Hello, and, welcome to, Converting Talks by Mouseflow, our second episode. And I am really happy that the second episode today is with Frida who is the CMO at Rillion. Yep. So welcome, and thanks for for joining the podcast. So I was really happy that you... And you said, yes. Of course. I want to to join. Frida, you have spent much of your career on making basically B2B products that aren't necessarily obviously sexy to convert. Is that an okay statement? Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. Well, I wonder... Well, when you said it's it's mostly finance. Right? When I look at your your background in the sense that with now at Rillion and before that with, well, originally, Bambora, if I'm saying it correctly, and and GetAccept. Right? So it's been on... In the the finance sales positioning, a little bit more long term sales cycles, I I could imagine. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. But tell me a little bit about yourself first, and then, yeah, we'll take the conversation from there. So very much, or I'm very happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me. And yes, my name is Frida Ahrenby, you already said that. And I'm currently the CMO at a company called Rillion, and we are operating in the finance space. We do AP automation and payments. Before that, I spent almost five years at another SaaS company that wasn't in the fintech space, but still B2B tech. But we targeted our product towards sales and marketing, so that was slightly different. But you're right. Before that, I actually also spent a couple of years within fintech. So... And before that, I actually spent many years within the telco business. So telco, fintech, b to b tech slash SaaS is my background. And I... Yeah. And and it wasn't to offend anyone. I mean, I have a background with ERP and cybersecurity infrastructure. So that is not is not either the most... I think the the common denominator is for sure that I've spent my whole career within b to b. I've actually never worked within B2C, more or less. No. So B2B is where I that's where I belong, and that's Yeah. That's what I know. Yeah. I know the feeling. I don't... I haven't either been in the B2C world. Mostly get inspired of it into, yeah, from a marketing perspective to get it into the B2B. Well, still humans, even though it's a business to business. But that's another conversation, you can say, that branding aspect of it. Well, yeah, what I wanted to talk to you about today is different areas within your go to market approach, especially, yeah, B2B logically and the softwares in the SaaS company right now, how... Where you are at now and and with the experience you've had previously, how you prepare your go to market strategy and how you kind of follow-up on it and how you work on on on the conversion part of it, which is logically the the thing that I feel on marketing and sales and companies, at the end of the day, we need to to bring some revenue in. Right? And what I've known you from from here and there, and I met you a couple of times, I was actually trying to think today, when did we actually meet first time? And I recall that I think I'm pretty sure that we met the first time, and it sounds a bit weird, put in the locker room before padel competition. And I said, yes. Definitely sure that's where That was, like, three years ago. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Probably three years. And, Yeah. I remember like, Oh, we were talking about, Have you done this before? I was, Yeah, I've tried it a couple of times. I have never failed that much in padel ever. I literally think I got the second last place out of 40 plus. I was kind of shocked by myself a little bit because I didn't think that I was that bad. But anyways, I'm pretty... Well, you definitely made it better than I did. But I think that just kind of and I haven't played padel since. I think it kind of completely crushed me. But anyway, a little bit of a side note. Frida, when you go in and and build these GTM functions in the different companies that that that you've been, where, like, you just mentioned, oh, I... A little bit bold as said, like, maybe not is inheriting this super excitement as a product. It might be a little bit more, yeah, a little bit more, difficult to sell in a more, like, woo hoo, enthusiastic, way. What is your... What's the approach when you can... That you can rely in this? How do you sell this product? How... What what is the go to market approach that you take? I think I am kind of triggered by these assignments or products or companies that don't necessarily present themselves as, you know, everybody know this brand or this is gonna be super easy to sell or this product is, you know, has a wow factor. Yeah. That you feel that immediately. I am super triggered by these underdog, call it underdog assignments in that sense. Like, the heck am I gonna figure this one out? And what really, how can we actually turn this into something interesting and build on that and make it into something that people all of a sudden realize more exists. And I also like when you have to sort of go in and sort of, challenge yourself in a way that you always come in with a perspective and you know yourself and you know what you like and how you look upon things and so forth. But really then try to challenge yourself thinking about, okay, we're not selling to people like me, we're selling to some kind of other persona. I really have to understand how this persona thinks, what they are engaged by or what they are interested in, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I mean, that's marketing for you. But I do like a challenge when it's not completely clear to me how to solve that in the beginning. And I think that has been something more or less that's been going on throughout my career. I mean, I started out, as I said, in in telco, and I can't I can't say that back then I was super passionate about mobile broadband. But I still did a lot of, you know, marketing campaigns, sell activities, product management around mobile broadbands or mobile switches as another example. So I still, I don't think necessarily that you have to love the product or be the best user of a product to actually come up with great go to market approaches. So that's a long intro to your question. But once again, I think you have to approach it with, okay, who are actually the buyers and the users of this product? What are they engaged by? What are they excited by? What makes their work... What would make their work easier? What would make them happier to jump out of bed and actually go to work? And then try to find ways to approach them just by understanding that. So I think it's more about, like less about making the product sexy, as you said in beginning and more about really understanding the jobs to be done and make that into something people actually care about. Yeah. And so that's basically understanding the ICP and the persona behind it, the use cases and the challenges they might sit in. When when you kind of had that, you know, perspective in and you've done your focus research group and all these kind of things and worked with sales on whatever battle cards they could be and positioning and so on. What is then your approach from a go to market again? I mean, basically, more of a targeting perspective. How do you... What kind of platforms today, how do you reach basically these personas or your leads? I mean, it depends back... It depends on back again to the homework in terms of where do I actually find these people? Where do they hang out? And that can always differ depending on if you are targeting The Nordics or Europe or The US for that matter. So we try to have a very, it doesn't necessarily need to be a broad approach in terms of channels, but it has to be a mix of channels, making sure that we cover the full customer journey or the full decision process that we know that these prospects go through. That we have enough patience to actually stick, hang around and stick around until they are actually ready to become a lead or to actually raise their hand saying that we do wanna, mean, know this in terms of 70% of the decision journey happening before somebody even reaches out. And that goes together with how we plan the different activities and the channels that we're actually present in. Yeah. Because also right now, I would assume that, I mean, you have an okay long sales cycle. I mean, it's not just like you see it one time or 10, and then you take a decision. It's a further longer time. It's a bigger investment, right? Yeah. And it's better for us, it actually differs on The US side and on the EMEA side. We have a higher ACV, meaning that the customer has a higher investment level on The US side of things than they do in EMEA. With that said, the sales cycles are in average actually quicker on The US side of things than they are in EMEA for us. And that has to go with the fact that EMEA is a replacement market to a much bigger extent, whereas US many times is actually a first buyer or first buying market, where they actually come from something more manual, and then they move into a more automated AI version of what they already had. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. We've actually also seen usually that in in Mouseflow that the sales cycle is usually shorter in in The US than than than in in EMEA, where we also basically have our markets. And and and and about that, the... I know that that you basically are expanding into The US. Have you seen from from your side, besides sales cycles is is is a bit shorter, which is a plus, I guess, for you guys, for all of us in that sense, have you seen any major difference in these two market from the approach that you need to take? Some... What works, what doesn't work? Can you do basically a direct copy paste? No. I would say is the quick answer to that. We see... I mean, both from a product market fit perspective, we see that it differs back again to European companies having done automation within AP more or less since the nineties in one way or or another. The the ways they've been doing it has have been diff... You know, has been different based on... It's been very much rule based and so forth, and now they move over to AI based. Whereas in The US, they haven't even gone through that process of three decades of trying to build automation, but they actually come from, no, we don't have any automation at all, we do everything manually. And we have human power that's been doing it in a manual way. So we're just throwing more people on the problem in that sense. So it's two very different... They come from two very different angles in that sense, but they both want the same thing. Hence, they want to improve and increase automation, which now becomes very interesting. So we can still offer them the same product and the same solution, but we have to sort of approach the way to get there from different angles, because they have different historic backgrounds in that sense. And that's something that we, I mean, obviously knew before entering The US, but it has become so much more apparent the longer we are there and the more buyers and users that we talk to. There's a lot of times when they actually think that they are automated, but when they start to explain the processes that they have in place, we very much realize that no, this is not automation at all. Yeah. It's hidden automation with manual touchpoints. So that's one thing. The other thing is that, I mean, US is by far much more noisier. There's so many competitors, giant competitors, huge marketing budgets. The market per se is enormous. So we have to be much more clear and sharp on who are we going after. Which verticals are we going after? Are we willing to only focus on the East Coast, the West Coast, the Middle Part Of The US? Would that make it more easy? So we have to have a smarter and more sharp segmentation. But we also need to be very, very clear on, you know, how are we different from these other players that are already in the market. And then we try to build a lot around the heritage that we have, the thirty plus years experience. Yeah, to actually stand out. Thing that I actually thought would work when we were going into the state are to, you know, let's focus on the Nordic heritage. Because that's, you know, that's very strong from a business perspective. And we can talk about the big, cool companies that have, you know, been successful that comes from The Nordics. Everything from Spotify to IKEA to Volvo, yada yada. But then I realized quickly that that's like, okay, box check, let's move on. Like I couldn't build a heavy narrative on that. It was just like, okay, cool. But now we don't care. How local are you? And how much do you understand The US market? So then the more important factor has been, how can we build the local credibility? Like with customer proofs, with relevant references, the local partnerships, understanding the local buyers, and teaming up with local communities in terms of CFOs and financial leaders and so forth. So that's been very clear to me that we have to... It's okay to be a Nordic company, but we have to quickly build the local Yeah. Ability and the local presence. So basically can give that first credibility step in because it's Nordic and the Nordics, you can say Scandinavia, has a good reputation in general in The US. But that's just the first step out of maybe 10 steps of credibility, I guess. Yeah. And I don't I yes. Both yes and no. But I don't necessarily think that it's the Nordic that hooks them. Oh, no. It's more a matter of, oh, okay. You have a lot of years of experience. But whether that experience came from The Nordics, from France and Germany, that would matter at the end of the day. But it's more the vast experience that we have that they feel like, okay, you're a smaller brand, but we hear that you know this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. I mean, US is a huge country, right? As you also say yourself, I mean, even in The US, there are also different cultures. So is this West? Is it East? It's the middle. So you can't even just... I always say, compared like, well, you have to compare US if you wanted to do a go to market approach to the entire Europe the same way. That wouldn't work. You don't approach maybe, like, just say the South Of Europe the same way that you would do typically for the North Of Europe. So The US is a big country, is a challenge. Even though it would be lovely if we could, yeah, just have one go to market approach that would make our lives way easier, but not as challenging and maybe not as fun then because that's also the part of it. Right? So you've been building over the couple of last couple of years, especially, yeah, these go to market approaches, but also not just you entering new markets, but also building and growing the teams from what I have understood usually more smaller scale to quite large scales. And in these... And and some what I've read that you've done is is in in also in a fairly quick period, going from a small amount to maybe 30 people, 20 people, something like that. When you build these teams, marketing maybe also some SDR sales in it, but you can tell a little bit more about this. How do you... What is your approach? Also, for example, when you are expanding, what is your priorities? And I know that, especially today with AI, the job description of what we want in our teams have have changed. But if you kind of look back in in today, what you did today, maybe also in the past, what is it that you see basically growing teams? What would you kind of, I would say... What do you have in your... In the back of your mind today of the learnings that you've had? Yeah. It's a good question. I think my last three growth journeys, really and including, have been very different in a sense. If I look back at the Bamboura journey, which happened, you know, between 2016 and 2019, there were very different times at that point. And we also had a very different strategy at Bambora, meaning we actually... I think we acquired 15 or 16 companies during the time when I was there. The whole idea was to grow quickly by acquiring companies and capabilities and geographic expansion. And with every acquisition naturally came people. And many times people that came in through these acquisitions were people that would come into my marketing team. So I had maybe a team of, I don't remember, but 17, 18, 20 people at the peak at Bambora. And I constantly had to understand the new capabilities and the new competence that came in with the new acquisition, and understand how I would fit that into the current team. And where we would need maybe more competence, and where we would need less competence, depending on the overall company strategy. So that was a different setup to constantly be on your toes in terms of how do I merge this new company and the new marketing resources that's coming in to the existing team, but also understanding how do we actually continue growing? And, a lot of questions around culture and fit and industry, all of that constantly challenged me in that setup. So that was one journey in a sense. Get Accept was another journey where I more or less built the marketing team from scratch. I think there were two or three people when I joined. And that was also different times, because this was between 2019 and 2024. And we brought in a lot of new capital, and it was, you know, growth before, hire before growth constant mantra. And I, you know, we all just kept on hiring, hiring. Whenever we had a new problem, we threw a new hire on it. And of course that was amazing in one sense, because you had this huge team that you could do things with. But I also quite, and on what you said, that team actually grew to 30 people maximum. And then maybe I took it down to 15 before I left. So it was both up and down, and then growing and decreasing at the same time during these years. But I learned when I joined Brilliant, because that was actually one of the questions I got when I was hired that how will you work with the team here? Do you expect to hire 20, 30 people? Or do you see a different approach? And I really felt back then, which was almost three years ago, that no, I don't necessarily think I need a big team. I think I can be much more efficient and much more smarter with a leaner team. And I want to avoid creating these silos. I want to avoid creating these, you know, leadership barriers where other people might be working individually with their team, might not be talking to each other. We will be, you know, slow in that sense. So I decided quite quickly when I joined really, like, let's keep this team lean. No leader layers, but direct lines. We all work together. We all set the strategy together. Everybody's aware of the targets that we have and the directions that we're aiming for. And we can on a weekly basis, during our Monday weekly meeting, actually just talk about what are we focusing on now. And work almost in a sprint manner. And how big is your team today at Brilliant? 10. 10. Yeah. Yeah. And it's been more or less 10 since I started. So I've been fortunate in that sense that I quickly hired the majority of the team, and then it stayed like that. So, yeah, I'm fortunate in that way. But then obviously based on what we can do now with AI and everything and the efficiency that that creates, I would say that we actually work as my 30 people team did five years ago because we get so much done. And that wouldn't have been possible obviously five years ago. But no. I think that in the size in the company sizes around, you know, two, three, 400 people, you will not see these huge marketing teams again. No. No. I think you're completely right. I see it myself. I mean, we're a smaller team. We're at six. But also, as I would say that I used to have in my previous job, I mean, we were 45 marketeers in my team, and it was a huge number. And, of course, here we had middle layers of directors and head ops because, I mean, logically, it's not 45 people reporting directly. But when I think about it today, especially within the last two years, I mean, sometimes I think, Oh my god, how slow did we work? It's to what we see today. Yeah, I think we're past those times. And personally, I think that's fantastic. I like being hands on. I like moving between strategy tactics constantly, you know, narrowing my scope down, taking a broader approach, like constantly doing this. And I think we will look for marketeers, but also leaders that are actually, that have that kind of skill sets to go up and down in the elevator, like I usually say. Yeah. Yeah, makes sense. I completely agree. I think it... But I also always believed even as a leader myself that you need to have a hands on approach, not in all marketing skill sets and areas because that would almost be impossible. But but you need to have... For me, it's been at least that I like to kind of get my hands a little bit dirty in the machinery because it else... At least helps me bring a better understanding of how my team can function together, but also in different job descriptions or roles that what they can basically either do or not to or, yeah, improve or... Yeah. Basically, so, yeah, I think that's super important. I've always believed that. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. So we are kind of closing a little bit in about this go to to market approach. I was kind of thinking a little bit a little bit on... And now we've talked about it, how to to approach both an existing and a new market and the teams, what we need to kind of be aware of, but also the changes that that have come here, especially over the last one, two years. When when you work on on your sales leads, when they're basically, as you said, 70% of the the customer journey, we actually don't even necessarily know that they're watching us, I wanted to say, but the conversion could come, very late on, basically, to actually identify, specifically that is suddenly becoming a lead in the system and so on. How do you approach this, when they actually land on on the website? And my thinking here, and and correct me if I'm I'm I'm wrong. I would imagine that your decision makers, the... And at least the one that's signing the paper is CFO, finance director, something like that. Are these also the ones that typically visits your website? Do you see anything in in that that journey that you use to basically have a better quality of your leads? Yes, for sure. I would say the CFO for us is definitely the strategic buyer and the economical buyer. He or she takes the decision most of the times at the end of the day, but they are not necessarily the users and they are not necessarily the ones you know, driving the the the change. It's it's usually more the the AP manager, the controller, the head of finance, the head of AP, something like that. And that's also the personas that we built the website to towards. So we've thought very clearly about the behavior on the website and the customer journey and making sure that we have the content and have created the high intent pages to connect to that Then I would say when it comes to the CFO and the 70% of the journey before they actually reach out, is who we build our thought leadership message, narrative and content towards. So everything we do at events, our own webinar series, our AI reports, our analytics, our finance labs hub, all of that is more directed to the CFO, because we want to be in their mind when these discussions starts to happen internally. But also when the champions actually come with the papers to be signed to the CFO, we want them to already know about us. Yeah. So it's it's Yeah. We we we target both, I would say, but the website itself is mainly... And and and like the campaigns that we run and the targets... Targeting that we do are mainly towards controllers, AP managers, head of finance, and so forth. Yeah. Makes sense. Makes sense. Yeah. And then we always know that for some of these product per cassis, let's just say they have five in the room, and if if you already know brand in their heads, it's always a faster travel to actually getting that signature in the contract. Right? That's true. Well, I think we've reached the time, I wanted to say. Do you have anything else that you kind of want to that you feel like that hasn't been said within your go to market approach, your experience with it that? If you had, like, one thing that from a... To a future leader, let's just say that in in the marketing world that's going this way, What would be a good advice from your end? I think one should dare to be different, especially in B2B. I think that's something that I've always brought with me in terms of back to GAN. I've always been within B2B, but I take a lot of inspiration from B2C. And I think if you dare to challenge and just think a little bit outside the box and a little bit more creative, you can actually have the chance to be different, to stand out, to be regarded as a little bit more exciting, and, you know, create that curiosity within your target group. You you... I don't think you you don't need to be so polished. You don't need to be so perfect. You don't need to be so professional because at the end of the day, you know, we're all... Maybe that sounds cringe, but we're all just humans. Yeah. And we want to have a laugh even if it's Wednesday and it's a workday and we're taking care of invoices. So I think there to be different and there to just think a little bit outside the box. Yeah. Even if you're working with a B2B brand. Good advice. Good advice. Well, I want to thank you, Frida, for joining this podcast. Thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation. And, yeah, well, probably not pedal next time, but we'll we'll see data again. Whatever it is, go to market Nordic awards or says yes. It's always a pleasure. Likewise. Take care. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Bye.