Anything is e.l.f.ing Possible | Connections Ep 2 | Salesforce

I watch my mom be told no all the time. No, you can't go to college. Women don't go to college. No, you can't fill your car with gas. That's a man's job. So for me, no became the fierce motivator. I was like, yeah, you tell me no and I'll show you what yes looks like.

Hey, I'm Sarah Franklin and welcome to Connections. My guest today is Cory Marchesotto, the speaker, the CMO of ELF Beauty. They're an Oakland based company dedicated to providing affordable beauty products for every eye, lip color and face. ELF has gone 100% digital in the last two years and their business has taken off. Corey is a no nonsense trailblazer at the forefront of innovation in marketing and commerce. I caught up with her at Yerba Buena Gardens here in San Francisco near the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, which felt fitting given Corey's lifelong connection to social justice.

Can we talk about the confetti emoji?

The confetti emoji? What about it?

I just love that that's your favorite emoji.

I mean, yeah, it's like celebration all the time, you know?

Is that because you're an optimist?

It's a good question. SHAS therapist, what is your emoji?

Mine is a rocket ship. Oh. So I drop a lot of rocket ships because I believe we're all superheroes on a journey flying in a rocket ship and we're here to unleash our superpowers.

I mean, you're a CMO of an incredible company. And what gave you the courage to, you know, go down this pathway? I know myself growing up as a girl was hard. People always didn't say, sure, go get em. What was it like for you?

I set an intention at a very young age. I would say three things. The first thing was fiercely independent. I grew up around women who were very dependent on male head of household. My mother didn't go to college, My sisters didn't go to college. I wanted to be the first person in my family to seek a higher education and be a successful businesswoman. So it was important for me to take a different path. I remember as a child going to church for weddings, which were supposed to be happy moments. And when they would say the word obey, for me, it felt like being punched in the gut. And I remember sitting there in weddings and everybody was happy and smiling, and I'm like, why do I feel like I got punched in the gut and all these people are very happy? So I made a declaration that I Would never obey anybody. And I would set out in my life to be independent, self reliant on my own journey.

And now you are CMO of elf. What was your journey? To get there. When people are watching, trying to understand how I make that connection into this career pathway. How do I be a strong, empowered woman in the workforce and the leader? Tell me about your road to elf.

I was in the premium sector in the beauty space for my whole career. And I started asking myself some tough questions, like, what is the next part of my career going to look like? What I started to realize was I was becoming too much of an expert in one particular thing. Right. I was marketing premium products to a very small portion of the population who could afford those types of offers. And I wanted to branch out into being able to market things to a much wider audience. So I had received a phone call from a recruiter who brought me the ELF opportunity. I really understood that they had the culture and the conditions necessary for the art of the possible to transpire. This is a company that was built on an impossible mission of creating $1 premium cosmetics and selling them over the Internet in 2004. And I was watching them from the sidelines, being the naysayer. Like, you can't sell cosmetics over the Internet.

You love that. They were being told no.

Ye loved every second.

They're being told no, I'm gonna go there and we're gonna make this awesome.

Exactly. So really what I set out to do was water those renegade roots and go back to the story of our founders and go back to the art of the possible and put the superheroes on the rocket ship and unleash everybody's superpowers. And it's just been an exceptional journey.

I love it. All the emoji rocket ships, like going up there for elf, that's incredible. Incredible. What's it like to disrupt this space? I mean, they call you the OG Disruptor. How did that feel when you went in there?

It's invigorating. And one of the things I learned being in the bigger corporations is inspiration is definitely perishable. When you have this great idea of disruption, you have to draw a deck, and that deck is lengthy and it's almost like a business case, and it's backed with tons of facts and figures, and you have to have large teams of people work on it, and then you have to go convince various stakeholders why you want to move this particular disruption forward. You meet with a lot of naysayers, you meet with a lot of hesitation. You meet with a Lot of resistance. It gets watered down and maybe nine to 12 months later, this great idea that you had in a watered down version is ready to go to market and you missed the moment.

Yeah. Because it took you nine months.

At ELF, we have the freedom, we have permission to do the unexpected. I truly believe culture has to be a mindset. If people wake up every morning and they say to themselves, today, anything is elf ing possible.

I love that. Elfing possible. Anything is elfing possible. Jinx.

That's a very powerful motivation. So nine times out of 10, my team will come to me with ideas and we have a very quick chat about. I'm like, go do it. Sounds great. And then we. Yeah, and then we do that and then we circle back. How'd that work? Because we have a culture of testing and learning. You're writing the playbook as you're going. So it's definitely something that requires fearlessness and it's not for everybody. And that's the sort of entrepreneurial spirit that really drives ELF and that art of the possible that really gets me out of bed in the morning.

You're on a journey. You charted the course and went there super fast to digital. What was that like? I imagine you have a lot more information and data coming in now that you've gone all digital.

So one of the things that I think is really important is look around and who are the 10 people closest to you? And if you want to be a digital disruptor, if you want to excel in the tech space, well, who are you sitting with? And Salesforce is a huge part of that. And attaching ourselves to organizations and companies who are like minded, spirited disruptors, then you can start to force multiply.

I love that idea of, we call it a lot of times beginner's mind of like surrounding yourself with people that are going to bring other ideas. I heard, I don't know if this is true, that you read like over 2000 comments a day from your customers and people. Is this a superpower? It is.

So It's a week. 2,000 a day would be a lot. It's a commitment of 2,000 a day.

It's only a day. I would go with a day. We can go the day.

We can go the day. That's fine. What's most important for us is who are we trying to serve and what problem are we trying to solve? And I don't think as a CMO that you can be really effective in your role if you don't understand who you're serving and what problem you're trying to solve. So, yes, there are reports for that. Yes, people can serve me up data, but what I can't see is the confetti emoji or the rocket ship or what color heart are they using? And that matters. I commit to reading a lot of input. And then one thing that I've recognized, one of my superpowers, is I do have an uncanny ability to break through a lot of noise to find the signals. And then, you know, I'll have the team pressure test those signals, and if they're proof positive, let's run. Let's turn it into action fast.

You've broken it down to such a simple framework of don't take no challenge the norms, be the disruptor, act fast, meet the moment, and then once you have those ideas, like make them scale and listen, it's so actionable. Have you found that your team is drawn to that leadership?

Yeah, and I love that. I was reading something about you where somebody said that, oh, God, I don't want to know. Your enthusiasm was contagious and that you have a sort of spell on folks. And my team often says that to me is that I just create this contagious energy and this sort of orbit that people want to plunge into. So if you make it an exciting place to be, I think more and more people want to be involved in that journey.

It's been a year of just rapid digital acceleration. What advice do you have to younger people, aspiring marketers looking to get into the business?

I would say be unstoppable. I like to wrap it up in three Cs. The first one is curiosity. The second one is courage. And the third one is conviction. Because your curiosity gave you the knowledge, your courage gave you the fearlessness to put into an action plan. The conviction is going to give you the resilience to carry it all the way across the finish line.

So the reason we selected this location, we're in San Francisco. Yerba Buena Garden, we're sitting near the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Fountain. Is inspired by how you are so passionate about social activism. Can you share where that came from?

ELF stands with every eye, lip, face, and paw. That purpose platform is not something we say. It's something we live. It's something we breathe. It's something we eat, it's something we sleep. And it was really built off all the treasures that were already inside our treasure chest. This was a brand that was built off inclusion. It was built off being cruelty free. It was built off empowerment. So it was really important for us to find a way to continue to use our platform and our brand to make a positive impact on the world, similar to how you do at Salesforce. And we're really motivated every day by more than just selling product. It's about what kind of impact can we make on our community. So when things arose on women's empowerment, our answer is already there. It's our second pillar is empowerment. When it came up with social unrest, our answer was already there. We support black Lives Matter, and we stand with all black people in this nation against racism of any kind. We stand with the Asian community. So it's in our DNA. It's fundamentally who we are at our core, and we live it every day.

I'm super connected to that. We need to bring love in and ground ourselves in that values and build trust and connection between ourselves. It's so important.

So I don't know if you know, but we work with Alicia Keys. She's an inspirational icon. You spend one hour with this woman, and you are absolutely a changed person. One of the things that she says is she calls herself a light warrior. She says that there's enough darkness in the world. Let's bring forward the light. And I just love that. And I feel like that's what we do with purpose. Like, let's take the light and shine the light. Only love can box out hate. Only light can box out darkness.

Never miss an episode by subscribing and turning on your notifications. We'll see you next time.