SUMMARY:
In this episode, Carlos Gil, U.S. Market Brand Evangelist, GetReponse, shares how he used B2C platform Snapchat at B2B brand BMC Software, turned a chance Uber ride into a career-defining opportunity, and changed who ‘the beef people’ were to put the customer first. |
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There’s a great Chris Rock bit where he says educational leaders lie to kids when they say kids can be anything they want. He says to – tell kids the truth, “You could be anything you’re good at. As long as they’re hiring. And even then, it helps to know somebody.”
The good-at part, hopefully we help you with that everyday on MarketingSherpa.
But the “it helps to know somebody,” that ties into one of the key lessons my next guest has learned in his career, and he uses the famous Porter Gale statement to explain it “Your network is your net worth.”
To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories from throughout his career, I talked to Carlos Gil, U.S. Market Brand Evangelist, GetReponse, and author of The End of Marketing: Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of Social Media.
Hear the full episode using this embedded player or by clicking through to your preferred audio streaming service using the links below it.
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Early in his career at Winn-Dixie, Gil created an influencer-style account to showcase relatable, humanized content. Rather than pushing promotions, he shared real moments that resonated with consumers. This approach highlighted the value of authenticity and shifted the brand’s focus toward customer engagement.
Later at BMC Software, Gil extended this philosophy by empowering employees to act as brand ambassadors. He trained the sales team to share personal, authentic stories on LinkedIn, transforming them into effective storytellers. This employee advocacy not only amplified BMC’s reach but also strengthened its connection with its audience.
Early in his career, Gil started creating free educational content on YouTube. Those videos eventually led to paid opportunities like speaking engagements and courses on platforms like LinkedIn Learning. Each piece of content helped build credibility and opened doors he didn’t foresee at the time.
On the face of it, Snapchat doesn’t seem like the right social media platform for an enterprise B2B software company like BMC Software. So when Gil first told me he launched Snapchat for the brand when he worked at BMC, I didn’t understand what the strategy could be.
But when he told me the story, I thought it was brilliant. He focused BMC’s use of Snapchat on recruiting and found his ‘in’ with the HR department, to help attract quality hires that bigger rivals had been getting.
During the pandemic, Gil started Outlaw Masks, an e-commerce fashion brand for masks. Recognizing the opportunity in a shifting market, he leveraged TikTok and its viral nature to scale and drive sales quickly. When sales began to decline, he pivoted again, using what he’s taught marketers for years to launch a brick-and-mortar sneaker resale store. These experiences taught him the importance of adaptability and applying marketing principles to his own ventures, not just those of others.
via Leigh Miller
The saying ‘your network is your net worth,’ often attributed to Porter Gale, couldn’t be more true. Gil’s network, built over years, is worth millions – it’s priceless. It’s been responsible for unlocking doors and opportunities that he wouldn’t have been able to access on his own. The key lesson is that a strong network is built on providing value, not transactional relationships.
Whether it’s through genuine collaboration, sharing expertise, or simply being present, he’s learned that nurturing these connections creates limitless opportunities. Gil shared the story of how a shared Uber ride led to a role at LinkedIn.
via Ja Rule
Forming a relationship with Ja Rule has taught Gil the power of bouncing back after failure. Ja Rule openly shared his experiences with Fyre Festival and how he has rebuilt his career and reputation through transparency and resilience. Sharing the stage with him at various conferences has been a reminder that failure doesn’t define you – how you respond to it does. It’s about owning your story and finding ways to turn setbacks into comebacks.
via Nick Utton, Chris Heller, and Simon Grabowski
Throughout his career, executives who recognized his potential have been instrumental in his growth. Nick Utton, his CMO at BMC Software, later brought him on as a consultant to launch a new brand, Go2Bank, at Green Dot Bank. Chris Heller, former CEO of Keller Williams, gave him the opportunity to lead social media training for thousands of real estate agents after they met at SXSW in 2016.
Most recently, Simon Grabowski at GetResponse brought him into a unique hybrid role as Brand Evangelist, where Gil can be creative as a content creator, an internal strategist, and an external spokesperson. Each of these leaders has shown him the importance of recognizing talent and creating space for it to thrive.
Social Media: Marketing to millennials
Authentic Brand Storytelling: Embed creative within your business model (podcast episode #105)
Marketing: Sometimes you have to throw the business model out (podcast episode #34)
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Not ready for a listen yet? Interested in searching the conversation? No problem. Below is a rough transcript of our discussion.
Carlos Gil: So I was able to get our CMO to agree to launch Snapchat for BMC. And the objective primarily was to use this as a recruiting vehicle to get younger millennials to come work for BMC. So one of the challenges that BMC had back then was they would lose out on top tier talent in the Bay area to cooler tech companies like Salesforce or Oracle, for example.
And they were struggling with attracting talent. So again, it goes back to selling to the needs of the end user, selling to the needs of the client. In this case, the client was my CMO being my boss at BMC. So I presented him the business case. Hey look, you know, I know the HR and they're, you know, interested potentially in using Snapchat.
How about if we use Snapchat as a way to talk about company culture?
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: There's a great Chris Rock bit where he says educational leaders lie to kids when they say kids can be anything they want. He says to tell kids the truth, you can be anything you're good at. As long as they're hiring and even then it helps to know somebody. The good out part. Hopefully we help you with that every day in marketing Sherpa, but it helps to know somebody that ties into one of the key lessons my next guest has learned in his career.
He uses the famous Porter Gayle statement to explain it. Your network is your net worth. Hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson filled stories from throughout his career. Today I'm talking to Carlos Gayle, the US market brand evangelist at Getresponse. Thanks for joining us, Carlos.
Carlos Gil: Daniel is great to be here with you today. Is it safe to say this is my second appearance? I'm marketing Sherpa.
Daniel Burstein: This is your second appearance. Although the other one, even though we were in a totally different city, we got to be in person. We were at IRC in Chicago. Carlos, remind me this ten years ago.
Carlos Gil: It was ten years ago. A little over ten years ago in 2014. If you want to take a blast into the past. Go on YouTube, look up Carlos Gil, Marketing Sherpa, and you'll see myself with Daniel at IRC in Chicago. It's crazy how fast time goes by.
Daniel Burstein: Yeah, we were both on this giant marketing trip as, media center and IRC in person, and now we are both in our homes. How times have changed 2024. Well, let's take a look at the background of your career. You've worked at many different corporate marketing roles along with entrepreneurial roles. We mentioned some of these brands because people have heard of them.
Winn-Dixie, store, Save-A-Lot, LinkedIn, BMC software, green Dot Corporation, Social Media strategy roles, global head of social media strategy, that sort of thing. For the past year, Carlos has been at Get response. Get response has 400,000 customers, and in his career, Carlos has worked from being a single producer to managing a dozen or more in cross-functional teams around the globe.
So, Carlos, just give us a sense first, before you jump in your career, what is your day like right now as US market brand evangelist?
Carlos Gil: You know, my my day now. It's, it's a good question. Not every day is the same. And that's really what I enjoy about this season. In with with get response. And the role of brand evangelists is unique because essentially I wear multiple hats and there are days where I'm doing work like this. As a company spokesperson, I'm being interviewed on a podcast and being interviewed for industry insights about email marketing or digital marketing.
I'm on stage speaking at a conference, but then I'm also in the digital boardroom. So to speak, right? I work within a global marketing organization where a company that's based in Poland, that's, 25 plus years old, and I have colleagues and counterparts throughout the, throughout the globe. I was about to say throughout the country, throughout the globe.
And, like I said, I wear multiple hats as a marketing strategist and also as a face of the brand here in the in the U.S., you could say.
Daniel Burstein: Well, let's now take a look at some of the lessons from throughout your career. I like to say I've never been anything else. I've never been like a podiatrist or an actuary. But I think the cool thing in Mark is we get to build things, we get to make things. Let's see what we can learn from the things you made.
So your first lesson is build a brand around authenticity. I know a lot of, marketers I talk about on how we made it a marketing like to talk about authenticity tells us, how have you done that in your career?
Carlos Gil: You know, authenticity is interesting because when you peel back the layers of the onion of marketing, what is marketing? At the end of the day, marketing is very much built around creating the illusion that someone needs something that's, you know, from my standpoint, the essence of of marketing and authenticity very often times is lost in translation, in marketing, especially social media marketing.
So I just want to preface by saying that I've spent the majority of my career since 2008 working in social media marketing. I've led social media for various brands, I've consulting advised for various brands, and the the one aspect about social that always stands out to me is that most senior level marketers ignore the fact that today's consumer can see through B.S., and this is something I'm very passionate about.
That's something that I teach through my book that the marketing I've spent now probably 100 plus keynotes, talking about authenticity of marketing and specifically putting authenticity into marketing. So I'll share a quick story with you. Early on in my career, I went to go work at Winn-Dixie, was the first brand marketing job that I had, and I was leading social media marketing at Winn-Dixie and Winn-Dixie, for those that aren't familiar, is one of the largest supermarket chains in the southeastern United States.
They're headquartered here in Jacksonville, Florida, which is where Daniel and I both live. And when I was hired by Winn-Dixie, social media was still relatively new for for brand marketing. And at that point in my career, I was in my mid to late 20s, and I didn't have the credibility or the expertise to really call the shots. I was brought in as a social media manager and much of my, role early on was provide education to our executives, and they just didn't understand the value that social brought.
So one of the things that I did was I took it upon myself to create a Twitter account and an Instagram account. If you go on Twitter, you'll see Winn-Dixie. Carlos. To this day, I never took it down and I used this as an example. For a while throughout my career, I essentially created almost like a influencer account to show Winn-Dixie, hey, look, you can put guardrails on the content that you post out as a brand, but as an individual, I can I can say whatever I want, I can post whatever I want, and guess what?
This is what the audience out there in the internet wants. They don't want to see, you know, brands like Winn-Dixie talking about, you know, chicken being buy one, get one free or Pepsi being on sale. They want to hear from real people with real solutions. And there's relate ability to those people. So this is one of the things I struggled with early on in my career because most brands, as time went on, I started realizing they're all about the dollar, they're all about the ROI, the KPIs.
And in order to leverage a medium like social, it's very much a platform to build connections at scale. You have to incorporate authenticity into your brand, and that's a challenge. Fast forward a few years after that, I was working for a company called BMC software. BMC software is not necessarily the most known entity like Salesforce and say, Oracle.
But they're a pretty big player in the IT solution space. So I'm working at this company at BMC, global head of social media, and we have a mass of sales team, Daniel. So we have a sales team in South America and Europe and Asia, obviously here in North America, massive sales team. I'm noticing a common thread or common trend, sorry.
And it's most of the sales team is pretty dormant on LinkedIn. And whenever they're going on LinkedIn, they're just posting rhetoric about the company and it's not very engaging. So again, I'm still relatively young my career at this point, but at this point I'd already work not just at Winn-Dixie. Well, spent some time at Save-A-Lot, I spent some time working at LinkedIn, and I had a little bit more confidence, I guess you could say.
And I convince our CMO, like, look, let me dive over in the sales and let me train our sales team on how to be storytellers. And we call this social selling. We call it employee advocacy. But at the end of the day, every employee that works for a company is an influencer. Whether you are the person that is greeting vendors when they walk in, whether you work in marketing or in sales, everyone's an influencer.
Everyone has reach. And BMC was the first company of of how many that I've had an opportunity to advise and consult for, where I was able to roll out a employee advocacy strategy that involves storytelling involves turning employees into influencers, and that, I will say when I talk about authenticity, that's what every company should be focusing on. It's leveraging the stories of your employees, is leveraging their voice, leveraging them as humans.
Because at the end of the day, man, people don't want to be sold to they want to be engaged. So you can either continue to go down this path of constantly pumping out brand content that the reality is people are not paying attention to, they're not engaging. Or you can empower your employees to be your spokespeople.
Daniel Burstein: No, I love it. I mean, I love to say nobody wants to be sold to they want to be helped. Right? And I do think because in a year, a lot of marketing, we can get into that and go back and forth. I do think that is an upside of marketing, right? It should not just create this demand for something that shouldn't have demand or people don't need, but it should connect the right people to the right products and services.
In a capitalist society where we've got all these choices. But, if VMC example is interesting to me because I've worked in, enterprise software before, in the B2B side, sales enablement field, marketing these types of things, and it's very hard to get sales reps to do something that doesn't directly relate to their quota. Right? They want to be in front of customers.
They want to be selling, they want to be in their quota. So I kind of wonder, like, how did you actually get them to post on social media, right? Because like you said, it's so helpful to have these faces out there. That could be authenticity. Like I interviewed, Diego Osorio, the founder and chief creative officer of Lobos 1707 tequila, on how I made a marketing and the faces for him.
Right. He's got these investors. We've all heard their names, right. He's got Brian James and Anthony Davis and Bono and Jimmy Iovine and Paul Walker and all these things. And so for for his authenticity, for that brand, it's getting these faces out there. But for a lot of us, if you're in a small consulting company or a big B2B software company, like Carlos said, it's getting your employees out there.
So how did you do this? Carlos? Like they want to be in front of customers selling. They don't want to be writers.
Carlos Gil: So here's what I'll say. You can get anyone in corporate America to do what you want them to do. Again, within reason. In this case, getting getting someone to use social media as part of their job, even though it's not their their direct responsibility, you can get them to do that by making the objective about them. And here's what I mean by that.
If my KPIs as a social media lead are tied to driving more impressions and engagement for the organization and ultimately growing our share of voice within our category or our industry, well, I can either continue to push content out on my own and hope that someone sees it. I can pay influencers to create content, and that in itself becomes very costly.
And it's also inauthentic. If we're gonna talk about authenticity, or I can just leverage folks in sales whose jobs are predicated based on selling and who's livelihood being their commissions are predicated based on selling. So when I say you to make it about the end user, you have to make it about the client. It's going to some of that works in sales and say, look, I'm going to teach you how to use social media to make more sales.
You want me to make more sales? You're not going to find a single sales professional. It's going to say no. If you can teach someone how to make more money now you're making the objective about them, not about you. Now, don't get me wrong, it's still going to benefit you as the marketer because now you can have more people talking about your brand, you can have more mentions, and that's going to increase your share of voice.
So in the day it's going to look good on you as the marketer. But you have to make it all about the end user. And this holds true for marketing 101, whatever it is that you're promoting out there, if it doesn't benefit the person that's seeing the content, they're going to keep swiping. If you're trying to run a program internally at your company and you're trying to gain adoption and buy in, it has to benefit the people in that room.
It has to benefit your audience. Otherwise it's going to go nowhere.
Daniel Burstein: Yeah. And I also think that's marketing that we forget about sometimes. Right? When we talk about marketing, sometimes we only talk to an external audience like you mentioned. That's a good one. But it's that internal marketing where we need a value proposition for the people we ask things to do in our organization. We can't just assume they'll do it because it's their job, or we tell them to.
Another lesson you mentioned every piece of content is a stepping stone to something bigger. How'd you learn this lesson, Carlos?
Carlos Gil: You know, I've been creating content on the internet since 2008, and, you know, I'm not really, I don't want to say that I'm not proud of it, because I'm proud of everything I've done to the stage of my career. But it's very humbling when I go back and look at myself in 2008 and 2009. Heck, even if you go ten years back on YouTube and you look at our video that we did at Irca, it's humbling because you realize like, damn, like I've, I've really grown since that, right?
The way I speak, pronunciation delivery, it's it's more crisp and a lot of that has to do from working in the inner confines of the boardrooms, in corporate marketing. At one point in my career, I was not a bestselling author. I was not a keynote speaker. I was just a guy in Jacksonville, Florida, trying to teach good old boys at Winn-Dixie about social media marketing, and I had already developed a personal brand for myself in 2012.
Granite wasn't at the level of where it is today, but in 2012, I had already created a personal brand for myself, and my personal brand was almost like a side hustle, if you will. It wasn't necessarily being leveraged by Winn-Dixie like my employer get response now is leveraging. My personal brand was very different back then. But every every video that I would upload, every tweet, every Facebook post, when you stack those all up, you're able to now create longevity and you're able to connect with people along the way.
And I always say this to folks like, one of the best investments that you can make is in your personal brand, because the day that you find yourself looking for a job, your network, which we're gonna talk about here in a moment, and your personal brand are going to be catalysts in helping you find that next gig. Here's where personal branding and here's where content really helped me.
Going back to the Winn-Dixie example, when I was younger in my career. And those executives wouldn't necessarily listen to me. I had to learn the art of speaking to an executive, and that is something that a lot of people feel like, regardless of their age. A lot of folks in corporate America are afraid to speak to executives. It's intimidating, and y is intimidating.
It's because someone has a title, and I had to learn very quickly to get over the title, and instead you get on a level playing field by educating. So if I could use a platform like YouTube to make a video and educate and thousands of people would see that video, I didn't know who the thousands of people were.
I just saw a metric. So I started developing that same mantra throughout my career, the same way that I flip on a cam on my computer, or a camera in front of me to make a tutorial that's content. If I just take that same delivery but do it for a live audience in a small boardroom, I can really ask for things like a pilot program or a trial or an opportunity.
And that's why I say, like every piece of content isn't just a piece of content for the internet, for social media, but it's content for your career in so many other ways and use cases. I think people overlook because naturally, it's gonna sound crazy. Most marketers are not content creators. Yeah, I'm like, I love the question about authenticity.
I could I could talk to you for the next hour about that. Most marketers themselves are not content creators. They're really good at analyzing data and metrics and coming up with go to market strategies. But they're not content creators themselves. They rely on other people to make content for them. So, as I find myself getting to to to now be in my early 40s taking this big bro mentor type role with a lot of folks in my network, I encourage them like, look like you got to build a brand for yourself.
You can do that by writing more, being more active on LinkedIn, being present, going to conferences, even getting on the speaking circuit. But everything that you do realize how it connects back to your job is it's going to make you feel more empowered when you're in those boardrooms with your executives.
Daniel Burstein: Let's talk about that Winn-Dixie boardroom for a second. How should you talk about a lot? That authenticity. And you also talk about kind of personal branding, those those kind of personal relationships from people putting the message out there. But what about actually telling the story to get the value proposition out there? Right. Because for Winn-Dixie, for example, I actually I worked there in high school for a few years.
I was a bag boy. That was an early place in my career, right? I learned customer service. I don't know what I learned either to the learn diet, that is our job, but one of the things I remember at the time was a really different shifted themselves or tried to by being the beef people. Right. Like the and they would tell the story.
They would take people out to the ranch and they did it in TV ads back then. Right. And so, you know, I think that is, a benefit of content. It's kind of that storytelling to show the value proposition. So yes, it's the people behind it, but it's also what awinnre we trying to show with the value proposition or for example, I interviewed, Nick Marrow Chick, the marketing director of Asia Pacific at Real Money Transfer, and he talked about creativity taking center stage in the realm of marketing and how you know, they had to kind of teach and show how the money, the money transfers actually work in different countries, right, to get
both sides of the money transfer. It's kind of that teaching element that the brand does. So can you take us into is there any example with Winn-Dixie about how, you also use that social media just kind of teach whatever that value proposition that Winn-Dixie was trying to get across, like take people behind the scenes into it.
Carlos Gil: Yeah. So where I started to find success, early in my career when I was at Winn-Dixie, was through, grand openings. So when Dixie was investing a lot of money into opening up new stores. And at this point, social media was still relatively new for the company. So I was able to convince our executive semi on the road, almost like a reporter or a journalist, if you will, and use social media as a way to live tweet, live stream, share content from the field, and to be completely honest with you and your listeners, like the ROI and that was not huge by any means, but it created some sizzle.
They created some real time content that the company could then visualize and say, I get it now. Like, this guy's going to go there, he's going to take good looking photos. It's going to showcase our brand on a platform. Being Facebook, people can tag themselves, people can share, people can comment. And that was really the breakthrough moment, if you will.
It's funny that you mentioned beef people because, I always used to bring up, like, we always say that, you know, when Dixie is the beef, people were like, who are the people? Do they have a face? Do they have a name? They have a voice. And I ended up, spearheading a campaign, with, hashtag. I'm the beef people, and I love that.
Yeah, man, it was a campaign tied to tailgating, and, it was really fun, man. Like, back in the day, the the Jaguars, and, Winn-Dixie had a partnership. So, not just the Jaguars, but the New Orleans Saints as well. So for like one football season, myself and another colleague, we would go to a football game every Sunday and we would go around the parking lot and we would take photos and share them with people who were tailgating with Winn-Dixie product.
And it was pretty easy to identify, like you could walk up to someone tailgating. You could see what shopping bags they had, and we would give people t shirts. We would take photos. We even like had a chef that would go with us to some of these. And again, that was just a way to humanize the brand. And I was doing this in 2012 and 13, 14.
And like little did I know that eventually, like my book, the in the marketing would be all about humanizing your brand in the age of social media. And I.
Daniel Burstein: I love that because you flipped that tagline, because the beef people would I remember is they would have these ads where they had they probably hired a plane or a helicopter to fly over the ranch and show, you know, them. Actually, I don't know, making the beef. I don't know what you'd call raising cattle, but you flipped it to make the customer the beef.
People. Is that what you did?
Carlos Gil: That's exactly what we did. It was it was humanizing the brand through the customers, both very much a user generated play. So it was it was a play to get customers to spotlight themselves as being beef people.
Daniel Burstein: That's awesome. And that's a good reminder to of like, we just always have this company focused look at things. Right. And sometimes especially for social media, you got to switch it in. What's the customer focus? Look, all right, here's another lesson. Pivoting fast and recognizing opportunities is key. We've had so many great, lessons on here about what people did during the pandemic, where we had to figure out how to pivot.
Right. We're all in the same place. So what did you do? How did you pivot during the pandemic?
Carlos Gil: Pandemic was interesting. And I first want to say, before I get into my story, that when you work in marketing, not everything is is going to go according to plan. In fact, more times than none, you're going to launch a campaign and there's going to be elements about it that you cannot account for that you don't that you overlook.
And that's that's okay. Like learning from mistakes is completely okay. Now your boss might get on onto you for it. But just understand something like your career, it's all about the long game. And as long as you're continuously learning and adapting and pivoting when things don't work out, eventually in the wash, everything will will work itself out the way it's supposed to.
Now, as far as I'm concerned, the the pandemic, even though this only happened going on five years ago, feels like it was a lifetime ago, I think. I think you would agree as well. Daniel. Yeah. Beginning of 2020, I was on an upward trajectory. I had a marketing agency with with big clients. I was working with Hertz and Western Union and Kay Jewelers and all these, all these big brands.
Life. Life was good. I had a bestselling book. I was getting ready to go on a global book tour. And then everything in March, mid-March just came to a screeching halt. No thanks to the Covid 19 pandemic. And for the first time in my adult life, I was like a complete standstill. It was almost like a midlife crisis.
Or what do I do now? I'm known as this acclaimed public speaker, but if I'm not speaking on stages, then I'm not really a speaker. I am this author, but I'm not out promoting my book. Then I did all this work for nothing, and I was very much at a crossroads. Daniel. And, very quickly I realized, like, I've got to shake myself off and I cannot allow myself to be defeated.
And my brother in law and I, we came up with this idea to come up with, like, a really cool fashion brand called Outlaw Masks. And what I will say is that when you work in marketing long enough, especially at a corporate level, you're in enough meetings where you're understanding how the sausage is made. You're you're, you know, either leading go to market strategy for a campaign or for a product launch, you know, more than the average business owner or startup founder.
And I often say that understanding marketing, it's almost like a superpower, if you will. So I knew, you know, how to get a brand off the ground from doing this for brands. I just didn't know for myself how to get something from A to Z, and I figured it out. So my business partner and I, we sit down, we're like, look like, let's create an e-commerce business, that we can help people, but also we're tied to of this moment in time where we're at.
We ended up on masks because, go figure, masks became a critical component to everyday living during the pandemic. But we created a fashion forward brand so washable, reusable masks that looked cool and more so than the mask. We actually created a brand, and that was the fun part of the business, was creating the brand we gave in an identity.
The copy itself was written us in a certain tone. You know, everything was like this badass country western persona. And we sold our masks. We got our masks into the NBA, we got them into the NFL. It was very much a, overnight success, I guess you could say we we used TikTok to create short videos. These are like feelgood videos.
You go back to authenticity. We were going to a wall of Walmarts and targets all over Jacksonville, Florida, giving out masks to frontline workers. And we would record these videos and we would put them on TikTok and these videos, man, would just go viral like I'm talking hundreds of thousands in some cases millions of views. And business was good for about a year.
And then as soon as mask mandates were lifted and there was a need for masks, the business just it went downhill and it came crashing down. The rocket went up fast and it came crashing down fast. And, you know, we pivoted and then we had to pivot again. And I think it's a good story from the standpoint of like, never feel too comfortable in what you're doing right now because I guarantee you what you're doing right now is not going to be to a tee what you're doing five years from now or ten years from now.
What you're doing right now is going to prepare you for what you're doing five and ten years from now. You know, whether good, bad or indifferent, you know, you start up a business like I did. In my case, I learned very quickly how to build a brand, grow a brand, build brand identity, communicate, sell, go to market, do all these things that in theory, I could console and teach someone how to do now and get paid to do that.
Or I can now create ten different brands. And again, like, there's a lot of people that they look at failure as this, this, this fear that paralyzes them from moving forward or paralyzes them from pivoting. And, you know, to be transparent, man, like, I'm someone I've, you know, been laid off from jobs before. I've been fired from jobs before.
I didn't get booked for a speaking engagement. I didn't get booked, you know, for a client. I lost the client. Like, these things happen in business. And the faster that you're able to dust yourself off and pivot from that thing and move on to the next, it's really going to determine your destiny.
Daniel Burstein: Well, yeah. And I want to talk about failure. We're going to talk about that in the second half of the podcast. But let me first ask you about that, will. You mentioned about what you're doing now is and what you're always going to be doing. Because let's talk about what that means for a corporate social media account. Right.
Because because new social media platforms are coming up all the time. So I wonder if you have any specific examples of how you identified a new social media platform for a brand and how you decided you know what to go with? Because when you say that pandemic story, it reminded me of I interviewed Edith Ann Raimi, the CMO of On the Border Mexican Grill and Cantina, and how I made it marketing.
One of her lessons was, sometimes you have to throw the business model out, right? They were a restaurant on premise during the pandemic. They had to figure out something else because it wouldn't work. And so that pandemic, I think we're always going to any marketer who's lived through that is always going to remember it through our career.
But there are these earthquakes in social media marketing all the time. When this new platform comes along and you got to decide, am I going to jump on it or am I not? Or, you know, as a, as a brand, as my brand or what are we going to do? Do you have any examples of that?
Carlos Gil: Yeah. You know, going back to BMC software, I was at BMC in 2015, 16 and 17. Right around that time, Snapchat was the hot new shiny object in social media. I was a huge proponent of Snapchat. I had thousands of followers. I was getting invited to speak everywhere about Snapchat. The only problem was that I worked for a geeky unknown B2B tech company, and my challenge was convincing my CMO why we should be on Snapchat.
And I think selfishly, throughout my career, whenever I've tried to go to a CMO and build the business case, you know, selfishly, I want them to do this because I know that that's going to now give me leverage to talk about that, which they say helps the company, but also as a thought leader, shows progression. It shows like, again, I can have this conversation with you almost ten years later and actually speak through like this is what it did.
So what we were able to do was I was able to get our CMO to agree to launch Snapchat for BMC, and the objective primarily was to use this as a recruiting vehicle to get younger. Millennials to come work for BMC. So one of the challenges that BMC had back then was they would lose out on top tier talent in the Bay area to cooler tech companies like a Salesforce or an Oracle, for example.
And they were struggling with attracting talent. So again, it goes back to selling to the needs of the end user, selling to the needs of the client. In this case, the client was my CMO being my boss at BMC. So I presented him the business case. Hey look, you know, I met with HR and they're, you know, interested potentially in using Snapchat.
How about if we use Snapchat as a way to talk about company culture? We don't use it to sell well. Used to talk about our products because are the decision makers that we're trying to sell to are really not on Snapchat, but we use this as a way to spotlight our company culture and frame it in a way that's intended to resonate with a younger, millennial audience.
Back then, Gen Z wasn't what it is today, so, he went for it. And you know what, man? For about a year that, you know, I was still with the company at that point, our HR department, which I trained, was the ones that were creating content on Snapchat. And it worked. And as a result of it, BMC was named and, you know, by different publications.
I was on podcasts like I'm here talking about the success of getting a B2B tech brand on Snapchat.
Daniel Burstein: That is brilliant, because when you were when you started this story, when you're starting tell it. I was on the CMO side. I'm like, what's this guy talking about? Why? What is a B2B enterprise software company going to be on Snapchat? It doesn't make sense. And then right when you mentioned recruiting, I saw the brilliance of it that I like that, I like that.
And so I think the lesson there too is it's not just find the right platform, but understand you have different audiences, right? Sure. I can imagine someone in B2B, you know, sales and B2B marketing, DMZ all day just thinking about getting leads. But that's a crucial audience recruiting I love. That's a great example. Carlos. All right. In the second half of the episode, in the first half, we talked about some of the lessons from some of the things Carlos has made, like making a brand account for a B2B enterprise software company on Snapchat in the second half of the episode, we're going to talk about some of the lessons that Carlos has learned from
some of the people he collaborated with, because that's what we get to do as marketers. We get to make things. We get to make them with people. But before we get to that, I should mention that the How I Made It and marketing podcast is underwritten by MC labs. I the parent organization of marketing Sherpa. You can get a three month free scholarship to the I Guild and get conversion focused training from the lab that helped pioneer the conversion industry.
Get your scholarship at joint Mic labs ai.com that's joining Mech Labs ai.com courtesy of MC labs AI. All right, let's talk about some lessons from people you collaborated with. You mentioned your network is your network. I love that, said the Porter Gayle book. We know I'm sure there's a lot of people in your network. You could have mentioned here dozens, hundreds.
Someone specifically you mentioned was Lee Miller. Can you tell us a story about how networking with Lee Miller helped your career?
Carlos Gil: For sure. So I first want to say a couple of things. Unpack there about your network. Is your net worth? First of all, there are people that control your destiny without you even realizing yet. So it's very important that when you are in situations like you're at networking event or you're at a conference, you force yourself to go outside of your comfort zone and, and network and actually talk to people.
And, you know, we're living in an era right now where all of us, myself included, are just glued to their cell phones. And it's bad, but it's also good because that can actually make it easier for you to connect and network. So I'll share, a quick story with you about how networking with Lee Miller changed my life.
So I was in San Francisco at the beginning of 2015. Full transparency. I was looking to move on from save a Lot, and I wanted to work in tech, so I was in the Bay area, and I actually was that job interview. And on my way back from the job interview, I was in a suit and I did a shared Uber pool ride.
At the time, Uber pool was still relatively new. For those aren't familiar with Uber Pool. It's an Uber ride shared with a complete stranger. So this young lady gets in the car, I'm in the car, I'm in a suit. And, she asks me if I was on my way to work and I said, no, I'm on my way back from a job interview, and she asks me, what do you do?
And I said to her, I work in marketing. And she said, yeah, me too. And I said, oh, interesting, where do you work? And she said, LinkedIn. And I said, interesting. I work in social media marketing and LinkedIn has made a huge impact on my career. And I literally went into my elevator speech at that point. I'd been seven years on LinkedIn.
This is 2015. I joined LinkedIn in 2008, and I just gave her this story of how I lost my job in 2008, in the banking industry, I joined LinkedIn. LinkedIn was a catalyst for helping me build a personal brand and build a network, and that network had helped me unlock so many opportunities. And she was so blown away by how big of a supporter I was of LinkedIn that she gave me her business card and she she told me, call me if you're interested in coming to work for LinkedIn.
And that changed everything for me. I went back home to Saint Louis, where I lived at the time. I went on on LinkedIn, and I saw that they had an opening for a senior social media lead, and I reached out to Lee. She connect me with the recruiter on that role, and I was in San Francisco for an interview for that job.
The following week. And the interesting thing about it is that for that role, they already had two finalists. There were down to two people, and I was like the curveball that was thrown in at the very end. They were going to decide that week on one of those two finalist. And because I had this chance encounter with Lee, because I was so enthusiastic about the company and I presented myself well, she took a shot on me and introduced me to the recruiter on the role.
The recruiter then spoke to me and brought me out to San Francisco. I interviewed with with the team and long story short, I was offered a job the like the next week. Like this happened all within a two week period. True story. And I've documented it on YouTube stories there. I've documented my book like the networking hustle is real, but if you don't put yourself out there, no one's going to know that you exist.
And look, that is literally a what's meant to be will be the universe conspiring for you. Like all these analogies that we hear like that's lightning in a bottle, but it happens. So my advice to anyone out there is go to the networking event, go to the conference. If you go with someone, don't hang out with that person the whole time.
Force yourself to talk to people. I'll share with you a very quick example. I was at a conference a few months ago. Right. And, I've been working to get response now for a few months at this point. And in my role at Get Response, I'm helping them bring more creators onto the platform. Right. We had this whole suite of content optimization tools trying to get more creators on the platform.
So I'm at this video marketing conference to meet creators, and this is like at the end of the day, and I kid you not, I've been on my feet all day recording content. I'm tired and I have a seat. And there's this guy that's sitting like, right in front of me on this couch. And I could have just been a tired, 40 something year old and ignored this dude and not said a single word to him, but instead, because I believe in the power of networking and again, your network is your net worth.
I just ask him like, hey man, what do you think about the conference? Which is a very easy question to ask anyone at a conference. And he's and like, it's great this and that. They ask, well what do you do? He's like, I work at an agency. Oh, cool type of agency. Says I work at an influencer agency.
Oh, dope. Cool. You asked me what I do. I say I work for an email marketing company. He's like, awesome, what are you doing here? And I just tell him casually, I'm here because I'm looking to get more influencer ers over onto the get response platform. He's like, dude, like I work with this influencer, that influencer, like let's talk.
These are some of the biggest names I won't name drop, but these are some of the biggest names on YouTube today, that this guy has access to. And that's the part about networking that's often overlooked. It's the access that you get to other people just by opening up, just by going outside your comfort zone.
Daniel Burstein: Our cars. I need you to be like my therapist. Or, what's up with a Will Smith smoothie where he was like, the dating coach? Remember that one else could hit you. Yes. I need you to be my hit. I need you to be my hit. All right? I am so introverted, okay? And you seem like a pretty extroverted guy, so, like, can you give me.
I need, like, one or 2 or 3 specific things, and I need them both in-person and online. Because what you did in that Uber, I don't want to overlook that. I think nine out of ten people, me included, would have just been looking at their phone and looking to try not to engage that person with you. Right. So what do you do in person?
Because again, I'm just going to be there on my phone or saying drink. I want to talk to people. But also what do you do online? Mr.. LinkedIn guy who used to work there because all I'm gay, it's these horrible pitches online right from LinkedIn.
Carlos Gil: So here's, a little unknown secret about me. I am one of the most introverted people that you will ever meet, believe in. Are you serious?
Daniel Burstein: You do not come off that way at all.
Carlos Gil: I'm serious man, my online persona, my personal brand, I guess you could call it, is very different from, like, my home life at Publix in my neighborhood. I'm like very reserved, right? I know how to flip that switch on and off though. So like I say this because I'm not going to be at Publix shopping for groceries. And this sounds really bad because I've just talked most of this interview about working at Winn-Dixie.
Now, target.
Daniel Burstein: I was going to mention, what do you mean.
Carlos Gil: Publix for up intensity of of it. All right. Where we're at, if we're going to bring this full circle, I'm not going to be a Publix shopping for groceries and like, be in line with someone and form conversation with them, because I'm not there for that. But my professional life meeting, I'm at a conference. Or I'll give you a better example at the airport, some of the best networking that I've done in the last, say, ten years of my career has been at airports, said the airport bar.
It's waiting for a fly. It's on the airplane itself because you got nothing but time. And people's guards are down because they're they're going to the same place as you are. So I think the phone is just a barrier that we have to get past. You know, my advice card, putting my, my Will Smith H hat on is be the one the initiates the conversation.
Otherwise you're never going to break through, that stigma of being the introvert like you. You can't you can't allow yourself to be shy. You had to realize that you might never see this person again. And this. This person might be the individual that holds the keys to your success. And if it's not them, it might be someone that they know.
So I say that's step one. Don't be afraid to approach people. Piece of advice. Number two is be vulnerable. So many times I've gone to a networking event and the people that I meet, they seem to be like the most connected person in the world, the most successful person in the world. And you get to be old enough and you realize there's so many people that are full of it.
It's all smoke and mirrors. Be vulnerable. If you're going through, for example, a transition in your job, let that person know because you don't know who they're connected to. If you are hunting for business, let that person know, even if you just met them. But tied to that is giving value to somebody. So before you ask someone for something, give them value.
Make an offer of some sort. Try to find a connection. Try to see how you can help them. Might end with people when I meet them is I'm a marketer. I know more about marketing than the average person, so that's always going to be my in. Whenever I meet you, I'll meet you somewhere randomly. Let's just say, we're at the airport bar and you're sitting right next to me and there's a game on, and we're both watching the game.
Right? We make a comment. Oh, man. You know, can you believe that? You know, this team just, you know, gave up the game. They threw an interception. We started talking. Hey, Daniel, you know, what's your name? Oh, Daniel. Carlos. Cool, man. Like, what do you do? Oh, man. I've got this, this small business. This plumbing business, you know?
What do you do? I work in marketing. How are you marketing your your plumbing business? Like, I always connect those dots with the person I'm talking to with what it is that I'm good at. And that in itself has opened up countless doors.
Daniel Burstein: Well, on the upside, I'm a Jaguars fan. They throw a lot of interceptions. I'll have a lot of reasons to open conversation. That's great. And I really like learning from you that you're an introvert. It's inspiring to me because it seems like it comes naturally to you and it does not come naturally to me. But I also want to ask you about LinkedIn, because I feel like there's so many people doing it wrong.
I get so many pitches, I get so many pitches. Now here's an example. I got a connection request from someone in my neighborhood a few weeks ago and it said, Hey Dan, I'm your neighbor, blah blah blah blah blah. And right away I thought it was like some video marketing agency in Tampa or something that's like, oh, I see you're in Jacksonville.
I'm your neighbor. Let me tell you this thing. And it was only later I realized, oh my gosh, this guy in my neighborhood that I know works in marketing, he really was my neighbor. And I treated him like a vendor. So, I don't know, it just seems like cold outreach, cold email, like spam. I don't know what.
What can we be doing better on LinkedIn?
Carlos Gil: Gosh, that's such a loaded question. I think so many folks, are bypassing being real, relatable human beings because they perceive. And this isn't just for LinkedIn. They perceive social media as being an easy gateway to get in front of people. And don't get me wrong, it is. But you need to approach people on LinkedIn no different than you would approach them in real life.
So I would never walk up to anyone and just start saying to them like, you know, hey, I've got this book called The End of Marketing, and it's an amazing two time bestselling book. It's one of a bunch of awards that can help you transform your marketing. Check it out. Click here. I would never say that to someone.
Just like I would never say, you know, you know, hey, if you're not using email marketing, you're missing out on potentially making thousands or millions of dollars you need to use Getresponse. So the way that you speak to someone in person, in real life, offline is the way that you need to be carrying yourself online. And that sounds so basic, but I'm with you.
I see this happen all the time. The other thing, it's funny that you mentioned a neighbor connecting with you on LinkedIn. I went through this, I was super bored one day and I went through LinkedIn and I just started typing in names of neighbors of mine in my neighborhood, and much to my surprise, a lot of my neighbors are on LinkedIn, but their profile photos look nothing like them today.
They were like, not well written profiles. And then I started to come to this foregone conclusion like Jesus, has this person never had to use LinkedIn to find a job? Have they never had to use LinkedIn to network? It was almost kind of like embarrassing, if you will. And, it's one of those things that when I see my neighbors, I want to bring it up to them.
But then I want to be that creepy guy that's like, hey, by the way, man, like, I was on LinkedIn. I saw your profile. That sucked. I won't be that guy.
Daniel Burstein: What do you do? Well, hopefully your neighbor's a plumber. He would say, hey, your house is leaking, so maybe you should go up to them. You. Here's another lesson you mentioned. Failure is a stepping stone to reinvent to reinvention. And you learned this from your rule. So what's the story? How do you learn this from Ja Rule?
Carlos Gil: So I met Ja Rule, at South by Southwest in 2017. This is before, the whole Fyre Festival, fiasco happened. And I met him very briefly. We we didn't really connect until, the following year, actually a couple of years after that. And we met very briefly in time. We connected, and then I ended up seeing him two years later, in LA at a event.
And this was the period in time where Netflix and Hulu had aired the Fire festival documentaries. And a lot of people were wanting to talk to him about that. And again, goes back to networking and giving value. So at the time, I was hosting a show with entrepreneur magazine at Nasdaq in New York called Real Talk and I see Josh at this party.
He's sitting by himself. So instead of approaching him like a fan, I just walk up and approach him like a regular human being. I'm like, hey man, what's going on here? He introduces himself. I reintroduce myself and I'm like, hey, I'm Carlos. I know you probably don't remember me, but we met a couple of years ago, South by Southwest.
I was wearing the Snapchat spectacle glasses, and you were as well. And he said he remember me. But this is a guy that meets a lot of people. But your story? Sure. I asked him if I could sit down. I sat down next to him and we just started talking. We started talking about life. I didn't bring up what he was going through.
I wait for him to bring it up, and once he brought it up, I threw it out there to him to give value. I say, hey, look, I'm going to be in New York next week. I have a show at Nasdaq. You're more than welcome. If you want to come on the show and talk about what you're doing in business.
And I left it very open ended. I didn't say, hey, I want to talk to you about what you're doing with Fyre Festival or anything like that. I just left it very open ended and organically. We turned that event into an interview, and then we formed a friendship. And it was through that friendship where I was really able to get to know the person and not the artist or the celebrity that everyone wants to always judge.
And I was but understand the person that really learned about failure and people's perception of failure is very different. Like the outside public will say that you're a failure or something doesn't work out. But what you learn from those experiences, what you learn from coming up short, that's actually a win. And even if you come up short and you learn from that quote unquote failure, you're still winning.
And that in itself is something to be proud of. I had the opportunity to, to do, no pun intended, some fireside chats with Josh about Fyre Festival app. And, and he talked a lot about failure and he talked a lot about, you know, reputation management and how to bounce back. And it just really all goes back to, to mindset.
It goes back to how do you respond when you get knocked down. You know, when you lose that client, when you lose the job, you know when you lose the relationship, you know, if you want to go personal, talk about spouses, you know, getting divorce, you know, that thing, whatever it is that doesn't work out the way it's intended to, the way that you decide to process that and bounce back, going back to pivoting, like my story with Covid, that's going to determine, you know, where where you go.
Daniel Burstein: You know, and if you're not failing, what are you really doing? You're not really pushing the envelope that much. Just, you know, especially in marketing, you're just playing it safe. You know what? I'm just going to work.
Carlos Gil: Here's what I'll say. There's not a single human being that has a 100% close ratio. There's not a single person that is highly successful their entire career and their experience is failure. Whether you're an athlete, whether you're a business owner, whether you're a marketer for a company, like you're going to fail, you're going to go through periods that things aren't going to work out.
That's, that's that's life. That's it's normal. I went through this, most recently, I've been very public about it. I was self-employed for seven years, like I shared with you early on in this piece. I started up a business in 2020. As a result, the pandemic, that business, it took off. And then technically, it failed. And I moved on from that.
I opened up another business. I went into the business of sneaker reselling. I opened up a store here in Jacksonville, Florida. First year that business took off very well. Second year was very hard to sustain the success of year one, and ultimately I was faced with a decision. Do I go back to doing what I was doing previously, which is public speaking, coaching, consulting, marketing?
Or do I stay in a business that I'm not really seeing the ROI in? And I went back to a marketing job, which is what I'm doing today for forget response as their brand evangelist. So again, like where some might call something a failure, I look at it as a new beginning.
Daniel Burstein: Yeah. One of my favorite headlines, New York Times headlines ever was from like a 50s or something like that. And, an experimental rocket blew up and the headlines like moon rocket, you know, finishes 20,000 miles short of goal right there, like, making fun of it because, like, oh, we're never going to get to the moon. But again, if you don't, if you don't try to push it that hard.
So let me ask you this. When it comes to then like making your next bets in life, right? When it comes to making your next bets, either in your career or, you know, either in when you're when you're doing a business, what have those failures taught you of, like, when do I push the envelope and when, when do I need to kind of keep it a little closer?
Try to be conservative because one of the I had this great interview, I think I mentioned Nick Merritt, who works for Ria Money Transfer. One of his lessons was don't do something for the sake of ticking a box. And that's something he really learned early in his career, where he was just kind of I think it was like even an internship.
He was just kind of trying to go through, I've got to do these things in my career boom, boom, boom, boom. And then he realized by just pushing the envelope a little more, he ended up getting his dream job. It was like some professional volleyball company did marketing for a tournament or something like that, remember? Exactly. But I love the way he worded don't do something for the sake of ticking the box.
And I think sometimes that's what we do and we don't push the envelope far enough. So I know there's probably no one answer to this from the values you've had. How do you how do you get the sense of, I'm pushing the envelope here, maybe I'll fail? Or you know what, this one. I need to play a little closer to the vest and be careful.
Carlos Gil: I would say, and I think it's a really good example that you just mentioned, because you mentioned the word passion. So I would advise people not to make decisions that are predicated based on their greed when it comes to money. So many times people make decisions because they're motivated by money, and there needs to be, there needs to be something beyond money that motivates you to make a move.
So I will say this money comes and goes and money is easy to make. It's also easy to lose it. So you should not make decisions based on money alone. You should make decisions based on what's going to bring you peace. What's going to bring you happiness. It could be like, in my case, just taking a job, right?
I was at business seven days a week. Sign up. Sundown. My family wasn't seeing me. I was completely miserable. I was not paying myself nearly what I am worth. Not even a 10th of it. And I was miserable. Even though I had what people would consider a successful business. I had to make a decision, pursue family, pursue happiness, pursue peace, and walk away from something that's not bringing that to me.
And again, like I'm at different stage and point of my life, in my career, I think there are so many folks that are in their 20s and entering their 30s. They're just thinking about the money. And we have to understand something is like, money's always going to come your way as long as you're talented. So just forget about it.
What really are you passionate about doing? And if it doesn't align, then don't do it because you're going to be miserable there.
Daniel Burstein: And I think long term, too, the money's going to come. If there's something where you can deliver value in the world. Like I said, you've got that passion. You can do this. Versus if you're just taking that job for the money, you're probably not going to push it that far. That's just where you're starting. How much more are you going to take it?
We got one more lesson here I wanted to ask about. The right leaders can unlock your potential. A few people you mentioned are Nick and Chris Heller and Simon Grabowski. How did these folks, unlock your potential?
Carlos Gil: So I want to give a shout out to Chris, Nick and Simon. And I want to just kind of share why these three individuals, why name them in terms of what I deem is the right leader and how they've helped me unlock my potential. So when I was working at BMC software, I you know, at that point in my career, I was on the speaking circuit.
I was talking a lot about personal branding. I was talking a lot about social media marketing for brands, and I felt as though I was developing a successful career as a speaker and social media thought leader, very much independent of my job at the time, running social media for BMC, it was almost like I had this personal brand, but it wasn't really integrated into the day to day of my job.
So the personal brand felt like a side hustle, the speaking engagements felt like a side hustle, and then my job was my job. They didn't really, like marry each other. And I was at South by Southwest in 2016, and I was speaking, at South by Southwest about personal branding back then. And Chris Heller at the time was the CEO of Keller Williams Real Estate.
As soon as I got off stage, him and his assistant, they pulled me aside. And this kind of goes back to networking. You never know who's watching you. You never know who's in the audience. Just keep that in mind. So, Chris and his assistant, they meet me on the side of the stage when I'm done speaking. They're like, hey, we represent Keller Williams.
We've got over 100,000 real estate agents, and we need you to present this training to them. Like, how can we get you to work with us? And that chance encounter led to two years of work with Keller Williams, which afforded me the opportunity to leave my job like I was at a point where I was just doing webinars.
I was doing a one hour, one hour webinar as a social media marketing coach for Keller Williams Real Estate agents. And it was it was Chris in that moment that recognized that talent. He didn't care that I had a job. He basically said, like, I need you to do you know, what you just did here on stage for our agents?
I mentioned Nick on because Nick was my CMO at, BMC software, and we, we developed actually, more of a mentor mentee relationship once we both left BMC. When I worked at BMC, he was my boss's boss. It was a very different relationship. It was when I left BMC that again, going back to networking. Nick lives in Connecticut.
I was going to New York a lot, and I invited Nick to meet me in New York. I started offering value to him. He was on my podcast, Real Talk. I buy into a CMO summit. I organized. I got to know him at a much different level and here's the thing about CMO once they leave a company, they're going to be a CMO somewhere else.
So you should just stay in touch with these folks. Stay in touch with them on LinkedIn, stay on their radar, engage with them, because eventually they're going to be a CMO somewhere else, and that's going to open up opportunities for you. So Nick went to green Dot Bank and he offered me, just about a year consulting gig working for green Dot during the pandemic.
And that kind of kept me a flow in between one gig to another gig, and it gave me an opportunity to work from home. I helped launch a brand and go to bank. I helped, you know, launched a whole go to market strategy for a brand. And, that was thanks to Nick recognizing the potential that he had seen many years before.
And then I want to give a shout out to Simon Grabowski. I haven't had an opportunity to work with Simon for very long. But Simon is the founder and CEO of Get Response, which is the company that work for it now. He started this company, in the late 90s in Poland, and he's really an innovator and pioneer in the email marketing space.
And when I interviewed for this role, I get response, you know, like every other candidate, I did my due diligence. I did my research on the company. I was really impressed by the backstory. And even though I was hired as a quote unquote employee, look, man, I'm always going to be an entrepreneur at heart, even if in that moment I don't have a business.
I really related to Simon, even though, selfishly, this man is, you know, perhaps much more successful, in launching a tech, a tech company that has existed now for 25 years and in my own endeavors. But there was a related ability there. I really liked him, and it was tricky because they were potentially hiring me. Coming away from being an entrepreneur to going back to being an employee, and I was very transparent and let him know I'm able to do the job that you're hiring me to do.
But you have to understand something. I'm used to working independent. I'm used to not necessarily having someone over my shoulder telling me what to do. So if you provide me with the autonomy to just do what I'm good at, which is getting on the road, shaking hands, inspiring people, creating content, then this is going to work out. If you try to put me in a box, it's not going to work out.
And, you know, there was that understanding. And, I use the analogy, let me continue to be myself, but with a get response hat on. And he agreed to it. And I think, again, that's a good example of a leader, a real leader recognizing talent and seeing how that talent fits into the into their into their system, into, their talent pool and then letting that person do what they're really good at.
And I think that's a true mark of every good leader, not just Simon, but Chris, Nick. And there's others that you I've worked with along the ways that weren't necessarily as high profile, but good leaders, they recognize talent and they allow that talent to shine. Bad leaders, they're always going to find a way to keep that talent hidden.
Daniel Burstein: Well, that was also good as a job interviewee. That conversation you just had, I mean, would you have had that conversation early in your career? Because one thing I really appreciate about what you've been talking about, which I think will be helpful to our listeners, are like, kind of here's who I was in my 20s when I was starting out, and here's why.
I'm in my 40s now, and here's what I've learned, and here's what I have grown and changed. So that's something that you had to learn and grow into to say, like, look, I'm not I'm I'm in a job interview. I'm not just going to try to please them. I'm going to say, here's what the value exchange would look like.
That would work well for both of us.
Carlos Gil: You know, that's a really good question, Daniel. I have developed this mantra that success cures all insecurities. And what I mean by that is so often in our youth, you know, we're we're playing into fake it until you make it right. We're saying the right things. We are, you know, showing up to the job interview. We're showing up to the meeting with, like, our best avatar.
But then we realize, like, when it's time to perform, like, shit, like, I talked a big game, but now I got back it up. And if you don't have the backing of senior management, if you don't have the backing of peers, like you're not going to go very far in any corporate environment whatsoever. So as time goes on and you're much more authentic, by the way, I love that all this has centered around authenticity.
And I was like the first question, because if you're not authentic, people are going to pick up on that and you're going to get you're going to get phased out of a gig very fast. So coming into this role, I knew, like, you need to be transparent and be my authentic self. And what is my authentic self at this stage of my career?
It's a it's a guy that's been successful. It's someone that's failed and learn from those failures. But I have done a lot of, you know, great things that I'm very proud of. That makes me an expert in my domain to I know to all know, but I am a true expert practitioner in my domain. I stick to that domain and, you know, again, I'm much more confident today that I was ten years ago when you met me on the show floor of, Internet Retail Conference and Expo in Chicago.
Daniel Burstein: I want to mention, by the way, Carlos was a pretty confident guy back in two. He showed up on his suit. He was like, you know, looking good. Ready for that interview? It's not like he, he came up there shy and I got him. And I have had I have interviewed also just give you credit real quick and I wanna ask your work why.
Sure. But I, I've interviewed, you know, some CMO, some pretty big companies, and sometimes you get on stage and they're just totally different people. And the bright lights turn on when the camera turns on and you kind of got to coax him through and you got to hold their hand and get their fantastic leaders. This is not public speaking, is not for everyone.
But Carlos, if that was early in your career, you didn't have any problems. Let me ask you one last thing. I love that word avatar you talk about. And I love how we are getting back to where we started. Avatar. We use avatars on social media. Don't use it in real life. Show up as your true authentic self.
So what does it take to succeed? If you had to sum all this up, what are the key qualities of an effective marketer?
Carlos Gil: Ooh, that's such a good question. And I could go in so many different directions with that. So what makes a successful marketer? I would say, first of all, you have to take a step back from being a marketer and you have to think like a consumer. I ask this question in every single talk that I do, I ask a very simple question who in this room likes to be sold to?
And rarely does a single hand go up? And I've asked this question now countless times. Thousands of people polled, and very rarely does a hand go up. And to me, that's very telling that as marketers, we don't like to be sold to. And what is marketing? It's an extension of sales. So if you don't like to be sold to or marketed to, then what makes you think that your customers do so you need to take a step, step back from being a marketer all the time and think like a customer.
Would you engage with your brand? If you wouldn't, then whatever you're doing, you're not doing it effectively. I'd say that's one two. You have to consume marketing content to really peel back the layers of the onion to understand how bad marketing really is. Like it really is bad. And I use this analogy a lot that today brands aren't competing just against other brands in their category or their space, are competing against people for attention to compete against personal brands, or competing against celebrities, or competing against influencers like the digital space, whether it's social or email or web, it's very noisy, very saturated.
And I know this because I've devoted now 15 plus years to really being a student of the game. And I think that successful marketers will always be students. I think the non successful marketers, they're just collecting a paycheck and checking boxes and you know, the, the way to stay employed, the way to stay in this game is you have to continuously push yourself to learn.
You look at what's going on with TikTok right now. Most marketers, if I had to pull them, couldn't even tell you what day Tick Tock is scheduled to to disappear in the United States because they themselves probably aren't using tick tock. And like, this is classic, right? I could go on a whole rant about this. Throughout my career, I've been just shocked.
How many CMAs are not on Twitter or they're not using social media, but yet they rely on people that report to them to be the expert. And I say, regardless of where you're at in an organization, just force yourself to be the expert and you'll never.
Daniel Burstein: Be out of work. Fantastic. Great advice. Thank you, crowd and great connecting with you again. Thanks for being here.
Carlos Gil: Thank you Daniel.
Daniel Burstein: 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 ecom.
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