“How I Work”: Sterling Snow, Vice President of Marketing at Divvy | Sales

By Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing

“How I Work” is one of my favorite recurring features in Inc Magazine as well as via Lifehacker’s This Is How I Work Series, and recently several sales experts (including  Anthony Iannarino, Dave Brock and Trish Bertuzzi) participated as well.

Every Thursday we feature a new B2B sales, marketing or business leader here answering what have become the standard “How I Work” questions.  You can catch up on everyone we’ve featured thus far in the “How I Work” series here.

This week, I was pleased to talk to Sterling Snow, VP of Marketing at Divvy.  Divvy is a rapidly growing company that changes how organizations spend. Sterling’s role as the Marketing head includes overseeing and growing all teams. Specifically he focuses on demand generation, marketing operations and automation, marketing communications, and content strategy.  Here in his own words is how he does it:

Leading our amazing team I’ve increased inbound lead flow by over 3000% quarterly, secured tier 1 media placements, implemented a content strategy, overhauled automations processes and helped sales beat booked business records month after month.

Location:  Lehigh, Utah. Affectionately called the Silicon Slopes out here.

How many unread emails do you have right now? I’m usually a zero inbox by the end of the day kind of guy. I’ve got 342 that I’ve got to get through today.

What’s the first app you check in the morning? I check my Divvy app first, request that my teammates make for funds that they need for the day, that kind of thing. Then I’m on LinkedIn.

What’s the first thing you do when you come into work?  I check where we are at with requests in the support queue. I want to take a look at what our customers are asking us, so I go and read the tickets that have come in and I even hop in there and answer a few, just to make sure that I’m staying connected with our customer and what they want and need.

What is your email management strategy? I try to be at zero at the end of the day so I can kind of hit it fresh in the morning. That’s my goal.

What’s your most essential app when traveling?

How do you keep yourself calm and/or focused? I think what I’ve learned is that perspective is just incrediblY important, and it’s never as bad as it seems and it’s never as good as it seems. And if you can go through your day like that, you usually get through them all and live to fight another day.

What’s your perspective or approach to work/life balance?  I think that’s a myth. There’s really no such thing in my mind as balance when it comes to work and life. This is the analogy I like: you’re juggling a bunch of balls, work, family, a bunch of other things, and a couple of those balls are glass and you can’t drop them, but there will be times when you have to focus on one ball that you’re juggling more than the other. So some days, some weeks work is going to dominate, and then there are going to be other weeks where it’s going to be more family or whatever your life balance is. To me it’s really about putting the focus where it needs to be when it needs to be there.

What are any work rituals that are critical to your success? I’m a big believer in culture, and that culture is what ultimately wins the day and makes great companies exceptional. One thing I love is high fiving our teammates at least once a day for something that goes well. I also do an Aaron Rodgers touchdown dance at least once a day. That’s a sight to see.

What app, software, or tool can’t you live without?  Slack, just think of what they’ve done and how much communication and work I do through Slack. It would be a nightmare to live without it.

What does your workspace look like? Open floor plan. I sit out on the floor with all of my team members, and we just like to get stuff done.

What’s your best time-saving shortcut or life hack?  It’s when I open something, I finish it. So if I open the email, it gets responded to. If I look at the text, it gets responded to. Slack message, same thing. It’s a one-touch policy that I’ve found helps me really get control of my time and not spend triple the amount of time to do the same task.

What are you currently reading? Currently reading a book about the Iron Cowboy, who ran 50 marathons in 50 days. It’s a good read.

What’s the last thing you do before you leave work? I check Spend. For Divvy, we’re a free product and we make our revenue based on the amount of Spend that comes across the platform, and that’s our lifeblood, really. So every day before I take off I check and see where we ended the day at and make sure we’re moving the needle in the right direction.

Who are some mentors or influencers that you wish to thank or acknowledge that have been particularly important to you?  It’s a good question, and one that’s super important. I look at Matt Peterson, who was the co-founder and CMO at Jive Communications. I worked for him for a number of years, and he took a lot of time to invest and teach me things that were outside of my scope and were just about the business in general. Things that he had learned, building an extremely successful company. So Matt Peterson, hands down, a mentor that I look up to to this day and am super grateful for, and would be nowhere near where I am without him.

Who are some supportive people that helped make it possible for you to do what you do best? I think you end up looking at family a lot in those situations. I look at my fiance and how patient she is with the late nights and early mornings and all the stuff that goes into building a business and building a career. I just have an enormous amount of gratitude for her letting me be my best self on that front.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? The best advice, in a phrase, is to take ownership. Of your career, of your life in all aspects. Just take ownership. You can’t assign blame or fault or any of that to anyone else. You really just have to decide what you want, what’s important to you, and then make the decisions that lead to that becoming your eventuality.

Name a guilty pleasure TV show.  Okay, I love Suits. I think that is just such a good show. It’s so cheesy and dramatic and I hate myself for liking it but I just do.

I would love to see BLANK answer these same questions. Kobe Bryant, easy.

Nominate someone for this series.   

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