#35 The Path to Leadership is Paved With Seized Opportunities

ABOUT THE GUEST: STEPHANIE COX, VP OF SALES & MARKETING at LUMAVATE 

From Stephanie’s LinkedIn Profile: 

"I’m a recovering perfectionist who believes you should “ship” new initiatives as fast as possible and constantly iterate on them based on the data. Speed > Perfection. 

I have an endless amount of crazy ideas and I enjoy challenging what’s possible. Ask anyone who has ever worked with me. 

I use the Oxford comma, love Coke, and hate crappy design. I speak candidly, have exceptionally high standards, and gravitate towards people who get sh*t done. 

I have more than 15+ years of marketing and sales experience in B2B, B2C, and B2B2C. I’ve pretty much done about everything in my career: launched companies, brands, new products, geographic expansion, and more. I’ve driven phenomenal growth, spoke at conferences around the world, led incredible teams, and I’m just getting started.” 

How to find Stephanie: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniecox/ 
 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/stephaniecox04
 

ABOUT THE EPISODE:  

This episode was supposed to be about sales & marketing alignment, breaking down silos, and unifying everything in a company that touches the customer under one unified vision. Turns out that it was all of that AND a lot more.  

In this episode, Stephanie walks us through the progression she made at Lumavate from VP of Marketing to the head of everything that touches the customer including sales, product, and service. From there we went pretty deep into sales management philosophy done right, but then we veered into something surprising and excellent: Leadership. Initiative. What it takes to grow and thrive in uncertainty by taking the lead and never looking back. It’s a fantastic episode. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!  


0:44 - What’s the best piece of sales advice that Stephanie has ever heard?  

2:00 - How did Stephanie address the “you never carried a bag” objection as a sales leader who came from a marketing background?  

4:20 - Stephanie comments about how the world has changed in these last few years and why that has shifted the idea of how sales and marketing and other customer-facing departments should align internally to address the full customer experience  

6:47 - Stephanie gives some background on Lumavate to give context to the conversation  

8:34 - Stephanie describes the more traditional silo oriented environment she found at Lumavate when she started in 2017, how it made sense at the time, and how a different way to think about leadership organization and alignment started to emerge  

15:45 - Stephanie talks about how sales is about relationships, how the way that each rep gets there in terms of process and activity isn’t as important as whether or not they are getting results, and how good sales leadership is about helping reps make more money  

18:30 - It’s important to get obstacles out of the way for those who are performing, but what do you do with everyone else?  

24:24 - If there is a leadership movement to a sole owner of the customer experience, why is it that Stephanie got there from marketing while most others who evolve into the role seem to come from somewhere else in the organization  

29:38 - How to power into leadership - fix the problems you see, especially if they are outside of your direct area of influence - and just do the work you can see that needs to be done until someone tells you to knock it off  

31:45 - What is one thing that Stephanie wishes she knew at the start of her career that she learned along the way  

33:58 - Where to reach Stephanie