Luis Báez, a Sales Enablement Strategist who has worked with tech giants like LinkedIn, Uber, Tesla, and Google, explains why LinkedIn is the best employment experience he’s ever had, how the same customers behave radically differently depending on the platform they're engaging with, creating a "water cooler" in a virtual setting, and how accepting messiness was important to his success.Hear Luis's full interview in Episode 459 of The Action Catalyst.
The best career experience I've ever had was at LinkedIn. The culture is bar none. And I mean, you would expect so, right? They're the world's largest professional network. And so the ways that you build your career and the kind of career experience that you have are very carefully designed.
So I borrow a lot of my ideas and my playbooks from the experiences that I had there and from the leaders that I engaged with while I was there.
I'm always intrigued by companies that are able to create that culture.
It is not impossible, right? I'm going to say that it certainly takes some time and some effort and investment. It takes some shedding of old skin and old assumptions about how we do business and how we should be doing business. But once you let go and you put your faith in the process and in the methodology, it can be a really wonderful experience for everyone.
It can be a really wonderful experience for you as a leader to see that your team is optimally productive and people are happy and you are trending to hit your own goals for your higher ups. And then the people who are engaging directly with customers, they feel a sense of responsibility to the customer in a very different way. They feel like a stakeholder and an owner in it.
You know, a lot of folks will, you know, ask, where do I build my community?
Yeah, a different customer intent. If I want to like break it down from that, the same person that I might be engaging with will spend their time on LinkedIn differently than on Instagram. When I engage with them on LinkedIn, I'm offering advice. When I'm hanging out with them on Instagram, we're sharing memes. It's the water cooler versus the boardroom, right?
And when you think about engaging with your colleagues or coworkers or customers in everyday situations and physical spaces, yeah, there are moments where you button up because it's time to do business. And there are moments where you let your hair down. And so I have to think about how to create those experiences in virtual settings. And that ultimately was my approach.
I had a different presence on each channel, but I was engaging with the same pool of business owners who were on these platforms for their own marketing needs or maybe researching and sourcing customers for themselves.
What feedback or advice would you give a young version of yourself? Like a 21-year-old Luis that's coming out. What do you think that 21-year-old version of you would need to hear from yourself today?
Start sooner and it's going to be messy no matter how much you try. So just get used to that. The younger me was like this perfectionist who had a 10-year plan. I grew up in poverty first in my family to receive an education. I wasn't going to blow my shot. Like I had a method. It was a way that I was going to continue to grow and and come up in my career.
And I think because of that, I delayed starting things because it wasn't the right time, or I didn't start because it didn't look right, or it was messy, or it wasn't perfect. But over time, I've learned the power of progress over perfection. So if I could go back to my younger self, I would impart that knowledge on them and say, Everything you want is going to happen.
Everything that you deserve is already in motion. Start now. Get it done. Slap lipstick on it later.
Yeah, that's good.
We're going to get you a t-shirt made that says that.