In this episode of Marketing Personalities, Brit Kolo interviews Dannie Fountain, who’s a side-hustling Marketing Strategist for creative entrepreneurs AND a full-time Ad Sales expert at Google. In this discussion, Brit and Dannie discuss what it’s like for Dannie to be growing a career at Google and a thriving side-hustle and how her Marketing Personality Type is helping her stay focused, growing, and living a life she loves.
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Links:
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Using Your Marketing Personality Type Episode Summary:
Welcome to another episode of the Marketing Personalities Podcast! I’m Brit Kolo and I’m here today with Dannie Fountain, who is a Marketing Strategist for creative entrepreneurs and a full-time Ad Sales expert at Google.
Right off the bat, you’ll notice that Dannie Fountain has lots of moving parts in her life. She works a full-time job at Google. She runs a thriving side-hustle business. She travels all over the country and world all year long.
This girl is living an eclectic, vibrant life, if you ask me!
So I brought Dannie on the podcast to talk about all these moving parts to see how her personality type might help her do and balance these things, hoping we could all glean some wisdom from how she approaches work, marketing, sales, and life in general.
First of all, Dannie has been running her Marketing Strategy company for 11 years now. And since entrepreneur years are like dog years, that’s basically a lifetime. Okay, not really! But we do joke about that.
I also learned in this conversation that Dannie went full-time in her business back in 2015-2016 but then, in the a “famine” season in 2017, applied to a bunch of jobs and got a solid job offer from Google. Since “you don’t say ‘no’ to Google,” Dannie took the opportunity and has been balancing the full-time career with the side-hustle business since.
She reflected that while this may seem crazy to some, she recognizes that she’s a procrastinator by nature so if she had all the time in the world to work in her business, she wouldn’t get much done. But because she only has 10 hours a week to work on her business, she’s ultra-productive in those side-hustle hours, while not wasting time.
I think the full-time entrepreneurial lifestyle has been over-glorified ad nauseum in the past few years, so this peek behind the curtain with Dannie gives a great example that having a professional career AND a business can be just that – a both/and. Not an either/or situation.
We then talked about how Dannie approaches her role at Google. What makes her approach to ad sales different from her other team members?
She tells us that while many of her team members are technical wizards, knowing all the techy ins and outs of Google Ads, she takes a more holistic, empathetic approach to ad sales. She works with businesses on their Google Ad strategy based on their goals and is willing to look at the whole picture of their online ad footprint.
This approach stands out to me as something heavily driven by Dannie’s personality type as an ENFJ. See, if Dannie wasn’t willing to utilize her natural strengths and preferences, she might be inclined to becoming more technical in her sales techniques. This wouldn’t feel natural to her and she might not be as successful in reaching her sales quotas. But because she’s allowed her natural ENFJ tendencies to shine through, helping her Google clients to have a clear WHY behind their ad strategy and being empathetic to the bigger picture, she’s been successful.
We see this dynamic play out in how Dannie markets her own business too.
See, she only has about 10 hours a week to not just market her business but actually serve her clients. With no time to get distracted, Dannie doesn’t try to be everywhere online, marketing in all the ways. She’s identified that as an ENFJ, speaking feels awesome to her. So, as you’ll hear in the episode, she only focuses on booking speaking gigs. As long as she has those booked, she knows that’s all the marketing she needs to keep running her thriving business. And since speaking feels good to her, she shows up on stage feeling good, her audience then feels good, and BOOM, sales happen.
This was an inspiring interview for me to do because it so beautifully demonstrated how much FREEDOM we truly have at our disposal when we lean into what comes naturally to us, what feels good to us, and let the other things that were never meant for us to fade away.
Dannie’s leaning into her ENFJ super powers, leaving all the other things behind, and living a lifestyle she genuinely loves.
This is what it’s about.
Thanks for listening!
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