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  • Oct 19 2020

Podcast: Competing with half the marketing budget with Emmy Granström, Marketing Director at SteelEye

In this episode of the FINITE podcast, host Alex Price sits down with Emmy Granström, Marketing Director at financial services and regulatory data platform SteelEye.

Emmy leads marketing for SteelEye with a small team and in an industry previously dominated by some big legacy technology companies with large marketing budgets. Alex and Emmy dive into how it’s possible to compete with just a fraction of the budget.

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Full Transcript

Alex (00:07):

Hello everyone and welcome back to another FINITE podcast episode. My episode today is with Emmy Granstrom. Emmy is the Marketing Director at SteelEye, an innovative business in the regulation technology space within the FinTech world. 

Emmy joined SteelEye as the first in house marketer and has gradually been building out the marketing function, but we’re going to be talking about how marketers with limited resources, limited budgets can begin to compete against much larger, more legacy enterprise technology companies, such as the case for SteelEye. So hope you enjoy.

FINITE (00:41):

The FINITE community and podcast, are kindly supported by 93x, the digital agency working exclusively with ambitious fast growth B2B technology companies. Visit 93x.agency to find out about how they partner with marketing team and B2B technology companies to drive digital growth.

Alex (01:03):

Hi Emmy, thanks for joining me today.

Emmy (01:04):

Thank you, Alex. It’s great to be here.

Alex (01:07):

I’m looking forward to talking. As we always do I’m going to start by letting you introduce yourself a little bit. Tell us a bit about your background experience and kind of current role and team.

About Emmy’s background in marketing and her current role at SteelEye

Emmy (01:16):

Absolutely. So my name is Emmy Granstrom. I’m originally Swedish, but I’ve been in the UK for about seven years now. And I came here to study at university. I never knew what I wanted to do with my life or a career, so I studied business, which then covered marketing to a large degree. I then got my first job off the back of university in a sales and marketing capacity. Again, it wasn’t particularly targeted to either of those functions, but marketing stuck with me and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. 

So I started out in technology surrounding telco and voice recording. And that then led me to the FinTech industry subsequently. And I’m now working for a company called SteelEye who specialise in regulatory technology, which is a subsection within FinTech. And what we do is we help financial institutions comply with global financial regulations. 

I’ve been with SteelEye since May, 2019. And when I joined, they didn’t have a marketing function in house. So they started in October, 2017 and they went through a journey of working with a PR agency and having ad hoc branding support. But in their journey, they realised that they needed someone in house who could just coordinate all the marketing functions. And since then I was able to hire a marketing analyst about six months ago, so we doubled our team. Which is a fantastic stat. So, that’s a bit of background about us.

Alex (02:48):

Cool, I’m always interested in the education side. Slightly off topic before we dive into things, but a lot of marketers I speak to, very few of us studied marketing formally. I know that marketing was a component of the business degree by the sounds of it. Then you said one of your first roles was sales and marketing too. Do you think the sales side of things makes you a better marketer as such?

Emmy (03:09):

I think the link between sales and marketing is so incredibly important that I think having an understanding of the sales side of things, the sales cycle definitely helped me out. I mean, we’ve maintaining that balance and that relationship with marketing and sales. I think it’s probably a challenge every single marketeer will tell you, but yes, I believe understanding that side will help.

Alex (03:32):

Cool. So let’s dive into the topic which we’re going to be talking about. I guess we’ve tied to it competing with half the marketing budget, but I guess for a bit of context, maybe it would help you to start by just explaining a bit about how SteelEye fits into the landscape and the world in which you operate and give people a sense of? 

What that competitor landscape looks like? And I guess there’s a number of probably more legacy technology companies that are huge and enterprisey that overlap with what you do. So it’s interesting to hear how you fit into things.

About the RegTech space 

Emmy (04:02):

Absolutely. So I think the RegTech space is an interesting one because we’ve had so much change over the past 20 and 10 years. So we have our incumbents, our legacy tech providers that have been around for ages and they’ve provided technology that helps financial firms do things like regulatory reporting or market abuse oversight. But what we’ve also had in this market, and particularly since the financial crash in 2008 is a huge amount of new regulations. And with this, masses of innovation in this space. 

So a lot of small startups that have come in and that are solving very, very new problems. And in clever ways, we didn’t have a first movers advantage, which you should say is a benefit. But in our case, not having the first mover advantage has really helped because what our founders were able to do was look at how this RegTech market was developing and actually realise what the key issue was now. The issue isn’t all these individual challenges, that all the firms have to manage, but what underpins all of that is data. And that is true for every single regulatory mandate across the board, bringing together vast amounts of data. 

And so by assessing this marketplace, our founders discovered that if we can actually build a data platform and then a bunch of regulatory solutions on one platform in one place that uses the same data, that’s how we can really help financial firms in this industry. So our competitive landscape is an interesting one because on each one of our solutions, we have a plethora of competitors, but the whole offering, which is our USP as such, there isn’t a single other vendor that does what we do when it comes to the data management.

Alex (05:50):

Interesting. And give us a sense of kind of size and scale,without naming names, but in terms of like functions that you’re effectively competing in games in some respects, I assume we’re talking like mobile marketing teams with tens of employees, if not more.

Emmy (06:06):

Absolutely. I mean, I think we’re looking at this traditional space. We have the incumbents, you know, we have, if you have firms like NASDAQ, they’ll have hundreds of marketeers in house, I can help them and, and very large budgets, so very, very different. But of course there are benefits with being the new kid on the block because you can be much more creative if you work for a very large company that’s been around for years, you’ll have such structured approval processes. That means it’s very hard to get things moving.

Alex (06:36):

Yeah, definitely. So even with a small team or limited resources or limited budget, I guess some marketing foundations are still needed just to make things work in a basic sense. I guess maybe this strays into marketing operations almost, or I guess there’s like some pillars and foundations of marketing that are required in some form. What do you think those are when you were kind of coming into a role such as this one where you were the first in house marketer? 

The marketing function for the first in house marketer 

Emmy (07:05):

We can look at it in two ways. You can, first of all, look at the kind of qualities and skills you need in the marketeers you’re working with when you’re starting out. And we can also look at the pillar. So the elements of marketing you need to adopt as a company when you’re starting a new company, or you have a small company. 

I think when you’re hiring your marketing talent, you want to make sure they’re all rounders initially. Communication skills are absolutely vital because you need to be able to communicate, write press releases, blogs. And quite often what you’ll find is the SMEs within your company will be too busy building the product that they won’t be able to translate what you’re doing into a language that is readable by your clientele. And that’s the role of the early marketeers that come on. 

Another thing is creativity is very important because you need to wear a lot of hats when you’re a small team. And also just a positive, can do attitude. But if we look at the pillars that you want to consider when you’re starting out, I think I’ve always believed in PR. I think PR is very important and that’s something we focused on a lot at SteelEye even before we had me on board, we made sure that journalists knew who we were, what we were doing so that when they were writing about topics that relate to us, they knew who to come to.

Alex (08:22):

Do you think that’s potentially FinTech specific or like financial services? Is it more important in that space? To some extent?

Emmy (08:28):

I think B2B are more important than FinTech, and especially if you’re in a niche market. And then another pillar I think is those touch points. So events and webinars are very important to engage with your audience, I would say.

Alex (08:46):

Cool. And are there any bits that you’ve done that you think are kind of tips, tricks, hacks, things that have allowed you to make things travel further? I guess, yeah. Anything that’s sped things up or allowed you to make better use of budget that you think is worth exploring? For any other marketers that might be the sole marketer or in a very small marketing team? 

Tips for doing creative marketing without an agency 

Emmy (09:06):

Absolutely. I think, don’t think you can’t do anything, especially on the creative side. When I joined, when I started my first job in marketing, you know, we had a person we hired to do all the illustrator, brochures, design work, creative tiles for social media. Now that’s fantastic. And they’re much more qualified to do so than I am, for example, but by bringing at least a little bit of that in house, getting the Adobe creative suite or building out some social media tiles on programs like PowerPoints, you can actually do these things yourself and you can move quicker quite often. 

It’s like, can we change this sentence with that sentence and this word with that word and that, when you’re coordinating with an external agency, it can take a really long time. So even if you’re not comfortable doing all the creative work in house, just to get familiar with the other creative suites and also with PowerPoint, PowerPoint is a fantastic tool for design because you can do videos and creative work and PDF documents, and you can change. You don’t have to have the traditional, you know, 16:9 layout. You can do so much. So that’s a way of being able to save a lot of resources, I found anyway.

Alex (10:13):

I think that’s a good tip. And I think it almost aligns with: don’t underestimate the power of a good spreadsheet as well. I think people are so keen to move to SaaS tools and spin up different products. Naturally a spreadsheet can conserve you pretty well sometimes. So it’s nice to hear someone fighting PowerPoint’s corner as well.

Emmy (10:30):

I think there’s such value that agencies that you work with, creative agencies in particular can bring, so let them do what they do best and bring on board the more adminy things where it’s just the change, this for that, and those kinds of things. And if you’re working with an agency, get them to build you the templates, but then when it comes to the creation, that we want to do a new image for a press release, do that in house. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to do that yourself.

Alex (11:01):

Yeah, absolutely. So I think, I’m just going to jump around the questions a bit, because I feel like this segways more neatly into balancing out the kind of skill set of what you have in house and that kind of generalist versus specialist marketing skills. So you mentioned, I think it’s fair to say we talked before that you’re more of a generalist marketer and what’s the kind of skill set of the marketing analyst that you’ve brought on board?

Being a generalist marketer can be financially beneficial

Emmy (11:25):

So yes, I’m absolutely a generalist. I’m good at many things, but not, you know, I’m not a Google Adverts absolute specialist. Jenny, who joined us about six months ago is very analytical, data really is everything. And we’re collecting masses of data and I just don’t have time to use it. We brought her on board so she can do things like look at our marketing performance and not just say, well we’ve increased our website visitors, we’ve increased our following. That’s great, but breaking down our campaigns, which ones have done better, why have they done better? 

And trying to slowly get to a point where we can have a cost per lead? I mean, we are still a long way away from that in our journey, but that’s why I brought on someone who has a little bit more of an analytical data driven focus, which I think is important too.

Alex (12:15):

Yeah, makes sense. And how do you, the question I was going to ask is around prioritisation, because I think most marketers will be able to relate to the fact that there’s a lot on the generalist marketer job spec these days. And I see some which are almost horrifying in terms of how much they ask, because everything from like marketing automation specialists through to AdWords specialists, to graphic designers, to web developers and everything in between, copywriters, it’s like every skill set you can imagine and 20 jobs in one. 

I think there’s always a degree of that in a smaller marketing team and as a generalist marketer. So do you find prioritisation is a struggle and has it become, obviously you’ve got, as you say, you doubled the marketing teams so you’ve got a bit more help now. But is it still a challenge to kind of divide time and stay focused on certain things between yourself in general?

Tips for prioritising marketing efforts 

Emmy (13:04):

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, we doubled our team because we’ve got ambitious growth plans. So we doubled our team, but we also doubled the work or even tripled the work we want to achieve and what we want to do and where we want to go. So prioritisation is very hard. 

And another thing I think all marketers will agree with is that everyone in the company almost thinks they can do marketing. And I think that is a great benefit because we want input and we want feedback, but you get a lot of people saying, why don’t we do this? And why don’t we do that? And how about we do, this is a great idea and we should go to this event and we should do that webinar. And everyone was talking about this topic, let’s do a blog on it and that’s fantastic. And we want those ideas, but we also need a way to be able to push back and say, that’s great, but we have a plan. This is what we’re doing. 

And so what I found helpful with prioritising is making sure I always have a well-defined plan annually and quarterly because annually at the beginning of each year, we do a plan. But then that changes as we progress through the year. But when someone comes up with a brilliant idea, measure it against that plan and say, will it help me achieve my goals? 

If it won’t and if you don’t think it’s a good idea, or if you think maybe just not now, then having that plan is a very good way of pushing back and saying, yes, I can do that, but it’s going to cost this much money and it means I won’t be able to focus on this, this, this, and that. If you want me to prioritise and do that instead, I’m happy to do that, but just know that time is money and time is what we’re dealing with here. And that’s what’s been a very powerful tool for me, especially when you have an entrepreneurial CEO and management team. And you’re a fast moving startup. That plan, I think is key.

Alex (14:49):

I think managing expectations is what that comes down to some extent in communicating, isn’t it? Cause it’s easy to have so many ideas and to be pulled in so many different directions, but you’ve got to have something to keep everybody on course. I guess the same kind of applies when you think about actually going out to the market and targeting clients. 

I guess you’re in a relatively niche space, which I guess lends itself to a kind of more enterprisey account based marketing approach, maybe quite naturally to some extent. But I think something that a lot of startups struggle with in the B2B space is particularly they have a kind of entrepreneurial leadership team. They kind of want to take as big a chunk of the market as quickly as possible. And actually it’s almost, although it feels like it doesn’t make sense, starting small and really gaining some early traction with a very focused segment of the potential market is usually the much wiser thing to do. How do you prioritise that side of things in terms of how you actually go to market and who you’re aiming at?

Targeting one specific market when launching a product 

Emmy (15:45):

So we’ve actually, similar to what you just mentioned, our initial sales pitch was any financial firm in the whole world could use us. Now that is technically true, but it does help the marketing function to focus on the area and the field that will really make a difference. And so certainly defining an account base that you want to fit that point in which you are in relation right now helps, because when you’re starting out, you probably don’t want to go straight to a massive enterprise deal because you have to build up so much operational infrastructure and teams and processes to support those. 

So as you grow, the account base will change and it’ll get more sophisticated and bigger, but evaluating that and defining these are our top 100 or even 50 or even 200 accounts, helps you to really understand your clients. It helps you understand where they hang out, what they do, all these kinds of things. So, that’s a journey we are still going on. So everything is very fluid in a startup. You start out with a we’re the best company in the world, let’s take it back a notch.

Alex (17:02):

Yeah, it’s tough, isn’t it? But I just feel like everything falls into place when you have that account list and you really define that ideal customer profile, however you approach it. But content strategy, messaging, everything just aligns behind that once you’ve got it. And without it, everything just becomes watered down and a bit lost and turning out blog posts on random topics every week. And there’s just a lack of alignment across everything. 

I see this often and I know I can kind of relate to it to some extent. It’s an entrepreneurial thing, that I want to go and take the biggest chunk of the market as quickly as possible and appeal to everyone. And it’s not natural to want to limit yourself so much, is how it can feel sometimes. But the traction you can gain and the amount you can learn as well from feedback from one segment is so much better as well.

Emmy (17:51):

I think you’re right. And it goes back to the prioritisation question you asked before, if you truly understand your audience and you’re aligned between the sales target and the marketing function, it becomes so much easier to prioritise everything that you’re working on. And of course, where you’re marketing and how you’re marketing will be defined by that segment. So everything becomes easier to control and to measure and to understand. 

I mean, the measurability is an interesting one because if you know that you’re only targeting 50 companies, all of a sudden the success of your campaign is so easy to understand. Did we get in touch with any of them? Did any of them come more from our website? Did it turn into many deals? And did we win any business? That is all you essentially want to know? Isn’t it. And then it’s so much easier than ABC company converted, we don’t know which marketing initiative it came from, but it’s great that he’s here and hopefully it goes somewhere.

Alex (18:42):

That leads us on nicely to the approach and structure of campaigns. I guess the marketing world is in many respects, almost shifting from campaigns based to some extent, always on approach in some ways, but there’s still certain campaigns that run throughout every company’s calendar year. What is a campaign for you in terms of what does that mean in terms of time period or anything else? And how do you structure and approach campaigns with limited resource limited budget?

How to structure campaigns with a limited budget 

Emmy (19:14):

Well, this has been another interesting journey because when I joined, we very much did what you mentioned earlier, random bits of content, press releases, a webinar here and there, without any overarching theme red thread or purpose, really. And that is something we’ve shifted a lot. So rather than doing that, of course there are the press releases that do pop up, and the things that you can’t control that you have to be reactive to, but we now plan quarterly campaigns as best we can and make sure that those are aligned to what we’re trying to achieve.

From a sales perspective, we talked to our sales team, our management team about what’s happening in the industry, the things, the products we want to focus on. And then we define a campaign that runs across a whole range of the channels and mediums. So, you know, white papers, webinars, eBooks, events, and we tie it all together under one overarching theme. 

Again, it goes back to that measurability, all of a sudden we can understand what campaigns went well and which ones didn’t, in a much better way than if we’re just doing individual items. Because the reality is, especially when you’re small, the sum of the individual, the sum of the parts is quite small and usually insignificant to make any kind of conclusive assessment about whether it was successful. But by tying them together, the total values and stats you’re getting are actually enabling you to make some justified conclusions about which activities.

Alex (20:48):

Absolutely. So we talked a little bit already about the kind of generalist versus specialist split and how things are looking for you at the moment. I guess this, and we’ve talked about this a bit too, but it kind of plays itself into what about internal versus external resources and how much do you rely on agencies, freelancers? And obviously when you’ve got a limited resource and budget, you need to plan those things pretty carefully and obviously big pros and cons to different approaches, but what’s your perspective on that split now? And what about looking ahead to the future as well?

When to hire specialist or generalist roles or hire an agency 

Emmy (21:23):

I think startup means generalist at least the first few hires, but we’re certainly at a point now, as we expand this team, we’ll start going down the route of specialists. So a specialist digital marketeer is actually something that we’re potentially going to start hiring for within the next few months. 

I think you need a generalist in terms of managing a marketing team who can understand all the different parts that are at play, but once you have that, the argument definitely shifts to the specialist route where you’re getting into people who know one specific area and they know it very well, and they’re able to execute that to the best of their abilities. And of course, balance that with agency support as well.

Alex (22:07):

Are there particular things which you feel like are better suited? I think you talked about, kind of performance marketing and media spend side of things as being something that you wanted to bring in house, but are there certain things that you think agencies are better suited to? Or freelancers versus certain other things?

Emmy (22:23):

I think PR is a great thing to use agencies for, the relationships they form with the press and the ongoing relationships they can maintain. And also because they have loads of clients in a similar space that they represent, they have to reach the market constantly. 

We do this well, I mean we do a lot of our creative work in house and it’s fantastic or something I enjoy doing, but agencies again, have a, it’s the same thing when it comes to creating and designing things. By doing it with loads of types, loads of different clients, they’re more efficient at doing it. And it’s something that takes a lot of time to do in house, but you also get a group of creative minds and an agency that can come up with wonderful ideas and problem solve in a way that you can’t always do in a small team in house.

Alex (23:11):

Makes sense. I think it’s impossible to talk about competing with half the budget without actually talking about budgets. I guess budget is one of those things that, particularly in startups now, I talked to a lot of marketers who don’t really have anything that’s kind of formally signed off and projects kind of happen ad hoc. And it’s just discussions with founders and CEOs and things are kind of chipped away as they go. It sounds like you plan things annually and then plan things quarterly too. So does that also include the budgeting side of things? And how do you approach budgeting overall?

How to approach a marketing budget overall 

Emmy (23:41):

I mean for me, when I joined SteelEye, it was very important to understand our spend. And actually when I joined, we did a lot of budget changing because we had about 50% of our budget at the time was being spent on PR, which just wasn’t a good split because it wasn’t allowing us to do a diverse range of things. So we skipped back and looked at what are the, like we talked about before, what are the pillars that we need to build up? And then from that point we then built up again. But we do annual budgeting, and then it’s under review every quarter because things shift and change. 

I mean, particularly with COVID, we had so much budget tied up in physical events that all of a sudden didn’t happen. So things always change. But for me it’s always helped having a number and then dividing that across the year to understand how much we spend, how much are we spending. And of course the budget is super important. Again, if we go back to measuring performance to understand if what you were doing made sense, you know, that the ROI is very important.

Alex (24:40):

Yeah. One thing that I talked a bit about with others on podcasts recently, is communicating the success of marketing and just generally talking about marketing to others in the business, to CFO’s and CEO’s, and I’m almost having to kind of talk that language. Do you, from your experience in other businesses as well, is having that relationship with others that might know nothing about marketing pretty key? And kind of making marketing work day to day and proving it’s worth?

Communicating the marketing budget to the C suite

Emmy (25:08):

Absolutely. So I’m lucky because we’re a small team and so far we are in one big room. So everyone knows what’s going on. But as I have a team that’s very interested in knowing what we’re doing in the marketing team and what’s happening, what I do at the moment is I do a quarterly report and then an annual reports. 

So every single quarter, I look at what we did for the previous quarter and that goes hand in hand with our campaigns that we want to do on a monthly basis. And I pulled together stats on our website performance and social media performance, and also our sales funnel. So how many leads did we generate? How many deals did that generate and so on? And then we have a big meeting where actually the entire company tunes in and I present these results. Which is a great way for me and Jenny to feel empowered. 

And so it’s always a very good thing. But then in those meetings, what I love about it is you also get people in the business who aren’t involved in marketing at all, that ask really interesting questions that make you rethink what you’re doing and make you question the information you’re collecting even more. So, yeah, that’s a long winded response to your question.

Alex (26:16):

That sounds good. I mean, I just always think about like, again I come across so many marketers that I think are stuck in organisations that aren’t engaged in marketing, and they think it’s just advertising and they think it’s a place where people have some fun, try things out, but it doesn’t really deliver much business value.

I can never quite figure out whether how much of it is within the ability of the marketer to actually change and how much of it is just culturally predefined by the leadership team and CEO and CFO. Because ultimately if the CEO and CFO and others are completely closed off to marketing and have a completely kind of outdated view on it, there’s only so much I think that marketing can actually do to some extent. No matter how well you communicate, no matter how well you try and take them on the journey, there will always be sadly some kind of limitation.

Emmy (27:00):

I agree. And I think that that goes hand in hand with a budget. So how important is the marketing team? I know a lot of people and I speak to a lot of people in our industry that just feel like they’re doing again, what we talked about earlier, individual bits and bobs, without any idea of the overall strategy. And it just feels a little bit out of control, but if you constantly reiterate the value of marketing and also if you have a bigger budget, but you need to push for it because I’ve certainly believed that marketing is one of the most important pillars of any business, particularly a startup, because if you’re not marketing your product, you’re not going to get anywhere. 

But if you’re carrying that budget, you have to prove that you’re getting a return on it and you’ll catch people’s attention, I think. And then taking time, so one of the things that really helped me change my mindset were these individuals, you know, this very itemised view of we’re going to do a press release and then a blog then a webinar. 

That was when we actually started looking at this information and these statistics and realising that there’s so little I can do with those individual elements, I need to think about this more holistically. I need to think about the strategy from a sales perspective and how we track things better. And that has helped a lot. 

And then when people see the results, they get excited with you and they then want to increase your budget and all this kind of stuff. And then I know what you mean, I think there’s a mindset. I’ve had a lot of people who refer to marketing as colouring in, which I find so offensive. It is such an important field, but you have to push for it.

Alex (28:31):

Definitely. I was going to ask you a few final, quick fire questions. One of which was, is there a MarTech tool, technology, something that you use that is a favourite at the moment?

Emmy (28:41):

I’m going to say PowerPoint. I absolutely love it . We use it for everything. I mean, we use it for social media mainly but it’s worked so well.

Alex (28:49):

That’s great. I think it’s such a good tip because it’s a noisy space, the kind of social media production side of things in terms of social content. And I think pretty much everyone’s going to have PowerPoint on their PC. It’s kind of staring them in the face. So that’s a good tip. What would you say are your biggest challenges right now? Looking ahead to the next few months.

Networking without face to face events 

Emmy (29:10):

I think coming out of the COVID lockdown, understanding how the world’s changing and how we engage with our audience in this new world, or whether we go back. I’m not convinced by digital conferences. And I know particularly in our field physical events, conferences, where you go and you network and you meet people are so valuable and you know, it’s the death of conferences. Do we have to completely rethink how we engage on that one to one basis with our audience? How do we do that? Because I’m not convinced by this online.

Alex (29:48):

I did an episode with a CMO in the US yesterday who said that they run their own flagship conferences. And I think they only have like a few hundred people attend them. One in the UK, one in the U S and one in Australia, I think. And I think they had like 5,000 people actually registered to attend the virtual one. I think 50% of them showed up, but I think the other 50%, or at least another 50% them consumed the content on demand afterwards. 

So her view was actually that she felt like she had to just share levels of engagement that they achieved and the widening of the audience by doing them virtually. And I’m talking about something that they’re running themselves under their own brand, rather than something that they attend, but she felt the pressure to basically do both moving forward, to do physical ones and virtual ones.

Emmy (30:33):

I think I agree with that assessment. I think when we look at information sharing, absolutely we’re reaching such a big audience. If we’re looking at it from the perspective of networking and meeting people in the industry, then you lose that at events.

Alex (30:50):

Yeah. I think again, that’s maybe without stereotyping maybe a bit of a financial services specific thing there. I think that world is maybe more focused on, or historically has been more, face to face and face to face networking. So that’s interesting. And if there’s one thing that you said you would be most excited about in the world of B2B marketing looking ahead, anything that comes to mind?

Emmy (31:11):

What I find really exciting is, again, particularly in our niche within this space, is how far behind the curve most companies are if we compare to the B2C world. So I always find it hugely exciting to take inspiration from the B2C world and look at what they’re doing and doing that. 

And actually almost go, you know, sometimes I’m just gobsmacked at how some of these firms we compete with present themselves and communicate and you know, how legacy they are. And that’s something, it sounds a bit vicious and I’m not excited about it, but I think it’s fun to see how the B2B world is learning from the B2C world and how we’re becoming more data driven and more analytical and more personalised and all these kinds of things.

Alex (31:55):

Yeah, for sure. There was an episode that published recently on the B2C-ification. I’m not sure if that’s a word still, but the B2C-ification of B2B marketing. And we were talking about some of those brands, which Klarna, which is in the FinTech space as well I think at one point had a bright pink poodle running along their homepage on a video. And some really out there, I guess the brand side of marketing, which a lot of B2B tech companies would just be like, no way are we doing anything like that. 

But I think there’s such a big opportunity to cut through the noise with things like that, but very few can really push to make that kind of thing happen. But I feel like we’ve covered as well that it has forced more of that more personalised way of thinking as well, in terms of the more of a B2C outlook potentially. Particularly as we get more data and personalisation and other things, but yeah, it’s an interesting space.

Emmy (32:54):

I agree with that. I was on a panel a couple of months ago, when we talked about the death of physical events and we have so many companies in our industry that physical events are such a large part of their sales and marketing, but they just hadn’t even started looking at digital as a channel. I think that’s absolutely changing. Now firms are realising the need to do digital marketing. We’re doing it in a personalised fashion. And digital marketing is not just sending email blasts once a week. You know it’s a lot more than that.

Alex (33:26):

Yeah. We’ve seen some very bad, even amongst FINITE members, seeing some big shifts and some very large enterprise legacy businesses trying to figure out how to do SEO for the first time, because that’s kind of one of the channels that they’ve never. They wished they’d started investing in about a year ago. How long it can take to build up that they’re realising that taking four weeks to make a development change to their ITT and then just realising how much has to change. 

I think there’s definitely an advantage to being in an environment you’re in now where you can kind of move with some agility and get stuff done to some extent. Because it definitely puts you in a big advantage compared to the more legacy contenders I think. It’s been a pleasure talking with you Emmy. I’m really grateful for you sharing your insights. I’m sure there’ll be lots of marketers listening to this who find themselves in a very similar position to your own and always looking for tips and tricks. So I’m grateful for your time and thanks again.

Emmy (34:22):

Thank you so much for having me.

FINITE (34:25):

Thanks for listening. We’re super busy at FINITE building the best community possible for marketers working in the B2B technology sector to connect, share, and learn. Along with our podcast, we host a series of online events, so make sure you head to finite.community to subscribe and keep up to date with upcoming events.

And once you’re done listening, find more of our B2B marketing podcasts here!

The FINITE Podcast is sponsored by Clarity, a full-service digital marketing and communications agency. Through ideas, influence and impact, Clarity empowers visionary technology companies to change the world for the better.

Find the full transcript here:

Jodi (00:00)
Hi Chris, welcome to the finite podcast.
Kris Rudeegraap (00:03)
Thank you, Jenny. Thanks for having me.
Jodi (00:06)
It’s a pleasure to have you here today to talk to about a topic that is quite close to my heart as a community leader. We’re talking about community-led growth. Now, you’ve been doing this loads at Sendoso. It’s been one of your main key strategies that has really been pivotal to your success and your growth. I can’t wait to hear more about that, but I think as we always do, before we get started, I would love to hear more about your background and experience to date.
Kris Rudeegraap (00:35)
Yeah, of course. So I started Sindoso about 10 years ago. Prior to that, I spent about a decade in software sales myself. While I was at my last company, I was seeing… just the efficacy of email and seeing that response rates were kind of diminishing. And again, this was 10 years ago. I thought email was going to slowly die out as the spam hit it so hard. and so I thought about, Hey, what are some of the other channels that are less saturated and can still grab people’s attention? And that’s where really direct email and gifting came to mind. And so I was doing a lot of it very manually. I was in the office grabbing swag, packing boxes, or on a call here at dog. bar, go grab a dog toy from Amazon and ship it out to a prospect. and all those things worked really well. It was just a nightmare to manually track it manually, expense report, manually click on tracking links and follow up. So I dreamed of a platform that could do all this for me. That’s where Sendoza was born. we’re the leading global direct mail and gifting automation platform where we do all of the worldwide procurement fulfillment, all of the marketplace of gifts and mailers you want to send and then the software and data layer to bring it all together. And so over the years, I’m scaling that company from an idea to hundreds of millions in revenue, learned a lot and done a lot with community as part of a growth strategy over the years.
Jodi (02:00)
Yeah, absolutely. Really exciting to hear all about your gifting business and the thought process behind that. I mean, I’m sure it’s a lot more than a gifting business, but we’ll go into that in a bit. I did hear from you some really, really great results about what you’ve done with community and what it’s done for Sendoh. So I think community is so kind of a little bit abstract for marketers. They don’t really know how it can kind of impact the bottom line. So I thought, could you please share some really great key results that you can directly attribute to community?
Kris Rudeegraap (02:36)
Yeah, would love to. Maybe for the audience, I’ll take a step back to share a couple of different communities we have, and that will set the stage as we talk more in depth about them. the first community I was a super sender community, there’s about a thousand members in this, and this is a user community of active users, power users on our platform. This community, we engage through a Slack group, through a newsletter, through a sendy awards, a user conference, both virtual, we’ve done some in person, and then we have some AMA office hours through this community. The next group is our cab or our customer advisory board. This is kind of a dynamic community. Usually there’s a few dozen people that we engage quarterly to share product feedback, to get market intelligence from. And that community we typically pull from supercenters, but they could be executives that are not necessarily in our user community. I’ve then built a personal advisory group community. There’s over a hundred members here. This is mostly execs. and people that I’m sharing more details on the business, but a lot of them are our target ICP. But again, it’s a group of individuals that have opened their networks, opened their insights on. And then nurture our alumni. And this is probably 100 plus folks in this alumni community where I feel strongly that even after you leave, you could still be a valuable asset or you could still want to still, you Bleed Orange, as I like to say. And so I engage with monthly updates this alumni community as well. And so those are the kind of the different communities we have. A few stats. So our Supercenter community of Power Users, one of the areas that we wanted to do was we really want to focus on training and educating this community. And so we have this stat where any Supercenter who completes admin certification will spend 71 % more on our platform. And so that’s really a critical area where we try to, first we try to qualify people into this super center community and then we try to get them into certifications. So that’s a big one for us. The next one is. You know, we know that people switch companies often. And so we track all of our super senders through a tool called user gems and we’re tracking job changes. And then we go out and outreach to them when they’re at their new company, reminding them that they should continue to use Sendoso again. ⁓ and we have over a 60 % response rate from that list, which is huge compared to typical, like cold outreach, which is like, you know, in the. you know, few percent response rates. So really we re-engage our community after they switch jobs. And then the last stat for this ⁓ personal advisory group community, we’ve generated over 7 million in pipeline from this advisory community through warm intros. And that’s been a critical lever for us as we’ve continued to scale the business.
Jodi (05:31)
very interesting and some definite impact there. I was wondering, this is something that I don’t feel like is talked enough about in B2B is people moving jobs, you know, and your database is based on contacts and their associated companies and when they leave, you know, all you get is bounced emails and tracking them is quite a laborious process if you have thousands and thousands of data points, like…
Kris Rudeegraap (05:42)
Mm-hmm.
Jodi (05:56)
Do you automate that? How does that work from a practical standpoint?
Kris Rudeegraap (06:00)
Yeah, 100%. So the tool user gems we use, we will monitor all of our users through supersenders. And then when they switch jobs every month, user gems goes out and looks to make sure they’re at the same job. And if they’re not and they switch jobs, then user gems flags that creates a new profile in our Salesforce links back to the old record because so we can have some history of like how they use this before. And then it kicks off some automated engagement through this tool they have called GEMI, where it’ll actually then do the outreach for us. So even before we let any human into this, we might already have somebody to raise their hand and say, hey, thank you for welcoming me. Will you then use Cendoso to send them gifts celebrating their new role? And that is all very automated.
Jodi (06:56)
Very cool. Yeah, I thought so. That’s great tips and great tool recommendation, but we’re just to say we’re not paid. is is totally just organic recommendation. Yep. Nice Cool. So I suppose I’m thinking, you know, what was it about Sendoso that made you think community strategy was compatible?
Kris Rudeegraap (07:04)
Yeah, that’s just something that I love personally.
Jodi (07:19)
you know, is community for everyone or is there something unique about when you were like this decision making process when you were founding Sendoso that led you to this?
Kris Rudeegraap (07:29)
Yeah, you know, it’s a good question. I’d say, I mean, honestly, at first, I’d say community as a strategy wasn’t necessarily a strategy was almost more of like survival, where in the very early years, you’re obsessed with your customers, you want constant feedback. So you’re really trying to engage them very frequently. And that ended up driving a couple things. One was, you know, our best customers were already becoming advocates themselves. They were already shouting out that they loved us. And so that was already happening. Two, we really realized that… you know, some of the original channels, like I thought, Hey, I’m starting this company because email is dead. Well, what are their channels can we leverage? And so kind of the community engagement as a strategy was really critical for us. Because if we built relationships, even if they switch companies, it was much easier to engage with them than just do a cold email outreach. So we thought, Hey, let’s build these relationships. So we really optimized for the kind of the long-term when starting this. But I think. For us, we sell into a lot of marketers, sales, and CX roles. Those are kind of our three core kind of personas. And I think that certain ICPs tend to have better success with community. I think for us marketers, they enjoy talking to their peers, they enjoy sharing best practices, they enjoy learning. And so that’s really helped us build a… community based on our ICP. I could imagine maybe some ⁓ ICPs maybe are less interesting for like a community strategy. But I think also because we were a cool new tool years ago, we were a new category where marketers didn’t fully understand like how do I leverage direct mail automation? And so having this community with education and peers lent itself to people wanting to almost brag about it and join a community to share more about it.
Jodi (09:20)
Yeah, absolutely. definitely seems like education is a big piece there and it almost seems like a lot of the more mature communities that exist in B2B now started with a forum of customers talking to customers experience managers troubleshooting and figuring it all out together. So actually did the start of your community strategy really look like? You’ve mentioned kind of advocates and maybe wanting to encourage word of mouth, when did it start to become more kind of structured and strategic and maybe measured?
Kris Rudeegraap (09:57)
Yeah, mean, looking back on it, think very early it was scrappy. It was these small dinners. was these, you know, more of an informal Slack group to get going that then was formalized as we brought on like a customer marketer. So no grand vision or, you know, fancy tooling, I’d say day one. It was just getting smart people in a room and getting them to talk to each other. We did have some fun early stories. So one that comes to mind was we had an early community event where I gave everybody fake prop money, like the money that they use in like Hollywood. And then I acted as an auctioneer and I made people bid on the features that they wanted us to build the most. That was probably my, one of my favorite community moments because it just got everyone so excited and the limited money made them really think about the trade-offs of which feature on our roadmap they really cared about most. And so I think bringing in some creativity and fun. You know, again, continue to make this community interesting. And I think that you need to bring interesting content or interesting initiatives into the community.
Jodi (10:58)
I’m interested because you’ve you really made it clear that there is kind of a bubbling excitement for your product and that that is interesting to me because it it almost seems like maybe third-party communities might be more kind of trusted or seem more objective in their recommendations for like tools or you know brands products and things like that. How did you engage customers to be brand advocates? How did you encourage that bubbling enthusiasm without feeling too salesy or like you were pushing Sindoso too much, if that makes sense.
Kris Rudeegraap (11:39)
Yeah, I think a few other things we did. You know, we, ⁓ we oftentimes had these office hours or AMAs where it was just the community, in these like, ⁓ zoom meetings. There was, and at some points we would have a customer market and they’re just to, kind of moderate or just to kind of chime in and help. But for the most part, it was community led. So I was, you know, one of our customers standing up saying, Hey, I’ve got a great story. I’ve got a successful Sendoso campaign I’ve done. I want to share with you what I did, what I learned and what I’m doing. And so it was really intentional for us to have them come in and share their success as a community member versus us coming in and saying, hey, here’s what you can do with our platform or, let’s teach you something instead. It’s like, hey, let’s let a peer teach you something. And so I think that was really strong. Even our Sendy Awards was that on steroids where we would award people for having success on our platform. And then the award ceremony was them sharing what they got their award for and what campaign drove that award. And again, I think that just goes back to feeling more real and authentic than having like some Sendoso member pitch.
Jodi (12:51)
Yeah, that’s absolutely makes sense. It’s, I feel like so many communities can mistake thought leadership or just kind of content strategy for community strategy. And really the heart of community is facilitated, facilitating those peer to peer connections and really encouraging those conversations between your, your audiences. And I can see, so that’s how you kind of, you’re not sales and you’re not blasting a message out. You’re really.
Kris Rudeegraap (13:11)
Exactly.
Jodi (13:19)
Yeah, encouraging those conversations. Is there anything else you do to encourage those conversations? I guess, you know, bringing your customers to events and you mentioned you’ve got a Slack channel. Is there anything else that you do?
Kris Rudeegraap (13:31)
One thing that we launched last year that I think is interesting too is we wanted to bring more customer conversations to the top of the funnel or earlier in the sales process as a community strategy. we really realized that customers love talking to customers. And then we also realized that a lot of peers or prospects wanted to talk to customers as part of the buying cycle. And oftentimes those were like back channels or harder for prospects to find. so, you know, one we are trying to that more prospects into this community. We don’t want it to become too prospect focused because you won’t have the value add yourself if you’ve never used Sindo. So, but one tool we recently rolled out was a company called Slash Experts. And what I loved about that is it really created a portal where we could showcase a couple dozen of our customers and then anyone could come instantly book a meeting with them. And so it eliminated us. feeling like we’re gating and only allowing prospects or customers to speak to people we’ve like purely vet first or purely say, hey, you want to talk to a reference? Here’s one person. Instead we say, here’s a bunch of people. You pick who you want. And that’s opened up more conversations. And I think at the end of the day, it all goes back to more conversations. And if people are organically talking to each other about you, it just spurs more engagement. so we’re trying to, back to facilitating conversations.
Jodi (14:55)
Absolutely. Yeah, that’s really interesting. And you’re lucky that you have so many kind of power users. Just out of curiosity, from a practical standpoint, how do you incentivize those advocates to kind of give up their time and promote or talk about Sendoso to prospects?
Kris Rudeegraap (15:12)
Yeah. So some of them do it because they want to have peer to peer network. And it’s almost like something that is context switching for them. It’s getting out of their day to day to, you know, talk to somebody else that’s interesting peer and share their success. It’s almost like brag, you know, being able to brag. for some of them too, we offer up like a thank you, or we’ll give them some compensation for their time. but it’s mostly driven by people that are raised their hand and they just want to, you know, celebrate their successes, share what they’re doing. And I think that a of people are in that boat where, you know, maybe their day-to-day job is, you know, something that they want to break out of and, and, know, do something a little bit different. so speaking with a peer randomly about a cool tool they’re using in their tech stack, ⁓ is something that they are willing to raise their hand for.
Jodi (15:56)
Yeah, awesome. Thank you for sharing that. I guess you are a gifting platform as well, so I guess, you know, it’s about recognition and it’s about, you know, rewarding that kind of advocacy. So I’m sure you do that as well. On gifting, how does that come into this? it?
Kris Rudeegraap (16:02)
Yeah.
Jodi (16:18)
impact your community strategy at all? Do you send gifts to new members or ambassadors? I think you’ve mentioned it briefly. Do you want to go into that a little bit more?
Kris Rudeegraap (16:27)
100%. Yeah, I think one of the best ways to engage a community is to ⁓ reward good behavior or just to surprise and delight. Because I think that goes a long way too. And so we will, there’s welcome kits, there’s things around ⁓ holidays, there’s thank yous, there’s life moments. So we try to track. know, life moments of our community. And if, you know, if they’re having a kid, they’re getting married, those are celebratory life moments that we can gift them. A lot of times we’re gifting swag items because again, they want to wear the Sendo so logo proud, proudly and go out and showcase to the world that they’re a super center or that they love the Sendo. So brand. I think swag plays a big part in, you know, gear that they want to wear and merge. but like you said, I think there’s different reasons why, rewarding good behavior tends to drive more good behavior. But I think the life moments is something that. some companies don’t think about, you we think about it because we’re, you know, a gifting platform, but it goes a long way if somebody, you know, has a big life moment and you step up and, you know, send them a nice little gift and that really helps build that relationship.
Jodi (17:41)
Yeah, I’ve never thought about that before. guess in B2B particularly, there is such a kind of boundary between business and personal life. know, I mean, we’re starting to cross it even more as B2B marketers use kind of consumer driven platforms like YouTube or even TV advertising. how do you kind of, how do you feel?
Kris Rudeegraap (17:48)
Mm-hmm.
Jodi (18:07)
Audiences react when a business kind of knows their personal life events and how do you see that line kind of maybe fading away in the future?
Kris Rudeegraap (18:19)
Yeah, you know, I think, for what we’ve seen is that that line is becoming blurred, especially since COVID where more and more people were working from home. And also people spend the majority of their day at work or working. And so if you can bridge the gap between what they’re doing for work and what they’re doing at home and or make that feeling, make them feel like you care about more than just their work. I think that builds the connection. and it builds, you know, if you have similar interests, you can build connections. If you, know, can, ⁓ thank people and, you know, at more of an emotional level, because I think a lot of business is transactional, and community, can really find people that care deeply about your brand. so if you can, you know, again, connect more emotionally with them, it tends to build that stronger bond and that stronger relationship, which then means. you know, when we do follow up after they switch jobs, they want to rejoin the community, you know, they want to feel a part of it again. And part of that is the warm and, you know, fuzzy feeling they felt when, you know, we sent them a gift, congratulating them on, you know, a job promotion and something that was a little different than just a, you know, or sending them a, you know, baby onesie with their favorite sports team logo on it. Things like that go a long way, even if they’re small.
Jodi (19:42)
I guess that’s another way that community marketing is described. It is one to many and I guess all one to few and that means that you are really making people feel special and like they’re being heard and like you’re not just some big brand hidden behind a website and fancy graphics. You are people behind that brand and you really are having those kind of one-to-one conversations. Would you agree?
Kris Rudeegraap (20:09)
Exactly. 100%. Yeah. And we’ve also done some stuff too, where we’ve, you know, we see actions where community members are talking with other community members and we’re rewarding that behavior too and thanking them for participation. So I think a lot of different ways you can use gifting in your community strategy.
Jodi (20:27)
All right, well, that’s all we have time for today. So thank you so much, Chris, for coming on the finite podcast. It’s been a pleasure to hear about community marketing from your perspective.
Kris Rudeegraap (20:36)
Yeah, thanks for having me on. What a fun conversation.

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