Tackling the retirement adequacy problem: A conversation with Endowus’s Samuel Rhee

| Podcast

In this episode of The Venture, we share a conversation with Samuel Rhee, chairman, chief investment officer, and cofounder of Endowus, a Singapore-based financial technology company that transformed the city-state’s cumbersome social security investment process into a fully digital experience. It has sought to offer individual consumers the same benefits enjoyed by institutional investors: expert advice, access to best-in-class products, and reasonable fees. Rhee sat down with McKinsey’s Andrew Roth to explain what drove the firm to confront the retirement problem, the reasoning behind its innovative solutions, and why content marketing is central to its success with customers. At the close of the interview, McKinsey’s Raphael Bick weighs in.

An edited transcript of the podcast follows. For more conversations on venture building, subscribe to the series on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Podcast transcript

Andrew Roth: From Leap by McKinsey, our business-building practice, I’m Andrew Roth, and welcome to The Venture, a series featuring conversations with legendary venture builders in Asia about how to design, launch, and scale new businesses. In each episode, we cut through the noise to bring practical advice on how leaders can build successful businesses from scratch.

In this episode, I’m excited to share a conversation with Samuel Rhee, chief investment officer and cofounder of Endowus, a Singapore-based fintech company. Endowus has transformed the city-state’s commercial social security process into a fully digital experience. It is now the only investment platform in Singapore approved for the investment of all funds, an eye-popping trillion-dollar wealth market. You’ll hear Samuel tell us about his mission to solve the retirement adequacy problem through financial literacy, expert advice, lower costs, the elimination of hidden fees, and a corporate culture that puts the client first.

Welcome, Samuel. Great to have you on the show. You’ve been on a fast journey with Endowus. In the past few years, you’ve announced some sizeable rounds of funding, and I think you’ve now raised over $44 million. But before we discuss the platform itself, what was the original problem to solve that inspired you to start Endowus?

Samuel Rhee: The journey of Endowus began in 2017. The idea was to try to solve the pain point of investing money and building wealth, because investing in Singapore is very costly and leads to poor outcomes due to many structural problems here. And it’s not just a Singapore problem. On the demand side, there’s a lack of financial education and literacy, so people don’t ask for the right products in the right way and at the right cost. The incumbent financial institutions have been unable to provide the services required to tackle real-life problems like retirement adequacy, which is arguably the biggest generational challenge we face as a society and as individuals.

Endowus was created to help individuals invest, save, build wealth, and prepare for retirement. Because of my investment background with Morgan Stanley, I know institutional investors don’t pay the high fees banks charge individuals for mutual funds. Institutional investment banks also give good advice and access to great products to help their customers succeed. I wanted to take this successful formula for institutional investors and make it available to individual investors at a comparable cost.

And one of the most critical retirement problems to solve was to really change behavior and improve the way the CPF pool of money was being invested, because it’s such a large pool of assets here in Singapore.

Andrew Roth: Can you please explain the CPF for those who may not be familiar with it?

Samuel Rhee: CPF stands for Central Provident Fund, which is the social security system of Singapore. Singaporeans and permanent residents here save about 37 percent of their income, with 20 percent coming from self-saving and employers contributing another 17 percent. So it’s a huge amount of savings. It’s also a very flexible system, since you can use it to buy a house, build for retirement, or for medical reasons. It’s one of the best systems in the world and very well structured, although I think it was initially designed to increase home ownership in Singapore. And as a result, Singapore has one of the highest rates of home ownership in the world, about 90 percent.

But I think the design of the CPF has to change: since there’s an aging population, the retirement portion of it is too small, and the housing part is not going to be enough to supplement the difference. So you really need to use this fund more efficiently in order to build wealth over the long term, and the only way to do that is to make financial investments.

And the CPF is the perfect pot of money to do that with, because you’re saving every month as part of a regular plan, and you’re investing for 20, 30, 40, or even 50 years. It’s a very long-term plan, and it’s locked up, so you can’t take it out or use it elsewhere.

But the system was very inefficient, very costly, and had many limitations, since the experience was completely offline. So Endowus moved the CPF investing experience completely online, which took us more than two years and millions of dollars—without any guarantee of success or approval by the government.

We created a purpose-built tech stack for the CPF investment piece and received government approval at the end of 2019. Although we originally built it for CPF, we also offer a holistic investment platform where you can invest your cash savings and other Supplementary Retirement Scheme (SRS) savings, all seamlessly in a single app. It’s actually the only investment platform in Singapore that allows you to invest all your funds.

Andrew Roth: So, you saw that advice, access, and reasonable fees were available to institutional investors but not to consumers. What about the customer experience, such as filling out forms and waiting in lines? What part of the innovation, aside from cracking the integration with CPF, was centered around solving the digitization of the customer experience?

Samuel Rhee: First of all, it wasn’t just me. My cofounder Gregory Van and a few other cofounders were there from the beginning. It was actually one of the other cofounders, You Ning, who came up with the CPF idea. But all of us were struggling with trying to invest our money. And I had the desire to solve the retirement problem. What’s really important is that we built a team around common values and a common purpose. We had this clear goal in mind, with a very strong desire to solve the retirement problem and the pain points of CPF investing. And if we could do that, we’d solve the general investing problem, the general investing malaise. So, that was what we were going after.

And when you talk about client experience, that’s really everything. When we talk about an offline-to-online transition for any service company, in the end, it’s all about the user experience and improving cost. Those are the two dramatic transformations that occur when a service moves from an offline to an online experience, and that’s the key value proposition. Unfortunately, financial services in general, and especially wealth services, have been so backward, with the worst client experience. You go to a bank, take a ticket, and wait for an hour to buy a single mutual fund. There’s been a gradual process of innovation with the move to online or digitization, and we just took that to the next level. I think that’s the key thing.

But financial services is not e-commerce. It’s a regulated business, a professional service, so it’s different. There’s a higher standard to which we need to build the specifications and the tech stack. And as a financially regulated entity, we have compliance and risk to consider, and so on. So, it’s a much more complicated solution versus an e-commerce player. And the user experience has to be very different, because it’s one thing to purchase a $20 headset online, but sending $100,000 of your life savings to a new brand you’ve never heard of—that’s a very different value proposition. There’s a long sales cycle, because you have to build trust, and you have to build the brand in the right way. So it takes time. But if you do it right, the user experience and the cost angle still come into play.

Andrew Roth: A confusing term that I’ve noticed that incumbents struggle with is this definition of “product-market fit.” Anything you can share about how you define product-market fit?

Samuel Rhee: It’s not easy, because it’s going to boil down to people putting their money where their mouth is and actually using the platform to invest. That’s the biggest vote of confidence anybody can give, actually entrusting their life savings to the company. So, assets under advice (AUA) is the single most important metric. If that’s growing, that means we’re being successful and actually resonating with the client base.

We also have a different model than robo-advisors, which target first-time investors, starting with $100. That was not our target, and we were very unique in positioning ourselves with a $10,000 minimum investment, saying, “We’re going to try to help solve retirement and long-term wealth problems.” We targeted the mass affluent, white-collar professionals with certain income levels and savings, and we were successfully acquiring them.

But the metric that really opened our eyes as to how the product-market fit was happening was the conversion number through the funnel. For us, the top of the funnel is somebody visiting our website and leaving their name and email address by registering. But from there, it’s actually a very onerous process before finally funding and investing your money. Because unlike a lot of robo-advisors and others who take shortcuts, we do everything the proper way. So, in order to manage your money, we go through a lot more processes, and that’s where we assumed people would fall off, because some people can’t be bothered or don’t have the time. But by the end of 2020, which was our first full year of service, the conversion rate ended up being more than 40 percent from the top of the funnel to finally investing.

And I’m not talking about opening an account. The conversion rate after opening an account was actually more than 50 percent. So that 40 percent was a shocking, tremendously high number for a service like ours. And that’s when we realized that we had to open up the funnel. Until then, we were bootstrapped. We didn’t have a single external investor or any venture-capital money, because we knew we needed CPF approval—which wasn’t guaranteed—and so we had to prove this product-market fit. And when we did that after the first year, when we grew about eight times over the previous year, that’s when we told ourselves, “OK, it’s really painful spending our own money to grow and market this. We need some external growth capital to help us grow a bit faster.”

Andrew Roth: Robo-advisors typically target millennials to get them into the habit of investing and automate the diversification of investments across different asset classes. Is Endowus doing this as well? Do you have technology that’s automating and rebalancing portfolios, or is there more of a hands-on approach to advice?

Samuel Rhee: We actually do. Robo-advisory services are a part of what we do. But we don’t like the term, because robo-advisors don’t have robo and they don’t advise, so it’s a misnomer. And when we talk to clients, they think there’s some kind of robot with some kind of algorithm to beat the market.

That’s why we didn’t want to be a simplistic, single-product robo, like so many others are. We didn’t want to just buy some exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which anyone can do. And that’s why a lot of robo-adivsors that take an active approach to managing money are no different from any other fund manager. And they normally fail, because 70 percent, 80 percent, or, these days, 90 percent of active investors are actually underperforming.

What we are is a total wealth platform, like a digital private bank. It’s an open platform, where we work with more than 50 fund managers to offer best-in-class products. We have algorithms and technology that help to personalize, curate, and match the right kind of products to clients, like the Amazon and Netflix model of curation. We do a lot of due diligence and product screening, which is the advisory piece to help screen out all the bad products. So we offer only best-in-class products and lower the cost at every layer.

For example, we introduced this amazing concept of 100 percent trailer-fee rebates. Here in Singapore and across Asia, distributors of financial products aren’t paid by clients. The client pays the product seller, who then gives a kickback commission to the distributor, which is called a trailer fee. These fees are illegal in Europe and some other developed markets, because you’re getting paid a commission for selling financial products, but you’re hiding it from the client, so there’s no transparency. There’s also misalignment because you’re always going to try to push the products that pay you the highest fees.

Andrew Roth: It’s an obvious conflict of interest.

Samuel Rhee: Absolutely. Conflict of interest everywhere. But the biggest thing is that people don’t know it, so there’s an education piece to this. We just announced that, through this program, we’ve returned more than S$2 million in cash to clients, refunding them all of these commissions that most advisors keep. But we decided to give the commissions back to clients to be totally transparent and completely aligned with the clients’ best interests.

Andrew Roth: I want to talk a little bit about the market correction that’s happened in recent months, and what you’re observing and hearing from customers in terms of access to different types of products. I’m sure you’re hearing from friends and customers all over on what they should do.

Samuel Rhee: It’s tough for everybody, especially when you’re investing in financial markets. Every single employee of Endowus is a customer of Endowus, too. We built it so that we can use it. So when the market falls, obviously, we’re losing money, and that’s painful for everybody, whether you’re a client or whether you’re an employee. So, I’m in pain as well.

There’s also a lot of fallout these days in the private markets, and investors have suddenly become very cautious. We experienced this during the COVID-19 crisis, when everybody panicked, but then we went back to normal. This time, I feel it’s a little bit different because there are many more structural problems coming to the surface—whether it’s China and structural indebtedness, the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, or inflation and supply-chain problems across the globe.

There’s nothing we can do about the market, which will do what it does. We will have cycles, and we’ll come out of this stronger. And in the long term, financial markets always tend to move higher as a result of volatility, because they’re an amalgamation of some of the best and most innovative companies, and those rise to the top. They also represent the bigger pieces of the market, so I’m hopeful that, in the long term, we will overcome this.

But for us as a business, as a financial advisor and a wealth company, we are directly impacted by this, as are our customers. While we’re a digital-first company, we also have client advisors we make available over WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, phone, and email. Clients can book appointments with them, and our advisors are the best in the business, with the highest ratings and reviews. So we have people who can handhold clients through difficulties, when they’re struggling with negative returns and don’t know what to do next.

But at the same time, you have to look at the long term, and if the markets continue to trend higher, that’s an opportunity for you to continue to invest. And a dollar-cost-averaging savings plan allows you to be disciplined and unemotional about things, and it’s really important to have that plan to succeed in the long term.

We also produce a lot of content, whether it’s webinars or written material, because we feel we need to engage with the clients a lot—not to make them transact or be fearful but to give them knowledge so they can make the best decisions for themselves. Because everybody’s different, be it their personal circumstances, their risk levels, or their investment horizon. So we need to personalize interactions with our clients.

Andrew Roth: When you think about how to get the message out about Endowus, what is your strategy right now? What is your split between branding and performance marketing? Anything you’ve learned from the branding side of things, or the investments you’re making in education and content marketing, that’s paying off for you on the performance side?

Samuel Rhee: We’ve been fortunate enough to hire some of the best people in the marketing profession and tripled the team’s size in the past year alone. We really do believe that marketing is critically important, but not just marketing to sell products.

I think two things. One is that we always say we’re a financial services company. But we’re also a content company. Content is critically important to us because of the roles we play in financial education and financial literacy. Even before we launched, the founders were writing a newsletter every week. We did that for over a year and got a lot of traction and subscriptions. We were even nominated for a financial journalism award, and we were like, “What’s going on?”

It’s one thing to purchase a $20 headset online, but sending $100,000 of your life savings to a new brand you’ve never heard of—that’s a very different value proposition. You have to build trust, and you have to build the brand the right way.

Samuel Rhee, chief investment officer and cofounder of Endowus

Andrew Roth: You were being treated like a media company.

Samuel Rhee: Precisely. And that has continued. We’ve written a lot of great content to help educate people, guide them in personal finance, investing, retirement, CPF, SRS, all these things.

And when COVID-19 hit, we quickly pivoted from live events, which we were holding regularly, to webinars on YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And those attracted several hundred people at a time, with thousands of views very quickly. We really established ourselves in that medium very quickly, and what we’ve done so far has resonated really well. So that’s been an important channel for building trust, because, as I said, the sales cycle is very long. And if people like the content and think it’s relevant, they come to our website, check out our service, try it out, and realize it’s great. So content has been critical for our success.

The second thing is brand building. I don’t think enough people focus on that, especially in financial services. Building trust and building a brand are so important. When we hear a name like Morgan Stanley, we immediately trust it. So Endowus is building a brand around trust, about doing things right, about the mission and vision we have to solve retirement problems. All those things I think resonate with people.

Andrew Roth: I can sense the energy level go up when you talk about the mission and the vision and solving this big problem around retirement adequacy. Can you share a little bit about how you’re creating a collaborative culture within the team?

Samuel Rhee: The mission and the vision of the company is very clear. It’s something that we communicate to our clients. It’s something that we communicate early on in the interview process whenever we hire, because finding the right fit is really important. Now that we’re bigger, there are a lot of people who want to join Endowus. But we want them to join us for the right reason, because they believe in the mission and the vision of the company: to help people invest better, so they can live easier today and better tomorrow.

And that better tomorrow involves this critical mission of solving retirement. And we’re kind of anti-establishment, because we need to fix this industry, solve its ills, and go back to what “financial service” really means. Finance is not an abstract thing. We’re here to serve customers and help them achieve better outcomes. If we’re aligned to the client and the client succeeds, then we succeed. But aligning our employees to that is crucial for us to get there and succeed as an organization. And that’s why the fit for any new employee is critical. They may be super qualified, but if they’re not aligned to the mission of the company, they cannot join Endowus.

It’s also not possible for one leader to drive the culture. The culture has to be bought into; the culture has to be every single person living it out in the workspace in their daily lives. And that’s why our culture is something that is sustainable and it proliferates.

We want to stay true to our mission, and the opportunity is huge; it’s a trillion-dollar wealth market here in Singapore alone. It’s a S$200 billion to S$500 billion opportunity for CPF alone. And we’re the only player, so we’re leading the charge, but we want more people to join.

Andrew Roth: A lot of start-ups have employee stock-option plans, but it sounds like you’re doing something different.

Samuel Rhee: One thing we did that’s very different from other start-ups was to allow any employee to buy into the cap table of the company. We’re not one of those fintechs where the founder or the founding team has 80 percent ownership. We are very, very spread out and allow everybody to buy in, and we’ve already minted many millionaires.

So, early on, when key employees were hired—and even junior employees who had just graduated—we offered them a chance to participate in an internal raise. And that really helped when we were bootstrapped financially for four years. So we had complete control over how we built that cap table. Greg [Van] and I intentionally designed this to allow people to have more skin in the game. We were happy to let people put money into the company and help it grow.

There were a lot of external investors who approached us early on, and a lot of friends and family who wanted to invest in Endowus, too, but why should we take their money when our employees are the best people to own this company? So we aligned with our employees early on—and not just in compensation or mission. We gave them a piece of the business, and that’s very different. And even though it’s now normal for engineers to move on every 18 months, we haven’t had any turnover in our senior or junior engineers. We have really, really low turnover, which is amazing.

Andrew Roth: This is an amazing point. Because you started with saying, “We have to hire for the right culture, hire people that fit into the vision and mission, but then also give them access to participate in the upside of the growth,” and there’s no better way to engender culture than by basically creating a long tail of cofounders for yourself.

Samuel Rhee: That’s right.

Andrew Roth: Are you also starting to look outside Singapore with the latest round of funding?

Samuel Rhee: Absolutely. We are licensed in Hong Kong now and are preparing to launch there in the second half of the year. So we’re really excited about our first overseas expansion. We held back because we wanted to go deeper and broader and provide more services and solutions for the Singapore market first.

Andrew Roth: This is a business that’s growing very fast. Anything you could share for someone who’s listening and who’s going through the same sort of entrepreneurial journey that we all know can be frustrating, amazing, and lonely? What are you doing to maintain your mental health or your energy throughout the journey?

Samuel Rhee: I’ve been in the industry 27 years, 17 of which were with Morgan Stanley, where I moved up the ranks and became CEO in Asia. So I had a similar leadership role in a larger organization. And I had some struggles, despite my success. But I think it really helps when you’re actually working at a company where you believe in what you’re doing. And this is my business, and it’s a business that I really believe in. So, when you have a purposeful mission, it really makes a difference. You’re excited to get up in the morning and go to work, because this is so important to everybody. And that really helps.

The second thing is that I’m older, so I’m a bit wiser and pace myself much better than I did previously. It’s also critically important to have a good team around you. And we’ve built a very great leadership team, with leaders in the financial and technology space able to take this forward. Also, my wife and kids are my joy and strength. And I have something called faith. I’m a Christian, which is critically important for me, too. Some people may get a bit fuzzy about that, but if you have strong anchoring beliefs that ground you and drive you forward, then that’s a real important source of strength. And it doesn’t have to be a certain religion. But strong beliefs and value systems help people continue on very difficult journeys.

Andrew Roth: It sounds like these sorts of anchors are grounding elements for the journey: having a strong purpose, having a leadership team that shares in the responsibilities and has competence and trust in each other, and then family and faith to keep yourself on solid ground. Sam, I really appreciate your taking time out to speak with me, and I look forward to hearing and talking more in the future on how Endowus is growing.


Andrew Roth: Now comes a segment where we invite founders and experts from McKinsey to provide more context and to draw practical insights. I’m joined by Raphael Bick, a partner at McKinsey and leader of Leap by McKinsey in Asia. Raphael, thanks for joining the show. Look forward to your insights here.

Sam talked in the beginning about how Endowus was disrupting the customer experience, in addition to what they’re doing with the business model. What he noticed is that, from a manual process perspective, the traditional wealth-management or banking experience is riddled with friction: visiting a bank, getting in line, waiting to buy a product. Can you comment on what you’re seeing on how incumbents or start-ups can win just by disrupting the customer experience?

Raphael Bick: I agree with Sam that simplifying the user experience or the customer journey is actually a crucial factor to improve the overall experience for the customer and create a better proposition.

Quite often, financial services requires a complex buying journey, so you need to build trust. Traditionally, the journey has been very focused on sales activity, and as regulations evolve, the digital journey is starting to get simpler. But to really create a compelling differentiation in financial services and the onboarding experience, you’ll need to go beyond purely the user experience and into proposition innovation.

To take just one example, a large bank we’ve been working with was launching a new offering of wealth-management products with new journeys. After we looked at the onboarding journey, we had an auditor really simplify it. We also needed to change how the products were constructed along several fronts—for example, the degree of automation on the back end so as to put straight-through processing in place, as well as the kind of partners they worked with to provide those products and the kind of policy requirements they needed to meet. Bringing all of this together essentially allowed us to really simplify the user experience and the onboarding journey. Particularly in financial services, where we see a very high degree of regulation, simplifying the journey usually also requires working on the product and the back-end processes to make it really smooth and simple.

Andrew Roth: So it’s not as simple as just improving the front end, but there’s a lot going on behind the scenes.

Raphael Bick: Exactly.

Would you like to learn more about our business-building practice, Leap by McKinsey?

Andrew Roth: That’s what Sam was getting into. He described one of the initial innovations of Endowus’s model: allowing Singapore citizens to invest their CPF or retirement funds through its products. And it was the first company in Singapore to get that regulatory approval.

My next question is on the business model and value proposition. Endowus is taking away the commission structure that typically exists between wealth-management banks and the different products available and is passing on that savings to the consumer. And this is different from what we’re seeing not only from incumbents but also from these robo-advisor banks that are popping up. Sam is very clear that they don’t see themselves as simply a robo-advisor, but almost as the Netflix of wealth management. What else are you seeing on business-model innovation? There’s UI/UX [user interface/user experience], there’s economic structure. Any other trends you want to highlight?

Raphael Bick: We’re definitely seeing the trend toward more transparent pricing, as pricing is coming down overall in the market.

One of the challenges—and one of the reasons why, historically, you’ve seen a lot of distribution-focused pricing structures—is that consumers have generally not been willing to pay for the actual cost of doing business and ensuring profitability. That includes the high costs of the digital model, customer acquisition (such as needing to run incentives for your sales staff to go talk to customers), and the promotion and push campaigns fund managers have used to get products out at certain periods of time.

The traditional model has worked quite well to cover those costs, and it appears relatively cheap to the customer, since the pricing is much more implicit. But Endowus is making the pricing much more explicit, which I think has the benefit of building trust with the consumer. But you need a consumer who values that transparency, who is willing to pay for a service. This links back to Endowus’s proposition, because the company is essentially enabling a much cheaper delivery model to customers. It can actually bring down the overall cost. I think that has the potential to draw in customers for whom this is a compelling proposition and who are willing to pay much more, directly, than they used to.

Andrew Roth: The pathway to trust differs, as Sam highlights, between selling something online for a hundred or a few hundred dollars and getting a consumer to transfer a hundred thousand dollars. So, that transparency and the pricing model create trust.

He also talks a lot about their marketing strategy and the early investment they made in content marketing to help educate the market on financial literacy and what’s going on behind the scenes. You and I have talked a lot about this in the past, too, how tech companies or start-ups really need to own the thought leadership in their space beyond what traditional paid media and PR do. What else are you seeing in terms of the capabilities and the level of effort required to really make a dent and have an impact when it comes to content marketing?

Raphael Bick: Content marketing is hugely important. We’re seeing a lot of more-traditional organizations building their own content-marketing teams. This is not a very difficult thing to build, but it takes a lot of commitment, more commitment than most folks realize, because you need high-quality content and you need it on a regular basis. You need to channel it to the right kind of leads or the right types of customers. And then you need to embed your content in an overall customer journey that allows you to engage a potential customer for the first time, nurture that interest over time, and then transition into a sales conversation or product purchase. So, it’s a lot of things coming together.

And content marketing is quite crucial for building trust as a brand, particularly as a new brand. But it’s also critical to understand what resonates with customers. For example, we helped a wealth-management and insurance business launch a hybrid digital journey. You acquire customers online through other channels, and then you transition them over multiple engagements—be it content pushes, little tools and calculators, or offline and online conversations with financial planners—to a point where the company really understands their needs, quite granularly and systematically, because a lot of the data get captured along the way. Also, the financial planners are then able to recommend the right product for the customer. A lot of that is enabled, essentially, by content marketing. And having the right types of content available—from how-to guides to advice on what to look for in a particular situation in life, to explaining products in a much more visual, interesting way, to calculators—all of that plays a crucial role in engaging the customer, learning about them, and then helping to guide and convert them to the right type of product.

Andrew Roth: Right. At Endowus, in the absence of an army of salespeople, the content-marketing strategy is critical to articulate the value proposition and create that authentic touchpoint with the customer through different long-form and short-form content. A few months ago, I was reflecting on some public statements from the CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, who believes that every tech start-up is now a media company. In other words, you need to own the content in your domain, and with the fragmentation of traditional media, the opportunity is real. And it’s not even an opportunity—it’s almost a responsibility to think of yourself as a media company, because sometimes the traditional media is not going to get it right, as Brian highlighted with crypto. So, I think this is a big trend.

Raphael Bick: And content also allows you to be much more nuanced and targeted when engaging with potential leads. Wherever you do your marketing or customer acquisition, content allows you to tap into higher-quality leads that you already know a lot more about by the time you’re actually trying to talk to them. And that makes your overall sales and conversion journey a lot more effective.

So, content marketing is a very powerful muscle to build—but one that takes a bit of effort as well. Because in addition to creating the engine that creates the content, you also need to embed it into your overall engagement journey, into internal marketing tools, and set it up as a learning mechanism.

Andrew Roth: This is not about just launching blog posts of how-to articles and top ten lists, but it’s much more integrated. Thanks, Raphael, appreciate your insights.

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