Her Story
About Rachel
I've been in my field for almost 30 years now, working across the entire go-to-market space. My experience spans everything from marketing to sales operations, product marketing, and product management. This breadth of experience made the Chief Marketing Officer role a logical next step for me. I'm currently serving as CMO at Zonar Systems, my third time in this executive role. I've only been with Zonar for about 6 months, but when they reached out to recruit me, I was immediately interested. I had been in this industry before and really liked the prospects of Zonar itself and its overall value proposition. As Chief Marketing Officer, every day is really different, but I tend to look primarily at what is going to have the biggest impact on both driving revenue for our business and making a positive impact on our customers. That often means looking at the programs, campaigns, content, and creative that we have going out to drive interest in our organization. The other thing I'm really focusing on is finding information from customers so that we can tailor our solutions and messages to ensure we're providing a great experience. I spend a lot of time working with my team, the broader company, product management, and the sales organization to make sure that we are presenting the company in the way that we want to in the market. We're not just doing typical advertising - we're really trying to add value, educate the market, and educate our customers on trends and what's happening in the industry.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Rachel
01What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best piece of advice that I've received is always ask. Especially for women, many times people are afraid to ask for what they want, whether it is in their job, whether it is in a sales process, whether it is in anything they do in life. And the reality is, if someone tells you no, you're in no different place than you were before you asked the question. So there's usually more upside to asking than not asking. So, always ask for what you want. If you don't ask, the answer is no anyway. You can get so much more than you imagine if you just ask. So never be afraid to ask.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
Right now, everyone's probably talking about AI, but I think it's more about learning adaptability. Some people wholly embrace it, some people fear the change. I think as marketers, we have to find the right balance between how do we automate, how do we expand what we can do, how do we multiply what we can do, but how do we keep an authentic voice. That is going to be the single biggest challenge and opportunity for any marketer in the future - finding authenticity in a world of AI content, but still finding a way to balance what you need from an AI perspective to help you grow and develop and produce.
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