Finimize is a London-based startup that has grown from a financial newsletter with a few thousand readers to a movement of 800,000 Finimizers worldwide. We sat down with Carmel Dickinson, the Brand Partnerships Manager at Finimize, to learn about pros and cons of working in Brand Partnerships, how her typical day has been impacted by the coronavirus crisis, and what young professionals can do to keep their finances in order.
K: Tell us about your role as Brand Partnerships Manager at Finimize
We have three partnership opportunities that we use to gain revenue: selling advertising across the weekly newsletter, sponsorships and partnerships across the events, and selling licenses to our news content.
My role day-to-day is sourcing leads and booking meetings with potential partners. And, also doing top to bottom sales, from the first initial cold call to closing the deal and handling it over to partnership managers who execute on it.
K: Where does your role sit within the organisation?
There are four of us in the Brand Partnerships team, of which myself and one other are Senior Brand Partnership Managers. Then, there’s the VP above us who reports to the Founder.
K: How is your performance measured?
I have to reach the meeting criteria and make sure that I’m booking in enough meetings. And then, there’s a basic financial target to hit every quarter.
K: What is the most exciting thing about being a Brand Partnerships Manager?
Essentially, it’s when you get to work with a client who is just starting out on their client acquisition journey or their brand awareness journey. We’ve helped a lot of small fintechs to achieve their acquisition goals by using our platform, and that’s really exciting.
Whether it’s sponsoring an event or advertising on our newsletter, I always find it very rewarding when our clients start seeing results and really feel the benefit from our partnership. Acquiring customers is really tough, and it is very satisfying to be able to help our clients with that.
Whether they’re sponsoring an event or they’re advertising on our newsletter, I always find it very rewarding when they start seeing results and really feel the benefit from our partnership. Acquiring customers is really tough, and it is very satisfying to be able to help our clients with that.
K: And what are typical challenges you face?
We’re in the middle of a global pandemic, so marketing budgets have shrunk. That’s the real challenge on our hands, at the moment, there is just not enough money in the market for all existing media platforms to succeed.
As a salesperson, you really need to have strong tenacity. Sometimes, if you’re getting lots of ‘no’s’ or not getting the conversations you want, it can really affect your confidence and momentum. Being able to keep on that high level all the time is a mental challenge that a lot of sales professionals are not given credit for. The perception of salespeople sometimes is that we’re like boiler room machines that bother people with calls, but it takes a lot of tenacity and motivation to keep going.
The perception of salespeople sometimes is that we’re like boiler room machines that just bother people with calls, but it takes a lot of tenacity and motivation to keep going.
When you’re sitting with your colleagues in the office and one of you is having a bad day, you can turn to a teammate and they can build your momentum up. Now, it’s more difficult. You can feel isolated, and it’s definitely been challenging for everyone to adapt to this environment. Remote and flexible working is great, but I think a lot of people are now learning the importance of having a team around.
K: Do you have some tips on what helps you to get work done at the moment?
Understand what works for you. Are you a morning person or an afternoon person? You should learn how to make the best out of your most productive hours.
I work in 90-minute sprints, during which I try to avoid any distractions, switch off emails and put my phone away. Whether I’m trying to generate leads or write a proposal, I fully focus on this task for 90 minutes.
I work in 90-minute sprints, during which I try to avoid any distractions, switch off emails and put my phone away. Whether I’m trying to generate leads or write a proposal, I fully focus on this task for 90 minutes. Then, I’ll take a break, check my emails or check my phone. I also try to take little breaks throughout the day quite often.
Keeping my morning routine is powerful for me because I’m quite enjoying not having to commute. Sometimes, by the time you get to the office, you already feel like you’ve done a million things cause you’ve been battling tubes or traffic. In the morning, I make sure to dedicate some time to enjoy my breakfast and coffee. I still shower and dress up in order to feel like I’m going into work, even if I’m just going to the room next door. This transition from one state into the next is really important for your mental state.
And doing some exercise is really helpful. I’m trying to get out of the house as much as I normally would when I had to commute.
K: How did a typical working day at your position look like, before the pandemic.
I’ve only been at Finamize since March, so I joined during the lockdown, but I would say that it’s very similar to my previous role at Boring Money, which was also a startup. No two days are really the same. In the morning, you check your emails or sometimes check in with your team, but then it really is about meetings and talking to clients.
So, my typical day would be two or three meetings in a day with it, whether that’s face to face, video calls or phone calls. It’s all about having as many conversations as possible and following up on your previous conversations.
My typical day would be two or three meetings in a day with it, whether that’s face to face, video calls or phone calls. It’s all about having as many conversations as possible and following up on your previous conversations.
I tend to leave my admin tasks for the end of the day. I write myself a big admin list and then tackle that throughout the day, and finish it up either when I come home after my last meeting or go back to the office.
K: You’ve previously worked at some bigger companies, for example News UK. How would you compare working at a bigger company to working at a startup like Finimize?
When you work at a startup, you really get exposed to other things. So I’ve been really lucky to have been involved in the sales strategy, and have been able to influence what the commercials looked like for our clients. When I started at Boring Money, there were only two of us, so I really built out the commercial and revenue strands.
If you work at a startup and something isn’t working, you can drop it and pivot really quickly. Whereas when you’re working at a bigger company what you sell is predominantly decided by the people that don’t actually do the selling.
At News UK, I was selling a setting in an established newspaper, which came with the legacy and tradition of great journalism. So, it does make it a slightly easier sell. Selling within a startup is harder because you’re unknown. That said, I found that my sales have improved with startups because I was really passionate about their products.
Selling within a startup is harder because you’re unknown. That said, I found that my sales have improved with startups because I was really passionate about their products.
When you work at a startup, you’re literally in the nuts and bolts of it. You know the founder and you know what their belief was in starting that business. I know everybody at Finimize, and I knew everyone at Boring Money. In a bigger company, you might not connect with the other teams a lot, for instance, I haven’t interacted with the journalistic team at News UK that often.
When you work at a startup, you’re literally in the nuts and bolts of it. You know the founder and you know what their belief was in starting that business.
Being a part of such a close-knit team makes you care more, you understand the risks for the whole team. If you don’t make these sales, these are your teammates’ salaries. When you’re in a big corporation, you’re just another cog in the wheel. So that’s what’s exciting about it, you do feel that pressure, but I like that since I thrive off pressure.
K: You’ve got great expertise in personal finance. Do you have some tips for young professionals on how to manage their money in a smart way?
- Always make sure that you’re auto-enrolled in the pension if it’s available. If it isn’t, start a pension anyway, get a private pension.
- Unfortunately, not all startups succeed. Make sure that you have an emergency fund there, three months’ worth of salary in the bank. If you lose your job for no matter what reason, you’ll be able to pay your bills and really go into the job that you want rather than the one that you need.
- Start investing as early as you possibly can. You can start investing with 25 pounds a month or even with a pound a month. If you invest just 13 pounds a week, every week from the age of 21 in a 5% return investment account, you will retire a millionaire. So the earlier you start, the better.
K: What advice would you give to someone who is just looking to get into Brand Partnerships?
Make sure that you have a passion for how brands work. In Brand Partnerships, it’s really important to have a passion for that and understand that each brand has its own identity. You can link your client’s brand with your company’s brand (in my case, Finimize) in a creative and clever way if you read up about them and understand their strategy.
Make sure that you have a passion for how brands work. In Brand Partnerships, it’s really important to have a passion for that and understand that each brand has its own identity.
At the moment with the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, you can see the way that some brands are positioning themselves around that. And, these are the brands that do well, the ones that have a story and purpose. So just get passionate about these things because it will really help you in your role. And you’ll be able to bring relevant examples to your sales conversations.
K: According to you, what is the most frustrating thing in job search from a candidate’s perspective?
As a candidate, just the sheer volume of job descriptions you have to sift through can be overwhelming.
One of the things you’re always being told as a candidate is not to have a too long CV, which is really frustrating when you’ve been working for as long as I have – your CV is bound to be long. Ironically, some job applications have very long descriptions, and somewhere down at the bottom, after you’ve read the whole thing, you’ll find one line that means that you’re just not good for the job. And that’s it, you’ve just wasted all that time, reading that job application.
That’s why, I like sites that can match you with the role as well as you just trying to figure that out for yourself.
K: According to you, what businesses could do to improve a candidate’s journey for women?
I think there are two things. First, there’s a lot of secrecy around what women need from the workplace. If you want to encourage more women to come and work for your business, then you have to talk about the amazing women that probably do already work in your company. Talk about their experiences, how you support them and their careers. You have to make sure that you’ve got a decent woman or women on your senior team. Because when all of the seniors are men, as an ambitious woman, why would you join a company where you’re never going to get a job at the top?
There’s a lot of secrecy around what women need from the workplace. If you want to encourage more women to come and work for your business, then you have to talk about the amazing women that probably do already work in your company.
Second, if you have a really good maternity package or you offer flexible working, these are things that affect working women, and you should talk about that.
There’s a common misconception that if you talk about how amazing your maternity pay is or how great your maternity package is, you’re just gonna attract women that will go and get pregnant and then take that maternity package. Women don’t think like that. We want careers, and we want to work in good places. And if we have a child along the way, then that’s what happens.
There’s a common misconception that if you talk about how amazing your maternity pay is or how great your maternity package is, you’re just gonna attract women that will go and get pregnant and then take that maternity package. Women don’t think like that. They don’t go and take a job just because they might potentially get pregnant, that’s not how we work. We work the same as men. We want careers, and we want to work in good places. And if we have a child along the way, then that’s what happens.
