¶ Introduction
Hello everybody. And welcome back to the finite podcast today. I'm going to be sitting down with Hannah Voss, Hannah leads, growth marketing, fluidly, fluidly as a super cool fast growing FinTech business.
That's really transforming the way that small businesses manage their cashflow forecasting and finances more widely with a really cool product that integrates with the Campsie package and just gives you a lot of insights and automation and helps manage lots of different elements of the finances. We're actually a fluidly customer ourselves. I think we , one of the first actual fluidly paying customers and the third they've actually since become a client of ours too at the agency.
So I'm really looking forward to seeing them with Hannah hearing about her experiences so far, she's actually transitioned from B2C to B2B marketing.
And if you were at one of our last final events, we were talking about that as a subject and Hannah was on the panel, but I'm looking forward to taking into culture today with Hannah and really talking about, about how culture feeds into marketing, how culture could maybe be a competitive advantage within marketing and some of the recent exercises and the journey that they've been on recently as a business to define what's important to them and think about their values and think about their
culture as they continue to grow. So they raised a series, a funding round, and my vendor of last year, I found on of people that joined the business since then. And obviously culture is one of those things is really key to the business generally, but I'm , I'm really excited to hear kind of perspective on how it feeds into marketing. So I hope you enjoy
The finite community and podcast kindly supported by nine, three X , the digital agency working exclusively with ambitious fast growth B2B technology companies visit nine , three x.agency to find out about how they partner with marketing team and B2B technology companies to drive digital growth. Hi Hannah, thanks for joining us. Hi, thanks for having me.
All right . So we're going to be talking today about culture and how that drives apart of B2B marketing, which is a fascinating subject. You lead growth marketing at fluidly. Do you wanna start by telling us a bit about what fluidly is? And then we can talk a bit about how you've ended up eating the bits of your marketing side of
¶ About Fluidly and its marketing function
things?
Yeah, absolutely. So it clearly is a B2B SAS company. We act as an intelligence layer for small businesses. So we provide them with automated cashflow forecasting and credit control, which helps them to make better financial decisions and help them control their finances more easily.
Cool. So lots of AI and technology being used to help businesses protect the future.
Yeah, absolutely. We use machine learning to kind of do all that heavy lifting with the data. Say the cash flow forecast is produced pretty much instantly, which is kind of a big improvement on the way that most people do it using an Excel spreadsheet and lots of, kind of number-crunching. Yeah .
Which is actually where we were before we were a fluidly customer . I think we were one of your first actual signups through the platform itself. So first paying, I think I remember Luke giving us a call when you sign up, but we love it. It's a very powerful too . And I know it's definitely transformed our cashflow forecasting, which is great. So you've had a really interesting backhand in transitioning to where you are now leading that growth marketing side of things at fluidly.
Tell us a bit about where you were before, and I know you at one of our last final events, you're talking about how you transitioned from B to C and to B to B kind of what you've taken, taken with you from that. But , um, yeah, it'd be great for the listeners to understand.
¶ Hannah’s transition from B2C to B2B
Yeah, absolutely. So , um, I had any worked on the B2C side before I joined fluidly. I started my career at a health and fitness startup called pays you gym . It's an e-commerce site that sells a gym day passes, say that you could don't have to buy gym memberships if you're traveling, or if you just think go to the gym. Very often, I started out there as working in paid search and sets up all their kind of AdWords accounts from there. I kind of moved into a much more general role.
So I did a lot of SCA , um , email marketing and getting involved in the content marketing side of things. I have to pay GMO moved, AVT, AXA insurance, or I worked on their Heyman mater insurance again, and an SCA role that was kind of new to them at the time. Um , they'd never really concentrated on organic search too much. So there's a lot of kind of getting the basics right.
Um, and doing technical things on the website, as well as starting to produce content that would bring in kind of relevant qualified traffic to them. And then after that, I worked for the post office and their head office that was on the financial side as well. So I worked a lot on their travel money , uh , mortgages. And that again was in kind of an SEO content role with also some kind of web of project management in there as well.
Interesting. So she starts quite specialist rather than general, and then actually kind of become more general, I guess, over time, but you've got some deep specialisms , I guess, in different areas of SEO and content and paid search .
Yeah, absolutely. I'm a page Jim , because it was a, it was a small starter . It was my role changed. I was there for two years and my role changed a lot over that time, depending on what the particular needs of the business were. So yeah, I started in a very very specialist area , um, and then broadened that to become much more general.
And then as the kind of sea need became more pressing than the business and I kind of re specialized in SCA along with kind of basically everything else along the way.
Interesting. And now you've kind of, I guess you are managing a bit of everything, a fluidly being super exciting journey so far recently raised was it series a and when was it so exciting and you mentioned that you think was it eight, 10 people have joined the last three months or about , so the growth trajectory is obviously you're flying along and everything seems to be going in the right direction. And this is a great opportunity to talk about culture.
So something I've always been fascinated by marketing. We talked before this about how I've always looked at different companies that have a really strong culture and how that really feeds into marketing.
Eventually, obviously the short-term Lear is that having a strong culture just helps you attract more talent to the business, but actually with a longer term view and thinking more holistically, having a strong culture truly attracts the right businesses and customers to you as, and helps you ultimately win more work and scale of business.
And it kind of, I guess, in an indirect way, see, I'm, I'm looking forward to diving into a bit more because I know that as you're growing, you've been investing a lot of time and energy and thought into how you create a culture that kind of helps support the growth goal . So it takes people with you. Um , and I think as you, obviously, as you grow a bigger business, it's kind of, I guess you have to think a bit more actively about how, how the culture works.
Uh , but then yeah, I'm looking forward to hearing how you, how you think that's going to really feed into the bigger kind of marketing picture and marketing strategy. So I guess setting the scene at a top level, when we talk about culture in this context, what do we actually mean?
Because I think it's a word that gets thrown around a lot and there's lots of different ways of approaching it and all kinds of different workshops and values and missions and visions and whys and hows and Watts and everything else. What's your take on that?
¶ What is company culture and is it owned by the marketing team?
Yeah . So I completely agree that they've kind of a thousand different words or ways to kind of understand culture. I think for , as it fluidly at the moment, it's a lot based around the norms than the kind of beliefs of the team and that kind of shades the way that we should behave internally and also externally. So it's not just kind of between team members, but also how we as a business kind of present ourselves to the world and how we interact with customers and how we make decisions.
Okay. Interesting. And so I guess there's then as a sub section , this is like, this is culture, something that's actually owned by and the responsibility of the marketing team. To some extent, obviously in any business, the leadership, the CEO founders always heavily involved in, even if they don't actively try a kind of setting the college summit centers by the way that they act.
And it kind of, you know , it trickles down across the business, but do you think it's something that is the responsibility of marketing to look after as such?
So I think fluidly , when we've, we spent kind of a lot of time thinking about, say for the last six months and we've grown from six months ago, we were kind of 15 people and went out there to say , we've moved from a position where culture was something that was kind of tacitly understood to something, to a place where culture needs to be kind of explicitly said .
And as we've been kind of gained along that journey, and we've done a lot of work talking to the team about how they feel the culture is and what they'd like the culture to be. Um , one thing we've kind of got from that is that we work in a place where everybody is really interested in building the culture and everyone's willing to work hard at building the culture because everybody believes it's really important to building a successful business.
Do you think that's part of working in a tech startup almost, or , cause I guess you could argue there in a lot of much bigger established businesses, there's plenty of people who maybe just don't care that much about culture , like to Jarvis a nine to five, you know, ticks the base of boxes for them, but do they, do they care
¶ The importance of culture as a start up
that much?
Yeah, definitely. And I think kind of joining a startup kind of shows that you're more likely to be that type of person that doesn't just want to kind of come nine to five. And I think it is also more difficult when you've got a business that's hundreds of thousands of people to , for all of them to kind of build the culture individually and understand the culture and feel the culture to be true.
But because we kind of realize that it's something that everybody's invested in working hard at, then that's something that kind of everybody takes responsibility for. Um, everybody understands the culture and everybody works hard to making sure that we embody the culture and that as we grow is one of the kind of reasons I hope it will continue to look. We'll continue to have such a strong culture because the individuals within the company are taking responsibility.
And I think they're part of the marketing complainant is kind of the tying the culture back to the brand and also articulating the culture in a way that everybody feels to be true.
Yep . Interesting. We can talk a bit more about that, but I know that you've recently been through kind of some exercises to help define what your culture is, to some extent, and really think, I guess, in a reflective way as a group, as a team, what do we value what's important to us at work? So tell us a bit about those kinds of exercises and how you kind of plan those out and what you, what you went through kind of on the
¶ How to form a culture through group exercises
day or days.
Yeah. Okay. Well, we , um, we kind of, before we even started the work, there was a sense that everybody kind of knew what the culture was.
Um, yeah,
Even though it had never been sort of said out loud or written down anywhere and we kind of wanted to test it out and make sure that we hadn't got that completely wrong. So we did kind of the initial ideas gathering session with the whole team where we did a few exercises, some kind of more serious than reflective. Some were a bit sort of more lighthearted. We did an exercise that was called more like X and Y where you picked tea brands or tea people.
And then you rate the sentence clearly is more like X and Y. So it could be something like fluidly is more like cake color than Pepsi or, you know , anything.
So you can do people or a brand brands or kind of famous, or that's really interesting.
And we came back with some really good things and that was a good way of kind of first getting down how people saw the brand. And then we went through and discussed about why we'd pick these things and what it was about particular things that we'd written down. So then we had a lithium had a list of words with how to describe what we see our culture as. And from that we kind of split that out into thankfully the words or kind of made some distinct territories.
So we then kind of had our five sort of territories.
Do you do a lot of post-it note grouping and , and did you do this, like an offsite you left the office and kind of had a refresh for you? Or how did you structure it? It was an offsite , but it was an offsite that's onsite . So in our office building, but on a different floor. Okay. So just about enough to, yeah . Cool. And was that the bulk of the day, was there other stuff that kind of fed into it by the before or after to kind of wrap it up afterwards or
Okay . Then kind of a later session , um , after we established these territories, then , um, we did some work on articulating them a bit more clearly. Um , and from there we kind of took it to sort of the C team and marketing and kind of firmed up how we kind of saw the territories.
And so with the C-suite and such involved in that earlier territories exercise as well. And so then it was more just about distilling it down and turning it into something tangible almost that you could have in five slides and an actual messenger . Yeah .
Yeah. And then more recently we've kind of played that back to the team and then worked on actually bringing the values to life as such by volunteering stories about how we think the values.
Okay. So this is a fascinating, but for me, because I think when you've got your culture and your values defined to some extent , it's so easy for them to then just slightly despair or you stick them on the wall in one of your meeting rooms and that's kind of a , and then so there's bringing them to life, but I think it's fascinating. So talk a bit more about how you've, how you've done that in any initiatives you're thinking you might be planning to do that.
Yeah. So we , um, when we kind of played the values back to the team, then we did an exercise where people kind of thought of different examples of ways that they'd seen the values embodied
At work by other people in the business, by other people in
The business, or between an interaction between someone in the business and the customer, or just the , in the way the decision was made or in the way that we articulated something externally or internally, or the way that we recruited. So, and we came up with all these stories. So one of mine, for example, one of our values is about stepping up and not leaving people in the lurch.
And as kind of a one person marketing team, a lot of my job revolves around carrying really heavy boxes of notebooks around the office , um , that we give out as a slag . And when I have to do that, I never have to ask for any volunteers to help carry the boxes. People kind of look around and they see what needs doing and he needs help. And then they just jump in and step up for people. So it was things like that and they, some of them were more serious and some of them are more like Hartford.
And from that, it kind of colors them and brings them back from kind of, kind of big , inspirational words down into actual interactions day to day .
Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. So is that something you envisage you'll keep doing or like on a monthly basis? I mean, you'll , you'll reflect on, who's lived up to values and like stories you can tell that reflect those values.
I think so . I mean, we're growing really quickly at the moment, so I think it's maybe natural that the culture will develop and change slightly over time. But , um , I think that stories is a good way to bring it back to each team member and for them to think about individually rather than to avoid it becoming just words is on the wall, as you say, that people don't really relate to.
¶ How culture is maintained as a company grows
That makes sense. Yeah. So I guess you just mentioned the fact that you're growing so fast and we talked about how many people have joined recently. Do you think it's more difficult to actually control the culture or maintain a culture case of the across everybody asked as you go ?
And I think obviously if we look at businesses of any size as they get to thousands of employees or more globally with any kind of serious pace of growth is hard to keep track of all of that and keep it all tied together. Do you feel like you've felt like this going from 15 to 20 to 25 people?
I mean, obviously you've been through this exercise recently, so maybe reading between the lines you felt the need to actually get it on paper a bit more, because I think I know when we were a smaller team, it was like, felt like everybody was kind of wrapped around the same thing. And there was just like a sense of what was important quite naturally.
And then as we grow and people get busier and people spread out a bit more, you lose that kind of sense of connectivity and everyone being tied together. Is that kind of how you felt things as they've progressed?
I think kind of getting back to what I was saying earlier about the team being invested in the culture and taking it seriously and wanting to work at it. I think that helps us out a lot because we don't have to work hard to get people kind of interested in the culture, the interest is there already, but that said, as we grow, as we look with a lot of things, I think he needs to be more clear about processes and kind of company documents.
And rather than things just being understood between a group of people, I think it's more important. The more people you have coming in that you need to be able to communicate that to them in a, in a quick and easy way. That's the same for every person say that people don't get a slightly different version of events depending on who told them. Okay .
So yeah . Yeah. And it's about onboarding, right ? When people join to begin with, it's about really making clear what those values are and trying to, I guess that, I mean, with any new person joining business that first few week period is such a critical, that will really define the rest of that journey with you. So getting that work then early on is important. Okay, cool. That's really interesting.
So I guess now understanding the journey that you've been through and how you've got to defining what you've , what you have so far then it's really about how do you work that into marketing? Like, does it become part of your content strategy? Does it govern how you service customers? Do you define whole marketing campaigns around those values?
And I'm really interested to, I guess, think on, we've talked about how culture is kind of indirectly something that's attractive to new customers potentially, but in a more direct way, how does it start to feed into what you actively do as a marketing team?
¶ How culture affects a marketing strategy
I think it really informs a lot of our decisions because it allows us to be really authentic as a marketing department and everything that we put out can reflect the values and be another way to show customers or potential recruits or anyone that kind of, this is who we are, and this is what we're doing, and this is how we're going to do it.
So I think having that clarity makes it actually kind of easier in some ways, because in terms of take, for example, content strategy, our values can inform how we write about things. What we write about one of our values is around being straightforward. So that obviously that can inform content in that we wouldn't write something that was really inaccessible to people. We would always want to make things clear and straightforward .
So in all sorts of different ways, that kind of informs the marketing department and the activity.
Interesting. Yeah . Yeah, because I think there's just so many ways that you can then start to work, particularly content side of things that you've talked about. You've been telling stories about how people were vote , but that's a great piece of blog content to write and I guess really feeds back into how people perceive the brand. And the authenticity is, I think you mentioned is really interesting too.
Obviously we're in this Simon Sinek age of talking about why you do what you do rather than the, how or the why, and, you know, there's that emotional more human side of decision-making that's really important. What, how do you see this feeding into the authenticity side of things in a bit more detail,
As soon as it said that we can show our customers what we're about and the people who, the customers, who you kind of relate to that and also agree with, with what kind of view of the world we'll see that we're kind of a good option for them. And we want to attract people who kind of see that kind of machine intelligence and human intelligence can come together to create things that are kind of bigger than the sum of the parts.
And that's, if we kind of share that through our values, but also through everything we put out, then the people who relate to that and kind of see that and see us will kind of naturally gravitate towards us .
Interesting. Yeah, that makes sense.
And I think as you, I guess if you look at like a marketing funnel almost as the top, which is just the acquisition game here with your site and kind of explaining what the product does and then as this kind of decision-making stage of content and this layer of content, which is actually about almost putting your fluidly and some other products side-by-side maybe, and comparing them and does it integrate with Xero and all these things that probably all tick similar boxes and it's quite hard to
differentiate, but what's key in that decision making stages then that you can stand out as your based on your culture, which is really, really interesting. I think something that's so often overlooked. So I think we great talk about that, how it came form a part of how culture can a part of competitive advantage within marketing. And that was, I think an article that I shared with you from Forbes, I'm just gonna read a quote from it. I thought it was quite cool.
I said the C-suites thinking too short term or too small, which is where marketing comes in. We think big for a living culture changes and bean bags, it's overhauling, internal communications, creating mentorship programs, offering better training for new technology, launching platforms for employee advocacy, giving employees a voice in the brand conversation, it's empowerment and support. It's bringing the best out of each employee, which in turn brings the best out of the brand.
I thought that was such a powerful kind of almost manifesto for how culture can be almost central to our things. We talked about how, you know, there's elements of culture that can just kind of support decision-making and help drive new business. But then I guess, is there a place for culture being like the leader of marketing? Like , is it, is it almost like everything becomes wrapped around the fact that you are a great place to work for? You know , you win loads of awards for it .
People love working for you. People are really behind this mission and actually it's almost like the product itself and the product specs and the integrations are just second or third tear in that in comparison. Do you think that resonates at all?
Yeah, I definitely do. I think it's definitely something that we want to shave the kind of the passion and the kind of vision for the future. And we almost want to kind of have a great product, but at the same time, we want people to understand that our kind of mission is as bigger and better than that. And will kind of carry on going beyond and kind of breaking new frontiers in terms of business finance. So definitely I would say,
Yeah , and
I think the other thing as well, and the other way in which culture can act as a kind of competitive advantage is that the culture that we've developed in the kind of values we've set, I think the team genuinely believe that it will help us to make better decisions and to grow faster and to do the right thing and build the best products based on the culture that we have and the way that we work internally.
¶ The importance of authenticity in marketing
Interesting. Yeah. We talked a bit before about how, I guess in B2B marketing January, there's often a real lack of that emotional side of decision-making and we all forget that just because we're SAS based tech startup or something that there's not a human being sat on the other end of the computer or reading a recent blog post or something.
And I think for us as an agency, I reflect on it a lot when occasionally a client will come in and say, Oh yeah, we read your, kind of meet the team interview with someone or, and it really makes you think that people do sometimes you become a bit detached and you kind of think like rash people were actually reading this as important.
And particularly, I think for you guys in a more tech focused world, it's about the features of the product and how it works and how it connects and all of the things that actually does. And it's so easy to get distracted by what it does and how it works and the AI and all the wizzy stuff. But then this , again, this Simon Sineck view of , uh , the Y over the, what are the, how, how do you think the emotional side of decision-making is ?
You know, we look at decision making units plays a part in B2B marketing January, but also for, for you guys at fluidly. And I assume that based on discussion that culture's going to be a part of that in terms of values.
Yeah, definitely. I think at the end of the day it's humans and then businesses that you're marketing to and humans respond to things that are real and that ring true. And they, you know, we all like genuine relationships, not just people paying lip service to things. I think that kind of is maybe best illustrated through our customer support, which is we care is another one of our values.
And I think sharing kind of genuine care, not just saying that we do, but also kind of embodying it through the interactions that we have with people and showing people. We get a lot of feedback on the fact that we've got our phone number very readily accessible on our website so that people can find us if they want to talk about a problem.
And so many tech companies don't have that and you can't get in touch with them, but for us, we want to make sure that it's, that we're kind of accessible and that people can, if they've got a problem or they've got a concert and then they can't get in touch with those really easily. So I think it seems like that kind of show the genuine commitment to values will kind of have the biggest impact on people.
Interesting. And so when you, I mean, I guess you're talking now about people actually getting in touch if they're already a customer, or I guess also when they're thinking about buying, but a bit of a segue , but I guess you kind of see the customer service side of things is falling somewhat under the marketing's responsibility and a big part of kind of obviously for you retention is kind of a metric.
I assume you're , you're measuring customer lifetime value and making sure that people stay engaged with the product and keep using it. So that's something that, again , I got it from your perspective, marketing wise is like, it's on your agenda and it's not just getting people through the door. Yeah ,
Definitely. I work really closely with the customer success team at fluidly. And again, it's kind of as much about presenting a sort of United front where things make sense from people that have the sense of having been got through the door and then left alone. But the handoff between the acquisition side and the retention side is kind of seamless, but also reflects our values the whole way through and say that people are getting a sense of our culture all the way through the customer journey.
Um , it's not just something that marketing steering off on their own. And then actually when you get to using the product or if you need help or support, then it isn't impacting that as well. Yeah.
Yeah. And that's fair enough, I guess, to nearly finish up the, that storytelling side that we've kind of touched on, we've talked about the emotional side of decision making and how powerful that can be. Culture's a part of that, but also just telling the story of kind of how you're found in growth.
And I think with a lot of any kind of startup, there's always that I guess you naturally have good foundations for that story because you've come from nothing to something quite quickly almost do you spend time kind of thinking about how you tell a story and paint that picture of growth.
And because I think that can be a really effective way of just taking people with you both internally in terms of the team, but also clients who are probably often attracted to, you know , people obviously that are successful.
¶ Telling a growth story as a way to be authentic
Yeah. I think the kind of fluidly story is one that we don't have to put too much work into making resonate with our , with small business owners as our audience because , um , Caroline plumber CA was a small business owner. The reason she started fluidly was because she was safe at , up with having cashflow problems in the business. And, you know, wondering whether she's gonna be able to make payroll or, you know, worrying about what was going to come up in the financial future.
And there was no kind of easy solution to that, to that pain point. So I think kind of having paradine , who's really been through that experience that so many of our customers relate to makes it really authentic and really real for people.
Yeah. Literally been there, done it, found the pain. That's pretty powerful, definitely authentic. I mean the authentic scale. That's really interesting. Um, cool. Well , I think it has been an absolute pleasure chatting through stuff. I think there's a , yeah, it's one of those areas that I don't think many marketing teams I've met have actually reflected on that much in terms of how culture and values feed into the bigger marketing picture.
So it's really interesting to hear about how you're driving it forward and I'm looking forward to seeing fluidly continue to grow and thrive and keep on booming. So thanks a lot for joining us and giving up your time. Great. Thanks very much.
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