Barbara Giamanco

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Why It’s OK to Be a Big Ass Failure w/Ashley Zagst, Zagst Consulting

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

People are often afraid to make mistakes or fail. But no failure means never learning and growing as a person or a professional. In this interview, I talked with Ashley Zagst who is a professional dancer/choreographer turned digital marketer.

Our conversation focused on how Ashley made the career transition from dancer to marketer and what she’s learned along the way about learning from mistakes. She is the former Head of Marketing at Bravado.co, the first digital community exclusively for sales professionals committed to elevating the profession by changing the stigmatized perception.

Key takeaways from the interview:

Everyone has transferable skills! No matter who you are or what you have done in your life, the skills you’ve developed along the way are NOT lost as you move to new phases in your life and career. 

Why Ashley decided to transition from a professional career as a dancer and business owner to a digital marketing career in Corporate America. Find out what that transition was like for Ashley and how she achieved her goals.

How Ashley knew she could make the leap from performing arts to working for a tech start-up even though at first glance it might seem an unusual career choice.

When making a career transition, steps you can take to get to the root of your strengths and skill sets.

Why following this “discovery” process can be even more important for women looking to transition in their careers? 

Why becoming comfortable with making mistakes and failing big is actually a benefit to our careers.

How feedback delivered in the right way leads to cultivating creativity, not stifling it.

Finally, learn about the connection between creating art(movement) → creating content → serving customers/members → building/being a part of a community → changing an entire profession!

Listen and enjoy the interview with Ashley!

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Or listen to the interview on the podcast page.

About Ashley– Connect with her on LinkedIn Explore Bravado and become a member

Ashley Zagst is a professional dancer/choreographer turned digital marketer. She is currently the Founder of Zagst Consutling and the former Head of Marketing at Bravado.co, the first digital community exclusively for sales professionals committed to elevating the profession by changing the stigmatized perception. Prior to working at Bravado, Ashley helped build the brand marketing team at Digital Trends. In between working, dancing, traveling, and spending time with her pup, she also finds time to crush the occasional triathlon.

Feature header blog post photo by Sharon Pittaway on Unsplash

Filed Under: blog, Featured Story Tagged With: Bravado, career, choreography, coaching, creativity, dance, digital, failure, marketing, sales, training

How Sales Organizations Can Create Digital Transformation for Customers with Lindsay Zwart, Microsoft

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

In this interview, I talked with Lindsay Zwart, US General Manager Cloud & Enterprise Business Group at Microsoft Corp. We discussed Transforming a Sales Organization to Become an Organization that Leads with Digital Transformation for Customers.

I had Lindsay kick off the conversation by telling me a bit more about her role at the company. Then we dug into the following questions:

Why digital transformation?

How should sales leaders think about digital transformation?

What does this mean for sellers?

What are some of the ways that sales individual contributors and sales leaders make the shift?

How do sales leaders catch up and keep up with the changes?

Enjoy the interview!

Apple Podcasts  – Please subscribe so that you never miss an episode! Write a review for the podcast if you like the interviews.

Spotify  Stitcher  Google Play 

Don’t use any of these platforms to listen? Listen HERE

About Lindsay:

US General Manager Cloud & Enterprise Business Group | Microsoft Corp.

As the US subsidiary BG Lead Lindsay has end-to-end accountability for the Cloud and Enterprise(C+E) business consisting of Application & Infrastructure and Data and AI elements of Microsoft’s Software platforms.

Lindsay is responsible for ensuring execution of strategies and tactics to further drive the business, including building deep audience insight, understanding audience segmentation, managing the investments in broad marketing and digital media outreach initiatives.

Before her career at Microsoft, Lindsay managed a large engineering business unit at IBM and worked with a handful of small and large companies with experiences in engineering development and support roles in the UK, New Zealand and South Africa.

Lindsay enjoys working in a vibrant, collaborative environment, and is an advocate for supporting women in leadership roles and empowering people through trust and accountability.  Through her passion around women in leadership, Lindsay started the Microsoft & Women in Partner community which focuses on connecting, empowering and inspiring female leaders in technology across Microsoft & our partner community.

When not working, Lindsay is married and has two girls, Mikayla and Hannah aged 13 and 11 years old who keep her busy. She is also involved in many leadership groups and enjoys traveling, sports, and outdoor activities.

Connect on LinkedIn and Twitter

Thanks to our Sponsors!

This podcast is presented by our Elite Sponsor, Microsoft. Corporate Vice President and Channel Chief Gavriella Schuster, along with other female leaders in the company, are driving for change, trying to bring more women into the technology industry. Gavriella and Microsoft are committed to giving “young women better role models and a stronger voice to all women.” You can hear more from Gavriella and other Microsoft leaders, on the Microsoft Partner Network podcast. Or visit partner.microsoft.com 

Thanks to our Media Sponsor. Women Sales Pros has a vision for more women in B2B sales and sales leadership roles where there are currently male-majority sales teams. We help educate companies on how to do this, and we champion women on what a professional sales career can be. We also showcase the very top women sales experts who are speakers, authors, consultants, trainers and coaches. People can sign up to get updates HERE and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @WomenSalesPros

Filed Under: blog, Women In Sales Tagged With: customer experience, digital, leadership, microsoft, sales, service, transformation

Digital Selling Best Practices with Jen Sieger, Microsoft

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

In this Conversations with Women in Sales interview, I talked with Jen Sieger, Director Inside Sales Specialist Team at Microsoft about Digital Sales Best Practices. Jen and I talked about how to train your salespeople to leverage Digital Selling Best practices to better connect with customers and exceed sales quotas.

Here are the key points we covered.

  • Why digital selling is important in the era of today’s modern buyer.
  • How Jen and her team members are driving Digital Selling within Microsoft.
  • The tools that the Inside Sales team members are leveraging to better connect with customers
  • The kinds of results that Jen has seen from these efforts.
  • Jen’s advice for other organizations who want to drive digital selling excellence within their companies.

Enjoy the interview!

Apple Podcasts  – Please subscribe so that you never miss an episode! Write a review for the podcast if you like the interviews.

Spotify  Stitcher  Google Play

About Jen

Jen Sieger, Director Inside Sales Specialist Team at Microsoft. Jen has spent the last 18 years of her career working across a variety of marketing, sales, channel and business strategy roles. For the last 10 years Jen has focused on growing Microsoft’s cloud business both with Microsoft partners and direct through the Inside Sales motion.  As the Director of Specialist Sales at Microsoft Inside Sales, Jen focuses on driving close integration between Microsoft’s sales and marketing engines and is leading the digital sales transformation of the inside sales team by implementing social and digital selling strategies across their global sales force.

Connect on LinkedIn
Connect on Twitter

Thanks to our Sponsors!

This podcast is presented by our Elite Sponsor, Microsoft. Corporate Vice President and Channel Chief Gavriella Schuster, along with other female leaders in the company, are driving for change, trying to bring more women into the technology industry. Gavriella and Microsoft are committed to giving “young women better role models and a stronger voice to all women.” You can hear more from Gavriella and other Microsoft leaders, on the Microsoft Partner Network podcast. Or visit partner.microsoft.com 

Thanks to our Media Sponsor. Women Sales Pros has a vision for more women in B2B sales and sales leadership roles where there are currently male-majority sales teams. We help educate companies on how to do this, and we champion women on what a professional sales career can be. We also showcase the very top women sales experts who are speakers, authors, consultants, trainers and coaches. People can sign up to get updates HERE and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @WomenSalesPros

Filed Under: blog, Women In Sales Tagged With: digital, leadership, microsoft, sales, selling

How Social Branding Intersects with Social Selling with Jasmine Sandler

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

In this episode, I talked with Jasmine Sandler about The Importance of Social Branding and its intersection with Social Selling in Delivering Results. I asked Jasmine to start by giving me the deets on how she got to where she is in her career today.

We also discussed:

Jasmine’s perspective on the intersection between Social Branding and Social Selling, and what she means by that.

You’ll hear tips on how to build a successful social brand presence.

You learn why Social Branding is for everyone, and your social brand is useful for anyone from Entrepreneur to Executive.

Discover how the Social Branding of the Individual Executive supports a company’s brand strength.

Jasmine provides tips for executives branding themselves online.

Finally, Jasmine talks us through a client case study, so you can understand the process she uses to help people build their brand.

Enjoy the interview!

About Jasmine:

Jasmine Sandler is a Google awarded Author, Senior-level Consultant and Keynote Speaker on Online Branding for global organizations and C-level executives. She is the Founder and CEO of Agent-cy Online Marketing, a NYC-based Social Media and Search Agency serving global brands including: CitiBank,  Private Jet Card Comparisons, Fly Home Jets,  Tuescher Chocolates, Diamonds International, Almod Diamonds and The Shade Store.  She writes on SEO and Social Media Strategies for Fast Company, LinkedIn, Entrepreneur.com, SearchEngineJournal.com and ClickZ.com. She has a dual MBA in Marketing and CIS and is a former IBM Marketing executive. Her passions are Speaking, Singing and Hockey.

Connect on LinkedIn and Twitter  

 

Filed Under: blog Tagged With: brand, digital, linkedin, sales, social media, social selling

Monday Musings

By Barbara Giamanco 1 Comment

Human Alphabet: Diverse Teenager Font Colorful Letters Calendar

The ruckus over #thedress.

Marketing teams invest thousands in an effort to try and make their campaigns go viral. Though I’ve read that some of the best in the agency business follow formulas that can potentially get you there, no one really is able to predict with certainty what will go viral. Who would have thought that a dress would spark a worldwide debate over the color and practically take down the internet? But that is exactly what happened. Buzzfeed reported that their post about the dress broke the site’s traffic records, with more than 670,000 people viewing the post simultaneously and garnering 16 million hits in six hours. Millions of tweets. Multiple arguments that had people lining up like the Hatfield’s and the McCoy’s about to embark on an epic battle to prove who was right and who was wrong.

thedressWas the dress blue and black (it is) or white and gold? That was the big question on Thursday, and I have no doubt that not much work was being done that day. When I first saw the picture in my Facebook feed (and I would see it more times than I cared to after that), I immediately saw blue and black. What was shocking to me is how many hundreds of thousands of people could actually see it as white and gold. Then, of course, articles popped everywhere explaining the Phenom. Color blindness, rods and cones, lighting of the picture and lightness constancy and color constancy. Regardless of these explanations, it is hard for me to understand how anyone could blame the lighting. I posted the original Tumblr picture in the post. Blue and black. Although I have no doubt someone reading this now will be as firm in their position that the darn dress is white and gold. Get over it. It isn’t! The dress maker has confirmed the color, but good for them that the sale of that dress jumped 347%.

What I didn’t get is why anyone would care. Oh, but care they did. Not only did this go viral but mainstream news sources were writing and reporting about it. Boston Globe, Wired, New York Times, Jezebel, Huffington Post and Forbes all had something to say about it. Even CNN and CNBC jumped on board.

Soooo… with all the books, videos and content marketers spouting off their strategies to help people and companies ensure virility of sharing their content, in the end, I think nobody actually knows. I mean, a dress? Really.

Search bar on your website.

This falls into the category of things that bug me. In. A. Big. Way. When I visit any content rich website and especially blog sites, I want to be able to quickly search for the content I want to read. I found myself annoyed by a company who put out a press release about a list of twitter influencers that all salespeople should follow, but failed to put a link to the actual list. Huh? I go to the website to find the article and you guessed it… no search bar. I wasn’t about to waste my time trying to scroll through all the posts to find it.

I suppose it is the little things. If you are going to report on a particular list, ebook, whatever… link to that specific piece of content not just to your website. While you are at it, make sure you have a search bar on your site. Make it easy for people to find the content they want. Isn’t that the point of bringing them to your site in the first place, so that they can consume and engage with your content?

Keeping it real.

I’m hearing the phrase more often these days. It begs the question, what does “keeping it real” actually mean? I suppose an apt definition is that keeping it real means to be who you are without censoring yourself to be more appealing to other people. There is a dark side to the phrase, I think. I’ve observed people use the term as license to hide behind bad behavior. They insult you, or try to bully you but they’re just keeping it real, ya know. Be yourself. Absolutely. But there is a very fine line between being who you are and just being a jerk to other people.

Unplugging from digital.

I chuckled this morning when I saw a couple of my Facebook friends talking about how they were suffering from WIFI withdrawal, which evidently wasn’t on the flights they were taking. OMG, how can anyone live 9 or 10 hours without being plugged in? I’m happy to report that they both survived the experience and are doing fine. As for me, does it mean I’m old if I remember when we didn’t have all this digital, cloud and mobile technology?

Frankly, I think it is okay, and in fact, quite necessary to unplug now and again. Constant ON leads to missing key happenings in life, stress and perhaps a little attention deficit disorder. There is something to be said for being present in the moment, which is why I shake my head when I see people walking their dogs while texting or yakking away on their cell phone. My colleague Joanne Black wrote a book called Pick Up the Damn Phone (good read by the way), and I say sometimes you need to put the damn thing down!

Filed Under: blog Tagged With: #thedress, digital, keeping it real, marketing, mobile, social

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