Leading Through Learning: Chief Growth Officer’s innovative approach to marketing leadership

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Here’s one thing I love about a career in marketing. I’ve gotten the opportunity to learn the inner workings of so many other industries I would have never been exposed to if I didn’t have to tell their story.

So I learned that my skill isn’t necessarily to know everything about every industry. But it’s to be able to learn quickly, work with subject matter experts to get the knowledge out of their head, and clearly communicate it to the ideal customer.

Or as our latest guest puts it – “You don’t have to know it to lead it.”

To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I spoke with Christine Healy, Chief Growth Officer, Seniorly.

Seniorly has raised $6.5M in Series A funding. Healy and her team have attracted five million visitors per year to the site.

Listen to our conversation using this embedded player or click through to your preferred audio streaming service using the links below it.

Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify | Listen on Google Podcasts

Stories (with lessons) about what she made in marketing

Some lessons from Healy that emerged in our discussion:

Believe in people

It’s essential to pick a candidate based on who they are as a person and their ability to mix well with other team members, as opposed to choosing them based on their exact qualifications in relation to the job description. If they are passionate, experienced, motivated, eager to learn, and open to trying new things, chances are they will align well with any role. Healy has had many bosses that have picked her for a job over other candidates because of her characteristics rather than her background.

For example, she worked at EF Educational Tours, whose founder was Bertil Hult. He had this concept that if you hire correctly, most of the time those people can do any job. She had a colleague – Michelle Bergland – who was a fantastic vice president of human resources but started out as a controller.

Her career has not followed a straight path, and Healy has shifted industries multiple times including travel, education, and senior living – which has helped her bring a well-rounded approach/mindset to her work. As she has made these shifts, the ultimate belief in people has been an important lesson to learn, as she has been up against other candidates with relevant industry experience.

Another aspect of this is when she became a single mother. She needed the flexibility and understanding from her colleagues that while she may need to leave for personal reasons, she’ll be online to ensure all her tasks are complete, potentially outside of typical working hours. Strong management who believe in your work ethic know all tasks will get done no matter what.

Embrace the crisis

External events happen constantly that affect industries and individuals. While those events can vary in severity, some like to sit back and wait to see how things play out. However, it is important to lean into a crisis to see what lessons can be learned and identify opportunities for improvement. For instance, Healy worked in the travel industry during 9/11, and in early education as the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

These were both transformative events for both industries (and throughout the globe), and although it was challenging, she learned important lessons stemming from both situations. She improved her communication skills with customers and clients by listening to how the events directly affected them, and advanced internal and external communication skills.

For example, she was working in early education during COVID, and her company partnered with Arianna Huffington, who runs an organization called Thrive Global, to open up sites to take care of health care workers’ children.

It’s also essential to check in with staff to ensure that everyone feels supported in times of uncertainty.

Say ‘yes, and’

This is based on the concept of using the two words “yes, and” to mean that you are up for anything and will take it one step further to push boundaries and think collaboratively. In improv, the word “no” is rarely used, so the “and” forces you to add or build on other ideas. Healy applies this to her work style and has found it to be a fundamental element in all of her positions.

Coming out of college, she didn’t have a set plan or a road map. Her approach was to just say “yes” to opportunities or projects that were offered to her, and she would figure things out along the way by talking to colleagues or using online resources. This process has led her to some great opportunities, even when she wasn’t an expert in the field or industry.

For example, she started a role where she identified a fundamental problem with the business that required a re-brand. She went to the leadership team and they said, ‘yes, and what should we do?’ Which led her to work with an ethnographer from the Parsons School of Design, Chris Prentice, to discover what the company’s ideal customers really wanted.

In her current role, she likes to ask her colleagues “yes, and” to understand their positioning or to learn more about the greater meaning of a certain topic.

You don’t have to know it to lead it

Throughout her career, Healy has been in industries that she has known little about. Any leadership position that she has taken on has been in an unfamiliar field; the challenge excites her. This links back to her point on believing in people, as she has had many supervisors take a chance on her based on her personality and the methodology behind her decision making.

As she has stepped into these roles in travel, education, and senior living, she tries to learn from her colleagues that have been in the industry to get a deeper understanding of goals and tasks. For example, when working in ecommerce in the college student market, she realized a sweepstakes they had launched on the new (at the time) Facebook wasn’t going to work because college students don’t want to get phone calls. So she brainstormed with her colleague who had more experience in the industry, Jeff Rahilly, how to overcome that challenge.

This has taught her that as she grows her career, she realizes that her ability to lead a team is rooted in her ability to be strategic and flexible. Being able to take lessons and apply them to leadership positions is far more important than actually knowing the industry vertical.

Lessons (with stories) from people she collaborated with

Healy also shared lessons she learned from the people she collaborated with.

The best outcomes are created when teamwork is at the forefront

via Martha Doyle, Chief Operating Officer, EF Education

Doyle has been at EF Education her whole career, starting as an assistant to the owner. She has since worked her way up the ladder to her current role as chief operating officer. During Healy’s time at EF, she admired Doyle’s ability to build a team around her that was perfectly balanced out. She would identify the strengths in each team member and ensure that everyone brought something different to the table in order to minimize conflicts and maximize performance.

She never saw other team members as a threat to her position. Martha greatly appreciated input from her teams and believes that the best outcomes are created when teamwork is at the forefront.

Present situations in a “win-win” light

via Shane Steffens, President, EF Academy

Another colleague Healy had while at EF was Shane Steffens, who is the president of EF Academy. When they worked together, they were both working in the same position, along with another team member, so there were three of them doing the same job at once. While it seems like a lot, they all brought different strengths to the table and found ways to work together.

Steffens taught her to communicate in a new style, as her style of communicating at the time was more aggressive and direct. She learned to present situations in a “win-win” light, so all parties felt like they were getting the best possible outcomes. Steffens would ask questions in meetings to get people to feel engaged, which she now uses in her role today at Seniorly. She constantly asks her peers “help me understand” or “why do you think that” to get a deeper understanding of their perspective and talk through different solutions.

Power comes from attitude, attention, and presence

via Jessica Fein, Vice President Strategic Brand Alliances, Bright Horizons

Jessica Fein was a colleague who taught Healy a great deal of what it means to be a working mom. While they worked together at Bright Horizons, one of Fein’s three kids was dealing with a degenerative disease and needed care from nurses around the clock. Despite this, Fein still showed up for work, and her coworkers would have never known about her home situation, unless she said something directly. She taught Healy the power of attitude, attention, and presence.

Her overall demeanor was always positive regardless of how stressful her life at home was.

No role is high enough to be disconnected from day-to-day activities and initiatives

via Arthur Bretschneider, CEO, Seniorly

In her current role at Seniorly, she works very closely with co-founder and CEO, Arthur Bretschneider. Seniorly is a small but mighty group, so she often sees Bretschneider volunteer to take on different projects and jump in wherever needed. There is no aspect of the business that he is not willing to lend a hand in. He will do anything to ensure the success of the company, and sometimes, you need to roll up your sleeves to guarantee a business is successful.

She also sees firsthand that Bretschneider embodies the fact that no role is high enough to be disconnected from day-to-day activities and initiatives. From her time at Seniorly and working with Bretschneider, she understands the importance of being nimble and willing to support in areas that require immediate attention.

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Transcript

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

Christine Healy: For me growing up. You know, I grew up in a house where you you fought to win. You know, like, there's in every intellectual conversation, there is a winner and a loser. And so I learned so much from watching Shane Manning's internal conversations, and it helped me so much to figure out how to really gain by and for new big things that we wanted to do.

And so that idea of Yes and is kind of like when you you know, when you are trying to sell something, the best thing you can do is to start with understanding who your who your buyer is and what they want and ask them more questions. And that will kind of help you guys get aligned. So. So that idea of Yes and was huge for me.

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 Burstein, to tell you about today's guest.

Daniel Burstein: We've been here because one thing I love about a career in marketing. I've gotten the opportunity to learn the inner workings of so many other industries I would have never been exposed to if I didn't have to tell their story. So I learned my skill isn't necessarily to know everything about every industry, but it's to be able to learn quickly and work with subject matter experts to get the knowledge out of their head and clearly communicate it to the ideal customer.

Or, as our next guest put it in her podcast guest application, you don't have to know it to lead it. Here to share the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson filled stories is Christine Healy, the chief growth officer at Senior. Thanks for joining us, Christine.

Christine Healy: Hi, Daniel. I'm really excited to be here. I have to tell you, on most days, I don't necessarily feel like I've made it in marketing. So to be on this podcast, I'm like, okay, today's a good day.

Daniel Burstein: I appreciate that humility. I appreciate that. And a play on words of the podcast. We as marketers get to make things. I look forward to learning from what you've made in your career. But first, let's talk about that. Just a quick look at your background. You were director of marketing and e-commerce. Lynn Evans, Vice President of Marketing and Ethics for America, Vice President of Consumer Growth Marketing, a Bright Horizons.

And for the past two years, Christine has been chief growth officer at Senior Lee. Senior Lee has raised six and a half million dollars in Series A funding. And Christine and her team have attracted 5 million visitors per year to their site. So, Christine, give us a sense. What is your day like as chief growth officer at Senior Lee?

Christine Healy: Well, I know you ask this of everyone and the answer is usually the same. There's no such thing as a typical day. The only constant in my day is my morning routine. So I usually wake up. I will have a cup of coffee with my husband. I sign up for a ton of Google alerts on every kind of term in my industry, and I do spend a lot of time reading through kind of news updates about what's happening, you know, whether it's from a legislative perspective, from a business perspective, from a consumer perspective.

And that's kind of fun for me. I will usually walk the dog and listen to some podcasts, so I listen to this podcast, But there are a few other favorites, too. And then I before I start my day, I will usually head up a few customer forums. So Senior Lee works with older adults in their families who are looking to find senior living solutions.

And you know, our primary audience is an adult caregiver. So this is, you know, someone my age and forties and fifties who's helping to manage care for our family and it is challenging for them. And there are all kinds of support groups across across the Internet, lots of Facebook forums. And so I'll usually spend a few minutes just kind of reading through people's posts just to kind of get a sense of of what their life is like.

And, you know, there are days that I have to stop doing it because it can get pretty heavy for a lot of those people. But it's also really informative and absolutely helps me stay in touch with why I do this. You know, I think one of the things that I'm sure a lot of us find is, you know, as our careers grow, we get further and further away from the end user.

And this is a nice and easy way for me to stay connected to the people that we're serving.

Daniel Burstein: I love that, Christine. One of the things I always talk about is our challenges marketers is customer intimacy. How can we increase customer intimacy? How can we stop looking to just databases at numbers and actually interact with people? And, you know, they're going through events, working in a retail store, if you have it going on a sales call.

I mean, there's a lot of great ways to do it. But you know, sometimes more personally, why can't I don't budget for that event. We don't have a store, whatever it is, but everyone could do it. You do, you know, in that forum, that's one of my favorite interviews with the CMO of mobile company Mint Mobile, and he mentioned he he was really active in Reddit, especially after they launched a campaign because he wanted to interact with people and see what they thought of the campaign.

So kudos to what's like. One of the biggest things you learned like going in. I know you mentioned this, the sentiment and the feeling, the sentiment, the feeling that that's important to get inside of their head. But was there something ever a time where you read something? You're like, well, I didn't I didn't really know that or think that.

Christine Healy: It's going to be very unsexy and we're going to go there. I heard you were like 5 minutes into this podcast, but I will say that incontinence is an issue that these people are struggling with so much and it is an issue that nobody is talking about. So, you know, that was a really, really easy way for us to kind of say, Oh boy, we need to write more content about this.

But I've also had had, you know, seen posts where people say, you know, why don't they make an app for such and such? Or why isn't there a tool that and, you know, those I take straight back to our product team and say, how do we build this? That's perfect. So yeah, there's a lot of inspiration that comes from there.

Daniel Burstein: That's fantastic. That's fantastic. Well, let's dive into it and see what lessons we can learn from the things you made in marketing. As I said, that's a great thing we get to do as marketers, right? I've never been a podiatrist or actuary or anything else, but I don't feel like they get to make things like we do. We get to make, you know, your first lesson.

You said believe in people. How did you learn that lesson?

Christine Healy: Well, I mean, I feel like I have benefited from people believing in me my entire career. But really, it started when I joined a company called F Education. So F is a incredible company. It's based in a North American headquarters, are in Boston. And they they kind of exist at the intersection of all things related to education, culture and travel.

So if you think au pair programs and high school year abroad and language programs and it's a really interesting company because it's very big, you know, it's probably pushing 40,000 employees by now, but it's very much a founder led company. And this guy who founded it, Fertile Holt, is a really interesting guy. He's dyslexic. You know, I think he was told by so many teachers that he would never graduate high school, and he founded it f in his college basement.

And he had this concept that people, you know, that if you hire correctly, most of the time those people can do any job. So, you know, Bartel looked for people who are interested, engaged, passionate, curious, smart, hardworking, ambitious. And he believed in this idea of lateral movement. So, you know, it was called the spiral staircase. So, you know, you might start in one function, and if you are doing well, you might get moved to a totally different function.

And there was something really, really great about that feeling of stepping into something new that you weren't prepared for, that you had no business kind of running and having people around you believe that you could do it. So, you know, I worked with this woman named Michelle Berglund, who's fantastic, and she started out as a controller and, you know, ended up as a vp of h.R.

And, you know, there are very few organizations that would, you know, move someone from a controller to h.r. With, you know, a stint in operations in the middle and and yeah. So i think that kind of started my way of thinking about roles and jobs and people's ability to do more than really what they were just trained for.

But I will also say, yeah, that I've been given a lot of things that I had no business being put into and you kind of figure it out.

Daniel Burstein: Yes, I love that lesson from an internal kind of hiring perspective, internal management perspective. Let me ask, how do you apply that with your marketing? Believe in people? Like how do you use the people in your company, in your messaging and your value proposition? Do you have, for example, our founder, Flint McLaughlin, wrote when he wrote Transparent Marketing, he said, People buy from people.

People don't buy from companies, from stores or from websites. People buy from people. Marketing is not about programs. It is about relationships. And I remember interviewing a key market leader at IBM. I don't remember who, but it was the early days of social media and I asked him about what their policy was of having employees on social media, and he was like, Look, we trust them with our patterns and our trade secrets and our customers.

How can we not trust them with social media? So for you, Christine, like how you believe in people, how do you believe in people when it comes to getting that marketing message out there? How do you use them?

Christine Healy: Well, I mean, if I hire people that I believe in, I trust the recommendations that they're bringing to me, without a doubt. So, you know, even if I have had many people put something to me that, you know, I'm not seeing it, I'm not feeling it, but I can see in their eyes that they think this is going to work.

And I let people run with it because I think for me, that's that's the greatest way that I've grown is by people giving me, you know, the leeway to to try and fail and try and succeed. And. Yeah.

Daniel Burstein: So I hear you. But let me let me ask this a different way. You know, so a lot of times webs with websites or factory, whatever it is, all of the value is hidden there. And with our marketing campaigns, right. It's not just as face as company getting those people out there, whether it's you know, I remember Walmart used to put their associates as models in there, like, you know, fliers they'd put out or for example, for Senior Lee, I saw I think there's some on your website you have like local advocates or something to that extent.

So I just wonder, you know, we're in this digital age. I love what you mentioned about how you try to break that down and go into forums and learn about the customers, the people. But in this digital age where we're hiding behind websites and AI and ads and all these things and people don't necessarily get to go face to face and see everyone in a store like they used to.

How do you use the people within your organization, in any organization you've worked in as part of that marketing message to get them out there to make that human connection with the customer?

Christine Healy: Yeah, I mean, I for to answer that question, I would actually think way beyond the walls of the organization and really going back to kind of creating evangelists for your product. So, you know, one of the interesting things about the where the the place that marketing sits in today's organizations is that we are really I think we're kind of at the Nexus of a lot of different functions.

So we work, you know, just as much with product as we do with sales, as we do with operations. And so I think when you can work cross-functionally to make sure that what you're delivering is really consistent with what you're promising, you create your own army of people who are talking about you and recommending you. And that is way more effective, frankly, than any any marketing campaign could ever do.

And then you can also take those people and feature them in marketing as well. But yeah, I mean, I've I've been in situations where I have willingly or suggested giving up marketing spend or marketing headcount if I thought it was going to solve a problem in the product, because I really firmly believe, like if we build a great product, you know, the rest of it is really easy.

Daniel Burstein: That is another other great insight. I don't want people listening to overlook that. You know, I think sometimes we silo these things and as marketing, we're just focused on let's get our programs out there, our brand, get our media buys right and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, what are we doing if we don't have a valuable product?

And so the fact that you said, I will sacrifice some of my marketing budget to make a better product, the product is the best, more restaurant tastic.

Christine Healy: Christine Yeah, Yeah, it really is. Yeah.

Daniel Burstein: So your next lesson, you said embrace the crisis. It feels and maybe just feels this way. And this isn't true for the history of humanity, but it feels like, boy, we do get our share of crises lately. So, you know. How did you learn this lesson to embrace the crisis?

Christine Healy: Yeah. And so I suppose I should start by, you know, putting a caveat on on crisis. This is an opportunity to take advantage of, you know, the horrible things that are happening in the world. You know, my personal lessons are embrace crises in the business. So, you know, I think back to times that I have really been challenged to think differently as a marketer or as a salesperson.

You know, I started my career in sales and they've all been around things that were happening in the world that were really challenging for the business I was in. So, you know, when 911 happened, I was working in the travel industry. I was actually working in the student travel industry, and that was a really, really challenging time to be in marketing.

We had to figure out how to make this a safe proposition for parents and students and teachers to still travel. We had to make it a fun proposition, but we also had to do it in a way that was not just respectful to what had happened. And so this was another time that, you know, I spent a lot of time on the phone with angry parents.

Like, you know, I probably spent three months taking customer calls from people who were telling me that, you know, moving forward in the face of what had happened was terrible. But it really gives you it gave me insight into how to manage the messaging and how to adjust our campaigns to be much more targeted. So, you know, for the few years after that, we really we had previously had a spreading prey approach and we really did very targeted, highly segmented sands and campaigns so that we could try to minimize the amount of advertising that was that was coming around from it, I guess.

And and I think there's something, you know, wonderful that happens. And I'm not saying any crisis is wonderful, but there's something that is wonderful that happens when you have constraints put around you as a marketer. I think it forces you to think more creatively. I think it streamlines your approach. You know, it gets rid of a lot of the fluff and that that as marketers, we can tend to create.

I think another time was very recent. I was working in early education during COVID. That was another crazy time. You know, people are obviously your children are one of the most valuable resources in general. And, you know, parents were very, very nervous about sending their kids back to school and trying to figure out how to balance their own work and, you know, keeping their kids and their families safe.

And, you know, there was a period of time that we really just had to back off on the sell and move towards adding value. So that was a time where, you know, we thought choose, what else can we do that would that would be interesting. That would say something about our brands that would that would help in this situation.

And and we actually ended up partnering with Arianna Huffington, who runs an organization called Thrive Global. And we provided we opened up sites for and this was in the early stages for health care workers to take care of their children. So even as a marketer, if you're not always focused on kind of growing the business, there are still other things you can do to contribute.

And, you know, for me, I think all of the things that all of the places I've worked have been very mission focused. And so that part feels good for me too, just being able to find other things to contribute when stuff when stuff happens. And my last point is this I think when when crises happen, as my feeling is generally people don't know what to do, right?

That's the nature of a crisis. There's no playbook. And so people tend to hold back and wait until they're given direction. And my advice to anybody, whether you're in marketing or anywhere else, is to lean into the crisis, to do something, to create a plan and let someone react to it. Because I will tell you, as someone who's led to a couple of crisis crises, you're always the hardest part is trying to figure out how to use everyone properly to move the business forward.

So yeah.

Daniel Burstein: So when you say embrace a crisis, the other thing I think about is corporate crisis. Like something yeah, there's the bigger things just and 911 but there's something happens in the company I know I'm getting these pictures endlessly from PR companies like communications and so you know, have you ever had that experience of a crisis in the company and how you handle that?

Because, you know, for example, when I've written about making claims credible in marketing, one that test we wrote about, I love this weakness one we had, we basically there was a test of a weakness subject line versus an incentive subject line, right? Incentive is the traditional thing you put. Yeah. Nobody wants to show a weakness and weakness did 21% better.

Christine Healy: It's the negativity bias, right?

Daniel Burstein: Well, I mean, I don't know. It's the only child I know with the negativity bias, I wonder is there credibility and transparency? And I think, for example, to the I loved the Domino's Pizza campaign maybe a decade ago where they said, hey, our pizza was bad and we needed to make it better. It's not that people didn't know, but when you hear a brand come out and say that, you're like, okay, yeah.

And I will say like, there's a lot of things I'm unsure about Elon Musk lately, but I don't know if he's even intentionally doing this, but he'll point out the weaknesses of his car company in his Twitter X and his rockets are not even intended. He just thinks out loud. And I think because of that, he does have credibility with a certain group that hears that.

So embrace the crisis. Have you ever been in a situation where he the crisis was something the company did maybe was wrong or perceived badly? And then how do you how do you embrace that weakness? You come out clearly or like, what do you do in that situation?

Christine Healy: Yeah, you know, fortunately, I haven't really ever been. The things the things that are coming to mind are more kind of in PR in the PR realm. It's not really product related, you know, You know, when I worked ATF, all kinds of things happen, you know, with kids on tour in Europe, but those don't really impact marketing. So there's nothing that's really coming to mind right now.

Daniel Burstein: I can go into that. I mean, a lot of marketers and smaller companies might have to be in PR. We are close to our PR brethren like, you know, we need to work together. We control that brand if we're going to control that brand so we can dive into all PR be okay with that. I think our listeners would want to hear that.

Christine Healy: Yeah, I mean, so so I think, you know, marketing tends to partner with lots of different functions at different times. You know, for me, PR is a big one. You know, when I worked at if there are things that happen to kids. Hunter because kids on top of teenagers and in other countries and and you kind of have to manage communications very delicately and when stuff happens, I would say the same in early and in early education and preschool.

You know, when when things happen with children, that might be the fault of of a teacher who just happened to turn their back. And those are much more small scale. So again, my inclination whenever those things happen is always to go back to one on one communication. They're not necessarily marketing solutions. It's, you know, holding meetings, it's talking to people, it's gaining trust, it's showing transparency, it's showing a willingness to listen.

It's making it personal. And I can't tell you as a marketer and a still as a chief growth officer how much time I spend on the phone talking to customers. So, you know, I'm on the channel that gets customer complaints. Like I will pick up the phone probably every other day and call a customer and just listen to them, partially because I want to hear what they have to say, but partially because I want those people to know that we care.

Daniel Burstein: Okay. So another lesson you had was say yes. And so that from improv is where you learned that. And how do you my.

Christine Healy: Gosh, it is. So years ago we had an off site and we were working on a team building exercise and we had an improv company come in and force us to do all these Yes and exercises. And there's something about that idea of yes. And that just stuck with me because, you know, I tend to be a no butt person.

So so it was really illuminating. And I think, you know, for me, there were a couple ways that I apply that very differently. You know, the first is in terms of managing internal communication. So as a marketer, you know, when you're planning for a new season or planning for a new budget or a new campaign, you know, sometimes if you want to do something big and new that doesn't have a proven ROI, why there's a budget associated with that.

And getting that budget passed is sometimes one of the hardest things to do. And I worked with a guy named Shane Steffens, who is now I think he's now he's a president of one of the products, ATF. But Shane had this really interesting background. He he went to school at Notre Dame. He studied literature. And I think all they did in this major was debate classics.

So he had this incredible way of debating people where everyone felt like a winner. So his response, you know, anytime he didn't agree with anyone, he would always ask them more questions to help, to help himself understand their perspective. And for me, growing up, you know, I grew up in a house where you you fought to win, you know, like there was in every intellectual conversation, there was a winner and a loser.

And so I learned so much from watching Shane manage internal conversations. And it helped me so much to figure out how to really gain buy in for new big things that we wanted to do. And and so that idea of yes and is kind of like when you, you know, when you are trying to sell something, the best thing you can do is to start with understanding who your who your buyer is and what they want and ask them more questions.

And that will kind of help you guys get aligned. So so that idea of yes and was huge for me. I will also say that, you know. Yes. And has been a functional part of my career. I am not one of those people who ever knew what I wanted to do. You know, when I graduated college, I thought I was going to go back and get a degree in history.

And so I have never been a five year career plan person. And I really just kind of said yes to anything that was offered to me along the way. And so, you know, that has given me experience in managing buildout for construction of new stores. You know, you you show up in your manager and construction crew and pulling permits and no one has given you any idea how to do that or, you know, heading to New York to be a buyer for clothes, you know, or, you know, to bring it to a marketing perspective.

You know, I moved into a newer job at at a division of F education. And, you know, as as I am apt to do, I kind of spent the first few months just listening. I know a lot of people come into a new job with 90 day plans, and I'm kind of the opposite. You know, I usually tell people don't expect anything from me for 90 days.

All I want to do is learn and listen. And I came in to this role and like I usually do, you know, I'm reviewing the marketing materials. I'm, you know, listening to sales calls. And I very quickly realize, wow, there's a huge problem here. You know, marketing is saying one thing. We're going to market with a low price guarantee message and, you know, a licensing deal with a very strong educational brand and nobody on the phones is even mentioning it or talking about it.

So I'm like, whoa, whatever. Marketing is promising is not what sales is delivering. And there is like a huge disconnect. And so, you know, I went to the leadership team and said, I think we have this big problem. And, you know, all of a sudden, you know, they were saying, yes, and what do we do about it? You know, And and so then you kind of go to, okay, well, I think we need to rebrand.

And they're like, yes, and what should we do? And and it really led to this whole kind of reinvention of the product itself, which again, like I had no business doing. I didn't know what I was doing, but it was one of those things that you figure out along the way. And in this case, it was a fascinating process, something I had never done before.

We worked with a woman named and it was Chris Prentiss, and she was out of the Parsons School of Design, and she was a customer. Ethnographer Do you have you ever worked with one of these guys?

Daniel Burstein: I have not. That sounds fascinating.

Christine Healy: So here's what they do. It's really cool. They go out and they basically like trail your customers for 24 or 48 hours. So we gave Chris a list of 30, you know, 30 of our customers. And she would fly out to Des Moines, Iowa, and she would meet, you know, Miss Bukowski, the teacher at her house at 6 a.m. She'd drive with Ms..

Bukowski to school. She'd stop at Dunkin Donuts. Whether she'd sit in the back of her classroom, she would go to the teacher's lounge at lunch. She would, you know, go to the basketball game. After after school she would sit with her. Well, Ms.. Bukowski, great at homework. And you'd just literally like, inhabit the life of your customers for a day or two just to kind of see what are they really dealing with, what are their pressures, what are their stressors?

And that really led us to like that exercise was the pivotal moment for us, figuring out like, actually this is what our product is. And for us, what it meant is, you know, we had had this this history of, you know, running a company for 40 years and our value proposition to teachers was always something around, you know, make your subject come alive.

So it might have been like make history come alive or, you know, make French come alive for your students. Because the assumption was these teachers were teaching because they had a passion for the product, for the the topic right. And what we found out is that the best teachers, the teachers who repeated year after year and took the most kids to Europe actually didn't care that much about what they were teaching.

They were teaching because they loved being around kids and they loved teenagers. And if you ask them what their dream was, you know, like, you know, what's the best outcome for you with a kid? It's like, I just want to be that teacher that a kid comes back to after they graduate from college. You know, I just want to be that teacher, that someone comes back and says, Thank you, you are so awesome.

And that that was the moment that we realized actually that's what our product is. Travel is how we do it, but our product is making this lasting moment for teachers and students like our product is allowing teachers to change students lives. So there was a very, very long answer to the to the question about yes. And but that's kind of what you get when you just have this Yes.

And approach. It's like, okay. Yes. And what does that mean? Yes. And what does that mean? And you just kind of find yourself down some crazy rabbit hole two years later.

Daniel Burstein: Well, no, I want to just stop and point out we were talking about customer intimacy before and that I mean, there's a whole other level. And see, if we were not talking about marketing in a business, if we remove that, that is itself a beautiful story like to learn about I mean seriously to learn about other human beings.

Yeah. To say how could we better help those other human beings be the best version of themselves. Yeah, right. If you took a marketing department out of it, like, that's beautiful like that. Yeah, that to me, that's. And that is an exciting thing that we should get to do as marketers. Customer first marketing. We should learn about them not just to hit a KPI or something, right?

Yeah, we should learn about them to serve them and then from serving them, hopefully hit that KPI and get the brand right. Like you said, that's beautiful. I mean inspirational. Yeah.

Christine Healy: Especially because, you know, I mentioned I'm, I'm tend to be somewhat mission driven but you know to serve teachers like oh my God, what a gift, you know. Oh.

Daniel Burstein: You know, it's funny when you said that actually my wife, the teacher, sells differently what you learn and that's actually probably pretty accurate. Yeah.

Christine Healy: Yeah. What does she.

Daniel Burstein: Teach English as a second language. So she gets students who are just fresh to America, but who speak English from all over the world and.

Christine Healy: Amazing.

Daniel Burstein: Help and speak it. Yeah, but. But it is true too. Like I think her passion more is kind of like what I want my passion be for marketing is helping people versus a specific subject so that the things she sees and helps people, right? Not just like, oh, this subject is so great, it's helping people, which we as marketers can emulate too.

Obviously we're not the level of a teacher, but again, not just keep your eyes and database to helping people. That's what our brains should be about. But let's talk about this Yes and idea because I want to challenge it or at least unpack it or at least understand it better. I love improv. I love what you're saying. Like, especially when it comes to brainstorming.

I love. Yes. And I try to lean towards Yes. But here's one of my biggest struggles. And I think the biggest struggle for many marketing leaders, for many businesses is prioritization. So I want to know how you balance. Yes. And and prioritization is for me. For example, I'll mention we have so McLoud is the parent organization of marketing Sherpa.

We have this whole patented process about how we do marketing is called the conversion sequence rustic. And for me that is something that helps prioritize. Okay, what we're going to do in marketing, what we do on a landing page and different things, right? There's a methodology we can prioritize because without that, my gosh, it's just seems overwhelming. It's just just, you know, a blue space.

So how have you in your career or in leading an organization, how do you prioritize? Yes. And I mean, how do you like go after. Yes. But at the same time, every guess is a no to something else. You only have so much time to day, so much budget.

Christine Healy: Every.

Daniel Burstein: Year. I just think about.

Christine Healy: How every yes is a is is not a no for something else. It's a little later for something else. Right. So so I would say the way that I think about it is anything relating to the delivery of the promise, whatever that promise is. It's a product, it's a service, it's a whatever that has to come first, whether that's marketing or whether it's a marketing function or something else, then everything else is just graded on like an LLC, a level of effort estimate and an LOI, a level of impact.

And so we kind of do sometimes our database and sometimes they're kind of back of the napkin, you know, and we just create a matrix that says like, okay, here's all the stuff we want to do and which ones are going to get us the farthest, the fastest.

Daniel Burstein: So it sounds like it starts with Yes. And but where the rubber meets the road, there's that matrix level of effort, level of impact, and that's what we decide either to go to market or to invest in or whatever. Yeah.

Christine Healy: That's how we do it.

Daniel Burstein: I can look at that. I like. Yes. All right. Eventually this is the opening. I love this. I've always felt this as a marketer, that part of the fun of being a marketer is you get to learn about all these industries, right, even if you don't know them. And you said you don't have to know it to lead it.

So I love when you mentioned that you have been in your career from the earliest, like early education. Yeah, it sounded like kind of the middle level in education, like K-through-12, I guess Now you're at seniors, so you've kind of probably spread the breath of human life. So what is this? You don't have to know it to lead it.

How did you learn that lesson?

Christine Healy: Yeah, I mean, I think I learned it from personal experience. I mean, my first job, ADF, I was hired, I showed up. To be completely honest, I don't even think I knew what my title was or what I was supposed to be doing. And this was 25 years ago before things were, you know what they are now. It is like if there's a lot of clarity.

And I walked into my office and I literally had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, like none. I didn't even know what function I was sitting in. And and so, you know, you figure it out. I started just grabbing my coffee in the morning and visiting colleagues and kind of pretending to talk to them, but like sneaking a look at what was on their computer and you kind of realize like, oh, you know, Jeff looks at, you know, these spreadsheets every morning and Korina has a stand up meeting every morning, and this other person does that.

And so I think I think, you know, we often and I will say especially women, I think we often us underestimate our ability to figure things out and to manage being imperfect for a period of time. And, you know, people in general are capable of so much more than we think of them. You don't have to have a marketing degree to be a great marketer.

You don't have to have a writing degree to be a great writer. So I think, you know, great ideas come from anywhere. And, you know, this goes back to that kind of first lesson about if you hire smart, talented, creative, curious, ambitious people, they will help you figure it out. So you know, that story I talked about, I just shared about rebranding like I had.

I never rebranded the company. I had never reinvented a company. You know, there's another one where, you know, again was. Yeah, but I was tasked with a few other people to develop a start up under the umbrella. So I've had these travel products for middle school and high school. They had travel products for adults, but they were missing that that kind of segment between high school and adulthood.

And so we were tasked with starting a college product for travel. And, you know, because if had had such a strong, proven history, their model, the assumption was we would set the model up the same way that all the other travel products were, which was, you know, you do seasonal campaigns, you have, you know, give forget where you get people to sign up for something, you know, like a chance to win a free trip or a travel poster or whatever.

And then that's your your lead pool. And, you know, we we set everything up. We got the computers, we hired the salespeople. We had a team of like 35 and, you know, we did advance, you know, advanced marketing. And we got, you know, 10,000 leads within a couple of days. And we started calling out and a can you guess what happened?

When we started.

Daniel Burstein: People got the calls. They're like, what the heck? Yeah, Well.

Christine Healy: Well, we're calling college kids and college kids like they don't want to talk on the phone. They don't want to be sold half the time. They're not even awake when we're calling them at one. If we start calling them at four, they're maybe pre party. They're, you know, starting to do their evening activities and having a little, you know, and so on.

Literally on day three, I was like, oh my God, I think we have a huge problem. Like, this model does not work for the college market. And this was back in the early 2000s and it was really before before ecommerce had expanded. So at that time eCommerce was really very commodities focused. It was, you know, you could buy things online, you could research online, but you certainly didn't you didn't necessarily sell experiential or high end products online.

And so, you know, at the end of the first week, we were we were like, is this not going to work? This is not going to work. And and so, you know, we had a brainstorm with two of my friends, one of whom is this guy named Jeffrey Healy, who's just a brilliant we both have very similar backgrounds in sales and marketing, but we come at it so differently.

You know, I'm very data strategy focused. He's like a creative genius. And and we we just make such a good team. So that's another plug is like find somebody who works differently than you and they they will end up being your best friend 20 years later. And we said, you know, I think we can figure out a way to do this online.

But again, like, you know, marketing automation systems didn't exist. There weren't email platforms. And so we built all these things by code and we kind of were just, you know, I, I had a head salesperson and I said, I want you to spend the next week on on the calls, and I want you to diagram what these calls are like, like I want you to create a name for each part of the call, you know, whether it's solution, objection, you know, questions.

And we need to figure out how to replicate that through. And it was email at the time, really, and we did it. So so that's kind of another example of of just being able to trust in yourself and and be okay with failure and be okay with trying. I mean, another thing that we did this was when Facebook was just first launching and I was like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen.

I'm just going to build our own forum. So I had our tech team build, build a Facebook for us. And by the time they were done, I was like, Oh, forget it. Yeah, that's that's.

Daniel Burstein: There's a.

Christine Healy: Facebook. Yeah, there's a you know.

Daniel Burstein: There's a I mean, that is another great example where you're trying to say, okay, what would a real in-person conversation be like? These people, college students don't want in-person conversations, by the way. Most people do not want to sign up for a computer, whatever, and get a phone call. And then you said, well, how can we replicate that in email?

And again, I just want to point out to listeners, that's another great customer first, really kind of close that customer intimacy loop. And I'll mention one thing actually that Christina mentioned to me before we were prepping. She asked me what makes these funny for you? And now we'll see. I would think about the wonderful guests I've had. They're all been fantastic, very customer focused people.

I don't think anyone has asked me that for.

Christine Healy: A good reason. Make it fun for you.

Daniel Burstein: And that is what we should be doing as marketers for our customers, right? We're going to make it fun for them. So I love that. I love that attitude. But no. So I think that's, you know, again, that great attitude going forward. Also, one to point out, I think you mentioned Jeff Healey. Were you too related or.

Christine Healy: Oh, no. Jeff Healey.

Daniel Burstein: Oh.

Christine Healy: But I will say it's funny, many people thought we were married because people misunderstood as.

Daniel Burstein: Us brother in law said. Well, I believe that because in the first half of the episode we talk about lessons from the things that our guests have made in the second half. We talk about lessons from the people they collaborated with. That is a great thing we get to do as marketers. We get to make things and we get to make them with people and learn from them.

But first, I should mention the how I made it. The marketing podcast is underwritten by Mac Labs Institute, the parent organization of marketing Sherpa. You can get 10,000 marketing experiments working for you with a free trial of the Mac Air Guild at Mac Lipscomb slash a I that's MGC AB Eskom slash a I and you can get the artificial intelligence revolution working for you.

So Christine so yes, you've you've mentioned a lot of people already. I wish I could see you're definitely someone who learns from people, loves working with people but let's call out a few specific lessons. You told me before we started recording one of these was with Martha Doyle, the chief operating officer at E.F. Education. And you said from Martha, you learned that the best outcomes are created when teamwork is at the forefront.

So how do you learn this from Martha?

Christine Healy: Yeah. So Martha is a force of nature. She is one of these people who is magnetic in her presence. You know, she walks into a room and and she just lights up the room and she's held several different positions over her. You know, she started out actually as Bertil Hull's personal assistant and, you know, grew over the years and has been, you know, president of different divisions.

And now CEO. And one of the things that always struck me when I was first working for Martha was how seemingly incongruous her her leadership team was. So she was a very distinct personality. And yet the team that she surrounded herself with were very, very different in terms of tone and temperament and style and, you know, interpersonal skills.

And, you know, I think as a young person, I never totally understood like it just seemed like an island of misfit toys.

Daniel Burstein: And misfit toys. Yeah. Yeah.

Christine Healy: But I think as I got older, I realized that there was just such a strategic way that she assembled her teams to really balance out each other. You know, she found people who enjoyed working together, but who brought really radically different things to the table. And I think that was a lesson that I, you know, I adopted very early on.

You know, I'm nobody is good at everything, right. Like and to pretend like you are is is silly. So I love working with people who are way better than me at certain things. And so so yeah. So that's a, that's a lesson I learned from her. Yeah. And I will also say my interview with her when she interviewed me, she asked me two of the funniest interview questions I've ever been asked.

One was, Where am I in the birth order? And the second one was she asked me to describe my closet and I went away thinking, God, is there a right answer to that?

Daniel Burstein: Did you ever find the reason why she asked a question?

Christine Healy: I think she's just looking to to see how you answer them. It wasn't about the answer. It just how you answer them.

Daniel Burstein: Interesting. Okay. Well, so I like what you talk about. And like externally, it can look like an island of misfit toys, but really it could be like weaknesses and strengths.

Christine Healy: Found slightly.

Daniel Burstein: Out. And so I wonder for you, like, have you ever identified a weakness you had and how did you find another team member that can kind of have a strength there and balance each other out? For example, I never identify weakness. Let me. How do you do that? Like, how did you find the weakness? How did you find it?

Christine Healy: I usually have people telling me what my weaknesses are, so that makes it really easy. You know, if you if you have good working relationships with their colleagues, they are happy to tell you what you stink at. So. So for me, one of the things about me is I am a crazy introvert. Yeah, you are too. We talked about that.

Yeah. Yeah. And so.

Daniel Burstein: So I by the way, you don't come off like that at all. You are so outgoing and well-spoken, and you've engaged more in this episode than a lot of outgoing people. So you're really hiding it well, But it's.

Christine Healy: Yeah, no, I mean, I like people. It's just, you know. Yeah. Anyway, and so one of the things that I tend not to be amazing at is, you know, building team culture, some great at assembling teams. I'm not always great as sustaining teams like my personal personality. I'm very I love change. I love solving problems. I love finding problems.

And so what happens for me if you work for me is that I am always just looking over the horizon to find the next problem that that we can tackle. And so there's very little time for celebration and joy. And so I absolutely look to other people to help me with that and to be like, hold up. You need to go do something for the team or you need to schedule some fun time or you need to to do something.

Yeah. And I think at various times I have you know, I mentioned this guy, Jeffrey Healey. He's so creative. You know, even after we stopped working together, he's still my go to for, you know, if I need a little bit of inspiration or I need I need a new way of looking at something, I'll I'll dial him up and say, help me work through this problem.

Yeah. I mean, no market outcomes. No one does it all by themselves. You know, marketing requires such a broad spectrum of skills. You know, you need data, you need analytics, you need strategy, you need creativity, you need design. Like no one's good at all of that. So, yeah, I'm happy to say that I'm not. And frankly, the other nice part about I'm a generalist, so I am, you know, better than average at most things, but I'm not as great as any of the specialists in any of the functions.

So I absolutely need to those who are better at me and those things in those areas.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah, and I think that's how we grow in our career. When I interviewed Dr. Michael Salzman, professor of marketing at Saint Joseph's University on how I made it marketing, one of his lessons was finding collaborators with complementary skill sets. And so like as a professor, he needed that. He was like a professor in Belgium who had some skill because you're doing specific research and like professors and researchers need to do that sometimes.

Like you said, Christine, we feel like we have to wear this hat of everything in marketing where there's very few industries where one person does everything. Yeah, right. So, well, it ties into your next lesson to present situations in a win win light. So, I mean, there's definitely a win win when you find the right complementary person. But talking about presenting situations in a win win, might you learn this from Shane Steffens who you mentioned earlier, the President of the Academy?

I do learn this from Shane.

Christine Healy: So this again, it goes back to what I was saying before, as is Shane was a master of, of creating consensus. And so, you know, the the idea behind gaining consensus and I will also say marketing is so reliant in my experience on having internal buy in at every level. So like I have never run a successful campaign or had a successful season where we weren't aligned from the you know, the CEO to the entry level person who was doing data.

Like everyone needs to understand what they're doing and why they're doing it. And and what's important. So Shane, again, just had this way of engaging people and always seeking to understand a point of view that he didn't agree with and then share his point of view. And you just kind of find that when you when you seek to not be right and you seek to understand and everybody ends up feeling kind of like a winner and and people, you know, again, from the highest level need to feel like they contribute, you know.

Daniel Burstein: So I think that's a great internal communication lesson, but I think a lot of internal communication lessons I always like to think of, well, how can they apply to our outward communication, to our marketing? And so I wonder, do ever taken this, you know, the win win approach in any marketing messaging. And, you know, for example, I did a case study with Valencia ICF, which is a soccer club in La Liga and they came up with a win win by they created a game for their fans and then the sponsors had prizes, right?

So they feel that, hey, this would be a great win win. This would be something fun for our fans to do and they get some prizes, but it's way for our sponsors to kind of organically get in front of the customers, you know? So I mean, for you, have you ever taken that win win mentality and interpreted the marketing messaging, branding a campaign?

Christine Healy: Yeah. When we going back to college break and this again was like probably the first year Facebook was happening, we created one of the first, you know, quizzes where you would you would fill out a quiz and show your results and it was around how many countries have you been in the world? And there was this I it was it probably got over a million participants posting and we had no idea again, because I don't think we really understood the power of Facebook at the time.

But there was a win for the customer in that they got to kind of showcase what their, you know, what their travel resumé looked like. There was a win for us because we were branding. There was frankly, a win for Facebook because they were growing. Yeah. I mean, but really any I think any marketing campaign should make the customer feel like they're winning.

Like there's really no reason to engage with a product or engage with any kind of asset if you don't feel like there's a value that's going to be delivered to you.

Daniel Burstein: So yeah, that is a great lot. You were talking about influencers before customers before and for social media. I mean that is a great lesson specifically for those venues where it's like, make them look good. Yeah, want to share it right? Make them feel good. Yeah. So you said power comes from attitude, attention and presence. And you learned this from Jessica Fine, vice president of Strategic Brand Alliances of Bright Horizon.

So how did you learn this lesson from Jessica?

Christine Healy: Yeah. Okay. So this is more of a leadership lesson, not necessarily a marketing lesson, but Jesse is, I shall say, a dear friend of mine now, But I joined with her at Bright Horizons and she is someone who had or has a very comp allocated home life. She had a daughter who was struggling with a mitochondrial disease and, you know, required round the clock care.

And her home life was incredibly, incredibly complicated. She had another child with some some other challenges and yet when Jesse would show up to work, Jesse was there, you know, like there was no question about where Jesse's focus was. There was no question about her energy. She loved what she was doing. And she was absolutely is absolutely mad at magnetic and captivating.

And like, frankly, I will also say the amount of energy this woman has is unbelievable. She is hosting her own podcast now called I don't Know How She Does it. You know, she just wrote a book, but I, I love being around. And frankly, this this has had a lot to do with my career choices. Like, I love being around people who are just so passionate about what they do that they can't turn it off, you know?

And so that's something that I try to really tap into. And, you know, I don't think I'm naturally I don't have Jesse's level of energy by any means. But I do find that, you know, if I feel like my energy, if I'm not bringing it, I will do stuff to adjust. You know, I'll go for a walk. I will take a day off.

I will, you know, go read a book, refuel my soul, try to find something that's, you know, beautiful and inspirational. Like, frankly, like some of the some of the new TV is actually so, you know, idea provoking. It's fantastic. So, yeah, so Jesse and she delivered great work. You know, she was always ready to partner and think with you.

Daniel Burstein: So do you work at home? I think we're at home.

Christine Healy: Now, right? I work from home full time now. Yeah.

Daniel Burstein: So how do you decide that to do that? How have you learned? Have you figured anything out?

Christine Healy: I have not figured out working from home. I love it. It's so much better for my work life balance, but I definitely miss the energy of human interaction. That part is hard. I mean, I try to go out to our headquarters. You know, every other month. I happen to work now with the most fantastic group of guys who are just so fun and have so much energy and that I can feel it through Slack.

So that part is nice. Yeah.

Daniel Burstein: Well, because when I heard your story, I mean first, that's very powerful. And I mean, I can't imagine going through that. I remember of a lesson of VP told me, like early in my career, not just my words, it was an off site. She was telling everyone and this is when like Blackberries were really big. And she's like, You know, what I hate is like, you know, you're at an event or a conference or every hour and you're in a hallway and you run into someone you haven't seen in a while and you're talking them, and then it's your BlackBerry, something happens and then you're like, you know, doing your BlackBerry, boom, boom, boom, boom.

But you're like talking to a person. And she's like, I'm not going to live my life. Like, I'm not going to have my career like that. And I don't think you should either, like, be where you are. Yeah. And so that I mean, that lesson seriously always really stuck with me. Be where you are. Yeah. Like, be all in And if she could do that, like going, I mean that's going to be so hard to not be thinking of your child all the time and I think we all can.

And working from home, something I have tried to do is to have some sort of separation where it's like, okay, I am boom, trying to be as much as I'm going to go in that room or whatever I do all into this working I'm doing now. And then when I close the laptop, I try to as much as I can, unless there's a crisis, the all out of it and that's that's been helpful.

And I interviewed the agency leader the other day. One thing he told me too, that I thought was interesting where he had to have both a creative and a kind of like business is he would even like do the creative job. Then he would change into a suit, He would walk around the block, he would come back and he would sit down and be something just to get some separate song and be like, okay, whatever I'm doing, I am doing this and I'm all in.

So I would.

Christine Healy: Say the other thing, the woman that I mentioned, Martha Doyle, the other thing that was very funny about working with her is she was always late for meetings. Always, always. I was late for meetings, but it was because whatever meeting she was in before she would stay with that person until the problem was solved. So, you know, the beautiful part is when you when you got her, you could have her till 11 p.m. if that's the time that you needed, you know.

So, yeah, it's a lesson, I suppose. We're all learning.

Daniel Burstein: That's beautiful. What's Let's take a look at. I think this is maybe the final lesson we're talking about. No role is high enough to be disconnected from day to day activities and initiatives. You learned this from Arthur Brettschneider, the CEO of senior Leo, who I assume is your current boss. I had feelings from Arthur.

Christine Healy: Yeah. Just by watching. I mean Arthur is an incredible force of nature. He is one of these guys who is both just very, very smart, very practical, very empathetic. You know, again, another magnetic personality. And there is, you know, you think at a CEO level there is a certain set of like larger kind of more strategic things that you focus on.

But Arthur is in the weeds whenever we need it. You know, if we need QC, he is there. If I need an opinion on something, you know, related to this content, he is there. He is, you know, reviewing profile pages on the weekends and helping us find, you know, bugs. And, you know, that is something that I think in an accelerated growth phase you need from everybody.

So you know, he he sets an incredible example for ownership of and commitment to the product that you're selling like you know kind of goes back to like you have to build a great product and that takes everyone that's not in any one single person's purview. Everyone contributes to that.

Daniel Burstein: So I love the humility of that. I love I love the focus on the focus on the customer of that. But as you mentioned, like a lot of these lessons, I'm thinking like, how do you balance and as you mentioned, when you're in that accelerated, accelerated growth phase, you are the head of growth. You know, with growth, we need to figure out how to scale.

So I wonder how you balance this lesson about not being disconnected from the day to day to ultimately getting into a place where you can grow in scale. So for example, let me just just might give you an idea. Interviewed Shruti Joshi, the chief operating officer of Facet on how I made it in marketing. One of her lessons was process is the foundation for success.

I mean, she used to talk about the roll out of Verizon FiOS and what she did there and how that process was so key to it. So for you, head of growth, I'm sure you're thinking through this great that the CEO is super in the weeds. This is so helpful. Now, how do we scale? Like, how do you do that?

Christine Healy: Yeah, I mean, for me, I have always held the belief that in most organizations, strategy is over, emphasized execution is under emphasized. And so you can have the greatest strategy in the world and if you are not paying attention to the details on execution, you are not kind of building the product or delivering the campaign or, you know, whatever the promises, if that's not happening on the execution side, that's where it all falls apart.

So for me, and this is part of what helps us scale is that when we get the the delivery of a new product or feature, right, because we're tech forward company, because we do everything, you know, using or leveraging technology, it is inherently scalable. So as long as we get the initial build right, then usually we've designed it in a way where it is scalable.

Daniel Burstein: Let me ask you about that. I hear you talking about technology and you've gotten to know your customers so well. So I wonder if you can help everyone listening who markets to senior citizens and figuring out this balance. Right? So and this may be a bias, but when we think of senior citizens, we tend not to think of technology, right?

We Tend to think of the opposite. They're tech averse. So how are you making that balance? How are you being, as you said, tech forward and being very tech enabled? Get get focused on this? Senior audience one Do we have it wrong? Or two, is there just something differently you're doing to to get them into it?

Christine Healy: Yeah, no, I think it has to do with the demographic shifts that are happening right now. So what we're seeing, I'm sure you've heard of this thing called the Silver Wave. It's the advent of kind of the largest single group of older adults, probably in the last hundred years. And these are baby boomers. And these baby boomers have really different tech habits than their parents do or did.

So, you know, what's above them is the silent generation. So I think when we talk about older adults and their aversion to technology, like I will say two things. One is I don't think we've kind of contemplated where the break happens because the younger set of older adults is very different technologically than the older set. And two, I will say that COVID really accelerated the adoption of a lot of technology, forward habits and devices.

So things like cell phones that a lot of older adults used to not have. They got face time. They're using Alexa, they're using much more. So I think it's really in a state of change. And what the other thing that I will say is what's probably even more influential on how these older adults will be using technology is how their Gen-X kids are using technology, because these Gen Z kids now are, you know, pushing 50 into their fifties.

And I'm they're I.

Daniel Burstein: Know when you say that I still think of Gen X as being. Yeah. But we are going.

Christine Healy: Yeah we're not we're not young and cool anymore but.

Daniel Burstein: Still cool. Yeah.

Christine Healy: But the answer and you know, we are going to be setting the kind of technology habits for our parents as they age. And so I think it's that combination of baby boomers aging up, having a different set of expectations and experience with technology, and then the influence of their children. So, you know, like I go when I when I visit my dad, you know, I set him up with Alexa.

You know, I have the rotating digital photos that I can upload from my home in Boston. And. Yeah.

Daniel Burstein: Let's go. Well, Christine, we've talked about so many different things about what it means to be a marketer from all your stories, from all your lessons from your career. If you had to break it down, what are the key qualities of an effective marketer?

Christine Healy: Okay, I'm sure I will get tons of people who disagree with me on this, but for me, marketing is all about finding problems and solving them. So, you know, it starts with finding the pain points in your customers experience. Why do they really need your product and give presenting them a solution? Sometimes that extends to finding problems within your own organization and working cross-functionally to solve them.

You know, on a granular campaign level, it's, you know, let's ab test the heck out of everything. Let's find the problem with the open rate on this email and let's ab test some subject line, some sometimes figure out where that problem is. Let's talk about why no one's clicking on the CTA button. Is that the language? Is it the color?

Is it the placement? Let's test all those things. So I don't know what it says about me, but I like to to look at the world in terms of a collection of problems that are totally solvable.

Daniel Burstein: I'm glad you said that. Let me tell you why. Because on LinkedIn, I see all these people say I'm the rock star of marketing, right? And I'm like, man, that that just doesn't sit well with me. And I will mention so I'm Gen X like kind of called me out when you're talking about these Gen Xers who are getting old.

But I'll mention I'm huge Pearl Jam fan and Eddie Vedder is literally a rock star. And I once heard him say, you know, they're asking what's it like to be a rock star? And he's like, I don't know. Like, I want to be a rock star. I want to be a plumber. Like, I want to like, you know?

And I thought, I'm like, yeah, I want to be the plumber of marketing, you know what I mean? It's I like what you're saying because that's what you do. You're going to go in, you're going to find income and you're going to solve it, and the water is going to be flowing. So I like.

Christine Healy: That. And that's my there are tons of marketers. We all have very different approaches and not one is not better than the other. That's just kind of what makes it fun for me.

Daniel Burstein: Well, thank you so much for your time. This this was fun.

Christine Healy: Christine, thank you.

Daniel Burstein: My pleasure. And thanks to everyone for those responses.

Outro: Well, thank you for joining us for how I made it in marketing with Daniel Bernstein. Now that you've gotten inspiration for transforming yourself as a marketer, get some ideas for your next marketing campaign. From Marketing Sherpa Extensive library of free case studies at marketing Sherpa dot com That's marketing SRH ERP Ecom it's and.