Introduction and Jenn Reichenbacher’s path into payments marketing

Alex Gluz: We have a great guest for you today. Hey, Jenn, nice to have you here.

Jenn Reichenbacher: Alex, thanks so much for having me. Looking forward to the conversation today.

Alex Gluz: Likewise. Can you do a brief intro of who you are and what you do?

Jenn Reichenbacher: Sure. My name is Jenn Reichenbacher. I am the Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer with Stax Payments. Been here for about two and a half years.

My marketing experience dates back a little over 30 years, and I’ve been in the fintech SaaS payments space for about 15 years.

Alex Gluz: Nice. How did you get started, Jenn? What did you go to school for?

Jenn Reichenbacher: I actually went to school for finance. I come from a financial background. My father was in finance, my mother was in the medical world, and I used to go to work with him and pretend that I was an accountant.

Once I got into accounting in school, I quickly realized that probably wasn’t for me. No offense to anyone that is in that profession. It’s a great area, but just wasn’t really pulling at my strings.

I found my way into marketing organically. Took some classes around marketing and advertising in school, but came out, actually did a quick stint in retail management, and then found my way into a really interesting organization that sadly is no longer around that was providing corporate relocation services.

Around the advent of the internet, ’95-ish, our CEO was very forward-thinking and realized that he needed a marketing team. He just pulled a bunch of us together in a room and said, “Hey, you guys are going to do marketing. We’ve got a new thing called the internet. We need a website, and the three of you figure out what you want to do and how you’re going to do it.”

It was a great opportunity. It was a lot of fun. It was very grassroots. It really struck a chord with me. I love the variety, the mix, the opportunity to do so many different things, and the ability that marketing translates over a lot of different industries.

Really every industry, on the B2B side and the B2C side, is powered by some form of marketing.

I spent the earlier part of my career across a variety of different industries: consumer packaged goods, real estate and corporate relocation. As I mentioned, more on the B2B side, although in the consumer packaged goods side, I did launch a consumer product.

Then in 2012, a former coworker of mine, actually from the real estate side of the world, reached out and said, “Hey, my boss is looking for a marketing director, and it’s in the payments space.”

I was like, “Payments?”

She said to me, “Don’t look at the website. The company’s really transforming.” It was a company called Merchant Warehouse at the time.

She said, “You’ve got to come in here and talk to them. I think you’d really love it.”

Honestly, I went in, I was encapsulated by the vision that the CEO had at the time, and I was hooked. I haven’t looked back since.

Alex Gluz: You said so much great stuff, Jenn, but the first thing you said blew my mind, and I’m not that young. You said, “Internet is just starting.” Hopefully no kids are watching this because it’s just going to break them.

Jenn Reichenbacher: It comes up with my team a lot, Alex, where I’ll be like, “Well, there was a day before digital marketing.” I know it’s shocking for people that there was a life before the internet, but there was a life before the internet.

How the internet and AI have changed marketing

Alex Gluz: You’ve been in marketing for over 30 years, Jenn, and you saw the internet blow everything up. Now AI is doing it again. What’s the same about these two moments, and what feels completely different?

Jenn Reichenbacher: It’s interesting. I just mentioned ’95 was when the internet started and people started to have websites, but they were brochureware.

It wasn’t really until I got to Merchant Warehouse in around 2011, 2012, that marketing started to move and acquisition started to move online. Historically, earlier in my career, I was measured on CPM.

It was very hard to do attribution. The shift in the digital marketing space happened really fast, especially in payments. The payments industry was shifting from a traditional ISO space where you were selling, you were leasing terminals door to door. The ISO community is still very robust in payments, but it shifted and evolved quite a bit.

Marketing went from zero to 100 in a very short period of time of saying, “Hey, people want to shop online. They want to have this choice, especially small businesses. Let’s give them optionality and give them choice to be able to buy this online. We can do the setup virtually and get people enabled for commerce pretty quickly.”

What I liked about it, and what was hard to catch up with, was that quickly you start to get your data and formulate what your funnel looks like. But it’s highly measurable, obviously.

The market for SMBs, as I mentioned, moved really fast. They really liked the optionality of being able to shop online. It was interesting. Early in my career, I was so surprised.

I think there’s over 55 million small businesses in the US. What’s interesting about new starts or new ownership is payments is often the last thing that people think of. They’re working on their inventory and their plan and getting their staffing and making sure they have payroll, and then it’s like, “Oh, how am I going to actually accept payments?”

A lot of those decisions were coming in last minute, and people were saying, “Hey, I need to take payments. I’m opening my store.”

We realized that we were also helping people meet them where they were on their journey in terms of shopping, and then really just gaining efficiency through increased investments from a marketing funnel.

It was a little bit more of a green pasture then. There wasn’t as much online competition, and there weren’t as many places to actually place your advertisements. There were a few affiliates, and then obviously Google, Bing at the time.

It was pretty measurable. Your optionality was you typically were in maybe one or two, maybe three affiliates, and then you were doing your own direct SEM as well. That’s drastically changed.

AI, from a demand generation perspective, I never thought I would live through another fast-moving disruptor, but it’s here. It’s happening.

What’s still a little bit unknown is how monetization will work. We know it’s going to happen, and what the consumer response will be. Will our funnels really shift to half the leads and double the output, which is some of the statistics I’m seeing on early-stage ChatGPT? How long will that be unique and differentiated? How will that iterate over time?

It’s a monumental shift, especially around performance marketing. Obviously, it’s changing the way we work, but save that for a different time. It’s a similar advent to when we went to digital search or performance, but now it’s AI.

With LLM, we’ve got to look at different metrics in terms of how you’re found.

Alex Gluz: What I find interesting is every time there’s a major disruption, everybody panics about the technology and forgets about the fundamentals.

When the internet hit, people thought the rules of marketing changed. They didn’t. You still need to know your audience, have a clear message and be where your buyers are.

AI is the same. The technology is different, but the core question doesn’t change: are you reaching the right people with the right message at the right time?

If you are, AI just makes you faster and more precise. If you’re not, AI just helps you do the wrong things at scale.

The difference this time is that AI doesn’t just change the channel. It changes the speed of everything, and also perhaps the quality and overall volume. Content creation, data analysis, optimization, it compresses timelines.

The gap between companies that get it and companies that don’t is going to widen much faster than it did with the internet. It’s much faster movement.

Jenn Reichenbacher: It’s also just a more competitive landscape. There are more competitors in this space today going after small business.

You’ve also got what’s happened on the SaaS side of the world in the last 15 years. Technology has been incredible. There’s exponentially more vertically tailored SaaS available for SMBs.

When I was coming into the payments space, it was still very much an on-prem POS environment, point-of-sale environment. There was hardly any online SaaS available, if any, and they weren’t being highly utilized. Those that were out there, people weren’t measuring the success of those businesses.

The superpower from a SaaS perspective is SaaS plus payments.

It’s really interesting to think about the SaaS community now. From a small business perspective, call it half to two-thirds are starting with some type of business management solution. For pure payments plays, that becomes an even more competitive market.

You’ve got to be looking at your payments acceptance and saying, “Hey, from a product scope, I’ve got to look different, feel different.” We’re using AI in our products to deliver a more comprehensive solution.

From an acquisition-stage perspective, one of the things I like is I’ve always been a big advocate of storytelling and content to support your marketing strategy. What I’m loving about LLM is it’s really catapulting on that, and it’s emphasizing that.

The traditional, “Hey, I’m just going to put super-low-cost slash freemium ads out in all the top affiliates or shopping communities and just blast the network and have a super-high initial CAC and hope I get the LTV to CAC on the back end,” it’s not going to benefit that structure.

It’s going to benefit those with more strategy, more time and more content. That’s a big piece of it.

You talked about ICPs. People need to be more in tune with where they’re winning and why they’re winning, and not just looking at casting the wide net.

This is an opportunity where focus will really benefit those who double down in specific verticals or specific products that can make meaningful impact for their consumers. Then they can really leverage that with the agentic community we’re living with, or AEO, if you would.

Content, customer experience and partner marketing

Alex Gluz: Content is still super important. I love how you say that.

I think that’s so important. You’re a numbers person. So am I. But the storytelling, I think that’s what makes us fall in love with marketing. This great story you can tell, and then it can touch the right people at the right time, at the right place, with the right message.

Why do you think so many companies still treat content as an afterthought, and what does it cost them?

Jenn Reichenbacher: I think they look at it as a cost center, and it’s because it’s not connected to the funnel the right way.

I’ve been fortunate, and people are sometimes surprised by this. I’ve been fortunate throughout my career to have both a performance budget and then what I would classify as a traditional marketing budget, where we have our events, we may have our public relations support, whatever we’re doing on that backside.

It’s important for me, when we’re talking about funnel performance, whether that’s ABM or direct acquisition, that we’re showcasing and thinking about the content that we’re producing that we can use there. We can use it in sequences. We can use it internally from a training perspective. We can use it in newsletters. We can use it on our website.

As we think about our content strategy, we’re always looking at it from a multidimensional lens.

So many companies focus just on the performance side, and it’s about ads and giving away product and just pure acquisition. They don’t look at the whole picture, the end-to-end funnel and the value of content.

To me, content is a fundamental, foundational part of marketing that you can’t succeed without. Now with AI and LLM models, it’s great because it’s pulling more from that.

The other side of that, just to shift a bit, is not forgetting your customer reviews, your online reviews. It’s been interesting, as my role has evolved to include customer experience, how that ties together so strategically.

This is an industry where I don’t think a lot of companies emphasize support enough. It’s been viewed as, “Hey, this is a self-service world.”

Being a small business owner has got to be one of the most challenging jobs in the world because you’re working in your business, not necessarily on it. You do need support. You need guidance. You need to be able to, not just tactically make sure that you’re processing, but you need help.

If you need to get a small business loan, or you want to understand the benefits of taking alternative payments or doing buy now, pay later, that’s where the consultative approach and the support really makes a difference for us.

Alex Gluz: It’s also understanding your customer in the different space. For example, if it’s a restaurant’s payment system, you have a dinner rush. If something is not working, you do want to get on the phone with somebody.

Jenn Reichenbacher: It’s a nightmare. It is.

It’s been interesting because we have a varied, multichannel strategy at Stax, similar to other firms that I’ve worked with in the past in the payments space.

We have an inbound sales team that’s working with a lot of new businesses, small businesses. They need some basic functionality, not a full business management system. We can help them with that.

One of our biggest growth engines over the past couple of years has been around embedded payments, working through ISVs. We’re actually working to help our ISVs drive payment attachment with their base and not just acquire.

We’ve got this real collaborative environment where we’re influencing, not just recruiting new ISVs in and building a community around that in very specific verticals through account-based marketing, but also co-marketing and helping educate our partners, once we sign them and get them all set up, on how they should be positioning and talking about the value that embedded payments provides for the merchant.

Building trust through pricing transparency and support

Alex Gluz: I love it. Let’s talk about the payments space a bit more. I do have experience, and we also work with some great clients. It’s a very dynamic and very competitive space, for sure.

Payments is notorious for bait-and-switch pricing and buried fees. Stax is very different, and it says, “We’re not doing that.” How do you get trust in an industry that’s essentially burned so many people?

Jenn Reichenbacher: It’s interesting, Alex. I’m glad that you asked this question because it’s really why I made the decision to join Stax.

When Stax was founded, now 12 years ago, it was actually started as a company called Fattmerchant. The founders really were committed to operating differently and not just coming out with a low-cost alternative.

Fattmerchant, now Stax, was the first company to come out with what I call payments-as-a-service pricing.

Our foundational model, and we do have traditional interchange-plus pricing options as well, but the vast majority of customers that we support are on a monthly subscription, very similar to the cable bill. It’s all-inclusive.

Obviously, we pass the transaction cost, but it’s based on your volume tier of what you’re processing, and we try to make it as simple and as transparent as possible.

It’s not for everyone. We’re the first company to say, “Hey, this might not be the right program for you, and maybe Stax isn’t the right fit.”

Foundationally, that was one of the things that I always respected when I was competing against Stax, and one of the things that I really love about the value proposition that we deliver for small businesses today.

We’ve kept that foundationally as part of our go-to-market. It’s key to our go-to-market. It’s key to what makes us unique. It’s one of the biggest attractions, and we’re going to stay steadfast to it.

Alex Gluz: This is actually one of the best positioning advantages you can have when the entire industry is known for having burned its customers or just not being transparent. Being the one that doesn’t do it is incredibly powerful.

You can’t just say it. You have to prove it. This is where I think most companies get it wrong. They put “transparent” on their website and think they’re done.

Real trust marketing means showing the receipts: customer reviews, side-by-side pricing comparisons and real testimonials from people who switched because they were tired of the games.

We’ve worked with a lot of companies in cybersecurity, and it’s quite a similar dynamic. Everyone claims to protect you, but the ones that show proof, real results, real stories, real data.

In payments, same thing. You have to over-index on proof because the default buyer assumption is that you lie, and that’s the starting point, and the market has to overcome that.

Jenn Reichenbacher: I alluded to it earlier, but one of the more interesting pieces of this expanded role has been we’re helping people acquire on the marketing side and then being able to carry that through from a support perspective and watch the reviews.

We’ve had a concentrated effort to really drive positive reviews. It’s a huge motivator for our team. Our team gets so excited.

We were a recent Stevie Award winner as we rounded out 2025.

We’ve got Trustpilot and Google scores of 4.4 and higher, with over 1,000 reviews on each. People think that’s silly, and it’s not. It’s because we go that extra mile, and it’s exactly what you’re talking about. You’ve got to be able to deliver on your value proposition.

Part of our value proposition is transparency and simplicity and support. We want to make sure that we triangulate our customers with that and have that through their entire life cycle of their experience with Stax.

Rebranding Fattmerchant and Merchant Warehouse

Alex Gluz: I have an interesting question. I know the company originally started as Fattmerchant, and then it changed its name to Stax. What was that decision like? What drove it, and how long did it take to really say, “Yes, we’re going to do this”?

Jenn Reichenbacher: I wasn’t with the company. The company changed the name in, I believe, early 2021. It could have been late 2020.

I think the rationale, if I recall from talking to other people that have been in the org, was Fattmerchant was primarily direct to SMB. As the company began to develop its own unique tech, some really slick onboarding tools, and expand into multichannel, especially into the embedded payments space, they just felt that a rebrand to Stax would be more suitable for an ISV-focused organization from an embedded payments perspective.

The X in Stax really exudes connection, integration.

We did the same exact thing. I was a part of the rebrand. I talked about my first experience in fintech, which was at Merchant Warehouse. This was an incredibly fun process and an honor to be a part of, but I was the team that led the rebranding of that organization for similar reasons.

We were pivoting from a direct ISO that was really servicing SMB, doing all digital marketing, to more of an embedded payments organization. We rebranded to Cayan, and it was a load of fun and a really fun, long-standing project that gives you a lot of insights.

One of the things I always say to people about brand in general, and I stole this from the agency that helped me with the Cayan rebranding, is when you think about your brand, it’s your vessel.

When you rebrand, it’s just the beginning of the next iteration of your company. We talk about storytelling. Part of your storytelling is pouring meaning into that vessel. That’s the way I always look at a brand.

When we launched Cayan, the company was excited, but it was like, “Okay, what does this really mean?” Then it was up to my marketing team to make sure that we were pivoting the narrative around what the company was doing.

A lot of that was the same trajectory that Fattmerchant was into Stax. Now we continue to build on the Stax brand. It’s also nice to walk into a company that has such a great brand and great brand reputation.

The founders of the organization and our private equity have set us up for great success with the work that’s been done to date.

Turning embedded payments into a revenue engine

Alex Gluz: I love the way you’re thinking about this. That’s a really great way to grow and evolve, and you just try to evolve to the next level.

There’s a lot of meaning behind this, and you’re saying this is a new stage of the development, and we want to build around this. I’ll keep that in mind. That’s a great perspective, Jenn.

One thing I wanted to mention, and we talked about this pre-interview also, is it’s an interesting way to look at things. It changes a lot how you approach marketing, how you approach sales, customer success and how you approach the product.

You’re not just selling the product. You’re selling the business model change.

How long does it take for a SaaS company to stop thinking of payments as a feature and more as a revenue engine?

Jenn Reichenbacher: It’s interesting because I think there are iterations of this. I always look at a SaaS business and say, “Okay, where are they on their payments journey?”

There are places where partnering with a company like Stax really makes sense, and there are places where maybe it doesn’t make sense.

In the embedded space, we’re seeing more value placed on the actual activation of embedded payments. Some of the really simplified APIs that are out there, and we have one as well, are great.

Probably five, seven years ago, even three years ago for some, even last year, having embedded payments was really a check mark. It was like, “Okay, I have embedded payments.”

Just doing the API and saying that you have payments offers zero value for your company. It does nothing to your valuation.

The superpower is how you go out and make sure that your customers and your prospects are using both your software and your payments, and it’s that one plus one equals three, hopefully one plus one equals four.

I reference this statistic a lot, but when you look at the early 2000s, the average public SaaS was growing at a rate of about 21 to 22%. That shifted into the low teens.

Now there’s just more downward pressure for revenue growth. Embedded payments with the right partner, to me, is the biggest lever that ISVs can pull and be focused on to really drive meaningful growth.

I was at a company where we actually bought 55 ISVs, and we started as a payments ISO. We were trying to connect the tech stacks in a few different verticals, but also make sure that everyone was getting the value out of embedded payments.

As we bought some of the companies, you started to see and hear, and I understand this completely, the mindset, but it was almost like they didn’t want the payments revenue to outshine the SaaS revenue.

You’ve really got to look at it holistically. We’ve talked a lot about value to your customer. You’ve got to look at it holistically and understand that it’s not just about the competitive nature of the two. It’s got to be viewed as one solution.

It’s not just about having the payments. It’s about activating payments and making sure that it’s delivering value for your customers, but also delivering value for your bottom line.

Where paid media fits in the marketing mix

Alex Gluz: Let’s shift gears a little bit. One thing I’ve been thinking about lately a lot is the role of paid media.

A lot of companies get it backwards. They treat paid like it’s strategy. They throw money at ads, get leads and hope they convert.

The way I see it, paid is an amplifier, not the foundation. The foundation is your positioning, your content, your customer proof. Paid just gets that in front of the right people faster.

When those things are strong, paid works incredibly well. When they’re weak, you just spend your money to show people something that doesn’t resonate and doesn’t hit hard.

We see this all the time. A client comes to us and says, “Paid is not working.” We dig in, and the ads are fine, but the targeting is off, the messaging doesn’t match what the buyer actually cares about, and the follow-up after the lead is received is broken.

We optimize those things, and performance flips completely.

For me, paid is the last piece, not the first piece. Get the audience, the message and the experience right, and paid just accelerates what’s already working.

What’s your take on where paid fits in an overall marketing engine, Jenn?

Jenn Reichenbacher: I don’t disagree with anything you’ve just said, Alex.

Especially in what I classify as a transactional funnel, a transactional model where your marketing team is feeding leads. You have live salespeople on the other end, but it’s a transactional sale. Typically, the sale is happening in anywhere from three to 30 days.

The mindset that I’ve seen in the last 15 years has been, “Hey, spend more money, get more out.” There are also a lot of diminishing returns in that.

You absolutely have to understand your audience, your segmentation, your offer and who’s going to really value it.

We were going out originally and trying to canvass everyone. We realized, as I talked about earlier, the subscription model, there’s a floor for how much someone’s processing per month that doesn’t make sense for us.

Rather than us trying to work those, we’ve actually just developed a referral partnership with a third party, and we refer that business over because that’s their bread and butter, and it’s not ours.

Do we compete in other markets? Yes, absolutely. On the mid-market and the ISV side, both of which we do, we can’t cast a wide net. We don’t have the funds to do that, nor do we have the resourcing to support it.

We’ve gotten very granular with our sales leadership about, “Hey, who are the people? What are your top prospects?” We’re going to try to canvass a wider net, but where do we really want to double-click in from a spend perspective?

That’s all about content. It’s all about multimedia syndication. It’s about creating experiences. It’s about being at events.

To borrow a term from the past, it’s much more of an integrated marketing experience.

To me, paid is a piece of that pie, but certainly not the only piece of the pie. You’ve got to have all the elements to make sure it’s working well.

Paid’s going to look different. Paid at the end of the year is going to look different than it has in the past.

You look at the marketplace in general. It’s always interesting because we do our own search on our own branded keywords, but then we also work with affiliates that are also paying into those. Finding the right mix.

I mentioned earlier, when I started, we probably had five major spend initiatives, and we had a referral partner as well that was doing a lot of small microbusinesses. We have over 50 different types of lead sources today.

Let’s not forget organic because we talked a lot about the brand and Stax’s brand and our value proposition. I talked about the customer experience stuff.

I’m not going to give the numbers away, but I would say close to a third of the business we bring in every month on our direct side of our business is through organic and direct contact.

You build a strong brand, you hold yourself tried and true to your value proposition, and over time you develop essentially a free inbound lead source that has a lot of trust, a lot of reputation tied to it, and just converts better and allows you to have a really nice blended mix of business.

Using AI to reduce friction and help small businesses

Alex Gluz: It’s definitely about having diversified assets and really trying new things. You said, “We have 50 sources of leads coming in.” That’s the ultimate goal. When everything is working, that’s when you get the maximum return.

We discussed a lot of things, Jenn. If you had to bet on one growth lever in 2026, what is it?

Jenn Reichenbacher: It’s AI. I’d expect you just to hang up on me if I didn’t have something to do with AI in the response to this question.

We talked beforehand, and I did think about this. I was like, “I wish I had some other crystal ball, marketing genius.” But I think it’s AI, and it’s for a couple of different reasons.

It’s about our sales. It’s about making us faster. That’s not about us pushing more through our own funnel. That’s about us streamlining the experience for our new customers and our partners.

The more we can reduce friction. Payments is a complicated space. You said it yourself earlier, Alex. It is. People don’t realize how much you have to go through to get a merchant account.

It’s regulated. It’s bank-sponsored. It feels and looks like a mortgage or a car loan sometimes.

Everywhere we can reduce friction, whether that’s new AI-based tools that we’re putting into our risk and underwriting, whether that’s AI tools that we’re using in our prospecting to deliver more personalization and more relevance, that’s a big piece of it.

We’re doing that in our CRM. We’re doing that in other third-party tools. We’re actually building some of our own tool sets to be able to help our teams deliver a better experience, whether that’s from a statement analysis.

The other side of it is in the product. You talk about making sure you’re delivering value and incremental value for your customers, and that’s what attracts new customers and new prospects to you.

One of the things our amazing team is doing is we’ve developed an AI tool. It’s going to be coming soon, but it’s essentially a layer within our portal. It’s really like a personal assistant within our portal that allows a consumer, a small business, to come in and do all kinds of comparisons just by asking Stax.

It’s literally type your question in: “How did my sales compare to last year?” Full chart. It prompts you to go deeper.

That’s something for small business that is just so critical. They just don’t have the time. Getting that analysis and making that more of an interactive tool is a huge advantage.

That’s just one example of many that are embedded in our products and our offerings that will be rolling out.

AI is making everything happen faster. It’s going to force more iteration, more personalization, and there will be things that don’t survive it.

AI is going to push all of us to be our best and to bet on the things that are going to make the best decision for the customer and have the best value for the organization as well.

Alex Gluz: It needs to go in context. This is the year when companies are starting to figure out real use cases.

Like you said, this is great. Especially a lot of small business owners, they are not on desktop. They’re on their phones. They cannot go and look through the spreadsheets. They’re in the store, restaurant. They don’t have time.

If you have this and they trust this, and they can say, “Hey, let me run numbers,” and it takes five minutes, that’s a really big use case.

That’s really great that we start seeing this, not hype, but real use cases, and you’re like, “Wow, it took me five minutes. It used to take me hours and days to figure this stuff out.”

Building cross-functional teams to adopt AI

Jenn Reichenbacher: We’ve put together an AI team, a cross-functional team: UI, UX, product. Our CTO’s involved in that. He’s been a huge advocate of AI since joining our company a few years back.

It’s been great because we’re also on a few different tenants. We have the ability to leverage those tools. We’re using NotebookLM for some communications things and market research.

We’ve got so many varieties, and people are able to go at their own speed within Stax.

We’re thinking about it internally: efficiency, external efficiency, external value. It’s been exciting.

As what I classify myself as an old dog, having talked at the beginning of this conversation about the world before the internet, I know it’s shocking. This has just breathed a whole new life.

I’m curious, and I enjoy playing around with all the different tools that are within our guardrails and understanding how we can do more. Whether that’s just using ChatGPT, whether that’s NotebookLM or HubSpot.

We have a great relationship with HubSpot. We’ve been really fortunate to take advantage of a lot of their AI agents and AI tool sets in a pilot and MVP, and now bringing them into full action.

It’s been a lot of fun. I love the energy that it creates. A little bit of a change is always good. It keeps you on your toes.

Alex Gluz: The best approach is these cross-functional teams, which are dynamic and getting input. Nothing can replace this dynamic and spreading the knowledge between the team. That’s what makes things exciting.

Not working in silos or just trying to figure things out. That gets frustrating. That’s when you get the biggest problems, when you work in a silo or you get in the rabbit holes. We all did that.

Jenn Reichenbacher: You hit it on the head, and that was going to be my follow-up, Alex. You literally nailed it.

These aren’t product squads that are just working on building this in silos. One of the other things we’re doing is sharing some of the successes.

Whether that be at an all-hands or team meetings, we’ll invite someone in to just say, “Hey, this is what this group just did in AI.”

Showcasing how easy some of these things are to do and leverage, and sharing the successes, is getting more and more people excited about it instead of being afraid of it.

Going into the second half of last year, it was like, “AI is going to replace everyone’s jobs. Watch out. AI is evil. Don’t lean in.”

It’s like, lean in and make it your superpower.

Mentors, career advice and closing remarks

Alex Gluz: I can tell you 100%, there are a lot of things it cannot do. Great talking with you, Jenn. I have one last question for you.

Jenn Reichenbacher: Sure.

Alex Gluz: Who were your mentors, and the best advice they gave you?

Jenn Reichenbacher: I talked a little bit at the beginning about what my major was. I would say both my parents, amazing mentors.

I grew up with a working mother who was a nurse, and my dad was in the finance side and hospitality. Always had a very strong work ethic. My grandmother worked, so I came from a long line of working females and balancing a lot.

I’ve also had the pleasure, it’s really been an honor, of working with some incredible people. I won’t name them because I’m always afraid if I name one, I’ll leave someone out.

I’ve worked with some incredible leaders who have always empowered me to explore, to make mistakes, to learn from those mistakes, and control what you can control and leave the rest behind.

I’ve been blessed. It’s been a phenomenal journey. It’s not over yet. I’m looking forward to what’s next and hopefully passing some of that on to the next generation, and sharing with different individuals in marketing and around the space my experience and guidance for them to capitalize on the experiences they’re having.

Alex Gluz: That’s great advice. We’ve been talking to Jenn Reichenbacher, Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer at Stax Payments.

Jenn, where can people learn more about you?

Jenn Reichenbacher: You can check me out on LinkedIn. There aren’t too many Reichenbachers. It’s R-E-I-C-H-E-N-B-A-C-H-E-R.

Also, just visit staxpayments.com.

Alex Gluz: For our listeners, if you would like to learn more about how we can help you build marketing revenue engines that empower growth, visit tamonroe.com or contact me on LinkedIn as well.

Jenn, thanks so much.

Jenn Reichenbacher: Alex, thank you so much. Have a great day, and such a pleasure speaking with you.

Alex Gluz: Likewise. Thank you, Jenn.