Gina Balarin is a hugely successful and world-renowned keynote speaker, trailblazer, role model, and B2B marketing leader and expert. She is the author of The Secret Army: Leadership, Marketing and the Power of People, Gina Balarin is also a hugely successful TEDx speaker whose name precedes her having also worked extensively on television and radio.
Who is Gina Balarin, and what’s your background story?
Well, if you think about it, the easy way to remember how to pronounce Gina Balarin is Gina ballerina. And actually, when I was very little I thought I wanted to do one of two things either to become a ballerina or to become a professional businesswoman. And so, as it turned out, while I did study dance for many years, I turned away from the theater and traditional dance performance or performing as an actress to do professional speaking instead. And I took on a career as a marketer, which meant that I wasn’t necessarily Gina ballerina. But lord behold, I managed to find and fall in love with my best friend and partner whose surname is Balarin. And so in the end, I did in fact become both a professional businesswoman, and a ballerina.
And where did you grow up?
I grew up in South Africa, actually, in the latter days of apartheid. So I hadn’t realized at that time how much my resistance to simply being told what to do actually came from living in a regime where things were changing significantly. And where we were told to behave in racist ways that we were just not sensible. And so I realized later in life, that actually there was no reason to behave that way. And therefore, I didn’t like being told what to do and the things that people told me to do didn’t make any sense. So it was logical for me to ultimately go and work for myself. My family members, both my parents were entrepreneurs. And so eventually, I found that the best way to make things happen to make change happen was to be in a place where I didn’t have to play.
So as an aspiring woman, what are your ideal stellar woman attributes?
That’s a really tricky question to answer. A lot of people have someone in mind who they would like to be or aspire to become. That’s never been the case for me, unfortunately. Yeah. I found at a very early age as a child actually we were singing a song at school. I believe children are the future. And there was a line in there that kind of hammered at home for me, which was everybody’s searching for a hero. People need someone to look up to. I never found anyone who fulfilled my need for a lonely place to be until I learned to depend on myself. And for me, that was almost the anthem I realized. Growing up in the 80s. In South Africa. There wasn’t an ideal woman. Women weren’t in positions of strength and power and authority and glory, and fabulousness. So I had to learn to depend on myself, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t women out there who are amazing. The problem is that they say you should never meet your own heroes. And partly that is because we are human. And you can have an ideal woman in your mind and you meet her and you’re disappointed because she’s not this vision of perfection. And that’s I think the myth that we need to bust yes, that there is no such thing as perfection in any context because we are all imperfect versions of ourselves working towards something greater. What is the stellar woman exemplar of me if I want to be the best version of myself? I think if I were to be the best version of myself, I would be brave all the time. Yeah, I would be. I would do things that scared me. And I would charge what I’m worth all the time without fear. And I think I would treat myself the way that I would treat my best friend with constant love and admiration and respect. I think the stellar woman version of me is someone who is much kinder to myself.
So you’re also a chartered marketer, and for many people, they don’t understand what that is about and why it is important to get a chartered marketer started.
So, in the United Kingdom, you can become a chartered member of many things you can become a chartered accountant, you can be a common have get your CIPD which is the Chartered Institute of Professional Development. Most HR people aspire and understand CIPD but chartered marketer is one of the strange things that most people don’t recognize. The charter is something that is given by the royalty so it’s a charter from the king or queen. To say we give you the charter to say you are allowed to be this governing body. And so, while there are chartered accountants, they are required to do the things that their charter tells them to do. Now, everyone knows about Chartered Accountants all over the world, but people don’t necessarily recognize that being a chartered marketer has the same responsibility. It has the same educational requirements. It has the same continuing professional development requirements in a different context of course. Now, if you want to be a chartered marketer, you’ve got to go through the steps. You got to get the education. You got to keep up with your education and training every year. You’ve got to make sure that you have met all of the requirements to become a chartered marketer. It’s not something you can do in a day. It takes at least three years and sometimes longer to be able to do that. But why do it because it is a seal of approval. It is a stamp to say that as a chartered marketer, I know and understand marketing. It’s not just theory. It’s not just practice it is a combination of the two. Now, I had studied to a Master’s degree level before I did a professional diploma with the CIM. And the CIM diploma was both harder and far more valuable than all of the academic training I’d had before that and it was well worth doing. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you should only study with the Chartered Institute of Marketing, you can study anywhere you want, but go through the charter process to become a charter member. And with any organization, you get level, so you start as an associate member, then you become a full member. And then hopefully, maybe over time, you become a fellow. And so in the last few years, I’ve been fortunate enough to become a fellow of both the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the Australian Marketing Institute. And that’s kind of a really big badge to say, hey, you don’t just know what you’re talking about. But you’ve done your time. That’s quite cool. I’m quite proud of that.
As a founder of Verballistics, please share with us what inspired you to start this venture and what your organization does, and what’s your experience so far.
Verballistics is a combination of two words verbal and ballistic. And if you think about it, the whole purpose is something where you smash words together to make things go ballistic, is to be able to identify words and their meaning. And to use that inspiration to create effective communication that enables change. What does verballistics do? it is a b2b marketing communications organization that helps understand what are the real problems you’re facing in marketing, and how you solve those, and it joins the dots between the two, but it joins the dots through the medium of communication. Now, marketing is an incredibly diverse and complex discipline. You can be a marketer, if you’re an expert in search engine optimization, you can be a marketer if you do nothing but send emails, but if you’re a diverse marketer, who has had the background and the experience and understand the whole process of how do you start with a plan and actually execute that plan and what is all the stuff that goes on in the middle? You realize that underpinning every element of that is the ability to communicate clearly, effectively and with your audience in mind. So verballistics helps people make it what it is that inspires them and their customers. And by connecting the dots between the problems and the solutions, it’s as simple as that.
You asked how verballistics started. It actually started out of adversity. I have been made redundant three times in my life. And the first time it was a shock to the system. I literally felt like I was superfluous to requirements. That’s the definition of the word. You are redundant. You’re useless, right? And it was hard to come back from that. And the second time I was made redundant. I saw the writing on the wall and I already had another job that made me redundant. And the third time redundancy came up. I was ready for it. In fact, I volunteered for it. Because I realized that I had made all of the changes that I could make happen in that organization and it was time for me to move on because I couldn’t help them any further. And that is when I decided to go out on my own and start verballistics, and it became a place for me to create the ideas that you have as an entrepreneur that often can’t find a way to bring home in a large organization. And this is a challenge. A lot of people have that spirit that have that ambition, they can see the changes that they need to make, but they’re somehow stifled by the nature of the companies that they work in. And I do a lot of coaching in fact, I’m mentoring a bunch of marketers at the moment and one piece of advice I gave to someone today was the people who get promoted are those who act in the organization’s best interests, not necessarily by doing what they’re told to do. And one of the women who has inspired me, got many promotions during the time that I was working in the same company as her because she had a mantra that was it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. And I’ve seen it happen so often with people I’m coaching that when they become brave enough to do the right thing, the thing that really makes a difference. They actually get promoted. It’s quite strange. They stop playing by the rules that do what’s right for the business. And as a result, they make a bigger difference. But it is that fear factor. If we are too afraid to do what we know is the right thing to do. Then everyone just ends up meeting their KPIs or not meeting their KPIs, we end up dotting the I’s and crossing the t’s rather than finding where the dots are that we need to connect. We end up doing what we’re told rather than doing what’s right for the business, for your customers for your employees. And I think that verballistics was a way for me to help people make a difference.
So what are lessons you could share, from a marketing perspective? That small and medium businesses need to get out of your working with big corporations to enable them to succeed and grow but mainly from a marketing perspective?
I think the most important lesson to help small businesses do their marketing better is not to try and be all things to all people. Be very, very clear on what you do well, and who you serve, and really target those people. There is a fellow who works for Hub Spot marketing. Well, they’re not the marketing agency, their marketing platform. Yeah, he was the sixth employee in Hub Spot, and he’s still working there in an advisory capacity His name is Dan Wiley. I want to say, Dan, I can’t remember his name Dan something and he says the riches are in the niches. Now forgive me because in English of course we say niche. That’s an American version of that phrase, but it rhymes so it’s easy to remember. So the lesson for people who are running small businesses is to find your niche. And then plaster that all over everything. And make sure that you’re reaching out to people who really have the need that you’re trying to solve. Now, the problem is that often small businesses think that they want to do everything and that they can do everything. Yes, they can. There’s no question about that. They can do a lot because I think small businesses have to be far more diverse in their approach and their experience than larger businesses are. But the lesson that we take from larger businesses is that that age-old marketing adage, STP, which is segmentation targeting and positioning requires you to segment you can’t tell me that every big business is going to go after every single other big business simply because they’re big businesses. Well, that can but they wouldn’t really succeed. And one of the principles of Account Based Marketing is that you’re marketing to an account. And I think that more small businesses would be better and better at their own marketing, if they were very clear about who they were helping. And then the flip side of that is shout about it. When you’ve done great marketing or whatever, when you’ve done the great when you provide provided a great service or a solid, great product. Get customers to talk about it. Customer Testimonials are one of the most powerful forms of marketing for various reasons, but the biggest reason in my opinion, is because you build trust. People trust you, they it’s credible, it’s authoritative. And if you’re asking customers who are happy with you, they can actually sense the love respect the pride that customers get out of having their problems solved by you. I know it’s hard to justify the investment in marketing storytelling and marketing customers and case studies and videos and testimonials, but they might not necessarily pay dividends. What they do is they speed up the sales cycle. Significantly. And that trust factor is something that cannot be underestimated in marketing. So small businesses, the riches are in the niches and do customer marketing in the sense of getting customer testimonials. And once you’ve got those customer testimonials, put them everywhere, everywhere. Put them in your email footers, put them on your website, but them on your social media, put them on your YouTube channel, put them in tick tock just make sure that your prospective customers are seeing and sharing the delight of your existing customers.
So we are interviewing you for our issue 9, which is striving for excellence. We want to know what does striving for excellence mean to you?
Striving for excellence means aiming to achieve the best working towards the best and knowing that excellence is not the same as perfection. Perfection is impossible. Excellence is always possible. But as someone who recognizes that I have not always acknowledged the excellence I have achieved. It’s important to realize that excellence differs for every person. Someone who is challenged in a way that means that they can’t do the same thing as everyone else, is excellent when they do that thing. Someone who is extraordinary in all sorts of ways might achieve excellence when they do something they really wanted to achieve and they set their heart and soul and they finally accomplished it. But the warning I will give people about striving for excellence, particularly women who are hard on themselves is that when you do achieve excellence for goodness sake, please give yourself permission to celebrate that excellence to celebrate that achievement. A lot of women have imposter syndrome. Now, imposter syndrome is fairly evenly spread across the world, but women manifest it slightly differently. And what it means is that we see ourselves as never good enough. We believe that no matter what we do, we’re faking. We are imposters and the message here is if you think you’re an imposter you kind of don’t yeah, of course I’ve done that nerve. Yeah, but it’s not good enough. I need to do this next thing and this next thing and this next thing and this next thing if we can actually take the time to recognize something that is excellent, I think and really in bring that into a heart and soul and go oh my god, I did that. I did that and it was excellent. Wow. The changes our perspectives of ourselves. Often, women are hard on themselves and there’s a nasty negative person in their head. And the way of one of the ways of getting rid of that nasty person in your head is to treat yourself like you would treat your best friend with kindness with comfort. One of the other elements you can do with that is to celebrate the Excellence in yourself. Sometimes we need a little bit of help. And sometimes we need a support network who we trust enough to actually say congratulations, you were excellent. And to actually just bask in that excellence and feel like wow, this is it. I did this I made this happen. I am excellent.
So what obstacles do you see that stand in the way of achieving excellence? In your organization?
Often there is a difference between what is excellent and what is good enough. I had a realization when I started consulting, which was that my definition of excellence was not the same as my client’s definition of excellence. And I found this reflection through other people who’ve written content in the past, which is that I would work on something and then work on it, work on it, and work on it until it was exactly how I wanted it to be. And the problem with that is that often if we do that we only allow it to reflect ourselves and our opinions and our research and our input. And actually, what happens is the consequence that we don’t allow other people to get involved. And almost by accident, I discovered that when I sent something to a client that I thought was only 75% Good enough. They liked it more than something that I submitted that was 95% good enough.
And I think this lesson can be applied to any perfectionist anywhere. In the world. Good is better than perfect. By which I mean, done is better than perfect. Get it done, and let it go and move on. This is a very important lesson for any content writer, anyone who’s involved in creativity we tend to hold on to our babies and we’re so scared that someone is going to judge them and found them find them wanting that we kind of nickel and nickel and nickel. And what happens is that there is a there’s a tipping point. At one point you have good at another point you have excellent and then at a third point you actually have less than excellent because you’ve spent so much time reworking it, that it can actually become this great. A tip for excellence in anyone that I work with or collaborate with is to get it done by the deadline. Get it done to the best of your ability and then let it go. You don’t have control over an item once you’ve passed it on to someone else. Whether that is a project plan, or a piece of writing that you’ve created, or a marketing strategy. You co-create with people, you create a product that is better because many people worked on it together. But at the end of the day, you can’t determine what a client wants and you can’t always read their mind. And if you are so emotionally attached to the work that you create anyone who changes that it’ll feel like they’re kind of gouging of a piece of your soul. Yeah, that’s not what they’re doing. What they’re trying to do is they’re trying to add a piece of there’s
So how do you go about improving excellence in your business and in your profession?
I think that in the marketing profession, being a chartered marketer is an element towards excellence. Marketing has a bad reputation. This we know. The reason I didn’t want to be a marketer in the first place was because marketing is synonymous with advertising. A lot of people see adverts they see the fact of simply driving spend of what making people want stuff that they don’t need. Marketing is not the same as advertising. Advertising is a tool that marketers can but do not have to always use. Soy driving excellence in a field is about recognizing the professionalism of your field and getting appropriate qualifications and holding yourself responsible and accountable. Chartered marketers actually have responsibilities to their clients. And this is something that I think any truly professional person will do is that they will know that you can’t just do something and shove it out there and expect people to pay you for it and not be proud of the results. You can but what does that achieve? I think that I use the word pride a lot and proud. And it’s interesting because if you look at the seven deadly sins, pride is one of the seven deadly sins. And yet I actually think that if we flip that on its head, pride should not be a sin, it should be a requirement. If you are not proud of the things that you have accomplished, why have you done them in the first place? If you are not striving for excellence, and by that I mean if you’re not striving for something you would be happy to show it to the person who matters to you. In my case, it’s my mum if I’ve created something that I’m really excited about, I want to tell her about it. If you haven’t done that, then you won’t have reached your own goals. Never mind your organization’s goals or your employees’ goals. Even if you can’t make yourself proud of every single thing that you do. Trying to find something that you can be proud of.
What does success look like to you?
In my mind, if I were truly successful, I would have enough wealth that I could purchase absolutely anything that I wanted, without having to think about the cost of it. I would be on stage all over the world speaking to people and I would live in a place where I could see over the sea and have a massage every single day of my life. But is that success or is that imagination? Well, it’s both. But the irony is that when I think about stuff that I really wanted to achieve and goals or visions, I look back on it now and I realize I’ve done a lot of those things. So I wanted to be a ballerina. I’m Gina Ballerina. I wanted to be a professional businesswoman. I’m a professional businesswoman. I had a dream car. I dreamed of owning a little red, Mazda sports car and you know what I bought and had and left behind my little MX five years ago. And if I hadn’t had those dreams, if success hadn’t been something that I’d actually committed to achieving, I never would have done it. So here’s the takeaway. It doesn’t matter what success is for you all that matters is that you start identifying and being brave enough to commit to that success. Success may mean you finish a jumper that you started six years ago. Success may mean that you write that book that you’ve always been intending to write. But the other important thing is to remember that as you evolve, your definition of success changes. And it’s also important to remember that just because you haven’t achieved that success that you set for yourself as the next goal doesn’t mean you’re not successful. Yes, success can be all sorts of things. Often in the coaching practices that I do. I help people identify what their definition of success is. For themselves, but more importantly, where that comes from. Because what we define as success is often stipulated by society, or our parents or our ancestors or our bosses or someone we met once who made us feel small. And so we wanted to prove them wrong. And so we wanted to achieve success. It’s not our definition of success. It’s their definition of success. If you love being a mom, then your definition of success is not going to work and never seen your kids your definition of success should be raising happy, healthy children who see the world in a way that is making a difference who are individuals that can contribute somehow to life who bring something to the planet. Exactly. Your definition of success can only be your definition of success. And you must allow yourself to identify what that definition is for you. Without having to necessarily subscribe to the definition that everyone else wants.
So what is your view about failure because I think this is now the point the most times people are looking for that they’re worried they can’t do themselves? All these things that we are telling us to do are surrounded we are we default into the view that we are going to fail so what is your view about failure?
Failure is inevitable. Quite funny, because when you stop being afraid of failure, when you realize that is a very, very important part of every single element of life. Suddenly it becomes much easier to achieve. There I think for me, there’s a difference between physical failure and big failure. And, you know, if you are made redundant from a job, for example, is that a big failure? Yeah, it sounds like it at the time. The first time it happened, but the third time I was like, Bring it on. Bring me that failure so that I can move on to the next part of my life. You know, when I wrote my first book of romantic fiction novel, I never published it because I was too afraid that every time I sent a letter to an agent or a book publisher that they would reject me and you know what, I got a few rejections and I told myself, I’m going to set a goal of getting 100 rejection letters. But I never did because I was too afraid of the big failure. And I spent years talking about this book that I was going to get published. Yeah, I never did. And eventually my husband said to me, that’s a gene that I love you but I can’t do this anymore. I can’t keep talking about this book that you’re never going to publish because you’re never going to publish it. So that’s it. We’re done. So you know what happened? I wrote another one. And I published that one. And if I hadn’t failed, in a way failed to actually attempt to get the fiction book published. I never would have figured out how to succeed to get this book published. Then if I hadn’t failed in terms of the publicity and promotion that I know I could have and should have done better and differently when I first published this book, I wouldn’t have it in my mind that the next time I write a book, I am going to put all of the marketing efforts and expertise I can into making that a massive success. So failure is inevitable. It’s also important to realize that no matter how good you are, no matter how naturally talented you are, no matter how much work and effort, and research you put into something, you will never be an expert at it the first time you try it. Ever. Yeah, there are child geniuses, child prodigies, you may pick up that violin and play it magnificently when they’re three years old. But that same child prodigy would not be a professional violinist in their 20s or 30s. If they didn’t practice every single day of their life, if they didn’t make mistakes if they didn’t sound the wrong note if they didn’t drop the violin or get crossed with a teacher. Failure is an inevitable part of success. I wish I’d learned that lesson sooner. I wish I had been brave enough to realize that not only is it okay to fail, but you have to fail failure is necessary.
And so what challenges have you faced during your journey?
I think the biggest challenge for me was moving to the UK from South Africa. I had expectations because South Africa is an ex-colonial country, you assume that what happens in the colonies is a mimicry of what happens in the Motherland to fit into England. I am bubbly and vivacious and over the top and that’s okay. But for a very long time, I didn’t believe that I was allowed to be bubbly and vivacious and so as a result, I kept myself in a box. I close the lid, and I let things squash me and squash me and squash means to push me until Gina was a fraction of the person that she really was. And I fixed that by finding a place where I was allowed to be myself. What happened as a part of that process? I started to discover the parts of myself that I liked and the parts of myself that I didn’t like so much. And by embracing the parts of myself that I did, like I was also able to reflect consciously on what was creating the unlikable bits and to start thinking about where did that come from? And I started writing about the bits of me that I wished I’d learned earlier. And I think was transformational to be able to provide that output in a way that helped me process that information. I did a lot with posts on LinkedIn. In fact, a lot of the posts I’ve written on LinkedIn and this was this was long posts. This is not you know, short ones. This is actually like articles. Some of them made their way into the secret army. I didn’t realize that was what I was writing the fourth time but then it was a really, really useful resource. And there are a lot of them that still exist, which are about how to have women argument with a negative person in your head or how to feel better about yourself or how to just accept who you are all of these things that I’ve been thinking about a lot over the years. I’ve written them down you can find them if you search back through my past articles and some of them are pretty damn good if I say so myself. But the other thing that I do now is I process information that is just a Lowe’s consciousness through poetry.
There is least something about the pandemic that happened that just happened and it did affect people’s lives and businesses. What key lessons did you take from it?
I realized I was an introvert pandemic was actually great for me because while you’ll see me as extroverted, I give people a lot of energy when I’m interacting with them. And I realized that actually I don’t get the energy from the interactions, I give it away. So being able to see people virtually and then shut down and not have to talk to people was great for me because I recovered my energy. What else did I learn? From the pandemic? I think it was that finally the rest of the world could catch up to ways of working that are actually better for humans. Don’t get me wrong there. Being in the office is beneficial for a lot of people. But it’s also not necessary for a lot of people. And I am increasingly frustrated by companies that are requiring people to go back to the office because have we not been able to prove that remote working works and it’s actually better for a lot of human beings. And I think it is often extroverts who need and crave that interaction. You want people to come back into the office. And there’s nothing wrong with that we all need to get energy from the way that we want to get energy but I think if the pandemic taught us anything it is that there is a way of being kinder and more honest and more authentic, that we should all embrace. So not from a personal perspective, but from a general perspective. I think the pandemic shifted our perspective about its okay to not be okay. And I hope that we can retain that perspective moving forward. I think we sew into each other’s lives in a different way. You know, the office you only see the image that people are projecting the dresses that they wear the suits that they put on to go to the office, you know, when you’re talking to someone and you can see their cat walking across the screen in front of them or you can get an idea of what’s sitting in their background. It gives you a whole different perspective of who they are as a human being. And I hope that long after we’ve gone back to living a post pandemic life, I hope that we retain that ability to know and to want to know people as individuals and as real humans, not just one view of the world that they show.
Now if you have to be given a magic wand to change the world, what change would you like to see?
I’d like to see more women in the international government. I would love every single government to make it mandatory to have 50% of their population in governance women in fact, 55% In fact, 60% I think if the world were run by more women rather than more men, we would see a massive shift in everything really.