Movement or progress? 5 marketing lessons from Fundment’s CMO

Elly sat down with us for 45 minutes to talk about those pressures, what actually makes for good marketing strategy, what she really needs from an agency partner. The full recording’s linked further down, but if you’re short of time, here’s five things from that conversation worth taking back to your own team:

1. A partnership between marketing and sales fuels growth

For Elly, most marketing teams aren’t making decisions, they’re defaulting. “What most of us do, because we’re only human, is default rather than really actively decide,” she says. Her starting point is growth: “what are those behaviours that we’re really trying to change? What’s the dial that we’re really trying to shift?” As she puts it, “my job is to help the company grow and really find those opportunities.”

That means marketing and aligning from day one. “It’s not marketing stops and ends here and then it’s over to sales,” she says. “It’s really how we’re making sure that we’re embedding that long tail together.” Data is what makes that possible, she calls it “the great equaliser,” a shared, objective measure both teams can work from instead of defending separate numbers. Elly and Fundment’s head of distribution built a joint commercial dashboard from day one, working “in lock step.”

The gap test: Ask your sales lead what one number they’d want on a dashboard you both looked at every week. If you don’t know the answer, that’s the gap.

2. Is AI part of your operating model, or your annual plan?

Everyone can produce content now. On the one hand that creates huge opportunity but quality is everything. “Possibility without prioritisation is just absolute chaos.” For Elly, staying ahead of that isn’t a one-off decision, it’s an operating model, not something you set once a year and revisit at the next planning cycle. “As a CMO or a senior leader, you need to be at the bleeding edge of how AI in marketing is evolving. That doesn’t mean being an expert in everything – you don’t have to be a technologist, but you’ve really got to take responsibility for testing and learning week in, week out, bringing in the right capabilities, investing internally where it makes sense and understanding that AI landscape.” That means staying close to how the tools are changing, personally, not through someone else’s summary of it.

Get a second opinion: Before your next AI-assisted piece of content goes out, get an expert that knows your business really well to read it. Is it authentic, is it distinctive, is it adding value and is it going to help (not hinder) your brand and broader business goals?

3. Brand value and consistency must permeate the culture and be pervasive throughout the firm

In the same quickfire round, we asked Elly which brand she quietly admires. Her answer: M&S. “They had a new CEO come in… and really think about how do we keep the magic but modernise the rest.”

She points to the new M&S superstore near her office as a live example: “the sonic branding, the way every single member of staff offers that consistent personal store experience,” she says. “It’s just feeling unmistakably M&S.”

She ties that directly to leadership, not just marketing: “it’s remarkable what aligning that leadership team and that vision has done.” The number she reaches for isn’t a brand-awareness stat, it’s the share price, up roughly three times in a few years.

Check yourself: Pick three touchpoints, would a customer know they’re the same brand without being told?

4. Great technology gets you noticed, but humans are what earn trust

Technology working seamlessly isn’t optional anymore, it’s table stakes stuff. Where brands stand out is in the experience built around it, especially the moments most brands get wrong: never-ending call queues, answering machines, four attempts with a chatbot before you stop trying… these moments erode customer experience and brand equity.

Achieving the right combination of a slick platform experience (through Fundment’s own proprietary technology), and human support is not left to chance at Fundment. The 35-second standard in which calls to support will be picked up by a human is a deliberate one, built specifically around the moments that matter most – that could be a pension transfer running late, market volatility hitting an adviser’s client. Elly’s team decided in advance which moments deserved a guaranteed human response, then built the standard to match. The phone gets picked up within 35 seconds, 99% of the time. The other 1%? A voicemail and a callback within the hour.

The response test: Pick your customer’s worst-case moment and time how long it currently takes a real person to respond and solve their issue. That’s your actual differentiator, not your interface.

5. Are your agency partners challenging you?

For Elly, an agency’s real job isn’t speed or scale, it’s perspective. “The role of the agency is that window on the world,” she says. Working across other clients and sectors means an agency can come in with new ideas a single in-house team wouldn’t reach on its own, ideas that help a brand stand out and do something its competitors aren’t.

The best ones challenge the brief before it’s even locked, something she’s experienced firsthand working with Ride Shotgun: “almost before we even get to discuss the brief in full, you’ve challenged it.”

Put it to the test: Ask yourself when your agency last challenged your brief. Are they broadening your view, making you thinking differently and encouraging you to be bolder? If the answer’s “never,” it’s worth a conversation.

That’s the five minute take

Taken together, they’re really about one thing: marketing that’s actually answerable to something, growth, judgement, trust, a brief worth defending. That’s the difference between movement and progress, and the question worth asking yourself.

If you’ve got the time, the rest of the conversation is well worth it too. Grab a coffee and give it a watch.