RevGenius Member Spotlight: Kristina Finseth
Kristina lights up every room (well, Zoom, because it’s 2020) that she’s in—and it’s not just because of her iconic avocado background.
The energy she radiates with every interaction is contagious. You can just tell she’s incredibly passionate about her work and the greater revenue community.
Early on at RevGenius, Kristina sat in as the volunteer Head of Growth and helped set the foundation for our membership to grow to the over 7,000 members it is today. She’s obsessed with growth and all of the strategy around it, and she excels because of the passion and energy she brings to it—whether for RevGenius or her “day job” at Interseller.
Below is our interview with Kristina.
Introduce yourself to our audience. Tell us who you are and what you are currently focused on.
Hi – I’m Kristina Finseth, and I currently lead growth marketing at Interseller, a prospecting + outreach platform for recruiters and sellers. In my role, I own demand generation, marketing, and business development. My favorite part of my role, though, is finding ways to enable our sales team better, and that comes in many forms.
How did your journey lead you to Growth Marketing?
Oh man, my journey is anything but linear. But, the cool part is it all led me to where I am today in Growth Marketing. To keep it short, my career path has looked like this:
– Medic in the Air Force on active duty.
– Recruiting and HR practitioner (in enterprise, startup, internal, and external recruiting too).
– (joined the dark side, dunnnnn dun dun) built content marketing from scratch at a now C-funded B2B SaaS HR tech company called Phenom People.
– Went on to lead marketing for a robotic process automation (RPA) consulting firm for 6 months (it was not the right fit at all).
– Joined an early-stage startup back in the HR/recruiting tech space as head of marketing, but 4 months into the role, I transitioned to full-cycle sales at the same company. Ran into funding issues and found myself searching at Christmas last year.
– Found Interseller and spent my first 6 months in full-cycle sales, really nailing down our cold outbound playbook – and realized that I love the hunt more than the rest of the sales cycle, so transitioned to Growth Marketing to bridge the gap between marketing and sales.
Why are avocados your calling card?
Ha, besides the fact that I loooooooooove avocados, I found myself doing more and more Zoom calls in obscure parts of my apartment (cue COVID, a WFH husband, and 3 kids under one roof). Canva came out with some cool virtual backgrounds at the beginning of the pandemic, and I chose avocados (it’s one of their backgrounds). It literally became my WFH on Zoom sales calls staple. And I quickly became known for it on recurring Zoom calls. Now, if I hop on calls without the background, I feel naked, and people get confused.
What advice do you have for people looking to make a career change?
Engross yourself where you want to be, put your mind to the change, and surround yourself with people in that same industry, role, space, etc. When I decided to switch from recruiting to content marketing, for example, I had already been writing on the side about recruiting topics for about a year and had a portfolio to use and back up that switch. I’m a firm believer that if you want something bad enough, you’ll find a way to insert yourself in it and build your own business case. Also, get good at articulating your story, your why, and how what you’ve done has led you to where you’re looking to go.
What gets you out of bed every morning?
Avocados? No, really – I’m self-motivated and absolutely love what I do each day. Plus, I have a family who loves to go places (normally), do things, and go on adventures (kayaking, hiking, camping trips) – so it’s important to be able to fund that time 🙂
What would you say your personal superpower is?
Transitioning careers?
I’m just kidding.
I think my personal superpower is being able to approach anyone and have a genuine conversation. I’m the most introverted extrovert you’ll probably meet, though.
Why should other revenue professionals join RevGenius?
It’s an amazing community with people across marketing, sales, revops, and all sorts of industries, backgrounds, strengths. It’s like supercharging your personal development without having to invest in paid community, courses, or anything else super costly. You can have a fun networking Zoom call with people all over the world one day and find yourself on a roundtable discussing the future of sales another day. It’s not boring, and if you aren’t in there – you’re missing out on some hot dialogue.