Most memorable moments from our interview with Sarah:
Sarah Pease is the VP of Global Marketing at FinLync, which helps forward-thinking treasurers advance to real time treasury in weeks. She’s also a Terminus rock star customer. And we love providing a platform for our customers to share what THEY are passionate about and their knowledge around topics like hiring, productivity, branding, and ABM. So with all of that, let’s dive-in!
Putting Your Aces in Their Places
When it comes to hiring and managing a team, have you ever heard the phrase, “Put your aces in their places”? According to Sarah, it’s a phrase she keeps top of mind.
“To build a high performing and creative team, you have to put your aces in their places. Find out from each person what they like doing best, because when people are doing what they like, they’re going to do their best work, which helps your team and makes them a happier, more productive employee. It also gives you a window into what they want to do as their next career step. So put your aces in their places.”
Productivity Hot Takes and Pet Peeves
Productivity has always been a hot commodity, where companies and people are constantly looking for ways to be more productive. Sarah has learned a lot about productivity in a team, individual, system, and WFH setting and wanted to share her takeaways with us. Here are her biggest takeaways on becoming and staying productive throughout the day.
Takeaway #1: Move your to-do list away from your memory and instead to a project management system.
Trying to remember all of the things you have to do or keeping a to-do list on a piece of paper are both an option, but not the best one. Sarah expressed that in the 21st century, going digital is most productive for her and her team.
“Asana is my favorite project management system. My team lives and breathes it, we use it as our own internal team email. It helps us not only organize ourselves, but have that focus time that we all need to do our best work.”
Takeaway #2: Swap out status meetings for an offline medium to make the most out of live meetings.
Ah yes, good ole’ status meetings. Seems like they have been around forever. Sarah heavily emphasized that the time spent on status meetings should be spent elsewhere and instead recommends taking it off video.
“Use an asynchronous method, whether it’s a Slack channel where everyone posts an update, or through a project management system. It works better, and you leave your meeting time for things that actually require discussion, things that require people to chime in and talk to each other.”
Takeaway #3: The work from home movement is great, with the exception of team happy hours.
Virtual team happy hours are simply not the same. What is the same though are the conversations, sometimes happening with people across the world. As long as these group discussions have a framework and structure, they can continue to thrive in a WFH environment.
“Remote teams are the way of the future. Companies that offer work from home options have access to a much stronger and better talent pool. And what’s more important to a company’s success than their people?”
Branding Success in One Sentence
“Branding is not rocket science- it’s connecting old problems with new solutions and making it visually memorable.”
Such a clear and concise way of describing the foundations of strong branding. When later asked about a brand example that does exactly those things, Sarah highlighted Ellevest. Ellevest is a financial services company by women, for women.
“Their copy is precise. Their branding is memorable. It stands out, it’s different compared to competitors. Ellevest appeals to their target market and it works.”
FinLync chooses to stand out with their branding by leaning on their teams, including creative, copywriting, messaging, and research.
“We know that the entire audience of our users is not who we’re marketing to. We’re marketing to the early adopters, the forward thinkers. It’s really important for us to do the research and understand who those people are and what makes them tick. And that we develop our brand and our messaging to fit exactly [both of] those.”
Wrapping It up With a Sprinkle of ABM
Sarah has had a variety of experiences working on ABM campaigns. In one of her past favorite ABM campaigns, she describes engaging with high-level executives in Fortune 50 type-companies. They were individuals that were already considered experts at their company. So what did Sarah and her team do?
“I give credit to one of my colleagues for the idea. We picked out a YETI cooler and the campaign was completely focused around the phrase ‘Not Yeti’.”
She expressed that they had done research on what these individuals already knew and had, and then asked,
“‘But do you have this? Not Yeti.’ The combination of understanding who our audience was, having a clever, memorable gift, the air cover along with paid advertising, and the email blasts resulted in a huge pipeline growth for my team [and that time].”
Ultimately, Sarah recognized that a successful ABM campaign doesn’t blanket to everyone. Truly understanding the target market and calibrating to them is key. 🗝
We will leave you with one final quote, where Sarah reflected on her ABM journey:
“Calibrate your ABM campaigns to your exact audience. Know them and the challenges that they face. Provide them with a real solution and third-party validation on what you’re trying to pitch, and do it in a way that’s memorable and adheres to their lifestyle.
You can’t send somebody who makes a gazillion dollars something [general] and expect them to take notice of it. On the other hand, if you were to send them something that’s engraved or has their name on it or [is personalized], you stand a little bit better chance of them opening that package or paying a little bit better attention.”
You can follow Sarah on LinkedIn for more learnings and tips from a Terminus rock star customer HERE!
And if you want to learn from another one of our rock stars, check out this piece with Jen Leaver from Bazaarvoice.
