Clarissa Horowitz - Treasury Prime

Hello and welcome to a new episode of the Demand Generation Club Podcast. I'm your host Franco Caporale. Our guest today is Clarissa Horowitz Vice President of Marketing at Treasury Prime.

Treasury Prime was founded in 2017 and is building the future of finance.  Leveraging its award-winning APIs and versatile Banking as a Service (BaaS) products, Treasury Prime enables fintechs, banks and corporate partners to innovate, adapt, grow and scale to stay competitive in a rapidly changing marketplace. 

Clarissa is a strategic and forward-thinking marketer who has extensive experience in fintech. She previously served as the VP of Marketing at BitGo and MobileIron turning startups into category leaders.

Transcript

Franco Caporale:

Hello, and welcome to a new episode of the Demand Generation Club podcast. I'm your host, Franco Caporale. Our guest today is Clarissa Horowitz, vice president of Marketing at Treasury Prime. Treasury Prime was founded in 2017 and is building the future of finance. Leveraging its award-winning APIs and versatile banking as a service products, Treasury Prime enables fintechs, banks and corporate partners to innovate, adapt, grow, and scale to stay competitive in a rapidly changing marketplace. Clarissa is a strategic and forward thinking marketer who has extensive experience in FinTech. She previously served as the VP of Marketing at Bitco and Mobile Iron, turning startups into category leaders. So I'm really happy to welcome today, Clarissa Horowitz, vice president of marketing at Treasury Prime.

Clarissa, it's really great to have you on the show today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Clarissa Horowitz:

Thank you so much for having me.

Franco Caporale:

Perfect. So you have a very, very interesting background and I can't wait to ask you a lot of questions. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your career, and how did you end up becoming the VP of marketing at Treasury Prime?

Clarissa Horowitz:

Well, like many marketers, it wasn't a completely linear journey. I actually graduated from college with a degree in history and my plan was to be the next great magazine photographer, and after a few years of doing that, I decided it probably wasn't going to happen, that I was a very good photographer but I was not a genius, so that set me on this quest to figure out, okay, well, if not photography, then what do I want to do? And after a lot of research, the answer that seemed to be a really good fit for me was to go into public relations. So in the dot com boom, I joined a firm in San Francisco and worked on every kind of account you can imagine, from food to wine to class five switches to e-commerce, all sorts of things.

So I spent about 10 years altogether in agencies working on startups, working on major accounts like HP, Yahoo, Wells Fargo. I worked at Google for a while as well, and then I really started going in-house with startups. And so the first one I joined was a company called Mobile Iron. I started working with them when they were 35 people. I went in-house when they were 70. I was the second person to join the marketing team as director of communications and I was there for eight years and was very involved in the IPO, in 16 quarters of earnings and growing the company from pretty much zero to 220 million in revenue and a thousand people.

After that, I decided it was time to go do something new and interesting, so I thought cryptocurrency, what could be more different from enterprise software? And so I joined a company called Bitco that at the time was going through a transition from being a Silicon Valley security company building hot wallets to a digital asset investment firm serving a Wall Street audience. And that was when I went in and had to build my first marketing team from scratch. We had no systems, we were using a CRM system we'd never heard of. It was about getting the technology, the people and the processes in place. And after doing that for a couple of years, I had an opportunity to go do something similar at Treasury Prime, which was kind of a perfect intersection of my enterprise software experience and my recent experience in the banking and finance world.

So what we do is we are like the Uber of banking as a service. So if you think about the Uber model, you've got passengers and you've got drivers, and you need to have lots of both for the model to work really well. So what we're doing is we partner with banks, we go in and we wrap and integrate all of their systems, we build an API layer on top of it, and that way, fintechs who are building neobanks, who want to embed accounts or provide payments or cards can just plug into our API in order to be able to do that. So if you think about what Twilio did for communications, we're really doing that for banking as a service.

Franco Caporale:

Very interesting. And obviously, you are again in the position of building the team from scratch, so can you tell us more? Where are you on that stage and how is your team today? Who are you looking to hire as well?

Clarissa Horowitz:

Yeah, absolutely. So when I joined, I was employee 14 and that was much earlier than I'd ever gone in-house with a company, and it seems a little counterintuitive when you think about it to say, why is a series A company, because that's super early stage, ready to bring in a senior marketer? And what I understood once I got in there was that we had actually established incredible product market fit. There was no doubt that this business model was working and now we just needed to start to put all of the other pieces in place.

So spent a lot of time talking with my boss, learning about the company, talking to customers, and my initial thing was, all right, we've got to work on the messaging and positioning because we're not doing a very good job of describing who we are and why we're different at what we do. So that was the first project I took on and that was something I did where I interviewed our founders, our customer facing employees, interviewed a bunch of customers, a bunch of investors, did a lot of competitive research and put together that framework which led to an overhaul of the website.

Then I started thinking about, all right, so what technology do we want to be using? If we're going to be doing marketing, we need a marketing platform. And at that time, we were already using HubSpot for CRM, so after many discussions with other people in the company, because these are big decisions and it can affect a lot of departments and can have some real cost ramifications, we decided that our business was not that complicated. We are dealing with a very specific set of verticals, we are focused on companies and banks in the US, we don't have a global program. There's enough to fix with the US banking system that we don't even need to look at other countries yet.

And so at that point, we started to think, all right, now we're going to put that in place. I've got marketing operations and they'll do sales ops for us so we're going to bring in an agency and do that. And after thinking about it, we realized, we need to really go after this developer audience. There is an opportunity to bring people together to get them really excited about our product. It was built for developers, it's really good. All of my engineers are very much developer focused so we knew that this would resonate.

So interestingly, the first hire that I opened was for a head of developer relations, and so that was my first hire and that person started at the beginning of the year. And then my second hire I think makes a lot more sense to this audience, which was I brought in a head of demand generation. And-

Franco Caporale:

Yeah. No, sorry, I was asking why you thought to start with the developer relations first? You said you want to break into that but there are a lot of other decisions involved with the tech stack, what campaigns and everything. Why was that the first hire basically?

Clarissa Horowitz:

Because we felt a real sense of urgency to get out in front of that audience sooner rather than later, and that there was also an opportunity to do it in a really authentic way that was very true to the DNA of the company, and that this would be a set of people who would be massively influential in driving our business.

Franco Caporale:

So is it now the demand generation person and this person working together? Do you guys measure the effectiveness of those campaigns towards developers?

Clarissa Horowitz:

Absolutely. Absolutely, and my developer relations lead went on paternity leave. So we got the foundation built and when he comes back, we're going to be focusing a lot more on outbound, but absolutely. They worked very closely together because the messages are similar for these audiences. There's a message about using our tools and getting to market faster with us than with any other option, and that will resonate with both business audience, which is where I think of the demand gen efforts being more focused, while the developer relations audience is about how easy is our tech to use? How fast can it work? How simple can we make the process? How good is our documentation?

Franco Caporale:

That's awesome. I actually have two questions for you right off the bat. Number one is do you have a favorite tech stack from a marketing perspective? When you join a new company, especially when it's brand new where you can pretty much choose whatever you want, do you have favorite tools, favorite platforms?

Clarissa Horowitz:

So having now been using HubSpot for a while, I think their UI is fantastic, but I love the granularity and the level of control that you get with Marketa, but it's not as easy to use. Anyone can jump into HubSpot, do a little bit of work, watch a couple of their videos and you can go manage this. Marketa is way more complicated. And I have a great story about things going very wrong with Marketa where we had somebody once who thought they were working in the sandbox but they were actually working in the production instance, and so we had an email go out to 30,000 mobile IT people about two for one coconut water.

Franco Caporale:

Was that a test? Just running a test?

Clarissa Horowitz:

Exactly, exactly. Somebody playing with it but it actually went out there, and so we had to immediately say, "Oh my God, we're a security company. People are going to think we've been hacked." So it actually became something that we needed to respond to immediately. So I grabbed our VP of marketing and said, "All right, here's the deal. We've got to get this out. Here's the copy I've written. I think it should go out under your name." And we tried to keep it a little bit light to say, "This was not a security issue, this was user error. And we also want to reassure you that Mobile Iron is not diversifying into food and beverage and then we'll continue to offer you the great technology and best practices for mobile implementation," things like that. So anyway, that's my way of saying I love that.

I think my favorite thing that I used recently was for corporate gift giving. So this was an incredibly hard year to be able to do gifts cause you can't just send things to people's offices, and so I used a service called Loop and Tie where we were able to do a curated set of gifts, and this was all on a shoestring budget. This isn't like a Sendoso where you can spend a lot more. And so we were able to do branded packaging, we were able to pick gifts. We were also able to include charities as an option if people wanted to just make a donation there instead of receiving a gift, and the feedback was so incredibly positive from everyone that in fact, the CEO of one of our bank partners got in touch to say, "Give us all the information. I want to do this for my employees."

Franco Caporale:

Wow. Yeah-

Clarissa Horowitz:

And [inaudible 00:12:52] the most popular gift was contributions to Doctors Without Borders.

Franco Caporale:

Nice. I love the charity aspect of that, and gifting is a big part of our demand generation strategy and I always believe in differentiating the touches between digital and offline, including events but also direct mail. I've been a strong believer for many years but I love how you turn into also that charity aspect which is, especially now, very appreciated.

But I want to shift from that. I'm going to ask you another question later but you mentioned this kind of PR issue with the coconut water that you had to manage. At the end, it's still a PR exercise to go and manage that situation. And you have a very strong background in PR so I want to take the opportunity to ask some questions about it because for the demand generation audience, PR is like something you do just because you have to but it's not where you put the majority of your budget, especially in startups. So I want to understand how you see the importance of the PR and the PR team within the demand generation context. And obviously, I'm going to ask you a lot of questions but what's your angle here coming from PR and now leading also demand gen and every other aspect?

Clarissa Horowitz:

Yeah. So I think that we think about demand generation, we think we run campaigns, we figure out how to work with third parties to bring new contacts into our database and then we market to them and we do all of those pieces, and I think it's easy to overlook how important brand building can be. And my personal opinion, obviously I'm hugely biased in favor of PR given my background, is that when you're a startup, this is probably not the time to be doing massive advertising campaigns, but maybe it is. It depends on your audience. And I think I should caveat this by saying my focus has been pretty much B2B through my career, so that's going after a very different type of buyer.

And what I think is so magical about getting reporters to write stories about your company is that that is an objective third party who, in theory, has choice about writing about a whole bunch of different things who is choosing to write about your company, and that is saying that to their readers, this is important, this is something you should know. This company is either doing something interesting, the CEO has something important to say, and that's actually an incredibly important measure of whether a company matters or not. And I think sometimes, that can get overlooked, and I think that so often, we see public relations being kept very, very far apart from demand generation and there's a lack of understanding on behalf of the people in both those areas of what the other person is doing, how they're doing it and why it matters. When in fact, I think if you can bring the programs together, you are able to tell the same story either through channels that you own, through channels that you're buying or through channels that you're earning.

Franco Caporale:

Do you think PR is going to have more impact, especially on the startup level, as driving the top of the funnel, the middle of the funnel or at the end of the sales process? Because I'm imagining if I'm an enterprise company, I decide to take a risk with a startup and I don't see any story, any news about that startup is an additional risk, right? It can be uncomfortable.

Clarissa Horowitz:

I think that's exactly right. I think that's exactly right. And so when you think about it, you have to put yourself in the mind of the buyer and that's where I think it's really important. And one of the things I've been doing lately is I'm building our sales development rep function, and so I've been interviewing very junior people, and one of the questions I've been asking them has been, tell me about the last time you made a major purchase. What was your process for research for decision making? And I think what we've all started to realize as marketers is usually, by the time somebody is coming to us, we're already on their short list. And when somebody fills out the Treasury Prime contact us form, they're not just a hand raiser. They've already discarded probably three or four other companies that they don't want to speak to.

And so you have to think about all of those things that happen before they come to your website or before they raise their hand in some other way, and it really becomes how do they hear about you? And you're absolutely right to say that if they're doing a Google search and they're not seeing any news stories, you think to yourself, well, how serious is this company? How long have they been in business? They can't really be that big. And I think it's also important to recognize that all of the media results you get contribute to your web presence and SEOs.

Franco Caporale:

In a major way. Sometimes, I see in publication like Tech Ranch or New York Times, if you have even a small story and a link there of any kind, it massively changes the ranking of and the authority of your website.

Clarissa Horowitz:

Absolutely. And so a couple of months ago, we announced our series B, we raised $20 million and we said, "Okay, we're going to go out with this story. What is the most impactful media outlet where this could run?" And we evaluated various options and we said, "It's really TechCrunch and it was TechCrunch for a few reasons. One, because I still think TechCrunch is absolutely an arbiter of the companies that matter in Silicon Valley. I think their reach is really broad and they have a reporter there who had written a story earlier about Treasury Prime and fully understood the economics of an API business so he would understand our business model, and because he's probably one of the best reporters who's focused on tech, who really understands earnings and fundings and so he would understand that our round, which was an insider round, was actually really significant in terms of what it meant and he would be able to explain it to the world.

And then the final reason to go with TechCrunch was that we had a webinar that we were doing with them scheduled for June, and so having us in more places within TechCrunch was going to be even more effective for that webinar.

Franco Caporale:

Absolutely. So now that you convinced us that PR is important, how do you see the execution of it? When do you bring PR as an internal, like hiring someone within your team, and when it makes sense to work with an external firm?

Clarissa Horowitz:

Yeah, that's a wonderful question and it's going to vary depending on your strategy. And so the way that I really, like the way we're talking about PR earlier, is to think of it as content marketing with a different set of channels. And so when you think about what you need for content marketing, you need to have somebody who's generating that content and somebody who's strategizing where that content's going to go. And so PR becomes very similar, and sometimes those can be the same person. Sometimes they're not, it depends on your size.

And so when I think about PR, I think that if it's going to work, you're probably going to start with an external resource. That could be an individual, that could be an agency, but that person or agency has got to have an inside contact who can get them what they need. And what they're going to need is they're going to need your content, they're going to need to understand your product, they're going to need access to your executives and spokespeople, they're going to need you to review things they've written and figure out what's right or what's wrong. And so I think that if you're going to do PR, you have to make sure that you've got somebody internally who is the owner and the advocate for that problem because an outside person can't function like an internal person can.

Franco Caporale:

Would that be the head of content or is it still going back to demand generation?

Clarissa Horowitz:

I think it really depends. I think it can be anyone, and the way I'm set up is because I have this experience, I'm running that relationship so I'm reviewing pitches, sometimes I set up my own interviews, I had a reporter come to me this morning. I write a lot of the content so I was writing an award submission and I shared it with my PR person and she loved it, which was really nice because I have to submit it today so I didn't have a ton of time, but it just has to be somebody who's interested and who can advocate. You don't have to be an expert but you have to be able to help that person work on deadline and understand their urgency, because when you're dealing with reporters and somebody says, "I want to talk to your executive today," if you can't make that happen really fast, you've lost that opportunity.

Franco Caporale:

That makes sense. But here is the problem though that I see a lot with startups, and the reason why a lot of startups, but even more established companies, they probably underspend in PR and branding, which is measuring. So how do you solve the problem of measuring something like PR and branding and the effectiveness of all the stories, the work and the budget you're investing with PR?

Clarissa Horowitz:

Yeah. So I look at measurement in a few different ways. When I've had larger budgets and when I've felt more concerned at the executive level about really having metrics, I used a fantastic service called Onclusive. And what I liked about them was imagine a database that collects all of your coverage, all of your competitor's coverage, and is able to measure the traffic to your website that different media stories drive and that can measure all of the social sharing of different stories. And what's fascinating is that not only are you able to benchmark yourself against competitors in terms of how much coverage are we getting? Is it positive? Is it negative? Is it a neutral tone? Are we getting prominent placement? Are we just getting named as one of five companies? You can look at all of that, but you also have this opportunity to understand which stories are really having an impact and driving people to your website.

And what's so fascinating is that when you open your mind and step back and look at that, it's often not the ones you would expect. And so we found that there were just, in some cases, second tier crypto or business press that were really effective for us, and it was like, "Oh, well, we need to double down on that and invest more." It was very much the way that you would look at the results of a demand gen program because you started to have some. And while it's still not easily possible to measure the amount of influence that a media story can have on a closed one deal, you can at least start to make some correlations.

So I'm not in a position to be able to do that right now. So I actually just did an RFP for new communication support, and my RFPs are really, really simple. I ask three questions. One is take a look at our coverage and tell me what you would do to make it better. Very simple. Second is how do we know if it's working? Which is just tell me how you think we should be measuring it. And then the third question is, and now give me some examples of similar projects you've done for other clients.

Franco Caporale:

That's a very simple framework, but I can see why. You can easily sort the good and the bad.

Clarissa Horowitz:

Well, and everything's a test, so if people get in touch with me ahead of time and say, "Hey, could we run some ideas by you or could we get on a call?" That's great, I want to be available to you, I want you to be coming to me with questions. And what I did in this particular case was I had six agencies present to us and I had both of my founders in all of those meetings, as well as my demand gen person, who had never been through a series of pitches. And it was really, really fun at the end because then I brought everybody back together after a week of having these pitches and I wanted them to talk because I knew that if I said anything, I was going to have an outsized influence on the conversation so I wanted everybody else to talk first. And what was so fascinating was of these six agencies, everyone was very clear that it was down to the same two options.

So everyone was automatically there without me saying anything. In fact, I agreed completely, they were my choices as well and then we just went through a discussion to figure out which one it was. But I felt that that was really, really important for a few reasons. First of all, for people who were not familiar with PR, I really wanted to bring them on this journey and to have them fully invested in this decision because we decided we were going to make a real investment. So we're spending almost 200K a year on this, and that's a bet that you're making, right?

Franco Caporale:

Yeah.

Clarissa Horowitz:

And it's also a bet where it's not like you turn it on and you start to see the results in 30 days. Sometimes you do, and in our particular case, we've definitely been seeing the results of having somebody completely focused on this.

But the other thing is that whoever you bring on is going to work really closely with your spokespeople and you want to make sure that they feel good about working with this person, because it's going to be a lot of emails, it's going to be prepping for interviews, it's going to be having them handle interviews, and so you want to make sure that all of that interaction is happening.

Franco Caporale:

And you mentioned something about dollar amount and budget, so how do you pick the right budget for this? Because obviously, any money that you are allocating to PR, you are taking it away from demand gen and other measurable campaigns. So how did you come out with the 200K or any kind of budget and what's the timeframe that you have to allocate for it?

Clarissa Horowitz:

Sure. So I came up with that number because I've spoken to a lot of agencies, I know a lot of agency people and I know that at a limit, for a fairly active PR program, you're probably... There's a great agency called Press Friendly that could probably take you on for less than 10K, but generally speaking, I think you're going to be looking at, I would say at least 12,000 a month for a robust PR program that ought to include not just pitching the media but doing award submissions, going after speaking opportunities and some other things as well.

Franco Caporale:

And so you are allocating a year of time to see, that's when you come back together and look at the results or is something-

Clarissa Horowitz:

Oh, no, no, no, no. I'm looking at results constantly, and one of the things about results is I'm not going to put in a system like Onclusive right now because I'd rather spend my budget on programs rather than measurement right at the moment, and that's because that works for my boss, he's okay with that. But ultimately, one of my goals for the program is that we need to become a defacto example of the category. So what I would like to be seeing in a few months is that whenever anybody writes about banking as a service and says, and companies like X, Y and Z, that we are one of those three.

And I would say four months ago, we really weren't nearly as often as we should have been. With the effectiveness of announcing our fundraise, we're getting there and then all of the work we're doing is really about setting up that goal, and that's one way. The other way that you know your PR is working is when reporters are writing a story and they come to you and you don't have to reach out to them, because then you become recognized as a leader in that category.

Franco Caporale:

And also, you hear on the sales team and your new hires, that they say, "Oh, yeah, I heard about from this story," right?

Clarissa Horowitz:

Absolutely, and thank you for bringing that up because that's a great point about recruiting. And so one of the other reasons I chose TechCrunch when we wanted to announce our Series B was because that is such an important place for recruiting.

Franco Caporale:

And yes, on TechCrunch, obviously, everyone sees it so you can get some good talent that reads those stories. But another interesting part, and I think I know we're almost out of time but I want to touch on this because the other value that you get from PR besides what you mentioned of being listed in some of those examples is to give that weapon to your sales team as additional enablement tool and something they can use on their calls. How do you see that value compared to everything else you mentioned so far?

Clarissa Horowitz:

Yeah. I think that's really important because I feel like that's the final step of really merchandising the results of your PR program, and I think that's one that gets lost a lot. And so I think that you need to pick your stories carefully because you don't want to have one that mentions all of your competitors because you don't need to give a prospect a new list of companies to go look at. But I think that periodically, there are stories that are really, really significant, and so you want to make sure that your sales team is aware of them, but not just aware. I actually think just package them up in an email, send it to sales, like, "Here's how I would phrase this. Here's this great hit that we got today." Because they are always looking for reasons that they can go back to prospects who have stalled or somebody who's being unresponsive, or even somebody who's feeling very positive so that they can be even more positive.

And I think the killer way to do this is to talk about this not just in terms of what it means for the company, but why should the customer care about this story? And it's not just saying, "Hey, wanted to share that we were featured in the Wall Street Journal." It's like, "Hey, wanted to share that the Wall Street Journal just wrote a feature on how Treasury Prime is approaching compliance, because it's such a different thing and I thought that was relevant in the course of our deal because..." And so there are pieces that sales is going to want to personalize, but I still think that - and this is back to content - it's how do you frame this? How do you tell people that it's important? And if you're not taking it that final step, I think you're really missing an opportunity.

Franco Caporale:

I agree a hundred percent, and I love this approach. Like I said, the sales team is hungry for these type of tools and things to add value in the conversation and PR fits this perfectly and having those great stories. So my last question for you is, in one minute, since you had these awesome results in your career of taking a company from very early to going public, what do you think is your secret? What do you think it is that you're doing particularly well that allows you to achieve that success?

Clarissa Horowitz:

I think first of all, it's being able to tell that story at the high level of why your product is really solving problems and changing the game, and doing that in a way that reporters understand, which usually means that you're talking about money in some context. Is it changing the way people do work? Is it changing where IT spend is going? Is it changing how investors are looking at this company? And then really being able to articulate that throughout all of your marketing programs, and that's part of having a great team and having other people who can say, "Okay, we're telling this. We're going to do it this way in product marketing. We're going to take this theme and we're going to explain it in demand gen. We're going to have the same story running in the press." And I think it's about having the idea be big enough and really, really pushing yourself to articulate why it's game changing. And that's hard but I think that's the core of it, and if it were easy, we'd all be doing it, right?

Franco Caporale:

A hundred percent, I agree. That's awesome. Clarissa, thanks again for joining the Demand Generation Club and for sharing your experience. I absolutely loved the conversation so thanks again.

Clarissa Horowitz:

Thank you for having me, and I just want to do one final plug because I am hiring and I currently have an opening for a content strategist and a head of product marketing, so if anyone is interested, ping me on LinkedIn.

Franco Caporale:

And I will make sure to post this in our channels as well, so, awesome. Thanks again, Clarissa.

Clarissa Horowitz:

Thank you so much.