November 26, 2025 • 35 mins
If your startup needs to speak to very different audiences — investors, corporates, consumers — this episode lays out why that skill matters more than most founders think.
How you explain your work changes depending on who’s in front of you, and that can decide whether people actually understand what you do. If you’re selling cookies, fine. If you’re building a complex solution to a complex problem, communication becomes core to the product.
In this episode, you’ll hear from Nina Mannheim, previously the co-founder and CPO of Klim. Klim started back in 2019 in Berlin, when “regenerative agriculture” was still a barely known term. The team had to figure out how to make a complicated topic land with groups who had completely different levels of context and completely different interests. Not easy — but they still managed to raise a 22M Series A in 2024.
What Klim learned applies far beyond agriculture.
00:00 – Why stakeholder communication matters
00:42 – Klim’s origin and early challenges
02:23 – Business model and stakeholder map
03:41 – Why consumers still mattered
06:26 – Building credibility as a tiny startup
09:07 – Which stakeholder group was hardest
12:20 – Early communication mistakes with farmers
23:45 – Tailoring communication for investors
Links
Connect with Steve Molino:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninamannheimer/
Check out Klim
Connect with the host:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/schmidt-marina/
marina@r2g.media
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Stakeholder specific communication.
I love this topic. OK.
OK. OK.
Before you write me off as a weirdo, if your startup needs to
convince several different stakeholders, for example,
investors versus corporates versus consumers, just to name a
few, this episode is for you. The way that you talk to
(00:21):
different stakeholders and also the way that you explain things
to different stakeholders, I think it can get very
undervalued and it plays a crucial part in in even getting
people to understand what you do, which of course, if you sell
cookies, it's quite easy. But if you sell a complex
solution to a complex problem, then marketing plays a huge
role. This is Nina Mannheimer,
(00:44):
previously the Co founder and CPO of the regenerative
agriculture startup Klim. Klim was initially founded 2019
in my Birftown Berlin by my friend and former colleague.
Robert Gerlach. And back in those days,
regenerative agriculture, a specific type of more
sustainable farming, was pretty unknown.
(01:05):
And This is why I. Find this case to be
specifically interesting becauseit's a complex topic and the
team had to figure out how to explain it to different groups
with very different interests and levels of knowledge, if they
had any. Not easy.
Despite this, they raised an impressive 22,000,000 Series A
in 2024, which was a big race inthis niche.
(01:28):
Fortunately for us, this isn't just relevant for this niche.
The takeaways in this episode are relevant across all
industries. I really enjoyed this
conversation with Nina and I hope you do too.
You're listening to Scaling Nerds, the one and only podcast
covering all things communications for science and
tech founders. My name is Marina Schmidt.
(01:51):
Let's jump right in. So to prepare our field for
harvest, a little bit of background info.
Most types of agriculture erode our soils.
Regenerative agriculture actually involves farming
practices that improve soil structure, increase
biodiversity, and store carbon. Our soils can actually be
(02:13):
incredible carbon sinks. By helping farmers use
regenerative agriculture, Klim would be able to put CO2 back
into the soil. So the business model for a long
time was very similar to how a carbon credit works.
So we would get paid per ton of credit that farmers save or
reduce on their farm by B2B customers.
(02:37):
What that means is that we need to appeal to the farmers that
have to do the actual change. We need to appeal to the food
companies that will drive that change in their supply chain.
And then finally, you also need to communicate with consumers,
with the press, the media, investors and all these other
(02:59):
stakeholders that play a huge role because consumer pressure
is a huge driver in sustainability within food.
And a lot of food companies carea lot about how they convey
something to their consumers. And so you really have to
balance all of that and keep thesame core messages while talking
(03:22):
to people who have completely different backgrounds and levels
of understanding. It's interesting because, right,
So if we look at the main categories that you have the
farmers, you have the corporates, right?
I just want to understand how the consumers were relevant to
you. So this was, I mean, this was a
bit of a journey for us, I wouldsay where to be very honest with
(03:45):
you, when we started out, we hadsome hypotheses, but we weren't
sure what exactly the role of consumers would be.
We wouldn't sell to consumers. We don't have AB2C facing
product. So we knew that they're not
going to be our direct customers, but we knew that food
companies cared about them. We took a bet on the fact that
(04:06):
consumers would matter. And so we very early actually,
even when we were a tiny company, one of the first things
we invested into was a consumer facing Instagram account where
we would post about the benefitsof regenerative agriculture.
And the intention there was thatwhen we speak to food companies,
we have some credibility around.We are experts in communicating
(04:30):
around regenerative agriculture.Look, we have this Instagram
account that has X thousand followers where consumers get a
sense of regenerative agriculture.
And these big food companies would be reassured that we would
help them also communicate successfully on this topic
because that is something that they cared about and something
(04:52):
that they had no expertise in. And there was also, of course,
you know, there's always a fear of greenwashing.
There's a fear of doing something that's good, but then
talking about it in a way that maybe is too much and then you
get a backlash because people say you're greenwashing, but
actually you have done somethinggood.
You just didn't communicate about it in sort of the right
(05:15):
tone and the right amount. So it was very reassuring for
food companies that we had some of that access.
And actually, you know, Nestle is by far Clem's biggest client.
They found us through our Instagram.
Interesting. OK, so you know, so we're both
German, right? And there's the saying in German
(05:35):
Uber Bandersbian, which comes from playing pool.
You sometimes hit the ball not directly to where you want it to
go. It sometimes doesn't work even.
You need to use the sides of thepool table to be able to
actually have a good shot. And I really love the saying
because I think when we talk about what kind of stakeholders
(05:58):
does a startup have, it's very easy to only think about the
direct shots and overlook the indirect shots and how like the
consumers end up helping you with the corporate deals, which
indeed will also probably help you with getting farmers in the
(06:19):
1st place, right? Then it just creates an
important cycle to make the entire business work.
Absolutely. And I think, I mean, one of the
things that I think I get asked the most when I mentor founders
that are just starting out and that want to sell to big
corporates, they say, where do Istart?
I'm this tiny company and I'm trying to sell to this giant and
(06:40):
I have no idea how to reach themand how to get there.
And it's true. It's incredibly intimidating and
it's incredibly hard. And I think you need to think
about what is our advantage, What can we be better at as a
young small company compared to these giants?
And the consumer access is one of those things where you don't
(07:03):
need a huge budget to have and you also don't need a huge
following. Like you don't need millions of
Instagram followers. All you need is sort of some
credibility in the space where, you know, in our case we had one
intern who is actually still at Clem who leaves our marketing
team now. We had one person working on
this and building this credibility and just creating
(07:25):
high quality content. And we could use that as a point
to build credibility. When you don't yet have a lot of
paying customers, you don't havea lot of business traction yet.
This is something that you can build up quite fast.
So I think especially as a founder who's in a disadvantaged
position because you're small, Ithink it's really important to
(07:46):
look around at the entire ecosystem and think about where
can you build yourself some credibility and some advantage
even with that sort of weak position that you have from
being small and young and. I would love to know how many
Instagram followers were we talking about if you can like
roughly remember when Nestle reached out to you?
(08:08):
Honestly, I I I'm not entirely sure.
My guess would maybe be 8000. Wow, that's that's.
Really not a lot. Wow, that's.
It's not a lot, It's not a lot, but it's, it's you, you need to,
I think you need to consider thefact that we were working on
what at the time was really a niche topic.
Yeah. And so it's not like we were
competing with gigantic Instagram accounts communicating
(08:32):
on this topic because those simply didn't exist.
Yeah. So all they wanted was this
feeling of, oh, there's a company successfully
communicating on this that is gaining some small traction.
And it I think it was also less about the amount of followers
and more about them seeing the content and seeing, oh, wow,
this is relevant. Oh, they actually explained this
(08:53):
in a way that my daughter would understand this.
Yeah, fascinating. Fascinating.
So if we look. At like the.
Three major stakeholder groups. Which one was the toughest nut
to crack? I would think about this in
terms of impact, right, I would say.
So consumers, I would say we're not that tough for us because we
weren't selling to them. So even if most consumers don't
(09:15):
understand what we do, we can live with that.
We're less reliant on them. Corporates are hard, but they
can also have some in house expertise and they usually speak
to a lot of different people because they have different
companies trying to sell to them.
They might be in some different,you know, lobbying groups or
(09:37):
they sort of have different access points.
So you're rarely doing the work just yourself.
You kind of have some support from other types of
organizations doing the work with you.
And I would say that with corporates, it can become a huge
advantage when it becomes one ofyour selling points that you can
explain things to them that theydon't understand.
(09:58):
So there I think you can really turn this challenge into an
opportunity by being very collaborative.
And this I think that, you know,our sales team can talk a lot
more about than I can. And that is really one big
achievement, I think of what they managed to do in sales of
having this collaborative approach.
Farmers are in some way I think the hardest because their main
(10:23):
focus is to do their farming work.
Their 24 hours are already used up by doing their day-to-day
work. And so any time and attention
you take from them, you are taking away from something else.
And they, they're already so focused on solving their
day-to-day problems getting through.
(10:44):
I think conditions for farmers are really hard.
They have a lot on their plate. They have a lot of challenges.
And despite what some people say, I don't think they get that
much support, especially beyond the financial support that they
that they receive. So there you need to really in a
way compete for their attention and convince them that it's
worth giving you their time. And that, I think, is a
(11:07):
challenge in itself. If you're someone who is done
things in a certain way for decades, and you were taught
that this is the right way to dothings, and then all of a sudden
you're asked to rethink that andyou're asked to potentially
change your mind and do things differently, it means that you
have to reflect on everything you've done for the last
decades. And I think this is just a very
(11:29):
that's a very human problem. We see this a lot with older
people in general, right? It's gets harder and harder to
change your mind. Yeah.
I guess few startups listening in are going to have
specifically farmers as a targetgroup.
But having people who have been in their position for a long
time, who are extremely busy, have their routines, have their
ideas, have their objections to new stuff.
(11:53):
That's going to be an archetype that a lot of startups will be
facing either outside of corporates or within like
specific stakeholder groups in corporates.
Do you have any examples of how you reiterated and improved on
your communication? Did you end up doing some kind
of workshops with them or did you create like a communication
(12:15):
strategy to begin with? How did you start?
I can maybe start with a mistakethat we made, and I think this
is probably a very typical mistake that companies in the
climate space make, is that our motivation to start this company
was to have an impact on climateand to help farmers while doing
so. And we made the mistake of
(12:38):
making that too central initially also in our customer
communication. And what we found is that
farmers may or may not have a focus on climate.
They certainly have a focus on farming.
We knew that climate should not be the key sort of communication
piece for farmers and that we really need to focus on what are
(13:00):
their goals and you know, what do the, how do they think about
the, the financial health of their, of their farms?
That is that that might really be endangered.
So we knew this, but yet in our communication, because we wanted
to communicate in a way that catered to the interests of so
many different stakeholders, we still put some climate
(13:22):
communication to central and farmers would get understandably
upset and they would kind of sayI'm working super hard to
produce. The.
Food that the country needs. And I feel like you're telling
me that I'm not doing enough of.I'm not a climate activist.
And it was incredibly hard to really focus on what their goals
(13:45):
are and that are so, you know, so understandable from their
perspective as well as focus on,on, on everyone else.
And I think the mistake was to try to kind of make everyone
feel OK about the way that we were communicating, like not
upset anyone too much, instead of having communication that was
really responding to their problems and their needs.
(14:08):
And be OK with using a differentlanguage when we speak to
corporate and when we speak to farmers because the intention is
all the same and the product is all the same.
And it wasn't fake or we weren'tlying.
It was just sort of really stakeholder adapted
communication. Yeah, yeah.
And this is something that I seeit's so often with impact driven
(14:29):
startups and I even face that myself, right?
Like the hardest comms project is 1's own comms project, The
thing one is closest to because the hardest involved, there's a
mission and there's so a desire to share the mission.
And we hear it everywhere. Like talk about why you're doing
this. Start with the why hashtag Simon
Sinek, right? I think it's specifically
(14:50):
challenging for impact startups because their why.
Is. More removed from the customer
than for most other companies. So even in the example of Apple,
when Apple talks about supporting creatives, that's
their why but. It's directly.
(15:13):
Relevant to the customer, every creative is going to be like,
yeah, I want that. Whereas most impact stars start
up, say we want to reduce CO2 emissions, we want to reduce
animal meat consumption. But their target customers are
like, well, I actually we just want to reduce costs and we want
to have a more resilient business model.
(15:35):
And both are true, both are goodin a way.
We need both of those. I think also as a climate
founder or sustainability founder, you're like, everyone
should care about these things. These are great things to care
about. And you have this risk of
becoming a bit too treaty. And what's important is
communicating more about the alignment between those greater
(15:58):
idealistic goals and the more concrete everyday goals, right?
A company that is bankrupt cannot do anything for the
climate anymore. That is also true.
So I think your job as the sustainability startup is more
to help companies create that link between how does investing
into soil or climate or whateverit is, how does that benefit me
(16:20):
as a company in the short, mid or long term?
And it should be more about thattranslation and alignment of
goals rather than, you know, preaching about the amazing
benefits of the climate protection.
Yeah. How did it look like in
practice? So once you made the this
mistake, you had this aha moment.
OK Damn we need to change something.
(16:43):
How did you actually start implementing more stakeholder
specific communication across the startup?
So there was certainly an element of Co creation with
customers on both the farmer andB2B side.
There was also an internal shiftwhere we would get more experts
internally, people with farming backgrounds who naturally just
(17:06):
knew how to speak to farmers better than we did as founders.
And then there there was also toa degree of trial and error,
trying things and getting feedback and seeing what worked.
And then you have those moments where you say something and a
farmer goes, yeah, exactly. And you're like, OK, you're kind
of on the right track. They feel understood, and then
(17:27):
you do more of that. So I think ultimately
communication is a lot of trial and error and it's sort of
understanding what hits the right tone at the right time.
And that's also something that Ithink is really important to
keep in mind that this is dynamic because the tone may
change. You know, for instance, in in
(17:48):
Germany, there you have big farmer protests at one point as
a reaction to some, you know, the some government action.
And that also changes the tone within the agricultural
community. And it's important that you
respond to that. It doesn't mean that you
necessarily react to every political thing happening, but
that you're aware of tone shiftsand that you're aware of what
(18:10):
that means for you. So it is a lot of experimenting.
It's a lot of staying close to the ground internally.
I think it's a lot of communication also between
marketing and in our case with product, because we have a
farmer facing digital platform. So we had a lot of
experimentation, for instance, when it came to copywriting.
(18:30):
Should it be a product person writing copy and then an
agricultural expert checking it?Should it be an agricultural
person writing content with a brief from a product person?
Should marketing do it? It also didn't help that it's a
very unpopular task to write product copies, so no one really
wanted to do it. But but those those things also
(18:53):
matter in terms of consistent language and in terms of really
stakeholder oriented language. Yeah.
And I remember, I mean I've seendifferent versions of your
website and the renaming and rebranding over the years.
And as far as I remember, you'vealso that some point introduced
(19:14):
stakeholder specific subsides. I assume that this is a way to
kind of be able to get that specificity in a place, a
website that is otherwise reallylike generic.
And that is the a classic example of where it would become
everything and nothing at the same time, where you, like, get
(19:36):
people on there and everybody's like, yeah, I kind of half
speaks to me, right. So how did you get to that
point? Yeah, I think that's sort of
the, the, the, the classic, sortof like if you are this, then
the product means that for you. And I think that is incredibly
important to make it tangible. It's I think it's like you say,
(19:58):
if you don't do that, everythingsounds kind of high level.
There's a lot of buzzwords. And I mean, I had, you know,
people come up to me all the time and say, I looked at your
website and I don't really get it.
Even my candidates, I would interview people for roles.
And they would say, so I tried to figure out what you really
do, but I don't really get it. And that was good and bad.
(20:19):
Like, of course it's bad if theydon't understand, but it's also
not necessarily bad if they lookat if you're a food company,
then do this because if if they're not a food company, they
don't need to understand the content for the food companies.
So I think that's also importantto not to not be afraid of not
being understood when it's not the right audience that needs to
(20:39):
understand. There's also I think a tactical
element to these landing pages and sub pages around SEO and
kind of appearing in the right searches for the right people.
Because often when you measure things like search appearances,
if you're not, if you're coming up in searches, but they're not
the right ones, then you're justthrowing money out of the
(21:00):
window, right? And so I, I think that was
really, really important. And I think also for us, a
journey of discovery, of really understanding what the different
stakeholders care about, what language they use, what
resonates with them to even be able to put that on a website.
(21:20):
And that was a journey because also food supply chains are not
very transparent. It's not like you build ABDC
product, you can talk to 10 people and figure out exactly
what words they use. It took us a really long time to
really understand that world from the inside out.
And even that is probably a taskthat's never done.
But I I think the take away fromthat is to use communication
(21:44):
also also as a way to self checkyourself to be like, do I
understand enough about my customer to be able to really
tailor some content to them? And if the answer is no, what
can I do to understand them better and understand what
topics resonate, what words resonate, what they gravitate
towards, and just put in the necessary work to communicate
(22:06):
well with them? Yeah, I like what you mentioned
with this kind of experimental approach because I think that's
really important and helpful. Most founders are aware of like
customer research and user interviews, that that framework
can be applied to communicationsand really checking whether
(22:30):
things resonate and trialing because it's very hard to pull
it out of one's head without being in constant communication
with the target group. It's like a solution looking for
a problem, a comms piece lookingfor somebody to understand it,
you know? Of course, the easiest thing to
(22:51):
do is when you build something for someone who's like you, or
when you build a communication piece for someone who's like
you, right? So for me, if I build something
for a starter founder in Berlin and their 30s, I don't need to
do a lot of customer discovery because that's me and we're
probably all a little bit similar.
(23:11):
But if you go and build, no matter whether it's a product or
a communication piece, for someone who's just quite far
removed from yourself, it's a really bad idea to trust your
instincts. Yeah, when you try to
communicate with them, I think. Yeah, absolutely.
Well, actually we do have. Like 1/4.
(23:31):
Stakeholder group that we haven't touched upon at all,
which would be the investors. So how how did you then adjust
your communication for fundraising?
The one thing that I found really hard with investors is
that you have very little time with them, usually when you
first meet them. So usually your first call is 30
(23:52):
minutes and those 30 minutes youneed to solve the problem that
you're solving and really make them feel that it's a problem
worth solving from both an impact and a financial
perspective. Because sometimes you can save
time. If they're like, oh, we've
already invested in a company inthe space, then it's clear that
(24:12):
they that they understand. Or if they say, oh, we just
looked into this, like you can kind of get a sense of how much
they already know and see what you can skip.
And then I think the most usefuladvice I got was someone who
said investors don't care about whether you give them all the
(24:34):
information they need. Your goal is just for them to
want to speak to you again. But just to think about how do I
prioritize what I say to make sure that there's a level of
reassurance. I think, you know, I know that
investors, of course, they, theyabsorb a certain amount of risk,
but still I find that they're also risk averse and they, they
(24:56):
want to be reassured that you'reon the right path.
So I would think about like, what is the right level of
reassuring them that this is worthwhile and really
interesting. And to kind of, you know, that
some of the risk is managed while making them really excited
about the scale and the opportunity and answering
certain key things, but not answering everything.
(25:18):
Where, like, the desired outcomeis that they come out and say,
oh, wow, like, really cool team.They're really, you know, really
motivated, smart founders that are working on something that
seems massive if it can be solved properly.
And it sounds like they're probably on the right track to
solving it. They don't even fully have to
(25:40):
understand how everything works.They don't have to understand
the competitive landscape yet oranything like that.
You just need to get them to that point where they say, I
definitely want to talk to them again or to the point where they
say, this is definitely not for us.
Because of course, there'll be plenty of investors whose thesis
you don't fit into. And then it's actually better to
(26:00):
find that out in the first call and save yourself the time to
speak to them again so that theycan kind of do a, a sorting for
you. And you then speak again to the
ones that are actually promisingfor you as a founder as well.
Yeah. And like the common threat that
I see here is a lot of educationwork on all fronts, right, Like
(26:23):
some education work towards consumers, a bit towards
corporates, quite a lot of towards farmers and then for
investors as well. I mean, while by now I think
regenerative agriculture is moreestablished, when you were
raising your seed especially, I guess it was really in the in
the early stages of investors truly looking into.
(26:46):
That, and I mean, Rob did reallythe all the heavy lifting when
it comes to fundraising and I think he's an incredibly good
fundraiser. Like I always told him that if
for whatever reason Clem doesn'twork out, he can be like a
fundraising guru. I think he's incredibly good at
tailoring the communication to investors and reassure like
(27:08):
giving, like having that balancebetween being reassuring that we
have the risk, that we have the risks under control, but also
creating the excitement that theopportunity is big.
Yeah, I think that balance is super hard to reach.
And I think he's really, he's incredibly good at that.
And that has nothing to do with with me.
So I definitely don't want to take any credit for that.
(27:29):
Yeah, absolutely. Is there anything else regarding
like these different stakeholdergroups that we haven't touched
upon where you're like, oh, thatwould be an interesting example
or story to feature? I think that the interesting
thing to do is sort of this selfcheck of how confident are you
(27:53):
about the way that you're communicating with the different
stakeholders. And if there's one where you're
less confident, maybe it means that you need to put more effort
into being close to that stakeholder.
And that will be a good thing for the communications, but also
for the product you build, for the value you provide.
So kind of using communication almost as as a gateway to seeing
(28:16):
whether you're close enough to astakeholder.
Yeah, I'm always thinking of exercise for people to take it
home and work on this. I'm kind of a fan of just making
a Google shade or a spreadsheet with columns that cover like the
basics of the pitch. Why are we doing this?
How does our solution look like the target problem at the top
(28:38):
and the different columns represent different stakeholder
groups writing in the different rows, the pitch in various
formats and not even like fully,just like in bullet points,
focusing on how it is different within the different columns as
a reflection exercise that can be useful because if there's so
(29:01):
many different stakeholder groups, it becomes quite
overwhelming. And if you have several people
on the team, you need some kind of way to align the team.
I don't know if you've had how you handled that, if you've did
it in informal meetings or or brought in an external expert,
(29:22):
or like how you iterated on that.
We definitely iterated on it a lot.
I think at one point we had a presentation that sort of said,
you know, these are the different stakeholders, this is
how you talk to them. Then everything migrated to a
Notion page at some point. But I think the, I think to pick
up your spreadsheet example, I think making it comparable makes
(29:46):
things really tangible. So if you say or three core
messages to farmers are 123 and are three core messages to
consumers are maybe the same ones, but in a different order,
it's 213. And the difference is that here
we use this word and here we usethat word just to make a really
tangible of what the difference is and, and why.
(30:08):
And I think is, is, is super helpful.
And then thinking about who needs to know what, because of
course not everyone in the company needs the same level of
understanding and nuance and detail when it comes to
communication. But having a a system of who
needs to know what, I think it'ssuper helpful.
Yeah, Yeah. Like at some point maybe having
(30:30):
like a general info doc that hasthese points a little bit more
easily digestible instead of a full on spreadsheet with tons of
info for sure. Because we're like now very
deeply in the stakeholder topic.Maybe we can look at the
internal team dynamics that remember in the beginning of our
(30:51):
conversation you were saying even applicants would be like I,
I find it cool, I just don't really get it.
So did you specifically also target that and try to improve
the communication and the hiringprocess or did it just naturally
happen as a by product of improving communications
overall? We had a little bit of an
(31:12):
employer branding effort for sure.
By the end, I would say that sure, like what we did was not
super easy, but if as a motivated applicant you want to
look into it, you can listen to podcasts with us.
You can look at our website, youcan look at a white paper that
we created with AB to B client. Actually, my first question to
(31:35):
most candidates would be, you know, I would introduce myself
and I would say, hey, I'm very happy to give you more context
on what we do. Maybe just tell me briefly what
you know that I know how much context to give you.
It was also a trick question because I wanted to know how
much research they had done intowhat we do.
And it was a real question because I would give them more
(31:56):
context. But the amount of applicants who
would say, oh, I don't really know anything.
Like I looked at your website, Ididn't really get it.
Like maybe start from the beginning out.
Exactly. Exactly.
So and and so I would basically see from the first question,
which was me offering them help.I would see to what extent they
(32:18):
had done their research, You know, some great applicants
would say, so this is what I understood what I to be honest,
I didn't quite understand X perfect.
Like no problem, let me explain X and also note to self that
this isn't easy to understand. Maybe we need to reframe some of
the communication on X, but there should be a degree of
(32:39):
something that you understand. And so that I think was a, it
was one way to go about it whereI was almost grateful that we
had a complicated topic because it was be a way to test what
amount of research people had put in when when they were
applying. I love that approach.
I think that's such a, this is like such a well phrased
(33:01):
question, like, hey, you know, like just tell me, tell me what
you understand about the companyand like if there's anything
that you still haven't. And then it really gives you so
much insight into how thorough they were, which probably on the
flip side is also how probably alot of corporates feel with
(33:21):
talking to start-ups where they're like, have you done your
research? Like, do you know, do you know
who you're talking about? Like, do you know who I am?
Right. Yeah, definitely.
I mean, what what comes to mind is for instance, that when it
came to farmer communication, wewould organize very regular
trips to farms and we always tried to have a product person
(33:45):
there and a marketing person there so that different teams
could kind of learn from, you know, how to build the product,
but also how to communicate around it.
That both would have really close connections to the
stakeholder in question or product people would join client
calls. It would be a 2 faced thing.
Like part of it would be doing aproduct demo and conveying the
(34:07):
product to the customer. And the other thing would be
hearing how the customer talks and what questions they ask to
feed into the product. So it was kind of this like win,
win on both sides, both when it came to farmers and B2B.
Feel free to connect with our guest or me, myself and I on
LinkedIn. You find the links in the show
notes and I always always alwayslove to hear from listeners.
(34:30):
Each episode requires a lot of work and we cut it down from
like 60-70 minutes to the best bits so you get episodes filled
with insights because I know you're busy.
It's no fluff, only signal as Mr. GPT would say if you haven't
had the chance to leave a reviewyet, it just takes 30 seconds.
It helps us a lot and it personally also means a lot to
(34:52):
me. Thank you.
My name is Marina Schmidt and this is Scaling Nerds.
Stakeholder specific communication.
I love this topic. OK.
OK. OK.
Before you write me off as a weirdo, if your startup needs to
convince several different stakeholders, for example,
investors versus corporates versus consumers, just to name a
few, this episode is for you. The way that you talk to
(00:21):
different stakeholders and also the way that you explain things
to different stakeholders, I think it can get very
undervalued and it plays a crucial part in in even getting
people to understand what you do, which of course, if you sell
cookies, it's quite easy. But if you sell a complex
solution to a complex problem, then marketing plays a huge
role. This is Nina Mannheimer,
(00:44):
previously the Co founder and CPO of the regenerative
agriculture startup Klim. Klim was initially founded 2019
in my Birftown Berlin by my friend and former colleague.
Robert Gerlach. And back in those days,
regenerative agriculture, a specific type of more
sustainable farming, was pretty unknown.
(01:05):
And This is why I. Find this case to be
specifically interesting becauseit's a complex topic and the
team had to figure out how to explain it to different groups
with very different interests and levels of knowledge, if they
had any. Not easy.
Despite this, they raised an impressive 22,000,000 Series A
in 2024, which was a big race inthis niche.
(01:28):
Fortunately for us, this isn't just relevant for this niche.
The takeaways in this episode are relevant across all
industries. I really enjoyed this
conversation with Nina and I hope you do too.
You're listening to Scaling Nerds, the one and only podcast
covering all things communications for science and
tech founders. My name is Marina Schmidt.
(01:51):
Let's jump right in. So to prepare our field for
harvest, a little bit of background info.
Most types of agriculture erode our soils.
Regenerative agriculture actually involves farming
practices that improve soil structure, increase
biodiversity, and store carbon. Our soils can actually be
(02:13):
incredible carbon sinks. By helping farmers use
regenerative agriculture, Klim would be able to put CO2 back
into the soil. So the business model for a long
time was very similar to how a carbon credit works.
So we would get paid per ton of credit that farmers save or
reduce on their farm by B2B customers.
(02:37):
What that means is that we need to appeal to the farmers that
have to do the actual change. We need to appeal to the food
companies that will drive that change in their supply chain.
And then finally, you also need to communicate with consumers,
with the press, the media, investors and all these other
(02:59):
stakeholders that play a huge role because consumer pressure
is a huge driver in sustainability within food.
And a lot of food companies carea lot about how they convey
something to their consumers. And so you really have to
balance all of that and keep thesame core messages while talking
(03:22):
to people who have completely different backgrounds and levels
of understanding. It's interesting because, right,
So if we look at the main categories that you have the
farmers, you have the corporates, right?
I just want to understand how the consumers were relevant to
you. So this was, I mean, this was a
bit of a journey for us, I wouldsay where to be very honest with
(03:45):
you, when we started out, we hadsome hypotheses, but we weren't
sure what exactly the role of consumers would be.
We wouldn't sell to consumers. We don't have AB2C facing
product. So we knew that they're not
going to be our direct customers, but we knew that food
companies cared about them. We took a bet on the fact that
(04:06):
consumers would matter. And so we very early actually,
even when we were a tiny company, one of the first things
we invested into was a consumer facing Instagram account where
we would post about the benefitsof regenerative agriculture.
And the intention there was thatwhen we speak to food companies,
we have some credibility around.We are experts in communicating
(04:30):
around regenerative agriculture.Look, we have this Instagram
account that has X thousand followers where consumers get a
sense of regenerative agriculture.
And these big food companies would be reassured that we would
help them also communicate successfully on this topic
because that is something that they cared about and something
(04:52):
that they had no expertise in. And there was also, of course,
you know, there's always a fear of greenwashing.
There's a fear of doing something that's good, but then
talking about it in a way that maybe is too much and then you
get a backlash because people say you're greenwashing, but
actually you have done somethinggood.
You just didn't communicate about it in sort of the right
(05:15):
tone and the right amount. So it was very reassuring for
food companies that we had some of that access.
And actually, you know, Nestle is by far Clem's biggest client.
They found us through our Instagram.
Interesting. OK, so you know, so we're both
German, right? And there's the saying in German
(05:35):
Uber Bandersbian, which comes from playing pool.
You sometimes hit the ball not directly to where you want it to
go. It sometimes doesn't work even.
You need to use the sides of thepool table to be able to
actually have a good shot. And I really love the saying
because I think when we talk about what kind of stakeholders
(05:58):
does a startup have, it's very easy to only think about the
direct shots and overlook the indirect shots and how like the
consumers end up helping you with the corporate deals, which
indeed will also probably help you with getting farmers in the
(06:19):
1st place, right? Then it just creates an
important cycle to make the entire business work.
Absolutely. And I think, I mean, one of the
things that I think I get asked the most when I mentor founders
that are just starting out and that want to sell to big
corporates, they say, where do Istart?
I'm this tiny company and I'm trying to sell to this giant and
(06:40):
I have no idea how to reach themand how to get there.
And it's true. It's incredibly intimidating and
it's incredibly hard. And I think you need to think
about what is our advantage, What can we be better at as a
young small company compared to these giants?
And the consumer access is one of those things where you don't
(07:03):
need a huge budget to have and you also don't need a huge
following. Like you don't need millions of
Instagram followers. All you need is sort of some
credibility in the space where, you know, in our case we had one
intern who is actually still at Clem who leaves our marketing
team now. We had one person working on
this and building this credibility and just creating
(07:25):
high quality content. And we could use that as a point
to build credibility. When you don't yet have a lot of
paying customers, you don't havea lot of business traction yet.
This is something that you can build up quite fast.
So I think especially as a founder who's in a disadvantaged
position because you're small, Ithink it's really important to
(07:46):
look around at the entire ecosystem and think about where
can you build yourself some credibility and some advantage
even with that sort of weak position that you have from
being small and young and. I would love to know how many
Instagram followers were we talking about if you can like
roughly remember when Nestle reached out to you?
(08:08):
Honestly, I I I'm not entirely sure.
My guess would maybe be 8000. Wow, that's that's.
Really not a lot. Wow, that's.
It's not a lot, It's not a lot, but it's, it's you, you need to,
I think you need to consider thefact that we were working on
what at the time was really a niche topic.
Yeah. And so it's not like we were
competing with gigantic Instagram accounts communicating
(08:32):
on this topic because those simply didn't exist.
Yeah. So all they wanted was this
feeling of, oh, there's a company successfully
communicating on this that is gaining some small traction.
And it I think it was also less about the amount of followers
and more about them seeing the content and seeing, oh, wow,
this is relevant. Oh, they actually explained this
(08:53):
in a way that my daughter would understand this.
Yeah, fascinating. Fascinating.
So if we look. At like the.
Three major stakeholder groups. Which one was the toughest nut
to crack? I would think about this in
terms of impact, right, I would say.
So consumers, I would say we're not that tough for us because we
weren't selling to them. So even if most consumers don't
(09:15):
understand what we do, we can live with that.
We're less reliant on them. Corporates are hard, but they
can also have some in house expertise and they usually speak
to a lot of different people because they have different
companies trying to sell to them.
They might be in some different,you know, lobbying groups or
(09:37):
they sort of have different access points.
So you're rarely doing the work just yourself.
You kind of have some support from other types of
organizations doing the work with you.
And I would say that with corporates, it can become a huge
advantage when it becomes one ofyour selling points that you can
explain things to them that theydon't understand.
(09:58):
So there I think you can really turn this challenge into an
opportunity by being very collaborative.
And this I think that, you know,our sales team can talk a lot
more about than I can. And that is really one big
achievement, I think of what they managed to do in sales of
having this collaborative approach.
Farmers are in some way I think the hardest because their main
(10:23):
focus is to do their farming work.
Their 24 hours are already used up by doing their day-to-day
work. And so any time and attention
you take from them, you are taking away from something else.
And they, they're already so focused on solving their
day-to-day problems getting through.
(10:44):
I think conditions for farmers are really hard.
They have a lot on their plate. They have a lot of challenges.
And despite what some people say, I don't think they get that
much support, especially beyond the financial support that they
that they receive. So there you need to really in a
way compete for their attention and convince them that it's
worth giving you their time. And that, I think, is a
(11:07):
challenge in itself. If you're someone who is done
things in a certain way for decades, and you were taught
that this is the right way to dothings, and then all of a sudden
you're asked to rethink that andyou're asked to potentially
change your mind and do things differently, it means that you
have to reflect on everything you've done for the last
decades. And I think this is just a very
(11:29):
that's a very human problem. We see this a lot with older
people in general, right? It's gets harder and harder to
change your mind. Yeah.
I guess few startups listening in are going to have
specifically farmers as a targetgroup.
But having people who have been in their position for a long
time, who are extremely busy, have their routines, have their
ideas, have their objections to new stuff.
(11:53):
That's going to be an archetype that a lot of startups will be
facing either outside of corporates or within like
specific stakeholder groups in corporates.
Do you have any examples of how you reiterated and improved on
your communication? Did you end up doing some kind
of workshops with them or did you create like a communication
(12:15):
strategy to begin with? How did you start?
I can maybe start with a mistakethat we made, and I think this
is probably a very typical mistake that companies in the
climate space make, is that our motivation to start this company
was to have an impact on climateand to help farmers while doing
so. And we made the mistake of
(12:38):
making that too central initially also in our customer
communication. And what we found is that
farmers may or may not have a focus on climate.
They certainly have a focus on farming.
We knew that climate should not be the key sort of communication
piece for farmers and that we really need to focus on what are
(13:00):
their goals and you know, what do the, how do they think about
the, the financial health of their, of their farms?
That is that that might really be endangered.
So we knew this, but yet in our communication, because we wanted
to communicate in a way that catered to the interests of so
many different stakeholders, we still put some climate
(13:22):
communication to central and farmers would get understandably
upset and they would kind of sayI'm working super hard to
produce. The.
Food that the country needs. And I feel like you're telling
me that I'm not doing enough of.I'm not a climate activist.
And it was incredibly hard to really focus on what their goals
(13:45):
are and that are so, you know, so understandable from their
perspective as well as focus on,on, on everyone else.
And I think the mistake was to try to kind of make everyone
feel OK about the way that we were communicating, like not
upset anyone too much, instead of having communication that was
really responding to their problems and their needs.
(14:08):
And be OK with using a differentlanguage when we speak to
corporate and when we speak to farmers because the intention is
all the same and the product is all the same.
And it wasn't fake or we weren'tlying.
It was just sort of really stakeholder adapted
communication. Yeah, yeah.
And this is something that I seeit's so often with impact driven
(14:29):
startups and I even face that myself, right?
Like the hardest comms project is 1's own comms project, The
thing one is closest to because the hardest involved, there's a
mission and there's so a desire to share the mission.
And we hear it everywhere. Like talk about why you're doing
this. Start with the why hashtag Simon
Sinek, right? I think it's specifically
(14:50):
challenging for impact startups because their why.
Is. More removed from the customer
than for most other companies. So even in the example of Apple,
when Apple talks about supporting creatives, that's
their why but. It's directly.
(15:13):
Relevant to the customer, every creative is going to be like,
yeah, I want that. Whereas most impact stars start
up, say we want to reduce CO2 emissions, we want to reduce
animal meat consumption. But their target customers are
like, well, I actually we just want to reduce costs and we want
to have a more resilient business model.
(15:35):
And both are true, both are goodin a way.
We need both of those. I think also as a climate
founder or sustainability founder, you're like, everyone
should care about these things. These are great things to care
about. And you have this risk of
becoming a bit too treaty. And what's important is
communicating more about the alignment between those greater
(15:58):
idealistic goals and the more concrete everyday goals, right?
A company that is bankrupt cannot do anything for the
climate anymore. That is also true.
So I think your job as the sustainability startup is more
to help companies create that link between how does investing
into soil or climate or whateverit is, how does that benefit me
(16:20):
as a company in the short, mid or long term?
And it should be more about thattranslation and alignment of
goals rather than, you know, preaching about the amazing
benefits of the climate protection.
Yeah. How did it look like in
practice? So once you made the this
mistake, you had this aha moment.
OK Damn we need to change something.
(16:43):
How did you actually start implementing more stakeholder
specific communication across the startup?
So there was certainly an element of Co creation with
customers on both the farmer andB2B side.
There was also an internal shiftwhere we would get more experts
internally, people with farming backgrounds who naturally just
(17:06):
knew how to speak to farmers better than we did as founders.
And then there there was also toa degree of trial and error,
trying things and getting feedback and seeing what worked.
And then you have those moments where you say something and a
farmer goes, yeah, exactly. And you're like, OK, you're kind
of on the right track. They feel understood, and then
(17:27):
you do more of that. So I think ultimately
communication is a lot of trial and error and it's sort of
understanding what hits the right tone at the right time.
And that's also something that Ithink is really important to
keep in mind that this is dynamic because the tone may
change. You know, for instance, in in
(17:48):
Germany, there you have big farmer protests at one point as
a reaction to some, you know, the some government action.
And that also changes the tone within the agricultural
community. And it's important that you
respond to that. It doesn't mean that you
necessarily react to every political thing happening, but
that you're aware of tone shiftsand that you're aware of what
(18:10):
that means for you. So it is a lot of experimenting.
It's a lot of staying close to the ground internally.
I think it's a lot of communication also between
marketing and in our case with product, because we have a
farmer facing digital platform. So we had a lot of
experimentation, for instance, when it came to copywriting.
(18:30):
Should it be a product person writing copy and then an
agricultural expert checking it?Should it be an agricultural
person writing content with a brief from a product person?
Should marketing do it? It also didn't help that it's a
very unpopular task to write product copies, so no one really
wanted to do it. But but those those things also
(18:53):
matter in terms of consistent language and in terms of really
stakeholder oriented language. Yeah.
And I remember, I mean I've seendifferent versions of your
website and the renaming and rebranding over the years.
And as far as I remember, you'vealso that some point introduced
(19:14):
stakeholder specific subsides. I assume that this is a way to
kind of be able to get that specificity in a place, a
website that is otherwise reallylike generic.
And that is the a classic example of where it would become
everything and nothing at the same time, where you, like, get
(19:36):
people on there and everybody's like, yeah, I kind of half
speaks to me, right. So how did you get to that
point? Yeah, I think that's sort of
the, the, the, the classic, sortof like if you are this, then
the product means that for you. And I think that is incredibly
important to make it tangible. It's I think it's like you say,
(19:58):
if you don't do that, everythingsounds kind of high level.
There's a lot of buzzwords. And I mean, I had, you know,
people come up to me all the time and say, I looked at your
website and I don't really get it.
Even my candidates, I would interview people for roles.
And they would say, so I tried to figure out what you really
do, but I don't really get it. And that was good and bad.
(20:19):
Like, of course it's bad if theydon't understand, but it's also
not necessarily bad if they lookat if you're a food company,
then do this because if if they're not a food company, they
don't need to understand the content for the food companies.
So I think that's also importantto not to not be afraid of not
being understood when it's not the right audience that needs to
(20:39):
understand. There's also I think a tactical
element to these landing pages and sub pages around SEO and
kind of appearing in the right searches for the right people.
Because often when you measure things like search appearances,
if you're not, if you're coming up in searches, but they're not
the right ones, then you're justthrowing money out of the
(21:00):
window, right? And so I, I think that was
really, really important. And I think also for us, a
journey of discovery, of really understanding what the different
stakeholders care about, what language they use, what
resonates with them to even be able to put that on a website.
(21:20):
And that was a journey because also food supply chains are not
very transparent. It's not like you build ABDC
product, you can talk to 10 people and figure out exactly
what words they use. It took us a really long time to
really understand that world from the inside out.
And even that is probably a taskthat's never done.
But I I think the take away fromthat is to use communication
(21:44):
also also as a way to self checkyourself to be like, do I
understand enough about my customer to be able to really
tailor some content to them? And if the answer is no, what
can I do to understand them better and understand what
topics resonate, what words resonate, what they gravitate
towards, and just put in the necessary work to communicate
(22:06):
well with them? Yeah, I like what you mentioned
with this kind of experimental approach because I think that's
really important and helpful. Most founders are aware of like
customer research and user interviews, that that framework
can be applied to communicationsand really checking whether
(22:30):
things resonate and trialing because it's very hard to pull
it out of one's head without being in constant communication
with the target group. It's like a solution looking for
a problem, a comms piece lookingfor somebody to understand it,
you know? Of course, the easiest thing to
(22:51):
do is when you build something for someone who's like you, or
when you build a communication piece for someone who's like
you, right? So for me, if I build something
for a starter founder in Berlin and their 30s, I don't need to
do a lot of customer discovery because that's me and we're
probably all a little bit similar.
(23:11):
But if you go and build, no matter whether it's a product or
a communication piece, for someone who's just quite far
removed from yourself, it's a really bad idea to trust your
instincts. Yeah, when you try to
communicate with them, I think. Yeah, absolutely.
Well, actually we do have. Like 1/4.
(23:31):
Stakeholder group that we haven't touched upon at all,
which would be the investors. So how how did you then adjust
your communication for fundraising?
The one thing that I found really hard with investors is
that you have very little time with them, usually when you
first meet them. So usually your first call is 30
(23:52):
minutes and those 30 minutes youneed to solve the problem that
you're solving and really make them feel that it's a problem
worth solving from both an impact and a financial
perspective. Because sometimes you can save
time. If they're like, oh, we've
already invested in a company inthe space, then it's clear that
(24:12):
they that they understand. Or if they say, oh, we just
looked into this, like you can kind of get a sense of how much
they already know and see what you can skip.
And then I think the most usefuladvice I got was someone who
said investors don't care about whether you give them all the
(24:34):
information they need. Your goal is just for them to
want to speak to you again. But just to think about how do I
prioritize what I say to make sure that there's a level of
reassurance. I think, you know, I know that
investors, of course, they, theyabsorb a certain amount of risk,
but still I find that they're also risk averse and they, they
(24:56):
want to be reassured that you'reon the right path.
So I would think about like, what is the right level of
reassuring them that this is worthwhile and really
interesting. And to kind of, you know, that
some of the risk is managed while making them really excited
about the scale and the opportunity and answering
certain key things, but not answering everything.
(25:18):
Where, like, the desired outcomeis that they come out and say,
oh, wow, like, really cool team.They're really, you know, really
motivated, smart founders that are working on something that
seems massive if it can be solved properly.
And it sounds like they're probably on the right track to
solving it. They don't even fully have to
(25:40):
understand how everything works.They don't have to understand
the competitive landscape yet oranything like that.
You just need to get them to that point where they say, I
definitely want to talk to them again or to the point where they
say, this is definitely not for us.
Because of course, there'll be plenty of investors whose thesis
you don't fit into. And then it's actually better to
(26:00):
find that out in the first call and save yourself the time to
speak to them again so that theycan kind of do a, a sorting for
you. And you then speak again to the
ones that are actually promisingfor you as a founder as well.
Yeah. And like the common threat that
I see here is a lot of educationwork on all fronts, right, Like
(26:23):
some education work towards consumers, a bit towards
corporates, quite a lot of towards farmers and then for
investors as well. I mean, while by now I think
regenerative agriculture is moreestablished, when you were
raising your seed especially, I guess it was really in the in
the early stages of investors truly looking into.
(26:46):
That, and I mean, Rob did reallythe all the heavy lifting when
it comes to fundraising and I think he's an incredibly good
fundraiser. Like I always told him that if
for whatever reason Clem doesn'twork out, he can be like a
fundraising guru. I think he's incredibly good at
tailoring the communication to investors and reassure like
(27:08):
giving, like having that balancebetween being reassuring that we
have the risk, that we have the risks under control, but also
creating the excitement that theopportunity is big.
Yeah, I think that balance is super hard to reach.
And I think he's really, he's incredibly good at that.
And that has nothing to do with with me.
So I definitely don't want to take any credit for that.
(27:29):
Yeah, absolutely. Is there anything else regarding
like these different stakeholdergroups that we haven't touched
upon where you're like, oh, thatwould be an interesting example
or story to feature? I think that the interesting
thing to do is sort of this selfcheck of how confident are you
(27:53):
about the way that you're communicating with the different
stakeholders. And if there's one where you're
less confident, maybe it means that you need to put more effort
into being close to that stakeholder.
And that will be a good thing for the communications, but also
for the product you build, for the value you provide.
So kind of using communication almost as as a gateway to seeing
(28:16):
whether you're close enough to astakeholder.
Yeah, I'm always thinking of exercise for people to take it
home and work on this. I'm kind of a fan of just making
a Google shade or a spreadsheet with columns that cover like the
basics of the pitch. Why are we doing this?
How does our solution look like the target problem at the top
(28:38):
and the different columns represent different stakeholder
groups writing in the different rows, the pitch in various
formats and not even like fully,just like in bullet points,
focusing on how it is different within the different columns as
a reflection exercise that can be useful because if there's so
(29:01):
many different stakeholder groups, it becomes quite
overwhelming. And if you have several people
on the team, you need some kind of way to align the team.
I don't know if you've had how you handled that, if you've did
it in informal meetings or or brought in an external expert,
(29:22):
or like how you iterated on that.
We definitely iterated on it a lot.
I think at one point we had a presentation that sort of said,
you know, these are the different stakeholders, this is
how you talk to them. Then everything migrated to a
Notion page at some point. But I think the, I think to pick
up your spreadsheet example, I think making it comparable makes
(29:46):
things really tangible. So if you say or three core
messages to farmers are 123 and are three core messages to
consumers are maybe the same ones, but in a different order,
it's 213. And the difference is that here
we use this word and here we usethat word just to make a really
tangible of what the difference is and, and why.
(30:08):
And I think is, is, is super helpful.
And then thinking about who needs to know what, because of
course not everyone in the company needs the same level of
understanding and nuance and detail when it comes to
communication. But having a a system of who
needs to know what, I think it'ssuper helpful.
Yeah, Yeah. Like at some point maybe having
(30:30):
like a general info doc that hasthese points a little bit more
easily digestible instead of a full on spreadsheet with tons of
info for sure. Because we're like now very
deeply in the stakeholder topic.Maybe we can look at the
internal team dynamics that remember in the beginning of our
(30:51):
conversation you were saying even applicants would be like I,
I find it cool, I just don't really get it.
So did you specifically also target that and try to improve
the communication and the hiringprocess or did it just naturally
happen as a by product of improving communications
overall? We had a little bit of an
(31:12):
employer branding effort for sure.
By the end, I would say that sure, like what we did was not
super easy, but if as a motivated applicant you want to
look into it, you can listen to podcasts with us.
You can look at our website, youcan look at a white paper that
we created with AB to B client. Actually, my first question to
(31:35):
most candidates would be, you know, I would introduce myself
and I would say, hey, I'm very happy to give you more context
on what we do. Maybe just tell me briefly what
you know that I know how much context to give you.
It was also a trick question because I wanted to know how
much research they had done intowhat we do.
And it was a real question because I would give them more
(31:56):
context. But the amount of applicants who
would say, oh, I don't really know anything.
Like I looked at your website, Ididn't really get it.
Like maybe start from the beginning out.
Exactly. Exactly.
So and and so I would basically see from the first question,
which was me offering them help.I would see to what extent they
(32:18):
had done their research, You know, some great applicants
would say, so this is what I understood what I to be honest,
I didn't quite understand X perfect.
Like no problem, let me explain X and also note to self that
this isn't easy to understand. Maybe we need to reframe some of
the communication on X, but there should be a degree of
(32:39):
something that you understand. And so that I think was a, it
was one way to go about it whereI was almost grateful that we
had a complicated topic because it was be a way to test what
amount of research people had put in when when they were
applying. I love that approach.
I think that's such a, this is like such a well phrased
(33:01):
question, like, hey, you know, like just tell me, tell me what
you understand about the companyand like if there's anything
that you still haven't. And then it really gives you so
much insight into how thorough they were, which probably on the
flip side is also how probably alot of corporates feel with
(33:21):
talking to start-ups where they're like, have you done your
research? Like, do you know, do you know
who you're talking about? Like, do you know who I am?
Right. Yeah, definitely.
I mean, what what comes to mind is for instance, that when it
came to farmer communication, wewould organize very regular
trips to farms and we always tried to have a product person
(33:45):
there and a marketing person there so that different teams
could kind of learn from, you know, how to build the product,
but also how to communicate around it.
That both would have really close connections to the
stakeholder in question or product people would join client
calls. It would be a 2 faced thing.
Like part of it would be doing aproduct demo and conveying the
(34:07):
product to the customer. And the other thing would be
hearing how the customer talks and what questions they ask to
feed into the product. So it was kind of this like win,
win on both sides, both when it came to farmers and B2B.
Feel free to connect with our guest or me, myself and I on
LinkedIn. You find the links in the show
notes and I always always alwayslove to hear from listeners.
(34:30):
Each episode requires a lot of work and we cut it down from
like 60-70 minutes to the best bits so you get episodes filled
with insights because I know you're busy.
It's no fluff, only signal as Mr. GPT would say if you haven't
had the chance to leave a reviewyet, it just takes 30 seconds.
It helps us a lot and it personally also means a lot to
(34:52):
me. Thank you.
My name is Marina Schmidt and this is Scaling Nerds.
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