Ep. 2: What is demand generation vs lead generation? Shree Magdani of TAMI AI explains modern B2B marketing

Welcome to The Payments Shed podcast, the weekly podcast that dives into the big topics, trends, and people shaping the worlds of payments, fintech, and business leadership with your two co-hosts, myself, Grant Evans, and Justin Hanna.

Welcome back to The Payments Shed podcast.

Today we have Shree Magdani from TAMI. Shree, please introduce yourself. hi guys.

Really happy to be here with you both. so as Grant said, I'm Shree working at TAMI, the marketing lead there. Been there for about 10 months now.

explored loads of different industries in my time. So I've been in edtech, digital mental health solutions, facility software management, AV, and now I'm in the world of AI and lead generation.

And what made you choose marketing as a career?

Do you know what?

It's a funny story. So I failed art at GCSE and always wanted to go down the route of being a creative of some sort and couldn't be an artist. then developed my own side hustle business of like painting and commissioning artwork and stuff and then decided that I really wanted to do something creative regardless of whatever it was going to be.

And then I found out about marketing essentially and I was like oh you can do graphic design in it. You can build campaigns. you can do a lot of creative work within that events as well.

So I was like this seems like a good choice for me and there's legs as well. I could really go into a career with that. So that's how marketing came about.

did it at uni and been doing it since. So it's been eight nine years now.

What experience do you think from you mentioned there about the creative art side of stuff have shaped your approach to marketing today?

I think patience is a big thing I think in marketing. I think a lot of people want quick wins when it comes to putting out a campaign. you spend months building a campaign.

You put it out to market and sometimes it just doesn't hit instantly. you have to do a lot of work in the background to make sure it's rising to the level that you want it to be so it's fully optimised. And I think patience is a virtue when it comes to marketing.

I think understanding your audience is obviously very key. But I think playing the long game. Don't turn off a campaign after two weeks because you get scared that it's not going to work.

Let it run. Let it do its thing. Let it resonate and then change it afterwards.

And in artwork when I was painting it was 40 50 hours of artwork to go on one canvas. But the end result's beautiful. And that's how I've taken that into my marketing day-to-day.

The exact opposite to how sales people think, right?. why there's friction sometimes because they want quick wins and we want to play the long game.

But then maybe that's filtered into the marketing world because there's certainly marketing leaders I've dealt with that then almost apply that same pressure back to sales people around ROI and that's probably because they're getting pressure that is not necessarily needed, right?

of course. Like I think when you push out a campaign, we are revenue driven as a business anyway. So we get inbounds in.

We know that they're very ICP. they get sent over to the sales team and then it's like right now what's happening where are they in the pipeline have they closed why haven't they closed like we want those quick wins afterwards so I do understand that the friction is probably a two-way thing to be honest but I mean at TAMI we work really well with the sales guys and they work really well with us as well so there's a good understanding of there's time taken to get things moving and we respect their roles and they respect ours so I think the end goal is always the same right everybody wants leads right and sometimes leads don't always come from new business.

They can come from existing business. I think one thing I've always noticed in my time is marketing and good marketing people are working just as much with existing accounts as they are with we're with we're trying to win new opportunities. of course.

I think a big thing for us is retention as well. people come they love TAMI but then how do we get them to renew and get them to the next stage and that comes to with us it's a lot of introducing the new products the new functionalities the feature updates getting them around a round table and speaking to them talking about the product roadmap and stuff like that really making them feel like they're valued customers because that's the core of what we do as well like customer service for us is a massive thing and we play a part in that as well to make sure that they are very well looked after and Is that some of the components that drew you into joining TAMI in the first place?

I mean I've like I said, I've worked in so many different industries and I've experienced very varied marketing. I've worked in companies where you I mean the brand was global. So our marketing was very much the fun marketing.

It was the brand awareness. It was going to like the bet show and having massive exhibition stands and spending hundreds of thousands of pounds and not really caring about the ROI at the back of that. But with TAMI, everything we do everything intentionally, whether it's brand awareness, whether it's any of the campaigns that we're running.

We want to make sure that we are getting the right people, but also we're getting the people who actually want to help us grow as a business and we want to help them grow because we our business is all built around lead gen, right?

So we want to give them the accuracy and then in return they give us feedback and we keep improving.

Good.

And marketing obviously changed massively over the last few years. I always talk about this how people are doing more research than they've ever done before. It's probably making our jobs a little bit harder.

so you have to try and be that front of mind. What's your thoughts on the shift of marketing?

I think to be honest like everything I learned at uni I could probably put in the bin. I think it's changed that much since I've graduated.. It's it's you learn about the traditional marketing where it's very much lead gen and that's your core focus getting leads in back in the day when I first started the amount of like competitions we used to do because those were our core focus the quantity of inbounds not the quality whereas now I think when people are researching you've got the likes of chat GPT and Gemini and Google AI as well and you want to be the front and centre of that but people still rely on people So word of mouth for us is always going to be super important.

We actually have had some of our biggest clients come through because their friend who works in another enterprise has spoken about us. that traditional way of marketing's always remained for us. But digital marketing is a whole different ball game for us now because people's attention spans are a lot lower.

Tik Tok has changed people's scrolling times as well. you really only have three to five seconds to capture the audience and if you don't do it within that time they're going to forget about you. But also we focus a lot on educating as well.

back in the day you put out a white paper, you want them to download it, it's gated. you get their leads in and then you follow up. I hate gated content.

I just say I absolutely despise that. Me too. And especially now when people post on LinkedIn and then they say comment underneath to get the PDF or whatever you comment don't hear from them ever again.

It's like what are you doing?

What are you gaining out of this?

I don't understand that. but LinkedIn's become a massive thing for us now as well. It wasn't before.

We used to focus a lot on Instagram in previous roles and Facebook and things like that and Twitter, well now X. But LinkedIn now has become our core playing field because it's not just for recruiters, it's for marketers as well to advertise and put your name out there. You guys obviously know you're really you're really on LinkedIn quite a lot and I've been following you guys for ages so I know but it's it's become a place where you can really have a voice which is really important.

I guess that spins us into demand generation which for some could probably be seen as a bit of a buzz word now. And I would say that because I know certain marketeers that I've followed that think that they're doing demand generation and it's not how I would perceive demand generation to be. What is your perception of demand generation?

How that's differing from the traditional lead gen mindset and I guess how you guys look at demand generation at TAMI as well.

So demand gen for me is it comes back to the education of what we do but also what's going on in the market right I think everyone tries to be a thought leader but you really need to dig deeper to what is actually moving and what's changing in the market. I think a lot of people see demand genen as just finding things on the internet, compiling it into one report, throwing it out there, and you're the thought leader. Whereas what we do differently is we use our own data to produce our own reports.

So, it's actually sets us apart from any other company because that's our data. That's what we know and that's what we see in the market. I think what happens now is you have I have it as a rule of thumb was you have seven touch points before somebody's ready to really speak to you or book a demo in.

So, you need to have you need to be present in seven different areas, whether that's on a blog, on LinkedIn, as an ad, on Google ads, whatever it might be. But that builds the trust of who you are. especially when you're working in such a saturated market as well, is so easy to get drowned out.

But I think it's constantly putting your voice out there, putting faces out there. Film content as well is massive for demand gen 2. I think a lot of the time people as we you guys have probably seen as well there's always people ranting about the fact that people write posts using chat GPT and put it on LinkedIn and stuff like that but having video content out there is no bot writing your content it's very authentic and it's a real conversation and I think that all plays into the demand gen now I think that probably goes when we talk about demand generation it's becoming now more demand generation in individuals just as much it is in brands so when you are the face of a brand and you're talking And people can see you and feel you feel that they know you.

The secondary questions then, oh, who do you work for?.. And what do you do?

After you've already told them, you have an understanding of the industry, their challenges. Then they want to come to you to ask for your help. And then if you've got a product to sell to them, even better.

But it's a secondary conversation as opposed to pitch slapping people, right?

And just I see businesses all day just putting about their brand new product on their company channel. People the only people that are liking it are employees of the business.

Product marketing is its own niche now as well, right?

And I think there's very specific individuals that get that product marketing role in the right way.

I was going to pick your brains just because you mentioned, ad spend and stuff like that. I mean, we worked at a company previously where some money was chucked at ad spend and we said we were better off spending it elsewhere. And I think the we proved to be right on that particular one because the ROI on it was zero basically.

And I think there are better ways to probably drive inbound now than ad spend. But ad spend remains this like ludicrously expensive form of marketing to generate inbound. Like what's your opinion on that part of the market?

I think LinkedIn advertising is bloody expensive. It's ridiculous. it's your whole audience is there on LinkedIn if you're a B2B company, right?

So they know that they're going to hike up their prices. There's smarter ways to do it though. So, there's you can find your ICP, you can find your book of business, but then you can just go straight to the top or go to that decision maker, drop them a message.

I think with the way that we do it now is we prioritize doing things like partnerships with you guys, for example, because there's more value there. You see an ad for what, a couple seconds, you scroll past it, you might not see it again. I don't really truly see the value in that.

I think if you're pushing something out there like a webinar, which is then going to be you're going to sit on, a panel and you're going to have a conversation or whatever, then I do see the benefits there. But when it comes to just plain static ads that you're pushing out there to the market, I do agree money can be better spent elsewhere. Google ads is a different ballgame, though.

I think because people can bid against your own keywords in your business. If you type in say TAMI. Ai, you'll have all of our competitors coming up at the top because they're bidding against us.

So you then have to go into that vicious cycle of bidding and the wars and all of that stuff. But you have to do that unfortunately. But Google is a lot cheaper if you do it in a smart way as well.

But it's still a crazy statement, right?

You're having to pay Google to protect your own brand at the top of the list smaller businesses cuz they're never going to be able to compete with bigger businesses with deeper pockets. Right. Exactly.

But then I think that's where the value of networking, going to an event, having a face-to-face conversation comes in. And that's something we do a lot of now as well is just pushing our brand out there through individuals. Like you've met a lot of people from TAMI, right?

And we have got some very interesting and cool individuals there. Like everyone's got such a big personality. Why not push that out there to the market instead of pushing the brand?

Like you said, the brand's secondary, but if people like us, then they will trust the brand as well. Like Mike Day does it all the time posting on LinkedIn and he does such a good job of it. Like he's very consistent and people come to him now because they like his content.

They know who he is. He's talks he talks on panels etc. So he's built that trust in himself and the fact that he works at someone somewhere like TAMI.

It builds the trust for the brand as well.

Tell us a little bit more about TAMI as a business and what you guys do.. So I mean for those of you who haven't heard of TAMI, we are a lead generation platform but we are AI first. we can our AI basically scans the entire internet.

So any open website we can look at that we can look at their code. We can look at everything to gather information. So our database is probably one of the most powerful databases out there for that reason.

what sets us apart from other players in the market, is we have real-time contact refresh because our AI is working in the background all the time. Say if I search for you on our website, on TAMI's platform, and we didn't have you on the platform, our AI will actively go and search for you and find information about you and put it onto there. if you move company, for example, our AI will find that and update the website as well.

So we have really rich and very accurate information which is what sets us apart from the traditional players that have been there for many years.

That's cool. So the data is constantly up updating. You're not in a situation and I have had this with other platforms where there's just old information that me or my teams can't utilize that data anymore because it's out there.

You have to pay for the upgrade. Oh, do you?

Oh gosh. No, that's all that's I mean that's the core of our business is all AI. So if I think one of the issues that we found maybe five six years ago was that a lot of people move jobs quite quickly.

People unfortunately pass away as well. So their email addresses, their contact details are made redundant. A lot of platforms don't update that information.

So you could spend hours building your book of business within the platform. You go after god knows how many people and you make 50 phone calls. You don't connect with anyone because they just don't exist anymore.

Our AI works super hard to make sure that is as up to date as possible. we also are GDPR compliant as well which sets us massively apart from I know there's been a lot of buzz around GDPR issues lately data vendors. there has been and that's been a massive thing for us.

we work with the likes of massive enterprise companies like Trust Pilot and we have to go through vigorous legal conversations and paperwork and stuff but we come out on top because of that GDPR compliance that we offer.

Obviously a lot of our listener network are in payments, financial services, fintech.

I guess the GDPR piece that you mentioned is particularly important to them, but as a wider focus for TAMI in that financial services ecosystem. What products and services do you offer that support that market?

So one of our big things within TAMI is our B2B filters and our e-commerce filters. So we can identify if a company has add to cart features on their website, if they use different payment providers. if a company's using PayPal, our AI can find that information and put it against that company search for them.

So that's been a massive win for us as well because nobody else can do that in the market. I think a lot of vendors can tag keywords against different companies, but when you dig a little bit deeper, it's it's not true. they will say that they are using thousands of payment providers and you actually go on the website and you're like, well, they don't even exist on that website.

It's not even a an e-commerce platform, for example. So that really sets us apart especially now because I think fintech and the payments world is very cluttered at the moment and when you've got everything within one platform and you're not having to use multiple different platforms to get all the information like the technographic information thermographic information. It makes everyone's life a lot easier.

and that's how we stay winning in the payments world.

Nice.

I've got a question. It says how does TAMI make it easier for businesses?

So, I probably answer that cuz I've used you guys a few times, but from your perspective, how do you think it does help businesses find the right prospects at the right time?

I think for us, one of the one of the issues that we have heard about a lot of the time is intent and the time to approach these guys. So for example in the logistics world you have a period of seasonality where it's Christmas time for example super busy but then after Christmas you have the returns period what our platform does is it looks at things like web traffic data it updates that in real time as well so you can really identify when businesses are super busy they have loads of traffic where that traffic's coming from which countries for example and around that time if you try and contact them, it's probably going to get drowned in their inbox, right?

You go for the quieter periods and you have a look and you analyze that data and that helps you really plan your approach and plan your plan of action really.

The Payments Shed podcast is proudly sponsored by TAMI AI, the market intelligence and lead generation platform built for sales and marketing teams who want precision, not guesswork. TAMI helps businesses identify their best fit prospects, gain deep market insights, and boost revenue growth. and it really has become the go-to solution for the payments and fintech industries.

Both Justin and I have used the tool in previous organisations that we've been in and we really can't recommend it highly enough. There's a link in the bio to click on the TAMI website and find out more about their product. You really won't regret it.

How do you set companies up?

because I know there's a lot of tools in the market and the functionality you talk about is brilliant but I've always found with certain business tools in teams that I've been in or teams that I've managed that we consume a but then when we don't get that onboarding or that education that we need to make the most of that product or you end up with someone that's using one out of 10 features that we should be using because that's the only thing that they've self-taught themselves how to use.

How do you go about setting up a business for their go-to-market strategy with TAMI?

So I think it all comes down to scenario based, right?

So our customer success team are really on it. I was actually just speaking to a guy called Mo from DNA payments yesterday. He's taken us from Santandere to Elevon to World Pay now to DNA payments.

so we've been through a lot of his journey with him as TAMI. and I asked him the same question. I said why did you why TAMI?

Why have you taken us every single step of the way?

and he was like, "The customer service is just unmatched. We sit down with every single one of our customers and figure out what are you trying to get out of TAMI." I think there's a lot on the platform and it can be super overwhelming and when you're left to your own devices, there's a lot of things that you could do wrong. you could end up with zero search results.

You can end up exporting a lot of things that you don't actually need to, which then, burns through your credits. And we want to get value because that's where we see progress and that's where our success is. So in terms of onboarding, our team will sit down with you guys, really train you up, have a trial period, then have a period within that where we have calls to make sure that you guys are actually using the trial period properly.

If an extension is needed, that can be offered as well. We just want to make sure that you guys are readily equipped for that. Even when it comes to like integrating with your CRM systems as well, we really help with all of that stuff to make sure that you guys are ready to go and hit the market.

Nice. I always talk about this around sales people need to be given the right tools to go to war with but actually the tools need to be given tools sometimes as well if that makes sense. You can't just given the sales tool like you mentioned like TAMI you need to know how to actually use it..

I think you mentioned about the customer service for me using TAMI.

I feel like I could go and demo TAMI to my team because I've been shown the right way to use it which always helps.. definitely. And I think also with the likes of TAMI, I think, you could be given a tool and say, "Right, this is going to be your platform to do all of your book of business, but what does that even mean?" And I think until you break it down with somebody who's an expert like our customer success team or somebody who's an ambassador within the TAMI world, it's really hard to figure that out and really figure out whether you're doing it right or not.

So, we've talked about the future of marketing a little bit already, but exciting news. TAMI is our official headline sponsor of the Payments Shed podcast. So, getting the reveal in there.

But why did you decide, and not calling us out specifically, but to go down that route of partnering with a podcast from a brand and marketing point of view?

What was the thinking behind that from your side?

I think as I mentioned before, like we are an AI first company, but we're not robots. It's not just bots building a brand to then push it out to the market. We're real humans.

We're really trying to help the market out. We're trying to solve a problem that's been a prevalent problem for so many years in the data world. and I think being able to be on a podcast like this where, I push marketing out all the time, but nobody really knows who I am.

I'm always on the other side of the camera as I said when I sat down here like it's weird being on this side. pushing us out there as a brand who is here to stay is big for us. being on a podcast and having a real conversation about that as well I think is what really sets you apart from everyone else.

I think we're a little bit late to the data game and the lead generation game and as I'm sure everyone knows there's massive players out there in the market but we are very different and we're not trying to be copycats of those guys. We're really trying to pave our own path and push our own marketing out there and something like this with the payment shed and with you guys is just is a no-brainer for us really.

I really like that piece though like robots and AI doesn't build brands, right?

people build brands. you can have a great product, but people need to be able to see the product and I think be able to partner with us. Hopefully, we can allow more people to see TAMI.

When you talk about the podcast piece, and obviously we jump on the podcast all the time, is community-led marketing is quite key, right?

do you think that's becoming more and more important in go to market strategies?

100%. I think that's where the trust side of things come in. Right.

I think if you I it's I think now in the world of Tik Toks and influencers and all of that stuff, you see paid promotions left, right, and centre. And I think it's very easy to spot that. I don't know if it's just cuz I work in marketing, but you scroll through and you see people mentioning different brands all the time, and it's a paid post here and there.

I think being able to be on a platform like this with you guys is it's it's a different way of marketing out there and opening up a community for us. as TAMI as well. we've actually seen more value in social selling than the traditional ads and the LinkedIn ads and things like that because there's there's trust already built there.

There's already people who are speaking about you, people who have used you. somebody down the road could be using TAMI, they jump on a call with their mate to show them all the cool things that they're doing. Then that's that's perfect for us, right?

Somebody could be watching this and think, "Oh, our date vendor's really and we need something better. Come and speak to me. the plan.

That's the plan. Plug.

No, I think it's it's really interesting and video content does stick around in particular as well. podcast repositories are great, but the reason we do the podcast and the podcast side of things is everything you talk about people's attention span is so finite now that, clips of tangible, really valuable conversations, real conversations with real people. That's the thing people want to look at and consume and they're segways into then winning business.

We've the whole dark social thing we talk about quite a lot because we've been doing this for a few years now, but in a sales capacity there's been times where you've done content, you've you've forgotten about it and six months later we've had a message where someone went we saw this video you did six months ago and you were talking about all of our pain points that we've had. we weren't in the right time to buy at that moment in time, but we jotted down, your details and we're ready to have a chat now.. And we have no clue like how can you even put that on a pipeline?

You can't really. But what you can do is start attributing back to social selling as the total ROI on that. I think we were challenged originally like well what's the ROI on the content that you're putting out two years into that journey or even 12 18 months into that journey we really could start to attribute ROI back to the lead source being a specific bit of content and that's powerful in itself I think last touch attribution is absolutely key right in marketing and conversations we always have is and we've all done it you screenshotted a post you sent a post you sent a link to something on LinkedIn or Google wherever it may have been and then you click on another link, another link, come to a website and then a marketing team have given substitu because a website leads come in.

But what you haven't realized that there's been eight different bits touch points before they've come to the website and that's not an inbound lead. It's not an ad, it's just the way they've come to the page. So being able to understand last touch attribution and we talk about a lot is ask your customers and your inbound leads how they heard of you.

I find that really important. and they'll try and make sure that sales teams all do it because you really need to get to the bottom of what's working.

And we've worked at a lot of startups over the years, scaleups, where you talked about some of the competitors in your market and it's that David and Goliath thing sometimes in terms of very established businesses. And how would you advise smaller, more nimble, yes, but more financially constrained marketing teams to think about going about that scrap if you like.

In terms of the David and Goliath piece, to be honest, I think the to start with, build your personal brand up. I think if you're a CEO, you're a founder and you're an expert in what you've built, you need to be present on social media. do it organically first before you start putting any spend behind it because I think a lot of the time you for example we put an ad out for TAMI and say for example we hadn't posted on the TAMI LinkedIn page for months and months and months and it was basically a dead web page for us.

People use that to refer back to see how big you are as a business, right?

A lot of people do. They look at how many followers you've got, how much interaction you've got. you probably look at the first three posts and think, "Oh, they haven't posted in the last year." So, are they really a business that's actually moving or are they just trying to really just get deals in now?

I think people can sense a lot of desperation when it comes to that stuff as well. And it's something that I it's one of my biggest irks is don't look desperate when you're trying to market because I can sense it and I know so many other people can. But for small brands is just build up your network slowly but surely and speak to people.

Have those conversations. Don't be afraid to message people on LinkedIn. Ask for advice.

Reach out to your network because people have been there.

We've all been there. Liz has been there as the CEO of TAMI. it's you guys are there now building up your brand as well.

It's it's about who's going to be there to support you and help push you out. You can't do it all by yourself.

No, I think that's really valid. And lean on network as well, lean on people that have been there and done it before. I think we've certainly done that with other people that have gone down that thought leadership journey just to understand what they encountered over that time.

I guess looking ahead then for marketing in general and with the TAMI hat on as well, what do you see the next 12, 18, 24 months look like as the marketing industry continues to evolve?

I think for us, I mean the next 12 months is very exciting. we are launching some very, very cool products and I could probably Liz has given me sign off to exclusively say this on this podcast that we are launching our AI lookalike product and it's going to go live very soon.

We've got beta testers at the moment who's looking into it, giving us feedback, but it's nothing like what you've seen in the market before. Our strategy now is to focus more on that social selling side of things. we I mean unfortunately and fortunately we figured out very quickly that we can't compete with the big players in the market when it comes to those adverts and stuff.

We're going to get outbid every time and I want to use that money in a way where we are pushing the brand out there but doing it in a way where it's sustainable as well. so I guess social selling and sustainable selling for us is our way forward for the next 12 months. But there's there's a lot of exciting things coming out.

And when we think about AI and automation, which obviously TAMI's sweet spot, do you think that will change how many businesses go to market in the in the future?

it's a difficult question. I think no.

I guess it's poignant because you've got your new AI product, right?

So it's the core of what you guys do from a platform level, but is it now front and centre for every company where they feel like they have to be utilizing AI in a specific way?

And I guess the marketing element of that as well, do you feel like people might get left behind if they're not utilizing some of those AI tools?

Do you know what?

I think there's a very fine balance with AI when it comes to marketing. I think use it by all means, but don't lose the spark of what you're really good at either. it's, back in the day you could write, I mean, we didn't have AI.

We'd be sat there writing reports, writing white papers, write creating infographics, all of that stuff. And that was how we pushed things out to the market. Now, you've got AI doing it for you.

It's almost going to become like what I see, and I know this is really controversial, but like the Canva of the world. I see an ad, and if I know it's been built on Canva, I don't know, it just does something to me. if I see something and I know it's been oh I'm just an ad I'm just an adobe girl through and through.

That's just how I learned like all of that stuff. But I and I can appreciate that, in terms of speed, it's it helps people become more efficient, right?

Like you want to get a post out there, get it out there very quickly, but understand that AI is not always going to be correct for you as a business as well. It's especially when it comes to things like chat GPT, it only knows what it knows. doesn't know what it doesn't know.

So, you have to feed it the information. By the time you fed it the information, could you have written it yourself?

Probably.

There's a lot of narrative about that at the moment, though. I think that with those AI tools prompting in the right way is an education in itself. So, you talk about AI is here to stay.

It's going to be in schools. It's going to be in universities. It's going to be in the marketing world.

I think that there was that stigma with marketing and journalism and all these things originally where I was like, well, this is this a threat to us, right?

And I don't think it is because the human touch we've talked about a lot on this podcast is so important.

Anyway, I like Canva because it allows me to do creative stuff. I did didn't do art, I'm certainly not doing a I failed anyway. I'm not spending 50 hours on a canvas.

Canva gives me the ability to create nicer looking content to go I do a lot of written content but it allows me to put some imagery and things that can maybe pull people into that written content that I have done organically but it is quite a divisive topic in general I think and it's interesting to hear someone in marketing say that about Canva though because I do see a lot of marketeers that use Canva as well day-to-day. I think I think Canva's great and I think it definitely has its place. I think I think maybe it was just back in the day when everything just looked the same and when it looks very samey.

I mean Canva's now come out with so many cool templates and stuff so you can really build a really cool graphic if you wanted to. but going back to the AI bit it's it's interesting because I think maybe last year before I joined TAMI I was actually quite scared that I was going to be out of a job very quickly because there was so much noise about AI. there was so much noise about how it can write things for you, how it can create things for you.

Then I was thinking, well, if you can do all of these things, even when you go into like Google Ads now, there's so much AI in there that you don't really need an expert to be able to build those ads at a very basic level.

Obviously, if you're building a little bit more complicated then you need a little bit more skill attached to that. But I was very terrified that I had to then think of a different route in my career because there was going to be no need for me. when in fact it's actually just removed a layer for me.

It's made my day-to-day a lot more efficient. if I if somebody sends me a 50-page document and I can summarize that very quickly without reading 50 pages, then that's that's saving me a couple of hours in my day. If I can analyze data and I can look at it and go into chat GPT Gemini whatever you guys use and just cross reference and make sure that your numbers are correct or this is right then it's it's just helping you out through your day-to-day.

So I'm actually using it as more as my sidekick rather than my I would see marketers as the people that become the best users of those tools, right?

And then it becomes just an enablement tool that makes you even better at your marketing job. And I guess then on that subject, what is next for TAMI and how do you want marketing to really shape the next stage of the journey that TAMI's going on?

So I think what's next for TAMI is we I mean we spent a lot of this year trying new things. next year is going to be a big year for us. I mean even next month onwards is going to be massive for us.

Like I said we've got a lot of new products coming out. We are really going to be leaning on network and building that community. That's our main focus now is building a community of people who know TAMI, love TAMI, and want to make noise about TAMI because as I mentioned before about, somebody who's starting a new business and they can't do it by themselves, we also can't do it by ourselves.

We need people to talk about us and we have so many happy customers now and it's unbelievable the journey that TAMI's been on over the past 5 years. Like some of the biggest global brands are working with us now and we just need to leverage that a lot more because those ads that you push out to the market, they might do something but they're not going to move that needle enough for us to really make an impact.

Brand association.

When you talk about someone like I remember the name of the guy you mentioned earlier, but someone that's taken you from to four different companies now. I mean they're your champions, right, for the product. Get those case studies out of them and that's really powerful in market..

Exactly. And case studies are always going to be winning. Always.

It's been there since I started marketing. It's still there now. And it's just so important to have those case studies out there.

I think you get these review platforms and I'm not going to name names, but one of them asked us to pay eight grand to continue getting reviews on there. And I was like, why?

I can go and speak to these people, have an interview with them, and push it out myself. Why am I spending eight grand to put a name out there for a very well-known review platform?

It's not valuable for us. It's just a vanity thing at the end of the day. The true value sits with somebody actually talking about us on camera and really singing our praises, but also talking about how they're using TAMI as well.

I think case studies now love to talk about the greatness of a brand, but doesn't really delve deeper into how they're really using the product and that's something that we really want to push out to the market as well to really differentiate ourselves from the big players. Well, the best sales pitch is one of your customers talking about how good you are, right?

This is the best sales pitch you could get. Definitely. Perfect.

Well, look, moving on to the last segment before we wrap up. One of our favourite parts of the show. what would you like to bring to the shelf of shame, Shri, for us to banish forever or allow you to take it away?

Oh, guys, I know we spoke about this before, but I'm actually I it's very controversial and it's something that has irked me for a very long time. And I really hope somebody out there in the world can agree with me on this, but not everyone knows how to be a marketer. I think it's one of it's the role in every corporate or every organization.

It's visual. You read it, you consume it, you see it. Everyone's got an opinion and therefore everyone thinks they can do it better.

There's a reason why there's experts in the field. There's reasons why we are where we are in our careers within marketing. And we're all for ideas, but it doesn't make you an expert either.

And I'd love to shelf that.

I feel like the marketing world just stood up and started a slow roll clap. We nodding our heads. I couldn't agree more and I think I can hold my hands up when I've tried to have a strong opinion to the marketing team because I'm a sales person and I want it really quickly.

And one thing I've definitely noticed in my experience, salespeople and execs think they know marketing however none of them have a marketing degree or actually do marketing day in day out. I think a lot of people I mean it's good to have a vision of where you want the brand to go, right?

And I think that's a collaborative effort with leadership, but let the marketers do the how. We're going to get that out there. That doesn't need to be from everyone else.

That's that's where our expertise lies.

So, what are we putting on the shelf?

Marketing interference. Yes. Yes.

There you go. There we go. Love it.

It's going on the shelf.

Well, Shree, thanks for joining us on the Payments Shed. Really enjoyed that one. Thank you.

Thank you.