Authentic Brand Transformation: To build a brand that lasts, consider rebranding a team sport (podcast episode #137)

Action Box: Let AI Agents Market For You

Learn how to use MeclabsAI tools that perform thousands of dollars' worth of agency work on your behalf. Register now, then join us on Tuesday, May 13th at 2 pm EDT (from MeclabsAI, MarketingSherpa’s parent company).

I’ll tell you what happened in my career before. Maybe you’ve been there, too.

There’s a sponsorship, sometimes a fairly high-profile sponsorship, and I have gotten asked to write it about it in an ad or email…but, there wasn’t really a strategy.

That is not the way to get the best ROI, the most juice for the squeeze.

Sponsorships truly succeed when they tie into the value proposition of the brand. So this lesson in a recent podcast guest application really grabbed my attention – “Maximize brand awareness by going beyond the ‘logo slap’ sponsorship”

To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I talked to Rebecca Biestman, Chief Marketing Officer, Guild.

Guild raised $175 million in a Series F funding round in 2022, at a $4.4 billion valuation. Wellington Management led the financing, and Oprah Winfrey participated in the round, along with other backers.

Biestman manages a team of 70 in the marketing department.

Hear the full episode using this embedded player or by clicking through to your preferred audio streaming service using the links below it.

Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify | Listen on Amazon Music

Lessons from the things she made

Maximize brand awareness by going beyond the “logo slap” sponsorship

Launching Guild’s first-of-its-kind partnership with USOPC and the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games was a true career highlight. This partnership campaign was more than just the typical “logo slap” sponsorship for eyeballs – and instead helped reinforce Guild’s impact for learners at the center of their marketing.

This campaign took their previous lack of brand awareness as an asset and really leaned into acknowledging this was probably much of the general public’s first time hearing of Guild.

Through this campaign, they were able to highlight how Guild is impacting athletes’ lives and featuring them front and center to share what it’s like to have a second chance at an education. A real beauty of the partnership is that they’re providing a value-added service to the athletes – it’s not just marketing – and through that comes authentic storytelling that doesn’t need to be invented.

Embrace new tech that helps drive your brand strategy

With new technology sweeping enterprises, it can be intimidating to learn how to embrace new tools to help drive your marketing bottom line.

At Guild, they took the AI wave head on and immediately started looking for ways to help streamline their marketing strategy. One way their Guild marketing team has been using AI has been to help democratize access to their brand across the company.

They’ve done some custom GPT work around their brand voice and visual guidelines to create a type of “brand police.” Using AI and leveraging insights from Guild’s AI expert, Mandy McLean, they’ve been able to codify the company’s identity in new powerful ways.

This frees marketing up from being a compliance or production engine and allows them to be strategic partners whose work pushes the business forward.

To build a brand that lasts, consider rebranding a team sport

One of the biggest lessons Biestman has learned overseeing rebrands at Reputation and Guild, is that brand isn’t something the marketing team creates in isolation. If it is, it’s doomed to fall flat. A successful rebrand must be a personification of company strategy.

In Biestman’s career, that means the entire executive team has been engaged from the start – including CEOs Joe Fuca at Reputation.com and Rachel Romer at Guild – ensuring that every function, from product to sales to customer experience, can authentically embody and elevate the brand.

Marketing might help bring the brand to life, but the work starts long before that – it begins with leadership alignment and a deep commitment to what the company stands for.

Biestman has come to understand that brand isn’t just a new logo or tagline, it's a company’s identity. And when done right, it becomes a powerful, unifying force that drives impact at every level of the organization.

Lessons from the people she made it with

Be prepared to step up when the unexpected happens

via Bijal Shah, CEO, Guild

Rarely are any of us fully prepared for the unexpected, particularly when the circumstances are so extreme. But when Guild’s founder and former CEO, Rachel Romer, suffered a stroke in 2023, Shah didn’t just step in; she stepped up.

Watching Shah take on the CEO role at Guild – without warning, without a transition period, and in the middle of her maternity leave – was one of the most powerful leadership moments Biestman has witnessed. With a clear vision for where the business needed to go, she quickly established command and trust with the team she was now leading.

What made the real difference was how she led – with candor, authenticity, and vulnerability. The big lesson Biestman has gained from Shah is that when uncertainty strikes, the strongest leaders don’t just manage through it – they rally their teams with confidence, create clarity in direction, and show up with authenticity.

In a moment that could have led to instability, the executive team at Guild came together behind her, solidifying a foundation that will serve the business for years to come.

The best candidate for a role isn’t always the one who has done it before

via Hemant Shah, Co-Founder & CEO, Archipelago; Co-Founder and former CEO, RMS

Early in her career, Biestman was trying to bridge her passion for social impact with brand and business strategy. Fresh out of business school, Biestman pitched Shah, the Co-Founder and then CEO of RMS, on an idea to start pro-bono work with non-profits and tie it to the company’s marketing and brand initiatives.

They partnered with organizations like the UN, World Bank, and the Rockefeller Foundation to provide catastrophe risk models at no cost to help these institutions prepare for natural disasters. This created an opportunity for really meaningful storytelling about the importance of the core business and the global impact of their products.

On paper, Biestman wasn’t the most qualified person for the job. But Shah gave her a shot. That experience taught her a lesson Biestman carries with her to this day: the best candidate for a role isn’t always the one who has done it before. Success isn’t just about a perfect résumé – it’s about strategic thinking, scrappiness, and the ability to lead with autonomy.

Shah was the first person in her career who truly let her run, and that shaped how Biestman leads and builds teams today. At Guild, they embrace that same ethos – betting on potential, giving people opportunities beyond what their experience suggests, and believing that the right mindset and approach can be just as valuable as hard skills. Sometimes, all someone needs is a chance to prove what they’re capable of.

Making a difference and building something great aren’t mutually exclusive

via Jill Spitzer, former CEO, Jewish Family Services of San Diego

Growing up, it never occurred to Biestman not to have a high-performing career. Her mom, Jill Spitzer, was the CEO of a non-profit, deeply focused on both impact and success.

Under her leadership, Jewish Family Services of San Diego grew from a $2M to a $40M operating budget, and through that was able to make a huge and expanding impact on their community. This included providing critical support – like clothing, food, housing, and mental health services – to refugees, military families, and those in crisis.

Watching her, Biestman learned that making a difference and building something great aren’t mutually exclusive. That perspective has shaped her entire career. Biestman always sought roles that blend marketing with social impact, finding purpose in connecting brand to the mission of a business.

That’s what made finding Guild so special. Biestman once thought she’d have to choose between driving impact and business outcomes, but at Guild, she has found a place where those two things go hand in hand. Marketing, at its best, isn’t just about growth – it’s about telling the story of why a company exists and the impact it can have on the world.

Discussed in this episode

Creative Marketing: Does it all make sense? (Podcast Episode #19)

Marketing at 200 MPH: Sports sponsorship lessons from F1 & finance (podcast episode #125)

Get more episodes

Subscribe to the MarketingSherpa email newsletter to get more insights from your fellow marketers. Sign up for free if you’d like to get more episodes like this one.

For more insights, check out...

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: Create and optimize high-converting webpages free digital marketing course.

Transcript

Not ready for a listen yet? Interested in searching the conversation? No problem. Below is a rough transcript of our discussion.

Rebecca Biestman: I think one of the things that we do best in marketing is that we test and we learn. We fail fast, we pivot, we try new things. I always think about marketing and product thinking that similarly is like the innovation arm of sort of a company. And one of the things I love most about marketing is that we do have some latitude to take risks, and I think that that risks sort of being weighed with understanding the business context around the risk is what makes someone a really good marketer.

Intro: Welcome to how I made it in marketing from marketing Sherpa, we scour pitches from hundreds of creative leaders and uncover specific examples, not just trending ideas or buzzword laden schmaltz real world examples to help you transform yourself as a marketer. Now here's your host, the senior director of Content and Marketing at Marketing Sherpa, Daniel Bernstein, to tell you about today's guest and.

Daniel Burstein: Tell you what's happened in my career before. Maybe you've been there, too. There's a sponsorship, sometimes a fairly high profile sponsorship, and I've gotten asked to write about it in an ad or email. But there really isn't a strategy that is not the best way to get the best ROI, the most juice for the squeeze. Sponsorships truly succeed when they tie in to the value proposition of the brand.

So this lesson in the recent podcast Guest Application really grabbed my attention. Maximize brand awareness by going beyond the logo slap sponsorship logo slap. You're just you're the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson filled stories. As Rebecca Eastman, the Chief Marketing Officer at Guild, thank you for joining me, Rebecca.

Rebecca Biestman: Thanks for having me. Really excited to be here.

Daniel Burstein: Now, let me just tell the audience a little bit about background before we learn a lot of lessons from you. Rebecca was it started her career as a financial advising assistant at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. She worked in brand management and merchandizing at Gap Digital, the head of marketing and social impact at Rams, VP of Marketing at Dial Pad, cmo@reputation.com.

And for the past three years, Rebecca has been at Guild yield raised $175 million in a series F funding round in 2022 and a $4.4 billion valuation. Wellington management led to financing, and Oprah Winfrey participated in the round. Along with other backers and at Guild, Rebecca manages a team of 70 in the marketing department. So, Rebecca, give us a sense.

What is your day like as CMO.

Rebecca Biestman: Even before the day starts? As CMO, I'm probably running around my house like a crazy person, trying to get my kids off to school, trying to get everything organized. And I'll usually kickoff my day either in the beginning or at the end with listening to some calls. So either prospect calls or customer calls. I always try to block my calendar to do some of that, and then it's usually back to back to back zoom calls.

If I get 30 minutes here or there, I'll try to have some heads down time where I can get some of the work done that I need to get done. I'll try to get out for a walk and talk for a couple of my one on ones throughout the day, so that I can at least pretend to enjoy the Southern California sunshine where I live.

And I would say that in terms of content like every day looks so different, who I'm talking to, what we're talking about. I think that's part of what makes marketing so exciting, is how interdisciplinary it is and how much is happening at once. And I would say the other piece is, I'm usually spending a fair amount of my time with the executive teams that sort of outside of the marketing team thinking about business strategy, company priorities, and really collaborating with my peers across other functions on our executive team usually takes up a bit of time to.

Daniel Burstein: I think what you say about listening to customer calls. But let me ask, like, do you actually physically listen? Because one thing I've done that's different now is with AI. I know we're going to talk about AI in a bit is you get a transcript and I summarize it for you. But I do get that there's something to actually hearing people say the word.

So I love, you know, I call this customer intimacy customer first marketing love when people are this close to the customer. So so do you are you actually physically listening to the audio or are you just like going through a transcript or something like that?

Rebecca Biestman: I am actually listening to the audio. I'll tell you why. I do love the the summaries and the key points. Gong is great is that that's the the system that we use for these calls. When I'm thinking about building a pitch for the sales team, or when we're thinking about some of the core assets that we're building for our client success team, we call them our employer partner services team, our post sales team.

I actually love to hear the way it's delivered. And so it's one thing to read it. It's quite another thing to be able to, not only understand the content being delivered, but the context around it, the sentiment, the way that that content is received. So I love it. We actually do something on our team where we do weekly conversations as the marketing team, and it's almost like a little book club where we pick a client call or prospect call every week.

And as a team, on Fridays we all get together and we talk about the call, what we heard from the client or prospect, what we heard from our teams, what's resonating, what's not. It's always a great conversation.

Daniel Burstein: That's great. That's great. There's a daily battle to break down this artificial wall we have between us and a customer. You're doing a great job of that. Let's take a look at some lessons we can learn from, Rebecca as career. So, like I'd like to say before, I. I've never been in an other industry. I've never been a podiatrist or an actuary or something.

But I do feel like we get to make things right. We get to make things, and not everyone gets to make things. So let's see what we can learn from some of the things you made. First lesson is what I mentioned at the top. Maximize brand awareness by going beyond the logo slap sponsorship. I like that lesson not just for it said, but you're good with where it logo slap.

It's so visceral. So how have you done this, Rebecca? How have you gone beyond the logo slap?

Rebecca Biestman: Yeah, we've been thinking at Guild for a long time that we wanted to have a sort of broader impact around our brand awareness work. Not a lot of people know who Guild is. There's a lot of brands that struggled with brand awareness, especially since it's such a crowded market. And so the idea of some type of sponsorship or sports sponsorship has come up in the past for us as a tactic or a marketing lever we can pull.

And it's just never really felt authentic to sponsor random athlete in a random sport that we don't really have anything to do with as a business. And what Gild does is we provide tuition free education and skilling for America's workforce. And so, when team USA approached us about a potential sponsorship, part of the reason why it was appealing is because we decided early on in the conversations we weren't going to do this unless they were committed to providing tuition free education and skilling for all current and former Olympians on Team USA through Le 28, and the only way, sort of typical sports sponsorship was going to work for us, if is if we

could actually lead with stories of impact around that sponsorship as opposed to it being this is a great opportunity for gold to get its name out there into the Zeit Geist. And I think that's what's been so important for us as a business. And I think it's part of what's made this sponsorship impactful and stand out, because not only are we able to sort of espouse what we do as a business in a really authentic way, because we're actually doing it for these athletes.

We're able to lead with the stories and the stories of the impact we're making. I always say, no one wants to hear a marketer talk about what the company does. The best marketing leads with data and stories, and really it's the marketers job to be able to package that effectively so that it catches the attention of whatever audience that you're seeking to go after.

And so for us, like I said, we had thought about wading into these waters a few times at gold and this sponsorship. It really felt like more than that for us. It really felt like a very value use and mission to line opportunity to expand our impact.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah, I love that. Not just, you know, the official whatever of this, the official candy bar or whatever, that's great. But let me get into a bit to the mechanics because I'm sure this is kind of complex. So as CMO, what's your litmus test for making sure all the elements of a complex and high profile partnership like this one work?

And I'll give you a quick example. I interviewed Carlo Cavallo, the global chief creative officer and partner at 72 on sunny and how I made it marketing. And one of his key lessons was this. This the question he asked, does it all make sense? And it sounds like a kind of simple and foolish question, but he told the story of working on this campaign with his famous pop singer and a great director, an epic setting and thousands of extras.

But nobody really asked that question, and it didn't come together. So I can imagine this. I mean, there's a lot of people, a lot of stakeholders involved on the guild side, on the team, USA side, ecosystem agency and vendors. But I've got to imagine it comes down to one person, and that one person is is the sponsor CMO.

You know, what? Is there some sort of litmus test or how do you approach this to make sure it all comes together correctly?

Rebecca Biestman: Yeah, I think does it make sense is just a great way to word it. And what I would say is like, maybe modified version of that for us is are we going to have the impact that we want to have with this. And at Guild we're a B Corp. So impact for us is not just defined as eyeballs or engagement metrics.

Are we going to get the marketing ROI out of this sponsorship that we seek? There's probably other sports sponsorships where we could have waded into those waters, and I could have said, here are the KPIs we're concerned about as a business. This will check those boxes for us. We had to take it a step further to say, can we get the business value out of this sponsorship, but can we also make the impact as an organization we want to have through this sponsorship, can this sponsorship via of a call for something more beyond brand awareness for us and I think throughout my career, that's how I thought of marketing, is that marketing in and of

itself? Sure, it's necessary, but it's not sufficient, especially if you want marketing to be seen as sort of a strategic business first function. There has to be more than that. And so for us, the reason why we had turned down other opportunities, the reason why we were reticent to engage in this type of sort of broad brand awareness sports sponsorship, is because it really hadn't met that litmus test for us.

Daniel Burstein: And do you have any sort of dashboard of how you keep an eye on this or something like that? Metrics. You know, you mentioned being a B Corp because it feels like performance marketing has eaten marketing and something like this. I would think it's not only just a conversion metric. So how do you how do you make sure you're meeting both the B Corp and the business value?

Rebecca Biestman: Absolutely. I mean, we have goals not only around again, the awareness and engagement metrics. We want to see what the campaigns you run around, the sponsorship and the activations. We have that, but we also really closely track how many athletes are actually going through guild programs, how many folks are doing the learning once they do the learning, are we connecting them with job opportunities?

Are our coaches at guild coaching these athletes on their learning experience, on their career opportunities? And so for us, we hold ourselves accountable to a lot of metrics that frankly, don't have anything to do with the marketing side. It really is about, are we getting the most out of this investment, not just for some of the business KPIs we're looking at over within the marketing function, but are we actually leveraging the team USA network as a partner for us to help reach more individuals that can actually utilize our services and our products.

Daniel Burstein: Are speaking of getting the most out of an investment. Obviously, we all hear about artificial intelligence AI these days. We're talking about it to everyone's talking about it. You should embrace new tech that helps drive your brand strategy. So how have you done this? Tells a story.

Rebecca Biestman: Yeah. Our team has been, I think, really gung ho about embracing AI. And we've given our team, I would say, a lot of latitude to experiment, to fail fast, to try different things with AI incorporated into their workflows, sort of their day to day. And one of the things that we've seen really successful is using AI as sort of an extension of our team, not only as like the compliance arm around our brand.

The brand police, as we call it, but also to sort of democratize access to our brand internally throughout our company. And so, you know, sometimes teams, marketing orgs or parts of marketing orgs, especially in brand, a lot of their job is compliance. Are you using the color palette, the visual identity and verbal identity correctly? Is this on brand?

Is this off brand. And that just sort of inhibits productivity from doing the more strategic, innovative, creative work that I really want my team's focused on. And I think it's a waste of all of the amazing talent that we have on our team. So we've instituted brand voice. GPT is so that the copy and the content we're creating is sort of automatically filtered through our van brand voice and that brand identity.

We use it for the visual identity and the design guidelines for our brand to do those easy check so that as folks are producing things throughout the organization, there's not some kind of cue to have a human in the loop to have to look at it. And that not only speeds up velocity and sort of the production of those assets around the organization, but it also really helps to ensure alignment.

And that's what I mean by democratizing access to our brand. It's one thing for the marketing team to kind of sit in an ivory tower and sort of wield that brand for the rest of the company, but it's quite another thing to have folks in HR who are doing recruiting or folks even in product or technical writing, feel like they have access to some of this technology so that they can always write on brand, whether it's a job description, whether it's some of the technical documentation that we have go along with our products.

There's so many examples across the org where we have people using the technology and it spans really far beyond the marketing team, but it helps, again, to sort of increase marketing's influence throughout the company and ensure a lot of really great consistency for teams.

Daniel Burstein: I'm glad you mentioned HR and so on the org, because I wonder, as a leader, has I affected how you've set up your org chart? And I ask, as you mentioned, Guild's AI expert Mandy McLean. And so I assume, you know, like in other things within the organization, SEO or writers or these different things, right? We have specific subject matter experts that do these things.

AI is like that, but then it also just feels like water at this point where everyone also needs to know it. Right. So. So how do you set the org chart to make the most of AI?

Rebecca Biestman: Yeah.

Daniel Burstein: What role does Mandy play.

Rebecca Biestman: So Mandy I call her eyes that's not her official title, but her entire job within our organization is really to be the steward, the responsible steward of this technology across the company. And she will actually herself deploy into teams. She has worked with my marketing leadership team to help us shape some of the initial use cases for AI and automation across the team.

Some of that is around workflow and process. Some of it is actually around the work itself that's getting produced. Still other pieces that she'll help us with are enablement and training. She'll help us with vendor and tool selection. And so she comes in really as the sort of subject matter expert around AI and the technology itself. And all of the benefit of that.

She pairs with my team, who are the functional subject matter experts. So she's not a marketer by trade. And so that partnership at least for us as an organization, has worked really well because we've been able to pair again a couple of times of subject, couple kinds of subject matter expertise together to say, let's not only do the things that are sort of efficient and effective in the broadest terms for the business, let's make sure we're actually investing in the right use cases for the right functions at the right time.

And so let's work together to create a little bit of a roadmap that is function specific. And we've really pushed the boundaries. We know we're only just beginning. We've gotten more productive. Certainly we've become more efficient, but it's also made us better at our jobs. Now sort of every first draft that we'll write, it'll be AI generated, but it will really force our folks to go in there and take a close look and say, is this the thing we want?

How am I then, if we're getting more productivity and more efficiency out of this copy, how am I then thinking of new horizons around channel distribution, or different and creative and innovative ways where maybe we haven't used this type of copy before? And so I think it's actually a great partnership, and I think it's a model that scales really nicely too, because we're not asking all of our marketing leaders to become deep technical experts in every piece of AI technology.

But we're also not staffing up a huge, centralized organization that's making decisions for our function. That just might not be the right ones. So I really love the model that we have in place at Guild, and we partner really closely with Mandy.

Daniel Burstein: Well, so speaking of that teamwork, you mentioned that to build a brand that last, consider rebranding a team sport. So how did you learn this lesson in your career?

Rebecca Biestman: I think I've learned this lesson the hard way. This is one of those where you kind of live and you learn. And over the course of my career, I started out in brand marketing and merchandizing, actually, when Gap Digital was creating a brand called Paper Lime. I don't want to age myself too much. It was an early competitor to Zappos.

It no longer exists. That was a really sort of interesting exercise to witness as a very young person. Early on in my career, sort of fortune 500 company, really building a new brand from scratch all the way to companies where I've been a part of sort of a rebrand or brand refresh, and I've seen a real spectrum of how this activity can be very isolated to the marketing team versus how much other teams within the organization are sort of brought in to this activity.

And I always say that the best brands are a personification of a company's strategy. That's something that I really believe. And if your brand isn't representative of the company's strategy, it's going to fall flat. In the same way, if the work around the brand a brand refresh or rebrand, creating a brand for the first time. If that work is isolated mainly within the marketing team, it's also going to fall flat because you really need the input, the buy in the perspective of folks who sit around the table across the business in order to make sure that not only is the brand whole lipstick enough, but also are they going to be advocates and evangelists for

this new brand. And so the way that we've done it in the past is we've brought in we did this@reputation.com, we did this at Guild when we rebranded. The entire executive team was a part of the process with our agency partner and our marketing team leads. And so we would do initial intake interviews with them and clients and prospects and a bunch of folks to get the data we needed.

But even along the process, as we were going through checkpoints with the rebrand, not all of them, but a lot of them, the executive team was a part of our CEO, Rachel Romer at Guild, Joe Fuchs, when I was@reputation.com. They were very involved in the process. And I think again, because of that, you end up with not only a better end product, you also end up with this kind of army of evangelists from across the business who are the executives across all of the functions, who are very bought into this work because they've been a part of it.

They've helped to co-create it. And I think it's super important in making sure that the brand resonates.

Daniel Burstein: I think that's so important because the brand isn't, you know, oh, what's in the big ad campaign or that sponsorship or everything. Right. The brand is those touchpoints, all of those customer touchpoints with all of those executives that are in your room. So I love how you're bringing them all together to make sure that that actually is what the brand is.

But when we talk about that in the personification, let me ask you a question that in fairness to maybe an impossible to question to answer, but but you seem close to us. I'm going to ask you anyway. We'll see what we have to say. What role does purpose play in a brand? And I ask you this because, for example, when I interviewed Louise Johnson, the global CEO of fuze, on how I made it marketing, also very sports related.

One of her lessons was ignore purpose at your peril. And she said, hey, that's the North Star of a company that needs to be everywhere. On the flip side, and what I like to do and how I made it marketing, I like to unpack these different ideas so we can understand them better. Not saying I agree or disagree, to me, the moment purpose might have jumped the shark, so to speak.

I don't know if you saw watch Silicon Valley. There was a famous Silicon Valley episode where they go to a pitch competition and every startup has a purpose, even though it's a fairly ordinary product. There's like software defined data centers. They're making the world a better place and, you know, scalable, fault tolerant, distributed databases that make the world a better place.

So there's probably not one right answer. But when you're working on that rebranding, you talk about the personification of the brand. We as people have a purpose. Should a corporate brand have a purpose?

Rebecca Biestman: But in my opinion, purpose is what can dial up the authenticity around a brand. But I think to your point, it also has the power to sort of lose authenticity if it's not deployed in the right way. I think you just gave really good examples of both of those things being true. So purpose when it is authentic can be, I think, the greatest superpower that a brand has, it can be the fuel, it can be the accelerant for folks rallying behind the brand.

It can be a great way to engage audiences, to learn about your brand or be loyal to your brand. When purpose is inauthentic, it can have the opposite effect. And I believe that now more than ever, consumers are very discerning about this. I think that audiences are really smart, they're very savvy. And if you are sort of creating purpose or planting purpose in ways that feel inauthentic, folks are going to sniff that out pretty quickly and they will disengage from the brand.

And so what I would say is, if you don't know at the core of who you are as a business, if you don't understand your identity, if you don't understand your why, call that purpose, call that something else. I think it's going to be really hard for you to have a successful business for a lot of reasons, brand being one of many.

And so I do think it's really important to get clearly identified around that. Where I've seen it go wrong is that it's not clearly codified or it's codified in a way that actually doesn't feel authentic, and that feels like a check the box exercise. And both of those are going to get you into a lot of trouble. And I think I just, I consider myself lucky for where I am today because we're just a mission driven business to start with.

That guild that I always had the most powerful brands or ethos brands. Those are the brands. Word evokes a feeling and an ethos, and you deeply believe in that brand. Not every brand is like that. There are brands that are product driven brands. There are brands that have a different purpose out there in the world. But that ethos brand is what we've really start to build at Guild.

And I think that what you're talking about, what you're talking about, is can your purpose be deeply ingrained in a way that feels authentic, that folks can deeply connect with, and figuring out what that is for your company? It's not always easy, and it's not always marketing jargon, because immediately folks will be able to sniff that out. And I think pretty quickly understand that that's not authentic to who you are.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah. So I'm glad you bring that up. Speaking of that, does being a B core give you a leg up in this because as you mentioned, well, first of all, this is another great example of why it's good to have the entire company in line. It's not marketing says it's our purpose and no one's doing that. Right. But secondly, that the authenticity is key.

And a lot of times when companies come up with these things, we're saving the world. Whatever. It's very hard to have that proof behind it. But the the core is one of the few ways I've seen that proof. So does that give you a leg up in in branding?

Rebecca Biestman: If you want to build an ethos brand or a purpose driven brand, yes, absolutely. But look at a company like Apple who has one of the strongest brands. They probably have more brand equity than anyone else. I don't think they would consider themselves an ethos brand in that way, or a mission driven, purpose first company. That's not how they built their brand.

They built their brand on having the best, most user friendly, sleekest products, most innovative products in the market. It's been really successful for them because it's authentic to them, to their business. And so I think that's what I'm trying to say is if you know, sort of what your purpose is in the world, it doesn't have to be some broad societal mission at Guild.

That's what it is for us. That's what we live and breathe every day. We're building opportunity for America's workforce. That's what we do. It's what everybody talks about. Everyone knows that's what we're here to do. There's other companies where they're stewarding a very different purpose. And as long as that is authentically reflected in your brand, that's going to be the thing that creates loyalty, that will be the thing that creates that evangelism and advocacy, not just from folks within your business, but outside of your business.

And I think that's where some brands have gotten a little lost recently, is that they've almost been afraid to be themselves, and there's nothing to be afraid of. That's actually the easiest way to market. It's the easiest thing to be. It's when you stray from that that you get some disassociation in. That's where you can really inhibit your brand equity.

That's where it can break. In my opinion.

Daniel Burstein: That's really well put. It's not always saving the world. Sometimes it's just building a really good computer. Right? Yeah. All right. So we talked about some of the lessons from some of the things that Rebecca has made. And in just a moment, we'll take, talk about some of the lessons from some of the people that Rebecca has made it with.

But first, I should mention that the How I Made It and marketing podcast is underwritten by Mech Labs AI, the parent company of marketing Sherpa. You can get conversion focused training from the lab that helped pioneer the conversion industry in our AI Guild and a community to collaborate with. Grab your free three month scholarship to the AI Guild at Joint Labs ai.com and join that Mech labs.com.

I also should mention that the AI guild is no relation to Rebecca's company, which is also named Guild. Okay, so let's take a look at, some of the lessons from some of the people that you collaborate with. You mentioned, BJ Shaw, the CEO at Guild. And from these you all you learned be prepared to step up when the unexpected happens.

How do you learn this?

Rebecca Biestman: Yeah, I think my time at guilds has certainly been I would say a once in a career experience in terms of a lesson in business continuity. Our founder and past CEO, Rachel Roemer, actually suffered a stroke quite unexpectedly. And during this time, our now CEO, Nigel Shaw happened to be on maternity leave. And so the rest of the executive team was sort of rallying together.

Beedrill was actually brought back into the business. We did have a business continuity plan. She came back early from maternity leave. And when your founder and CEO, who plays such a prominent role in a business, especially a scale up like ours, given our stage of maturity, it can be highly disruptive to have an unexpected change in the leadership of any business, much less the founder and CEO.

And Beedrill came back with a bunch of grace and fortitude, and as an executive team, we were all very aligned that it was our job to rally around Vedral and really make sure that the business, first and foremost, had stability and confidence in our future. And I think was just such a lesson for me in sort of you can never really be prepared for the unexpected.

It's really about in those moments how people show up for each other. And for me. Vedral was such a great example of leading by example, leading with integrity, rallying everybody on the team behind her, making sure that we were all putting on sort of our guild first hats instead of our team first hats or individual first hats. And all of us as leaders really making this a moment to come together as a unit where it could have been a moment that really fractured us as a team.

It could have been a moment that really fractured our business, frankly. And so for me, it was just such an awesome example to see that not only from Vedral, but really from our executive team together.

Daniel Burstein: That's great, great culture. You mentioned the business continuity plan. So it's not just the culture, it's also the forward thinking. And I wonder you as a marketing leader, is there any you know, I know we don't have a literal business continuity plan like the overall business does, but is there any kind of continuity plan or fallback plan you have as a marketer?

Because one of the things I'm sure I'm not the only person who feel this way is the pace of change since I started my career is through the roof. You know, I started my career. I was doing print ads in the Wall Street Journal and we all live through Covid. We're living through whatever this is now, whatever your political beliefs are, things have changed a lot.

So is there anything you do as a marketer and say, obviously we've got our planning for the year, we've got our goals, we've got this, but is there anything you do that some sort of continuity plan or thoughts to pivot ahead of time before some of that changes happen? So are you ready?

Rebecca Biestman: Yeah, it's a great question. I think because the past ten years of my career have all been a tech scale up. We're pretty agile and we're pretty prepared to sort of expect the unexpected. And strategy pivots have been pretty often has. You're in that startup mode going through what I call scale up, this kind of awkward teenage years.

You're finding product market fit, you're really scaling operations. So we experience a lot of change. And for me, I think mindset matters so much. And having the right type of folks on your team who are comfortable with being really agile, feel comfortable when things change. Are able to pivot quickly. For me, that has done so much more for the team than sort of codifying or documenting contingency plans.

We certainly, you know, on the crisis comms side, we have our plans, we have our documentation. There are certain functions where I would say it's standard operating procedure and are really important part of the way we sort of ensure that risk mitigation across the business. But generally, I think one of the things that we do best in marketing is that we test and we learn.

We fail fast, we pivot, we try new things. I always think about marketing and product I think about similarly is like the innovation arms of sort of a company. And one of the things I love most about marketing is that we do have some latitude to take risk. And I think that that risk sort of being weighed with understanding the business context around the risk is what makes someone a really good marketer.

And so again, we don't have formal documentation around this in if anything, I think the mindset of our team is one where you should be prepared for the unexpected. And when that unexpected happens, as opposed to scenario planning out a million ways it could go wrong, it's much more about how you act or react in that moment that will determine how set up you are for success.

Daniel Burstein: Well, let's talk about how you build that agile team of marketers. You mentioned that the best candidate for a role isn't always the one who has done it before. And you learn this from Hemant Shah, co-founder and CEO at Archipelago and co-founder and former CEO at Rmbs. How did you learn this?

Rebecca Biestman: Yeah, I talked about this a little bit too, which is, you know, career paths are great. I don't really believe in them. I don't subscribe to them. I really think about sort of saying yes to opportunities, even if they don't appear at first glance, to be linear to someone's career plans. I've had a lot of success personally in my career saying yes to new opportunities, especially opportunities that may be on paper I wasn't totally qualified for, and so I experienced this firsthand.

When I was at mass, I ran Social impact for Rmse, and really there it was much more of a business development function. Figuring out how we could use our product, give it away for free, do some pro-bono services to open up new markets for us nonprofits, government. So really thinking about social impact with a very business aligned approach and on paper, I certainly wasn't the candidate that I would have hired to do that type of job.

I was straight out of business or had just gotten my MBA from Haas at Berkeley and had spent really my career in marketing and brand building, but was so convinced that if we could do this work right at this company, it could have all of these positive externalities for the brand. It could have really positive impact for our business eventually for our revenue, if we did our experimentation.

Right. And I think I don't want to speak for him it but probably what he saw in me was just a lot of passion, drive, tenacity, and I would say a history of achievement and being an achievement oriented person. And it's a profile that I often look for when I'm building teams, which is if you hire folks who are high achievers, have had success and bring a lot of passion and drive to the work you're asking them to do, that can be a recipe for success.

There are other places where having a ton of experience or pattern recognition. It matters a lot, but I think sort of the archetype of folks that I look for are people that are hungry, that have a lot of drive, and that are very achievement oriented. If you give those folks along leash license to run and hold them accountable in the right ways for what you define as success, they can have a lot of impact on an organization.

And I think really encouraging folks on our team to take on new stretch projects, new opportunities within marketing, maybe spiderweb move laterally to a different function that you never thought you would be a part of. Doesn't always have to be upward progression in your career and really thinking about what are the intangibles that people can bring to a role that are really going to be the determinants of success above and beyond?

Have they done this exact thing before? I think that matters so much, and I, I love letting people shoot their shot. It's one of my favorite things. I love taking someone who on paper, we're not totally sure that they can do this role, but after talking with them or after working with them in a different context, we're pretty sure they can do it.

Letting those folks come in and just giving them a chance and seeing that come to fruition has probably been one of the most rewarding parts of my career as a leader.

Daniel Burstein: So I can imagine a lot of people listening in on their heads, agreeing, but not knowing how to do it. So I wonder if there's anything specific you do in recruiting or hiring or interviewing, because when you talk about best candidate for role isn't always the one who has done it before. So internal hires, yes, I can see that's a different story.

But externally we tend to default to, like you said, they've done it before. Okay. Well they're Salesforce certified or they know CRM or whatever, right? The the kind of more industry things anyone can learn versus those key. I don't know if I want to call them personality traits or skills to make them agile and all the things you talk about.

So do you have any advice, any specifics you do recruiting, interviewing, hiring to find these people who don't necessarily have it on their resume?

Rebecca Biestman: Yeah, I'll talk about that. And it's funny because we also talk about that at Guild when we're working with our own learners and we're coaching them up to apply for roles. One of the things we talk a lot about is what are those soft skills, or the foundational skills that might not like directly appear on your resume because of your experience, but are things that you're great at.

And so I just I think it's interesting because it's also part of what we do as a business for the folks that we serve. And it's funny, I do look for things when I'm looking at candidates that maybe, I don't know, are indicators that this person might be a good fit for us, but we don't really know. To your point, until you talk to someone resumes or just it's really hard.

We'll look at folks. LinkedIn. What I love is seeing internal mobility from people. So if you've been at a company and you've either got gotten promoted or you've tried different things at that company, to me that's a signal that you have the agility and that you also have the credibility within the business to have moved around or moved up.

I think that's a really important leading indicator. It's one of the most important things that I look for. Another thing that I think about is like, how far have you bridged in your career outside of the thing that you started? And I will often ask people questions about that when I'm doing behavioral interviews after we've gotten through the resume screening phase.

And the other thing that I look at, which, again, you never know how it's going to work, I behavioral interviews, there's a ton of evidence. It's like not often a great predictor of success. Enroll. And so one of the things that I'll look at sort of after we've done that initial screening, is how can we assess that type of agility, that comfort with being uncomfortable and that willingness to go sort of above and beyond and be hungry for those results we're trying to achieve from the business.

So we'll ask questions, you know, tell me about a time when you faced a challenge. We'll ask things like that, but we'll say things like, tell me about a time when you were 90% done with a project and something changed the last minute. What happened? How did you deal with that? What would your manager say if I was talking to them?

Would they say the same thing you just said? What about your team members? How would you bring people in to help you with this problem? We'll ask sort of a lot of questions that I would say go kind of above and beyond your standard behavioral interview questions to try to assess for some of those intangibles.

Daniel Burstein: I love that level of specificity. And I'll tell you one thing that I like our look for is just how they handle the application, right? How like cover letter resume, not necessarily what's on the resume, but how is the resume design, how is the cover letter? Because to me it's one thing to again, we do behavioral interviews too, and they're great and it's great to learn from that.

But you know so much of marketing is team based. We okay. What did you actually do? What was involved there. But now you're actually seeing a marketing campaign right in action. So I don't know if it applies to every department, but for marketing or how are they applying. What's your cover letter? What's your resume? So true. I love this last one.

This is your mom, Jill Spitzer, the former CEO of Jewish Family Services of San Diego. You said you learned that making a difference and building something great aren't mutually exclusive. So how did you learn this from your mom?

Rebecca Biestman: You know, it's funny because looking back at your childhood, I don't even think I realized how much of an impact this was going to have on me and my career until pretty recently. But I think growing up, not only with a mother who was a CEO, certainly that had a lot of impact on my life. And what I saw every day is an example of what was possible as a woman in work, a woman who had kids and worked, but also the fact that she was CEO of a nonprofit.

It was always a part of my life to see that impact come to the forefront of her experience and my experience, you know, the organization that she led for over 25 years, they had the largest food pantry in all of San Diego County, served a lot of military families, a lot of other families. They had, a lot of mental health services that they offer.

They do a lot of work with immigrants. Were in San Diego, right next to the border, a refugee resettlement. So just such a wide variety of programs. And I'd often go and participate in these programs as a kid or at the dinner table. I would hear about what was going on with these programs. And so it never occurred to me that I had to disassociate from volunteering for an organization that I felt passionately about, versus making money or having a viable career.

For me, those things were totally interlinked, and I struggled for a long time trying to find this balance. For me personally, I loved marketing. I was so passionate about the function, I loved the work, and I didn't always feel like I was having the impact that I wanted to have on the world with that work. And so I tried corporate philanthropy for a little while.

I tried some core social impact work, and I would do that, and I would sort of miss the marketing piece of the work that I was doing. And so I don't think it's easy, but sort of that was my guiding light or my goal post for what I wanted my career to look like. I wanted to be able to do work that I love and feel passionate about, and I wanted to be able to do it for an organization that was having a real impact in the world in a way that translated meaningfully for me.

And it's funny because before I, took the role at Guild, I was about ready to get out of tech altogether. I it's a grind. If you've ever worked at a startup or a scale up, your listeners will know what I'm talking about. It's not easy. Being on the executive team isn't easy. So none of these things are easy.

And I just thought, okay, it's been a decade. I've done it. I've checked that box. I'm going to go do something totally different. I'm going to go work for an NGO. So I'm going to swing that pendulum in my career yet again. And it was one of our board members who really, talked to me and said, what do you want to do next?

And I said, I just want to do something that's impact first. That's what I want to do. And he said, oh, well, I mean, we can do that. We have companies that do that, or you can still run marketing, you can still do the thing you love, but you can do it in an organization where you feel deeply passionate about the work and the impact that they're making.

And that's really what led me to Guild. And so I feel really fortunate that I'm here. And I think it it was the first time in my career that I've really been able to feel like I haven't had to make a trade off, and it's the first time when I felt like it's been really reflective of the experience that I grew up with, with my mom.

She's sort of been the guiding light that you can do well by doing good and in your own career. You don't necessarily need to make that trade off.

Daniel Burstein: Well, first of all, it's just beautiful to see it up front from your own mother. I mean, that's fantastic. Let me ask you, let's say I'm a high school senior now choosing a college major. And, you know, why should I choose marketing or anything? You mentioned a lot of the impact you have. Can you give us some examples of the impact you has a marketer because I love hearing you talk about this, right?

Marketing. I mean how I made it marketing podcasts for marketing, sure. But honestly, obviously we do not have the best reputation in the world of marketing, unfortunately. However, like you said earlier, I mean, when I was asking you about branding, you're like, look, there are certain purposes that you lack for a better word are saving the world or whatever, but there's other purposes to like just it's a marketplace, it's complex, and you're connecting people with the right product that has value to you.

Right. So can you give us a sense? I know you talked a lot about the impact. You come from a family, from a home where your mother was a nonprofit leader, nonprofits. It's like you said, NGOs. It's so much easier to say we've had this impact. It's in the annual report. You know what I mean? Our annual reports, sometimes you're a B Corp, but a lot of times are to shareholders and just about profits and some of these things.

So can you give us some examples? I love the passion. You're talking about the impact. What impact have you had as a marker if you're looking back at your career now?

Rebecca Biestman: Oh my gosh. One of the things that I think is so amazing about marketing is that you really are able to help control the destiny of a business in a way that very few functions are. You are that function that is making sure that the business has the reach that they want. And so in a different way like that is impact that you're driving, impact that you can.

So intimately feel when you're working in marketing, that you are able to sort of drive that reach that engagement. And so throughout my career, whether it's been in digital marketing, when we've been really concerned with audience acquisition, do people know what we're doing over here at Gap Digital? Do we have the right products for them? How are we bringing them in?

That's real, tangible impact that you're creating for the business. That's not some halo that someday someone is going to feel. That's true performance marketing, to your point, that's do we have the people we need to make sure that this business is viable and sustainable long term? There's no better impact than that. And that is literally what the marketing team drives.

We create the demand. We convert that demand. We incent loyalty. I've had so many experiences across my career where that hasn't been some, again, theoretical thing that we're talking about on paper. It's been real impact. Even over my time at Guild over the last three years, we've had moments where the business has come and said, hey, the learners that we have, they're not engaging with us the way we want.

We have all these great coaching services. How do we get them to understand that? How do we get them to know about that? They come to marketing to solve that business problem. And I always say, the best marketing leaders I've ever worked with in my career, they're business leaders first and their marketing leaders second. And I think one of the best things about marketing is that you can't be a good marketer if you don't have a deep understanding of your business.

If you don't understand the market, if you don't understand your customer, if you don't understand the dynamics with your competitors, you'll never do your job well. It doesn't matter if you're a copywriter or designer. It doesn't matter if you're a go to market strategist or a demand gen leader. There is no job in marketing that you're going to be able to do if you don't understand that.

And so the bar to be great at this job is high. It takes a ton of business acumen. It takes a ton of conceptual knowledge and experience. And you can sniff it out when you're on marketing teams. And so I think if you're interested in business, whether it's again, sort of a mission driven business or a business that has a very different type of purpose in this world, if you go passionately about what that business is doing, going into marketing is going to help you make a real impact on the trajectory of that organization in a way that, again, I believe very few functions can.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah, I like to say everyone in that building has a job because of you. Really? Because. Right. Because there's the creation of value, which is great. But if that value is not perceived in the marketplace, it doesn't matter how much that value is created and that at the end of the day, strip away the technology and the CRMs and the databases.

All we're doing is helping the ideal customer perceived value. So I love what you say there. We talked about so many stories, lessons from your career. If you had to break it down. Rebecca, what are the key qualities of an effective marketer?

Rebecca Biestman: Yeah, I kind of stole my thunder already. But reiterate at that point, it's because I'm so passionate about it. That was the.

Daniel Burstein: Why. That was the why. Let's get into the how. What are the qualities?

Rebecca Biestman: Qualities? Yeah. I think being, wearing a business first hat is probably the most important. If you do not understand the context in which your business is operating, you will not be an effective marketer. And I've seen it time and time again where you can take the most talented practitioner in whatever the thing is that you're doing, and the ad copy will fall flat, or the one pager won't resonate or whatever it is, it won't work the way I thought this was going to work, I thought this person who's such a rock star at this thing they do is going to be such a good fit.

You'll never be great at your job if you're not a business leader first in marketing, if you're not an expert on your business. So that's number one. Number two is I think the best marketers are both really creative, have some type of ingenuity. I mean, creative necessarily in the traditional sense, where you're a creative quote unquote. I definitely wouldn't consider myself that.

But you are creative and you're innovative and you can pair that with strategy. So being able to have both a strategic mindset and a strategic mentality, while also being sort of innovative or sort of deeply creative in your core, I think it's the balance of those two things that make a great marketer. And then I'm going to say something which maybe sounds obvious, but so much of marketing today is data.

So if you're not at all analytically inclined, there might be a couple jobs for you on the marketing team. But even my designers are looking at the data around how their ads perform. I mean, there's really not a job in marketing today where you don't need to be analytical, and it doesn't mean that you need to be as analytical as your finance counterparts, or we're not going to ask you to code like the engineers, but there is no world in which you don't need to be able to understand data and interpret that data to make better decisions for the part of the business that you run as marketers.

And then the last thing I think is just really understanding risk taking and risk tolerance. The best marketers I've worked for, and we have just some folks on our team who are amazing at this, is they understand how far to push the envelope within the context of the business, the context of the market that you operate in.

Because if you're not going to be bold and you're not going to take risks, marketing is probably not the function for you. There's other jobs where you'd be a great fit in those roles, and it's probably not on a marketing team. Now, I don't care if you're a B2B business, if you're a B2C business, B2B to see it doesn't matter.

The marketing team is going to push the company forward. You are going to push the company in places where it might feel a little uncomfortable, because you're not thinking about three months down the road. You're thinking about three years or ten years down the road, ensuring that this is the kind of company that we're going to want to have.

And that requires foresight and also requires some risk taking.

Daniel Burstein: I love that, be bold. All right. Well, thank you so much, Rebecca, for sharing all the lessons from your bold career.

Rebecca Biestman: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It's been great.

Daniel Burstein: And thanks to everyone for listening.

Outro: Thank you for joining us for how I made it and marketing with Daniel Burstein. Now that you've got an inspiration for transforming yourself as a marketer, get some ideas for your next marketing campaign. From Marketing Sherpas extensive library of free case studies at Marketing sherpa.com. That's marketing Paycom and.