To end your week, we’ve got two meaty articles on the difficulties of servicing SMB banking clients and lessons in scaling marketing from Airtable.
1. Changing how Main Street businesses bank
A thoughtful analysis of the difficulty of servicing SMB customers by community banks from Patrick McKenzie, in particular, the threat that embedded finance in other tools/platforms these customers rely on for their business:
BigBank has no system in place to see “OK if you just had a purchase on your website then probabilistically you should receive $48 in four days so, hmm, modulo credit risk and cost of funding, I should just advance you $48 to keep you happy”; Shopify and friends can build that. (Shopify offers next-business-day payouts to Shopify Balance.)
2. Building Your Marketing Engine To Drive Scale
SaaStr shares a talk and takeaways from Airtable’s CMO Archana Agrawal. Among the barriers for growth and insight, is the need for leveraging automation and cross data usage in your marketing stack:
Airtable recently ran a survey that found marketing leaders spend over a day and a half of their work week completing manual tasks using an average of 23 tools to get the data visibility they need. When teams work independently like this, it results in siloed data, making it difficult to see the impact.
Simplifying your operational workflows is essential for modern marketing. Airtable considers operational excellence a necessity. I recommend taking a progressive approach to ensure that your teams always move in the same direction and operate with speed.
Automate as much as you can to limit time spent on manual tasks. Invest in your tech stack so that you keep growing while you scale.
And that’s a wrap. Here’s to keeping up with the change right in front of you. Drop a note to say hi, and any likes/hates at blog@mindspaninc.com and share before everything moves.