The CMO Spotlight is a chance to get an inside look into the minds and journeys of high performing marketing leaders. 

Setup CEO Joe Koufman virtually sat down with Lauren Weatherly, the Senior Vice President of PGi. Weatherly shares her career and leadership experience working in telecom and how, through emotional intelligence, communication, and intuition, she rose above the ranks. 

WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW AND READ THE RECAP BELOW. 

Q1 | Tell us about your career path.

Weatherly finished her MBA and spent nearly 15 years at her first telecom company. After climbing from a Product Manager to a Director level, PGi recruited her to work in channel marketing. Now six years later, after working in Demand Generation for a number of years, she is SVP at PGi.

Weatherly is excited by all the aspects marketing offers. “You have to look at marketing from an end-to-end perspective, you have to understand why the product ticks and how it ticks and why people are interested in it too. How do you build compelling content around it? And then you have to understand the entire digital experience, the entire buyer journey, who your personas are...it just gives you all those fundamental building blocks that really cover marketing as a whole.”

Q2 | What is your super power? 

Weatherly prides herself on her intuition which enables her to sense what is needed from people on her team. This gift is partially attributed to her keen awareness of emotional intelligence and its importance in the workplace. 

“As I'm hearing things and having conversations and engaging with people, I feel like I'm a very intuitive person and I can see beyond what's being said to me. It enables me to ask questions that maybe get to the next layer of things.” 

Q3 | Is there a piece of advice that you would like to pass onto other marketers?

Emotional intelligence is important for communicating ideas, valuing team members, and creating strong teams/relationships. Weatherly learned the importance of EQ from a prior CMO. 

“The emotional and the EQ side of our intelligence plays such an amazingly critical role, and it really was a pivotal moment for me in terms of gaining confidence in myself and seeing something that I bring to the table that not everyone necessarily can bring to the table.” 

Q4 | What is the biggest challenge that you're facing in your current role? 

When there is so much going on, Weatherly stated that staying above the noise is the biggest challenge. They need to know how to be in the right place, in the right space, in front of the right people, and at the right time. 

Q5 | What are the most important values that you demonstrate as a leader, or that you may even demand from people on your team?

1. Respect - “Holding each other to a standard, holding yourself to a standard. I think respect is just a critical aspect of all relationships.” 

2. Open-mindedness - “Hearing each other and listening.” 

3. Personal integrity - “Just to be able to stand by what you do, what you believe.” 

4. Constant communication - “Coaching and mentoring isn't something that you set a time to do, it's sort of in your day-to-day.”

For more marketing leadership advice and a view into the mindset of a marketing executive, be sure to watch the full interview with Lauren Weatherly, and keep an eye out for more thought leadership from our CMO Spotlights.