Harvard in Tech Spotlight: Fei Fei, Group Vice President in Global Sales Strategy and Operations at Gartner and TED speaker
I spoke with Fei Fei, Group Vice President in Global Sales Strategy and Operations at Gartner and TED speaker. Prior to Gartner, Fei was a Product and Product Marketing Lead at Google, consultant at McKinsey, and manager at Groupon.
Fei shared her advice for effective communication, building resilience, learning about new spaces, and cultivating relationships.
Be genuine. When asked about effective public speaking, Fei underscores the importance of being genuinely passionate about your topic. While other people can help refine the content of your presentation, what makes a speech memorable is the emotion it elicits in your audience. Let your passion shine through and excite your audience.
Learn to handle rejection. Throughout her career, Fei has supported sales teams in sales strategy. For Fei, sales is incredibly effective at teaching people to handle rejection and be persistent in the face of rejection. This type of preparation builds the foundation of resilience that is crucial in all career paths.
Know your audience. From working with many great sales leaders, Fei shares the importance of building rapport with prospects and customers. Sales leaders are especially capable of understanding the deepest needs and wants of their prospects, tailoring their talk track to this insight, and making organic conversation to bring the human element to build strong, genuine relationships.
Learn to problem solve. In sales strategy, Fei focuses on improving metrics such as sales productivity. In this way, her role is quite similar to one of corporate strategy. In this process, she exercises innovative problem solving, thinking through how to break down complex challenges, structure them, and iteratively build and test solutions.
Be intellectually curious. Throughout her career, Fei has worked all around in the world and in many different industries. When asked how she picks up new skills quickly, Fei underscores the importance of having natural intellectual curiosity and following that through soaking up as much knowledge as you can through books, practice, and conversations.
Similarly, looking back on her time at Harvard, Fei was glad to have taken classes across all different schools at the university. She was able to learn about diverse spaces, forming a strong knowledge base for her career, and she was able to meet many different people and diversify her network.
Leverage associations to improve your daily habits. For example, Fei enjoys watching movies but only lets herself do when she is exercising. Making this seemingly small promise to herself has been a game changer for her health.
Keep getting inspired. Always think about what is next. When you reach a milestone, think about what more you can do and how you can do even better. Look for ways to inspire yourself each day through your goals and your process.
See more of the world. When asked for advice she would give her younger self, Fei notes the impact of travel. She grew up in China and lived in Chile, where she became fluent in Spanish. Traveling and actually being in a new location helps you build greater global empathy by truly understanding a society’s culture, history, and people.
Optimize your time. No matter who you are or where you come from, everyone has an equal amount of time each day. Use that time wisely. Plan your days and weeks in advance to make the most of every minute you have.
Find energy in challenges. When asked about building resilience, Fei shares the importance of mindset. You can let a difficult situation bring you down or you can use it as your motivation to prove people wrong.
Watch her TED talk on Resilience here.
