Sandra King is a highly respected marketing and communications consultant. She has led teams in sales, marketing, communications and brand development. Sandra has worked with organizations such as Time Magazine, the Boston Red Sox, the UMass Boston and WGBH, one of America’s most storied PBS outlets. 

In addition to running her own marketing consulting firm STKing Associates, Sandra is a lecturer at Boston University for both the School of Business and the School of Hospitality Administration. She also guides the mentoring program for health sector MBA students at Boston University.  

As if all this isn’t enough, Sandra is a principal with the CREST internship program that places underrepresented minority college students and women in the commercial real estate industry. She is also on the board at Daily Table, a nonprofit community grocer dedicated to providing fresh and nutritious food to communities most in need at affordable prices. Sandra has also served on boards for WGBH, New England Baptist Hospital, The Museum of African American History and REACH, an organization dedicated to eliminating domestic violence.

Davida Dinerman recently had a fascinating and wide ranging conversation with Sandra King on the Look Left @ Marketing Podcast. Here are just a few of the highlights: 

• 04:35 - Sandra’s path to a marketing career
• 06:48 - Listening skills are vital to a successful marketing professional
• 09:05 - Classic marketing books that are a must-read
• 14:40 - How has higher education handled COVID-19?
• 23:41 - Young professionals starting careers in the year of remote work environments
• 29:13 - Sandra’s multi-faceted consulting experience 
• 34:46 - Is progress being made in hiring a diverse workforce? 
• 38:15 - How did corporate America handle this year’s civil rights 
• 41:51 - The importance of working with non-profit organizations

NOTABLE QUOTES

• On the art of listening: "If I am pitching an account and I go in for the first meeting with a prospective client, part of my discipline and the discipline of the people that I try to instill with the people I work with is to do less talking and more listening. Let's ask a question and step back so we can hear the issues that this organization, this individual, this group might be grappling with. How are they framing it? Are there some key words, some trigger expressions that you should be capturing?"
• As a college lecturer, she's concerned for new graduates entering a workforce where important mentoring and networking opportunities aren't as easy to cultivate as in the past: "If I look back at the first job I had, I'm still in touch with those people. I know a lot about their families. They know all about mine because we spent physical time together. We traveled together. We did research projects together. We walked down the hall and had a cup of coffee together. That dynamic is not here right now and it won't be for a while. So trying to figure out what you can replicate in the virtual world to give that same sense of community is one of the challenges that these organizations are facing right now."
• Sandra's thoughts on progress toward more equitable hiring: “You need to look differently at what your sources of resources are for students and for prospective employers. It's beginning, there's a confluence, as you know, societally of a bunch of things happening right now. There is a feeling that most people have been talking the talk, but not walking the walk. And therefore, we are at a point where we feel that society needs to do the latter, which is walk the walk and walk the talk.”

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