Episode 92 : Lead With Value - Leave People With Something They Didn't Have Before With Jessica King
To be an entrepreneur, you have to lead with value. That is one of the most important lessons that Jessica King learned throughout her journey. Jessica is an experienced B2B marketing expert who is passionate about social sciences and communication. That passion soon drew her to sales and marketing. In this conversation with Amy Vetter, Jessica shares how she built great relationships that weren’t cliché sales relationships. If you plan on going into marketing or sales, you have to change your mindset and understand what the people are trying to achieve rather than telling them you got something to solve their problems. Tune into this episode and learn why you need to focus on delivering value.
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Lead With Value - Leave People With Something They Didn't Have Before With Jessica King
Welcome to this episode where I interview Jessica King, Chief Marketing Officer for Botkeeper. She is an experienced B2B marketer with a history of working in software, SaaS technology, accounting and services spaces. Her passion for Social Science and Communication drew her to sales and marketing, where she has worked with clients across a range of industries, including retail, education, technology and more.
With real-world experience at top marketing and software companies, she has assisted hundreds of businesses across numerous stages of growth and has a BS in Psychology and Counseling. She is uniquely qualified as a senior leader and team player to help lead businesses to maximize their reach, tell their stories, digitally evolve and build mission-driven marketing strategies. During my interview with Jessica, we discuss her journey of being responsible and independent very early in life that ended up creating the work ethic and drive to create her success as a sales and marketing leader.
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I'm here with Jessica King from Botkeeper. Jessica, do you want to start off and give us a little background on yourself?
Amy, I'm happy to be here. I'm Jessica King. I'm the CMO at Botkeeper. I've been there since 2018. I have a wonderful team. I oversee all of our growth and educational initiatives with the accounting profession.
I'm looking forward to getting into your story for everyone, but I know you've done a number of companies. You helped them grow from the marketing side. Before we get into that, we love to hear more about your beginnings and your story as a person. Where did you grow up? What did your parents do?
I'm from Massachusetts. I grew up on Cape Cod in a little town called Bourne and I'm a bit of a townie. I haven't ventured too far from home. I have worked in the area my whole life and then ultimately in and out of Boston, which is great. It's been a nice balance between city, ocean life and all that jazz. My past has been a bit unconventional. My parents were also from Massachusetts. My dad's a Marine. My mom was an RN for many years and came from a very hard-working and passionate family. I'm the oldest of four siblings. For a large part of my life, I've had a very heavy hand in helping to raise my younger siblings. I'm very family-oriented in general.
Why were you helping to raise them?
My mom, for a good part of my life, was a single parent working nights as an RN, overnight in the psychiatric space. There was a good age difference between myself and my youngest sister. We're fifteen years apart.
Were you an only child for fifteen years?
No, my little sister. There were two older and then two younger. We took care of the two little. We got them off the bus in the morning, and it was a good balance. I think I was well-suited for it. I fell into the role naturally as the oldest. It taught me a lot.
Your father being a Marine, was he moving around a lot?
He was a Vietnam vet. He was no longer active by the time he had my sister and me. He has been a bit out of the picture since about 13, 14 years old. The family is amazing. We've stayed close with the family, but from him, we learned a ton of survival skills. He's very intelligent. He would give us spelling bees in the car and was teaching us hardcore math at a very young age.
Being a Marine, he is very tough and structured. He is about respect and honor. I had a cool dynamic between my parents. It's a different kind of balance. My mom was a free spirit. Also, incredibly intelligent, hardworking, but very much about emotive kinds of interactions and great interpersonal skills. My dad was that little bit of a harder personality, but that honor, respect, structure, education and everything. We turned out okay, all things considered.
All of us have similar situations. How did your mom become an RN? Just being a free spirit, what was her major? Is she more of a creative? How did she end up becoming a nurse?
She was in theater. She was an actress for a good part of her young adult life. It was a different time in the '60s and '70s. My grandparents pressured her a lot to get a real career, and so she pursued nursing school that became her long-term career, but she sings and dances. She was in all sorts of theater growing up in high school and then in college.
She's been waiting for one of her children or grandchildren to pick up the torch and end up on Broadway. It has yet to happen. We danced and did a lot of singing and things like that growing up a little much younger, but nobody's quite grabbed the torch and ended up on a Broadway or with their name written on the sidewalk or anything like that. It’s up in lights. Not quite yet.
Did you do that younger?
Not theater. My sister and I being the elder too, danced competitively for years. We did gymnastics, ballet, jazz and all of that stuff. We did a lot of choruses at school. That was fun. That stuff helps in communication, being confident and being okay with speaking and up on the stage. It was a great experience growing up. Luckily, we have the schools to support it.
Even though my mom was a very hard worker and very busy all the time, she was huge in getting us immersed in activities and keeping us busy and having something other than just typical school going on eight hours a day. We did some cheerleading. We did pretty well, competed and got our trophies when we were younger. It was great. There are some questionable pictures out there of me in a lot of sequences at age ten. I'm hoping that those don't surface on their own later in life.
Now you've told your whole company. I'm sure they're going to be on the lookout for getting that out. With that, you're in creative activities and still working hard in school, your mom being a nurse. What was it that you dreamed of when you grew up that you wanted to be?
Early on, I was passionate about Social Sciences. My mom being in psychiatric, worked with adolescents for a long time and they're very hands-on with adolescents, especially trauma. It's a very hard job, especially when you’re a parent. We never learned anything confidential about the folks that my mother worked with, but she would certainly speak to the bigger picture. She teaches us a little bit about borderline scenarios or what schizophrenia was. I got immersed in Social Sciences. My dad has been to Vietnam, a lot was talked about when it came to PTSD and things of that nature. We've all got our stories. Families all got things that have happened.
For whatever reason, I dug into those things and started to fixate on like, "Tell me more. I want to understand the why." In high school, I was like, "I'm going to be a doctor." I'm going to either practice psychiatry or get into clinical or abnormal psychology. I've worked my whole life. Starting at age twelve, I was in my god family's restaurant, working the hostess stand, busing tables and then worked my way upfront of the house back of the house. I was running a kitchen by the time I was nineteen. I was a general manager by the time I was 21. It was a crash course about life in the restaurant industry. Anybody that ends up reading this who has worked in the industry, gets what I'm talking about.
Awesome management of all types of personalities.
Talk about a persona exercise.
If you're trying to look at the psychology of people.
Those things totally go hand-in-hand. I've met a lot of folks in the marketing space that have that combo. Social Sciences major who worked as a bartender, a restaurant person and now they are in sales and marketing. They fit well together, but I knew I wanted to pursue that for a big picture career, and I was working my way through high school and college ultimately. I then hit a fork in the road.
As many do, I had been on track with my degree, pursuing the right courses and getting into my twenties and the back half of school was like, "What do I want to do from here?" I had moved out when I was seventeen and a half. I had a house. I was renting very much trying to do the adult thing on my own, the older sibling mentality.
I was saying, "On one hand, I can pursue this career in Social Sciences and keep going on the doctor track.” I liked it and I was enjoying it, but it meant several more years of school, unpaid internships and it wasn't like a slam dunk moment where I knew like, “This is my career. I can't see myself doing anything else.” On the other hand, there's this hospitality thing that's going well and making me good money. I enjoyed it and people from the business, it's a love-hate thing. I know I don't want to own a restaurant so what is it that I want to do?
I had been evaluating my life. Enrico Palmerino, who's the CEO of Botkeeper, we go way back. We got to talking and he was like, "Have you thought about sales?" He knew my sister initially and we all became friends early on. Now, here we are, a couple of companies later still doing the thing, but he is now my brother-in-law. We've worked together, as long as we've known each other. Within a couple of months, we were colleagues. He told me to pursue sales. He said, "I think you have the skillsets. You should go and try." I was like, "Can I? Let me give this a shot." I have nothing to lose. I ended up going to work at another outsourced bookkeeping company.
How did you get tied into that?
I had started applying around Massachusetts. I think I took a couple of interviews at payroll companies and I was new to the space. He suggested outsource services, and there I ended up. I cut my teeth in the accounting profession there. It wasn't like Botkeeper, where it's high tech. It was very much outsourced services to business owners. A crash course in everything that goes on under the hood financially in a business and I had to learn a lot quickly.
Luckily, I'm a bit of a nerd. That stuff was like, "This is cool," number and data. I also learned a lot about the accounting profession itself because that was a good lead gen machine for me. We started strategically partnering with accounting professionals and CPA firms that needed bookkeeping. I started to befriend a lot of folks in Massachusetts doing a lot of networking and spending a lot of time understanding who they were.
That went well. I got my sales experience climbed through the ranks there. I ended up managing that team and then pivoted into software sales. I ended up going to work at a company called HubSpot. It's a marketing software company, a bigger software company in Boston and they are amazing. It's a really great culture. They put you through essentially a very tough, but amazingly, gratifying, super thorough sales and marketing like baptism by fire.
Lead With Value : The purpose of marketing is to tell the story, make it memorable, and draw people in so that you can bring them value.
Within a couple of months, you have to be able to talk the talk, walk the walk and talk to a CMO. Talk to somebody that's been marketing for 30 years because you are going to work with them on their strategy, not just a sale from the ground up. It was awesome. I met some amazing people and sharpened my sales skills at that point. I went from selling services to getting into a SaaS sales model.
On one hand, I was cold sourcing and doing a lot of interpersonal like face-to-face sales and relationship sales. I then ended up in more of a remote position selling into the West Coast. I'm talking to brand-new to the scene entrepreneurs who are launching their companies that don't know how to do marketing and don't know how to go about creating a presence and lead generation for themselves.
On the other side, I'm talking to veteran CMOs who are stuck in the same rhythms that they had been in for years and this is when inbound was relatively new. The concept was starting to become a bigger thing. I ended up working with, over the course of my time there, under 700 companies in some capacity or another. The way that they model their sales process there is it doesn't matter if that person on the other end of the phone buys from you or not, you bring them value.
It's such an interesting job when you think about it. You were good at sales, but you were learning marketing strategy. It's giving you both sides of the coin without you even realizing it. You had to learn it to sell it. You then see a marketing strategy from so many different companies too, so you can see best practices.
Not just best practices, but the industry differences, I'm talking to a software company, dental practice, and veterinary company. It was one of HubSpot's clients. It was every shape and size. You're in the trenches with those business owners and with those marketers on, “Here's where I need to get to. How do I get there?” While a marketing agency is a person, if they're outsourcing, typically writing the blogs or creating the content, we work with them building their strategy from the ground up and saying, "I have to get here,” and going, “Let me explain this methodology of marketing. Let's talk about what inbound is. Let's talk about what digital marketing is. Do you believe that this is how you're going to get to where you're going to go?” “Great.”
“We've got these tools. This is how they factor in. I'm going to take you through the entire process. We were very relationship-like post-deployment over the course of a couple of years in the thick of it with our clients working with them on strategy.” It was pretty crazy. I worked my way upmarket there, so I started with the startups and smaller organizations. I ended up doing mid-market and some enterprise-size organizations as well. It was fascinating. It definitely evolved over time.
From the Social Science aspect of working that into your career, how do you think that helped you in sales and now helped you in marketing?
Being somebody that wants to understand other people, if you're drawn to Social Sciences, it's because you're drawn to the whole like, "How does this all work?" What's going on inside your head that brought you to where you are? The role that I'm in now, I hear it used a lot generically now, but it is a blend of art and science. On the sales side, it came down to listening as somebody in a psychological role or psychiatric role must do. Understanding where this person is coming from like, “Lay it out on the table for me. Tell me everything. Where are you trying to go? What's got in the way? How are you trying to get there?” Ultimately, you're just supporting them through that process.
It helped me on the sales side. I feel like I built some great relationships that weren't like your traditional cliche sale relationship. If I tell you something, I'm out of the picture. I still talk to some of my clients that I sold software to years ago, which is cool. You know that you made a dent in their strategy or had an impact on them getting to where they needed to go. On the marketing side, it's a lot of the same approach. The purpose of marketing is to tell the story and make it memorable and make it elicit an emotional response and draw people in so that you can bring them value.
One, you need to mean that. You need to understand who you're going after and do everything you can to learn about what is going to bring the value, what their challenges are, what they need and try to figure out where you fit in and how you can help. The listening happens on a much bigger scale. Digging into where you're coming from the person on the other end is important in what you're putting together to execute upon.
It's got to line them. That person that reads that blog, clicks on that social post, downloads that piece of collateral or end up in a sales process with your team needs to experience value. It needs to say, "What this person is saying or doing is either educating me or giving me something I didn't have before in one capacity or another, in every way."
All through the journey, whatever they need at that stage that they're in. It's a lot of detailed work.
When I've trained up other marketers and both like HubSpot when I was training business owners to understand marketing, and now with my team, I use dating as an analogy. Top of the funnel mentality, it's more flywheel now, but if we use the funnel as a marketing analogy, somebody at the top of the funnel may not even understand what their problem is yet. You're not going to go at them proposing on the first date. You can't assume you've got something that's going to solve their problem. It's helping them understand what it is they're trying to achieve.
If somebody goes into Google and searches, "My business is losing money." Why is it losing money? What's going on? What is it that you're looking to solve for? Throughout that process, that's when they come to understand using Botkeeper as an example, “It's my bookkeeping or my capacity and my capacity ultimately comes back to a bookkeeping challenge, operational challenge or sales and marketing challenge.”
You do have to be ready to support them at every stage of that journey both in high-level interest and self-education to, “I understand what my problem is, but how do I want to go about solving it? Is it a tool? Is it human capital? Is it let it go and suffer the consequences and then into that decision-making phase, which is, ‘I know what I want to do, who do I want to do this with?’”
I've been in two different conversations where who I'm speaking to at a company is like, "There's nothing different between marketing and sales." They do the same thing. They want to use the marketer to do the sales or they want to use the salesperson to do the marketing. I keep trying to explain how the skillsets are complementary, but you need them to focus on what they do. How would you explain the difference between marketing and sales? There's always healthy friction.
It's a team sport. We joke internally like it's the baton handoff. Our job on the marketing side is to create brand awareness and create value in mass, draw people and elicit that emotional response. Collect the information that is going to help us understand who that person is and lead them down the funnel. At some point, we're going to take them from education to qualification.
Now it becomes a two-way convo of, “We've got something that could help you. Let's deep dive into who you are and what you're trying to achieve and determine if this is going to work for both of us. At the end of the day, we sell you something that's not going to work for you, you don't stay a client. We lose money, we lose a partner. It helps nobody.”
We're in the life cycle. Marketing is certainly involved at every stage of the journey down to the customer, down to upgrade. We're there every step of the way, but what we're doing functionally is a bit different. There's a baton handoff from here's who we are and what we do to, "We're having a two-way conversation." That's where the sales role. We have account executives here. They're specialists in understanding who that person is, the aspects of what goes on in an accounting firm. They have the technical knowledge and know what to listen for to say, "Here's what I'm hearing. Here's what we've done. Here's how I think this might all tie off and tie together."
I challenged that statement of, “They are the same.” They are definitely overlapping and they're working together, but marketing is very one-to-many in many scenarios. Even with heavy personalization and heavy targeting regardless, it's still one-to-many. Sales is like this is you and me. They're very interpersonal back and forth, two-way conversations.
The human part that comes into making sure that the lead was worth it in the first place.
It’s worth their time.
If you look back at you taking care of your siblings, that pressure you had younger, starting on your own so early, owning a house, a job and all that stuff. How do you think it has affected your work style in good ways and not so good ways?
Responsibility, I thrust myself into adult responsibility which is funny, like my kids now. I can't imagine them moving out. That's insane to me. They got behind. They take kindergarten into first grade and you're like, "This is a huge, crazy moment." It taught me a lot about responsibility. My entire life responsibility was a big theme. You have to take care of yourself. You have to take care of the people around you.
That's certainly translated into my sales experience. Take care of the person on the other end of the phone, the marketing experience. Take care of this community because you have to bring value and then my team. It's a big personal thing for me. I feel a huge responsibility to the people that I work with, especially the people that roll up to me like, “Your career development is wrapped into this organization and what we do here. Your life experiences, the money that you make and the bills that you pay, this is tied to this organization and I need to do right by you.”
Responsibility is a huge theme there. Interpersonal skills, not just coming up with my sisters, going through the motions, but teaching them how to talk to people and passing things down that I learned, as cliche as that sounds. Make sure you say please. Make sure you say excuse me. This older woman is getting out of her car, make sure you let her go first and then hold the door for her.
General consideration and interpersonal skills in a way that's considerate and respectful of the folks that are around you so that they feel valued in a much more specific capacity. Here, especially at Botkeeper, it’s something that I took with me from HubSpot, the culture-focused diversity inclusion. Making sure people here are emotionally and mentally healthy. They feel included and feel respected.
That's luckily something I've been able to bring with me into this professional capacity and help reinforce and instill in the people that I bring onto my team. It's a non-starter. This is what we do here. This is how we treat people. This is how we interact. Know that this comes first. I'd say in a lot of different ways, but those are the few that come to mind right away.
Is there anything about your work style that might be too driven, that you get too stressed, or anything from that time period that you have to be aware of in yourself to pull back?
Big time. Workaholic is a strong word but once I had kids, it changed everything. I became much more fiercely protective of my personal and family time. The value of unplugging takes on a whole different context especially when they start growing. You're like, "How did a year just go by?" I became very much aware of how enthralled I was with projects and work.
It's a double-sided coin. I like to think that I'm dedicated, passionate, involved and I do care about what I do. To have to acknowledge that and say like, "You have to strike a balance now with family life." It's something I had to learn. It's hard, especially when you're a working woman and I'm a feminist. My mom is a feminist. We're strong women and we don't let people forget that.
Coming into a professional technical role, a tech company in the software space, you hear a lot of people struggle with that. A lot of working women struggle with that. They struggle with being heard and being recognized. There were a lot of these components that I had to balance and it's not an overnight thing. Being very driven and having to have something to work on all the time, I have to check myself occasionally and be like, "The world will not end if you do not finish this thing. Have dinner with the kids. Have dinner with your partner. Do the load of laundry. Take care of your house. Experience this moment that's happening.”
I've gotten better at it with time. I've been remote long before COVID, which has been helpful. You don't lose 2, 3 hours in a car commuting back and forth, and then you get more time back. Being part of an organization now and even in my last role that does prioritize that as much as you do, like family first, take care of yourself first, has also helped fast track that and teach me how to balance.
What about dancing?
Lead With Value : Retain your human empathy. Give back and stop focusing on the wealth you have.
I still love to dance. I may do it in front of my sliding glass door. In an alternate universe, that's something I stayed with. I teach little kids or I ended up sticking with cheerleading, gymnastics or something like that, that had a physical component. I was in volleyball. I love competitive physical activity in terms of what I took from that into the adult life structure. Each facet of dance is something a little different like ballet structure, commitment and discipline, but in a way that was healthy, at least for me, competitiveness naturally.
Also, that whole team mentality, if somebody misses a step, somebody screws up, you've all screwed up. You got to carry that person through that next motion or you need to make sure that they show up for practice too. If it's getting too hard and somebody is wanting to quit, reminding them that they've worked so hard and that this is just a fleeting moment. It's going to be worth it and keeping each other afloat. That was a big thing growing up in dance, sports and everything else that I have done.
I'm lucky that I had great coaches, great dance teachers and great adult influences in that way. That's been something I've lucked out in the long game with. I've seen some other folks, “That teacher was too tough. That coach ruined it for them.” I've been lucky to be surrounded by great people in a lot of different scenarios. That physical memory kicks in and you point a toe, do a time step and feel the pirouette coming on. You just got to do it.
Even if it's alone in your family room.
It's great. I have five girls. None of them are hardcore passionate about it.
That gets you back in love with it.
One of my daughters asks me to show her things once in a while. She was in dance for a little bit and working on something and she said, "Can you help me with this?" I'm like, "Yes." I've taken a lot from it, but it's something I certainly wish I stuck with a little bit longer. If there was an adult version of that near me, that's probably what I'd do for physical activity. It's tons of fun.
I'd like to end with some rapid-fire questions. You pick a category, family and friends, money, spiritual or health.
I originally thought I would talk a little bit more about family because I've seen the rapid-fire but I've talked about that a lot, so I think money.
Things or actions I don't have that I want with money.
I ideally would love for my children to have very good future nest eggs. Have something that they can fall back on. I don't like to say want for nothing because they need to learn and go through life as we all have but I'd love for them to be able to have balance in their lives. Whether that comes in the form of a savings account or college education paid for and all that, those are things that I'm working towards. That's definitely something I want, financial security for my children.
Things or actions that I do have that I want.
Now, we're generally comfortable. I've got a house and a car. I have the ability to go to the store and get what I need. I'm very lucky in that I have the ability to if I need to take my children to the doctor, get seen and not have it cripple me. That took some work to get there because that was not always the case, but that is something I have that I did want for a very long time and I want to hold on to at a minimum comfort and security.
Things or actions that I don't have that I don't want as far as money.
I don't want fame. I think money and fame go hand-in-hand. Don't get me wrong. Having a lot of money would be great, but I wouldn't want Jeff Bezos’ level of fame. I only want to have so much money and so much wealth. This probably sounds totally backwards, but it's true. I would not want to be someone that has so much that they are incapable of giving back or so focused on what they have. They are incapable of seeing what's beyond them.
It’s being defined by it.
That's a great way to put it. I'd want to retain myself and retain my human empathy. I think that getting to a certain point in life with money can make that a bit difficult and fame goes hand-in-hand with that. I want enough basically.
Things or actions that I do have that I don't want as far as money.
I think debt is always a thing. The compulsive need for money is always a thing. Knowing that if you don't make a mortgage payment, for example, you could lose what you've got. I'd love to own what I own and not necessarily ever have the concern of losing what I own because it's not entirely mine. That ties into money. That security, that state of mind of, "I've got enough to get by," is great, but one of my favorite questions that I've ever been asked is, "What would you do if money were absolutely no object?" You get to thinking like, "I may not do anything, but I'm doing now." I wouldn't have to buy a Porsche, but what is it that I'd be passionate about or what would I love to do every single day? In a perfect world, I'd love to be able to drop the need to have to be financially secure and be able to do it.
I think that's one of the things with money itself is that it ends up and then you keep living to the means of it. You're still going for the next thing when you could live a lot less or whatever is comfortable and then you're beholden to what you've committed yourself to. It's like trying to keep yourself where you're not going to be overstressed about what you got.
It's hard not to love money, especially if you can have as much of it as you like, but wouldn't it be a perfect world if that were not the case? You knew you'd have somewhere to sleep at night if you knew you could get to where you needed to go and money was no object. It's never going to happen. Nothing is happening along those lines.
Is there anything you'd like to end with? Anything we haven't talked about or message you want to leave for the readers from this show?
For those that might be pursuing a similar track or career field, one of the most gratifying things for me is leading with value. Especially, for some of the folks coming onto my team, I've got under 40 people amongst three teams that we're left to me now and it's awesome because they're coming from different walks of life in different capacities. With that sales marketing career, a lot of those older approaches are not relevant anymore. The me, me and my, my, it is all about the money. It's, "I have this thing. I'm going to convince you to buy it," doesn't work and people don't enjoy it.
Changing the mindset. If you're going into sales or marketing capacity, especially if you're trying to partner with an industry like Botkeeper. You are partnering with a profession and you want to do that and mean it, you got to alter your mindset. If you go into a sales and marketing career with the mindset of like, "Not just I want to help people, but I want to leave people with something that they didn't have before." Education that they may not have had and a tactic that they didn't know about. If you bring them value in some capacity, you're going to be wildly successful because it shows.
The tone comes through the true consideration. The relationship comes through like the tactic of a smile when you're on the phone because people can hear it. That happens in such a bigger way when that's your entire strategy. I do want to help you. I want to understand what's going on in your business and your life, goals, challenges, etc. Folks coming into any career field like that, having that mindset going in, especially early, helps get you a lot farther than making it the me, me game.
Knowing where software companies and tech companies are going with what's happening with sales and how people buy, that's the future. People want help. They want support and putting yourself in a position to be able to do that and have positive impacts is incredibly gratifying and it's a great career track to be in.
Thank you so much for sharing your story. There were so many great tips for people along the way and I appreciate your time.
Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. It was great talking with you.
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For my Mindful Moments with my interview with Jessica King. She started out this interview by giving a descriptive background of how she grew up being very responsible for her younger siblings and learned a lot of survival skills along the way. The example that her mom gave her of not only being hardworking but also being a free spirit and having that creative side to her and the importance of singing, dancing and other creative outlets, even when you're working hard.
She also talked about how at seventeen, she became financially responsible for herself. As she was in college, had a job at a restaurant that eventually led her to be able to own her own home. By the time she entered the adult working world and moved into her first role in sales, she had the work ethic and had lived a lot of life that has built the experience that she had going into her first job in sales.
Also, having her background in Social Science, watching her mother that helped people with mental health. Different scenarios and issues that they had. It spurred her when she went to college to go deeper into that and understand that, which has also driven a lot of her success when she went into sales. Not only did she go into sales, but she eventually went into technology sales.
She learned how to work with customers that were Chief Marketing Officers. I think this piece of her experience is so important because we take these different pivots in our careers. Sometimes not even intentional that we go to a company, but we learn about an industry and get whole other expertise that layers on to the expertise we have. Not only was she learning to be a good salesperson and what it took to build those relationships but in her job at HubSpot, she dug into marketing strategy and understood what different industries and companies were doing in order to create their marketing strategies.
Utilizing her background in Social Science, digging into understanding what each person wanted and how you blend that together in order to deliver on their pain points. The biggest thing that she talked about that was so important in her success in sales and also in understanding how to market properly to your customer-based was the listening aspect and understanding what people's pain points were and how you support them. You either support them through content, education or through the human relationships we have in sales to have a one-on-one relationship to help deep dive into the needs that they have.
Lead With Value : One of the most gratifying things is leading with value. Have a mindset focused on helping people and leaving them with something they didn’t have before.
We drilled down into the things from her background that helped her in her adulthood. One was taking responsibility for yourself and what your responsibility is for the people around you. Rather than blaming your circumstances, but what is my 100% responsibility and how do I play into what other people need?
Also, the interpersonal skills that she created, not only through having to survive the different things in her life but also, through the Social Sciences side of learning behaviors and what different people's needs are to create a better work-life for people and culture. Also, to share the knowledge that she's had over time to help other people as well.
We did talk about it because I've been in the same boat, is when you are bootstrapping things younger is how to break from that workaholic syndrome and create boundaries. Even though you struggle to get to where you are, how you take a step back from that and be able to check in with yourself occasionally, get present, and make sure that you're in alignment with what you do.
I also talked about how do you still incorporate these things that gave you joy as a child? We talked about how dancing was such a big part of her childhood and how she's been able to bring learnings in from being on a dance team and the mental strength to have to be a dancer. Also, how do you corporate that into your life and still enjoy it?
Overall, we left with understanding how to lead with your value. How to understand how to give value from your expertise and what you have, but first understanding the pain points somebody else has so that you're helping in the right way. Not just for selfish interest, but also being able to allow someone to leave a conversation with something that they didn't have before.
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About Jessica King
Jessica King is an experienced B2B marketing expert with a history of working in software, SaaS, technology, accounting, and services spaces. Jessica's passion for social sciences and communication drew her to sales and marketing, where she has worked with clients across a range of industries, including retail, education, technology, and more. With real-world experience at top marketing and software companies in Boston, assisting hundreds of businesses across numerous stages of growth, and a BS in Psychology & Counseling, Jessica is uniquely qualified as a senior leader and team player to help lead businesses to maximize their reach, tell their stories, digitally evolve, and build mission-driven marketing strategies. Jessica’s specialties include Branding strategy, SEO, Social Media, Integrated Marketing Campaigns, Web Design, Digital Marketing, Project Management, Email Marketing, Product Marketing, Strategy, Content, and Public Relations. If you catch Jessica outside of work, she’s a proud mother of 5 strong and intelligent daughters, an avid animal lover, and a big Comicon-goer who’s down to nerd out anytime, anywhere.