may not be a positive thing, it can lead to recognition and a path to improvement.
For example, Lorena identified her weakness and together with her team implemented an improvement strategy and a way to evaluate her progress. This helped her strengthen her skills as a marketer and a team lead, know when to delegate tasks, and also recognise the highs and lows and how they impact the business.
Second, deeply understand your customer. It’s not enough to know the product and has multiple touch points with the product team. You have to live and breathe branding, understand what makes it effective and what your customer’s needs are to build a better customer experience.
Episode Highlights
Transcript excerpts from the interview
“It is crucial if you want to be in the marketing world. Marketing has been the department that has experienced the most change in the last let’s say, two decades, than any other instance of the revenue team. That needs a specific type of mentality or individual to run those things.
“You can only be effective or have an impact to revenue if you understand that, for example, you start asking the right questions of like, “okay, how many leads of our pipeline were actually close to our ICP?”. Those questions you couldn’t even ask them yourself, what, like 10 years ago. And now because of the automation that happened, we have more information than ever. And that’s on the internal side.”
“It’s a great time to be a marketer if you ask me because now not only we have the trust of the customer because they can see everything, it’s like they have these laser vision where they can see through the entire company, but especially marketing, your customer is going to know if you’re selling something that is not good for them or that is not a fit. “
On starting to lead a team
“When you start managing, it means that automatically you stop being the do-er. You don’t do things anymore. Your job changes dramatically to being the person that is more coaching someone else, or that it’s making sure that your people are feeling good emotionally, or that your people are in the right positions, or that your people like the things that are way more people-oriented than anything else.
On knowing what it takes to lead a team
“You’re not gonna receive a pat in the back. Recognition is out of the door at that moment, because, again, you’re not going to be fixing things or at least not the tactical things that have a bigger impression in the company. You’re going to be kind of the back-end person of the organisation. But if you do it right, and if you like that sensation of “I have to do with the potential of this person, and I get to see these person bloom to their entire, full, full potential”.
Characteristics of successful leadership
“I think that the self-awareness, homework that you need to do every single day on yourself, it’s primarily gonna be impacting how you present yourself at work. “
“the first thing that you need to understand is the areas where you need to improve. And believing in the honesty and believing in humility and believing just seeing the truth, in general, is gonna set you apart from the other leaders.”
“If you want to be in a leadership position in marketing, you need to understand two things and own them, or take responsibility of them, because ownership tends to have this meaning of like, nobody touches these that I own. And that shouldn’t be the case. It’s more around what are you responsible for.”
These two things are:
insights on how their business is going – so you have to bring your analytical mind. For example, it’s been a weakness of mine for a very long time, and my team at Go Nimbly is fantastic, helping me become a better marketer in that sense.
Product – you need to understand what the hell you’re selling, and you need to talk to your product team often, even as often as, as with your customer, if you can, and you need to, to live and breathe branding. Understand what is the brand and make it effective.
Top quotes
[38:58]
“It’s not a coincidence that there’s new kind of metrics that the very sophisticated marketers in very sophisticated companies are looking at, that eventually become ROI. So, for example, the cost per outcome. That’s a metric that not everyone is talking about. What it means is, in your head, the cost of not only one strategy or one tactic, but the cost of, let’s say, a campaign, that it’s gonna impact one of the areas of marketing. If you set a level on that, and then you match it, that’s when and you attach several dollars to that. That’s when it becomes ROI. “
[40:47]
“People tend to think that trust comes in your contract or your benefits packages. It’s not. It’s something that it needs to be gained every single day and how you gain trust by being accountable.”
[54:09]
“The most valuable things that the human has, in this life or any other that exists is precisely your time and how you spend it. So your sleeping time should be as precious as your time with your significant other, with your dog with your coworkers.”
Share