Beatriz Gomez Is Making Payroll a Dinner Conversation

The most revealing number in Beatriz Gomez's marketing strategy is not a conversion rate. It is 15. That is roughly how many founders Ontop, the global payroll and fintech company where she is chief marketing officer, will seat at one of its small dinners. Add too many chairs and the chemistry changes. Conversation becomes performance. The quiet person gets quieter. The founder who might have admitted to being lonely or uncertain returns to polishing a pitch.

So Gomez keeps the room intimate. No product demonstration waits behind the main course. No one is marched through a funnel between the salad and the bill. Founders talk with other founders about the strange, specific weight of building a company. Ontop hosts, listens and helps. It is marketing by way of good manners.

This would be easy to romanticize as an escape from metrics. It is nothing of the sort. Behind those dinners sits a deliberately constructed system for reading engagement, recognizing intent and following up while a conversation is still warm. Gomez's work joins two instincts that marketing departments often separate: the host's sensitivity to a room and the operator's appetite for a clean signal.

The banker who kept the spreadsheet

Before joining Ontop, Gomez spent eight years at BNP Paribas. The institutional chapter matters because she did not arrive in startup marketing as a stranger to systems, regulated products or the consequences of missing context. At Ontop, that discipline appears in the plumbing beneath the public-facing work.

Her team has used tools including Lovable to turn executive LinkedIn activity into something more precise than applause. Reactions and comments can be read across time. A founder who repeatedly engages with a leader's personal posts and company ideas is a different signal from a stranger who taps “like” once. Sustained attention can trigger a more relevant workflow. Social media becomes a trail of intent, provided the marketer resists the temptation to mistake every footprint for a buying decision.

“You follow up too late. You qualify the wrong leads. You send campaigns that don't reflect real behavior.”Beatriz Gomez on fragmented marketing data

Gomez has described the cost of weak customer context in blunt verbs: follow up too late, qualify the wrong person, miss the moment. The point is not to turn a human exchange into surveillance theatre. It is to preserve enough context that the next interaction does not begin with corporate amnesia.

A community has local manners

Ontop operates across borders, but Gomez does not pretend that a global audience behaves as one cheerful, timezone-spanning organism. Her channel choice changes with the region. In Latin America, founder communities gather on WhatsApp. In the United States, Slack is often the more natural room. The practical principle is generous: do not make people learn a new habit before they can receive value.

This is localization beneath the level of translation. The copy can be perfect and still arrive in the wrong place. Gomez starts with an observation most growth plans bury beneath a channel matrix: where do these people already talk? The answer determines the infrastructure.

High Frequency, the name Ontop gives its founder-community program, began as a relatively simple encounter and grew into a recurring brand ritual. By Gomez's account, it has connected hundreds of founders in more than 10 countries. The format expanded again through a digital bootcamp for pre-seed to Series A founders, taught in English and Spanish and offered without charge to selected participants.

The name suggests speed. The method is more patient. A useful community cannot be ordered into existence with a landing page. It develops through repeated evidence that the host values the members' problems even when there is no product to pitch. In one story Gomez shared, a founder was stuck on marketing strategy. She helped without turning the exchange into a sales call. The founder later became a customer and referred others. Assistance did what pressure could not.

Make the community the protagonist. A brand earns relevance by improving the room, not by owning every sentence in it.

The person before the company page

Gomez applies a similarly human logic to executive social selling. Her leaders do not post only about their job descriptions. The content spans professional subjects, family, setbacks and ordinary experience, with company material occupying only one part of the mix. A person who writes like a person gives an audience more reasons to care than a logo rehearsing its positioning statement.

Her pitch to a reluctant executive is shrewd because it aligns incentives. “This community follows you, not the company,” she has said. “Build your personal brand for whatever comes next.” An audience becomes portable equity. It can travel with a leader into another role, a new venture or an unforeseen turn. Marketing receives distribution, but the executive is not merely borrowing a megaphone on behalf of the corporate account.

The proportions matter. Gomez has described a content structure with several pillars and only one weekly post directly tied to an executive's company role. A leader might write about family, a personal difficulty or an observation from outside the office, then return to the work with a voice the audience already recognizes. This is not a license for compulsory confession. It is permission to develop range. When every post points back to a product page, even a thoughtful executive begins to sound like a rotating billboard.

Payroll discovers an emotional life

There is a delicious difficulty in marketing payroll: almost nobody wakes up hoping to discuss it. Gomez says as much in her public profile. The category is operational, necessary and usually noticed most when it fails. Ontop's familiar employer story was correspondingly efficient: contracts, compliance, international hiring and payment across more than 150 countries.

Then Gomez listened to workers on the platform in places including Lagos, Bogotá, Manila and Kyiv. What stayed with her was not a chorus about interface speed. People talked about feeling like professionals, having a financial identity that matched their ambition and receiving money in a form they could use globally. Features such as a global account, a Visa card, early wage access and benefits carried an emotional consequence. They suggested membership in an economy that had previously kept many workers at arm's length.

The distinction changed how she described the company. The employer still needs fewer compliance headaches. The worker experiences payment as proof that the arrangement is real, usable and respectful. Retention lives in that second story. A company may arrive looking for payroll and remain because its people prefer the experience.

“If how you pay people tells them whether they matter - what is your current payroll experience saying?”Beatriz Gomez

It is a question with a longer reach than fintech. Companies tend to describe products through the jobs they perform. Customers often remember the status, relief or confidence those jobs create. The emotional result can hide in plain sight because it sounds less measurable than processing time. Listening supplies the missing unit.

Taste, energy and a little useful friction

Gomez's hiring language reveals the culture she wants around the work. When recruiting a product marketing lead and a motion designer, she put attitude, energy and willingness before skill. She asked for autonomy, curiosity, an appetite for learning AI and good aesthetic judgment. The list joins temperament with taste. Tools will change; judgment must decide what deserves to ship.

Her own public career contains that same mixture. A project from her Universidad de los Andes years received recognition in a graduation exhibition. She later completed the Inside LVMH Certificate, a program rooted in luxury and brand craft. Now her remit includes data architecture, cross-border finance, founder dinners and the choreography of executive voices. The line through it is not a single channel. It is attention: to presentation, to behavior and to how a person feels on the receiving end.

That range also explains why High Frequency can move between a dinner and a digital bootcamp without losing its premise. The format is allowed to change because the promise is stable: practical access to people who have already wrestled with the problems in the room. For a founder, the value is less another grand theory than a shortcut earned by someone else's scar tissue. For Ontop, the program creates familiarity before a contract ever enters the discussion. Both sides can leave with something useful, even if no transaction follows.

For all the automation beneath Ontop's growth system, Gomez's most memorable tactic remains furniture. Fifteen chairs. Enough structure to create a room, enough restraint to let the room speak. The data comes later, where it belongs, preserving the trail without stealing the evening. Payroll gets its conversation. The founders get dinner.