Jillian Murphy

I think my willingness to learn and be challenged and be coached has made me the most successful. Being able to put myself out there and saying, hey, I don't know how to do this, but I want to learn, and if you're willing to take the time to teach me, I'm going to listen and I'm going to, you know, do what you say. I trust you to kind of guide me through this process. Being coachable is, like, the most important thing that you can be in a job. And kind of coming in and understanding that you don't know what you don't know, right? My education helped me understand the importance of learning and being humble, and it's okay not to know something. But don't pretend like you do, because then that will be a problem. You'll never actually learn it.

One of the key things that a lot of women in tech have told me is, be confident, act like you belong there, and people will believe it. And I think that has really made a difference for me. I know that my most successful meetings and interactions with both customers and other people in the industry has been when I went in and I felt confident, and I felt like I belonged there. And then, just making sure people know who you are, and really listening to them and understanding them, remembering things about them that you can then, bring up later and showing that you care and you're concerned. Asking other people around you to tell you what they're doing right. People love being mentors to other people, especially in the industry I'm in.

I would say, as much as it is easy to be intimidated by walking in a room full of mostly men, don't let that intimidate you into, being afraid or making it paralyze you. Go in with confidence, you have a lot to provide. Walking in, I didn't have the technical background, and my only sales experience was serving in a restaurant. But I had a lot of people telling me, I see the skills that you have, and they're transferable, right? You might not know what a firewall is but you can learn that. You can't learn integrity. You can't learn being coachable. That's something that you automatically bring to the table, and either you have it or you don't. So recognizing that there might be things you don't know, but there are a lot of skills that you do have, and as long as you know how to transfer those into a different position that maybe doesn't feel fully comfortable. You're gonna be fine. And being willing to be challenged every day, learn something new, if that's something that's exciting for you, which it was for me, then you're going to be fine as long as you go in with an open mind and you're willing to learn and be challenged and coached and going in with confidence, you know, humble confidence, where it's okay to know you don't know things, but you do know a lot of things, and you're going to learn a lot more if you're open to the experience.

The biggest challenge is there are a lot of new cybersecurity vendors popping up that are claiming to do the same things that the company I work for does, and so trying to set your solutions apart so that you can close that deal. How, like, understanding how you're different or better. And sometimes you're not, sometimes there is a better product, but, you have to find a way to bridge that gap, and I think the relationship building goes a long way in that case. And showing, like I said, that you're going to be a trusted advisor, you're going to answer the phone if there is an emergency, you're going to care, about their business. The biggest opportunity is being a woman going into tech is a great opportunity now, because they are starting to, I think, more and more think about that, and think about how being the only woman in the room can often feel kind of jarring, and I think a lot more people are talking about it, having conversations about it. I know at Fortinet, we have an organization called Women at Fortinet that promotes mentorship programs and things like that, so I think the fact that there are a lot more conversations about it, and it's not really, like, a taboo topic anymore.

A main one, I think, for me, especially because I'm, in my industry, it's a lot of remote work, is responsiveness, being making yourself available, and responding in a timely manner, and because we're I'm in such an industry where you know, if something goes down, that can affect business operations. I'm being responsive, and I'm supporting them, and being a trusted advisor, so kind of integrity, responsiveness, those kinds of attributes, I think, are extremely important and go a very long way. Whereas, like, you know, sales, sometimes there are people who are just trying to sell you something. They're not trying to help you solve problems, and I think Coming at it from, like, a human place of, I care about you, I care about your business, I want to help you solve problems. I'm not just trying to sell you something, I think that's very important.