Mindful B2B Marketing | Business Growth and Social Impact (Former: Forward Launch Your SaaS)

S2E1: How to Create a Healthy, High-Performance Marketing Team ft. Jeff Zelaya, VP of Demand Gen at Hite Digital

• Keirra Woodard • Season 2 • Episode 1

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Chapters

0:31

Introduction to High Performance Marketing Team

0:56

Importance of Mindfulness in Marketing

1:43

Jeff's Journey into Marketing

3:48

Impactful Campaigns for Business Growth

5:09

Unbreakable Program Implementation

8:25

Development of Unbreakable Training Program

10:24

Creation of Unbreakable One-Day Program

13:14

Embracing Wellness Initiatives

18:11

Marketing Mindfulness within the Organization

21:59

Implementing Mindfulness Programs at HITE

24:46

Leadership Collaboration for Program Success

30:08

Steps to Implement Mindfulness Programs

32:58

Designing Thoughtful Employee Surveys

34:32

Overcoming Objections and Challenges

37:48

Handling Engagement with Mindfulness Programs

38:14

Connection and Collaboration with Jeff Zelaya

Long Summary

Jeff Zelaya discusses his journey in marketing and the importance of mindfulness in a conversation focused on creating a healthy, high-performance marketing team. He emphasizes the impact of mindfulness on marketing professionals, especially during stressful times. Jeff shares personal experiences from his childhood and describes how he developed a passion for marketing at a young age.

As the VP of Demand Generation at Hite Digital, Jeff delves into the initiatives and programs implemented to prioritize mindfulness within his team. He highlights the "Unbreakable" program, which focuses on resilience and mental toughness through training sessions, breathing exercises, and even ice baths. Jeff explains the positive outcomes of these initiatives, such as improved team retention, morale, and happiness.

The conversation touches on the implementation of mindfulness programs, including the importance of budgeting and measuring success through surveys and feedback. Jeff provides insights into potential obstacles when introducing mindfulness programs, such as resistance from team members or leaders. He emphasizes the need for consistency and adaptability in such initiatives.

Jeff also offers practical advice for marketing leaders looking to integrate mindfulness into their teams, suggesting steps like setting clear goals, designing surveys for feedback, and adapting programs based on results. He emphasizes the importance of being open to feedback and customizing initiatives to suit the team's needs. Jeff encourages connection on LinkedIn for further discussions on mindfulness and marketing practices.

Brief Summary

Jeff Zelaya discusses the significance of mindfulness in marketing teams, sharing personal experiences and insights on implementing mindfulness initiatives.  Jeff emphasizes the positive impact of mindfulness programs on team retention and morale, highlighting the importance of consistency and adaptability. He offers practical advice for marketing leaders, emphasizing clear goals, feedback surveys, and customization based on results. Jeff encourages further discussions on LinkedIn for those interested in integrating mindfulness into marketing practices.

Give feedback on this episode by sending the host a text message.

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[0:32] Okay, so today I am sitting down with Jeff Zelaya, and we are going to talk about how to create a healthy high performance marketing team.
Jeff is the VP of demand generation at Hype Digital and has had quite an interesting career.

[0:52] And so Jeff, I'm super excited to have you on the podcast today.
I am so excited to be here. And let me tell you, congratulations congratulations on your first podcast your launch of this podcast guys you got to tune in this is going to be such an important podcast mindfulness is key to everybody but especially in marketing we're stressed out people we got a lot on our mind we need to be more mindfulness more mindful about our mindfulness so i'm excited to talk about this this is a topic that's very close to my heart so kira let's let's kick this off yeah same same i've just recently been getting into like actual mindfulness and studying up on meditation and things like that.
And it's been really beneficial to me personally.
So kind of incorporated that into the name of the podcast here.

[1:43] But yeah, I just like to kick things off by asking a little bit about how you got into marketing and why it's important to you.
Yeah. So my story goes back to me being being a young kid. And I remember I grew up in Miami, was born and raised in Miami.
But summers, I would go back and help my abuelita in Costa Rica with her store.
She had a little, I would go spend summers with her. And I would spend a lot of time helping her in her store.
And I would think of all types of crazy ideas. Like, grandma, let's get a boombox outside.
Let's put some music on. Let's get some people in here and have a dance contest.
Let's give away some them some ice cream and bring the kids by.
And when people showed up, I would take good care of them, ask them questions, find them the things that they needed, make recommendations, remember people.
And guess what happened? Sales went up.

[2:35] People were happy. My grandma was excited. She would look forward to spending time with me those summers because she knew we would have fun together, but we would also bring more sales in for the store.
So that's, I remember where my love for marketing and sales started.
And then I went to school and I just kind of knew that was my lane and I wanted to stay in that lane. And my first job out of college was at a marketing agency.
And from there, I went through a couple different experiences working for SaaS, startups, consulting, cybersecurity companies.
And now here at HITE, I have the privilege of overseeing an incredible team.
We launched a franchise model. So three years ago when I joined, we brought in this model that resulted in a very quick expansion of our team.
So I'll talk a little bit about how that affected some of the stress of the company and kind of our team there.
But it was an exciting rollercoaster and we made Inc. 5000 List fastest fastest growing agency in America, two years back to back.
So really excited about that. We grew our team from 50 people to 150 people.
And we've had a lot of great successes in these past few years.
So excited to share how mindfulness is tied into a lot of these successes and

[3:45] how it's been helping us, guiding us through some challenging times as well.
Oh, awesome. Awesome. So if you had to focus us in on like a particular campaign or initiative that you started that was beneficial to growing the business.

[4:01] Then what would you say that was?
Oh, wow. So I think from the very beginning, you know, one of our pillars is faith and family and excellence, right?
So when it comes to family, we really care about our family, right? We care about the people around us, our moms, dads, aunties, uncles, brothers, sisters, kids, right?
We care about them. We care about their health, Right. So in our company, we try to we try to have that same culture of caring for our team like we do family, understanding each other, working with each other through the hard times and the good times, celebrating with each other.
Right. And part of that is, I think, always as a priority, prioritizing the health of my team, making sure that we are intentional about taking care.
How can we help that person better take care of themselves?
Because if they better take care of themselves, they're going to show up better for their family. They're going to show up better at their job.
They're going to show up better for their clients and for their team.

[4:56] So we've always kind of had that from the very beginning in terms of this is something that we want to create a company that cares about this.

[5:03] And because of that, we've always had different initiatives in our company's

[5:06] history that focused on mindfulness.
And I'll tell you one of the flagship programs that we have at Hype, which is called Unbreakable.
So every new team member that we bring on to height goes through what is called the Unbreakable Program, which is a day spent with our leadership coach where we undergo a series of training to understand how the mind works, how to develop this mindset of being unbreakable, being tough, being resilient.

[5:34] Because in marketing and business, you're going to get knocked out.
You're going to get knocked out and it's going to hurt.
You're going to have some painful moments. But it's not about getting knocked out. It's about getting back up and keeping going, right? So we want to develop that with our mind.
And that's the culture we want to have in our company, right?
Because we want people to get out there and do things.
And sometimes you will fail, but it's how you deal with that failure, what you learn from the failure, making sure that we don't repeat the same failure, right?
So this is all covered in this day-long training outside of the space where it's very serene.
We do it at different centers, different places around, but it's very serene, very quiet.
We also do breathing. So we practice on our breathing.
If you could control your breathing and your thoughts, you could control your life much better.
So to deal with stress, and we practice different breathing exercises.
So our coach walks us through that.
Different breathing exercises that help with our stress, with our anxiety, when we're having some difficult moments.

[6:36] Getting into our right breathing so that we could then assess what we need to do next, right? So we work on that intentionally.
So that's all part of our new hire training.
And then that is finalized with what's called an ice bath.
And many of our new team members haven't done this before, very new to them.
You guys may be familiar with ice baths, but we take bags and bags of ice, dump them into a tub, fill it up with water, and bring that temperature to a very low mark. park and your challenge with getting into that bathtub.
Now, it's not mandatory.
I'll just tell you this. Everyone that has worked behind has done it, right? The training at least is mandatory.
You have to do it. You don't have to get into the ice bath. If you really, for health reasons, you can't, but we encourage you to break that barrier, right?
Whatever that layer, whatever that limiter is you have, break through it, get in the ice.
And people have been able to accomplish things that they didn't think were possible by getting into that ice.
Many times they feel like giving up within seconds of getting in, but through that meditation, through that mindfulness, through that getting into that area where like, ooh, I could do this, right?
Guess what? They break, they go two minutes, three minutes. We've had people say 10 minutes in the ice.
And it's been just incredible to see what that does to a person.

[7:51] Many sometimes have certain experiences in the past that have put baggage on them.
And a lot of times they get in that ice, they get out, they're a different person.
They're much lighter. They're excited.
They're They're energized and ready to take on whatever comes their way.
So that's, again, one of the very intentional things that we've done at height to be able to empower people and make them aware of mindfulness and how much we care about it at our company.

[8:17] Wow. Okay. So this, this unbreakable training program, was that something that

[8:22] you guys developed on your own? Were you like spearheading that?
Did you bring in some kind of outside company to set up this program or how, how did it get started?
And like, how, how is it run now? Okay.
Very, very interesting question how this got started. So at HITE, one of the other things that we do that also covers mindfulness, we bring in guest speakers every Friday to talk to our team.
Now, these guest speakers are not just about business.
They actually cover areas outside of business many times, areas like our health, right? So we have speakers that have come in to talk about our teeth and dentists that have talked about taking care of our teeth hygiene.
We talked about financial health and how to get our finances and budget in order.
We've had people that come in to give motivation and encouragement.
We've had a nutritionist come in to talk about eating healthy and how to develop good nutritional habits. habits.

[9:14] So we really focus on bringing in some guest speakers that are quality speakers to talk about a variety of mindfulness related and health related and topics that our team cares about.
So with that, we had a speaker come in. His name is Jose Bolaños.
And he did an incredible session on mindfulness and breathing and a mindset.
And through that session, our CEO, JC, just saw so much value in it.
They said, I need you on my team full time.
How can we get this training to every Every single person that comes to height kind of starting with us, how do we get this and make this happen?
So through some conversations, we figured out a way to bring him on our team.
And he now is doing that, has done that for the majority of our team, as well as with other, we have done other sessions for business owners to teach them these techniques and strategies so that they could go and teach their team how to do it.
So we've been spreading this a lot because we see the impact that it has had on our team in terms of how they deal with challenges and difficulties and just building a more resilient kind of culture within our organizations.

[10:18] Hmm. Okay. Okay. Okay. So, but how did the one day program get started?
That's what I want to know. Cause I want to know like how, how specifically, how did you guys develop this and like, like put it together?
Like who put it together? Was it you or was it somebody else?
So that was strictly to the coach. We brought in the coach. He does this.
He has done this for business leaders before. He's been doing this for business leaders and has done seminars and workshops.
So he came to the height. He exposed us to this, especially the CEO.
And he saw the CEO says, no, we need this here full time. So by working with him closely, we started collaborating on what would a program look like for our new hires.
And that's what we started designing that curriculum.
But that really was spearheaded by coach Jose Bolaños.
And he is the one that's developed that curriculum. It's called the Unbreakable or Incrementable program.
And it's been the flagship of Heights onboarding for the past two years almost. most.

[11:18] Okay. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. You have a coach who already knows how to put this together.
They're collaborating with you and then customizing the program to height.
Yeah. And that may be what a lot of, I'm sure some people have B2B marketing leaders that are listening to this podcast, marketing leaders.
You guys may not know a lot about mindfulness and that's okay.
Right. I didn't know a lot about it either until I got exposed to people that did.
And sometimes that means getting, hiring a coach, you know, paying someone to say, I say, hey, can you show me this mindfulness? What is it all about?
I read about it. I see it. But I just need someone to really walk me through it.
And sometimes we need to get exposed to that, hire someone to walk us through that.
And then we start realizing we become woke to what is possible.
And then we start looking for ways to do it in the rest of our lives or with other people.

[12:04] So for you personally, like what was the difference kind of before and after you actually went through this program, you learned the breathing techniques, you went through the one day training and all of that, like how, how, how did it impact you?
Like, and your understanding of mindfulness or your understanding of yourself or even like your performance at work?
Great. So, yeah, we'll talk about some of the impact that it had.
But let me tell you that one-day training is not enough.
So I want to make sure that I make that clear that if you're thinking about doing mindfulness as an initiative in your organization, don't think this one-day workshop is going to cut it.
Okay, great. I talked about mindfulness. Let me check that box and move on.

[12:48] It's about being intentional and being consistent with how you carry out.
This really is important to your company and to your people and show it by showing up consistently. consistently.
So that being said, we want to make sure with our breathing, it was not just that one program, but we also had weekly meetups, right?
So like Wednesday, we would have a breathing break, right?

[13:13] So anyone is welcome. It's an open Zoom.
Anyone's welcome to come to that, show up, turn your camera.
You don't have to have your camera on if you don't want to. Get in a comfortable spot.
And then you have our coach walking you through some breathing exercises because you might need that during the break.
You might have a stressful call or whatever. You just need someone want to jump on, hey, walk me through some of that.
So those are some of the other things that we're doing consistently. We also pray together.
So I know this is kind of maybe some weird for some companies.
You may not be in the position to do that or want to do that, and that's cool.
But at our company, we just value that because it is a form of meditation, prayer, and thanking God and grounding ourselves in gratitude and expressing our wins.
These are things that we do consistently within the culture and to be more mindful and to develop that as a muscle in our organization.

[14:02] But there's been challenges, right? Because it's easy to forget.
And that's kind of the point I was trying to make. It's so many things you could do, but it's hard to remember them. And so you got to build habits.
You got to build routines.
You got to make it kind of non-negotiable, right? Right.
So another non-negotiable, something that we're very keen on is making sure that we're encouraging people to take time off, to disconnect.

[14:23] That's hard to do. Right. Because I got clients. I got we got work to do.
So now you got to take time off. You know, it may it's something that's maybe counterintuitive to some bosses.
But if you're a true leader, you know, the importance of encouraging your team to take time off, to disconnect, to come back fresh and recharge. charge, right?
So those are other things that we do consistently in order to try to permeate a culture of mindfulness, but it's not easy, right?
We've been faced with challenges. One of the challenges we've had was COVID, huge challenge that we were faced with, right?
Where people needed more mindfulness because now they were stressed out, they were anxious, they had a lot of challenges, may have gotten laid off or all these other things, right?
So we had things that that we did there even during that time to be able to stay connected virtually like zoom exercise classes where we got together to do some zoom some zumba and yoga and it was all guided and we hired a coach to to do that gym to do that training for us we also encourage giving back together so how can we get together as a team and get back to an organization that one of us cares about a lot so our coo is very passionate about dogs and like orphanages for dogs so and like abandoned dogs.
So she put out a cause, people were receptive and they wanted to participate, and we got some funds together for a very good cause.

[15:46] We've done this for not just animals, but we've done it for orphanages of kids, and we've given back to lots of different communities.
But that's something, again, mindfulness is there, right? That's part of mindfulness, gratitude, giving back, having impact.

[16:02] Meditation is not just mindfulness. There's a lot of different different ways to practice that, encouraging it.
Within our office, when we got back together, we decided, let's put a cafeteria in the office.
And we'll have all kinds of options, but make sure that we're providing healthy options for people.

[16:19] Our team because they were sometimes rushing to get to the office. Traffic was bad.
Many times they forgot to eat breakfast. There weren't a lot of great options.

[16:27] Around the office. So let's bring in and make our own cafeteria.
So we started funding that. And it was, everything was kind of at cost.
We weren't making money off of it. It was just a way to give back to our team and provide some healthy options so they could, you know, take care of their body and eat fresh food and good, delicious food and be able to still get their work done.
And, you know, we've consistently looked for opportunities. Another one was we had a lot of moms that were, they were about to give birth.
So we opened up a nursery in our office.

[16:55] Again, encouraging moms, take your time. You don't have to rush to get back.
Obviously you got all your maternity leave that you want, but when you're ready to get back, we have a space here that makes it easy for you to transition into the workplace.
You know how much stress that took off the moms that took advantage of that, right?
They didn't have to worry about finding a place for the kids, you know, or you having to go back and forth, you know, breastfeeding, all that stuff, They have a safe private place with nursery beds and toys for the kids.
So things like that. We also brought in a chaplain. We had a chaplain in-house.
So for those that wanted some spiritual mindfulness, spiritual guidance, they had someone there.
They could realize a pastor with many, many years of experience.
He was retired and chose to partner with us to give back.
And we gained a lot from that relationship with the chaplain.
And he gave a lot of – he worked with married – we have in the office, we have some married team members.
So he worked with – just did a great job helping people wanting to get married or were in the marriage.

[17:59] Sometimes we had unfortunate losses as well, people that lost a loved one.
He was there to help them through that grievance process.

[18:08] So these are things that we offer, and we're going to make it intentional.
The biggest marketing campaign you will ever run for mindfulness should be within your own organization.
But in your own organization, right? How are you going to preach mindfulness, talk about it to others, market it, if you're not doing it yourself?
So I encourage, I think this is a great first episode is for everyone to be challenged.
If you're listening to this podcast, do I have a culture of mindfulness in my office? Do I have it in my workplace?
And if not, how can I create it if it's important to me? And let me tell you about the benefits, right? Because you asked about what's the results?
What do we get out of incorporating these different things that you're doing, Jeff?
Let me tell you what happens. Measure these KPIs, the happiness of your team.
How important is that to you? The morale.
These are things that may be hard to measure, right? It's more qualitative than quantitative many times, although you could send out a survey and probably get some numeric values back. But the happiness, you could tell when people are happy.
You could tell. It's something about their voice, something about how they do their jobs, something about how they show up.
That, you can't sometimes measure it exactly, but I see the impact that's had in the morale of the team and how happy they are and how it shows through attendance.
Attendants, many of them, I have to encourage them to take time off because they want to show up. They love working here.

[19:28] You could see it through how many applications we get for people that want to work here.
Because the word gets out. It's doing all these different things to take care of the team. Who wouldn't want to work in the place?
They actually care about you? They're not just using you to do a job and paying you the bare minimum. They actually care about you?
Yeah, of course. So applications are way up, right? We're getting some top talent.
We're attracting some really good talent.
Why? So that's the ROI, right? Those are the benefits.
People are staying longer. Retention is very high. It's rare to see someone leave the team.
Very rare, right? They don't want to go once they're part of it, especially the managers and the leaders, right? Because of all the stuff that we're doing.
That's the ROI. That's the ROI. And I'm not even counting the ROI that our clients get.
Because when our team is on top of their thing, right?
When morale is high, when they're feeling good, when they're looking good, don't you just perform at a better place, right? So think about that.
How is that impacting the phone calls that these account managers are making or the outreach the salespeople are having?

[20:34] The going above and beyond. When we have an after-hours emergency issue, the loyalty of the team is unmatched. Because why?
We care about them. We treat them like family.
We're concerned about their mindfulness. We want them to have good mental health, good spiritual health, good physical health. right?
Professionally, we want them to be healthy. So we have programs where they could continue to train and be challenged because that's another area in mindfulness that you may be challenging your mental health if you're not truly challenging yourself at your job.
If you ever work at a job where you feel like, man, these guys aren't using me.
I'm like running at 10% of what I could possibly be. That's going to weigh on you.
It's going to take a toll on your mental health, right so guess what at high we are constantly challenging our team pushing forward we have different levels that they could grow to professionally so they have a pathway for their next promotion for their next raise so those are other areas that we're constantly investing in and our team that is all focused around creating more mindful team members that are that are growing in every single area of their life yeah i love this i love i love how many different ways is that this is incorporated.
You have, you guys have so many different programs, but so specifically for you, you're the, you're the marketing leader and you have been for a couple of years now, right?

[21:59] Yeah. So with you coming into this company, were they already doing a lot of these different programs or were a lot of them implemented like since the time that you got there? Yeah.
So a lot of these actually started getting implemented around the time that I got there because I got there around COVID.
So I was right on the team at the very end of the height of COVID, right?

[22:22] So they were in need of this because during COVID, think about how our mental health suffered, right? There was a lot of stress, anxiety. anxiety.
So I think at that point, we just became more serious about, okay, this is going to be a focus of ours, right?
We need to be really dedicated to instilling this type of culture within our organization.
I'm not saying we didn't have it before, but I know it was much improved during the COVID time because we started prioritizing and realized, oh, shoot, this is a.

[22:49] This is super important. Like we got to make sure we do this.
So even, even things like having a more flexible schedule, right.
In the past, you had to show up at the office.
That's not the case anymore. Right now COVID is giving us, and even through that, right.
Even now, not just because, just because of our ability or want for freedom and flexibility, like having schedules where we could work with people to, to, you know, they wouldn't need to travel or they're working at a different city.
They could do that. No worries. Right. Right. So these are all things that were accelerated because of the COVID era.
Right. And I was very fortunate to be brought on at the company during that time to kind of help continue building that momentum of programs that would help continue helping their mindfulness, developing their mindfulness.

[23:35] OK, so with your role in as part of the team, so you're you're you're the director, VP of marketing.
So within that, how big was your team when you got to height?
And when you say you're helping to implement these programs, are you in board meetings with the CEO and some other top leaders?
Are you pitching ideas and bouncing back and forth with each other?
Or are you like kind of implementing some of these initiatives like on your own or like going and researching them and bringing them in?
Like to what extent are you like personally having an influence on this or like driving things forward?
Yeah. So these conversations are happening at the C-level and we're meeting, it's a group of five of us at the time when we were going through these conversations.
So our leadership coach, our CEO, our COO, and our leader of product and myself.
So between us, at the time of me coming on board, we had about 50 people.

[24:40] That we oversaw. I think my team was maybe six, seven people when I started.
And then from there, it kind of expanded. It grew.

[24:46] But we had weekly conversations with the executives. How is this doing?
How are we doing here in this area? Something that we really focused a lot on was the result of our surveys.
So that spurred a lot of what we created. So we would have quarterly job happiness surveys, where we would send out various questions just about asking them them about what they like, what they didn't like.
So that would guide a lot of the programs that we would build.
Like for example, one program that came out of that was wanting to get reimbursement for gym membership.
So some people were not able to attend the exercise classes and they'd rather say, hey, how about you just give me the funds and I could go to my own gym or do my own workout and I could get that money back.
So we customized. So we listened to the people.
We constantly, And then that helped us brainstorm different ideas and strategies to implement and then figuring out, okay, how do we actually do this? How do we roll this out?
Because there is a price associated with any of these initiatives.
If we agree to do something, we got to calculate, okay, is that feasible to do? Do we have that in the budget?

[25:54] What's the cost of that? Opportunity costs or other?
So I went through that kind of conversation analysis before we decided, OK, let's run everything that we did. We rolled it out company wide.
Right. And we believe that was the best way to do it because we didn't want to just for some only some few people to benefit and others not.
If we're going to benefit, let's all benefit.
Right. And that's kind of the mentality that we took.
OK, so you're sending out surveys and you're tracking results.
Results you're implementing in these conversations with the C team, the, the best ideas.
And then you're, but you're, before you push out an idea, you're calculating like the potential, if not like ROI, then at least like the opportunity cost or how much is it going to cost? And like, is it worth it?
So can you tell me a little bit on like, like numerically, how are you kind of calculating these trade-offs?
Like, do you guys have a budget or like, Like, how do you know if it's worth it to invest in a program or how do you decide to do something else?
Yeah. You know, sometimes we don't know, right? But what we do know is that we have to set aside part of our budget to invest in our team.
And that's something that's mandatory, right? We decide that at the beginning of our budgeting season, right? What that's going to be.
And then every, there's different budgets, but there's a global budget, but there's also team budgets that are available to do special team functions, right? Right. For example, like a special team get together to take them out to dinner or whatnot.

[27:20] So, you know, that's one of the part of the analysis, right?
Like, OK, what is that budget?
How is it going to be shared? Right. And then how do we decide what programs to allocate the budget to?
So I think that kind of is just a creation process establishing that.
But then we get to have discussions around which programs would work and which won't. Right. And sometimes it's about trying stuff.
So, like, for example, the weekly breathing that we were doing, it was great for a season, but after a while, people just stopped showing up.
They just were too busy. So we paused it. We didn't see people showing up.
So we pulled back and we tried something new.
So we also look at stuff like that. How are people taking in?
Just because you offer a benefit doesn't mean people always take advantage of it.
So that's one thing that I'm measuring. How many people are actually using this, taking advantage of? And the other one, obviously, the upfront expense, right, like the hard cash, how much is it going to cost us to do it, or the time, or even the people that will run it.
We have something that we started recently has been Slack clubs.

[28:23] So we've organized, we've sent out some surveys and surveyed, hey, do you want to join clubs?
Like back in high school, hey, the art club, the exercise club, the volunteer club, the spiritual club. Okay, great.
We've organized them in Slack, and now people are joining it.
They're part of these clubs that get together and do different activities.
So for that to work, someone has to manage that. It doesn't just kind of happen on its own.
You have to be intentional about setting it up, curating the communities, analyze this work. So we have a person dedicated to that.
I could have spent her time maybe doing other stuff, but now she's doing this stuff. So we're going to see. How does that work?
Will it work? I don't know, but we're willing to try it out.
And I think that's been kind of our attitude, right? Like just seeing how, and then in terms of like other things that I measure is like retention rate of my team, how many people are staying.
We have retention rate above 90%. So it's very, again, like I said earlier, once you get into high, like very rare that you'll get kicked out or lose your job or anything like that. Yeah, we want to make sure we do a good job of bringing on the right people.
But retention, happiness, morale, right? We can look at surveys and scale one to five. How happy are you here? We want to be on the five.

[29:33] And in different areas, right? How are we living up to our values?
So we get data on that through our surveys.
So those are kind of the biggest, the most important things that we look at, is when we do these programs is what's the cost? What's the investment?
And then what's our potential return?
And did it work? Did it not? If it worked, great. How can we do more of it, expand it? If it didn't work, okay, let's move on. Why didn't it work?
And then let's move on to the next.

[29:58] Okay. Yeah, I love that. I love that. And so if we had to look at this kind of step-by-step, let's say I'm in...

[30:08] VP of marketing at a company and I've got a team and I wanted to implement something similar, some kind of mindfulness or something to improve the team culture, like step-by-step, what would you have me do to go from a culture where we don't really consider these things to actually having it be integrated into the marketing team or into the company as a whole, if I can push for that as well. Yeah.

[30:39] So a couple of places, it depends on where you're at kind of in your company.
If you have influence to be able to say, okay, we're doing this and it gets done, or you have to convince other people to buy in. So I think it depends a lot on that.
But if you are at the very top or part of that C-suite team, then I think it's just about taking a stance and saying, hey, I think this is important.
We need to do this. And I don't.

[31:01] You shouldn't like if they're good. I don't want to say they shouldn't push back.
Right. Because I think there's a case to be made and you could find it, you know, online.
So you could get data like if you really care about this, it will impact your organization. It's impacting it already, whether you know it or not.
So be in control of it. Right. By being intentional about setting a program.
And I would say just take a first step. Right. Like what is a program that you could create that could show the company that mindfulness is important to you and start thinking about what that would be for your company and just start there.
All right, okay, let's create that program. What's exactly the benefit?
What will it cost? Who is it going to benefit? How can people take advantage of this?
How will we continue to nurture this and be consistent with this?
And if we can answer all those questions, then launch it, announce it, get people to buy into that, right? And if you want to even make it more interactive, get people to survey it and say, hey, how are you liking this?
What else should we be doing?
And then measure that. And I think through that one particular focus, you could get enough data to say, oh, wow, I can see this. This is working.
There's momentum there, appetite. Let's keep going.

[32:10] And then you could grow it from there. I think that's kind of the step-by-step is putting your foot down, bringing it up, saying this is important to me.
Making sure your team is bought in right if they are create that first initiative focus on that get people your team bought into that active with that take some feedback and see if it's working and if so then continue that and add on or if not pull the plug and try something else okay and when you're getting feedback from the people in your company you said you're mainly mainly doing it through surveys.
So what are you doing? Like sending out that quarterly survey.

[32:48] Maybe through an email or something like that?
And what kind of questions are you asking? And how do you design that survey

[32:55] thoughtfully to make sure that you're getting high quality data from it?
That's great. So luckily, I don't have to create that survey, but our HR team does a lovely job of designing the survey and they go through organizing the questions.
But they're asking pretty much like different parts of our values like hey how do you feel we're doing on the side of family how are we doing on the side of excellence right what areas you know look at these programs that we have how how well are you using them you know how valuable are that are they to you one to five right and that's some of the questions that we're asking is just kind of around the different programs that we have overall kind of like the team members morale you know any opportunities for us to improve, you know, how are they enjoying working as part of their team?

[33:41] So all that stuff is just like maybe like a three-page survey that people are almost required to fill.
Like we really push it so very hard, very hard, very few, very rare that people don't fill that out because we want to know, right?
We create that culture of open feedback because, and then we use the feedback that they give us, right?
So then when we get all that information back, we summarize it, and we analyze it, and then we figure out what to do with it.
And we do that at least quarterly.
We do those surveys. Unless there's something special happening, then we may do another one, but we try to keep them to a quarterly cadence.
Okay. That makes a lot of sense.
Have there been any like obstacles you've encountered that other people might run into or like some pitfalls that, you know, leaders might encounter if they

[34:30] try to implement a program like this?
I think part of it, some people won't be open to it. And that's all right.
I first thought that was a challenge.
Oh, man, not everyone's going to accept this. And then I realized that's all right. Some people are just not wired that way.
And I can't get offended by it. Or, you know, we still love them, right? It's still part of our family.
So that's cool, right? And others will embrace it and they'll really go for it and you'll see it benefit them. And so I think that's definitely a challenge, right?
Like, it's not going to always be great for everybody. You might have some exceptions.

[35:06] And then I think the other kind of challenge that you'll run into is the one I mentioned earlier, being consistent with it.
Because I find like mindfulness kind of like, you know, like a lot of things, right?
It could be seasonalities, right, of mindfulness that you could go through.
And consistency could be difficult unless you're very intentional, very disciplined about doing that, right? Not forgetting about that.
So I think that's the other one, just kind of, you know, if you're going to commit to it, commit to it, dedicate yourself to it and see it through.

[35:34] Hmm. Okay. Okay. And when you say sometimes people are raising objections or they're just like not into it, is that like the team members or like, like the other leaders you're working with?
And like, what, what are some of the objections that they come up with?
Or like, what, what are some ways that they, they might act that is a little bit anti your programs? Yeah. So I'll give you an example.
We had the cleaning lady also take part because we want all our members.
We're not excluding anybody.
So the cleaning lady, she's already older.
She's been through different stages of life.
This is not something that she would find – she just didn't think she would find valuable. valuable, right?
Like she has other ways to deal with mindfulness.
I just put it that way. Right.
And, you know, this way, maybe it wasn't the way for her. Like she doesn't think breathing like ice baths, that may not be so that that's just fine.
Like sometimes people, and it may go just to go through it, but they're not really believers are like, yeah, this is not, this is not working for me.

[36:38] You know, it's okay. I don't know why that's the case. I don't know the science behind it. I don't know. Maybe it's their mindset. I don't know, but I just know that you're going going to face that.
So if you do, don't feel challenged by that. That's just, that's okay.
We're not, not everyone is going to be a believer and that's okay.
Just take the ones that are on the ride and see how that works out for them.
Okay. So when people aren't into it, you generally just kind of like saying, okay, well go on about, go on about the rest of your life and, you know, do, do it whatever way works for you.
Like if you're, you're in the middle of your seminar and like somebody doesn't want to do an ice bath, you just kind of shrug your shoulders and saying, okay, that's fine, and then move on to the next person?
Or how are you handling it?
Yeah, the ice bath is not like we've had people.

[37:23] I think one for health reasons maybe sat out, the other one.
I don't know exactly what. But we forgot about it. It's okay, right? We moved on. It's not...
This is not forced. Mindfulness shouldn't be forced. You can't force mindfulness on people. How are we going to do that?
So I think people have to be open and receptive to it.
And if not, that's okay. Find a way for them to still kind of be engaged as

[37:46] much as they can, but don't make a big fuss about it.
Focus on the people that are engaged, the ones that are bought in and spend time there.
They're going to gain benefit from them. them. And typically what happens is the ones that did buy in get benefits from it.
And the one that sat out, so I was looking at those benefits and say, shoot, I want that.
Cause I saw where he was at. Okay. Okay. I'm in now. So you'll see some of that happening too.

[38:09] Oh, awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, yeah, I really appreciate this conversation, Jeff.
And you know, as we're wrapping up, I would just like to ask if there is anything, any projects you're working on, anything you'd like to promote or there's anywhere that you'd like people to get in touch with you?
Yeah. So the best place to connect with me is on LinkedIn. Send me an invite.
I'm always looking to connect with marketing leaders. I have an extensive network, actually put together events where we bring together marketing leaders to do roundtables and openly discuss kind of best practices, things that are working, campaign ideas.

[38:44] And it's just a great place to get some good dialogue in between like-minded people.
So please reach out to me on LinkedIn, connect with me there on Instagram, Jeff Zelaya, Z-E-L-A-Y-A.
I look forward to connecting with you. Kara, thank you so much.
Congratulations on the launch of Mindful B2B Marketing. And I'm so excited for this journey.
I can't wait to tune in to amazing guests you're going to be inviting to your show. Yeah, thank you so much, Jeff.