Clover
Clover and EM Marketing: An Effective, Evolving Relationship
5
Years
of EM helping Clover
17
EM consultants
who have helped Clover
26
Projects
with Clover
93%
Rate of Extensions
for consultant work at Clover
9
Full-Time Employees
placed by EM including consultants that converted to full time
Background
Clover sought EM Marketing’s services in January 2019 as the company looked to reposition itself from a point-of-service hardware provider to an open merchant platform.
Clover was an innovative tech company embedded in a large financial institution, parent company Fiserv. Clover had become the largest and fastest-growing payment processor for SMBs — processing around $800 billion in sales a year — and as such Fiserv’s leadership saw it as a key growth engine.
Facing high expectations for the company’s growth, Clover’s leadership saw the need for a marketing push to pivot its market position as a way to avoid a race to the bottom among POS hardware providers.
Clover’s Challenge
Clover’s pivot would take a lot of marketing brainpower and legwork, but at the time that the company made this decision, Clover had no marketing team at all (due to being acquired by First Data years earlier). The company brought on a new CMO, who looked to tap talent internally but soon realized he needed outside help to move quickly.
Clover’s Solution
The most effective way to rapidly ramp up marketing capacity was to bring on some seasoned consultants with industry knowledge who could hit the ground running. Clover found these at EM Marketing, starting with a team of six consultants — all but one with fintech experience, several with SMB marketing experience, and one with restaurant experience, a key market for Clover.
EM’s Challenge
Considering that there had not been a Clover marketing team before, an essential task for the EM consultants was to build trust within the company. This required helping the organization see value in the consultants’ marketing ideas and skills, their understanding of the market and Clover’s merchants, and their ability to drive the transition to become a platform company. They also need to play the role of ambassadors between Clover and Fiserv, to make sure each sees the value in effective marketing.
“I got way more from your consultants than I expected. You know, you have a vision and plan for what you think the consultant can do for you. But that’s not what really happens. They come in and see what you need and who you are, and they see ways to add value.”
The Partnership’s Success
EM’s consultants provided top-notch service to enact the market repositioning, including doing product marketing for the launch of Clover Food & Beverage, Clover Retail, and Clover Service. Over the next several years, 17 consultants worked on 26 distinct projects to assist with product marketing, partner marketing, copywriting, digital production, email marketing, marketing acquisition campaigns, and other needs. In an indication of how well-received EM’s services have been at Clover, 93% of consultant engagements have been extended, and almost a quarter of them have converted into full-time positions.
