The Risks of Trying to Rush Quick Marketing Wins with Bianca Bass

The pressure to deliver immediate marketing results has never been more intense. But what if chasing those quick wins is actually limiting your long-term success?

In this episode, Bianca Bass, CMO of Privalgo and one of the Top 30 Most Influential Fintech Marketers, reveals why the most successful marketing leaders resist the temptation to rush results. Having transformed marketing functions across multiple fintech scale-ups, Bianca shares the strategic frameworks that create sustainable competitive advantage over flashy quick fixes.

From her methodology for deep customer understanding to her evolved approach to team building, discover why patience and strategic thinking build marketing functions that truly scale businesses.

What You'll Learn:
✔️ Why rushing to prove immediate ROI can backfire on long-term impact
✔️ How to shift from tactical activities to legacy-building marketing strategies
✔️ Strategic frameworks for sustainable B2B growth that withstand market changes
✔️ Why AI makes strategic thinking more valuable than ever for marketers
✔️ How to build internal stakeholder confidence without chasing vanity metrics

Perfect for CMOs, marketing directors, and anyone leading marketing functions who want to build lasting impact rather than just hitting short-term targets.

Connect with Karen on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lloydkaren/

Connect with Bianca on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/biancabass/

Brought to you by Armstrong Lloyd - your go-to solution for recruiting marketing, sales, and business leaders in B2B.

Want to know more?
Discover more at armstronglloyd.co.uk

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Step by step by step, you will get there, but optimize one thing at a time. When you're doing too much concurrently, that's when balls get dropped and things just do not have the same impact.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Welcome to the Spotlight on Marketing, brought to you by Armstrong Lloyd, headhunters in the B2B marketing space. I'm your host, Karen Lloyd, and today I am joined by Bianca Bass, CMO of Provalgo. Bianca has a reputation for marketing transformation at multi-fintech scale-ups, and today she's going to share her expertise on playing the long game. So if you're feeling rushed to deliver a media ROI, or you're struggling to balance that short-term demands with a long-term strategy, this episode reveals why patience beats speed every time. Without further ado, welcome Bianca.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

Brilliant. So you've been working in fintech and payment sector for several years now. So what drew you to this space in the first place? Because some people consider it to be one of the more slightly boring sectors, but you actually chose it, I believe.

SPEAKER_00 1:17

Yes. Well, I didn't find the sector. The sector found me. A recruiter reached out about a role at a company called 3S Money. Now, they specialize in international business account solutions for businesses who are often underserved by tech-first firms like Revolut and Wise and overlooked by the large banks because their turnovers aren't big enough. And so that mid-market play. And I was curious about it, but my background was very much private. B2C, big brands. I'd started out my career working at places like John Lewis, Selfridges, TripAdvisor, where you're really fighting for consumer attention and you have to be intensely creative. And you also have budget to try things out. So for me, this was very different. I had worked at one fintech previously for a little bit earlier in my career, Totally Money. But again, that was a B2C credit-focused startup. Very different. And when it came to going to 3S Money, meeting the founders, understanding where the business was at, I just felt that there was something creatively challenging about the space, about the opportunity, because you have so many constraints. You have, if you're an FCA regulated business, you have lots that you cannot do with language. You have a market that is intensely product focused. Therefore, there isn't much room for talking about the broader problems and maybe some of the more emotional marketing that I had been trained in. And there's also a huge amount of opportunity. within that sector to do something very different because a lot of people within that sector don't leave. And you also don't have many people entering it. It can be a kind of echo chamber. So meeting the founders, going into the co-working space they were in at Barclays Rise, I just walked in and I felt, okay, this could be a real intellectual challenge for me. It's a risk. It was a startup that had just raised 3 million pounds at that time. They were about 25 people and I would be their first ever senior marketing hire. So I understood that they're a little bit skeptical of me. I'm a little bit skeptical of them. But if this works, it could really work. So... When I talk about boring industries, what I really mean is how do you take storytelling principles from the conventionally great marketing industries and sectors and apply them in places where they're not expected? And that really for the last few years has been my focus. How can I take my natural storytelling skills and bring them into companies and places and to customers who just aren't receiving that elsewhere? And ultimately, a lot of these businesses are not sure about marketing. As I say, they've got I think, I don't know what this investment is going to bring. We've never done brand. We've got by so far without it. But actually, I really love working with a founding team and a leadership team and showing them over time that this can be a complete competitive advantage and differentiator for you if you get it right. So no longer boring to me. Instead... Actually intensely exciting and full of lots of comms challenges, creative challenges and things that I really have to think about every day. And there's not a lot of big examples out there. So I, in a way, get to build that blueprint for myself and the businesses that I work for.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

And I think it's testament to them, actually, that they were open-minded to take somebody who had actually come from B2C because so many companies, when they are hiring, they are looking for that B2B job. you know, technology or have already worked in payments background when they're looking. So it was unusual. Was that their choice or was it the recruiter that sort of selected you for that?

SPEAKER_00 4:53

I think it was a bit of both, but the one thing that I'll say about 3S Money that stands out to me and how I think I got that in, the CEO was very marketing-minded. He'd never done marketing. He'd not worked with senior marketers, but he believed it could be something. He had enough belief to take a chance on someone like me. And I would say this to anybody who is entering B2B or FinTech or any of these other SaaS-type industries. I truly believe that coming from the outside, is

Why coming from outside an industry is a competitive advantage for marketers

SPEAKER_00 5:24

a competitive advantage for you, especially as a marketer. I think that that fresh perspective we have as marketers to an industry where everybody else around you is so accustomed to, well, we've always done this that way. It's always been that way. If you can come in with a fresh pair of eyes as a marketer, as a brand leader, you will do so well. So I always say to marketers, don't be afraid to not be an industry veteran. That is your advantage.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

I don't think it's the marketers. I think it's the hiring managers and the CEOs that are more second their way, if I'm honest, than the marketers. Most marketers are actually quite flexible to some degree. It depends on the route to market and their ability to pick up a new route to market and challenge and way. And it just depends on the problem of the organisation at the time, I suppose, in terms of what they're trying to achieve with their recruitment. But it was a really interesting point.

SPEAKER_00 6:17

Well, that's so true. And I think to CEOs and to hiring managers, what I would say is, why would you not want the most expansive, diverse set of professional experiences around your table? Take businesses like the ones that I work for. We are targeting clients in lots of different sectors. As a CEO, I would want the maximal number of people who have worked in those specific sectors that can bring those viewpoints. So I know that as marketers, we are agile and flexible. And exactly as you say, we like to have, to be quite industry agnostic, but when people are viewing us and thinking, oh, I want someone from our sector, do you want the typical sectors marketing or do you want to stand out? That would be my challenge to them.

UNKNOWN 7:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:05

Fantastic. I think that's great advice to both sides, really, to both sides of the coin. Recently, you did this LinkedIn post where you were talking about transitioning away from previous short-term strategies and maybe looking at the longer-term game. What's prompted this shift in your strategy and what does it look like in practice?

The shift from short-term tactics to long-term strategic thinking at Privalgo

SPEAKER_00 7:24

It's so interesting because we're talking at a time when everybody is talking about AI and what is the role of the marketeer and where are we heading? And when I came into Provalgo, I had a sense that this is a business that was financially very solid. They have not accepted external investment and a lot of it is self-funded, which is so impressive. We are profitable, we're growing and marketing and brand for them is an accelerant. It's something that they are investing in because they want to take it to the next level. But we're not a scrappy startup anymore. So I looked around at the landscape and said, okay, earlier in my career, and part of this is a personal thing, right? I was so...

Personal evolution: from proving worth to building lasting legacy

SPEAKER_00 8:04

keen to want to prove myself and prove my worth. And honestly, I had some self-doubt about, okay, I'm being paid well, but they're not sure about marketing and brand and content. I've got to prove it to them instantly. And now at this point with some real wins under my belt, I just felt that if I come in here and do my old approach of, okay, I'm going to try and get some ad campaigns out and I'm going to run an event and then I'm going to run in this direction. make some website updates. That's fine, but it isn't building legacy. It's not building the kind of deep strategic thinking that for a business like Provalgo, which is already doing well, is going to move things forward for them. When you work in e-commerce, D2C, those kinds of sectors to which I was accustomed, you want to immediately prove that you can change the customer acquisition costs, that you can just improve an on-site conversion rate, whatever it may be. But that's not the game at Provalgo. The game at Provalgo for me is how how do I actually have that deep resonance with the people that we exist for? And how do I give brand positioning that will elevate us to that next level? So it was a bit of a psychological shift for me in the sense that I did feel, okay, I've not had in my first quarter a load of wins that I can start shouting about. I'm investing longer term, but I've been very lucky in that the founders have had that belief system too, and that they've wanted me to work on these longer term projects because that's ultimately going to move us forward. So it's been a marathon, not a sprint. It's a marathon that I'm still in, but it's one that I think I'll be taking forward with me throughout my career now. I am very impatient as a person. It's something that I have to work on. It's probably my weakest And yet, when I look at business actually building for longevity, being short-sighted isn't going to get us where we as a company want to go. I also think going back to the broader kind of macro landscape, with all this talk about AI and marketers and what does it all mean?

How AI tools change what constitutes valuable marketing work and strategic priorities

SPEAKER_00 10:10

I am very keen to say, okay, the things that were quick wins before perhaps have become easier in some senses. You can create content with some great LLMs. You can have different tools that can help you with video editing, whatever it may be. So I think that we actually as marketing leaders have to shift our own beliefs about what value we can bring. To me now, firing out a load of blog posts for SEO and boosting traffic a little bit, that's a little incremental gain. It's not something to write home about. What I can still do, what no LLM can do, what ChatGPT, Claude, whichever you use, cannot do is properly get into the brand strategy, be a sponge for that business, and then deliver something that is going to move us forward. Be that in the employee confidence, which is such an important part of any brand project, be it in the market perception, and ultimately our valuation and our customer proposition. So I do think that it's twofold. It's the company culture, it's the part of my career that I'm in, But it's also the landscape and seeing that the demands on us as marketing leaders has changed. And therefore, I need to pivot too.

SPEAKER_01 11:19

Yeah, brilliant. And you've been doing it since January then, this new approach. But you've obviously previously had the other wins before when you joined the business anyway, haven't you? So you're just building on blocks, really.

SPEAKER_00 11:30

Yes. And I think that's a really key part. You have to come into the business and have the humility to know that you do not understand that company and its culture. Prevalgo is a very similar, on paper, business to 3S money and currency solutions. They do similar things, foreign exchange, international payments, business accounts. But actually, if you're paying proper attention, they're entirely different. Their approach to business, the way they talk to customers, the things that they focus on, very, very different. So when I first joined the business in March of last year, it's been a a real sense of I need to pay closer attention to what's in front of me here. If I come in assuming that I know how this is going to play out and what's going to work, I will not have the same success. And that's been, again, another lesson for me.

SPEAKER_01 12:23

Yeah, that's really interesting because there is always that We're going to talk about playbooks in a little bit, but lots of people are expected to come in and rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat as a marketeer. But quite often that doesn't actually work. You know, you have to adapt. You have to be agile. It's like having a child, isn't it? Every child isn't the same in your family. You think you've had one child, you have another, and that's entirely different, even if you have the same gender. So it's the same when you move businesses and become a marketeer. So absolutely, I think your strategy is brilliant. I'm dying to know if you could share your story of how you did take the business from very few leads to 60% of inbound leads in the company in less than two years. What were the key strategies and what made the big difference?

The 3S Money transformation: from scattered focus to systematic customer-driven approach

SPEAKER_00 13:08

Coming in, the team was just two people. And as I mentioned, there was not a senior marketing presence. And really, as with any startup that's growing and making things happen, they were throwing things at the wall, hoping they would stick. There was a lot that was being spent on Google advertising and other channels that weren't properly optimized, and they were spreading their focus too thin. So when I joined the company and really started getting into the analytics, I thought, okay, We are hemorrhaging money in ways that we don't need to. Let me bring everything back to basics. I dialed everything back. And I was looking a lot at a book called Crossing the Chasm, which if you haven't read it, I highly recommend. And I read that very early in my career. And the principle that that book delivers is this idea

The "thin end of the wedge" strategy for focused market penetration

SPEAKER_00 13:55

of the thin end of the wedge. So this idea that you focus your initial marketing efforts on a very niche segment, and then you expand out from there, but you nail that segment first and foremost. And so when I started really listening to some of the client calls, understanding how sales pitch the business, seeing where there was some resonance, I thought, okay, I don't think that this business right now is actually speaking to any kind of pain point. And this often happens with B2B in the FinTech space. We get so focused on articulating our product as well as we can. We've got all this functionality and these features and we know it's complicated. So we really agonize on that without actually paying attention to how our customers and the people we exist for talk about and think about our products. So often we're monologuing out We're putting out there what we think is our nailed proposition. But actually, good marketing is a conversation. It's a dialogue. So the first thing I did after I dialed back our Google advertising and what we were spending and spreading ourselves too thin, I started listening very obsessively to customer calls. I would sit in with the sales teams. I would pay attention to what the questions they asked, the language they used, the things they didn't say. And from that, I started to get a sense of the personalities that we were serving because we often talk about, okay, our ICP. Yes, ideal customer profiles are so important. Of course they are. We need to know what job role they are and the demographic data and everything else. But what are the personalities? What are the things that actually make that person have a great call with your business versus just a really functional one and it was through that that I begged our CEO and the founders I really want to meet with some of these clients in person I just want to sit in I just want to go to meetings and really understand who we exist for in an entirely new way and that was where it began so still under the wedge going back to that principle it was okay let's start with a very specific audience in this case it was non-resident directors and shareholders trying to open a business bank account in the UK who didn't have access. And of course, functionally, we were giving them access to a local GBP account. Great. But what are the emotions of that process? How do we speak to that? How do we speak to the frustrations? And I think the broader business, and this wasn't just me, this was what the CEO was very much leading as well. We knew that we were offering something to people after they'd perhaps been rejected, by a big bank or had felt like they couldn't speak to a human at a Revolut or a Wise and their business was too big for that kind of pure tech play. And so how could we actually make these people who have arrived at our website and to 3S Money frustrated, exhausted, just completely fed up? How can we make them feel like it's a premium experience? Like they haven't been rejected, they just haven't found us yet. How do you shift that mentality? So took those principles, very much started landing page by landing page, built out messaging based on what I'd heard from those customers and people. reflected that back and then started up our Google advertising again, while also building a lot of SEO content around the kinds of things that non-resident directors and shareholders need to know. If I am launching in the UK, okay, what's the sort code? What are some of the business practices that I need to be aware of? What are the cultural implications? How can I feel a broader part of that business community? And that was the strategy. It was incredibly empathy driven. If I'm in that position, how do I speak to that emotion driver and those pain points. And as we continued on, we became top ranking on the first page of Google for what documents do I need as a non-resident business account owner? What do I require? Can a non-resident open a business bank account in the uk you know top page on google for that because we'd taken the time to understand them properly and we weren't just saying local business accounts uk everybody's saying that no one's actually speaking and especially not at that time to the challenges they're facing so it was that psychological shift very much influenced by thin end of the wedge niche and a lot of customer research, not in the conventional sense, just listening in. I wasn't there with a script asking them specific questions, although I did do a bit of that. I immersed myself in the day-to-day and we built up from there over time. And then interestingly, the final thing on this is I started tapping into the origin story. In the B2C space and in the brand marketing space, we do a lot of, hey, what's your origin story? What's your vision? What's your mission? In B2B FinTech at that time, we weren't doing any of that at all. And so, but through this money I tapped into, well, hold on, our founders are also not British and they're here building a successful business in London. How do I speak to that too and connect those emotions across the board so that our customers can see themselves in everything we put out there? So it was a combination of that and step by step by step, it built momentum. And a year in, we were resonating and generating leads in a way that I hadn't forecast and that Continued from there.

SPEAKER_01 19:22

Absolutely brilliant. There was one other question I had, actually. Did you listen in to the calls that were prospect companies or were you only listening to ones that were existing or did you do both?

The Friday afternoon call listening ritual that transformed customer understanding

SPEAKER_00 19:33

Both. Very intentional about doing both. So I met with existing customers who our CEO could take me to and I could go with the sales teams to meet them. And my team and I were actually quite ritualistic about this. Every Friday afternoon, we just did call listening. And that's not something I've heard in other marketing teams, but I really believe in this. We would spend every Friday afternoon listening to leads, prospects, what questions they have, what came up, what key messages were delivered, what key messages weren't delivered, and just developing that understanding more and more. So it was a mixture of both.

SPEAKER_01 20:11

And you did that forever, not just in the time you were doing the project. We

SPEAKER_00 20:16

were doing that when I left still, yes.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

Oh, brilliant. Actually, you're the first person I think I've ever heard someone say that to. So that is definitely quite unique. And also, were you listening to it live or recorded?

SPEAKER_00 20:28

Recordings. In the early days, we would actually, because we're a tiny team at that point, we would actually sit in. So we'd say to someone in the sales team, please, can you just take your call in a meeting room and we'll just listen in and hear what's going on. So that it was, it was that balance because of course, sometimes it's confidential and you can't have the opportunity, but where it was possible, but they said, you know what? Yeah, join us. We took every chance we could.

SPEAKER_01 20:54

No, that's brilliant. And I love the fact that you listen to the recordings. I was thinking Friday afternoon probably isn't the best time for someone to make sales calls. No, recordings from the week. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Oh, well, brilliant. And also, I think it's great because it kind of starts to probably spark over the weekend, can trigger your brain into planning for the next week, isn't it? So it's a good way of finishing with the customer as the last thing you're thinking of when you finish on a Friday. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

Well, exactly. It's a bit of an unconventional thing to ask your marketing team. Okay, every Friday afternoon, we are listening to customer calls. And by the time I left, we were a big team. So that was the designers that were listening, our UX team were listening, performance marketers, content managers, everybody. And from that, you get so many content ideas. You have greater empathy when you are designing. You understand kind of the technical ability of the people that you're creating UX for. So I wanted the team to be really immersed in that. And also we had things like scorecards where typical sales leaders will score the calls that they hear and they'll do a bit of QA on them. And I thought, why can't marketing do more of that? If we're nailing our proposition and our positioning, why are we not applying that too? We should be working in absolute tandem.

SPEAKER_01 22:06

Honestly, it's gold. I think a lot of people will take that as an idea to move forward if they can record calls in that basis. So amazing. So thank you for sharing that. You mentioned to me before that you have a playbook that you've developed for the fintech sector. I'm always a bit sceptical about a pure playbook you can roll out over and over again, but I'd love to walk through what your components of your playbook are and how you might adapt it or someone else could perhaps adapt that concept to a different business.

The four-phase marketing playbook: listening, positioning, toolkit, and demand creation

SPEAKER_00 22:32

Definitely. So the first phase goes back to what I was saying about listening. So spending a lot of time with the sales team, shadowing demos, reviewing those recorded calls, what language are the clients using, what objections come up, and what are the triggers that actually lead to conversion or not? So always starting there. I always say to people in the first 90 days, if you're not spending more of your time listening to actual customers and clients and sales versus actually trying to pitch yourself and trying to prove your worth, then you're doing something wrong. The second is about refining positioning. So early on, I don't think you can completely nail your brand positioning, but you can certainly start refining it. So use those insights from that listening phase to define or refine a very clear value proposition. Take all the jargon out and really use that fresh pair of eyes that you have for that limited amount of time to make some changes. And to me, I don't think of brand positioning as, okay, it's delivered, it's done. To me, it's iterative and it's something that's living and breathing all the time. But phase two is definitely refining that positioning and doing what you can with it at that stage. Then moving into the third phase, it's about building a toolkit. So I have managed lots of marketing teams over the past decade, and I've learned that you can't expect a team to be high performing if you don't give them the right tools. So When you're looking at where the business is with its marketing, you need the right set of enablement assets. So it's not just slide decks and really sleek content, but what's actually genuinely going to support the marketers that you have in your team? And what's going to support sales conversations? What's going to deepen trust? So if you can do a bit of an audit, if this is the initial toolkit that I'm going to deliver to the business, that can really help. When you have all that foundational work done, you've listened, you've refined your positioning, you've built out that initial toolkit, then it's about creating demand in that order. So don't try and do everything, is my advice always. You can do anything, but you can't do everything. you need to focus your efforts on the channels that your audience actually uses. So historically for me, that's meant investing in SEO, building a really smart content ecosystem, making sure that we are showing up for those niche keywords and then expanding out from there. But I think also treating every campaign as an opportunity to educate as well as conversion. And I think when it comes to creating demand, we have to say, oh, well, they're only getting X number of leads at the moment and they want to get to Y and I've got to help them get there. And it's like, no, strip everything back. Focus. Step by step by step, you will get there. But... optimize one thing at a time when you're doing too much concurrently that's when balls get dropped and things just do not have the same impact and the fifth is to measure and iterate from there so having really tight feedback loops marketing staying incredibly close to sales i always immediately befriend whoever the sales director is and make sure that we are getting on very well that they understand that i am an asset and a support for them rather than anyone trying to question what they're doing and then learning from them as time goes on So that is always my playbook for the first six to 12 months. I do sometimes invest in PR, depending on where the business is at and whether we have a story to tell. But I typically follow that kind of order.

SPEAKER_01 26:05

Do you know, I love the analogy. I don't know if you've heard it. Don't try and boil the ocean. And that's basically what your approach is. You know, don't do everything at once. Don't try and do something impossible and get overwhelmed and carried away and let's laser focus in on something. And it's worked. It's worked. And it's just that building block of moving up. So brilliant advice. So as we talk about different playbooks, we also talk about different team structures and how things have evolved. Because I know at 3F Money, you grew your team from two to 20 But in your current role, you've taken a completely different approach with a much smaller in-house team and several agency partners. So what's influenced the decisions and changes in both businesses?

SPEAKER_00 26:45

I

Team building evolution: why strategic structure beats hiring speed

SPEAKER_00 26:46

think this links to the long-term strategy that I'm focusing on and what I said about the toolkit that teams really need to have to succeed. Coming into Provalgo, I quickly noticed, okay, the marketing team has been in place for about five years. They have been doing bits and pieces, but talking to them as individuals, they had been feeling really fragmented. They'd not felt like they'd made a real impact. And that was because they hadn't been given the right tools to make an impact. I have in the high growth companies where you just need to hire, you just need to get going. I've brought people in when they I myself as a leader have not been 100% clear on what our objectives are. And I vowed to not do that this time. And what this business needed was a long-term brand positioning project and the optimization and redesign of our client platform. Those are big, meaty projects and they take the time they take. So for me to bring in in-house resource when we're in the middle of those projects didn't feel right because I've done that before and I've seen that it can cause confusion, it can cause disconnection and that's not what I wanted. Instead, I thought, right, let me get a very solid foundation set up here. I'm not in quick win mindset. I'm in, okay, longevity mindset. How can I actually increase valuation, increase value for customers? That isn't just about firing out some LinkedIn posts or just doing some quick blog posts. It's a different game now, especially with AI and the tools and what that's enabling. I have been in this process of let me keep our BAU, our business as usual activity going, supporting sales, our email marketing, our SEO. Let's just keep that going. So we'll maintain a content manager in-house. But rather than building out that function, let me nail the positioning first. What is the brand that we want to be? We don't have that clearly articulated. We're kind of at a bit of a juncture where we could go one of many ways as a business before bringing more people into that mix and into the equation. Let's be 100% certain on this is us. So when I do start hiring, I can say, here is our brand. full brand book this is everything you need to know about the history of the business the vision of the company how we articulate ourselves and then ultimately I will save so much time with onboarding rather than bringing lots of talented people in which is what I've done before and said we're all going to figure it out together for people's careers they need structure When you're coming in at that junior to mid-level, you deserve structure. You deserve to have a really good idea of this is the business that I'm in. This is where I can contribute. So that's my thought process. It's come from a lot of painful, difficult experiences, building teams who haven't had the right tools, expecting the earth from them, and then realizing that all of our heads are spinning trying to figure this out rather than doing that precursory work, which I think is so important.

SPEAKER_01 29:54

Yeah, absolutely. And the thing is, is I think we're also in a very different place economy wise and like company goals to where you were three or four years ago. So, you know, businesses aren't in isolation, aren't they? That's again, the whole you can't repeat something because other external factors also affecting what's going on in the business. But I think it's true. Yeah, no, I think it's interesting that you've also recognised that it's important to train those people and build up that and not just expect people to come in and do that themselves and give people a framework. Because I think the better you can onboard somebody and partner with them, especially for me as the recruiter, I see that all the time that companies come in and then things might not go so well. And it's like, well, let's look at how did you onboard them? What did you do to help build their knowledge up? And depending on the level of the person You know, there needs to be some partnership.

SPEAKER_00 30:48

It does. And you're so right. As a recruiter, you will see this all the time. People come in with the best of intentions. But if there isn't that support there, then a company can very quickly turn and say, well, they're not delivering. It's not working. And I've been that hiring manager. I will be very honest and say I've had so much to do and I'm thinking, why are they not getting it? Why are they not hitting the ground running? And We have to give them, and to use a running analogy, we have to give them the right running shoes. You have to get the right kit. You can't just say, well, go on then. And so because I've had those experiences where I felt like I could have done better as a leader and a manager in creating that structure, I'm not there anymore. I've learned from my mistakes. I understand better, as you say, the landscape that we're operating in and when the time is right. I really feel that when you're in a high-grade startup and you've just got so much that you want to get done, you can bring people in and hire because you want that sense of, well, the team's growing. We're on the right track. There's a lot of vanity metrics with it, safety in numbers, that kind of thinking. But what is right for the individuals that you're bringing in? Because if we get to probation and I'm saying, no, you just, you haven't hit the expectations that we have in place. We also have to look at, well, have we failed with onboarding? How have we, what have we been missing in our onboarding process that's meant this person isn't able to achieve their potential? So onboarding a bit of a re-ordering of priorities for me, but one that is feeling a lot better, I have to say. Because you do get people who join a startup and they love the chaos and they thrive in the chaos. But most people, I would say, and I'd love your thoughts on this, most people do need more support. They do need proper onboarding and it cannot be an afterthought. Right now where I'm at, I can't provide full structure for someone and a full understanding of Prevalgo. But in six months' time, I will have a much better shot of doing that.

SPEAKER_01 32:48

Yeah, that's great. So it's great you've recognised that and you're using agencies. But I would say what we would always do in the recruitment process and we're supporting startups, first of all, we'll ask people and try and assess their soft skills about how they feel about not being in a structured environment. And we'll ask questions and identify as a key kind of soft skill really is how someone can deal with the lack of ambiguity and framework. Because even the best startups in the world that may have some framework, there's still that pivoting that needs to happen because the business has got to come first and it's about growth and you know sometimes they could have a completely different shift and change in terms of what the product focus could be or what they're doing or how they're working or they've now got investors in so the structure's changed or they've brought in a new CRO so things change very very quickly almost overnight so I think anyone that's going to come into a startup in a marketing team they need to have resilience they need to have the agility to change and they need to You know, just accept that it's not a larger organization where everything is siloed and in its box.

SPEAKER_00 33:55

And that is an opportunity for the right person. If you have that attitude, if you are quite entrepreneurial, you will thrive. And some of my best hires ever have been natural entrepreneurs who have come in and said, OK, we don't have any frameworks. time for me to create my own, or that allows me to be more creative and inventive. But I think when you are hiring at that content manager, marketing manager, designer, product designer level, and in our case at Prevalgo, you don't have your brand kit in place. You don't have your UI kit. You don't have a tone of voice guidelines and everything else. I found that it could have been a bit too much of a scramble. And we've experimented and we've tried different things. And now... it feels like the most aligned point. Not to say, to your point, that there isn't going to be a lot of ambiguity ahead. There definitely will. But if I can give as many tools to navigate that, that's my goal.

SPEAKER_01 34:51

Brilliant. Well, I think you're seven steps ahead of most startups, Bianca, and they're lucky to have you to have that structure and anyone would be great and happy to join the team on the basis that you've had that forward thinking. And, you know, I think the thing for me just listening to you is that I love your humility and the fact that you failed forward. You know, you haven't just kept doing the same thing over and over again. Every instance you've done something different, which I think is commendable.

SPEAKER_00 35:17

Thank you. That's so kind. And marketing is about experimentation. And I do sit here very humble because there's so much still that I don't know. And that's what keeps my career interesting to me. What else am I going to fail at? What other mistakes am I going to make that are going to turn into these really valuable lessons that I can just apply to whatever's next?

SPEAKER_01 35:38

Well, you're one to watch. I definitely know that in terms of where you're going and moving and shaking the sector. So we're nearly out of time. So is there anything else that I haven't asked you today that you would like to cover in the podcast?

Building internal relationships and making the business case for brand investment

SPEAKER_00 35:52

Yes, I think I would like to talk a little bit about relationship building as a marketing leader. Now, all over LinkedIn all the time, we are talking about AI is going to take our jobs. Oh, no, no, no. It's not AI that's going to take our jobs. It's people using AI better. They're going to take our jobs. And there's so much distraction out there. And what I'm learning is that now is the time for marketers to really be thinking about brands. We've talked a lot about whether people believe in brand. What does it mean? That is... in my view and from my experience, the number one differentiator that a business, particularly in the B2B space, should be investing in right now. There's so many interesting things going on in the B2C space. So for example, I'm seeing lots of the big beauty brands are now taking their customers on trips rather than influencers. So we are actually becoming customer-centric, which I love. But if you're in B2B, you also have this opportunity to do that. So build the right relationships, early on with the CEO and the CFO in particular and take them on that journey of what that looks like. I think often as marketers, we're very keen to make sure that people are understanding our world and that they don't get marketing. They don't understand marketing. They're not understanding that things... take time. And that's fine. I've been there and I've had those frustrations. But I think we have to understand the business as well, first and foremost, and then educate over time to show what brand can do. So a few thoughts there on relationship building, the opportunities we have, and why I'm really excited about brand marketing in this phase and why I've been campaigning to invest in it. And it wasn't that it was easy to get that signed off. It was a process of just really having several meetings, helping them understand that if we get this right, it moves the needle on everything. So that's a bit about where I'm at and I've loved this conversation. Yeah,

SPEAKER_01 37:56

no, I've loved it too. And I love the fact that you've almost identified your own internal personas of who the people are to be able to go forward and to go to make a business case and move forward. So that's brilliant. Thank you for listening. It's been an absolute pleasure to meet Bianca today. hope you've enjoyed diving into the mindset methods momentum behind driving a strategic marketing leadership Do you know, I'm really lucky to be a podcast host and speak to brilliant marketing leaders like Bianca. As a passionate marketeer myself, I'm also a headhunter and the managing director of Armstrong Lloyd, sales and marketing search firm. So if you're looking to grow your team and you'd like a conversation of what the current market looks like, please drop me an email at karen at armstrongloyd.co.uk. I'd love to hear from you. Until next time, keep shining the spotlight on marketing.

UNKNOWN 38:50

Thank you.