MODcast Episode 4 – Selling the Vision: Achieving Internal Alignment for Embracing MarTech with Maxine Eiland

MODintelechy Co-founder and CEO, Scott Thomas, spoke with Maxine Eiland, Sr. Director Digital Marketing and Web at SailPoint Technologies, on her insights on MarTech buy-in and the importance of data-informed strategy, experience as a female leader in the tech industry, and the cultural value of falcons in Abu Dhabi.

Scott:

Welcome Maxine Eiland, Senior Director, Digital Marketing and Web at SailPoint. Maxine’s career path is a unique one driven by her continued interest in growing and developing not only her career, but on a personal level. While in college, she discovered the joy of coding opposite of myself and taught herself how. She also realized how it applied to everyday life and the power it held. Fast forward a few years later, and she was managing both the publishing and content teams for United Airlines, you may have heard of them, in Chicago, but as the cold was out to do, it got the best of her, and she came back to Texas. Eventually she made her way to SailPoint technologies to start their digital marketing program and help them go public in 2017 where she is still at today. Welcome Maxine.

Maxine:

Hi, thanks for having me today.

Scott:

All right, thanks for sitting down with us. So I’ve had the pleasure of working with you for, I can say many years. Can I say many years?

Maxine:

I think we can say many.

Scott:

So what are some things that compel you to work in the marketing technology space? Even beyond coding, and what excites you most about it?

Maxine:

I think one of the reasons I’ve always been drawn, it started, like you said, in coding and then obviously my career has evolved since then, but I think one of the big things I love about our MarTech space is just the constant change in the landscape. From day-to-day, there’s something new out there, a new technology, the things you can implement to innovate your your different experiences digitally, I think is really great. There’s also new challenges constantly. Right now we’re going through a lot of privacy and compliance changes that impact marketing, obviously, but it also affects the experiences that you’re able to provide on digital platforms and websites, et cetera.

Scott:

Yeah. That’s a great point. So that kind of leads to the next question, what are the hurdles you personally face and how did you overcome them?

Maxine:

Well, obviously we have some of those challenges today that I just mentioned above, but I think when I look back at my career, obviously, I’m a brown woman in technology, so there’s obviously struggle surrounding that. But when I think about actual career things that I’ve had to move past, when I was 24, I became a tech lead for an agency. And so that just essentially meant that I worked with clients one-on-one, analyzed, I researched problems that they had to try to figure out the right solution for them kind of what you do. The company was pretty small. They didn’t really have a way to develop those communication or leadership skills for somebody, especially at the age that I was. That’s kind of a really different skillset that not everybody has right off the bat, right? And so I think a lot of that was me learning myself, asking other people, peers, mentors, things, and figuring out really how to handle a room of older white men. That’s pretty much what it was back then.

Scott:

That does bring up a good point. Obviously it’s much more at the forefront, but do you feel like it’s getting beyond the headlines, right? That it’s getting better for like Latina women as an example? Is it the same? Is it just different than when you started?

Maxine:

Yeah. I think, it’s definitely different. I think back on, again, early on in my career when I was faced with different challenges and kind of my work environment, I think the things that kind of slid by if you will back then aren’t necessarily things that can pass today, whether or not people are trying to change or acknowledging it is one thing. But I think people are a little bit more eyes wide open if you will, on things. They’re at least thinking about things a little more thoughtfully. I think it’s caused some companies to try to make some really big changes, especially with everything going on in the state of today. So, I think it’s definitely shifting, I wouldn’t say it’s something that’s going to change overnight, right? I think we wish we could change certain things overnight, but unfortunately you’re shifting whole mindsets, right.

Maxine:

People that grew up their whole life thinking one way, you’re basically telling them that what they’ve been growing up with and what they thought was wrong. And I think or different, I should say, it might not necessarily be wrong, but they don’t know any better, right? So I think educating and trying to help people understand how to look at things from other people’s perspectives that they might’ve had an advantage when others didn’t. So I think we’re on our way. I think there’s obviously lots that need to go on to get us fully into a much better space than we were, but I’d say we’ve made some progress at least from 15 years ago.

Scott:

Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s a positive, not that you want to celebrate going as small amount and not having full equity. Right. But it’s interesting. Well, thanks for sharing. I know that’s been topical and we didn’t necessarily plan on talking about that, but it it’s very relevant. Well, let’s go to a slightly different topic. So you’re an ambitious marketer and you’ve always innovated and tried new emerging technology in your career. What are some of the things you’ve learned as you try to break the glass in an organization speaking about breaking glass in general?

Maxine:

Well, it’s excruciatingly hard. So, that’s the biggest, I guess, learning that I’ve had. I think when you’re younger, you think it’s easy, easier said than done, I guess, but when you’re actually physically doing the work, it’s definitely a lot more challenging. I think even if a company is really innovated at its core, like take SailPoint, for example, we’re a pretty innovative company and we test things, we try different things see what works, but I think no matter what, there’s a level of knowledge that goes into the decisions that you’re making towards innovation, both within your team. But I think larger scale, even looking at how do you educate your leadership team on what a positive impact the tool can have or a new technology can have?

Maxine:

And I think that’s something that you have to be able to do is articulate what you have in your head, and your vision and your strategy, and really put it in a way where people that don’t necessarily understand the technologies very well or how they all kind of fit together. It’s your job to really help them understand so that they can then go help sell it or support you. And so I think that’s a skill in and of itself.

Scott:

Right. Yeah, no, and this one is, we have it from different sides, right? But I’m always looking, I won’t say struggle, but this is an area, especially senior leadership, how do you get senior leadership to not fall in love with the demo of a specific technology? And that’s an old saw, but I started at Accenture way back when, and the saw was people process and technology. And I feel like some of that’s gotten either forgotten or never put forward. And I think I see a lot of executives who didn’t come up through coding, didn’t come up through digital, like Madmen admin. And it was great, very creative, but I feel like sometimes the demo can really hook people, and I feel, and again, this is what we do. How do you dig into the technology and say, well, how does that actually match? Is that benefit our use cases? Anyways, I’m curious, you said it’s hard. Do you have any tips and tricks on that front? How do you position a pitch it, in a certain way to speak to non-technical folks?

Maxine:

Man. I can tell you the stories of trial and error. That’s obviously the biggest one. you might think that one way is the right way to do it. And you might have think that you have organized it in a way, and then you present it and it just doesn’t work. So I think it’s understanding your leadership team and understanding how they work and what makes them tick, if you will. If it’s analytics, like my CMO, for example, very data-driven wants see the whole picture. And so I know that, so that’s kind of how I organize presentations for her, because if I give her the right information, she can then present that to the rest of her executive team. And so I think that’s trial and error. If you don’t get it right the first time, that’s okay.

Maxine:

Ask them how they want to kind of have this information, have a conversation first, try to explain it in a way that you think makes sense and then organize it in a way based off of that conversation. But honestly, it is a lot of trial and error. Like I said, it’s a skill to learn and I can guarantee you if I had to go present it to somebody else other than my CMO, I’d have to change it all around again and figure out how to get that person to be able to process the complexities of some of the technologies we have.

Scott:

No, that’s a great point. And this kind of leads to the new question, but my biggest struggle, sub struggle on what we’re talking about is somebody locks into a demo or vendor that they love and how do you potentially not unwind it to unwind it, right. But to really deconstruct, what are you trying to actually do, and this tool may not do that. So that does lead to the question being in MarTech, are there any software vendors, like big or small that are doing it right, to help with that process or anyone impressing or letting you down right now?

Maxine:

I think I’m actually doing this right now for a presentation later this week, but I have to take some of the platform we just purchased and figure out how to, to, to educate on what that can do and the positive impacts again, that it can bring. So I think software vendors, I would say, are not the best people for that. I think it’s, they’re always about the sell, right? So I have six decks, that this specific vendor has kindly given me. And I now have to dissect those decks to kind of pull together two to three slides. That describe what they do in a way that makes sense for my audience. So I would say there’s not really a vendor that does that type of stuff really well, or that I’ve had the experience with, but they have all the data, they have all the information for you. So, you basically just have to go and deep dive into it and pull out those nuggets if that make sense.

Scott:

Yeah. No, that does. I mean, and that’s a whole, there’s so many topics on that. But that’s a great point, right? Because I’ve seen a lot of executives say, “Well this Salesforce vendor said this”, right. And it’s not even lying, sometimes it’s just it’s context. It’s they’ll say a word that means something different to someone else, but someone takes it and runs with it, right?

Maxine:

Or they can do it, but your implementation doesn’t support it, right? So just because they can connect to say Salesforce doesn’t mean that you have the right set up for your Salesforce to connect to whatever that tool is you don’t have the fields or the database to support it. So those are all the questions you really should be asking is in order to get these setups, what do we need to do, kind of thing.

Scott:

Yep. Yeah. And this is something and we haven’t formalized it, but we did this with a client, basically, didn’t do a formal RFP, but kind of ran through RFP process and we had to keep translating between the software vendor and the company. Which is you’re doing right?

Maxine:

Well, and I think it’s helpful to have a tech background because you can kind of pardon my French, but you can read through the kind of the BS a little bit, right? You can figure out when they’re saying something that, “Oh, yeah, yeah, we can do that. We can do that.” Versus actually tangibly explaining how they can do something.

Scott:

Right. Yes, exactly. And again, we’re talking about big vendors, but the big vendors are, I don’t want to say guilty, but a little guiltier than the smaller vendors typically because it’s not technically lying. They may have eight different suites of software that if you spend a million dollars integrating them all or more, they could do all that stuff, right? So, it’s not a lie, it’s just, what’s the LOE and…

Maxine:

Right. Is it going to take you two years and you have to redo the whole platform?

Scott:

Right, right. Anyway, so yeah. I mean, I know you know that, I just kind of bring that out for folks who are going to check this out because that’s always, how do you convey that? So speaking of, kind of the hype, right. ABM, where is it in the hype cycle and what is real, like tangible, I guess, and to your point, I think that’s a good word, and disappointing about it?

Maxine:

Yeah. ABM it’s always such a hot topic, right? It reminds me of the, this is the year for mobile. It was like mobile’s year for 10 years. So it’s like ABM’s turn now, but really ABM can be really, really huge for your organization if it’s done right. So we’re fortunate that we have a devoted team in marketing for ABM. And so we brought them, that was something that we established a couple of years back and it’s honestly made a huge difference in our marketing efforts. The quality of our leads is very high. So I would say there’s definitely big, big pros to doing ABM and kind of actually putting it into practice in your company. I think the unfavorable part, I wouldn’t say it’s disappointing per se, it’s kind of expected with something like this, particularly so new, is it’s only as good as the data that it’s getting, and it’s pushing out.

Maxine:

So the data needs to be clean and it has to be right for your industry and company something like say a specific platform might view say the health care industry completely different than another platform might or how you do within your own organization. And so I think making sure that everything is aligned for your business and then actually making sure that the data behind it is accurate. But I think there’s a lot to go still when it comes to data accuracy for the targeting side of things. And obviously privacy and compliance is not really doing ABM any favors, but even at its worst, I think ABM is in its current state, it’s still way better than the spray and pray mentality that most of us had before this. So, definitely say, take a stab at it if you haven’t started to dabble in it.

Scott:

Yeah. No, you made a great point of which is, I actually haven’t seen another organization put together to an ABM like org. Usually it’s an initiative, but usually there’s nobody dedicated. It’s one of your 14 jobs.

Maxine:

Yeah. Which never goes over well.

Scott:

Yeah, right. So I mean, and I think that’s a good lesson you got to, if it’s that serious resource against it. I’ve seen most people resource the tech, that’s usually, a not resource the people. And so yeah. And with-

Maxine:

Yeah. I mean, you can’t, sorry, you can’t bring in a new tech unless you, and that’s a huge, huge thing that a lot of companies do. A platform does not solve your problems. You still have to have somebody that runs your platform and you still have to have somebody that dedicate the time and energy to analyzing the data in the platform that goes with it. And so I think you bring up a great point, the resourcing behind it is huge and that will actually make or break a lot of your programs. If you can’t have somebody to dive into everything for you.

Scott:

Yeah. We’re lucky enough to work with seriously pros like yourselves and some of our other clients, like we’ve actually looked around and said, “Oh our clients have actually been doing this for a while.” And so what I have learned is I think there was a hole and we’ve had some clients who I think they buy into the sales pitch, which is if you buy it… It’s kind of if you build it, they will come sort of mentality. If you buy this technology, you will get all the benefits magically.

Maxine:

…the next shiny thing.

Scott:

Right. Right. Well yes. Although I would say people have gotten a little better about the shiny tech, but I think they buy the promise that the tech will solve the people problems, they’ll solve the process problems. They’ll solve the data problems right, to your point. And so, anyways, now I’m waxing philosophical. I don’t think anyone’s fully figured out the ABM CDP Nexus yet, right? I know DB says they have, sorry DB. But yeah, it’s a little long ways from that. So I don’t know if you have any commentary there, that’s just me kind of going on.

Maxine:

No comment.

Scott:

All right. Good. I’ll put it out there. So obviously this is stating the obvious, right, but everything is tough, challenging, scary, right now. As Leonard Cohen said, “There’s cracks in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” What’s going really well, or at least pretty good for you and your team right now?

Maxine:

I guess right now we’re all in this kind of work from home remote lifestyle. Right. And that’s really, I think it’s been a positive for a lot of people. You can be at home, you can be with your kids, you can do whatnot, but for businesses and corporate corporations, I think what it’s really done is shown that some of them have big gaps in their security. Financial industry is a great example, right? That they just were not set up in any kind of industry where it’s a little bit of an older backend older tech. They’re having a little bit more of a harder trouble with this whole work from home, remote lifestyle we’re in right now. So, I think what I am grateful for is that I work for a company that helps to solve the problem, right. So that’s always been a positive with everything that’s coming out.

Maxine:

And so I think because of the positive that the company can bring and help other companies solution for their security problems, it’s given me the ability to think of new and innovative ways to expand how we’re talking to them, educating them on this kind of information that they never knew they needed to know about, right? And so I think one of that is that new platform that we’re bringing on that you so graciously helped us with or you are helping with us with, I suppose, but that’s going to help enable us to do just that, but in a much more effective, efficient way. And I think that’s all positives, I think that’s been really beneficial for the company itself.

Scott:

Yeah, no, that’s right. I mean, I think, like you said, there’s a lot of digital trends or five-year trend that became a six month trend. Even for us, right. We run a lot of MarTech stuff, but we’re doing a lot of still like revenue generating campaigns. And it’s not always the sexiest thing. CMOs like it pays the bills, which certain executives love, but sometimes CMOs don’t love it. It’s sort of a thing, but it’s not fun. And so I’ve seen it. All of a sudden the boring revenue generating programs are actually getting a lot of love, or even would say things that were ignored, have now come to the surface, I’m not going to say identity was ignored. But I think it’s a hard thing to wrap your head around, even for some of the security things. “Oh, single sign on. Right? That’s what that is.” It’s the proverbial iceberg, right? That’s the tip, there’s a whole lot of stuff underneath. How do you market what’s below. Maybe that’s the question. How do you market what’s below the surface of the iceberg, right?

Maxine:

Yeah. It’s been the whole… I think when I joined the team three years ago, that was the whole conversation is how do we educate people on a thing that they didn’t know they needed and why it’s so important. Again, the whole COVID stuff really, I think emphasized some of the security needs, and with that obviously identity and why that’s important to protect what people are doing, who has access to what, the data behind it, bots, et cetera. So I think that’s all been a way for us to kind of… A problem that we really need to solve. Again, going back to your first question, right? What’s the challenges every day of being innovative in technology? I think we, as an organization, have kind of had to think about things a little bit differently, figuring out how to use search, for example, how do we target what people are actually searching for using ABM?

Maxine:

For example, we know what intent data people are looking at, what they’re searching for. So we can pull them in that way and then educate them on, well, how does it solve this, pain points, challenges that people face, businesses face, use cases, that’s what makes it clear to people versus saying, “Oh, there’s this thing that you need that does this thing.” It’s not relevant. They can’t really put it into perspective until you say, “Hey, this will make your IT team way more efficient”, if they’re not having to constantly do say password resets, or something like that are automatically provisioning somebody when they onboard or off board. So I think it’s figuring out what those kind of those everyday use cases are and how that can be relevant to your audience.

Scott:

Yeah. And how do you find those people that have that pain point?

Maxine:

Yeah, exactly.

Scott:

Which are maybe not always the people writing the checks, at least that’s what I’ve experienced.

Maxine:

I think there’s a statistic, right? That it’s like 10 to 15 people are usually the decision makers when they buy a platform. There’s the people that are kind of like the little research people and maybe they’re interns or individual contributors, but they’re the ones that are going and finding the shortlist. And then they’re going in and saying, “Hey, this thing is the new thing we need to have because of X, Y, and Z.” And then they’re trying to sell it. So how do you help them not only be able to understand the need, but be able to articulate it again to their executive team and why they need it.

Scott:

Yeah. That’s a great point. Great point. And that definitely highlights ABM right there. I mean, 10 to 15, there’s no way you’re going to get to that traditional marketing.

Maxine:

Well, and if you know on an account, for example, where you have somebody coming to the site and that they’re researching, give them the information they need, but if somebody that’s an IT director, or CTO or CIO, and they’re coming to the website and they’re a completely different audience. So you should be presenting them information that is vastly different than say somebody that’s a researcher. If a finance person is coming to the website, they need to have something completely different investors, et cetera. So I think it’s within an account understanding who you’re talking to because they all have different needs, right? They all have different ways of consuming the information and making their decision. Like I said, an executive is going to be more interested in return on investment, and what’s the bigger, larger business problems it’ll solve versus somebody on the research end is going to be just more understanding all the complexities of this an engineer, for example, on their team might also be looking at how do I even do this? How do I implement it? Who do they connect with that kind of stuff?

Scott:

Yeah. No, that’s great. I think this is definitely the ABM primer I feel like already. So, this, I think we have our working title. Maybe not, but now we’ll move to some more, to a different sort of thread, right? So we have a running theme, we sort of just backed into it to be perfectly honest on the podcast we call adventures in marketing. And it was our first interview which this is a plug, but you definitely, I’m not saying you should probably check it out. It’s one of the best stories, business, or otherwise I’ve ever heard, honestly, it’s a good one. There’s involves in Brazilian prison, just leave it at that. Maybe not that crazy, right? But can you share a cool adventure story where your marketing career has taken you somewhere unexpected?

Maxine:

Yeah. I definitely was never in a prison, so I can’t match that, but I was at an agency a few years ago and one of our clients was an airline in Abu Dhabi. And so I had the opportunity to travel there, not once, but twice, and just kind of dive into their culture, and really just experience just some things I’ve never experienced. We went off-roading in the desert. I got to hold a Falcon, which is frightening at the same time, but also really cool. I have a picture I’ll send it and just have a just a beautiful, beautiful dinner in the middle of the desert with amazing entertainment and just, it was just a really great experience. And so I’d say that’s probably my coolest marketing adventure story.

Scott:

That’s super cool. Wow, man, I’ve seen that where they have like the hood over the Falcon.

Maxine:

So, the guy was like… I mean I was holding it and he’s like, “Yeah, we have to have that on or it’ll attack you essentially.” So they have them covered with the little blinders, so they can’t see anything because I mean, they’re trained to just, and they’re worth, I don’t know if you know this, but Falcons there are worth so much money. It is crazy. They’ll fly them on their own planes! People have their own private planes for their falcons. It’s insane. Because they it’s all about racing so it’s like having a prize horse. It’s very fascinating.

Scott:

Yeah. That’s super cool. All right. Abu Dhabi is on the bucket list officially. That’s super cool. All right. Well, not to sound like a viral TikTok challenge, but what would you say to your younger self if you could go back 10 years?

Maxine:

I’d probably tell myself to stop being so hard on yourself or myself, but I just remember again, I was fairly young, kind of managing a lot and doing a lot. And I think I would get very angry at myself if I made a mistake or I didn’t immediately know an answer to a problem. And I think that was something I had to kind of retrain myself that as part of the process you have to fail a little bit in a way that you can learn and grow from it so that you can expand your curvy on things, you know? And so I think it’s easy when you don’t know the answer to kind of struggle a little bit with imposter syndrome. I’m sure you’ve heard of that one.

Scott:

I’ve experience it myself.

Maxine:

Yeah. Everybody deals with it. And I think the older that I’ve gotten in my career, the more I realized that it takes more of a leader to say, I don’t know the answer than it does to say you do. And so I think it’s still obviously hard to quiet the little voice in your head, but more often than not, if I take a moment to say, “Hey, let me go find some answers for you, or give me a couple of days, I’ll come back with you something”, but I’ll usually come back with a more thoughtful, much more researched, I talk to the right people and really have at least a direction, right. You don’t necessarily have to have the answer, but you maybe have a really good strong direction on where you should go. And then that’s sometimes all you need you don’t need to have that very specific answer right away.

Scott:

Yeah. But it’s interesting when you say that, what I hear is also you’re hard on yourself, but what you’re saying at the end is it sounds like you’ve always had a point of view. Is that a fair statement?

Maxine:

Oh, yeah, I always have an opinion on everything!

Scott:

Where did that come from? And the reason I say that is sometimes I’ve and some very successful people where I haven’t seen, maybe it wasn’t always apparent, but I don’t always see a point of view. I see a lot of copying others. And again where it’s smart, I feel free to borrow from others. I think it’s just, I don’t know, you don’t have to recreate the wheel, but where do you think that comes from, having a of view?

Maxine:

Having a strong opinion? Gosh, I don’t know. Not to get all sentimental and whatnot, but I think I grew up the youngest of four girls and my dad always instilled in us, I think a very strong ability and strong work ethic. And I think with that, it just came naturally to want to solve problems and want to face challenges head on. He always knew that, as women, we were going to have a little bit of a different experience. And so he tried to give us, I think, tools that allowed us to be stronger women, mentally stronger. And I think that’s just something that has carried through with us our whole life. My sisters are all, I would say, extremely successful women. They manage careers and also have kids and I think that’s a testament just to the way that we grew up and the ability that we had that support system at home.

Maxine:

And I think a lot of people don’t necessarily have that support system. And I think it does make a huge difference. It doesn’t matter where you are in the whole chain of working commands and whatnot. I think, if you have support at home, that’s huge. And so I think that’s probably what lends into the opinions. My parents never really, I would say, it never occurred to them to say that was a negative thing, so I think that fosters it too. So, yeah, I think I was grateful to grow up how I did.

Scott:

All right. No, that’s awesome. I was going to add, maybe it’s a little bit of Texas, but it sounds like it’s all your parents, so. And this is coming from a native California, so.

Maxine:

Yeah, no, just we were born to be strong and independent women.

Scott:

That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, Maxine, thank you. Anything you want to bring up? Stories, questions?

Maxine:

There was one question I think that was pretty, I think towards the top of our kind of conversation about how I overcame that kind of struggle that I had trying to adapt at the age of 24. And so I just think that coming in that so early on in my career, one of the biggest things that was huge for me was having a male champion and my boss was at that time you’re so young when you’re at that age and I think I was very, very lucky to have not only a really great boss, but I worked with all guys, I was the only female and I think, at varying ages, and I think that not only was my boss really supportive and he mentored me a lot, but I had male counterparts that I worked with that kind of took me under their wing in a very professional manner and helped me develop skills that I didn’t have before.

Maxine:

And I think that was huge for me because I had never had that before. And I think having that kind of support system is huge, honestly, when you’re at a younger level of your career. And so I think that’s a big thing. I think if you get the opportunity to, if you see somebody and you see potential and go after it and help them and really figure that out because you were once there, right? We all were.

Scott:

Yeah, no, it’s a great point. And there’s obviously something unless, you can tell me if he was just obviously a really good boss, but probably something in you too, that he saw that made it I don’t want to say worthwhile, but that he’s putting in that extra effort to mentor you right, because he sees potential. Is there anything you can say? I’m making a leap there, but I don’t think I’m wrong, to like sort of show that potential, so that you can maybe attract mentors more effectively, or just maybe talk a little bit about that process. I don’t know if there’s a secret sauce to that, because honestly, I actually struggled with mentors. I kind of had put together my own assembly of little parts from different people.

Maxine:

Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting, because I’ve worked at a couple of companies, one of them being a major, major airline where they have a very large presence, they worked really hard to try to build out a mentor program, at SailPoint, we’re building out our own mentor program within the company itself. One of the things that I’ve learned over the years is you can’t force a mentorship relationship. I think when you talk to people and you have conversations with them, you should know right away. I think whether that’s somebody that one you click with, right, because you have to click really well with them. And I’ve again, been fortunate. I’ve had some great bosses. I’ve also had some great female leaders that have allowed me to grow and given me opportunities and challenges, to keep progressing my career. Just really taking the time to ask the right questions.

Maxine:

But yeah, I mean, most of my mentors that I’ve had are organic ones. The ones that I’ve been kind of do a Q&A, and do a speed dating, I’ve done a speed dating one before, those never worked out, because you’re not getting that initial kind of like emotional kind of connection. And you really have to have that type of connection with your mentor because you have to be vulnerable with them to ask certain questions and you have to feel comfortable asking those questions with them or bouncing an idea off of them. And I think that’s something, it’s a good idea in, in theory to try to match people together, but at the end of the day, it’s more like, how do you organically create a mentoring program or a mentoring relationship?

Maxine:

And yeah. I mean, I have different mentors for different things, so you’re not going to have one mentor that solves all of your marketing problems. You might have one that’s really, really good at digital marketing and you might have one that’s really, really good at executive decks. And so I think it’s knowing when to pull from your different mentors for your different needs. And there might just be some that have gone through the same things as you. And you can say I’m having a bad day. I need that motivational, pep talk.

Scott:

Right. Yeah, no, that’s a really good point. Maybe that’s a whole… We can create a whole sort of organic mentoring process. Which is sort of an oxymoron, right? But I think to your point, yeah, because I knew that like Accenture and some others had very formal programs, but inevitably, yeah, I think there was probably a one or two that I connected with somebody. And it definitely helped, but how do you get something that is just based even on mutual interests where you just increase the communication and let it sort of spur from that.

Maxine:

Yeah. I mean you have to enjoy talking to the person, right?

Scott:

Right. Exactly. And have something in common, personal or professional. So, it’s a really good point. Yeah. And thank you for bringing that up. Most of the time when I say, is there any other questions everyone’s like, “No” kind of rushing to get off. I’m kidding. But, no, I appreciate you, seriously, because I think there’s a lot of people starting their career that, and again, I wish I had some of that too. Meaning, you read a lot of the books and like people’s success is really based on a mentor and I kind of look back and go, yeah, I mean, I’ve certainly had some really good ones, but I didn’t have that one or two kind of long-term mentor, and so maybe I have FOMO?

Maxine:

But it’s okay, right? I mean, I think you also have different mentors that come in out of your life at different stages of your career. And so the mentors I had when I was in my twenties are not the same ones that have in my thirties and probably not the same ones I’m going to have in my forties or fifties. Your career changes. You evolve and you’re, especially, as you’re facing different technology challenges and different marketing challenges, you’re going to have different people to kind of want to have different conversations with. And I think I have women mentors that are very good at pumping me up when I need that female kind of thing. But then I still have male mentors that are helpful. And because they’ve been around longer or have done what I’ve been doing for so much longer that they can help me analyze certain situations a little bit better. So yeah, I think it’s just one having your garden of mentors and then knowing when to call upon each one of them and being okay with growing out of your mentorship program, you’re a mentor.

Scott:

I love that garden of mentors, It’s a good moniker. Well, Maxine, thank you so much. And thanks for hanging out a little bit longer too.

Maxine:

Yeah. No problem.

Scott:

We covered a lot of ground and yeah I learned a little bit more about you selfishly too. So, it’s always fun to learn kind of where people come from and get a little more context.

Maxine:

Awesome. Thank you so much for having me, it was a really good time.