Episode 50

Process-First = Customer-First

In this episode, Gino Palozzi, Chief Marketing Officer at DailyPay, discusses process over technology, who should be setting AI guidelines, and why B2B is becoming more like B2C.

Process-First = Customer-First with Gino Palozzi, CMO of DailyPay

 

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Guest Speaker: Gino Palozz 

Gino Palozzi is a results-oriented B2B marketing executive who believes in leading by example. He has experience developing go-to-market strategies and leading transformation across organizations- both large and small.

Prior to joining DailyPay, Gino led marketing for software and services divisions at Dun & Bradstreet, g2o, Cisco, and IBM. He spent the early part of his career as a management consultant partnering with clients, across a range of industries, to transform their business.
 

Episode Summary

This episode features an interview with Gino Palozzi, Chief Marketing Officer at DailyPay. Gino is a B2B marketing executive with experience in developing go-to-market strategies and leading transformation across organizations – both large and small. Prior to DailyPay, he led marketing for software and services divisions at Dun & Bradstreet, g2o, Cisco, and IBM.

In this episode, Kailey sits down with Gino to discuss process over technology, who should be setting AI guidelines, and why B2B is becoming more like B2C.
 

Key Takeaways

  • Effective marketing starts with detailed customer insights and a clear mapping of their decision-making processes.
  • Successful data and tech implementation must be preceded by well-defined processes. Without the foundational process, technology alone cannot resolve data integrity issues.
  • If you over-govern new technologies, you’re stifling innovation. Instead, gather insights from practical uses of data to understand customer needs and tailor services better. 
     

Speaker Quotes

“Certain groups and people came in and said, ‘Oh yeah, all this [AI] is normal to me. This is how I grew up in front of a screen or with the internet.’ Why have folks that aren't as comfortable setting these governances in place that are going to restrict the possibilities? It's more of the governance and the processes of what to do and not to do.” – Gino Palozzi
 

Episode Timestamps

‍*(02:23) - Gino’s career journey

*(08:50) - Trends impacting customer experience

*(20:48) - How marketers can avoid overbuilding AI processes 

*(25:17) - How Gino defines “good data”

‍*(34:53) - Gino’s recommendations for upleveling customer experience strategies 

Connect with Gino on LinkedIn

Connect with Kailey on LinkedIn

Gino Palozzi: Certain groups and people came in and said, Oh yeah, all this is normal to me. This is how I grew up in front of a screen or in front of, you know, with the internet. Why have folks that aren't as comfortable setting these governances in place that are going to restrict the possibilities? So it's more the governance and the processes of what to do and not to do.

 

Kailey Raymond: Hello and welcome to Good Data, Better Marketing. I'm your host, Kailey Raymond, and today we're diving into personalized marketing at scale using generative AI. This effort begins with understanding your use case, working backwards to determine the right processes, and ensuring the integrity and quality of that data. Once the processes are in place, marketers are able to create relevant and engaging content for their audiences on the right channel at the right time. On today's episode, I'm joined by Gino Palozzi, CMO at DailyPay. We discuss process-first strategies, who should be setting AI guidelines, and why B2B is becoming more like B2C.
 

Kailey Raymond: Today, I'm joined by Gino Palozzi, CMO of DailyPay. Gino is a B2B marketing executive with experience in developing go-to-market strategies and leading transformation across organizations, both large and small. Prior to DailyPay, he led marketing for software and services divisions of Dun & Bradstreet, G2O, Cisco, and IBM. Gino, welcome to the show.

 

Gino Palozzi: Thanks for having me, Kailey.

 

Kailey Raymond: I am excited to be here with you. You've had a wealth of experience and also worked at a company that is similar to what we're doing with a CDP Dun & Bradstreet, and I've kind of had that. So I'm just curious to hear the evolution of your career. Gino, in your own words, tell me about how you got to where you are today as the CMO at DailyPay.

 

Gino Palozzi: A wealth of experience just means I'm old, Kailey. But how did I get where I am? I think, you know, I won't go too far back. I started early in my career in a management consultant capacity and really love that experience 'cause it really helps you kind of ground yourself in understanding the problems that you're trying to solve. And the clients are looking to get to point B and they're at point A and helping to shape that journey. And a lot of that work is analytical, right? It's also strategic. And I loved it.

 

Gino Palozzi: And it was a great experience to kinda go across different industries. When I did that work, what I really found a passion for is the go-to-market strategies, doing a better job of really engaging with people, understanding the buying journey. And that was where my love of marketing really was formed.

 

Gino Palozzi: After that, I actually spent time kind of focused at IBM, really around marketing the data and analytics space, both in the services group there, as well as the software group. It was really a learning experience and the power of all that data, all that analytics that people are leveraging to really make decisions in a much more thoughtful and compelling way. After my work at IBM, I went back and forth to small companies and larger companies because I really enjoy different stages of maturity.

 

Gino Palozzi: G2O is one example of a company that was a very small regional company that was really reinventing themselves in the area of digital CX. And it was a fun time to kind of market digital CX experiences in services and transformation for organizations. My time at D&B, in that space, it's more than the data, right? 

 

Gino Palozzi: D&B is known for their data and the ability to understand the firmographic, the contact data, and to better understand, you know, feeding the systems that need that and how to do that well. We had a CDP at the time that we'd acquired. And that rev tech revolution, as I like to say, really helped to kinda solidify the challenges that marketers had, right? Which is, you have 20 plus tools, you're trying to piece them together, you're trying to make sure that you trust and have, you know, the data has integrity. But it's not even the tools and the data that is the hardest part. The hardest part is the process.

 

Gino Palozzi: Process precedes the technology. And if you have data issues, you have tech issues, they're not gonna fix it on themselves, right? So you actually have to, as an organization, start really putting into place and organizing for success so that you truly understand what outcomes you're trying to get to as a marketing leader. I've landed recently at about 18 months ago at DailyPay. And DailyPay is a really interesting company. The reason I'm here is the mission, right? 

 

Gino Palozzi: We offer a benefit sponsored by employers where people have the ability to access their pay as they earn it, right? Which is really disruptive technology. It's something that is allowing people to not wait for an arbitrary two-week pay cycle. And what I'm most passionate about is what we are helping people to do is really improve their financial situation, help provide that stability and the security that they expect. And it's all about understanding the needs of those employees. But it's a win-win because employers who are offering it are also in the corner of these employees.

 

Gino Palozzi: So they get the benefit of offering kinda what people need and want. They actually help build people's trust in them that they offer this benefit. They are helping them, you know, not just be productive at work where they're picking up extra shifts and they have the visibility into their earnings and the data in real time, but they're seeing people stay longer. They're attracting better talent. So what I find most fascinating is we're helping to drive success for both the employer and the employee. And it's a win.

 

Gino Palozzi: You don't have that very many times in your career for a very simple concept that I personally believe in, right? Because I want people to kinda do better and I want people to actually feel like they have what they need to be successful. So we are maniacally focused on those consumers and the employees that we serve and we continue to add services for them. So it's a mission-driven company to help, you know, people be their best at work and in their life through a very simple concept that has been really successful in bringing people to the table, to the app, experiencing that. And we have amazing success, right? Engaging with those folks, 40% plus enrollments on the benefit, which is right behind health insurance, which is pretty impressive.

 

Kailey Raymond: Whoa.

 

Gino Palozzi: And it's also a demonstration of like when you deliver something people want. But what I'm actually most proud of is they're coming to that app five to seven times a day. I mean, I'm sorry, five to seven times a week. I wish it was a day. But that level of engagement presents so much opportunity for the employers who now can communicate with their frontline workers. And what else can we bring to that experience, right? When they're coming to that app and what else can we do to make sure that we're listening and understanding, you know, their behavior, what they want? Because earned wage access is just the beginning for us. There's other benefits and things and value that we can bring to the table once you have their attention. So that's kind of where I am today. And I'm fortunate to lead a very, very successful and talented marketing team here.

 

Kailey Raymond: It's an amazing thing in your career when you can get to a place where you feel like you are doing well by also doing good. You mentioned that kind of feeling of having everything kind of falling into place. It's really nice to kind of be there. One of the through lines that I am kinda picking up on in your career journey is, well, first of all, you know, you've always kind of maniacally centered the customer in everything.

 

Gino Palozzi: But also you were an early adopter of really data-driven marketing tactics and making sure that data was kind of at the center of a lot of the programs, strategies, you know, go-to-market solutions that you're kind of putting out into the world. I'm wondering if you could describe to me any of the bigger macro trends that you think are impacting customer experience today. Obviously, this kind of umbrella of digital transformation and data is certainly a part of that story. Anything else you want to call out of trends that you're watching impacting that customer experience? 

 

Gino Palozzi: I mean, one of the things that I, you know, obviously the biggest trend that right now de jure, if you will, is Gen AI. And what Gen AI, the potential there, I know everybody's talking about it. So there's so many different use cases. We have a program that my team is actually leading for the enterprise here. And the obvious ones are you can accelerate and be more agile, right? 

 

Gino Palozzi: Building good, compelling content. But not just content and the speed of that content, really understanding with proper prompting and proper kind of use of it, truly, you know, being able to personalize at scale, right? Understanding who your audience is and helping to build out things that you can then test. So I think Gen AI, in addition to the traditional kind of content creation, the personalization at scale is something that we're excited about. And I think we also look at how do we build more insights into the buying group? 

 

Gino Palozzi: We do both B2B and B2C. So we have a kind of a double funnel. I've always said, even years ago, that like B2B is becoming a lot more like B2C. And what I mean by that is that you are not selling to an organization. You're not selling to an entity. You're selling to people within that. And you're not just selling to one people, depending on your product. You typically send, you know, have to kind of pull in five to six different folks with different personas, with different needs.

 

Gino Palozzi: And what some of the data now allows us to do, which is we used to in the old days, in the old days being, probably even five years plus ago, right? Not that old, is we used to build these persona profiles, right? What are the care abouts of this part of the buying group? And what do they care about? What are their needs? What are their challenges? And it becomes so static, right? It was good, right? Recognizing there's a buying group, there's different kind of ways to reach those people. They consume different content. All of that through some of the most recent innovations allows us to not just build it in our, you know, finite set of research about these people, but looking at it collectively to understand what are those people's needs? 

 

Gino Palozzi: What is happening, right? You know, in a larger community of insight and data. And then obviously keep it, you know, more dynamic. And then also be able to then build out the content and the channel strategies that are gonna best reach that. So it's not really different than what we strove to do, maybe five, seven, eight years ago. But now the technology is catching up with the concepts. So I see a lot of that personalization, the buying group and B2B certainly changing. I don't manage the customer success and customer service team. I partner very closely with them, but there's a great set of use cases there, right? 

 

Gino Palozzi: To kind of help build out, you know, chatbots have been there, but now the level of sophistication of understanding what people, you know, need so that you can quickly respond to them and then get them to a human, that continues to accelerate and be used in a really effective way. So there's B2B and B2C are fundamentally changing. If you are not a data-driven marketer, you might think about picking a different career because I think it's no longer an option.

 

Gino Palozzi: And I realized that maybe 10 years ago, Kailey, if I don't really get steeped in this, at that point, it was really getting more steeped into the targeting, the, you know, understanding your audience, understanding the tools to reach those audiences through paid, but it continues to accelerate and accelerate in rate.

 

Kailey Raymond: I totally agree with you. I mean, as somebody who, you know, works with our sales teams all the time in an ABM function, when you're talking about the buying committee, you're really hitting home for me. And so I'm wondering, I wanna dig a little bit deeper here of how you're leveraging AI and Gen AI in certain use cases to help move along and penetrate that buying committee at the right time. You know, some buyers might wanna come in, like one persona might be the one that starts it. And then you actually bring in another one and you have to serve up the right content at the right time and the right CTAs at the right time to the right people. Any examples of tests that you're running with, you know, Gen AI or predictive AI to build those audiences and make sure you're hitting these people at the right time? 

 

Gino Palozzi: Yeah, I mean, we're a little nascent in our, I mean, we've been putting this in place over the last three to six months. So building it in, you know, embedding it within our programmatic isn't quite there yet. But I think the work that we have had success in is really being able to understand and doing things like having the ability to kind of build out very tailored type of dynamic messages to the different audiences.

 

Gino Palozzi: And then allowing that very quickly to be kinda fed into, so you're not just building, you know, the one email, you're looking at the specific information about, especially in our Top Gunner or kind of like these higher touch ADM type programs, really knowing what's happening at the account. So you're truly personalizing it and not just sending, you know, a one to few type email where you're saying the same thing.

 

Gino Palozzi: So really understanding not just what's happening at the account, but what's happening to the individuals you're targeting with that account. So you can really tailor the content that you provide to them, whether that's a follows board that we use, which is essentially a really powerful microsite, right? So the content becomes very dynamic for the people you're reaching, the messages to get them there become very dynamic.

 

Gino Palozzi: So we're focusing in on that Top Gun kind of top account type programs and the, you know, one-to-one ADM type things because we wanna cut our teeth here a little bit, but there's nothing to say we couldn't start scaling that out for the broader set of audiences. So we're kind of tailoring that content, tailoring the outreach and personalizing that dynamic experience for those individuals at those set of top tier accounts. But our plan is to kinda speak in to kinda make that broader and more far reaching in the other segments that we serve, right? We just wanna make sure we do it well. We learn how to scale it.

 

Kailey Raymond: That's a really, really cool use case that I haven't really explored too much myself. So, you know, I was reading this report. It came out from Pavilion and TrustRadius, I think a couple of weeks ago. And it was basically kind of assessing, you know, some of the ways that people are spending their money, marketing leaders in particular.

 

Kailey Raymond: And there's this trend over the past year or so with that marketing leaders, you know, efficiency at all costs, like, you know, growth at all costs is over, efficiency, ROI are kinda the name of the game. And so a lot of folks have been shifting spend away from tactics that are more brand oriented and to demand capture, lead capture making. And so, you know, that mix over time is short term versus long term levers and making sure that, you know, you're spending on the right channels at the right time for the right people to target accounts and pull them through the entire funnel is missing because you're entirely shifting to one side rather than, you know, making sure that you have a really robust mix.

 

Kailey Raymond: So this recommendation to kind of take this process and do it on an individual account level to be able to spend dollars based off of what channels you think that this person or account might respond to the best based off of their current intent, love it, keep me posted, you know, wanna learn more.

 

Gino Palozzi: The biggest danger we have in marketing is to kinda, we have to be optimized, right? All, but there's a pendulum swing, right? And it's gonna really almost company by company, right? So based on your maturity, what stage of growth are you in as an organization? And obviously the old kind of rules of thumb and like what percentage of your revenues are you spending in marketing? 

 

Gino Palozzi: Those are all good kinda guideposts, right? And then within your marketing, how much are you spending on people, programs, right, technology, those are great starting points, but it really comes down to, you know, like at DailyPay, we're still on a very high growth trajectory. So the spend that we have is very different than the spend of other companies I've been at, whether it's at Cisco and IBM.

 

Gino Palozzi: But even when you get under the nuances of that, I think it's really important to understand that you don't treat channels by channel and performance of channels by channel as a, you cannot do that. And I see too many companies and too many people, usually outside of marketing, that wanna justify the investment in one particular channel.

 

Kailey Raymond: Yes.

 

Gino Palozzi: And they get all enamored with success. And it's like, listen, you can't take a dollar of paid search and move it over to whatever tactic you wanna and think that, or take brand dollars that you mentioned and move it over to paid search. At some point there's a critical mass and there's a lot of diminishing return on some of those channels and they don't operate independently. Yet there's so many people that want that hammer nail black and white answer.

 

Gino Palozzi: So the complexity of doing marketing mixed modeling is it's kind of the different blended mix of things and the impact synergistic effect that the various things have, which nobody outside of marketing, and some people even within marketing, they don't have the wherewithal or the desire to really position that. But as a marketing leader, you have to help people understand that in simple terms, how that works. 'cause you have to advocate for the money, right? 

 

Gino Palozzi: And the only way you can advocate for the money is to demonstrate the success of the previous spend. So ROI is a means to an end. It's to demonstrate the credibility of the success you're having. But again, whether you're spending 8% of your revenues or 12 or 13% of your revenues, it really depends on where you are, the level of buy-in that you have from leadership and the level of trust they have in marketing that they're gonna be good stewards of that money.

 

Gino Palozzi: But data will usually, and results at the end of the day with your confident data to present back, will enable you. I've had leaders tell me marketing has an unlimited budget. And those are really forward-looking leaders who know that if you can show me that for every dollar you're spending, that we're going to get $3 back, in theory.

 

Kailey Raymond: Sure.

 

Gino Palozzi: I'll just keep giving you money.

 

Kailey Raymond: Sure.

 

Gino Palozzi: But I'm like, let me go get you the $3 before you just throw a million dollars at me because it's not as you can do it, but you need to be thoughtful.

 

Kailey Raymond: Wow. I've never heard a leader say that, but it makes sense.

 

Gino Palozzi: Marketing's a long tail. So even if I can show you 3x return, you have to work through the funnel, every single touch point from open all the way through, hey, they're qualified, they're an opportunity, and then your sales cycle. So the dollars you're spending now are paying off depending on your revenue.

 

Kailey Raymond: Years from now.

 

Gino Palozzi: Six, 12, 18 months if you're lucky. So if you're looking to spend a dollar now and you want $3 a month back next month, there's very few things. Unless you're in B2C, which is what I love about daily pay, in that you actually have a faster cycle to get to impact, which this is the first experience I've had on the B2C world. So it's been a great learning experience for me.

 

Kailey Raymond: Yeah, that feedback cycle of the time horizon that it takes for the dollar to actually become the revenue on the back end is a really important reminder. And also something that I think about as it relates to AI. The pace of AI at this moment is probably faster than a lot of our ability to understand how the impacts are actually moving our business forward or not. And so I'm wondering if there's any advice you might have around building processes to avoid over automation as it relates to AI.

 

Gino Palozzi: I'm not sure about over automation, but you can absolutely overbuild the processes if you're not careful. And what I mean by that is you need to be responsible in the usage of AI. But it's not a tool. It's not like PowerPoint. It's not like any other tool that an IT team or a legal team has kind of experience because it becomes almost part and parcel to how you do your work, right? And here's what I tell people all the time. You may not have a formal program. You may not have a process or policy or guidelines. You need those, if you don't. But when you go and start thinking about it, start simple. Think about the responsible uses. First and foremost, protect your own data. But then when you think about how people are using it, if you try to over govern or over-structure how somebody needs to, where they can use it and how they can use it, you're kind of stifling innovation. So rather than try to think about here's the eight approved use cases, you can say here's the ones that we encourage. But these are not like you can't approve use cases. What you want to do is have a committee understanding how are people actually using it in practice because they're already using it, if you started your company.

 

Gino Palozzi: And in really cool ways, right? So you want to make sure that it's not putting your company at risk. But most of them know most people are intelligent. But you do need an oversight committee to say, how are we applying it? To take a step back. And then if there is any concerns with it, to kind of make sure that we put in place so you can limit use of open source, which I'm sure companies probably don't want me to hear say that, if you're worried about certain data sets or certain kind of use cases being kind of shared in the broader corpus of information. But I wouldn't stifle use. Because you want to maybe guide how we can refine that use or maybe restrict use after somebody's brought it to the table, as opposed to restricting the concepts and the ideation. That's the biggest thing, is don't overbuild the governance on it. Have governance, but it's emerging so quickly that you want it, like the use cases that can come out are going to be really fantastic. And I think it's going to be more organic within the earlier generation of people coming in to the organization who are using this kind of like the way certain groups and people came in and said, oh yeah, all this is normal to me. This is how I grew up in front of a screen or in front of, with the internet.

 

Gino Palozzi: Like now it's like this, I asked my son about getting certified in certain ChatGPT certifications and whatnot. He's like, I know how to do it all. I was like, yes, you're 19 and you probably don't know everything, but the reality is he's very comfortable with his usage and that's what you're going to see. So why have folks that aren't as comfortable setting these governances in place that are going to restrict the possibilities. So it's more of the governance and the processes of what to do and not to do. Give people general good guidelines. Don't do this, do this, avoid doing this, but don't say you can use it for this, this, or this, because more often than not, you're going to see it embedded and you're seeing this already in the tools we use. So how are you going to govern proper use? Are you going to put in a procurement process to understand how each company is embedding AI or shut off those features or put guidelines on every single embedded AI functionality within every tool set? It's not realistic or practical.

 

Kailey Raymond: Interesting. I like this take. One of the takes that we hear very often, especially from companies and industries that are a little bit more regulated, is that they really do just need to have full faith and trust in their data to ensure that they have controls in place to make sure that no PII will be leaked or whatever. And that, yes, there are some suggested use cases, but there are a lot of places in which they want innovation to grow as long as they can make sure that the data itself and they know how it's being used. So I'm wondering, Gino, we're coming to the namesake of the show. If you have a definition for what you would call good data.

 

Gino Palozzi: Well, you kind of you led the witness a little bit on that. I think my definition of good data is it needs to be trusted. It doesn't have to be perfect. But I think you need to be confident in the data so that you can make confident decisions with that. In order to be confident and recognize that the data is quality and the integrity of the data is good, you need to understand where the data came from. You need to understand the processes and the systems that are generating that data. So good data is the outcome of good process of what data do I need to run my business? What am I trying to understand better? Have a clarity on that. And then really then sit there and go work backwards and say, well, how do I get that data? What's the right process in place to ensure the integrity of that data? Because it always starts with process. So if you don't trust your segmentation or your data in Salesforce, more often than not, it's a matter of the age old garbage in, garbage out.

 

Gino Palozzi: If you don't have guidelines and strong processes on how people input the data, then your data is garbage. So I think good data starts with understanding what you want to understand, not even what data you want, what the best data is to help you kind of determine that. Where is that data generated? And then really making sure you understand the nuances of how it's flowing through the various systems and the various processes that are generating it. If you don't take the time, you're going to indiscriminately trust the data, and that's not a healthy way to make decisions.

 

Kailey Raymond: It makes perfect sense to me. I think one of the things that kind of stands out here is you're starting with the outcome, the use case in mind, and you're working your way backwards to understand what traits you need to actually ingest and what that means, if it's good or not. And what teams have access to that. And then they're going to be able to make decisions based off of it.

 

Kailey Raymond: I'm wondering, Gino, if you've learned anything surprising about your customers based off of some of the insights that you've gleaned from data? 

 

Gino Palozzi: So we anonymize the data, so we don't look at individual data. But what is really interesting, and I kind of maybe touched on it earlier, is everybody talks about access to their wages. And that's really one of the fundamental part of our employee success platform. It's like we offer earned wage access. And that is something you would expect people to use when they need the money to access it. What you're finding is that actually the usage is more about people wanting the visibility into their shifts and how much money is available to them, whether they want the peace of mind of that, that that money is available if I need it, or they're just getting that adrenaline rush that we all get, right? Because even at different stages of your career, that never changes. Oh, today's payday. You get a little bit of an excitement of like work well done. People are going in, watching their shifts and watching the accrual of their earnings way more than you'd expect them to every day. And that's a really surprising fact because that's what that shows is like maybe the value is the control and flexibility that I know and the peace of mind that the money's there. I may not need it. So that was probably one of the more interesting things when I got here to see.

 

Kailey Raymond: That makes sense to me. I am one of those people that will say, Hey, it's payday. That felt really good. And you know what? Just looking at it does make me feel a little bit better.

 

Gino Palozzi: It does. It makes you feel accomplished and a job well done, like hard work paid off. Now we just get to do that for people on a daily basis.

 

Kailey Raymond: Wow. That's really cool.

 

Gino Palozzi: Like who doesn't want a little bit of like that reinforcement because people are motivated by different things. But one of the things that I've seen is people more than money, they want the flexibility and the ability to pay their bills when they need to pay them. I think the flexibility that we offer is also refreshing to people. Once they have something, it's like, why did we ever accept waiting two weeks from my employer? It's like, I've earned it. Why shouldn't I have access to it? Now there's cash flow issues that companies have to deal with and processes. So it's not that they don't. I think people, once you see that they actually want the flexibility and control, and there's other things that you'd uncover, they want to be heard. They want to be respected, right? And once you have somebody coming to an app every day, you have now a conduit between the employer and the employee becomes a really powerful employee experience that they can use, especially for the frontline hourly workers who are often fragmented and decentralized. They may not have a even a company email, how do you communicate? How do you stay in touch? Well, if they're coming to your app and the benefit that you're offering every day, it presents a really powerful opportunity for them to engage with those people, to understand those people, and ultimately to support those people.

 

Kailey Raymond: Yeah. That's an incredible space to be in, to be able to have somebody's undivided attention for a moment of their day, to be able to move them in the direction of...

 

Gino Palozzi: In a positive way.

 

Kailey Raymond: Trusting your brand. Because you're coming at it from a financial perspective. There's a lot of different ways you can really help somebody build a little bit of a savings or leverage their money in a way that they're using for something they've been saving up for and really feel you're empowering them as a brand, which is really, really powerful.

 

Gino Palozzi: We actually do that today. So that was the other finding is once you understand that there's an appetite for this, it's like we do offer saving capabilities and creating that muscle memory and the good saving habits. So you can set aside some of your paycheck, right? And you can reward that too and incent that or celebrate that in an app. And then you can also look at things that we offer free coaching and financial guidance to anybody who uses this. Well, yes, people come here because they like the concept of access to their wages. They stay because it's helping to fuel their way forward. To help build their future. And we have to recognize that's a responsibility we want to offer those things in the app. So we continue to build out the things that we want to understand people want for their overall financial wellness. So the app continues to grow. And it's not even just in after you get paid, there's things that we can do to incent and help communicate between employer employee before payday that is adjacent to those things. To incent picking up shifts or to help look at opportunities to say, what else can you do to reward your most talented people.

 

Gino Palozzi: We offer rewards for an employer to offer to their most, their top performers. It's surprisingly not that easy to do in the current payroll systems. To do a spot reward. So when you have that mechanism where they're already coming and you know what motivates people, you want to build those out. And anything we build has to be helping and support, first and foremost, of the employees. Is it helping them be more successful? Because if it is, they're going to embrace that a feature of the benefit and they want it. And if it does help them it's going to support the success of the employers, right? Because they're the ones who are bringing to the table for their folks. So they're going to feel that builds a sense that you do understand what I need. You do offer the benefits I want. So you're going to attract talent. You're going to keep the talent. And that's why some of the biggest companies in the US and some of the biggest organizations are leveraging this, the Targets, the Hiltons, the Kroger's. Because they recognize the power of it.

 

Kailey Raymond: It makes perfect sense to me. You're building a virtuous little cycle between employee and employer and being able to drive value back and forth between each of them. It's really, really interesting work that you're doing. I have one last question for you, Gino, which is, if you had any recommendations, if somebody is asking you how they could up-level their customer engagement strategies, what would they be? 

 

Gino Palozzi: Oh, that's a loaded question. When I give advice to early career people on developing their talent, first and foremost, the one thing you have, even early in your career, is to surround yourself with people that not only you can learn from, that are willing to teach you. So no matter if you're in a big company, a small company, find your people in your mentors, right? And those mentors are not just the senior people, they're the peer mentors or the people who are, done your role. So the biggest thing for learning is go find people within your organization or find an organization if you're not in one or move within your organization to a group that fosters your development, that actually is invested in that. So find good leaders, find good teams, because you have 100% control of that at any given point in your career. Fresh out of college even. So the second thing is be very observant. Always seek to understand. So I was probably this way earlier in my career too. It's like you immediately jump to the answer to something. But you may not have the full context. So always seek to understand and ask good questions. Don't be afraid to ask questions. And then third, and this is a little bit of an old school statement, is just observe people.

 

Gino Palozzi: Observe people that are successful. Because acumen and knowledge is really important to build. And you can get that through certifications or building yourself around a good team. But true success is observing how people operate in the way that they kind of work amongst others. And then try to see the good qualities and try to follow people and try to kind of reinstall. I want to be more like that. I want to learn about that. I want to understand how that person got to that point. And the flip side, look for things and traits you don't like about people or leaders or other things and be like, I want to avoid that. So build your mentors, build your strong, your support team, and just be very much willing to learn, seek to understand and watch and observe people because there's so much to work and growth that can be had just by watching talented other people or finding yourself. Talented people are actually willing to actually grow the next round of talent too. You just need to do it in a way that is very authentic and just you want to kind of put yourself in a situation and learn from others because learning on your own is tough.

 

Kailey Raymond: It sure is. Stay curious is really, I think, a lot of sentiment behind this.

 

Gino Palozzi: Always. Always. Yeah, in marketing, if you're complacent you don't want to learn about what's next, you're going to be left behind.

 

Kailey Raymond: I love it. Gino, thank you so much. This has been great. We struck some chords. We found some common ground. It was fun.

 

Gino Palozzi: I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for having me.

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