Denise Dalton

I mean, it's gonna sound cheesy, but I think just hard work and determination. I absorb a lot from various leaders and various projects that I was given in my corporate life. I never said no to a project, so that certainly served me well to get a vast amount of different sorts of experiences. As I got more confident in my career and moved up, I really didn't have any concerns about asking clarifying questions or making sure I knew exactly what the challenge was that I was being tasked with. I also surrounded myself with good people. If I was on a task force or had a big project, I had my go-to people throughout the organization that I would work with, and I didn't care if they were a C-suite or a junior marketer. If I knew that they had the experience I needed in order to propel the project forward, that's who I wanted to work with.

I think it's about trying to find support within your organization and making sure that you reinforce the voice that you're bringing to the table. As odd as it might sound, but you need to have support not just within the entire organization, but in the specific meeting. Even late in my career, I would make sure that I had someone else sitting around that table who would back me up. You know, instead of my idea being regurgitated from someone else, perhaps of a different gender, I'd have that person be like, 'no, is that kind of exactly what Denise said?' I think it's sad, but I think we still need that. Beyond finding your tribe, I think it's important to focus on how you present yourself, how you're perceived, how you're being succinct in your ideas, and how you're making sure that your ideas are having business impact. They're not just really great ideas, but what's it going to do to drive the business? Those sorts of connections to driving the business forward make those ideas stand out a little bit more. Even if it doesn't work, you learn more from your failures than your successes, but at least you had an idea about how you were going to measure success and how you were going to change the trajectory.

There's been a lot of churn within the pharmaceutical industry of late. The challenge is finding the right clients and like-minded individuals that have a distinct interest in building these customer experiences that I've got a ton of experience in. It's about making sure that comes across when I'm speaking to them, and they know exactly what it is that they're going to get when they work with me. Really, it's about continuing to expand on building those relationships with the customers and meeting them where they are.