Crayton Montei - Peach

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To learn more, go to SaaSMQL.com. Franco Caporale: Welcome everyone. I'm here with Crayton Montei who is the VP of marketing at Peach.

Hi Crayton, welcome to the Demand Generation Club. Crayton Montei: Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here. Franco Caporale: I'm really excited to speak with you today.

So I'm going to ask you to tell us about your background and how did you get in to join Peach and be their VP of marketing? Crayton Montei: So in college I majored in economics and I made that choice mostly because I had no idea what I wanted to do. Economics seemed a very versatile degree. After I completed that degree, I actually started writing science fiction short stories, and I did that for about a year.

Still didn't really know what I wanted to do. And after that year, HBO did not offer me a ton of money to turn my stories into a miniseries. I started thinking about what I was really good at and what I could do to actually get reliable income. So I'd gotten pretty good at writing over the course of that year and I decided to apply for jobs as a copywriter.

And the first job I got was as a freelancer with a company called Enova International. It's a FinTech lender, and my first role there was writing blog posts. I was asked to write about a blog post per hour. You can imagine that their quality was not super high, but definitely taught me how to work quickly.

I was fortunate enough to move into a full-time copywriter role, working on both copywriting and UX writing. And from there moving into a managerial role in leading the copywriting team. After a few years there started looking for a new challenge, a company with a lot of ambition. I moved out to San Francisco and joined the FinTech lender, BNPL lender firm and was asked to build out the content team, which brought in my focus a little bit.

Yes, it included copywriting, yes, it included UX writing, but also now content marketing and technical writing. So that was a great experience to continue to take on new skill. And in the course of my time there, I had an opportunity to help lead a firm's rebrand. And so the snowball of my career, picking up additional fields and experiences.

I found that this focus on brand was really one of my favorite things to do. How can you help a company translate the great work that they're doing into the marketplace in a way that really resonates with their customers? And so I had a great experience at the firm. I was there for about six years, and now at Peach is my first time focusing on marketing specifically.

I've been at Peach for about two years. Franco Caporale: Honestly, I have many questions on branding because that's what we're going to talk today, but before we jump on it, can you tell me what are some of the platforms or tools that are really part of your work that you don't want to work without? Crayton Montei: Let me just speak for one second sort of about Peach and where we're at because I think that informs a lot of the tools that we're using. So we're a series A company.

We're a B2B SaaS company. We make software infrastructure for lending companies, whether those are FinTechs or banks. And our focus is largely on price size lenders and there aren't hundreds of thousands of those out there. So in our case, we have a much smaller target list than other companies may have.

And so that to some extent informs some of the tools that we use. We can get away at this stage with some more manual effort sometimes. And so one tool that I'll mention is what we use for email, Mailchimp. Typically, in the past I've worked with Marketo or Pardot tools that take a lot more work to use, but they're also a lot more configurable and flexible.

But at our size, I am the only full-time marketing person at Peach. And so we need tools and solutions that can allow us to do a lot with a little. And so Mailchimp, I would say I've been pleasantly surprised my first time using it in at least 10 or 15 years. It's really made it super easy for us to manage our email programs.

It offers enough flexibility and it helps us deliver email campaigns that really look great and look on brand with pretty minimal effort. Aside from that, we found some intent data solutions to be very beneficial, both first and third party intent data. And then, of course, we use the standard Google Analytics, Google ads, and so forth. I'm sure my answer will be different in a couple of years just because of how fast things move at a company of our size.

But those are a few of the tools that we're relying upon today. Franco Caporale: That's awesome. And I'm glad you highlighted the difference of now being a Peach in a fast-growing early-stage company versus when you were at a firm that everything is more enterprise looking. And that's going to be what I want to ask you today.

We're going to talk about really nailing the branding strategy for a company and the differences of doing it at a large established brand like a firm versus early-stage company like Peach. Tell me how do you approach first at a large company? You have already a brand that is very strong, that is very well known. What do you do when you join and you're trying to make it better?

Crayton Montei: At a well-established company, you've probably already picked the low-hanging fruit. So that's one of the main differences between the end of my time at a firm and the beginning of my time at Peach. I did join a firm when they were quite small and left when they were fairly sizable. So it was a great experience to be able to see the progression of the impact of brand.

I think no matter what stage you're at, nailing the brand revolves around three key points. The first being what is true to who you are as a company and what you do well and what you believe. The other is what your customers want. And the third is what your competitors are doing or already own.

And so if you think of that as a Venn diagram and trying to find the overlapping area of what we do well that our customers also really want, that our competitors don't already own. And so when you're a small company, presumably you're trying to own a space perhaps that isn't occupied. And so every decision takes on pretty big importance. You choose to own an area and you can run with that and a lot of noise about it, but when you're large for the most part, you're going to find that there's a lot of other competitors out there trying to do something pretty similar.

And that was the case with our firm. And so it's a matter of continuing to try to identify and build differentiation than a narrower space. Some forms of differentiation are more easily replicated than others, and one that a firm chose and hasn't let go of and no one else has really tried to do except maybe Apple in their BNPL offering now I'm not sure, is that they don't charge late fees. And so that's a pretty powerful message about customer centricity.

And as one that costs a firm quite a bit of money every year, they could be charging a lot more. But the thinking is that by making that pretty bold decision, a firm is going to get recognition for that, going to get appreciation from its customers. And for those customers who really care about working with a BNPL brand who has their best interest in mind and is an advocate for them, hopefully they will choose our firm. At the very beginning at our firm just the fact of offering BNPL was almost enough of a differentiation to give it a ton of runway.

But the more you progress and grow as a company, the more specific and focused you have to be about carving out that differentiation. But it's always possible. You just have to identify what it is. And then the last thing I'll say on this is if you look at companies like Coke and Pepsi, brands like Coke and Pepsi, there isn't really a ton of meaningful differentiation that you can find that's about the product though.

Those companies fight in terms of brand specifically. So they're building in their brand all sorts of attributes that really don't necessarily have anything to do with the product. It's about aspiration or happiness, whatever it may be. That is the farthest end of the spectrum perhaps, where at a firm they still have something that they can really hang their hat on.

Coke and Pepsi, they're really fighting over whose brand is better and who can really speak to customers the best in their advertising. Franco Caporale: Yes, it's very much about the lifestyle there and what they present. Let's now focus on Peach and this idea of a fast-growing, early stage company that is more like a white Canva. When you are trying to see where should the brand go, what kind of positioning are you going to take and what are you going to stand your ground?

How do you take the first step? What kind of data do you look at to start understanding what paths to take? Crayton Montei: That's an interesting question, and I think this has to do with something that we may get to in a little bit, which is why I joined Peach and working for a company that I believe is truly the best in the market versus one that's maybe on par, but working to build a better product. For Peach I think our platform is really so much more modern, so much more configurable than other solutions in the market.

Building a brand at Peach is mostly about, honestly, conveying to the market why it's different and why it's better. And that's pretty tough in our industry because it's very technical. There can be a large gap between the technical product or feature description and the actual benefit to the customer. Why do I care about that?

So we always have to be careful and cognizant of that. But at Peach, it really was an effort of our brand. When I joined, felt like mostly any other startup. It wasn't really portraying to the marketplace the differentiation of our platform.

And so it was just a matter of, okay, let me fully understand what Peach is about, what really makes us different, what really makes us better? And let's find ways, whether it's in the visual brand, whether it's in terminology and product names that we can trademark, whether it's in the language that we use to describe those things or the places that we show up or the way that we sponsor events. How can we find these various ways to communicate to the market honestly, but in a way that also isn't shy, that we are truly the most differentiated solution out there.

So I think we've seen pretty good success there. In our case, we do have some competitors who were offering a solution that purported to fill the same need. So even though we are early, it's not like we have the space to ourselves. And then, of course, there are much larger players who have been in the space for decades in many cases.

So keeping all of that in mind and trying to triangulate what is the space that Peach really needs to own in order to be perceived by our ideal customer as the most modern, the most flexible solution that's going to solve the problem in the best way for me as the business decision maker. Franco Caporale: And I have two more questions on this, because I'm getting very curious. How do you execute all of these things? Because you mentioned you might have a smaller team, a earlier stage company.

When do you decide when you work with outsource or agency, outsource people, freelancer versus bringing talent in-house? And what are some of the things that you prioritize from a pure execution perspective? Because there is a lot to do, obviously. Crayton Montei: There really is, and it's a constant exercise of reevaluating at a company, series A company, things can look very different every six months or even every three months.

And so it's important to constantly reevaluate what we're doing. I think that the question of resourcing is really an interesting one, and I don't think that there's necessarily a right answer, but I think there's a few helpful ways to think about it. Firstly, I think you have to look at the ethos of the company, the strategy of the company, our platform, the technological platform to begin with that is our product was built in a very configurable, in a very scalable way. One of our values as a company is think long-term.

And so we've always been thinking from day one about how do we build a solution that is actually future-proof in an industry where there are constantly new approaches to lending, Binopolis is just one example, but there's tons more. And so we've always been thinking about how can we be as efficient as possible? While some of our competitors might throw more resources at something, we might ask ourselves, is that the right way to go, or is there a way for us to do the same amount with a little bit less, be smarter, be leaner?

And so for marketing, I've given a lot of thought to the right way to resource things and what is the right scope to take on given our scale and our position right now. I would say that having a background in writing has come in handy because I found that content is one of those things that is a bit tricky to outsource. We do use some AI tools to help us out, but they're not good enough in a very technical industry like ours to really get you to the finish line. So that's been handy.

I think I've worked with designers my whole career and that's come in handy as well. We do work with some freelance designers who are fantastic, could not do what we do without them, but we don't really have necessarily work for a full-time designer right now. And I think it's better to go that route than to hire somebody who's going to be twiddling their thumbs 30 or 40 or 50% of the time. And then I think another thing that's made it easier for us to do a lot with a little has been just the evolution of tools, marketing tools like Mailchimp, as I described earlier, the amount of flexibility and automation that you can get from a self-service tool like that is so much more than it was in the past.

And so while some my colleagues thought for sure I would go with Marketo out of the box, that would've take so much more time to manage. And yes, we would have some more flexibility, but what benefit of that right now? Is it really worth the money that we spend, the extra resources in terms of headcount that we need to devote? So I think not taking any decisions for granted is really important.

Take a look at where the company is, what the company's goals are over the next year, what are the options on the table? Literally lay out everything that we could possibly be doing from a marketing perspective, lay out how many resources each thing would take and what the expected return would be. And then you can make a fairly common sense, fairly rational decision about can we get the most value with whatever amount of resources we're prepared to spend right now? And I think the last thing I would say is you have to strike the right balance.

In some cases, what's right for the business has a lot to do with what's happening in the market. So a business might choose to grow faster than they would need to in order to reach profitability because there are other competitors in the space who are really challenging them, they're nipping at their heels. They want to make sure that they have an opportunity to take market share before those competitors do. And so in those cases, maybe it does make sense to spend more on demand generation upfront so that you can really get your name out there and generate a ton of interest and a ton of inbound going forward.

In other cases that may not make sense, it just depends on company and where it's at. Franco Caporale: Yeah, it's amazing how writing content and design is a bottleneck in 90% of the cases. So you're right, having the luxury of the fact that you do have those skills in-house helps a lot. You can really kickstart campaigns very fast.

One last question I have about the branding strategy is how do you measure results and how do you know when the strategy is working? Crayton Montei: It's a really important question, and I think marketing and brand are still very early at Peach. I don't have a super detailed answer for you. One thing that's relevant is because as I said, our target list is quite limited.

It's not, as I say, tens or hundreds, thousands or millions of lenders. It's much less than that. The customers that we really care the most about, we get a lot of feedback from the market when we're attending events, when our sales team is on calls with prospects or clients, and we get a lot of feedback about how well-known Peach is and how people discover us. And that helps us a lot in terms of informing whether we need to invest more in brand building and more in driving awareness.

It is a big industry in terms of dollar signs, but in terms of the actual number of people who are making the decisions and lending and the number of companies who really are the big players, it is a fairly niche industry in a way. And so everyone talk and referrals are so important. And so we do have to think about brand building, not in terms of billboards, but in terms of creating great experiences for the customers that we have, in terms of being selective about sponsorships and advertising and where we show up because our customers are present in the fairly narrow slice of the possible.

Advertising landscape, we don't need to be going super broad. We're not going to be doing the Super Bowl ad of course. We just need to figure out where our customers are. So I think those conversations that we have tell us a lot about how well we're doing.

And because it's so early and because we're employing such common sense decision making to a lot of what we do, we're not yet at the stage where we're extremely rigorous about measuring metrics. Metrics do matter. We do track them, but a lot of what we do is either very difficult to measure or so common sense that we're going to do it almost no matter what. So I'll come back on the podcast in a couple of years and have a more detailed answer for you, but today that's how we're thinking about that question.

Franco Caporale: I know we're almost out of time, so I wanted to ask you, now that you have all these years of experience in B2B marketing and you're an MVP in this fast-growing company, what is the one thing that you wish you knew a few years ago when you started? Crayton Montei: I would say it's okay not to have the answer. That's one of the big things. When you're young and starting out, and even now oftentimes I feel I'm in a position where someone's expecting me to know the right answer.

And I think what's most important is that you can get to the right answer, not necessarily that you know it off the cuff. So if you're willing to say, I don't know, but I will come back to you tomorrow or in an hour with a very detailed answer, I think that says a lot about your capability to help the company in the long run. It's bad for the company if you go down a rabbit hole that you sort of committed to in a meeting, because it sounded like the right thing and then you realize later that it was wrong and you've burned a lot of time and resources, much better to say, I'm not sure.

Let me think about that and get back to you. Then you're really an advocate for spending company resources wisely. You're an advocate for how can we be smart about actually achieving the company's goals in a very focused way. It's a very tough thing to implement, a tough advice to follow, especially when you're young and you want to make a great impression on people.

But the more I worked with senior leaders throughout the course of my career, people that I really respect, the more I realized that they don't necessarily have all the answers either. And oftentimes they're okay admitting that and asking you to help them come to the right determination. So that's something I wish that I had known more early in my career, and it's something that I'm still building some comfort level with in certain contexts, but I think is really important. Franco Caporale: Yeah, I agree a 100%.

I think we've all been there at the beginning when we try to answer on the spot, even when we're not very sure about the answer. So thank you for the advice. Really spot on. And Crayton, was great speaking with you today.

I learned a lot. So thanks again for joining the Demand Generation Club today. Crayton Montei: My pleasure. It was a lot of fun.

Thanks for having me. CLOSING: That's a wrap for today's episode of the Demand Generation Club podcast. If you're curious about how we're landing enterprise deals and unlocking millions in recurring revenue using account-based marketing and integrated direct mail campaigns, check out our website, SaaSMQL.com, that's S-A-A-S-M-Q-L.

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