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Today’s show featured an interview with Liz Elting, author of Dream Big and Win, and the cofounder of TransPerfect, a billion-dollar translation company.
Center for Elevating Women in Sales Leadership (CEWL) Program Director Gina Stracuzzi conducted the interview as part of the Women in Sales series of the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
Find Kristin on LinkedIn.
KRISTIN’S TIP: “Your mind is so powerful, and you are not your thoughts. You’re capable of endless possibilities if you stick your mind to something, believe in yourself, and stick to it.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Gina Stracuzzi: Welcome everyone. I’m super excited for my guest today. Kristin Allstadt is a Senior Account Manager taking care of Deloitte Healthcare for AWS. I met Kristin when she went through the Women in Sales Leadership Forum, and I was really impressed and loved her energy, so I thought I would have her on because she has an unusual journey and I thought we could learn a lot from her. Welcome, Kristin.
Kristin Allstadt: Thank you so much, Gina. I’ve been really looking forward to our conversation.
Gina Stracuzzi: Me too. I like to do this with my guests. I’d like you to tell us how you got to where you are today, and then that leads us into our story a bit.
Kristin Allstadt: I’ll start from the beginning. When I was very young up to around four years old, I spent a lot of time on my hands tumbling, swinging on things. My parents enrolled me in gymnastics at a very young age, and I basically became a full-time gymnast, balancing that with school throughout my childhood. I was really fortunate to work hard enough and got a full ride for University of Minnesota to join their gymnastics team, which was my dream as a kid to compete on my home turf. I spent four years as a Golden Gopher, which was really exciting. We can get into that later. Graduated from University of Minnesota with a degree in business and a minor in Japanese. That was really cool because Minnesota allowed me to study in Tokyo. Then I also had an intern there when I was at University of Minnesota. That was a really fun experience I was able to do.
Then right after college, I was basically an athlete my whole life. I had no idea what I wanted to do, and I feel I was really lucky. I stumbled upon a job at Target headquarters in Minnesota and I just took it because I could relate to it. It was product and it was Target, and I liked Target, and it was a Minnesota based company. I grabbed this job as an analyst and it turned out to probably be the best job possible for somebody like me coming out of college that didn’t know what they wanted to do and really didn’t have any experience. They basically trained me. I was managing a product, which was music, I’m dating myself, but it was a really fun product to manage.
I was in charge of inventory control for 630 stores at the time, through seven fulfillment centers. In terms of product control, making sure each store had the right amount of product at the right time for about 200 or 300 different SKUs, stock keeping units. It was just this crazy job that allowed me to get a really good understanding of how to run a business, how to run a budget, how to place product so people see it and want to buy it, how to deal with returns and how to deal with profit margin. It was just an amazing job, right out of college. I’m so grateful for that.
Then after that I was itching to get my MBA. After two years at Target, I went on to Thunderbird Graduate School. It’s an international management MBA program in the middle of the desert right outside of Scottsdale, Arizona, in a town called Glendale. That was probably the most fun I’ve had in terms of education. That was just an amazing time. I did school full-time, so that was really nice. It was my first time being a full-time student and not having to do anything else but be a full-time student. That was really fun.
Upon graduating, I knew I wanted to get into management consulting, and Thunderbird was an amazing school for lots of different things. International marketing, international finance, all these different international relations jobs, but I wasn’t getting any companies to come on campus to interview for consulting jobs. Everything was different than what I wanted. I was in this predicament where I had to figure out how to get into management consulting. I can get into that later if you’re interested to hear that story, but that was really a difficult situation there. But I did find my way into management consulting eventually, spent most of my life in management consulting and then found my way to, well, I was at PwC, Deloitte for five years, and then McKinsey for about three and a half years selling to government CIOs, and then found my way to Amazon.
One point on management consulting. I’ll say it’s a great career for somebody that is not sure what they want to do, that you get exposed to a lot of different things, high energy, wants to solve problems, likes to move around. It fit what I wanted to do. It just ended up working. I did everything from helping an automotive company with our HR processes to helping the US Navy with a wellness program, to doing retail strategy for retailers, lots of different cool things I did as a management consultant.
Gina Stracuzzi: I remember you telling me a story that to me aligned perfectly with the discipline that you need to be a gymnast. Before we get into that, I want you to tell us what it was like to be a competitive gymnast at a Big Ten school and what that life was like.
Kristin Allstadt: Coming on as a first year, it was intimidating. Marie Roethlisberger was on my team and she was an alternate for the ‘84 Olympics with Mary Lou Retton. All these top-notch talent and I was this insecure freshman joining the team, it was really scary. One thing I learned is I just put my head down and focused and did the hard work, and eventually I was able to make the lineup. I never thought I’d compete because my team was so good. I ended up making the lineup in every single competition as an all-arounder, which means each team at the time had to have two all-arounders that did vault, bars, beam, and floor. I was steady Eddie on all four. I was probably my best on floor, but I was steady Eddie on all four events, enough that they justified me making the lineup on all four events. I was one of the two all-arounders.
That was awesome. I was surprised. When I look back, I never thought I was going to make the lineup, but I just put the hard work in and I just decided to believe in myself and then things just fell in place.
Gina Stracuzzi: That kind of discipline to get you to where you were an all-arounder and you were in every meet really goes to the story that you told me about when you were graduating from MBA school and you really wanted to get into a consulting firm. Tell us that story.
Kristin Allstadt: I think just being an athlete in general requires a ton of work. Gymnastics requires a bizarrely high amount of discipline. That discipline and that tenacity really shines through in that particular sport. I was trying to get into management consulting, as I was saying, and nobody at Thunderbird would talk to me. What I did is I went to the alumni office and I got a stack of papers, again, dating myself, literally papers, not files. The papers were not filed in any format. It was about a six-inch stack of papers and it had all the different alums resumes. It wasn’t filed by career, industry, or anything, it was just alums resumes. We’re going back to the 1970s, the 1960s, et cetera.
I just started dialing for dollars. I said, “Okay. From 6:00 AM to 8:00 AM every day,” and I was on West Coast time, and most people are on the East Coast time, are in Europe, “I’m going to dial for dollars and I’m going to try to figure out if I could find an alum in consulting that will talk to me.” Of course, nobody answered the phone. I just kept leaving voicemails and voicemails and voicemails, nobody would call me back.
One day I was done with my two-hour session. I was frustrated. I was about to leave, go to the gym, take a break, and as I opened the door to go to the gym, I heard my phone ring and it was an alum from Thunderbird. I ran back to the phone, I grabbed the phone, and this is exactly what she said. She said, “Hi, this is Kathy Gramling from Andersen Consulting. I’ve got five minutes. What you got?” She literally had five minutes for me, and she wanted to know what I had to offer her. I did my pitch.
I told her I was just like her, as a Thunderbird graduate, and I was looking to get into consulting, et cetera, and she did not have an opening. It was Andersen Consulting, which is now Accenture. She did not have an opening, but what she did do is she transferred my name to a colleague of hers at Pricewaterhouse. The person from Pricewaterhouse eventually called me and I had a phone screening with this person.
He asked me the typical consulting questions at the time. I remember the question. It was, how many elephants fit in a 747? That was one of my interview questions with this person. It was just one of those they try to throw you off and see how you perform under stress. But it just so happened that this person, when he found out I was a Big Ten athlete, his girlfriend was also a Big Ten athlete. She was a swimmer. That did something. There was a spark there that he was like, “Let’s give this person a try.” He asked me, I remember it was a Thursday, he said, “What are you doing tomorrow?” I was planning to go see my boyfriend in San Francisco at the time, and I said, “But why?” He said, “Well, I want to invite you to final rounds in Chicago happening tomorrow. You got to be there. You got to land by 4:00 PM for a happy hour.”
I booked my flight, I was there and went through the whole weekend of networking my butt off and interviewing, et cetera, and I got the job. Honestly, Gina, I would’ve done that job for very little money. I just wanted to get into consulting, and what they offered me, I was so pleasantly surprised to get the offer letter. It was an industry I wanted to do so badly and I was just so grateful. The tenacity there paid off.
Gina Stracuzzi: That just blows my mind, but those are how you do things. You just got to put it out there and you make it happen. I believe that the universe gives you what you need, even if it’s when you’re on your way out the door to the gym and the phone’s ringing. Had you not answered that phone.
Kristin Allstadt: Exactly. This woman, and I still stay in touch with her today, she is incredible. She’s very busy. I don’t think if I wouldn’t have answered that phone, that was my chance.
Gina Stracuzzi: Good for you. Let’s talk about the whole aspect of being part of a team, your experience at the University of Minnesota, but I think it’s a broader question too. What have you learned from that and who made the best teammates and how does that apply to working with teams right now?
Kristin Allstadt: It’s interesting because I think even as a gymnast, there’s a lot of synergy on the team. People with different strengths and different personalities. I was one of those athletes that took everything really seriously. I was really intense. I still am intense, but even more intense I am today. I took things very seriously and we had a couple walk-ons that were amazing. This one walk-on, and she’s still a dear friend of mine today, her name is Christy Speck. I didn’t think she’d make the lineup. She was not taking it very seriously. We were all on very regimented diets and very intense training, and she was doing her own thing. She ended up making the lineup on a couple events. I just have this funny memory of this person, Christy.
I remember being at a meet. I was warming up on bars, and Christy, she didn’t compete bars, so she was somewhere else. I look around and she’s at a concession stand eating donuts when I’m sitting there in my zone, I’m in my game time, my intense mode, and my best friend is over there eating donuts at the concession stand. She taught me a lot. You can still get places and you don’t have to take everything so seriously. That was one thing. I still think that plays into effect today in my team environments at Amazon.
Another thing I’ll say is another teammate of mine, we were very competitive with each other. We would have really hard practices and it was five sets on here, you got to make five beam routines, not falling on anything, nailing five beam routines before you can move on to the next thing. Her name is Dawn Ketcher. I knew if she could do it, I could do it. I would always look at her and see, “Okay, if Dawn can make it through, I know I can make it through.” That’s another thing, is I think at Amazon here we have bars, and you’re always trying to raise the bar, and you see somebody doing something that you want to do or that you think you can’t do, and you see them do it, so it’s constantly raising the bar. I would say that’s another thing that it taught me.
Gina Stracuzzi: I love hearing about the different teammates and their approaches, because there always are those people who it’s like they don’t have to work as hard or they don’t seem to take things as seriously, and yet they still make it. It’s like, “What am I missing with that?”
Kristin Allstadt: A hundred percent. There’s so many ways to end up at the right answer. There’s lots of different ways to get to a right.
Gina Stracuzzi: You mentioned being a Gopher. There are times in our careers when it can feel very much that way, that you are the person that people go to to take care of things, like, “Can you handle this? Can you handle that?” What did you learn from that? What skills came out of that that you use today? What other fun things did you learn from that time in your career?
Kristin Allstadt: I think I was 18 to 22 when I was a Gopher, I didn’t think I would learn new skills, but I was able to actually still learn new skills and still improve at that age. When you’re at 22 years old and you’re still learning new skills, that’s unusual for a gymnast, especially a woman gymnast. That to me was interesting, and just believing in myself and knowing I can learn new things. With that attitude, starting as a first year, not thinking I could make the lineup, and looking around me and seeing these incredible gymnasts, and then turning out four years later, being able to make the lineup and every single meet for all four events, that really taught me that it’s all about mindset and believing in yourself and believing you can do something and putting the work in. I got a lot of confidence out of going through that experience. I just think that you put your head down, you do the work, and you have great work ethic and discipline. I really do think eventually you do achieve the results you want when you put the work in.
Gina Stracuzzi: Let’s talk very specifically about gymnastics. We’ve all watched it and the concentration, you can see it on their face, and it’s like they’re watching themselves in advance before they hit those bars, hit the mat, and start doing all the tumbling, whatever. Talk to us about those skills and then relate it to how you use those skills in the workplace.
Kristin Allstadt: That’s a great question. There was a skill that I learned, it’s called a tkatchev, it’s on bars. This is one of the things I never could imagine my body doing, but I’ll describe it to you real quick. This is a low bar, and this is a high bar. Imagine being in a handstand on this high bar. Here’s the low bar, and you swing down, here’s your feet, and you come down, and as soon as you come around the bar and you see your toes on the other side, you let go and you throw the bar behind you, and you come over the bar. Again, here’s the low bar, so you could easily hit the low bar if you miss, and your legs go across the side and you catch the bar.
It’s one of those skills that I had to envision over and over and over hundreds, thousands of times to get my body to do this thing. I would envision it, and then I would actually feel my body doing this thing. Learning this tkatchev took a lot of tenacity and resilience. There’s so many times you come across the bar and you miss the bar, hundreds of times you miss the bar until you actually catch the bar the first time. I can’t tell you how amazing it is when you actually catch a release move for the first time, and you didn’t believe it could happen, and it was like, “Wow, I caught this thing.”
I would say the whole thing of visioning and envisioning what you want and having the work ethic and having the tenacity to go after it, are the two things that I really carry through myself. I did when I was in my late teens and twenties, and all the way into today, it’s something that I use every day. Deciding to go to grad school, that was really scary for me to leave that job at Target that I loved. I envisioned myself in grad school and I made it happen.
One thing I didn’t mention earlier is when I was in the corporate world in consulting, I took a two-year hiatus and I wanted to dabble in the startup world in San Francisco. I wanted to tap into my entrepreneurial spirit. I envisioned myself doing this, leaving Chicago, going to San Francisco, dabbling in the startup world. I worked for several different companies, and of course, they all were very early-stage startups, they didn’t make it. But what I did upon that is I took a big risk after that.
I felt this calling to get back into something to do with Asia and something to do with athleticism. I saw myself doing some type of yoga or doing something to deal with Asia. I ended up going to this center in the Santa Cruz mountains called Mount Madonna. It’s a yoga and learning and Ayurvedic medicine center. I was so interested in learn about Ayurveda medicine and all these different things with India and the history of yoga. I spent time there learning, and then I went on to consult for yoga studios in Arizona. That’s another thing that it’s such a different thing to do from the corporate world, but I used my mind and really saw the story, and saw my life playing out, and then was able to execute and actually make that happen. That was another different way that I used visioning. Even in my breaking into consulting, I used it there.
Today, in my current role at Amazon, what I do is I work very closely with Deloitte in the healthcare space. It’s brand new. It’s a lot of white space, and we’re helping healthcare providers get off their own data centers and not only migrate to the cloud but also once the data’s in the cloud, really make best use of the data so you can really improve healthcare outcomes. This is often leading with EHR, electronic health records. When I started this role, there really weren’t many people doing what I do in this particular role for healthcare. I envisioned it, I saw it happening, and I was able to convince people to give me a chance. I was a trailblazer and developed the role for myself in the healthcare space. It’s ending up to be in great demand and it’s actually really making a difference.
Envisioning, tenacity, those are two big qualities I would say that I took away from being an athlete that I use every single day in my life. It’s really helped me do what I want to do and pivot my career in different ways and take different risks and have the kind of career that I really wanted to have.
Gina Stracuzzi: That’s a nice segue into talking about athletes going into sales. This is more prevalent than we might think, and it really, for the most part, seems to serve people choosing this career path because of the things that you’ve mentioned, the tenacity and just being able to envision their goals and know that there’s going to be defeats. Let’s just say that you were talking to an athlete that’s coming out of college. What advice would you give them about wanting to go into sales?
Kristin Allstadt: First off, I never thought I’d be in sales, because the word sales scared me. I’ll just say, I think that all of us are selling all day long, and if you’re not selling a thing, you’re selling an idea, you’re getting somebody on board to something you want to do. The whole thing with sales, I think it’s very broad and it’s what we do all day long as people, even as parents, with my daughter. That’s one thing I’ll say, is just sales is everything. It’s convincing people to get on board, do a campaign or something you want them, motivating people to get on board.
If I’m talking to a graduating senior that might remind me of me, might not know what they want to do, especially being a gymnast, you spend your entire life in the gym. That’s all I did. I never went to football games or anything, unfortunately, when I was in high school. I was always in the gym. A lot of people that are graduating in gymnastics are coming with not a lot of experience and potentially feeling imposter syndrome, which I certainly did. I have to admit, I still feel it once in a while, even today.
When I do feel imposter syndrome, and if I’m feeling like I don’t fit in or feeling insecure or scared to give a talk or to solve a big problem with a bunch of people, what I do is I think about something I did as an athlete. For me, it is specifically one thing, it’s doing a front flip on four inches on the beam. One of my moves on beam was a front flip, and it’s not an easy thing to do. I look around the room and I say, “Well, I know this is one thing that I can do that these people probably can’t do. I got that.” It’s funny, but it gives me a little bit of confidence.
This could be for a goalkeeper that saved an amazing penalty kick, or a lacrosse player that scored that incredible goal the last five seconds of the game, whatever it is, it’s something that you’ve done as an athlete that is different, that made you unique and it’s something you feel good about. It helps you get a little bit of a confidence boost when you’re surrounded by people that have more experience or have more education or have more whatever. There’s always going to be somebody that has more. Being an athlete and falling back on some of the things I used and learned as an athlete really helps me get by in those situations.
Gina Stracuzzi: That’s good advice. Just remember, “I can do this. You can’t.”
Kristin Allstadt: Yeah, totally. There’s one more thing I would say, is the whole thing with what I described earlier, visioning and this tenacity thing, it took me a long time to realize that. I didn’t know I was really doing it when I was in my early twenties. Now looking back, I see I was visioning using my work ethic, et cetera. But I think if I were to say to my younger self, and I’m actually talking to my daughter about this right now, we just went on a vacation and I spent some time talking to her about this. Spend some time quietly and really trying to think through, when you are at your best, what are you doing?
If you can really identify and meditate on that, whatever you need to do, quiet your mind, but really think through what it is that when you are feeling your best, all cylinders are working and you are jazzed, you’re happy, you’re making things going, really try to identify what that is. I think being an athlete, there’s a lot of moments that you feel that, try to identify what that is and try to bring that into your career in some way, because that helps you keep your energy, your passion, and your motivation keep on going.
Gina Stracuzzi: I think it’s probably good as adults who are into their career, if you’re feeling restless or frustrated or whatever with your current situation, do that exercise. Stop and really review, when were you at your happiest? When do you feel most complete? What are you doing? Because it could take you in a completely different direction.
Kristin Allstadt: Absolutely. It’s interesting, going back to the visioning thing, your mind is so powerful and you are not your thoughts, and you’ve got to remember that. You are you, you’re not your thoughts. You’re capable of endless possibilities if you stick your mind to something, you believe in yourself, and stick to it.
Gina Stracuzzi: That’s great advice all the way around. We’ve come to the end of our conversation. I’m looking at some of the things that we’ve talked about and thinking about them, the discipline, the self-motivation, the looking for new opportunities. Before I ask you for your final tip of what young people or mid-career even can do to put themselves and their career in a better place, is there anything else from your career there that you would like to share? Any pieces of skills or anything that we haven’t talked about?
Kristin Allstadt: There’s a bunch of things. There’s a running list that I keep in my mind, what I use. I would say one thing that’s been really helpful for me is to have a mentor. As an athlete, there was always somebody older than me on the team that I looked up to that would help me. I learned that as an athlete, looking up to some of the older girls. Then today, I have a mentor that I have known for probably 30 years now. Every time I make a big life decision, before I came to Amazon, I called him. Before I’ve done anything major in my life, I’ve called him. It’s one of those people that I can trust that I don’t work with today, that’s outside of my political area at work, and somebody that’s completely at a different company, different career, but it’s somebody that knows me, that has been really successful, that I trust.
I would say developing that mentorship, no matter how senior you are, it’s always helpful to have a human being that you fully trust, that knows you and knows your strengths, knows your blind spots, and can really help provide real advice and be totally honest with you, even if it’s hard to hear. That would be one thing.
We talked a lot about the visioning. I would say advocacy and speaking up for yourself, being an athlete, you really have to speak up for yourself. If you don’t think you can do something, or if your body hurts and that ankle actually isn’t just a small sprain, it’s actually a big sprain, or whatever that is, you really learn to speak up for yourself, and you have to wave your hand and say, “Listen, I can’t do this.”
I think being an athlete, learning how to speak up for us often, and the opposite is true too, if you think you’re capable of more. I remember for myself, personally, I knew I could do more at one point than my coach was having me do. I had to raise my hand and say, “Listen, I actually can do a double back, not a single back,” or whatever the skill was at the time, but it’s raising your hand, advocating for yourself, fighting for what’s best for you. That’d be another thing I would say, is just leverage all of that that you learn as an athlete getting into your career, advocacy, having a mentorship, the visioning, and the tenacity. Those are some of the key things I would say.
Gina Stracuzzi: For us mere mortals, who have flown around bars and done back flips and what have you, what piece of advice would you like to leave us with?
Kristin Allstadt: My thing is gymnastics. Everyone has their special sauce. What I don’t have, because I have the gymnastics stuff, you have, and everyone else has something else that’s always special about them and their secret sauce, so identifying what that is and really leveraging it and using that to thrive. What I lack, you have, and vice versa. It takes a lot of different skill sets to make the world go around. Really identifying what that is, that makes you tick, that you’re good at, and that you love, and run with it.
Gina Stracuzzi: Great advice. I love that. Well, thank you very much, Kristin. It’s been a fabulous interview and I know you’re going to keep rocking it.
Kristin Allstadt: I appreciate it so much. I really loved the conversation, Gina. Thanks so much for the opportunity.