PAAY: Trade Out The Trade Shows

Yitz Mendlowitz, co-founder and CEO of PAAY, discusses his firm’s biggest change in response to COVID-19, which has been a pivot to offline sales and marketing tactics: “Without spending money on events and face-to- face meetings, we had to ask ourselves, how could we connect with prospects and current customers?”

The following is an excerpt from What Did You Change?, contributed by PAAY Co-founder and CEO Yitz Mendlowitz.

Our product has always been digital, but our go-to-market strategy has not. PAAY’s most significant change in response to the pandemic has been its approach to sales and marketing. As a B2B FinTech company, we relied heavily on trade shows, business meetings and events to sync up with current and potential customers.

Building trust and long-lasting relationships with fraud and payment executives is our priority. And when the pandemic hit, the most authentic way to do this — spending quality time, in- person — was no longer an option.

The most significant change our organization has made in response to the pandemic is a shift in the sales and marketing budget. Without spending money on events and face-to- face meetings, we had to ask ourselves, how could we connect with prospects and current customers?

Telling our story online became significantly more important overnight. Marketing dollars that were originally allocated toward events were put into digital marketing opportunities with industry trades such as PYMNTS. com. We are now (for the first time) working with Sutherland Gold, an amazing PR firm, to thoughtfully articulate who we are and our point of view in easy-to-consume online content. We now have to reach our audience via digital channels and industry publications like PYMNTS.com, Digital Transactions, Payment Source, etc.

We have also begun hosting and partnering with other companies to produce podcasts and webinars to help us reach prospects that we otherwise may have met at a trade show. Lastly, we are spending significantly more time and money on social media, especially LinkedIn.

As we begin to navigate the digital space, we are quickly realizing that quality  content is everything. And people still have a deep desire to connect with other people. In the pre-pandemic days, we could connect on a personal level over a glass of wine and follow up via digital channels with business talk. Today, we need to showcase not only our product, but also our people through digital channels.