Editor’s Note: This transcript was created using AI transcription and formatting tools. While we’ve reviewed it for accuracy, some errors may remain. If anything seems unclear, we recommend referring back to the episode above.
Episode Trailer
So sometimes there’s going to be scenarios where like the things that could get you the best lift in conversion is going to need product development and often times you know teams are running lean and there’s not a lot of time or maybe even buy-in from the developer side to be able to you know accommodate what’s being asked for.
I started off my internet marketing journey as an SEO and self-taught PPC and UX cuz back in the mid 2000s there wasn’t really kind of formal training for this everybody was just on forums and digesting as much as you could and you know like figuring it out on the fly. CRO as an industry and as like a career choice for people has kind of blossomed so there now there’s a lot of voices there’s a lot of people on LinkedIn sharing like their own test stuff their own like methodologies and covering different angles of it so it’s really nice to see like there’s wide coverage in the industry and a lot of information and a lot of sharing.
Being able to have soft skills around you know how to know when to push for your idea and push back on the push back and really hold your ground versus like you know being flexible and and letting go around it I think those things are are things that we can continually practice. There’s always something that affects like SEO um mobile page load speed like Google is making changes right now as we speak to things like how they measure performance and all that kind of stuff so if you’re CRO you need to be aware of some of the technical stuff and how that might impact page speed or SEO which all flows into the conversion equation.
If you’re using AI within your personalization tools or with your conversion optimization tools there’s going to be more and more generative stuff out of your Photoshop and out of your no code tools and stuff so I think those are good trends to kind of get at least um your hands dirty and play around with them and get to know the tools but the frontend stuff I would I would leave for probably 3 to 5 years.
Introduction & Guest Overview
Jinal Introduction: Welcome to another episode of the women in CRO series by VWO podcast this series is an ode to the contribution of women in the CRO industry before we speak to our special guest for this episode here’s a quick summary of who we are and what we do VWO is a leading experience optimization platform that helps fast growing brands optimize their digital experiences using our latest product VWO insights you can understand user journeys and identify conversion roadblocks on your website and mobile apps so without any further delay let’s jump right into the conversation.
Guest Introduction: Hi everybody in today’s episode we have Linda V founder of Addison and E-com Ideas Linda is a seasoned e-commerce entrepreneur and content creator with over two decades of experience Linda founded Addison and Ecom Idea specializing in e-commerce consulting she has also led pivotal roles at corporate gifting to.com and Linda is known for her thought leadership speaking at global events and contributing to publications like Forbes a staunch advocate for women in technology Linda has been recognized for her influence and leadership so join us as we explore Linda’s journey and insights about CRO.
Interview Content
Personal Introduction & Background
Jinal: Hi Linda so how are you and welcome to the VWO podcast.
Linda: Thanks very much for having me Jan how is your day going Sun here so I can’t complain.
Career Journey & E-commerce Origins
Jinal: All so what inspired your career in e-commerce optimization and how was your journey or how is your journey so far?
Linda: Well um so my background is I’ve been blogging about e-commerce since 2006 I started off my internet marketing journey as an SEO and self-taught PPC in UX because back in the mid 2000s there wasn’t really you know uh kind of formal training for this everybody was just on forums and digesting as much as you could and you know like figuring it out on the fly.
Um so I was very um into and influenced by like Jakob Nielsen’s publications and Jared Spool and there were a lot of like UX thought leaders that were doing lab experiments and user research like one-on-one in real time and publishing those findings out there and that’s what everybody else you know in the community was picking up and that ended up turning into like what we now would call like a heuristic evaluation but that was before things like Visual Website Optimizer and the other tools that like enabled you to actually do experiments live on your site for your um your own context.
It was like you had to kind of rely on these big behind the curtain you know massive research things to like disseminate the information so as a blogger through that like around 2008 2009 time once the tool started becoming available and people like Bryan Eisenberg and Chris Goward from Wider Funnel and stuff started actually becoming these practitioners that like was naturally became part of my blogging because I’d always been writing about like e-commerce UX and then that was just like the next step on the evolution is that CRO becomes a part of that and then I got the chance to like do some hands-on CRO stuff as as part of my role um at Elastic Path as well so that’s kind of how I got into it.
Jinal: You’re still doing that so it’s been like almost two decades nearly two decades it would touch right like if we go 2008 and like in 2028 it would be like almost two decades.
Linda: Yeah I took some time out of that to you know when I went back into the corporate world and did some other roles I stopped writing about it but I really missed writing about it so I kind of felt like I wanted to get back in and um and it makes you a lot more part of the community as well than when you’re you know just focusing on your own internal stuff.
Jinal: It’s a sense of like giving back things to people who are really willing to learn from the way you have learned from others you are just trying to contribute back to the community which is still trying to grow so it’s indeed a contribution because it takes a lot of energy in writing thinking apart from writing I think the background ideas and like UX and all that so it’s entire journey I guess it’s like completely a different one.
Linda: Yeah and it was nice after having taken a few years out and kind of not being on the scene to come back and see that like CRO as an industry and as like a career choice for people has kind of blossomed so there now there’s a lot of voices there’s a lot of people on LinkedIn sharing like their own test stuff their own like methodologies and covering different angles of it so it’s really nice to see like there’s wide coverage in the industry and a lot of information and a lot of sharing.
Jinal: Yes and these days especially people are writing more about losses as well and like what are their setbacks when they try to induce CRO into different brands so that’s also that makes it more interesting that hey there are others as well into the same world facing same problem so that again becomes very interesting to know that how people are also struggling there would we definitely struggle in different fields but yes it becomes it it feels good when people are writing and like our thoughts were also there but then someone has written that out so it also matches the pain and gain as well both.
Biggest CRO Challenges
Jinal: MH yes and based on your experience like uh helping online companies with CRO what are the biggest challenges like business faces when it comes to like improving their conversion rates?
Linda: I could give you about 25 answers of it because there’s a lot of different there’s a lot of moving parts I think one of the big challenges for CRO in general is that like you can test very small things and get um you know small wins and that’s not as exciting right as you know really being able to move the needle and when you’re talking about e-commerce you’re always trying to solve customer’s pain like the biggest gain that you’re going to get is like the biggest pain that you solve and oftentimes that’s going to involve development.
So depending on the client like if we want to talk about like CRO agency client relationship that’s not necessarily the same one in the same team you’ve got the CRO experts that are looking at the product or the project or the whole scenario from uh here’s what we have and here’s what we could do and apply to the site to squeeze a little bit more juice out of it but sometimes that stuff doesn’t exist or making that change affects the actual product underneath and now you’ve got a client with a development system and a team of developers where their day-to-day job is you know putting out the fires keeping the system stable protecting the code and all that kind of stuff.
So sometimes there’s going to be scenarios where like the things that could get you the best lift in conversion is going to need product development and sometimes that means waiting you know when you’re on the CRO agency side you need to wait for um the the clients to be able to fit that in to their development backlog and oftentimes you know teams are running lean and there’s not a lot of time or maybe even buy in from the developer side to be able to you know accommodate what’s being asked for from a third party.
So I think that’s one of the challenges um and then that can kind of force the CRO to um stay within the box of like little CSS things that they can do on the front end without touching code and without you know interrupting anything which can lead to a series of kind of safe tests they get like a marginal or a null result or even like a loss um so I think that’s the biggest challenge is just that it is it spans not just the front end side but it touches the development side as well.
Jinal: Got it entire cycle and then buy-in from people matters the most in order to make our like road map to success map because after all like if it doesn’t get implemented it would be like it would still be a tested idea and not into a converted product idea.
Handling Test Failures & Professional Development
Jinal: How do you feed ideas uh when if some if there are tests that win there’s like no further explanation needed for most of the parties but then if a test fails how do you try to tackle and what are the learnings that you try to take them forward?
Linda: Uh conversion optimization is kind of a hybrid of a bunch of different things right you have to think like a marketer you have to be intuitive you have to have a lot of empathy for the customer uh you have to know about statistics and have some critical thinking to apply to something you have to know enough about the web and where the web is going and a little bit of technical stuff so it kind of turns into a Swiss army knife and that’s why we have teams for CRO where people can specialize in certain things.
But CRO is like a very exciting um career or like thing to double down and specialize in because you get to apply a lot of creativity but if you want to get into this industry make sure that you absolutely love self-educating and keeping up with the moving target that’s going on all the time there’s always something that affects like SEO um mobile page load speed like Google is making changes right now as we speak to things like how they measure performance and all that kind of stuff so if you’re a CRO you need to be aware of some of the technical stuff and how that might impact page speed or SEO which all flows into the conversion equation.
So yeah my my advice would be to pick like pick a few people maybe outside of your area of expertise to follow um pick someone in SEO pick someone in social ads pick somebody in psychology and you know user behavior and maybe even development and that will make you a very well-rounded person you don’t have to be the expert but as long as you’re aware and you can speak to those things and keep them in context when you’re making decisions it’ll make you a much more well-rounded CROer.
Jinal: That’s great yes and indeed it’s it’s kind of a package of like multiple like skill set that we would need to we would not need to master but at least we need to have some knowledge about them so that at the end they don’t hamper our own program when we are executing it out.
Linda: Yeah and I think the other part of it is like focus on soft skills because this is um this is an industry where it’s a little bit of art and science so you know we always come with a hypothesis that might have a little bit of gut feel might have a little bit of I think this could work and it can be deflating when other people push back because they see the world slightly differently or they have a little bit of experience or maybe you know going back to what we talked about about developers sometimes they have some knowledge about technical implications or consequences of doing something a certain way.
So being able to um have the soft skills around you know how to know when to push for your idea and push back on the push back and really hold your ground versus like you know being flexible and and letting go around it I think those things are are things that we can continually practice.
Jinal: Yes we should be at the end accommodative when it’s needed and like shouldn’t totally lose the hopes but yes we should be able to accommodate no to the ideas and like trying to understand why there was a no is also important so that we can like fit into the shoes of customer who is like trying to push back or understand their pain as well I think that is also going to be important for the practitioner here.
Linda: Yep and if you’re an agency or you’re outside of the core team and you you’re working with people who are product managers really book to read is called “Managing Product Equals Managing Tension” it’s a book out there that somebody wrote you can get it on you know ebook um but but I think it’s really always a idea to have empathy for the people that are managing the product because they are you know beholden to a whole bunch of stakeholders including marketing maybe the CEO maybe the chief technical officer maybe sales um so they have to you know answer to a lot of people and then you know you get a CRO agency now they’re answering to the CRO agency as well so it’s definitely good you know kind of um yeah practice that and and just be able to put the hat on of other people on the team.
Jinal: Yes that’s true.
Gender Inclusivity in CRO
Jinal: And then how’s your your experience like can businesses foster inclusivity for women in experimentation and optimization?
Linda: Yeah I think um inclusivity um there’s two ways to look at it like number one is just getting a seat at the table to begin with right so hiring or inclusivity is kind of something that a company has to um believe in and and incorporate into their values but then when you get into the team dynamic like very similar to what we just talked about is that there’s day-to-day interactions where you can feel not included by not being heard within a team within a group.
Um so I think for inclusivity like if you are in a management role or in a leadership role across you know where CRO falls into so that’s again product maybe it’s marketing maybe it’s the e-commerce operations um just being sensitive and aware that if you pick up on it that people in the room might be giving the body language that they feel like not being heard or that they didn’t maybe they just have a personality trait where they don’t speak up and share like you as a leader can do a lot to help by almost playing moderator or you know being able sensitive to those things to make sure that you step in and say hey did you know ask that person like did you have anything to say and try and foster this kind of um open environment no bad ideas kind of um situation because I think a lot of the inclusivity are feeling excluded doesn’t get communicated back to HR or to anybody else it’s what people take home alone so I just kind of being more sensitive to that I think can go along way.
Jinal: True like we take home more those memories than that of like working back and like bouncing back with 2x or maybe tox like double the thought process or streamlining the things yes that’s a good tip that I think we all would love to carry forward and like fit in our mind so that next time if it happens so then we try to like bounce from that instead of like dooming from that.
Linda: Yeah and sometimes when you’re hired to do a job and to you know analyze something and to tell a client what’s wrong it can be very intimidating right especially for women we we’re more we we do want to be agreeable and and you know put good vibes out there so um it can be intimidating to deliver feedback as well.
Jinal: Yes agree.
Female Role Models in CRO
Jinal: Do you look for any female personality in this field?
Linda: Well um if we I can say who like I was initially very much inspired for it was a woman in this industry who I think has been out of the game for a long time I don’t I I’m sure she’s still on this Earth but I think she uh probably out there living your best life in Holland so she used to run Marketing Sherpa and then she sold that at some point to Marketing Experiments but just going back to that like late 2000s era of um who were the voices that were really pushing forward like hey now you’ve got tools and you can do experiments I’d say she was one of the pioneers.
And one thing that like really stuck with me there like part of her philosophy was you know you’d start with optimizing the checkout if it’s e-commerce because that’s the people who are closest to conversion so if you can take that checkout completion from X to Y then that’s going to be a lot um more impactful than chasing like things on the homepage or earlier up on in the journey.
I think that’s kind of changed a little bit now where Shopify has been like quite tight I mean it’s kind of a Shopify world in e-commerce in a lot of ways but we kind of locked down that checkout so everyone had to move to you know testing other things earlier in the funnel and now that’s kind of changing more to where now the checkout is getting a little bit more open and more flexible but she really influenced me a lot and I had the privilege of of having some interactions with her personally as well which I uh treasure dearly.
Jinal: That’s good that’s good like at least you have like inspiration and we’ll have your inspiration as well in future but yes like definitely journey.
Linda: Yeah she was really influential but that’s not to say that there’s not a lot of inspiring people today I definitely want to shout out Lucia Vanden Brink because she started the slack community for women in CRO so um that takes a lot of like passion and uh and effort in and around her own job to like build that that’s a that’s a dedicated effort so if any women out there want to join that community it’s a really slack group to share uh and encourage and even there’s a lot of like opening doors for opportunities for speaking engagements and webinars and stuff we’re always sharing those um opportunities with each other.
Jinal: That’s great that’s great at least it would help spread the word and awareness and like involve like-minded speaker and encourage them to speak more and share their learnings.
E-commerce Trends for 2024
Jinal: Can you share any e-commerce trend that businesses should definitely leverage in 2024?
Linda: Well it’s 2024 so the default answer everyone’s gonna say is AI right that’s a big it’s true I mean in this last week so as the time that we’re recording Amazon just launched uh or announced that they have this Rufus AI assistant and Shop uh Shopify and Google both are trying to you know get this whole chatbot guided selling kind of thing and the way that I think about it is it’s so far off from those um algorithms actually being usefully trained and it really working that I think that most brands and retailers should sit this one out and let the big companies make all the mistakes and you know work out the the wrinkles in this kind of thing.
Because even like on LinkedIn LinkedIn is you know those articles where they ask you to kind of can you contribute to this AI written line and all that kind of stuff and now I noticed that they’re putting it into their little chatbot so if you click on somebody’s post it kind of summarizes it and then tries to branch off into you know like let’s take you down another rabbit hole of like this topping and breaking down and it’s like okay so that whole article feeding thing that’s been going on for months has all been about this chatbot and it’s not really good you know the user experiences that I’ve tested on these sites are just not really good.
But that doesn’t mean that AI can’t be useful on the back end like if you’re using AI within your personalization tools or with your conversion optimization tools there’s going to be more and more generative stuff out of your Photoshop and out of your no code tools and stuff so I think those are good trends to kind of get at least um your hands dirty and play around with them and get to know the tools but the frontend stuff I would I would leave for probably three to five years.
Jinal: Think learning as well as you mentioned like on LinkedIn we often see those stuff coming up but yes not always it’s fruitful at times it would be but yes we can use it in different way at least leveraging AI for refurbishing our ideas or maybe like trying to build a stronger hypothesis as well when like you mentioned skill set and the soft skill would matter a lot so maybe that’s how somewhere we can interconnect but yes um like align with your thoughts like on the AI as well.
Linda: And any ADV really funny um I mean you talk about AI hallucinating and stuff like that and it’s not really human I recently got one of those things on LinkedIn like would you uh contribute to this article and it made no sense I had to read it like 10 times I’m like this makes no sense it was like you’re a PPC manager that is you know blah blah blah um responsible for driving all these things what how do you choose an email marketing program like those two things are not even anywhere near each other if you’re running PPC you’re not automating emails from your PPC campaign.
Jinal: Yes it never meets like those ends never meet but still it’s like being selected so yes that happens like we often receive those invitation that you have been selected but by the time we read it because oh my God.
Linda: And that’s why it’s a little bit scary to think about the prospect that this is coming to CRO tools as well is that um you know I think it’s kind kind of goes a little bit back to um the self-driving car versus driving a car I think we all got into the industry because we like analyzing and we like making decisions and I think the tools you know are going to need to build in features that make our lives easier but where it gets into the self-executing or the self-decision making I don’t know how how close or far we are away from that I think a lot of us are going to want to keep you know doing the fun stuff as humans.
Jinal: Definitely we would want to also have a human intelligence in place and like continue to have that no matter how big AI goes in future.
Linda: Yeah I think the tools are going to help amplify people and help us be more productive but we need to keep the uh the the empathy and the the human uh experience front in center right.
Jinal: Right.
Career Advice
Jinal: Any advice that you would want to give to others who are like interested in pursuing a career in like conversion rate optimization?
Linda: Yeah it’s a super exciting field and I’m glad to see that a lot of people like that is their title now where it used to be you know uh where it was just kind of um a a little seed of an industry it’s I think one day it could be as big as SEO so yeah I definitely think this is something where you need to be uh two things always self-educating and always following a few different um branches so if you can follow somebody in SEO so that that going to help you I think I kind of already answered this question earlier.
Jinal: Fumbling worries I think that’s that’s thing like yes as you mentioned it’s just a seed and we need to grow its branches in future and we need to continue nurturing those branches as well so that it grows as big as a tree in near future.
I think we had a fantastic discussion so far with Linda and now it’s our time to switch gears and enter our rapid fire round this is where I’ll put some quick questions your way and would love to hear your spontaneous answers all right we’ll get it started.
Rapid Fire Round
Quick Questions & Answers
Jinal: Three apps that you cannot live without?
Linda: Um Notion because I’m building my website in that so wish me luck um uh definitely Gmail I guess LinkedIn having a lot of fun on LinkedIn want add two more Instagram and WhatsApp you know what I am very much not a a social media person um outside of like what I do for my job because I feel like I can’t walk into gum at the same time um so I find like those things are like super distracting so I’m rarely on Instagram or Facebook or any other app.
Jinal: That’s good that’s good to keep this side.
Jinal: If a movie was made on your life what would the title be?
Linda: Oh my goodness oh I don’t know would you want it to be made on like how you spent your or how you are spending your life or have you grew from a child to like into this field and what aspired you in somewhat on that.
Well I think it would be a movie that not very many people would want to watch I think it would be very boring because it’s you know like I’m pretty um I’m pretty focused on work and you know like the things that are going on in my head so I think that it would be the world’s most boring movie it would be like a lot of me in my apartment behind a computer cranking out work and it wouldn’t be a lot a lot of too much adventure so maybe the world’s most um yeah the the world’s biggest sleeper sleep it snooze fest.
Jinal: But be exciting maximum of them would want to see that out.
Linda: I just watched the movie Groundhog Day with my nephew and the family um you know on Groundhog Day and it was kind of like you do the same day over and over but you make little micro tweaks to it to kind of optimize it I feel like my day is very similar every day but I think as a person you’re always trying to you know optimize it a little bit more every single time you repeat the day.
Jinal: True right there.
Jinal: One thing that you would like to change about the CRO industry?
Linda: Um I I think sometimes conversion optimization can kind of sometimes lose sight of the fact that product management is slightly different function um not absolutely everything can be AB tested you would simply not get anything done so there does need to be gut feel and the hippo in the room that often gets you know speared and like mocked that there might be you know somebody that’s making a decision that doesn’t get an AB test um but that’s the reality of stuff I mean you you’ve got to pick one.
If you’re if you’re data driven all day all the time you are going to fall into that trap of testing safe low hanging fruit or you would call it low hanging fruit but really what it is is easy um and easy doesn’t move the needle or evolve your digital product you have to take bigger risks you have to look at a bigger picture um and sometimes that means shipping things that didn’t get a formal AB test.
The other part of it is I think that um CRO needs to understand that um sometimes an experiment has biases in it um because of the virtue of you picked a variant or an implementation that if you tested it again with a different different implementation or even a different design or some other different variable within that test the outcome could have been wildly different and that means that sometimes you take a learning because yay we have the test and here’s the data and then you wipe your hands of it and you want to move on right because you want to get through a whole backlog of tests and you don’t want to like keep retesting something into oblivion that um that you said the data you know proves otherwise.
But there’s so many things left on the table that didn’t get tested and I recently posted something about this because I I think about these kind of things late at night but like you know if you would run an ABCD test right yeah that’s going to stretch that’s going to stretch your test sometimes into a very long duration or um you know whatever reason we like to do AB tests and get it done quickly and move on but an ABCD test can be really telling because you’ll see one variant you know win on a certain KPI and not on another um or you might see one variant that you might not have included in the original AB test but when you line them all up together then you see like oh it’s surprising this particular configuration of stuff won and that’s a lot better than doing an AB test and going okay like let let’s pick another one and and AB test this again with B and D head-to-head or whatever like you’re just not going to get the same data.
So I think that um CRO is just not perfect um there is a lot of as much as you want to call it data drift and there’s a lot of heuristics and there’s a lot of like um decisions that have to be made and there’s going to be a lot of debate like we talked about before where sometimes ideas get pushed back or pushed completely off the table and never get tested and and you just really can’t um always know so that’s that’s kind of what a thing that I I would want to change about CRO is maybe just a little bit more open-mindedness that the data that we get from the the test is um there’s nuance around it right.
Jinal: And definitely we should have reiteration and plan otherwise it might just happen like you said that it’s just like raising hands up and then like moving further.
Jinal: Then what’s the most random fact you know by heart?
Linda: Random fact oh wow okay so um this was an influential fact I don’t know if it’s so much of a fact but I used to watch House as a kid and there was an episode where DJ um was she said that um meat stays in your stomach for six hours and I thought that was absolutely disgusting um that just gave me a the little something in my head and I went vegan for a while but um but that’s a weird random fact and I’m not vegan anymore but I mean that’s a little random fact that sometimes you pick up these little things from like TV shows as a kid and then you just never forget them.
Jinal: That’s true.
Jinal: Any guilty pleasure TV show or movie?
Linda: Oh yeah I like Selling Sunset I love that show but actually I take that back because I wish it was more about the pretty houses I it it it’s right now the last few seasons have just been a lot of like arguing in drama and they’ve tried to center the drama so I don’t know if I can take another season of it but I would absolutely love like I’d love to see a reality show that’s just about selling gazillion dollar houses and make it just focused on the the inner workings of maybe more about like what makes a good sale and you know the negotiation part of it or the you know the actual lived experience of realtors would fascinate me.
Jinal: I did follow some of those episodes yes and it’s it’s good from learning standpoint how do people sell and what are your requirements and actual and what do people do when they are actually trying to buy when they have choices so yes even I have like seen in past but it it seems to be like very good and interesting as well like quite engaging.
Linda: Yeah and there’s a little bit of this you know you would never see the inside of one of these bougie houses otherwise right so you get a little peek and sometimes the designs are so innovative and like interesting as well that also helps pick our brains that okay this we could have done in our own house as well.
Jinal: Yeah.
Jinal: And if you had a podcast who would be the first person you would want to invite on the show?
Linda: Oh I I would try and find where Anne Holland is these days and I’d want to ask her what she’s been doing since she left the marketing space.
Jinal: Yes.
Jinal: And three books that you would recommend to our listener you already recommended one but any three you would want to recommend our listeners?
Linda: Oh well you know what I read so much more online than I do reading books um yeah but like I have a few faves that are longstanding like I love all the Baymard Institute books I don’t know if they make the print the print versions anymore but I have some of like the old like UE 600 those are like some of my most treasured stuff but I think that like if you go and pick up like anything that Jakob Nielsen did in like the 2000s he has this big homepage usability book for um his first uh I think it was 2001 he published this book that you can still get on Amazon of like e-commerce usability just the memory lane of flipping through and seeing what websites used to look like back in the day like 2000th era is such like a coffee table book experience and I think those are really fun and especially if you’re in this space um on the web you know it’s nice to see how far we’ve come and today’s books and today’s blogs and stuff are going to be tomorrow’s you know fossils so yeah I think those are are a lot of fun.
Jinal: Any one superpower that you’d like to have?
Linda: Oo superpower I would love turbocharged productivity yes I think that it would like people would want to like steal that power from you.
Jinal: Yeah.
Linda: Like one thing that I envy about um AI is that it’s just able to um take in so much more data and you know crunch connect the dots so much more I feel like I’m doing that in a very analog way.
Jinal: Any one goal or dream you would like to achieve in next three years?
Linda: I don’t know because honestly I’d like to retire in three years that’s a very impossible dream but I think about it every day.
Jinal: That’s also a good thing like stop working.
Linda: That’s my goal I’m working so hard so I can stop.
Jinal: Like you also had your like public in Forbes so so any learning like you would want to share around that because you had like contributed to the publications in Forbes so any learning from that?
Linda: Well I can tell you that like back when I was blogging a lot I was on a ton of media lists and I would get like sometimes like really exciting people want to interview you and all that kind of stuff my tip is that if anybody approaches you with that like reply immediately because they ain’t going to wait okay so I’ve have lost opportunities on like you know some really cool things I was like oh I was this close to like being on I’m not even gonna say it but um yeah so definitely if a reporter reaches out to you if you do media or you do you have a LinkedIn or whatever like you got to get back to them ASAP like if you’re in the middle of a meeting get back to them ASAP because they will move on if you don’t reply immediately.
So the publications that I did get interviewed for during that time time um you know those were ones where I was responsive or or the they really really wanted to talk to me but that’s just my tip and my learning there on getting covered by media.
Jinal: That’s good that’s good piece of advice for others as well who have were planning to get covered. Yeah yes Linda it was speaking to you and like I think here comes an end to the episode of our podcast at least with the women in CRO discussion.
