Tag Archive for: Marketing

Rising Star: Sarah Zilenovski, Marketing Manager; ClearSale

Sarah ZilenovskiBefore starting her career, Sarah Zilenovski had always believed you had to choose your area of expertise while still in college; while in reality, as she found you can build your path as you go.

While obtaining the necessary skills is vital, of course, she believes it’s important to plan while keeping an open mind. “We must remember that we can’t control external variables and that the person we are today is not the person we will be in the future. And as we change, so do our dreams and desires.”

And that means that your career might take unexpected twists, which you can embrace if you are confident in your abilities and potential. “I always believed that I could choose the companies or assignments that were appealing to me, not rely on it going the other way around,” says Zilenovski.

A Career Built on Seeking New Challenges

Born and raised in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Zilenovski moved to the United States in 2015, bringing solid credentials—including master’s and bachelor’s degrees in finance and business management from a top Brazilian business school—and experience.
She began her career in 2007 as an intern for P&G, working on customer business development. Soon after, she was hired as a finance manager for P&G largest manufacturing facility in Brazil. One year later, hoping to become more involved with the business side, she moved back to P&G’s headquarters to work as a finance manager for the commercial team, specifically working with P&G’s distributors and wholesalers.

After five years of a successful career at P&G, she began to think she’d like to try a smaller company, ideally one with a more direct social impact. For her, it was a leap, but she landed successfully at ClearSale, a company fighting against fraudsters—and was the fastest growing medium-sized company in Brazil.

There, she pivoted back to sales and marketing, where she had started at P&G; her first role was to manage the sales team during a large restructuring in the commercial area. That entailed recreating everything from the sales teams’ portfolios to the go-to-market strategy. In addition much of her focus was on the joint creation and customization of solutions with enterprise prospects and clients.

At that point it became clear to her that she preferred combining her business background with her proven communication and analytical skills, rather than leading the sales teams. She was subsequently invited to join ClearSale’s international team, with three other Brazilian peers, to open ClearSale’s first foreign branch, based in the United States, entirely from scratch.

After that successful launch, she is responsible for ClearSale’s global marketing and sales strategy, excluding the native market of Brazil. Zilenovski also recently started her MBA at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, which she says is “a childhood dream, to attend one of the top American schools.” That’s one of the professional achievements she is most proud of so far—working in a position of great autonomy, at a company that trusts her insight and skills, while attending one of the best business schools worldwide.

A Work Culture That Meets All Her Needs

While Zilenovski has had a number of role models along the way, her first positive impressions started at home, with her parents who both held PhDs and instilled in her the importance of investing in knowledge.
In addition, her first boss at P&G, Ricardo Wasserman, gave her an early education in integrity—making it clear that rules are needed to define right and wrong, and there’s no space to question them.
At ClearSale, she finds the current EVP, Rafael Lourenco, to be a great example of being excellent while respecting your own desires, needs and weaknesses, by truly believing that we first must like what we do on a day-to-day basis. “After all, if our work makes us miserable it will be a lose-lose situation in the long term, even if we make it work in the short term.”

And that fits well with her goals of future success, which to her is far more than aspiring to a specific title or salary. For Zilenovski, success comes from working for a company with a high social impact, while considering that work/life balance can be a day-to-day challenge—it’s a marathon, not a sprint, she says. She appreciates she can build a routine that fits what she wants or needs in any given situation, such as flexible working hours and the ability to work from a home office. ClearSale’s culture, which focuses on diversity and flexibility, has been the perfect fit for her. “There are no distinctions regarding gender,” she says. “And it’s important to me that I have autonomy in an environment where titles don’t shape my possibilities,” she says.

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Mover and Shaker: Noelia Torres, Market Development Lead, WEX Europe Limited

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By Cathie Ericson

Although WEX’s Noelia Torres began her career as a journalist, then as a public relations practitioner for  large consumer brands, her career has been linked to the payments industry for the past 16 years.

She made the move when she realized that although she enjoyed advising clients on strategy, she yearned to see how it all played out and decided to try the client side. She began her finance career at Barclaycard, an independent division of Barclays, in Dublin and then entered what she calls “the exciting world of payments,” where she enjoys contributing to the constant evolution and progress in the payments world.

Over the years she has worked in a wide variety of different markets and geographies, starting in a local market in Spain and then moving on to WEX initially with responsibilities throughout Europe and now she embraces her new challenge of working in global strategy.

Right now Torres is focusing on new ways to innovate and simplify the ways that companies make and receive payments, using a design thinking approach that employs a creative process to solve business problems. . She describes herself as passionate about the methodology because it always begins by looking at people and their unmet needs.. “We have to remember we are always designing for people: You have to understand what each customer wants and needs and how they behave and think when they’re interacting with products or services.”

Teamwork is Goal Number One

When she first entered the corporate world, she expected it to be full of uncertainty and overly competitive, organized in silos where everyone had their own specialization as a sole focus. While her expectation of embracing uncertainty came true, she has since seen that over the years much of the corporate world has evolved, particularly the team orientation. “It’s not about just my sales volume or my meeting,” she says, but doing the best for everyone.

In fact, she considers her ability to build teams as the professional achievement she is most proud of so far — bringing disparate teams together to work toward the same goal. “No matter what department we are in, we want to discover our customers’ problems and solve them,” she points out.

Over the years that has been one of Torres’ biggest learning moments, that the most relevant asset a company has, no matter the size, is their team. She learned that early on when she worked for a Spanish savings bank, Caixa Galicia, with a team composed of only eight people who covered the entire spectrum, from consumer to business to government accounts.

While other, larger companies might have devoted at least 100 people to covering that breadth, her firm wanted to play in the big leagues and strove to provide supreme experience even with a smaller team. “I learned early on and have taken this lesson with me that if you want to achieve a goal, it’s all about the team that surrounds you,” she says.

In fact, that is the first “ingredient” in her professional recipe for success – knowing that working in silos or isolation is ineffective. Secondly she encourages others to listen a lot and then go outside the company to listen more. “Don’t get trapped inside your company; when you go to your customer and ask ‘why,’ you can gain insight that will help you improve.” And finally, she  adds “Never give up. I know that we can get better;” as another touchpoint : A leader’s function should be to transform the team to improve.

Opportunities to Learn Are Everywhere

Torres says that both sponsorship and mentorship have been crucial to her success, helping guide her professional career, but also providing direction in her personal domain. “My sponsor in Europe believed in me from the very first day and was key in opening the doors to my most recent move to the United States,” she says.

She names Carina Szpilka, former CEO of ING Direct, as her role model. “She is not only a super charismatic and authentic woman, but she was foundational in revolutionizing banking culture by putting the customer at the heart of  business decisions,” Torres notes. But mentorship doesn’t have to just come from the top; she notes that it’s important to remember that you can always learn from everyone you are working with, by finding people on your team who are great leaders or motivators.

WEX, in particular, has been empowering because of the many example of women in key strategic positions throughout the company, which has been inspiring to Torres throughout her career there.

And finally, Torres knows that you can learn from the world around you. She and her husband have a motto that “the world is a book and those who don’t travel read only one page.” They are eager to read the whole book,  lived in different countries in Europe and now moving to the United States , learning about people and culture.

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Mover and Shaker: Susan Nicholson, Director of Product and Marketing, WEX Australia

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 By Cathie Ericson
Susan Nicholson says she always assumed that her degree coupled with hard work would equal success. “Those elements are your ticket to play, but hard work is not enough,” she found.Susan
In addition, she says, “You have to demonstrate mastery, but also align yourself to deliver on key outcomes and be a well-rounded leader. If you don’t work well with others, your ability to move up in the organization is hampered.”
She herself has found that a key to success is always delivering on what she has promised, which creates trust and respect in your network.
 
Growing Her Career and Her Team
 
After earning her graduate degree, she got her start in the buying office for Myer department stores (at the time part of the Coles Myer/WESFARMERS retail group). Over a 13 year career at WESFARMERS, Nicholson worked across their business units from department stores to supermarkets and then focusing much of her time on getting the organization to unlock the insights from their rich data through POS, scheme, shareholder and loyalty programs. She participated in the launch of a Coles Supermarket scheme card they worked on with GE, and after that worked with GE for five years, before joining WEX four years ago where she is currently in the role of Director of Product & Marketing for the Asia Pacific region.
Seeking to emulate the qualities of leaders she has admired over the years, Nicholson says the professional achievement she is most proud of so far is her growth as a leader. She particularly appreciates any chance to instill confidence in women who haven’t yet developed it. “I love to empower them to understand their potential to have a great career,” she says. “When you see your team grow and their accomplishments be recognized it is a commendation of your own role.”
 
“I’ve been able to build a diverse, highly accountable team. While the skills of the team are very different, the values are shared. That’s one of the reasons we all enjoy continuing to push, challenge and improve on what we are doing”
 
“The work we have been doing over the past couple of years in the innovation and digital space has created a great energy across the team and the broader business, and WEX Australia has earned recognition by being named one of the top 50 most innovative companies in Australia for 2016.”
 
In terms of career advice, Nicholson would also encourage others to continue to keep their skill set current. “What are you doing to develop yourself? How are you externally focused? Do you understand your customer needs and pain points? What could be the disrupters to the way you do business?” she challenges.
 

Right now she is looking forward to an imminent fuel card program launch which will bring one of the missing ingredients they’ve been looking for in their existing product sets. “I am excited for the potential for that launch and a big focus on expanding in Asia, which will be a positive challenge for our team.”

 

Career Lessons Learned

While she notes that mistakes will always happen, the most crucial component is how you deal with them; for example by exuding a calmness and having the ability to logically work out next steps to arrive at a solution. Your take away should be what you have learned from the experience and building on that.
 
“Seeing how someone mitigates failure is one of the most telling aspects of their character”
 
In addition she recommends always being ready to jump in to any project and give it your best. “If someone gives you an opportunity, put your hand up so that you can be involved in the newest and most interesting things, which is where you are bound to learn the most,” she advises.
 
“In today’s environment you need to create a culture and be a willing participant in a culture that isn’t afraid of failure, brave enough to try something new and figuring out new paths for organizational growth. Working with companies such as WEX with the freedom to explore, build and grow is really important to me in terms of career satisfaction,” she says.
 
That attitude has led Nicholson to be active in many groups, both internal and external. She was involved in the GE Women’s Network and now at WEX has been active in the Women in Payments Australian Symposiums. WEX is one of the first sponsors of that group in Australia, which fosters a network for women in the payments industry.
 
WEX is currently planning its third sponsorship of the event, which has been a positive way to raise the company’s profile, as well as leverage the network and introduce others to the fact that there is an exciting career path in payments.
 
WEX has a robust leadership program that has given her a lesson she is happy to bring home. “I want to make sure I am giving my two young children the time they need to watch them grow,” she says, a life balance encouraged by WEX.
 
This holistic view has also inspired her to find time to squeeze in fitness and other pursuits. “I am happier and more productive when I achieve a healthy balance in all parts of my life.”  
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