The Mindful Marketer With Lisa Nirell

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

 

Mindfulness is not the first thing that comes to mind when talking about marketing. Zen and being one with nature is the opposite of the high-stress environment of marketing. But, Lisa Nirell makes it work! She is the mindful marketer and she’s here with your host John Livesay on how to practice mindfulness. Lisa is the founder and CMO of EnergizeGrowth LLC and is also the author of The Mindful Marketer. Join in as Lisa shares the secrets to innovative marketing, why she is the CMO whisperer, and more. Go out, practice mindfulness, and make friends with nature.

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The Mindful Marketer With Lisa Nirell

Our guest is Lisa Nirell, author of The Mindful Marketer. She said, “Don’t let a good crisis go to waste.” She also talks about the key to success, especially as a CMO, is not about doing more. It’s about being more. Find out what she means. Enjoy the episode.

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Our guest is Lisa Nirell, who helps marketing leaders build more sustainable companies and better lives. She’s known as the CMO Whisperer, a LinkedIn faculty member, live streamer, podcaster, executive coach, and award-winning author of The Mindful Marketer and EnergizeGrowth NOW. It’s so much fun to have her because I’m known as the Pitch Whisperer, and I get to talk to the CMO Whisperer. Lisa, welcome to the show.

It’s great to be here, John. Thanks for inviting me.

Let’s dive into your own story of origin. You can take us back to childhood, school, wherever you want, where you’ve got interested in marketing, in general.

I have been thinking a lot about my father. He passed away years ago. It has been fun to connect all the dots that he taught me that helped me get to where I am. I have been an entrepreneur for many years. I looked back and realized, “Dad was preparing me for this.” The first moment happened when I was about twelve. We used to live in this bucolic town in Connecticut at the top of a hill. This is in the ‘70s. You could open your front door and let your pets roam free. My mom, dad, and I had a dog named Buster who liked to hang out with another dog named Barney.

 

One day they didn’t come home. Back then, there were no email and cell phones. We started calling all the neighbors until an elderly woman, miles away, said, “I think I hear dogs barking in the woods.” My dad and I embarked on this long hike. Lo and behold, we heard the dogs barking, found them on a 4×4-foot ledge, which had a 100-foot drop. Dad dropped me with his pants belt. He said, “I need to let you get down on the ledge and lift the dogs to safety.” At age twelve, that’s a feat.

That’s not very often that you get that opportunity. The dogs were emaciated because they had not drunk nor eaten in three days. This continues. I think about the time then I’ve got my driver’s license. I drove my mother’s Ford Pinto wagon back from high school up the big hill. I spun the car, and it was facing a ledge. I called dad and said, “Thank God, you are here. Here’s the car key.” He said, “No, get back in the car. I’m going to teach you and walk you through how to get your car out of the spin and away from the ledge.”

These little lessons have prepared me for my first pandemic of completely retooling my business virtually within three weeks, the courage to make some tough decisions, release some people from my team, hire new people that were prepared for the change and have the courage to fall in love again as well in the middle of a pandemic. It has been a roller coaster but I owe a lot of the courage muscles to my dad.

I also know from reading about you that your dad was an inventor and had a lot of patents for medical security devices. That must have been so inspiring to be brought up by somebody who not only teaches you how to fix problems for yourself, as opposed to rescuing you but you’ve got to see somebody not just creating one thing but multiple things. That spirit of creativity is where that got born in you.

That is true. He was an inventor, had several patents filed, and was in the security business. He invented all kinds of push-button security locks and added machines before the computing age. My mother also taught me creativity because she was a fashion consultant and worked in upscale women’s boutiques. She brought a different type of creativity to the family than my father did. He was the fixer and innovator but mom was the warm-hearted fashionista. They brought very different gifts and talents. Isn’t creativity a wonderful thing?

[bctt tweet=”It’s not about doing more. It is about being more.” via=”no”]

Yes. Especially, many people think if I’m not a painter or an inventor, I’m not creative but you talk about that boredom creates a space for creativity and self-reflection. I’m thinking your philosophy might be, “Don’t resist being bored, embrace it.” You have this great quote that I want to make as one of our tweets. “It’s not about doing more. It’s about being more.” Can you expound on that?

I will expound as little as possible and say when was the time any of us walked outside, turned off our phones, looked up at the sky, and allowed nature to be our friend? When I think back at how I named my company, EnergizeGrowth, how I started my business, every single moment when those a-ha moments came to me, I was outside and in nature. I wasn’t sitting at my desk with a 2×2 matrix or an Excel spreadsheet trying to do market research. I was out with an open heart and mind in the place I loved the most.

We hear so often that people get inspiration in the shower and all these other places. We don’t know why something is happening when we are not trying to force something to happen.

The other great place to get bored is when you are sleeping because that’s the time that our brains are refiling. They are taking all the stuff out of the filing cabinet, putting it back in where it belongs, and allowing us to process issues for the day. That’s also a wonderful place for boredom to happen. My friends always say, “Did you have a busy weekend?” I say, “I did not.” For the most part, I woke up, looked out, checked the weather, and then figured out what to do or what not to do. Sitting on the sofa and looking out the window is a perfectly good exercise.

You are also a speaker like I am. One of your talks, which has a very clever title, is From Order Taker To Innovator. I like anything that has a little rhyme to it. It makes it easy to remember. You cover five rules on how people can spend more time creating things that are innovative for marketing. Can you share one of those rules with us or is it what you described? Don’t be afraid to be bored.

 

I look back at some of the research on aging. If you read what doctors say about people who age gracefully and look at communities around the globe that have very healthy aging people living together, they have three things in common. Number one, they are focused on their wellness. Number two, they have a purpose. Number three, they have a robust community. I believe that we have to have those foundations in place for any innovation to occur. COVID has put a sucker punch in all of those areas.

Many of us have had to revert to online communities. The quarantine messed with my mind a few times. We are coming out collectively out of a state of trauma and grief. Unfortunately, overdoses are at an all-time high in the United States, depression and treatment of depression and therapy are at all-time highs. They are going to be for a while.

I would recommend for anyone who’s reading this, if you don’t remember anything else from what I have to say, use this as a time to rebuild those three cornerstone pieces of your life and be gentle with yourself. Once those three are back to some form of stability, innovation can begin to occur and happen. As marketers, we can start to contribute in a more wholehearted way to the growth conversations in our organizations.

In your book, The Mindful Marketer, I love anything with an alliteration. We all know the concept of being in the moment and mindful being in nature. I’m not so sure that many marketers automatically think about taking that Zen quality of being aware of their thoughts and feelings to their marketing. How did you come up with the title?

I owe that to a brainstorming session or five with one of my favorite mentors named Mark Levy. He calls himself the big sexy idea guy. I called Mark when I was in negotiations with my publisher, and I said, “Mark, I have trouble coming up with the big sexy idea for my next book. Would you help me?” He said, “Lisa, it’s time for you to out yourself. You have been hiding and haven’t told people that you have been a mindfulness practitioner for the last years.”

[bctt tweet=”Find your purpose by asking yourself ‘what business are you in?'” via=”no”]

I said, “That is true.” Guilty as charged because I don’t like to proselytize. If people are interested in the various mindfulness practices that have helped me get through multiple moments of trauma, I will talk to them about it.” However, you will notice I don’t ever push them to try any form of mindfulness practice unless it calls to them.

Mark said, “You’ve got many years of marketing and sales experience, and marketed some of the most complex technology and professional services solutions, 6 and 7-figure solutions, to big businesses. You are also a mindfulness practitioner. What you are is you are the mindful marketer.” I said, “Mic drop moment for the mindful marketer.” That’s how that was born. This book, which I started writing years ago, still has legs more than ever.

When people like you share your story of looking at things that haven’t been connected, what it is about you that makes you unique, and then figuring out a way to package that in a way that makes it unique and memorable, it helps to hear those stories. Let’s do another one. How did you come up with being called the CMO Whisperer? What does that mean?

I was sitting across lunch one day in Tysons Corner, Virginia, with a 25-year marketing veteran named Sam. He said to me, “Lisa, I needed to meet with you. I have an existential crisis.” I said, “What’s going on?” He says, “The Board of Directors wants me to start having revenue responsibility. I have never sold anything. I’m a marketing leader. They want me to solve problems, understand and deploy customer experience initiatives. I don’t even know what that is yet but I’m not so sure I want to stay in the CMO profession. I’m overwhelmed and feeling alone in this.”

I said, “What do you think about helping me build a private community of CMOs who all work in non-competing industries? We can come together, innovate, solve problems, and share resources. Would that be of value?” He said, “Yes.” He helped me build the community years ago. Here we are working with some of the country’s top CMOs with that purpose in mind and helping them make that leap from that order taker mode to innovator mode. Our members get promoted faster than their competitors, and they enjoy a more enriching life.

 

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room a little bit about the CMO world. Typically, people are not in those jobs for more than eighteen months. There are a lot of stress to perform quickly, keep the job, and a lot of pressure in Corporate America around that. I’m imagining having this group that you were describing, EnergizeGrowth, can help people tap into other people’s ideas as well as their network when they need it.

Being the contrarian that I am and I have been known to be not just the CMO Whisperer but also a provocateur, I challenge people to look at those turnover numbers. The people who are reporting the high turnover happen to be recruiting firms. I view that like the fox guarding the henhouse statistic. I would look at that and also challenge people to say, “Did you bring that upon yourself?” If you focus on output versus outcome, you have already started a job on the wrong foot.

People can find some of my posts at LisaNirell.com. I’ve got 110 articles and another 50 videos out on LinkedIn if you follow me there. It has been very interesting working with CMOs around this topic. We find that the members of our group either exit a toxic work environment faster or build credibility faster in the company they like, where they are appreciated and given room to grow. If I can help them in either path, I say, “I have had a good day at the office.”

It’s reframing that need for fear. No good ideas come out of fear. I was fortunate enough to be asked to be one of the speakers at the Coca-Cola CMO Summit. They had invited all the CMOs of all the quick service restaurants and movie theater chains that had sold their product versus another. I wanted to give them some storytelling tips. I remember asking the CMO of Domino’s Pizza. I said, “What’s one of your biggest marketing challenges?”

I normally would get answers around going after a certain customer or the niche. He said, “Our biggest marketing challenge is getting tech people to work here. We are in the Midwest, competing with Amazon.” His team was in charge of that wonderful app that tracks your pizza order and tells you who’s put it in the oven or the name of the person driving it to you and all that interactive connection.

[bctt tweet=”Don’t be afraid to be bored.” via=”no”]

He said, “We used to say that we are a pizza company that uses tech to get tech people to come work here. Now we say we are an eCommerce company that happens to sell pizzas.” I said, “That sounds a lot more like Amazon books.” I wanted to get your intake because a lot of people assume marketing is very outward-facing towards consumers buying a product but CMOs are also responsible for getting the right people, at least in their division, the branding of the company.

You bring up a point and a pattern that I started noticing right before the pandemic. The CMOs that I work with and advise are expected to focus generally on making sure that our demand gen, brand, and image with investors or stakeholders is the best it can be. Right before the pandemic, I sat down with the former head of employee engagement and recruiting at Kimberly-Clark.

He kicked off a phenomenally successful program to help apply marketing strategies to attract candidates to one of their Wisconsin plants. They were trying to attract high-quality corporate interns and younger professionals to Wisconsin. They are competing against brands that are based in big cities like New York, LA and Chicago. The level of engagement and gamification they use to attract good candidates to the Wisconsin plant paid off. Taking those marketing skills that he generally only used to bring in more customers could be equally applied to their recruiting and employee engagement programs. Klaus is a great guy and knows how to use storytelling to tell the Kimberly-Clark story.

I love that there’s a gamification element into the marketing because that says a lot about the culture right there. It’s a little playful, fun, even not quite so intense data-driven that they forget there’s a playfulness to that. There are so many nuances in how you market a company to attract top talent. Especially with the Great Resignation, brands have to not just attract but also figure out a way to keep them.

Another topic that I wanted your expertise on is a lot of companies are focusing on the environmental, social, and corporate governance of what a company stands for. Are they lead certified to be green? They have to measure and improve that, not just to stockholders but to the employees. It’s a recruiting tool. I’m guessing that also falls under marketing. They have to make sure that that’s part of their culture and why some people are investing in them for social impact or whatever the issue is or they are being environmentally correct. That also becomes another part of your marketing messaging. Do you have any thoughts on that or an example of someone you have seen doing that well?

 

One of the things I am not is, I am not an expert in ESG initiatives. The only thing I remember is years ago when the business round table worked hard to get those 140 CEOs to sign that pledge on sustainability. Sadly, the jury is still out as to whether there was ever any progress or improvement. A lot of people and journalists claim that it was nothing more than posturing. I tried to reach out to the business round table run by former GM CEO, Mary Barra. They haven’t responded to me yet.

I would love to see more movement there. I understand that many companies are still trying to figure out how to establish baseline data on what to measure and how to hold themselves accountable. It will be interesting to see what comes out of the G20 Summit and the Glasgow discussions, whether we see the government step forward and make the big moves or whether corporations step forward and make the big moves first. I feel like you, and I are in the middle of the maelstrom. We may not know for a few years how things play out or what you are seeing.

I gave a talk to a company called Measurabl that measures that data. That was my first awareness and introduction into how important it is for companies in the commercial real estate world, especially when they are building a building, that has to hit a lot of checkmarks. It ties into the recruiting part. A lot of people, Gen X, Millennials, whatever you want to call them, are a big factor for them. They don’t just want to have a job. They want to have a job where they feel like the company’s values are matching their concerns. That is a relatively new emphasis that I don’t think was around in the ‘80s and ‘90s. There was Earth Day and all things like that but that was an isolated thing.

Companies were like, “Let’s all recycle,” but this is a much more sophisticated in-depth look at what we believe. We want to have those people work here and even attract a certain investor who’s not just looking for a good ROI but wants to put their money into a company that has a social impact. I find that whole concept fascinating because the old school of the ends justified the means. As long as we are hitting our numbers, no one cares if we are polluting or whatever the issue is, making a car that’s not safe, or all the other things that come into play. It’s great. It makes the CMOs job much more challenging because there are so many different messages you have to communicate beyond selling a product or service.

I want people to shift their thinking away from a conversation around the planet and think a little higher around the purpose. What is the purpose of our organization? Follow the footsteps of the former CEO of Best Buy, Hubert Joly. Hubert and I are both members of Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches community. You can read more about us on 100Coaches.com. When he was hired to be CEO of Best Buy, they lost $1.2 billion in one quarter.

[bctt tweet=”If you’re focusing on output versus outcome, you’ve already started a job on the wrong foot. ” via=”no”]

The first thing they said to him is, “We need you to lay off people and close stores,” but he said, “No, we are essentially facing an existential crisis. We need to figure out why we are in business. Amazon is cleaning our clocks. We can’t go head-to-head with them. We have to differentiate ourselves and have to tell a different story.”

What they did is they came up with 4 or 5 key areas to focus on and came out with this beautiful and simple message, which is, “Our purpose is to enrich lives through technology.” If you haven’t followed Hubert Joly or read his book, The Heart of Business, it brings it all together. ESG initiatives fall underneath that purpose. There is a place for it but the higher-level question that we need to ask is, “What business are we in?”

I’m going to be leading several offsite planning sessions for my clients here as we embark on the new year. One of the exercises you can do, which also was popular at Airbnb is to set up pairings of people, dyads, have people sit across from each other, go through five rounds, ask each other and take turns, “What business are we in?” You have to do it five rounds. You can’t comment or judge what the other person says. You write it down and say, “Thank you.” You go through it five times. That’s how Airbnb came up with their purpose statement around, “We want people to belong and feel like they belong.” Not we rent outhouses.

That’s one of our mutual friends, who’s also been a guest on the show, Chip Conley, who’s one of the Founders of Airbnb and continues to help people, not just figure out their purpose and business but in their third act with the Modern Elder Academy, which I love.

He’s a great guy. I’ve got to get down to Baja. He got hired by the Cofounders of Airbnb to teach them about the hospitality industry. He was an employee for a while. He still advises them but he came in after they founded the company to get them to the next level. What are they valued at? It’s $120 billion.

Before I let you go, I wanted to have one more awareness of the amazing impact you are having. You also have a LinkedIn learning about helping people become an effective CMO. Can you tell people how they could find out about that or what that entails?

You can do a couple of things. You can go to LisaNirell.com and make sure you sign up to receive our insights and invites. I have a course that 11,000, almost 12,000 people have finished on LinkedIn Learning. It’s called The Effective CMO. When you launch a product, you come out with the best of intentions and say, “This is for directors of marketing and VPs of marketing who someday want to grow up and be a CMO.”

What has been fabulous is people who don’t understand CMOs or who work with a CMO but don’t get what it’s like to be a CMO are taking the course as well. You can go to LinkedIn Learning. I’m also hosting December 9th, 2021, a follow-on update to the course on LinkedIn Live called The Seven Secrets of Modern CMOs. The role of the CMO has changed since the course was launched pre-pandemic. People can follow me on LinkedIn or get my newsletter at LisaNirell.com. We will make sure you get some of our latest insights and lessons learned.

Inviting people to enroll and get your insights and invites. From a branding standpoint, that’s so memorable. It’s alliteration and not a typical opt-in to get emails from us. You have packaged even that in such a way that is cutting through the clutter, making it feel warm and personal. There are so many examples of what you are doing and the kind of people that you get to work with. If anybody is lucky enough to get to work with you or have you as their coach, I’m sure their business will certainly take off. Any last thoughts you want to leave us with? Any last quote or an insight you want to share before we say goodbye?

Everyone, don’t let a good crisis go to waste. That’s my advice for people. I don’t care what profession you are in. This is a time to revisit, who am I? What is my business’s purpose? How can marketing communicate that purpose to the world and make the new world a better place than pre-COVID? Please don’t sit back and wait for life to happen to you at this stage. The new world is emerging and let’s be part of it. I also want to honor you, John, because I love joining these shows. I get invited a lot to speak and be on live streams. You did your homework. You made this so easy for me.

That’s one of my favorite quotes, Arthur Andersen, the famous tennis pro, Arthur Ashe, “The key to success is confidence and key to confidence is preparation.” I treat these interviews like it’s an Olympic moment or a Super Bowl. It’s also a form of respect for the guest. I’m thrilled that you noticed. Thank you.

I appreciate you, John.

If you want to find out more about Lisa, her book, coaching program and courses, go to LisaNirell.com.

 

Important Links

• The Mindful Marketer
• EnergizeGrowth NOW
• EnergizeGrowth
• From Order Taker To Innovator
• LinkedIn – Lisa Nirell
• Measurabl
• Hubert Joly
• 100Coaches.com
• The Heart of Business
• Chip Conley – Past Episode
• The Effective CMO – LinkedIn
• LisaNirell.com
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

 

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Tags: CMOs, Gamification, Innovative Marketing, Marketing, Mindfulness, Sustainability