Ep.159 Business Blueprints: Lessons from Leaders in the Channel with Jen Dimas
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Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus and this is Next Level BizTech. Hey everybody, welcome back. We’re excited to be here with you today because we’ve got a little bit of a special track this month. So we’re here talking about business blueprints, lessons from leaders with a little bit of tribute to Women’s History Month. So who better to have on to kick us off than a female leader of our own that is out here killing it at Telarus, our chief marketing officer, Jen Dimas. Jen, welcome on.
Thanks for having me Josh, I’m excited to be here.
Jen, we got a lot of questions for you here so we better just dive in. Let’s start with your background. So for anybody who doesn’t know, give us just a little bit about your background, your unique story, how you got into this space, any weird windy stuff along the journey.
There’s lots of weird windy stuff. I’ll try and summarize it because I’ve had a long long career and it’s been weird and windy. So I’ll tell you originally I did not know I was a technologist. That’s not what I prepared myself for an undergrad or anything. I fell into a technology delivery role actually. I was a system administrator and an app dev person in client service and client server solutions way back when.
And so I learned about my inner nerd, who knew that that was me, but it was. And then I chose to marry a newfound love of business and technology with an interest that I had in marketing. So I literally went back to school to marry those, to merge those two things. And since that time I shifted from technology delivery into marketing. And I was the very happy recipient of a massive coincidence and alignment of skill and experience with a trend that happened in the marketing universe, which is I’m a nerd and I’m very efficiency driven. I’m about people, process and systems and making sure that programs are built with efficiency in mind and impact and effectiveness and measurement and data. And that happened to be when everyone started using the internet and when most of the buying journey started becoming online and trackable. That was a trend that happened in the marketing function as well. And so yay for me, I was able to really take advantage of that interest and experience and and sort of parlay that into what has become like a very happy career for me in tech marketing, pretty much solely focused on B2B.
And I’m super passionate about it. I love it. And I’ve had enough time on the planet to make lots of mistakes doing it and learn lots of things. And I’m just thrilled to be able to keep doing what I love to do.
So I love I love hearing the the app dev background. I think that’s a cool transition. I don’t think we’ve had any app dev marketing transitions yet. So that’s awesome. How did you like what pointed you initially when you said, you know what, I’m going to get into app dev, I’m going to get into code. What was it that drew you into that at least initially? Is it just did you know or?
Oh, it’s very much like your career story in that like I was when I finished undergrad, I graduated into recession.
I could not get a job to save my life. And I actually was an office manager at a at a consulting company. And I was adding value and doing what I did there and learning a lot of stuff. And pretty soon I was like, I could help also by doing that thing over there. And I could help. And I had a wonderful boss who at that time was like, wow, I can see how you could help us over here and created opportunity for me that I was able to step into. So I deepened my experience and and like moved in that direction. It wasn’t something that I ever sat down and planned for.
Fun. Love to hear that. All right, let’s let’s go into leadership philosophy here. So any key core principles guide your leadership style and maybe how that’s influenced things here or things in the past. Just walk us through how you think through that.
Well, back to my like nerdiness and efficiency thing, I only like to be doing things that help the the broader cause, right? I’m here for the cause of the company. And so I’ve always been like, okay, what’s our big giant goal? Like, where are we moving as an organization? And for me, my happiness comes from working in a team, environment and collaboration, and working with folks together toward that goal. So my leadership style is a lot about that. Like, I am very transparent. I’m pretty direct. I am very collaborative. So it’s a conversation about what are the things that we need to do as a as an organization, and as individuals to help move that needle forward. And I’m also pretty, I’m a human, and we’re all humans. And I’ve made lots of mistakes. I think part of my other leadership style that’s evolved over time is trying things, piloting new ideas to see if you can prove out a thesis or disprove it, and then making the next big step, the next big step, I’m not a big, giant sway of the in some cases, that’s true. But what’s the first step that you need to take in that direction? What’s the next step? Because there’s always unexpected outcomes. And you need to be able to make adjustments and all that kind of thing. So I would say, I love hiring, and working with people who are very good at the thing that they do, and empowering them to do those to do those things get out of their way. Like my role as a leader is to provide guidance, help remove obstacles, prioritize when people get overwhelmed, those provide strategic guidance and direction. But I’m blessed here to have this insane team of folks who are all extremely good. We were just talking about a couple of my team members before we got here today. But like I have a team of people who wake up every day, super passionate and excited about the things that they do. And that’s true, not just in marketing, but in all of Telarus, right? We’re all we all wake up here to serve our advisors help them grow their business to help our suppliers deliver their message and product. So I feel like we’re just in such a nice spot about that.
You know, it’s interesting. I’ve heard similar to right from from other leaders and bosses and things like that. It’s, at some point, the tide shifts, and it becomes how do I enable my people to just make a clear path for them to enable them and empower them to do what they need to do? Because they’re making those decisions. And I don’t think that that’s as your as your kind of coming up, you don’t know, and you’re not told when those moments are going to happen, right? So you just, I don’t know, I think you do the right things to your point, you do the extra things. And then all of a sudden people see that, oh, you have a lot of those capabilities, right? And I don’t I don’t know, people don’t see that in themselves, they’re just so head down doing the work. So it’s awesome to have somebody that calls that out and sees that and empowers that.
All right, let’s, let’s think about mentors. I love, I love hearing who everybody looks at and has had in their life and the windy paths of mentors. So any mentors for you, female leaders, inspirations, just people who have influenced your career? And then of course, what’s the valuable lessons?
I love that you asked me this question. So I spent a little bit of time thinking about it. And I guess what I’d like to say first, before I start getting into like a very long list of people who inspired and influenced and directed my career, is I believe that we should all develop a personal board of directors.
And so it’s not that there’s a mentor, like a person who will necessarily I mean, if that’s a true thing for someone, that’s fantastic. But I actually believe, and I have always just been lucky to have people who have been great examples, and have been willing to share their time and direction with me about things that they know and are and are good at. And so I’ve cultivated a personal board of directors throughout time. And they’re like, they come from all over. Many of them are people who work on my team. They’re not all people that as many of them are people I have worked for, but also it’s just people I’ve been in, in relationship with. And so I would say in the spirit of International Women’s Day and Month, I would say there are a lot of women on this list. So I did come up with a list of folks that I’ll just rattle off their names for acknowledgement. And then I’ll say a couple of things about them.
Heidi Mullen,
Maria Pergolino, Deb Wolf, Michelle Randall, Carolyn Yapich, Kate Bullis, Christine Heckert, Kristen Engelhardt, Julie Peoples from here at Telarus, who I’ve just met recently, Deb Raps and Alison Metcalf. Those are some female leaders that I consider on my personal board of directors. And I would say they’ve all had an impact on me. I believe I can go to them each when I have different kinds of problems or questions and things. And they’ve all made themselves available. They’ve been super generous with me to help me work things out and come up with solutions or ideas.
I’ll just give a specific shout out to Heidi Mullen, who early in my career, and I worked with her at five different companies. She was my CMO while I was learning everything about marketing. And she has incredible grace, incredible insight. She has seen these plays so many times, but I learned more than I can tell you about how to be and how to add value. And she was direct with me when I needed correction.
And I think it’s because I worked with and for her for so many years that I was prepared to take on a marketing leadership role when I was. So I’m incredibly grateful. She’s a friend, like I love her to death. And I’m very appreciative of her guidance and leadership.
I love it. Good stuff in there. Awesome.
Let’s go back. Let’s go back a little bit. We talked about innovation for just a minute earlier. So think about, I’d love to hear kind of how you’re fostering this culture of innovation. How does that go into long term approach? Is it phased, you know, maybe just some other transformations that you’ve gone through over time?
Well, what I do is transform. That’s, that’s literally my job. I love to be involved in building companies and programs. And what I am hired to do is transform a program. So that’s why someone would engage me. And so I’m always in transformation. And I think maybe if I go all the way back to my role as a technologist, and when I was in management consulting, I developed this skill set of doing what’s current state analysis, what’s our future state desire, and what’s the gap analysis between here and there? And how do I direct a project plan that’s going to get me from here to there? And it, and it doesn’t have to be giant big leaps, like we talked about, right? It’s like, what’s the first step? What’s the next step? How do I prove that and take the next step in that direction?
So since that, if we look at Telarus, since I’ve been here, the idea was to broaden the impact that marketing could have on our ability to tell the market about the service and the value that we deliver to our advisors and suppliers, make sure that we work consistently and concisely messaging about our company. And then in addition to that, what are the specific go to market motions that we have that marketing can enable and move forward? Because if marketing isn’t doing it, selling sales is doing it, right? Everybody has to market and sell. And so how can we evolve our program to help more with the major business objectives that we have?
And so we’ve been in a constant state of evaluating current state and future state and coming up with a plan. And then as a combined executive team prioritizing, what’s the next thing that we think is going to have the most impact on our business plan?
And I’m so thankful that we have the team that we do here that is, again, eyes wide open, but 100% focused on our advisors outcomes. So we have hard conversations with each other, but we say, is this thing that we’re talking about? We all have lots of ideas. I’m sure you know this too, Josh, but we are not short of ideas for how to make things better here, but we’ve gotten much better through constant conversation and through being really honest and transparent about what’s worked and what hasn’t about trying to do less things, but do them better.
Yes.
Right. I think one of the curses of a growth stage company is distraction. Right. Too many ideas that you’re trying to all implement. And I think that Adam’s been really great at guiding us to decide what is the most impactful next step forward and to be focused and to minimize distraction. We’re still getting good at it, but we’ve gotten better since then.
No, it’s such a good, and this is actually going to lead into the next question about entrepreneurship, but it’s such a good innovative culture. And I think what we’ve learned is to your point, yes, there’s no shortage of ideas. Ideas aren’t hard. Execution is hard. So I love the, let’s just get really, really good at what we should be good at. Right. And consider all of those things for sure, but I love the idea of execution is key.
All right. So to this idea of entrepreneurial insights, we’ve got partners out there. These guys and gals have built their businesses up, solo preneurs, many, many, many person shops. So from your perspective as the chief marketing officer, what advice would you give the partners of any size as they’re working out there to build their business?
I think by and large, all of our advisors in any capacity, whichever capacity, they are working their sellers, right? They are selling confidence and trust to their customers who are making very difficult IT buying decisions. And what they offer is confidence because they have helped others make these decisions over and over and over again. And I think my best advice would be to pause and look at what has worked and do more of that and do less of the other things. It’s so hard to be a business owner and there are so many things that you have on your plate. So that concept that we just talked about, about focus is really appropriate for our advisors as well. And I think one of the things that’s true is most of our, everyone in business, you spend a tremendous amount on acquiring your next customer, right? You spend a lot, literally you spend dollars, but you spend time, you spend resources in the acquisition of that customer. And I think we all could spend a little bit more attention on cultivating and extracting more value from those relationships that we already invested to create. So what’s the next thing you can do for that customer? What’s the next problem that you can help them solve? And I think it’s easy to get distracted with just new logo hunting and all that kind of thing. You’ve already spent an amazing amount of energy and resource to acquire a new customer. So making sure that everyone does that here, cultivate those relationships and make yourself more available to help them solve the next additional problem is cost-effective from a business perspective. It helps CAC, right? If you if you’re focused on extracting value once you’ve acquired that customer. But I think that’s something that we in our industry could all get a little bit better at.
Fair. Good points.
All right, I feel like this part should have a real high pressure, you know, loud, scary background, doom music, but it’s not. I’m just going to ask a real nice question. It’s about decision making and high stakes uncertainty, right? So what’s your approach when you get into these high pressure decisions, uncertainty? How do you process that and figure out what to do?
Well, I lean on my experience and what I’ve already learned. Because I’ve done lots of these things, lots of times, and I’ve done them well, and I’ve done them poorly, and I’ve learned things. And you I’m pretty good at pattern recognition, too. So even if it’s a brand new problem, it many times has some similarity to something else that I’ve encountered before. Also, I mentioned to you already that I’m surrounded by many, many, many very smart, very experienced humans. So I do not make decisions in a vacuum ever.
And I’m relatively new to this specific industry, which is very nuanced. So in this particular role, I also like interview the heck out of everybody all over the place. I’m hearing voice of the customer. I’m talking to our suppliers about what they know. I’m talking to my peers and people who’ve been here in this industry for a lot longer than I have to make sure that I understand as much as I can. And then there’s this crazy leap you have to make at some point, which is the thing that you talked about, which is execution. Everything I just told you was academic. You get to the place where you have to do a thing. And you have to get to a place where you’re like, I know enough now to trust my instinct. And I have a thesis like I’m going to move forward. And I’m going to try this thing to see if I’m moving in the right direction. And I’m going to create success metrics where I know, like I can say, was this a good idea? Was it a bad idea? And I’m also extremely transparent. I’m going to tell everybody all around me, I’m trying a new thing and it may work. I’m thinking it’s going to work this way. And this is why I think this. And I might be wrong. And if I am, it’s okay. Because we set up a way for us to check and correct. And so there’s a lot of transparency. There’s a lot of expectation management that’s important, but mostly it’s containment,
measurement, like planned measurement for outcomes. And knowing as much as you can know, but then making a little leap of faith and actually becoming active to try the thing.
Yeah, I like that. I was reading on this the other day, what did some of the common founders and entrepreneurs and business leaders and others of the past that have leapfrogged their competition? And it was just exactly that thing, right? They studied, they researched, they solicited. And then the final step was, to your point, just bias to action. Don’t analysis to paralysis to death. Make a move. Right? And you hear the baseball adage, what’s the out of every 10? If you hit three of every 10, you can get in the hall of fame. But if you don’t ever swing, you never get in.
Right. None. Yeah.
And I do think that whole experimentation theme that we’ve been on here, like piloting a concept, it’s really important. And I would say, a lot of times we get wide-eyed and eyes bigger than stomach. I mean, we humans, right? We have this big idea when really what we should be doing is like, what’s the first thing? Let’s take the first one.
Fair.
All right. Let’s talk personal growth. So what are the things that you leverage, the resources that you leverage to really develop as a leader in supporting and empowering in the industry? I mean, is it resources? Is it experiences? Anything you want to share?
It’s many things. One is that board of director that I talked to you about. I’ve been so lucky to know so many people who are great at so many things. And I’ll ask for help when I don’t know. But I also am so there’s excellence everywhere I look. And so I learned something from everybody new that I’m with. So I think, I don’t know if I think you know this, but I trained martial arts. And there’s a martial arts principle, which is about having an empty cup.
Right? So if you come to a situation with an empty cup, it means you have availability for that cup to be filled. Right? If you enter a conversation or a situation and your cup is full, there’s no room for it to be informed or filled with any new information. So I think as much as I’ve done lots of things, lots of times, I’m 100% sure that I could be wrong and there could be a better way. And the better way could come from some unexpected source.
So that I would say being open, I’m so lucky that everywhere I turn, there’s excellence and I can learn from other people’s experience and guidance. And so it’s a lot of like being transparent about what I’m trying to figure out and getting all kinds of ideas.
I love it. I do love hearing about everybody’s little like side hobbies or passions or whatever, right? You know, hey, okay, it’s, it’s cool to hear that you’ve been in marketing and then, oh, by the way, I happen to be a fellow nerd and like active and I’m in martial arts. Like I just love everybody’s intricacies. It’s so fascinating to see where everybody’s passions are. It’s so cool.
Also, we get to know each other better and work together better when we understand everybody is multidimensional. Right?
So true.
None of us are just one thing.
All right. Let’s think about trends here as we start to get to get a couple final thoughts here. But as we think about trends, I mean, what’s the, what do you think the trends are that are going to really impact the industry over the next few years and really how do we prepare for some of those changes?
Well, I think if you, okay, I think that from our advisor perspective and from a TSD and supplier perspective, we are,
we as an industry need to catch up to the way the market engages with content in the world and how people learn and develop preference and all that. We’re still very, and this is a lovely part of our universe, but we are in the habit of being physically with people and spending time and, and, and developing those relationships. And while that is amazing and it’s a lovely part of what I love about this industry,
most of the buying process happens online. Most of the way that people learn, even adult learners, how they choose to learn, it can be much, it can be effectively delivered in other formats than just in person. So I would say from an opportunity perspective, there’s a lot of digital behavior that we can exploit or, or, or, you know, we can all take advantage of to further our own business causes. Part of that is why we’ve developed a pretty great content program over the last couple of years at Telarus and digital marketing and digital learning has come into play from our program. An adult learner, there’s, there’s all different kinds of learners, you know, this about your kids, you know, it’s the same thing with adults. Some people want to go sit in a classroom and take a bunch of time out of their day and go learn this thing. And they believe, and, and it works for them because they’ve removed distraction. They’ve created a space for themselves to really be in this moment. Some people don’t have that kind of time or they learn better in a different way. Like, I, there’s a bunch of folks on our executive team that are voracious, like listeners of digital content. And they love to listen at a very high speed, because they’re like trying to do as much volume as they can to take in that information. And some people consume information because it is calming and all that. Like, I’m one of those people where I’m like, I can’t do the 1.5 or 2x listening, because it kind of freaks me out and stresses me out. I feel like the opportunity for us as sellers and advisors and folks who operate in this industry is to understand the watering holes of today, the places where we go to learn and to help us make decisions are increasingly digital and stepping into some of those opportunities.
Good.
Let’s talk about a failure that turned into a success. So give me something that you just thought was totally going to bomb or at least was perceived that it was going to bomb and then, you know, led to some success or just an important learning lesson.
There’s so many of these. When you wrote this question, which by the way, I love this question, I was trying to figure out which mistake that I’ve made would be a really interesting one to tell. And sometimes in a career which is long, the lesson that you learn isn’t like the benefit from that lesson isn’t in that particular job. Right. So I, one of the things, there’s two things that came to mind for me that I would say I wouldn’t, I didn’t perceive them in the moment as a success that have helped me become a better professional and more impactful after that. So other folks afterward benefited from that mistake that I made somewhere else. But one of the things was kind of eyes bigger than stomach. So, and that was a technology implementation. Like I, since marketing automation has been a thing, I’ve been implementing marketing automation. And then since we’ve been able to have really wonderful CMSs and dynamic websites that help solve a variety of business problems, I’ve been implementing those. And a bunch of hops ago, I would say in like the 2010 area, I was going to develop a new website. I did develop a new website and I had all of these great ideas. It was a global company. And I was thinking, great, we’re going to develop this many sites and this, it’s going to, it’s going to translate. We serve three different industries. So we applied technology that would allow the website to dynamically serve up content based on the industry that someone was from. I way over-engineered the site.
I
selected a technology that was much bigger than we needed for the short term. It was so it was a big investment and it required very specific skill sets to be successful with. So the resourcing was heavy for it and all that comes up. By the way, that website was fire. It was amazing, but I also bought a tool that was way bigger than what I needed.
So what I learned very dramatically in that moment, like I can still call that implementation a success, but the next time I selected a technology, I was very much like, what’s my near term business goal and what’s the next step that I need to make from technological progress. And I hear our advisors doing this all the time, by the way, really smartly, thankfully they’re not as dumb as I was. But like I worked with advisors last year who were implementing CRM solutions for themselves and they weren’t, they were already smart enough to be like, I don’t need a giant CRM solution. I need to solve these particular problems. And this is already a very big step for my company to move in this direction. So they went with a lightweight tech solution that helped them address their current challenges. And then you can always scale up.
Oh, easy. Yeah.
So that I would say that’s another, like we definitely have a theme running here, which is a baby step theme.
Yeah.
The other big lesson that I would say that has nothing to do with technology, but has to do with success, satisfaction, and all those kinds of things professionally is I once made a hop that was a bad cultural fit for myself.
And I knew it when I made it, but I was like, I can change the culture from within. I can like do all these things. And I had people who I trust in my network say to me, like, are you sure? Because that culture doesn’t feel like you. And I was like, yes, I can do it. And I couldn’t. And it was a bad fit. And so ultimately, that that was not a place where I was going to be successful or happy. And I learned in that lesson, I learned the hard way that the culture of the place where I’m working and the people with whom I’m working every day is an incredibly important factor to me being successful and me being happy and what I’m doing. I know, I know that sounds like duh, but I actively talked myself out of a feeling that I knew that was like also ignoring that little voice you have in your head.
Yeah, which you should never do.
Those voices are funny because you have those voices and you do kind of the benefit of the positivity and seeing the upside is like, nah, I can figure it out. I can get there. Anything’s possible. I can do whatever. And sometimes those people that you do trust and that you do have in your circle, they don’t, you know, maybe they’re thinking, shoot, I don’t know. Maybe she is right. So I don’t, I don’t want to come down too hard, but I’m just going to drop these suggestions. And so then you really have to figure out over time how to wait some of these decisions. And so it’s, you got to listen to those voices, but sometimes you just never know.
Yep. So again, that was, that felt like a massive heartbreak too at the time. And it felt like the worst thing in the world. It wasn’t, it was just another lesson I could learn. That was like, okay, well, since then leaned very heavily into what are the relationships going to be with my peers, with my boss, with my, you know, my, my most important relationships at work and make sure that the culture is one because I told you, like, I thrive in a collaborative environment where we’re all on the same boat rowing in the same direction. That’s what makes me happy.
Lots of other people can thrive in more sort of competitive kind of dog doggy dogs, like lots of people thrive in that, not me. I like to be working on a team toward a goal. And now I’m really clear about that. I also think it becomes a developed superpower over time for you to know the things that you’re really good at and the things that you’re not. Yes.
Good call out. Yes. I love that.
Okay. Let’s see. Final thoughts here. So this is a, this is a weirdly phrased question, but just hang with me. So it’s about impact. It’s about impact. It’s about legacy. It’s just about, you know, footprint, fingerprint, whatever you want to think of it as. So if you could look forward 10, 15, whatever, however many years you want to look way out and then look back in your role and your career and your path here and, and, and, and kind of everything before, what’s the impact that you hope to have had on the industry?
Well, I’d like to think that I helped. I helped move the, the ball forward in terms of the, the ability for every company where I’ve been to, to accomplish their specific goals. Right. That’s, that’s what I show up for every day.
So I would like to think that if people were looking back at my body of work, that they would say that I was someone who helped forward that helped accomplish stated objectives and did that with impact. But also did that with kindness. Did that by helping by being honest, by having hard conversations, by hearing hard conversations.
And I think the most important thing to me in the world is connection. And I think I care very little about all of the other detritus, but I’d like to think if someone was looking back at my professional life, that they’d say I was someone who was honest and, and helpful and did what they said they were going to do, owned their mistakes, you know, learned what they needed to learn, all that kind of stuff. I’d like to, I’d like to be remembered that way.
I love it. What a better place to wrap it than there, Jen, good stuff. Like lots, so much, so much good nuggets. Appreciate all you’re doing. Thanks for, you know, obviously your contributions here, but your contributions more broadly and being our first guest on for this special session.
Thanks for having me. This is fun.
Awesome. All right, everybody, that wraps us up for this week. Make sure to get these on Spotify, on Apple Music, wherever you’re listening, go follow. So you get them as soon as they drop every Wednesday. That wraps us up for today. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. Jen Dimas, Chief Marketing Officer at Telarus. Until next time.
Next Level BizTech has been a production of Telarus Studio 19. Please visit Telarus.com for more information.