Leslie Green

I don't know if I've found success - I don't feel like an influential woman and feel a little underqualified to even be having this interview. But if we're looking at success in terms of continuously learning and making a go of a career, then it's just resilience. Marketing can be a brutal field with a lot of turnover, and I have ADHD, which makes it a really difficult field because things don't really end. So I rely on the resilience that I built as an elder millennial and knowing that I have teams I can rely on when I need to. That's been integral to my longevity in this field, I think.

The best advice I've received is definitely focusing on my strengths and then leveraging that to learn new things, and not to get stale. I had a wonderful leader who advised me early on, before AI was just a thing, to learn these new tools and to not become obsolete. It's very easy in marketing to fall behind. So even if something is new and I don't think I'm going to use it every day, I'll at least spend some time - half an hour, an hour - reading about it, watching a tutorial, or doing something with it, just so I know what's out there to stay competitive in the landscape. Another piece of advice that's been really helpful came from a leader who said to find a way to celebrate the accomplishments and the goals that you can accomplish, even if you're breaking those up into miniature projects. You know, say this week I want to do something new and then see how it does. Watching those metrics and trying those new things and seeing how they perform is kind of the closest thing sometimes that you'll get to seeing the results. So trying to find the little wins in a landscape where the goalposts are constantly moving is really helpful for someone who's results-oriented and likes to put a stamp on stuff every once in a while.

Do the hard stuff. Volunteer for projects, tasks, or initiatives that other people don't want to do. I found some of the most rewarding work to be in those situations. You know, we'd be in a team meeting and something would come up and everybody would just kind of roll their eyes and groan, and I would just raise my hand and say I'll do it, let's get it done. Someone has to do it. I didn't want to sit around that table and wait 10 minutes for somebody to volunteer or finally to be assigned. Those are usually the times when I learned something new or at least was able to say okay, we got it done, it's done, it's shipped, it's off our plate. So volunteer for things that may not sound exciting at first. In addition, marketing can be a little challenging for women. Speak up and use your voice. Don't be afraid to push back. I've definitely been viewed as just the marketing girl, especially way back when I first started. At first I was kind of meek and would just say okay, I'll just get this done. But eventually I would run into situations where someone would want to make changes to copy that I wrote that I knew was going to make that copy less effective. One day I just pushed back. I said, you know, we can do that, but here's what's gonna happen. Let's start from the audience and the goal that we're trying to accomplish. Here's what our audience wants to hear, here's what's important to them, here's what we're trying to get done. Are these changes just for the sake of changing it, or do you think these changes are going to accomplish this goal and resonate with the audience? Putting that back on them, even if it was a manager or somebody above me in the food chain, I found they kind of stopped and said hmm, maybe you're right. After I realized that I'm not just execution, I'm not just the writer, something kind of clicked for me. Ever since then I've really started to push back in a respectful way to make sure that I'm not just making changes for the sake of pleasing leadership or someone else. I can do that and also still write effective copy. So don't be afraid to push back if something doesn't settle right for you.

In my work, I'm a little obsessed with my audience. I'm very in tune with the need to understand the audience who I'm talking to, what their pain points are, what their day looks like, because if I don't know who I'm talking to, I'm not doing my job from the outset. It's a non-starter. That's something I struggled with a little bit when I started at Inferscience, so I did a lot of research and put together this very long, detailed document, kind of a bible on value-based care and risk adjustment medical groups, and it really helped me understand better who I was talking to and improved my work. So definitely always starting with the audience. In my personal life, my biggest philosophy - and everyone who knows me has heard me say this at some point - is from the Ice Age movies. There's a line that says, that's what you do in a herd, you take care of each other. My family, my friends, anyone who's around me, I take loyalty to those people very seriously. I'm kind of known as the person who is there if you need help, absolutely, hands down. If you're in my herd, I've got you. That's what you do in a herd. It's become kind of my motto, and people say it back to me now. I'm thinking of getting a tattoo. So taking care of my people, taking care of my business, and not postponing joy is kind of my philosophy.