Santa. Um, yeah. So my my past is quite complicated, and I'll spend a couple minutes walking you through how I got today to be ah, product marketing manager at a company called ust Global. But it has been, ah, long journey and probably 20 years in the in the making. Um, so going back to who I am, So I'm I'm Diego Zapeta. I, uh, and my Canadian raised in the U. S. Born to immigrant parents from South America. They left Argentina in the late seventies. My dad was a paper engineer, went to Canada and we grew up there when we're little And then he emigrated to the U. S. And, um, my two parents were good students, and we're very demanding on the four of us siblings that I have, um, to do well in school and really excel. So originally in my life, I was gonna be a scientist or engineer. I really like chemistry. And in high school I had a debate with myself, saying, Well, the dot com boom is here, and I was in high school in the late nineties and I want to create a hotel of the future that is uh, gonna change the world. So I change course dramatically and study hotel, restaurant management. And it probably wasn't the best decision, but it is the path I chose, and I and I did well in school, but it was in in with regard to managing hotels and restaurants and later on, towards the end of my, uh, undergrad, I really started to, like brand management and marketing because those were senior level courses that I took. But the economy is really tough. I graduated right after 9 11 and, um, yeah, and and for for me, I couldn't find it really a job in marketing. So I went in tow hotels, and I moved to Chicago. I worked for a five star hotel. I was room service manager. I dealt with all the celebrities, so I felt glamorous. It felt like the right place to be. I was only making, like, $32,000. It wasn't very much, but I enjoyed that really loyalum after there, I was the head restaurant manager for a cruise ship in Chicago called Odyssey. I managed, uh, staff of 80. I also managed the bar revenue. Um, and I served, like, 700 customers. Every Saturday on Friday is super busy. I did that for about 2.5 years, and then I, um Then I was trying to think, What do I want to do with my life? I applied the business school. I was a little bit arrogant and over confident and only apply the top five. I didn't get in any of them. And some of the feedback I got from some people like you really need to get mawr analytical work experience. Um, I I tested okay, but it wasn't high 700 or whatever to get into those schools. So I, uh, said whether two ways that I can get into business or one is to start up a company and get ah lot of experience on and then get the rest of the education that I wanted or, uh, doom or analytical work. So I found a job at NPD Group. They do market research, and, um, it was in the food industry. So I I would analyze at Kraft Foods, I would analyze what America ate the top eating trends. Um, basically any question around cheese Oreos, any product that craft on to Gino's pizza at the time, and then I really like that work. But what I realized is that I wanted to do the work of the person that would across the table from me. Most of those were MBAs out of top business schools like Kellogg, Chicago, Michigan, and those were the brand managers that made the decisions. I was the the data monkey that that pulled reports together, did all the analysis, but they were the ones who made the decisions at the same time, like in year two. There I I started up a bakery and it's called New World Pastries. And I was partner with a French chef that I had met earlier, and we sold to restaurants and hotels, um, in Chicago more B two B. So I was doing that while working. The market research is very busy, chaotic life and, um, after three years running the bakery, we were in the middle of the recession, and my forecast for becoming a super millionaire. Selling bakeries did not pan out. Um, and we we were running basically at a break. Even all the money we made went to expenses. I wasn't able to save anything, and it was very stressful because there was a lot of risk on the line. I had borrowed money from friends, family and, um, the credit cards to run the business. It was a lot harder than it seems, very similar economic conditions to what may be some some people are dealing with right now. And, um, and then I did apply again for business school. So I was about five years from from where I started so that the bakery I put a pause Year three at the end of year three. I sold it off to, um, my partner's friend. They took it over, and then I didn't. I wasn't on the hook for any more debt, and at the same time I started studying for the Guilmette. I got good recommendations from my boss and then went toe University of Michigan that following year in the fall, and I studied marketing. Um, Michigan. I concentrate, marketing and and try to get a lot experience in marketing. I also was very heavily focused on entrepreneurship for my internship. There I went to Dell, and I worked on a product called the M 3800. Um, it's the thinnest, fastest laptop that Dell makes, and at the time it was their first, like supercomputer. That was a laptop. So I called the project that Apple MacBook killer and the the ask from the marketing team there was to develop out of the box very creative way of getting this to market. So I came up with some ideas I printed presented to the chief operating officer. So he's the number two toe to Michael Dell. And, um, they really like the presentation. And then I went back to school, and, um, I finished school, graduate and then went back. Thio work in at Dell right after school. Now, for the audience here, one thing they may find interesting are, uh, appealing to their life is that it was a very stressful process, and I'm sure they could relate, uh, to recruiting or trying to find a job in business school. It's super competitive, especially in these big business schools that have 500 to even 2000 people in the class, and they're very few spots at a company so well, your whole life, you are good academically. You stood out at work here. You are dealing with another 500 people that were very similar, Um, and maybe had more experience in one area that you didn't, Um, the first year I had 12 offers for my internship or not 12 offers. I had 12 opportunities to interview. I only got Dell and another start up. And then when it came to full time, I had 14 interviews and on Lee got Dell in another company comment Bond at a time they they weren't willing to pay me very much, but ended up taken off because it was a startup. I don't know how my life would have been if I had gone to comment, Bond, but it would have started off very poor in New York City. And so so one thing that keep in mind is that through all this it you will feel that it's very hard. You're you're prepping your up all the time. Studying. Even getting into business school is very stressful. You're you're studying for the test you're trying to practice how to do your interviews. You're writing your essays, Um, and you have to work right? And and then in business school, it's like you have to study despite people thinking it's, ah time for partying it. It was actually very intense, and everybody basically worked all the time and then slept very little so that they could have fun. And, um and you have to practice for your interviews. There's, like, a whole way of interviewing and and practicing that. And so, for the people that feel discouraged right now, you just got to keep at it. Um, when I in order to get that MPD job, I applied the 72 companies. I M. P. D was the one that took me because my background didn't was saying a good match to pivot. That's why I had to go back to business school toe to pivot, to do what the skill set of the jobs that I wanted required. And it requires planning and confidence and optimism that you keep at it. Um, you may have a setback. She's just go over it, you know? It seems, I say, like finding a job is same as dating. You just gotta keep at it. Not everything is a perfect match. Maybe, you know, tough situation or whatever is going on. Um, you know, especially with way hirings happening right now. And so that's my my advice to the audience here in terms of how do you How do you manage your career and get what you want. So so then I got got to Dell, and I was there for from 2016 and I'm sorry, 2012 13 14 to 2000 17. So three years, um, 3.5 years. And, um, I started in a marketing operations role, not super exciting fairy data heavy. I thought I I like data, science and all that, and And the work was appealing. That regarded was doing like all this reporting and dashboards for company. But it wasn't what I want to do long term. So then I pivoted to North America consumer small business planner, and that's basically managing all the accessories on dell dot com. So I sold the monitors the nice keyboards, um, develop the wholesale strategy, worked on the deals, and and like the Black Friday deals, things like that. I worked with a bunch of other, um, merchandisers and, uh, strategist toe Do that. And then I got into a product marketing role. Ah. Ah. Year later. Um, that was an internal product marketing role. It was to enable sales, too. Um, no. What to position, um, to to their customers. So Well, let's say, for example, Delta, Home Depot, huge company. They they are telling Dell we're gonna buy 50,000 computers. So my job was to tell the sales guy Hey, you can also sell Ah, monitor. With every computer you could sell security license. So I worked on a recommendation engine using artificial intelligence and machine learning, and they say it was like a Netflix recommendation engine so that that's what I worked on. It was internal facing product, basically, uh, make sales smarter on the spot. So they have a customer, they can look up in their tablet. What what to recommend is something like that. And also online. The recommendation engine, they're similar to the way Amazon works. Um, And then, uh, during that experience, I realized that I needed more funding for Mawr investment in artificial intelligence because there's a very beta product. It was smart, but I wasn't getting smarter. And so I I was working with my boss toe to get more funding. Um, and that was stalled because of the AMC merger. So Dell had bought another huge company, Onda. Um, I didn't have too much patients, just the weight, because it could be, ah, year. So before the, you know, you get a million dollars to to go on work on this. So at the time a couple of years ago, the market was very hot. Here in Austin, I got recruited for hot schedules. They do restaurant software. It was product market. Are there? Um, and the software that they did was labor optimization. So basically telling restaurant, how maney bartenders, How many servers? How many, um, people they should have by by our in the restaurant. And we serve Cheesecake Factory, McDonald's biggest biggest companies. Um, that you can think of as well as the mom and pop stores. And I also worked on the inventory product, telling the chef how many pieces of meat to order every week so I could get into more detail, I guess, and further under discussion and product marketing there. And then about a year ago, I joined UST Global. They're huge. I t services company. About a billion in revenue. Um, and they basically help are, for the last 20 years, they've helped companies with extra staff. So all this, um, labor pool that can help build APS, maintain systems. I t systems. Um, they help with reporting dashboards, things like that. And now they have all these capabilities that they're building products, and I work on an AI automation platform. AI automation platform means, uh, it's a software that helps with business processes. Meaning work that seems very repetitive, like invoice processing. Um, every company has to pay invoices. You know, you order something you get ah, paper that says you ordered this. How much you owe when you owe it, right. Every corporation has invoices. And the process basically the same. Every day you get an invoice, you have data on it. You take the data you put into a system and then check its cut to pay it. Right. So that process could be automated because the software can observe every day you grab that same piece of paper you write the same date you write the same price you put in the system and then payment. So it's processes like that that we automate. Um, and that's where the technology or the industry's going around technology. Um, so we could do it for invoicing. We could do it for hiring employees. We could do it for new customers that sign up. You know, on a let's say, a banking form you fill out, you have to show your license. We can automate that whole process, and it's called intelligent automation because it's it requires, like the aspect of the human thinking. Um, that software can mimic. So there's computer vision that's the like. I scanning it, reads documents. There's the natural language processing. It's like listening it can. It can interpret text and then summarize and say, This is what I think this paragraphs about, Um so there are a lot of different algorithms and approaches for artificial intelligence, and this software basically houses 30 of these capabilities. Um, the company gets these capabilities from Stanford M I. T. Oxford. There, some of them are open source and others. We work closely in their research and apply it. Thio industry eso that that's my journey. It's a it's a long journey, but I think it's important to understand that it's, Ah, not a direct path to get the product marketing most of these positions require on MBA, so that that's why I kind of took you through that journey, how to get the MBA and how to get this type of job.

product marketing is very broad and you can look up online. There's a framework called pragmatic marketing. I didn't I didn't learn this in school. I learned this in my last job. Everybody talks this lingo and product markets like What is that? And it's Ah, it's a framework of all the different areas that a product market or does a product marketer could write the content on the website. They can write an email that sales sends out they could right? Um, the copy foran ad they could set up on event. They could do a digital webinar. Um, they could do sales training. So it's very broad, and in my current role, I literally do all of it because I'm the only Onley one. And there was no marketing at this company. But before I joined So there were four of us that I'll join at the same time, and we set up the infrastructure and the infrastructure being the marketing tools that we use. Um, so we use a tool called Hot Spot that tracks the customers that come in. Um what what they're engaging with. So if they clicked on, add, it'll tell us they clicked on this Facebook ad, Um, it keeps track of all the information it keeps track of if they have a deal. So it's called CRM. It's ah, customer relationship management tool. Um, we also use Microsoft Dynamics. It's ah, it's another tool that sales interacts with and the to talk to each other. So we track all the things that they do with marketing. And then that data flows into Microsoft Dynamics. Um, in terms of the scope of work, I do all the content writing. I do the scripts for the webinar. I made videos. I write the script with the video, and then I go get it designed by animators and a copywriter as well. Who makes it sound mawr like a commercial? Um, I write the copy for the ads and then it gets edited. I I write blog's and the brochures. I do all the emailing that goes out to customers. Um, I do the script for the webinars I helped with the collateral for the events. Um, I pick which events to go. I do the budget in the planning. I do what it's called market sizing. I estimate you know how big the opportunity is to go out there. I prioritize who were going to target. You know, they're thousands of companies out there. Which which three? Which 10 do you go after? Um, I do something called personas. Uh, that I Hi. Right up. Basically who we're going after in terms of the people in these companies you don't target. You know, Dell has 100,000 employees. I don't target all 100,000. I go after the 30 that deal with automation, Things like that, um and then in terms of the top priorities, So it's really important to create pipeline pipeline is how many customers you have that that are aware of your product and want to talk to you. And it's very hard to get customers and to pay, pay you money for your product. It's easier when you're a B to see that you're serving street customers like I did with the bakery. I had a store and people could come in here. I have to find business customers. And those people don't go to a store to buy the software. They go online, they may call sales. They may have, uh, people in between that that let them know about these products, so the biggest priority is making pipeline for sale. So I have to go and do enough advertising. Have to do enough webinar. So people engaged to come in and learn more about the product. Um, and then with that, in order in orderto to do that effectively, you have to have a lot of content. So that's my second priority is writing. When I started, there was nothing. So now we have a website. We have a lot of brochures so the customers can learn about the product that can evaluate it and see the value that we have, um, and how it makes sense for them. It's really important to keep writing blog's and these white papers to articulate exactly how does the technology solve the problem? What are our differentiators? How do we stand out? And then the third priority is more related to the marketing technology and making sure that we can track and report everything. So one thing that's really important is to be able to show accountability that you spent $10,000 but you created a million dollars of pipeline right that you you spend all this money and you brought in opportunities of people that want to spend money with you. Because imagine, I I go and spend $100,000 and I don't have anybody knocking at the door. Nobody to pick up the phone. Well, we're not gonna be in business very long. Right? So that's the third piece is being able to spend the money and track it. How many? How many people visit the website? How many people downloaded the brochure? How many people called sales things like that. And then right now, I work between 50 to 60 hours because I'm still alone in this, uh, venture. Hopefully, in 2021 I get a sidekick toe divvy up the work, but I think typical working hours for for managers out of school and then tow senior manager is between 45 to 60 hours. It depends what company? Some companies more laid back. I think in general, technology companies are in that range. If you go to more demanding industries like banking, um, you you will work 70 to 80 hours a week. I have classmates where consultants they goto work for the big consulting companies like McKinsey or Deloitte and and they work. Ah, lot more because they have company timelines and pressure there. So, um yeah, that that that will vary by company. But that's why the tech industry usually it's it's manageable. Um, and then you have vacation and time that you take off, right? If you're if you're kind of feeling tired. Uh, so, yeah.

major challenges is because you're alone. There's so much to do. So it is important to articulate Ah, plan of action. So you start with how many customers do we need to get to so that people are happy here, right? That my salary is paid for that Other people's salaries were paid for that we can pay for the marketing, right? Um and so you developed a plan, and then with the plan, you have the tactics of all the activities you're going to do. So I'm going to write 10 blog's. I'm going to do a white paper. I'm gonna spend about $5000 of advertising a month and going to, um, send out 100 emails. You know, things like that. And so the pain point is that it's a It's a lot to prioritize. You don't have infinite budget, right? I'm given uh, a small amount of money to do the most with, and we don't have history of what works, so you have to do a lot of experimentation. It's called a B testing like I show one message or so another message to similar audiences, and I see which message had a higher click, right? I write one piece of content. The feedback from sales is I don't like it. I write another one. Right. So you're doing a lot of experimentation. I I do. Webinars. I do events. I do, um, advertising. And I test out, you know, where am I getting different types of contacts and are the context that come in the right people because they I could get people that are not interested in this product. They were interested in learning about my my software, but they're not interested in buying it. So I get a lot of competitors. I get people from universities, professors, uh, students that click on my stuff and they're not gonna buy. So, um, so that that's part of it. The is organizing it being focused on being efficient with how you spend money. And then, uh, yeah, the pain point is keeping track of all of it and and getting results. That's the other pieces. At the end of all this work, you better. You better generate revenue and Comte