Viaduct Generation (00:00) Hello everyone, my name is Duray and you are here with the Wise Build Bridges. The Wise Build Bridges is a podcast dedicated to spotlighting marketeers who are building something truly special. And today I'm here with Stephanie Hendries from Previsico. Stephanie, hello and how are you on this wonderful Friday? Stephanie Hendries (00:18) I am good, thank you. Thank you for having me. Viaduct Generation (00:20) The Wise Build Bridges is dedicated to marketeers who are open to sharing ideas, building connections and helping others grow. It would really be good firstly to understand what it is that you're building. Can you tell us a little bit more about Previsico? Stephanie Hendries (00:32) Sure, I'll talk to you about Previsico and I want to kind of set the scene when I start to tell you about Previsico because ultimately we are at a point when climate change is transforming our environments. It's impacting all of us, it's impacting our lives and we know that things like extreme weather, things like droughts and things like flooding are now a real reality for all of us. I think it's a stark fact that we know that flooding is going to impact all of us now. what Previsico do is we actually provide real-time flood forecasting solutions in order to help communities prepare and protect their assets. And I think it's the way we work is we're a very, we're a small and dynamic team and we really, really care about trying to mitigate the impacts of flooding around the world, which as you know, the devastating impacts of flooding. So I think we're a real impact startup and we're scaling up fast and it's an exciting place to be. Viaduct Generation (01:28) That's amazing. It's really nice to speak to a fellow marketeer who's building something with purpose behind it, not just profit orientated and in the conversations we've had, always learned a lot from you already. So, yeah, excited to get into this. It's quite a position you've got there as marketing lead for such an innovative and impact startup. I'm sure there's a number of marketers that are listening to this going, wow, I'd love to go to work trying to actively make the world a better place, but I'm sure you must've put the hard yards in. Tell us a little whistle stop tour about how you came to where you are today, please. Stephanie Hendries (01:58) So talking about my career, if I go back, I originally started out as a journalist and I actually worked in a B2B publication called Construction News. From there, I actually moved to New York for a year and trained, I worked in a marketing role there. So that was my first foray into marketing, which I really loved. I came back and did some more journalism. I was working at IPC Media. across their homes magazines, Living Etc., Ideal Home. And at the time I was playing a big role in bringing their content online. All the homes magazines were bringing their content online. And so, and I was actually leading the project on that. So was a really, really exciting time. But from there I moved to Zoopla. So into a very, very specific marketing role at Zoopla in the B2C team there. And... Zoupla had just IPO'd, so it was a really, really exciting time to be there. And then after that, I've worked across several innovative prop tech startups, booming and good lord, and now I've found myself at Profico. Viaduct Generation (03:00) That's amazing. I love that. it sounds like you've got a really interesting career that is kind of gone and its ebbs and its flows. Looking back on it, if you were to like just rewind yourself all the way to the start of your career, what thing would you tell Stephanie then? What would you say to her before the start of this wonderful career that you've built for yourself? Stephanie Hendries (03:18) I think one of the most important things to tell yourself is to believe in yourself and have confidence because when we're starting out, as a young 21 year old, you don't have experience and it's quite a nerve wracking time to be in the workplace. And I think back to me then and look at me now and huge differences, but that does take time to learn and grow. But if you can, just try and have confidence in your ability, in your decision making, and in the work that you're doing. Viaduct Generation (03:47) difficult right you raise a good point in that like as a young person you don't have that much experience and a lot of companies are looking for experience because they don't want to teach everyone or teach their new market here absolutely everything I was recently at a at a session I did at Oxford Brooks talking to some of the free or up-and-coming or budding freelancers and a number of them were working in marketing or wanting to work in marketing and I thought it was quite interesting that a number of them were wanting to be like almost like fractional CMOs and marketing strategists without having ever opened MailChimp or without having ever used SEMrush or Ahrefs or some of the basic Canva for example, but they have the idea that they can kind of ideate and strategize without having executed on that. What advice would you give to those people? Cause I was kind of ripping my hair out going, Guys, you got to get your hands dirty. You got to learn it. You got to light the fire first, right? Before you can hire a great SEO freelancer or SEO agency, you need to know the key fundamentals behind SEO to make sure that you know how to hire. So what advice would you give to those budding future CMOs? Stephanie Hendries (04:59) The advice I would give to future CMOs, think, is it's brilliant to have loads of confidence and loads of ideas. And obviously we're in an environment now with the rise of AI. There's lots of things that could be automated. There's lots of things that you could probably do much easier than you could when we were all starting out in marketing. But I think that one thing that they would need to learn and that takes time is developing relationships. Viaduct Generation (05:12) Mm. Stephanie Hendries (05:24) within the business and without like outside of the business. Because as you start to grow, you will need all of your stakeholders on board with you. And then in a broader sense, when you start to do types of activity, know, like PR activity or thought leadership activity, you need to be able to be out there and explaining what you're doing and talking to people and having the confidence to do that. So that takes time. And I think my advice to them would be absolutely brilliant that you've got all this enthusiasm and you're wanting to go to CMO role, you know, very quickly, but there's a lot of building blocks you need to do to get there and never underestimate the value of relationships. Viaduct Generation (06:02) You mentioned that the understating the power of relationships and I think that's that's so true. Never more so true with the relationship between sales and marketing. The age old conundrum of how can sales and marketing be more in sync as someone who's gone from much bigger companies like Zoopla to more startup companies and now as an in an impact startup. key things are you doing to ensure that sales and marketing are singing off the same hymn sheet? Stephanie Hendries (06:30) In terms of sales and marketing and the ways of working together, I think it's particularly at startup stage, it's so important to be very close. And I understand that as you scale up and you get much, much bigger, that does become more challenging. But I think for any kind of, I would say startup or scale ups, you really need to get close to sales. And working together on strategies, whether you're looking at different industry verticals together, whether you're looking at different kind of projects that are coming down the line, know, is it a thought leadership project, like making sure that you two are both aligned and just working together, I think, and respecting each other and trying to, you know, ultimately we're both trying to grow the business. We're like the growth team. So it's very much about like a close relationship. And I really believe in that strongly. I think it makes for a much nicer working environment as well. Viaduct Generation (07:22) On the working environment, it's interesting, right? Because me and you've been in the world where sales and marketing used to sit alongside one another. They'd throw paper airplanes, tease each other about leads versus quality of leads and whatever. Today, we're all sitting in our lounge. How on earth do we encourage that closeness, which I completely agree with you. And I'm sure all of the marketers listening to this are like, yes, I'm one closer and better relationship with sales, but I'm also working remotely. How do we, what the? do you think marketeers could consider or how can we better foster that environment or that connection in a remote environment? Any tips? Stephanie Hendries (07:58) Yeah, I think visibility is really key. So if you're using Slack or Teams or whatever, it's very important to ensure that you have key visibility. So I would say that one of my tips for making sure that sales and marketing can work close together is being quite transparent with what you're both doing, keeping each other up to date across, know, various platforms, as said, maybe Slack or Teams. And I think the key other thing is to put time in for like important meetings. So at the end of every quarter, make sure you have a retro, make sure you have planning sessions, like really, really devote time to each other. And then you can do online brainstorm. I've done a lot of online brainstorms, you where you go into breakout rooms. There's lots of value in that, I think. I do love to be in the office occasionally. Like I think that's important to be in the office occasionally, if you can as a remote team. Viaduct Generation (08:45) Mm-hmm. Stephanie Hendries (08:46) try and get sessions in where you can be together like once a quarter, because I think it is powerful to have that kind of rapport in person occasionally too. Viaduct Generation (08:54) Yeah, there's nothing that beats that kind of in-person connection, right? And I think you're absolutely right that cross-functional collaboration between sales and marketing, but other stakeholders too is super important because I'm sure in your, in your career, you've seen the value in building relationships with key stakeholders. Is there something that you would advise that the market here who's trying to get more buy-in from C-suite or key stakeholders? Is there any tips that you'd give them that can kind of accelerate that process a bit. Stephanie Hendries (09:24) My advice, if you're trying to get buy-in from senior stakeholders, is to try and include them as much as possible, being mindful of their schedules. And I think that you have to be strong because there will be times where you're working on a project and not only do you have to re-explain it every time you're seeing key stakeholders because they're so busy, you know, they forget the nuances of what you're working on. So you have to be prepared to have a lot of realignment sessions. and explaining the value of why you're doing something, but also not being afraid to push back. There will be times where you have to push back, whether that's to do with a specific idea that you're working on, whether it's to do with timings, you've got to get something done and out the door. There will be loads of reasons why you need to push back, but I think that as long as you do it in the right way, in a way that's purposeful and meaningful and obviously respectful for the senior stakeholders, you can get buy-in because they'll start to believe. if you're fighting for it to be a certain way, they'll think, okay, you know, he or she is really passionate about this. And that's really important. And they'll see the passion that you have and they'll believe in you. And it means that can get things done and out the door. And to your point around kind of cross-functional collaboration, I think that we all need to be mindful of like, the marketing team are experts. They're being asked to do multiple things all the time. So occasionally they just will have to push back and that is just the nature of things, even to senior stakeholders. Viaduct Generation (10:46) Yeah, I love that. So make sure that you're patient, but also make sure that you demonstrate purposeful bravery and stick up for marketing and stick up for yourself and the hard work that you put in, right? Stephanie Hendries (10:56) Absolutely, yeah, it's very important to stick up for marketing and the work that they do because the marketing team always gets lots and lots of noise from loads of different directions and lots of people that want them to do things. Viaduct Generation (11:06) It's interesting, right? Because marketing is such a broad role and especially in a startup environment, when it's a bit bigger, you kind of are more segmented into a specific role. But in a startup environment, there are so many hats that you need to wear. And... It's often times that we kind of miss out on maybe some of the fundamental things that and marketing is brought in to do I wondered if you had some some tips in terms of Marketeers who are building something and trying to stand out in maybe a crowded space What might be something that you would encourage them to fall back on from a foundational perspective? Stephanie Hendries (11:41) So my advice to people that trying to stand out in a crowded space is once you've got the foundations of what you're doing, you know what your USP is, you have a good understanding of how that's going to work with your ideal customer profile. If you have enough there, then you can set up the building blocks for things, email comms, all those kind of things. But I think never underestimate the power of content within that too. I think that that's a really good way of standing out from the others. The content that you produce, particularly now, there's a lot of people producing content that's AI-generated content, that's not particularly purposeful, that's, you know, in a way thrown together. And I think if you can actually come up with something that's much more meaningful, whether it's a thought leadership piece, whether it's producing your own newsletter, whether it's a certain direction you want to go in with your content strategy, I think content still can be an incredible, incredible. incredible platform for marketing. think content, whether it's through short form video, whether it's through reports, whether it's through blog posts, it's really, really important. think that's a way that you can actually stand out from the crowd. Viaduct Generation (12:46) I completely agree with you there. The power of content is quite often underestimated and the term content is king has been knocking about for a while, even in the SEO community. You've recently put together a pretty amazing piece of content yourself, haven't you? Can you tell us a little bit more about that and the process that you kind of took to get that live? Stephanie Hendries (13:10) So we have recently put together a report, it's called the State of Flood Resilience. And ultimately I came to it because I had done a couple of webinars with people asking questions about certain types of flood and then telling us that they didn't really have confidence or plans. And this was something that at Previsico we kind of guessed or knew, but we needed a way of, I guess, holding a mirror up to corporate world, not just the insurance world which we work with closely but the whole corporate world and saying we're not quite there yet in terms of our attitudes and our approach to flood. So I thought well the easiest way to do that would be to do a large-scale kind of survey style basically data research. So for about two or three months we did lots of surveys some with various different partners so we could gather as much data as possible. And then we've put that all together into this report, which actually came out on Tuesday, and produced a report that shows, it gives a good range of people's opinions and shows the gaps that we have. It shows some of the strengths in terms of people's attitudes to climate change and flood risk, and it shows where some of the gaps are. And I think it's really, really important. We want to use this report to kind of highlight where we can go and where we can move forward. So I think it's a really important thing and we'd actually love to do it, perhaps even each year, so we can see how people's attitudes are changing. Viaduct Generation (14:29) That's amazing, I love that. Can you, that certainly sounds like an interesting report and I encourage those people that are listening to this that have assets and or need to be aware of this stuff, where can they find that report firstly? Stephanie Hendries (14:41) So our report, the State of Flood Resilience, is on the Previsico website. We also have, if you follow us on LinkedIn, you'll be able to find links to the report there. Viaduct Generation (14:51) Okay, perfect. Now, I know as much as anyone that that report has taken many hours of research, of planning and the execution. Now, while some people hold that up, they go, wow, that's a lovely piece of content. But I know that a lot of time and research and effort went into it behind the scenes. Can you... kind of elaborate further on the kind of almost go-to-market strategy for that report. And I know that there was an event involved. Can you talk us through a little bit about that too? Building up some of that momentum around the report and around any great piece of content. Stephanie Hendries (15:25) It was very important to me when it came to this report to make sure that it had the proper platform. So the first thing I did was, as we do in the last couple of places in marketing, I've worked where we put together a key comms plan for how we're to launch the report. So we have a good idea of that. As I'm busy writing that, I can have people that are then planning that comms plan, putting things together. And the event was a key part of that. So we hosted an event and that event was really to help us launch the report and kind of cement our place as thought leaders in this space, this climate change, environmental space that we're talking about. So we held an event actually, who is a renowned broadcaster and campaigner. And Chris had, he'd got various different versions of the report as I was producing it. So he was very familiar with what was in it. Viaduct Generation (16:03) Mmm. Stephanie Hendries (16:17) And we wanted to use him alongside a fantastic panel we had. We had Estelle Herschelhorn from NGO Rap. We also had Carl Lindbergt from Equon. So we had a really great, hard-hitting panel. And we talked all about the kind of issues that Chris Packham actually talked about, climate breakdown as opposed to climate change. He says we're at a point where it is a breakdown of what's happening here and we really need to act. So that was really a great kind of scene setting place for us to then launch the report at the end of the evening. So I really knew that I wanted to do something big for the report. And we have lots and lots of different, I would say, other touch points that are coming that will help us continue to develop the comms and the excitement and the noise around that report. Viaduct Generation (17:03) That's brilliant Stephanie. The language used there kind of is so inspiring like climate breakdown. I'm so grateful for having you on this podcast and I'm in your corner. I'm your biggest cheerleader. So please continue to fight the good fight and do what you can to fight against this climate breakdown. For everyone listening, you can find Stephanie on her LinkedIn. That's Stephanie Hendries. That's H E N D R I E S. And from all of us here at the Wise Bull Bridges, thanks so much, Stephanie. It's been a pleasure having you on. Any final words to fellow marketeers before we say goodbye? Stephanie Hendries (17:36) I would, my final words would probably just be have confidence and believe in yourself and everything will be all right in the end. Viaduct Generation (17:43) I love that. All right, Stephanie, thanks so much for your time. Goodbye for now. Stephanie Hendries (17:46) Goodbye.