How to leverage your skillset for success ft. Senior Vice President of Marketing @Yelp, Dan Kimball

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This week’s will be about Senior Vice President of Marketing at Yelp, Dan Kimball.

Dan Kimball is the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Yelp. Prior to Yelp, he was the SVP of Global Marketing at Eventbrite, where he led marketers in 8 different countries. And before that he led many marketing teams in various sectors such as real estate, banking, and healthcare.

Parts of this newsletter are freely taken from our interview and adjusted for reading. Everything a person says in the interview reflects the guest's and host’s opinion, not the newsletter's or brand's.

GG: Many successful people had diverse experiences when they were younger and didn't necessarily come straight into their industry. What was your experience in your 20s or 30s like? 

DK: I found early success in my career. I chose a weird path, but I was always in leadership positions right out of college. In my 20s I was part of the dot-com boom, I watched it get built, and completely torn down. Moving back to the East Coast I focused on building a family, started working at some larger companies, and established myself while learning the skills I needed. I wanted to learn more foundational marketing capabilities, but I just hadn't had the experiences so I put myself into different situations that were sometimes uncomfortable. I'm a big believer in getting thrown into the fire. It happened to me, I survived, and I've got some burns, but those burns make me stronger and smarter and able to anticipate things. People might sometimes hate me for doing it to them, but I know that at some point it'll pay back. In my early 30s, CoStar Group was the first one of my first senior leadership roles and that was the thing that trained me the most, not only in marketing but in leadership.

GG: Wat do you look for in a role when it comes to maximizing your career growth?

DK: I look for problems that I think I can solve, both personally but also where marketing can play a strategic, and not just a supporting role. That's a trap for a lot of marketers. Marketing most often can be second fiddle to either product, engineering, or sales. I look for places where there's that white space to fill in and an openness to exploring new ideas and opportunities. A personal example was my decision to join CoStar Group, which was probably my biggest career accelerator. I was a digital marketer by trade and I was looking for a way to become more of a marketing GM. My boss before that was a CEO of a Fintech company and I was running digital marketing there, I was good at Google, affiliate marketing, and email marketing, it felt like I was on top of the world, I was like "I am the best digital marketer" and he looked at me and he was like "You're a smart guy, but how are you ever gonna become the person that's leading all of the marketing? " And I hadn't thought of that. It did make me think about how I needed to put myself in a situation to get the maximum amount of leverage from my skills. And so I joined a company where I saw a lot of promise for digital and e-commerce in general. During my first year, I signed up to manage a very strategic project that I had no business in signing up for, but I said "I'll GM this product." It took off, and I had no idea what I was doing, but it showed that I was willing to take risks. I put myself out there, found leverage in a skill set that I had that I knew I was better at than anybody at the company, and then later when my boss left I got called out from the bullpen to take the reins and became the CMO because I had shown that I could operate at that level.

GG: Let's say you're starting your first day as the marketing leader of your company. How do you set up KPIs for yourself and how do you figure out the critical problem you need to solve?

DK: I will start from the top: "What are the company's objectives?" That's hard for early-stage startups but it becomes easier when you're at an established company and you have a couple of years of historical data behind you. Then you can know what kind of incremental improvement you want to see in the next year or what's the big thing you want to do. I will start there and then say "What could marketing measurably contribute to? What could we drive? What could we influence? And what do we need to support?" Then pick some stretch goals. It could be performance marketing, customer acquisition, product marketing retention, LTV, or just a channel like email marketing. Then I will go through a process. Do we have what it takes to hit those goals? What skills do we have where we are confident, and what skills are we lacking that I need to hire for or make up for? Let's go "red", "yellow", and "green". Green is "I'm super confident, we can hit that". Yellow is "I don't think we're gonna get there", and red is "There's no way unless we invest in this, we don't have the people, we don't have the skills, and we gotta make investments soon". And from there, it becomes fairly scientific.

GG: What have you learned about marketing and leadership in your journey?

DK: At every stop on my journey, I learned an important lesson, and some things were reinforced over and over again. For me, it's less about the industry and more about the business model and the customers. I learned that I don't want to be the head of marketing at a company that only focuses on closing big deals. I felt like I didn't have a lot of accountability for the things that mattered most, and it usually fell on the shoulders of a really good salesperson, so I promised myself I would never go to a company that only succeeded based on the efforts of a small number of salespeople. At Eventbrite, I found my groove for two-sided marketplaces and self-serve acquisition models. I went from supporting just big deals to a place where 65-70% of new customers came through the website, which marketing owned. I could use all the growth hacking and growth marketing skills I had developed as a consumer marketer for a long time, but I also learned some hard lessons there. I had teams in eight different countries, which had some real challenges, including language barriers. At Yelp, I confirmed my love for marketplaces, and it's just fun being able to operate across two different audiences, consumers and businesses, but also finding really interesting methods to address both together while also experiencing new challenges. I have learned something at every company I go to, and I will, I guarantee you, continue to learn something new at every company until I hang up my shoes. And that's what makes it so fun.

THIS WEEK’S QUOTE

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What's the key takeaway from this? Marketing and leadership have more in common than you think. Both involve understanding other people's needs and goals and finding ways to help them achieve these.

• To grow and advance in your career, you must take risks and try new things. You may be surprised by the results! 😉 

• Every tool has its use. If you have a particular skill or talent, you should seek out a company that can benefit from it or make it your selling point if you're building something for yourself.

• Progress is made in small steps. Be honest with yourself about what you can achieve right now, and then focus on the next step.

• There is no such thing as being on top of the world. There will always be someplace or someone to learn from, you just have to find them.

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