Vanessa Yeh has ten years of experience in brand building and integrated marketing. Vanessa is a creative and entrepreneurial storyteller who is passionate about leveraging strategy, creativity, technology, and human connectedness to form a powerful brand story across multiple mediums.
Vanessa previously served as the Vice President of Brand Marketing and Communications at 1871, an internationally recognized incubator for tech startups in Chicago. She is currently the Director of Marketing at Ascent, a high-tech B2B startup serving financial services.
In this episode, Vanessa discusses how losing out on her dream because of a simple mistake led her into marketing, how the storytelling skills she learned working in Hollywood helps in her marketing career, why customer service should be a team effort across the entire company, her advice for adopting this mindset in an organization, why she utilizes “win-lose meetings”, the importance of understanding your co-workers’ struggles and appreciating their work, why we need a diversity of values and opinions in the workplace, her predictions for future trends in marketing, and more!
The CliftonStrengths Assessment (Formerly StrengthsFinder)
Transcript
Hey, Hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast, where we explore the intersection of human dynamics, communication, and service. If you’re interested in growing your own voice of influence or the influence of those on your team, check us out at voiceofinfluence.net and contact us to talk. It’s always fun hearing from our listeners. You can always rate and review the podcast as well, which is a real benefit to us. We really appreciate it and helps other people to find it.
So today we have with us Vanessa Yeh, with 10 years of experience in brand building and integrated marketing. Vanessa is a creative and entrepreneurial storyteller passionate, and I can tell you that’s true. She’s passionate about leveraging strategy, creativity, technology and human connectedness to form a powerful brand story across multiple mediums.
Vanessa is currently the Director of Marketing at Ascent, a high-tech B2B startup serving financial services. And previously, she served as VP Brand Marketing and Communications at 1871, an internationally-recognized incubator for tech startups in Chicago.
Andrea: It’s so good to have you with us on the Voice of Influence podcast, Vanessa.
Vanessa Yeh: Thank you so much,Andrea. I am really happy to be here.
Andrea: So, how did you get into marketing in the first place?
Vanessa Yeh: Actually, for most of my life, my dream was actually to be a movie producer. So, I moved to LA right after high school and I did the whole, you know, I worked on sets. I was an assistant where I did everything from scheduling auditions to helping an actor pack when they were moving house, like all of that, you know, kind of grunt work. It was very Anne Hathaway in Devil Wears Prada, but like without the nice clothes.
Then after some years of this, I finally had gotten anintroduction to Universal Studios forbasically my dream job and then I proceeded to screw it up massively. I ended up mistyping one digit on my phone number so they were calling and calling some other phone for a week before they gave up on me. After that happened, I was just sort of tired, you know, I’d spent six or seven years of sort of being broken, eating ramen and being screamed at by Hollywood producers and you know, to lose outon that major, major opportunity over such a stupid act of self-sabotage, you know. It was tough and I was like, “Do I really want to keep doing this?”
So, sort of on a whim, I startedtemping at a company and that company was SapientNitro, which is a global digital advertising firm. They actually merged with Razorfish a couple of years ago. But that’s kind of where I got stokedon marketing because I found that so many of the things that I loved about theater and film, telling good stories, making an audience feel or respond in a certain way, engaging in this weird two-way relationship where you sort of both implicitly agree that you’re along for the ride, but at the same time it’s like this push and pull, like the constant negotiation for attention. Like all of that, which is so kind of integral to storytelling and theater and film,transposed, I think,right over into marketing.
So, you know, I started doing brand and marketing for a number of startups in LA and then, you know, fast forward quite a few years, Chicago and I ended up at 1871, which was amazing. And then today, yeah, I head up marketing at Ascent, and we servefinancial services. So yeah, in a nutshell, that’s basically how it happened.
Andrea: Wow. That’s really fun, that’s a fun story. I mean, it’s obviously very sad in many ways because a single digit on your phone number would possibly ruin a whole entire direction of your career, but yet maybe gave you an entry path into a new one.
Vanessa Yeh: Absolutely. And I’m actually so grateful that it happened. I mean, I still obviously have a huge heart for kind of the movies and TV and theater, but I am very, very happy where I am. So, I’m actually really grateful that it happened.
Andrea: So how do you see your past working on movies and this idea of storytelling in that regard, really integrated into what you’re doing even today at Ascent?
Vanessa Yeh: You know, it’s interesting because I feel like in the same way when you’re working in film and production and directing, you do so much of everything,and I think that’s translated directly into what I do today. I mean, I would definitely consider myself a marketing generalist. I actually met someone at a dinner just last night who was like, “I don’t like generalists.” And I was like, “Oh, well, so glad we’re seated next to each other then,buddy.”
So, I actually don’t have deep, deep expertise in any one marketing discipline. Instead, I’m fairly dangerous at a lot of things. You know, branding and digital writing, design, web development,and on, on, you know, which as it happens,is I think exactly what’s made me successful as a marketer so far because I have enough knowledge spread out over all of these things that I can basically stand up a marketing function from scratch.
So, I think that is something that I picked up very much from sort of guerrilla theater and guerrilla thumb is you have a hand in managing people and directing and writing and designing things. And you have to be good at kind of all of it in order to make this weird baby that is your film, or your marketing campaign, or whatever the case maybe, actually like breathe life into it, right?
Andrea: Hmm. So when it comes to your customer experience, the digital experience, the marketing that you’re doing, what are some of the successes that you’ve seen or what’s made it a success for you?
Vanessa Yeh: So, in my experience, I find that something that’s really key is creating a culture and expectation internally that customer experience is everyone’s job, right? It’s not just the people in customer support or customer service who are on the phone or emailing with customers the most. It’s everyone’s job.
So, you know what’s interesting about that too is that I was hearing someone speak recently and she said something that really resonated with me, which was that, when you, at a company, at a brand, when you lose a deal, you don’t lose a deal because it was any team’s fault. It wasn’t like the sales team’s fault. It wasn’t product’s fault. It wasn’t marketing’s fault. Typically, it’s because that customer had a negative experience over a number, dozens, maybe even hundreds, of touch points along their journey with you, and that’s what made you lose the deal.
So, this idea being that customer experience isn’t kind of relegated to one silo or one team in the organization, but that it’s everyone’s responsibility, I think has been really critical in creating a successful customer experience team.
Andrea: That makes a lot of sense. But how do you communicate that, how does that get communicated so that everybody is onboard with this idea that everybody has to provide the best experience?
Vanessa Yeh: Yeah, I mean I think it’s hard because it almost has to come from management, you know, that has to be like a top down culture decision, right? And I think it’s so natural for organizations, sort of no matter how big or small they are. I’ve been in big companies and I’ve been in small ones,and organizational silos are always an issue, which is crazy. You think that smaller companies wouldn’t have that problem but they still do. And it really kind of feel like an only, it can only change course on that if, you know, management team is really committed to fostering a culture of sort of cross collaboration.
And I think the huge part of that is ensuring that no person or team is the gatekeeper of customer knowledge. And what I mean by that is that, you know, there are usually individuals or teams within a company who do, like, customer research or user research and then sometimes that information is hoarded, sometimes it’s dispersed or sometimes you have subject matter experts in the team who supposedly are like the voice of the customer and that’s who you go to, right, to learn about the customer.
But in my experience, I feel like we can’t rely on that. You can’t rely on certain people just to be the gatekeepers on knowledge on the customer because everyone comes preloaded with bias. We all do. So I think a really important part of the process is establishing rigor around how we collect customer feedback and insight and how we disseminate that internally. And I think that can really make or break the customer experience overall.
Andrea: What are some of the tactics that you’ve used to collect that data, but also then to kind of distribute it so that everybody’s understanding about, you know, on the same page with it?
Vanessa Yeh: Yeah, I think when it comes to collecting that data, it’s so easy, especially if you’re a small company. Just to sort of ask a few customers, maybe your mom,who knows, maybe your friends, you know, like, “Oh, what do you think about this feature?” “What do you think about this or that?” And there’s just not enough rigor around that process. I think that the ideal situation is you have someone in product or someone in, like, customer research who has an understanding of interview and survey methodology that can actually go out to your customers wherever they are and sort of develop a real process for that.
But if not, like you don’t have those people on staff, I think all of us have access to Google and we can at least do some of that work ourselves. Like figure out what does like good interview methodology look like. How do I, you know, not inject bias into my questions? How do I frame questions so that I’m getting, you know, as objective answers as I can from the customer, because a lot of times the customer doesn’t necessarily know what they want or how to phrase what they really want. It’s up to the interviewer to sort of understand that or gain that from the information that they give us. So there’s that.
And then I think in terms of disseminating it, I mean, there’s a couple of things tactically that we do that have worked so far. I mean, we have something called win–lose meetings, which is kind of a painful process, but super beneficial when we have representatives from product, sales, customer success, and marketing get in a room, you know, once a month and we really perform a post-mortem on why did we win or lose deals these past months. And that, like I said, can be a painful process but really, really valuable. So, and that’s just a couple of things I think tactically that anyone can do.
Andrea: So when you’re in that conversation, who leads that conversation, and how do you handle the tendency or I guess, it’s maybe not a tendency but maybe it’s a temptation to sort of point fingers and blame others or that sort of thing. How does that actual conversation kind of play out?
Vanessa Yeh: Yeah, I mean I think I’m fortunate in the fact that I don’t know…at my current company, I don’t think we have a lot of the finger pointing yet. Thankfully that hasn’t happened, which is great. But I know that that is sort of a constant pressure, especially I think between product and sales because it can feel like they have such different objectives, right? Like sales is trying to go out and sell a dream and create revenue and product is saying, “Well, we can only build so much in this amount of time,” like you stop selling features that don’t exist, right? That’s sort of like a constant battle between those two.
But something that I think we draw on as a company is this really beautiful sentiment of calling ourselves a best effort community. And what I mean by that, when I say best effort community is that a commitment that we make constantly to each other. And that is reinforced and when we talk at our team meetings, when we communicate with each other is that we’re abest effort community. Meaning that we assume that no matter what any of our colleagues does, they’re doing the best they can with the knowledge and information that they have at their disposal at that time.
So that’s just a really important like mindset to have because I think it’s really easy no matter what team you belong to say, “Oh, like that deal didn’t go well.” “You know, it’s Carol’s fault.” Or you know, “That feature is totally bugged out. Kevin messed up on that again.” And it’s usually comes from a place of ignorance or not understanding just how difficult that other person’s job actually is and all the different sort of obstacles theyare contending with to get their work done. So if you come at it from this perspective of actually no, they’re making their best effort with what they have available to them right now, it helps to ease a lot of that tension and develops like a really healthy culture and undercurrent of respect.
Andrea: Is that something that is just sort of is it a value in your company or how does that get communicated? I love it.
Vanessa Yeh: Yeah, it is. I believe that actually originated with our tech team, I don’t know what genius penned that in the beginning, but I think it’s been sort of present at, at least Ascent, for quite a while. And I don’t know that,it’s not like we have it written in big letters on the wall, although I do think that is a great idea. But I think it is reinforced in the sense that people are encouraging to each other. Like in all hands meetings, you know, we’re always encouraged to praise each other, to give respect to each other, to give kudos to each other. And it’s just like constant sort of drum beat of appreciate your coworkers, be understanding and try to learn about (what their tribal about,) what their jobs entail and you know, kind of go from there.
Andrea: Hmm. Cool. All right, so as a marketer you are oftentimes the marketing team is usually in charge of kind of understanding or coming up with the voice of the brand. I’m curious about your experience with that and how that takes place.
Vanessa Yeh: Sure. Well one, if you’re coming into a situation where there isn’t a really strong brand voice or brand aesthetic developed yet and you’re sort of tasked with doing that, it always starts with the customer, right? And this kind of goes back to are you interviewing and surveying customers in a sort of methodical and objective way to understand what their challenges are? What are their fears and motivations, their pain points, what are they scared of? What keeps them up at night?
Like trying to understand and get this really holistic picture of what our customers are dealing with on a day to day basis, that’s going to drive what our brand ultimately looks, feels, and sounds like. Because really when you look at it, you know, you got to come at it from two places, right? Direction one is the customer, you know, what are their desires and needs and motivations. The other side is our product. What does our actual product value? What does it do and how does it solve the customer problem and where they meet that’s the perfect brand, right? So what you deliver has to answer the customer’s need and their desires.
So, for us personally, you know, we know that our customers are risk and compliance officers at banks and other financial firms and they’re really scared of being fined and being held in noncompliance by a big government agency. That’s really scary. So for us, when we think about that, we’re like, “OK, well, that means that our brand needs to reflect a sense of safety, security, want to make you feel safe.” At the same time, we’re also a high tech company operating in a very conservative industry.
So, how do you also kind of impress upon customers, “OK, we’re accessible and we’re safe and we’re friendly, but we’re also, you know, very human. You don’t have to be scared of the technology, technological side of it, right? The robots aren’t coming to steal your jobs. So it’s balancing sort of, again, all of these customer(s)needs with what your product actually delivers.
Andrea: So, you know, with best effort community and things like this that are really important to your company in particular, what is like for you, for an individual as an individual to have a sense of your own purpose or your own things that you really care about,your values? How does that come across in the way that you lead teams and lead the marketing efforts?
Vanessa Yeh: That is such a great question, and honestly something I am still really to figure out. I mean, I think I’ve certainly had amazing bosses who really know how to identify people’s personal values and help them leverage those values to do better work. And I’ve met some people who have this really kind of uncanny instinct for that, right? Like who can zero in on your exact motivations and it’s actually kind of scary how good they are at it. But for the rest of us that hasn’t come naturally.
I think a huge part of it is developing this level of trust with people, where they feel they can share their values in a way that is going to elicit like a nonjudgmental response from you as their boss or their manager. And I think it’s really kind of an interesting concept here because I feel like what we don’t talk about a lot of is, you know, it’s been popular for a while to talk about things like values and impact, passion and purpose.
And I think implicit within these words, there’s this pressure to say that you’re internally motivated by these really lovely things like helping people or making the world a better place. But what if you’re working with someone or you have someone in our team who’s like their honest to God value is like they want to make money, wealth, right? Or some other non-feel-goodytype of things, you know. Do we only invest in people who have more sort of feel good values or values that align very, very closely with ours? And I think my answer to that is no, (you’re right).
I think when we talk about things like diversity, which is obviously very important, we don’t mean just diversity like gender, racial associated, economic diversity, but also like diversity of thought and diversity of how different people approach the world. So, it’s really interesting when you think about figuring out what your teams like really their personal values are, even if they’re different from yours. And then leveraging them in a way that makes them be better at their jobs. And like I said, I think it’s something that I’m still trying to figure out. I don’t have like a super solid, “This is what you should go do and that’s the playbook.” I think it’s just a process of learning.
Andrea: Hmm. Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting point because there are people certainly that are motivated by wealth, by money, by success and climbing a corporate ladder or whatever it might be. And that’s certainly important when you are building a company because you certainly have to make money in order to continue the company and to have it be profitable and that sort of thing. So, how do you kind of navigate the relationship between people who are really motivated in one way or versus motivated inothers? It really is an interesting question.
Vanessa Yeh: Yeah, it really is. And I think a part of that, you know, there are so many different sort of exercises, team exercises that are available out there. Like StrengthFinders is a really common one. There’s a bunch of other ones as well, but I think they’re super valuable for a team leader to actually do with their team on a regular basis because it helps us understand each other,like what our different strengths and weaknesses are and how we complement each other in a team.
And again, I think sometimes it’s just really easy to assume that because someone doesn’t have the same values as you or they work in a different style than you do that somehow that’s going to clash. But it doesn’t have to, right? And this is when we talk about, you know, when we interview for things like culture fit, like what does that really mean and should we really be thinking about, “OK, it’s not cultural fit, it’s culture add”, right? We don’t want 15 people who approached the world the way I do, right? There’s enough in me already. I need a team that approaches the world very, very differently than I do because that’s going to increase the chances that we can hack a problem in different ways and solve it faster and better. So I think having a constant appreciation for sort of that process.
Andrea: I think that’s a really, really important point. Just the point that you brought up earlier about having a diversity of value and(it)diversity of opinion,of course,is so important to moving a company forward and to be able to tackle problems like you said. So, I really like that. So, you know, when you’re looking at the future here in the next couple of years maybe, what kinds of things are you looking at as a marketer when you’re seeing AI become a bigger deal and customer experience is just really, really hitting its stride in terms of how much it’s being talked about and that sort of thing? What kind of things do you think are coming down the pipe in terms of changes or trends?
Vanessa Yeh: Yeah, I mean, this stuff is wild, Andrea. We’re living in a crazy world. I’m really interested to see how,kind of what we call the age of assistance, how that’s going to impact how brands interact with consumers. So, you know, when I say age of assistance, you know, I’m talking about, you know, that you can kind of turn to Google Home or Alexa or Siri, right? And they can do all these different things for you, and today you can ask Google Assistant or Alexa to, for example, buy things from Amazon for you, right? Like, you know, shop this and they’ll actually buy it for you and deliver it to your door.
And I recently saw a Google demo of the Google Assistant actually calling a hair salon and scheduling a hair appointment for someone. And the Google voice, the actual voice was like a real human voice. And the person at the hair salon didn’t even realize they were talking to a robot the whole time.
Andrea: I’ve seen that same… yeah, I’ve seen that too. That’s crazy.
Vanessa Yeh: It’s fascinating, yeah! So, you know, I’m just thinking, you know, as assistants become more and more capable of serving as a proxy and interfacing with the world on our behalf, how will that change how we market, right? Even when you think about social media these days and how many accounts are actually botsand how that impacts how we target audiences. You know, arethese even real humans that we’re talking to? I’m just super fascinated to see how the age of assistance really shapes the way we change our strategies to actually meet customers where they are versus talking to their robot assistants.
Andrea: Oh yeah. You know, one thing that comes to mind though, when I’ve been paying attention to some of these trends that are coming, I start to question how many of these algorithms and things are going to start making decisions for us. And you mentioned the age of assistance, Google Home, Alexa, that sort of thing. You know, Alexa already knows what I want from Amazon and can order it for me or whatever. I mean, at what point do we get to a point where, things are making kind of a decision for us and we have to be on the corporate end of things making sure that people understand their own agency, their own ability to make decisions for themselves and things like this. Are you with me on my, my topic here?
Vanessa Yeh: Totally, 100 percent. I think it’s such an interesting question to be asking and it’s so relevant for these days. And I often questioned too with sort of the cyber security concerns, right? You know, we’ve talked about there’s so much activity on like hacks, and Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook and Google stealing your data. All this kind of different stuff that we just don’t have control or visibility or agency with our own information, and our own digital fingerprints and footprints. It’s areally interesting thought to see.
I’m always just sort of curious as to whether the generations that are really young now who are sort of growing up with these machines in their hands. Is the pendulum just going to swing totally the other direction,andthey’re just going to abandon some of these technologies just out of frustration and sort of a revolting kind of against the control that technology has over their lives? I don’t know. It’s a really interesting question.
Andrea: It is. That is really interesting. I’ve got a couple of them in my home and I wonder about that too. It’s interesting watching them for sure.
Vanessa Yeh: Yeah.
Andrea: OK, so Vanessa, it’s kind of time to start wrapping up our conversation. So, I’m really kind of curious bringing it back to influence and being a voice of influence. What kind of tips or what kind of final tip would you leave with the audience?
Vanessa Yeh: I would say that there are, just to keep in mind, there are so many different ways to influence, and by the way, I’m still again learning and figuring this out for myself. But it’s this idea, right, that you can influence by having swagger and confidence and owning the room. But you can also influence by being the person who speaks very rarely, but when you do it super meaningful and kind of everything in between, right?
And so leading into whatever that is for you, instead of just trying to replicate what people around you are doing. At the same time, and this is going to sound a little bit contradictory and, again, that’s because I’m in the midst of figuring this out for myself, that while you want to lean into your own style, you also don’t want to rope yourself off. Like I feel like I went through a phase where I just decided that I was terrible at small talk and I didn’t like it anditkind of my shtickwas sort of this grumpy misanthrope who avoided parties. And I kind of convinced myself that that’s who I was and I’m pretty sure I’d locked myself out of some really amazing relationships and opportunities because I constrained myself in this little box.
But ultimately, I think that we can be whoever we say we are in our minds. And it’s kind of balancing that with like owning and appreciating who you are, like your own style and kind of what you bring to the table, but also not putting yourself into a box and saying, “Well, I am just this thing. I can only ever be this thing,” I think is what I would kind of leave with everyone.
Andrea: Very, very wise words. Thank you so much, Vanessa! How can people connect with you if they’re interested in following you?
Vanessa Yeh: Yeah, for sure. So I’m on LinkedIn. It’s just Vanessa Yeh. I think I’m the first one on there,no crazy numbers or letters after it,so that’s pretty cool. I’m happy to connect.
Andrea: Awesome! All right, we’ll link to that in the show notes too, to make it easy for folks. So, thank you so much for being with us today, Vanessa, and for being a voice of influence for our listeners.
Vanessa Yeh: Thank you so much, Andrea! I enjoyed it a lot.