When she was younger, Linda Vetter had “champagne taste and a beer salary.” Thankfully, her waitressing experience taught her how to work with what she had. Fast forward to 2014 and Vetter, now a VP of marketing, applied this same mentality when she led the launch of Yes Lifecycle Marketing, an integration of the company’s existing solutions, in one month without a separate budget.

Marketing strategy: We have this saying that hope is a dangerous thing. We’re not going to be focusing in on what we hope will work, but rather what the data is telling us has worked and what hasn’t worked. Then, let’s figure out how to make improvements and start it all over again.

Winning ways: Launching Yes Lifecycle Marketing itself…. A ton of our prospects and our clients were dealing with a number of different vendors. We were asking ourselves, “If the whole goal here is to ensure that we as marketers are providing this multichannel seamless experience for our customers…how can we do that if we’re going to town with several different vendors?” The launch of this concept—this holistic approach of aligning technology and services—was really great for us as an organization.

Defining moment: I was with a company for about nine years and had the opportunity to go follow a boy to Europe. I left the company and went and traveled to Europe, and when I came back, I just had no idea what I wanted to do…. I was working at Alterian as an executive admin, and then opportunity presented itself within marketing. I dove in and loved it. That was just one of those moments of being at the right place at the right time, forging this path, growing within the organization and learning everything that I could, and it led me to where I am now.

Trend watching: We just recently did some research…and we found some crazy numbers of how many [technology and service providers that marketers] are using and the amount of time that they’ve spent coordinating their activities. Think about how much time you spend coordinating six vendors, whereas if you have one or two to work with couldn’t you be putting much more time then toward your strategy and applying that toward your marketing activities?

Words to live by: “Pour yourself a drink; put on some lipstick; and pull yourself together.” – Elizabeth Taylor

Good read: Use What You’ve Got, and Other Business Lessons I Learned from My Mom by Barbara Corcoran 

Sometimes what I think books like this do is give you this great reminder of ‘use what’s right in front of you’…. As marketers, we’re often asked to do a lot with a little, and we have to learn quickly to use what’s available to us—that’s often right in front of us—to the fullest extent possible.

Good advice: Never stop searching for the next “next.”