Marketing Hyper-Growth at Scale with Klaviyo’s SVP, Global Head of Marketing, Kady Srinivasan

Hi everyone. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. I am super excited to talk about marketing at Klaviyo and generally how to build a hypergrowth marketing engine. So before we get in, let me— I'd like to take a little bit of time to introduce myself. So my story is interesting. I started my career as an engineer, and to be honest with you, I was really bad at it. I was probably one of the worst software engineers you could meet. So I call myself a failed engineer. And then by a long kind of circuitous route, I ended up in marketing. And for the longest time, I didn't really believe in the power of brand and storytelling. My whole focus was growth, performance, data, automation. I loved that shit. And then after a long time, I started to think, oh gosh, I can't really change any consumers' minds with all of that stuff. If I really need to understand customers' aspirations and figure out how to emotionally resonate with them, I really need to understand brand. And that's when I kind of understood the power of brand and storytelling. And so I was able to bring the two kind of halves of marketing together. So I call myself a reluctant marketer just because I came at this at a kind of a zigzaggy way. And today, my role is focused on helping build this engine. So I think of myself as a scientist who's also a marketer who's trying to bring the data and the science and the art and the creativity together to achieve the best outcomes possible. So I've kind of gone— around a little bit. So I've worked in hypergrowth companies, big companies, small companies, not hypergrowth companies. It's been a lot of different flavors. And the one thing I will say is hypergrowth companies are just a completely different animal. The kind of decisions you have to take, the kind of choices you have to make, the kind of trade-offs you have to make are not the same as in any other kind of growth environment. I'm hoping I can share with you all some of the things that I'm thinking through and some of the things that I'm building at Klaviyo and what I've built in the past that might help. One quick thing about Klaviyo is before I joined, we were a very, very heavy word-of-mouth-driven company. Our product has an amazing product market fit. We have tons of raving fans. They spread the word. We have this beautiful virtuous ecosystem— sorry, loop of people who talk about us. They come back, and more people come. But marketing was completely in its infancy. And so my mandate from our CEO and the board was figure out how to make this more of a professional organization. And so you have this company that's already growing crazily. On top of that, you come in and you're trying to build a marketing engine to go from 0 to 60 at the same pace and the growth of the company. It's a pretty interesting and unique challenge. So I wanted to talk about some of the lessons I have learned and some things that I've kind of put in place as we started to build this, what I call the agile modern marketing engine. Let's dig in. The first thing for me is align with the CEO. This is fairly obvious and straightforward. The thing I want to point out here is what people don't realize is how much of this has to happen and how early on. To be honest with you, almost every company that I've done in the past 3 years, 3 companies or so, I started this process of aligning with the CEO in my interview process. It's how deep that gets. I start digging into what is the company strategy? What is the product strategy? What is the product vision? What is the path to market leadership? What are the different go-to-market options? What are the assumptions we are making about the market and the business and all that kind of stuff? This is what is going to create a really strong foundation and grounding of how the company was built, what were the principles the company was built on, what is the principles the product was built on, and what we see is the extensibility of the product and the platform. What I have found over and over is if you have a founder or a CEO with a particularly large vision, they're thinking, 20 years out. They're thinking big, far-reaching, you know, wide kind of visions. And it's the job of the CMO to bring it down to the 1-year, the 5-year mark, and to really figure out how to distill that down to what we can do now, tomorrow, you know, 3 years from now. So there's a lot of stuff there around how to really get into the heart, the minds of the CEO and the and the founder. The other interesting thing about this is there is a lot of stuff to figure out with the CEO on what your communication style is. We do a lot of things together jointly to think about the category, think about the brand. How do we position the brand? How does the brand reflect what the company should be? And if you're not communicating seamlessly and in a certain flow, It's just really hard to get on the same page. So one of the tips that I have used is I have weekly one-on-ones with my CEO, who is Andrew Bialecki. And then that one-on-one is just generally to focus on here, the here and now. This is the decision we have taken in marketing. Here's some of the stuff we are doing. Here's the progress update on a couple of things. Et cetera. But then I also set up these mind-meld sessions with him on a completely ad hoc basis. And that's like 2, 3 hours long. It's what we call blue ocean thinking. And those topics might focus anywhere from how do we think about this, this category, to what do we think the impact of blockchain is going to be on our business. So it's as broad and far-reaching as that because that's how you start to really get connected. Another important thing not to forget is very, very important to know what is your— what is the role that your CEO wants you to play in the leadership team? There's marketing being kind of amorphous and fluid. There's almost always a different role that you're expected to play as a head of marketing in those leadership team meetings. So super important to get aligned and coordinated on that. The next— not the next, but in parallel, you also want to start thinking about your team. As I've built teams from ground up, the one thing that's been really, really clear is obviously hiring. Again, that's super obvious. The caveat or the nuance to hiring is this, which is you have to hire at the right level for the context you're in. Meaning there are some contexts where some functions where you need to bring in the doers, the people who can roll up their sleeves and get it done. There are some functions where you have to bring in the strategists, the people who are going to set the vision and the strategy and think about how to lay the foundation for a lot of different things. I've made mistakes on both ends. I brought in people that were too junior. Which meant that we couldn't do any of the strategy stuff. And then I brought in people who are too senior, which meant we couldn't get any of the urgent things done. So you've got to figure out how to right-size the team. My first hires at Klaviyo, the first 5 were my head of brand, my head of product marketing, head of performance marketing, head of self-serve, and my head of analytics ops and research. And there's a reason for those being the top. They are all what I would consider really strategic functions within marketing that you want to bring in a pretty senior level who can then think about what the next 2 to 3 or 5 years looks like. And then I call out this thing called talent dense organization. Everybody in the team, in my team right now, is focused on hiring people who basically exhibit 4 characteristics. One, they have to have some level of strategy or strategic thinking. They have to be able to roll up their sleeves and get things done, even at the size that we are. They have to demonstrate agility because at a hypergrowth company, nothing is constant. Nothing is static. Every day brings on a new challenge. Every day there is a new problem to be solved. And then the last one is EQ, especially in high-growth environments. Stress— there is nothing like a non-stressful day. Every day you're going to have all kinds of challenges. And because it's so fast-paced and dynamic, you need to have people who are centered, grounded, who can have the right kind of communication if needed, who can push when needed. And there's a whole bunch of things around that. So I personally have always preferred EQ over any amount of IQ because that's what makes strong teams. The other thing that I want to point out is this. You cannot operate in a silo. So what I do a lot of the times is make sure I build these communications protocols with my head of HR, CFO, my head of product, and so on, because they, at the end of the day, they are taking your vision and amplifying it to the rest of the organization. Last thing on this. I have made the mistake in the past of growing faster than my process. What I mean by that is we scale up so quickly. We bring on all of these amazing marketers. All of them are going to need tons of things like creative and assets and campaigns that they want to run, and there's a sudden explosion in output. But if you're not organized, when that goes out in the market, it is sheer chaos. You're not telling a compelling story. You're not putting the right kinds of things in place. And so without the right kind of processes, you're not going to get organized, particularly in a high-growth environment. So don't grow faster than your process and make sure you're always thinking about if you have 10 people today, how are you going to 10— when you get to the 10x of that number of people, does your process scale up along with you? It's a super, super important kind of future casting skill to have. The third one is, so you have the founder and the CEO on the one hand who has a vision. You have the product team on the other hand who have a vision. You have the sales leadership team that brings a certain level of vision. Your job there is to be the person with the best pulse on the market. You have to bring the market realities to bear to the company strategy and say, is this actually landing the way we want it to? Are we making the right assumptions about the market? Do we know for sure that our market segments in this way that we want them to? Do we know that these feature sets are going to be useful to the audience that we want to go after? So there's a whole lot of market intelligence that as marketers we have to bring back to the organization. So what I tell my team is we have to be the experts in customers, customer attitudinal segments, meaning How they think, how they— what their mindset is, how they are thinking about different products, all that kind of stuff. And then customer journey, where they are in their customer journey. So it's not enough to just look at demographics. You have to get deeper into attitudinal segmentation. So I don't know if you've heard of this framework called Where to Play and How to Win. It was created by A.G. Lafley, who was the CEO of P&G. It's a great framework. The where to play really defines your market where you should put your bets. And the how to win talks about the specific things that you can go execute towards. So in my team, we follow that. The first things we kicked off with our head of research was the TAM market research segmentation. And we do a lot of different things around the customer journey, customer journey research studies. Specific questions into why do these people switch from this solution to this solution. So we do a whole bunch of things to surround ourselves with customer insights and customer data. And in doing so, we have become kind of the central— Grand Central Station, if you will, of all of the customer insights. And we kind of tie it with what the CS team is hearing, what the sales team is hearing, what our product team is hearing, and We merge everything together to create almost like a 360-degree profile of the customer. I cannot tell you how important this has been in my past. In a lot of the product-led companies, as you can imagine, there is a strong gravitational pull towards being very, very feature-centric as a company. Most companies are thinking, I'm just going to build this feature and people will come. I'm going to throw it out there, give it to marketing, and they're going to figure it out, and people will come. Might be true, but a lot of the times, you're still losing a lot of people on the edges, customers that don't necessarily care about that product, might be interested in something else. So it is the job of marketing to kind of shine a light on the market and the people that you're underserving. All right. Big, big question that we constantly talk about in my— we have a little CMO group. Big question we talk about is how do you balance the short-term versus the long-term? You go into a new role almost within the next 6 months, you're going to be expected to show short-term results. Whether it's MQLs or pipeline or customers or leads, But at the same time, you know that you have to build for the long term. You know that you're going to be expected to deliver 18 months from now. So how do you do that? And the way that I think about it is you have to operate on two different, what I call, motion reels. The one motion reel is here and now. So the next quarter, next month, next week, what are the things that we are doing? The second motion reel is the next— 8, 12 months out, 18 months out, what are we trying to do? And the job of the CMO, in my opinion, is bridging the two. You're always trying to bring the two together saying, OK, we're doing all of this stuff that just kind of adds up to the long term. But the other thing I've tried to do, which has been pretty successful, is I challenge my team to come up with one low-hanging fruit opportunity per month. So every month. Each of my directs and me, we sit down together and say, what can we do that we can jump on this month that we can go find some success in, or even fail for that matter, but learn something from? I can tell you it builds a tremendous amount of confidence in the team because you're starting to accumulate those wins, and that just creates this magic word called momentum, which when you go into a new role, you need. And then this is a pretty dramatic statement, but when you go into a new role, you've been basically hired because you know something really, really well. But in the last 3 companies I've been at, every single time, 6 months in, I'm like, OK, throw out this old playbook. We have to create something new. Because you're outgrowing that playbook so quickly that you have to be very agile in thinking about what's worked for me in the past. Take some of those learnings, some of those timeless classic things, add on a few things, and create new ones, and definitely discard a few that don't work. For instance, one thing that we have found is self-serve motion for us. I've always felt it is one of the most incredibly powerful go-to-market motions. In a previous company, what worked as self-serve is actually not working in the same way here. So we've had to change our definition of self-serve. And that's the kind of playbook that we have to create. All of this is on a bedrock of experiments. So I ask my team to think about how do you create the right experimentation mindset and DNA in the company. So with each of the stuff that we take on, we are always looking at how do we create an experiment based on either some kind of data or gut-based hypothesis. And then how do we create what I call a stacked experimentation culture? So run the experiment, learn, fail, or improve, and then use that to go on to the next one. And it just keeps stacking up. And the sum total of that becomes this institutional knowledge and intuition that is extremely critical for any marketing team. However data-oriented it is. This brings me to the last point on the slide, which is intuition is extremely, extremely critical, particularly in a high-growth environment when you're having to take almost lightning-speed decisions in some areas. You don't have the data. Every problem is new. You're just— every day brings on a new either opportunity or challenge. You're going to have to have people people who can use all of the information and the historical data and say, all right, I think these things have worked for us. So let's go try this thing. And so that's the kind of culture you want to create in every level of the organization. And the last one is a little bit of a personal kind of anecdote. I have been extremely bad at this, which is I have not prepared myself for a roller coaster. Every single job I go to in one of these hypergrowth environments, I'm like, I'm just going to go do this and everything is going to be fine. But you are going to have ups and downs. Things work, things don't work. Every single day is a new day. So what I tell my team is it's about this idea of you're forming and norming. All of us are familiar with that. But instead of storming, we just have to get to performing as quickly as possible. And then from performing, you have to get to outperforming as quickly. And that's kind of the gradation that we— or the lifecycle that we have to go to. And in all of this, my role as a leader is holding both these ideas of compassion and accountability. When I mean compassion, it's about making sure that people are delivering at their best. They are getting the best out of this experience. But at the same time, you also want to make sure that you are holding people accountable. And those two, for the longest time, I didn't believe they could go together, but they do. You have to have that kind of dichotomy. It's okay to screw up. And man, I have been there so many times. In fact, I just had a conversation with my CEO a couple of weeks ago where he said, everything is going great. How are you feeling about it? I was like, Yeah, I don't think I'm doing that great. He asked me why. I said, there are so many things I wish I'd done better or could have— I wish I'd known better. He said these amazing words, which is, look, you're trying your best, but we are on a journey together. We are on an adventure together. Don't ever forget that. That's the kind of culture I want to create in my team, which is it's about an adventure. It's about you don't really know where you're going. You have to be focused on the— sure, the goals to get there. But consider this as a really big, big adventure that we can go after. So I tell my team about this idea of hold your goals tightly, but your path lightly. Because the path is always going to change. As long as you hold your goals really close to your heart, it doesn't matter what path it's going to take. You'll get to those goals. So that's basically some of the big lessons I have learned and some of the things that I wanted to share with you all. Just to recap, even though this is obvious, getting aligned with the CEO and their vision is extremely critical for the marketing team, particularly when you're thinking about creating or recreating and redesigning a brand. From ground up. Building the right size team, hiring the right people who can both what I call shoot and aim and aim and shoot at the same time, it's extremely critical. It is not an easy thing to do. Hiring generally is very hard, but hiring the right people is exponentially hard. But that's where you get the highest leverage once you have the right people in the team. Building the right processes that go alongside or that wrap around the team. Again, critical because otherwise it will end up in chaos. Being— taking on the ownership of the customer and the non-customers, and more importantly, actually, what I would call the rejectors, the people that have rejected your product, is extremely important as well because you must know the market more than anybody else in the company. Balancing the small stuff with the big stuff. Running on two speeds. So the here and now, and then the medium to long term. Again, another very crucial skill, both as a leader as well as the skill that you want to bring down to your people. And then finally, creating a playbook, like really creating and thinking about what's going to work in this environment. What are the levers? What are the growth tactics that are going to work? And creating that playbook. For yourself that's unique to that situation is super important. And finally, don't forget this is as much about the team as much as about you. And you have to be careful about how you manage your own time, energy, and the amount of work that you're putting into it. Because if you're not taking care of yourself, you may not be taking care of your team as much.