“The Top 10 Growth Hacks to $100m ARR” with Aircall’s former CMO

Please welcome to the stage Jeffrey Riekers.

CEO and co founder at Champion, former CMO at Aircall. It's first playing in the right sandbox and understanding how to identify what that sandbox is. The second story here, it's probably my favorite story altogether. Whatever it takes greater than process or a night of in flights entertainment. This is Tommy Jester. He's an account executive at Eric Living now sales director. Just imagine, we've all been in this scenario before. You're a week out. We were 100k behind in our target for the quarter. We had this epic week. We were trying to close it all up. I got to the final day, Friday, September 30th, we were still 30k short. There's zero pipeline left. What do you do? We all got together, started narrowing it down, finding every possible lead, opportunity to call. By 8pm that night, we were 3,500 away from the target, but there's nobody really left. So Tommy just started calling all his future leads, trying to find any possible lead to close. He ended up pulling somebody that was supposed to close in the following quarter ahead and had a great conversation with him. It seemed like there could be something there and Tommy's talking to him, but then all of a sudden it starts to go haywire and we realize that individual is getting on a flight. It's nine o' clock at night, he's getting on a flight and we're not quite sure where he's going because the call cut out a little bit too soon. What we ended up doing when Tommy led us was to this bar here, but not to wallow in sorrows, it was to pull up a dashboard of every possible flight that he could have been on. And we just started tracking every single possible flight and telling me at the end of every time one of those flights closed, we would try to give a phone call. We eventually got ahold of the person at 11:45, closed at like 11:52, made the mark for the quarter. And that is to say whatever it takes is greater than process. And when you're in those moments, even if you have fantastic processes, you're going to get into these situations where you, you just have to make something special happen. And on the path to 100 million, you just see these stories happen quite often. It becomes part of the culture. And if that's not part of the culture today for you, it's up to you to really make it and create those stories from scratch. The third story here is obliterate silos or a team United. What's really interesting about this journey from 1 to 100 is just things organically happen that at various stages that you don't really anticipate. And for us, 1 to 10 alignment was super easy. Everyone's on board, everyone understands the goals, the mission. It's a one team mindset. All of a sudden you start adding on managers and managers of managers and departments celebrate different success metrics together. I'll say if you're a CMO or VP of marketing, if you ever celebrate a successful quarter and you have a sales or success team that is not successful that quarter, there's a real big challenge there that you need to be able to solve. We're in a specific moment where we had these silos sort of naturally starting to build up and then a second thing happens which is teams are starting to fall short of targets. You get that crazy mix and it's a great environment for finger pointing to start and happen. Gianna joined on at that time. Gianna is now a co founder and COO at Champion. By the way, she has a concept called the Taffy Effect. I can't possibly tell the Taffy Effect. It's not my story, but it's essentially what this is. So I'll meet Gianna afterwards and talk about the Taffy Effect. But the ability to bring all teams under one target and one roof is a really essential part as you're growing and scaling and it takes dedicated effort, more than I ever thought possible. One thing tactically GE have done throughout these stages is you just have something simple, right? Like a deal that closes. Oftentimes we all celebrate and congratulate the account executive on closing that deal. One thing she would do which was always so incredible, find everybody that was involved in that deal, whether it was the support person that was helpful on the trial process, whether it was the person that ran that campaign that developed the lead, whether it was the HR person that hired the account executive that closed the deal and just publicly congratulate people for those successes. It's incredible what it does to unite people and really give them a feel and a sense of, of how they are contributing to the broader mission and goal of the company. If you want to build a company to 100 million, it's a one team mindset and you have to have a dedicated effort towards that. Number four and the last on our culture portion, 100% doesn't mean success or a trip to the moon. This is Jonathan coo, co founder of Aircall. He always used this phrase, go to the moon. And if you miss, you land among the stars still. But we were December, I think 2018, we were all getting together for our December executive meeting to plan out the next year. We were already at 115% of our growth target for the year. Just really surpassed what our ambitions were. And we were all going around talking about successes and what led to that achievement. It got to be John's turn. And John goes, well, the BDRs only hit 80% of their target and we should have been much better than that. And we had this key account that I can't believe we lost and we should have been doing so much better over here. And Ollie cuts him short and says, john, you are already at 120% of your target. And he goes, yeah, but it should have been so much better than that. There's board target, there's team target, and then there was what's possible. Really great teams that are on this great trajectory hold themselves accountable to what's possible, not what the targets are. We're going to shift from culture into the go to market area. Now this is where I get a little more tactical about growth stories from a channel perspective. There's this 11 star experience as build demand or be remarkable. There's three marketers from the team that were just taught me so much about how to go above and beyond. This is Carly Dale, she's now chief of staff over at Pavilion. Kira Wright, greatest event marketer I've ever met. And Luis Mate from our French office, Paris office, one of the greatest marketers and now a director over at ercol. All these three were so creative in the types of campaigns that they would put together. We had this concept internally, we called it the 11 star experience. It came from Brian Chesky podcast on Masters of Scale where he said Airbnb. As they were trying to disrupt the hotel market, how do they really start taking customers away from hotels? Well, hotels already have five star experiences. They offer them, they get them all the time. So to do that they had to stretch their thinking. They had to think, what's a six star experience? What's a seven star? What's an eight star? Maybe an eight star is, you know, that the guest has preference for surfing, there's a surfboard waiting for them, directions, all those sorts of things and then eventually get somewhere that's impossible. But somewhere there's this sweet spot of really pushing the borders of what's possible. We had this internal philosophy and we trained everybody on it internally. And some folks like these three marketers really took this to heart. There's too many campaigns to mention, but there's one that really stands out to me. This was our New York takeover campaign, where we bought inventory for 60 phone booth ads throughout New York City. And we specifically picked the locations and overlaid them with about 150 target accounts that we had and a few zip codes in New York. And then on top of that, the team went to the subway stations and mapped the walk from the subway station to the offices to see how many times would somebody cross over those ads. What's the color like? What's the background look like? How do you even make those ads stand out? And on average, going from the subway to the office, in aggregate, someone's going to walk across an ad six times a day. And we launched that alongside of SCR campaigns, direct mailers, webinars, all on the same concept and theme. The first day we launched those and the ads were live. We have an inbound lead call us and say, hey, I saw your ad. It was a close loss opportunity from the past. I was thinking about their call recently. We ended up closing that deal a week later. And it paid for the whole, actually paid for the whole campaign. We didn't have a lot more of those examples, but every time we closed a deal within one of those target accounts, everybody mentioned it. It was one of the best campaigns we had run. And that is to say, particularly if you're early stage, if you're going to do marketing and you're going to do campaigns, make them remarkable because your company comes off as 10x the size that they are. And it's rarely actually a monetary thing or resources. It's just a creativity element. A similar story. Wow. Your way to growth or law shoes and raving fans. In 2008, I left my job at Forbes to go get into tech. And this fellow, David Schnurman, was the CEO of a company called Law Lion. Dave was a champion and figured out efficient growth before anybody knew the term efficient growth. And he was just doing it on his own. It was a bootstrap company. I joined on as one of the early customer support agents. My job was to answer the phone and we were doing streaming technology for attorneys. Streaming technology was not great in 2008, so it wasn't working a lot of the time. Lawyers, when they're stressed out, can be a little bit upset. And my job was to convert irate customers into raving fans at the end of that call. And we took that Zappos philosophy where Dave trained everybody on Tony Hsieh's book Delivering Happiness it was a mandatory reading for us all. We built a really efficient method of growth just through the experiences that we were providing and keeping that in the back of my mind when I started at Ericall's VP of marketing, I was also heavily involved in sales in the early stages. And there was a company, I can't use the name, don't have permission for the name, but it was a top e commerce brand out of New York. It's a big one for us. Probably our biggest customer we could have gotten at that point. And we got a three month trial with them. Finally we landed a three month trial with them and we called it Turbo Mode. Turbo Mode meant if anything was going on in that trial, you stop what you're doing and you solve the problem. If they call in at 11:58 on Saturday night with a support ticket like you answer the call and you've solved the problem. If there's a new hire to be trained, we're in their office two hours later to train them. It's all hands on deck. We ended up winning that account. It was a 30k deal. They stayed with us for the entire 6 years and are still customers today. They grew from 30 to 50k in ARR. But far more than that, that I didn't anticipate or didn't recognize or didn't realize was just how much would come out of that one incredible customer and that the tangential growth out of that. Their head of support was our landmark guest for executive dinners over the next six years. My last week at Aircall was still doing exact dinners with them. The manager on that team ended up becoming a director at another company. Brought in air call with them and the aggregate impact that that one customer made was 10x what they were paying us. And so that is to say happy customers bring happy customers. If you can create incredible moments, so much comes out of this. It doesn't necessarily just get tracked in your ROI reporting next quadruple down on your number one channel or the internal pacer. There was a moment, I'm going to recollect that story a little bit. There was a moment that we were planning our targets for the end for the next year. You ever get in that mode where like you're in a spreadsheet and you're manipulating 1 percentage point, 2 percentage point, like you're in your win rates column and you're saying maybe we can move the win rates to 18% that'll get us to target and the financial plan. You start manipulating cells and like that's how you come up with the plan to meet your targets, I can tell you if you're doing that, it's going to be a really bad year. You don't have enough margin of error to support the growth that the financial plan has. We were in that scenario once and we had to call ourselves out on it. And the unique scenario and situation that we had was we had a number of different channels that were all sort of getting started and then one massive channel which is our inbound, that was about 55, 60% of the business. Now we continuously anticipated that that inbound engine would just start to slow down over time and that we had to invest in other categories, other riskier categories. We had an individual Idris here who was a director of growth and I believe still is over there who approached us with the idea to build a growth team. And a growth team was quite simple. It was one manager and then cross functional departments that could iterate and build fast. So you had an engineer, you had a designer, you got a content team, content manager, somebody for SEO, paid acquisition, video specialists, all on the team. They were iterating every single day under the same campaigns with one central goal which is to drive qualified leads for the company. This ended up being a respark, I'll call it, for inbound that really continued to drive it as the main success email engine for the company that helped get us continuously to that goal. And maybe the lesson here is before you start investing in every new channel, it's better to have one A something that is your core before you have four Bs or C minus or Cs in your go to market mix. Get to 100 million, create some A's in the mix. Number eight, partnerships accelerate growth. This is my favorite lunch, Andy. I am. When it comes to lunch, I'm the most American person on the planet. I like refined foods, I like processed food, I like it to be microwaved as quickly as possible. And I like to eat at my desk and just keep pounding out work. That's how I started at Aircall anyways. And we're a Paris space company or we have a Paris office, I should say, or French founded. And my first visit to the Paris office was such an experience because I sat down with some microwavable food. But at one o' clock everyone breaks, right? Everyone breaks. They sit at a communal table. It's a part of work. It's just like doing anything else, like putting together your campaign. A part of work is the communal aspect of getting to know each other, building bridges and understanding what the challenges are and building those relationships. Certainly my Mac and cheese was not a great, a great example in the Paris office. But learning from them, I became a better professional and I really learned the power of what I believe was the foundations for partnerships there. Similarly, if you're thinking of the competitive market, particularly now and today when it's so competitive, there's so many SaaS companies out there and so much competition. If you're thinking of the market as competition, I mean, I have a champion jacket like I love competition like nobody else. But I think a better way to be approaching it is thinking of the industry competitors as all part of a communal table that you sit down and sit across because you're great at certain things and other companies are great at other things that you're not great at. And so we had a number of partnerships at Erkel that we drove with partners, whether it was Fortune 50 companies or large communications providers that were launching telephony products where we were able to fill gaps for each other. Maybe they were good in a certain market and we were good in another market. We can build bridges, find ways to grow. It's not a zero sum game. We can all grow together. The power of partnerships is an absolute accelerator on the journey to 100 million. Number nine here, place bets like a VC or tyranny of the Ore. This is Tim Porthouse. He's a great mentor and somebody that was along with me throughout the entire journey at ericle that I learned so much from. And he's a fantastic fan founder as well. There was one moment where I mentioned those hero stories earlier on. There was one time when we ended Q3 and we're looking at the forecast for Q4 and it's really evident we were going to end off about 5 to 10% below what our growth targets were for the year. I put together a plan that focused on short term customer acquisition, paid advertising and I got board approval, I got the C level approval to invest an extra about $350,000 and said I think this will work. It didn't work. I wasted $350,000 and I had to own up to that at the end of that quarter and feeling the impact of that, really made a commitment that we wouldn't put ourselves in that position again. You get to a certain size, this is around 50 million in ARR. You just can't move the ship that quickly. It takes a long time to start steering it. And so it became obvious we had to place more bets, more strategic bets, and that became the Leadership game of at this point. Now, the tyranny of the OR is a really specific part of this because the more we grew, the more we just hear from folks, focus, focus, focus, focus. You got to focus, you got to do less, focus, more, et cetera. And I would actually challenge that in many cases, I think the tyranny of the. There's a tyranny of the or and it's sort of a genius of the and to quote Jim Collins. And really the and is about understanding how to place bets that have high upside to them and understanding how they cut the downside. This was a mix that we had put together as a team going into Q2 of 2018 for big growth initiatives that could help fuel our growth for the next stage. And the way we had done these, we just take one of these examples. Launch apac, okay, that is now a huge region. There's a couple hundred people staffed down in Australia and Singapore with their call. But that just started with let's put 30k of budget to see if we can drive some leads. There's nobody over there. Let's just see if we can drive leads. Let's answer that question. Once we did that and we proved that that was true, great, let's see if we can close those leads. And that was the next three month experiment. Once we could do that, then we put somebody locally there and we started building the office further and further and further and growing. And we had a great leader who built it out from there. But it all started with just a small experiment. So often we get plans, particularly as we grow, where we need 20 headcount for this, we need six headcount for that. But what's a way you can just tell something out in a really small manner, you get a positive indicator, keep going and if you don't kill it. And that's part of the discipline that you have to have as you're scaling is understanding when to kill things. So in the growth to 100 million, it's all about placing strategic bets, understanding when to cut those bets and how to double down when you see the success. Number 10 here, coach for 18 months from today or be human. This is one where I feel kind of dumb. This is Sandrine, our cpo, our chief people officer for a few years and Jan Hochfeld, a great CMO industry leader, one of the most magnificent leaders, marketers you'd ever want to come across, who I was lucky enough to have as a mentor for a number of years. And we were going through a specific stage and I'm sure we've all heard this as well through our growth journey, which is we have to uplevel our teams. The way I interpreted up leveling a team was, oh, I've got to replace folks on my team, we need to get ready for the next stage of the journey. And I came to realize that was quite maybe immature way of looking at it. And I was two days away from letting somebody go on the team who I felt wasn't ready for that next stage. And I mentioned it to yom because I wasn't certain I was going back and forth on it. And so he came to me and said, so you're about to let this individual go turn their life upside down because you failed to prepare them. And he posed the question of who should be on the chopping block then. And I thought that was a really great insight and made me reflect quite a bit. And the approach thereafter was to Prepare people for 18 months ahead of time. If you hire great people, they've got it for the next 18 months, particularly as you're starting to grow and you bring in real experts on the team, they've got it. You don't need to be managing them on the day to day. What you need to be able to do is carving out what the future looks like, weighing where their strengths and weaknesses are and what they're going to have to work on for 18 months, what's what they expect out of a manager. So as on the path to 100 million, particularly as you start bringing on more and more experience, it's about really understanding how to prepare people for the next stage and empower them. And when we're talking about up, leveling our team, we're talking about investing in our people last. This is maybe the bonus rule. Replace yourself with somebody better or move over when it's time to move over. In lockstep with that last lesson. This is Emmanuel Benoliel. She's now CMO over at Eric Hall. She's on the team for a number of different years. Greatest marketer I've ever met in my career, in my life. At some point you're going to have somebody on your team like that. And if you're the limiting factor for them to decide, should I be going somewhere else because I can't have any more trajectory at my company, it's time to take a real honest reflection of is it time to move over? If you've done a great job, that'll come about. Maybe the one lesson here is it's far greater to be A part of a great one, part of a fantastic story than the whole part of a story that didn't reach its potential. Okay, some key takeaways here. Growth hack. I don't see the shortcuts. Growth hack is a term we use. I find it to be the optimal path. How do you get somewhere in the optimal manner? And to me that's about challenging the status quo, learning, adapting and having that wearer of other clothes mindset. There's three foundations that I really experienced and saw in the path to 100. It's culture, it's go to market, it's leadership. Those are the three core components from setting a cultural foundation of excellence, play in the right sandbox and have an honest opinion. Vantage does this have an opportunity to make it. It's whatever takes over process and having that culture of winning and making that non negotiable within the organization. It's knocking down silos as you grow and really investing in doing that. And it's holding yourself to a higher standard beyond what the team targets are from the go to market side. It's gaining efficiency over time, investing in things over time. We didn't talk about this particularly too much. I have a certain opinion on things like paid advertising where invest in them but you're not really building assets for the future that compound. Love to build things that compound over time. The campaigns, the brands, the customer experiences and the customer growth and focus as an organization. Things like inbound, that growth team that can keep compounding results over time to get more efficient. And last, build leadership that delivers sustainability over the long haul. Prep your team, make great bets and when it's time to get out of the way, get out of the way. And so we'll summarize here and conclude maybe if I can leave us all with one thing, it's to be aware of new clothes and keep that open mind. And we're all at Sasser here with so many amazing executives, peers, people to learn from. And if now is ever time to just try on new clothes and learn from those individuals, this is a great moment to do it and be able to bring those back to our organizations and into our future as well. Thank you so much everybody. I think there's Q and A now. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, can I just hijack the mic like this?

Yeah.

Okay, cool.

Awesome. Well, thank you. That was.

First of all, that was awesome. And something I was thinking about the entire time as you were talking was sort of this idea around being creative based on your industry. The growth hacks that you're doing when you're first getting going. But then also the opposite dynamic of I've heard a million times, focus on SEO, make sure you get that core correct. Now let's say you don't have the bandwidth and you don't have the ability to do both. What's your take on that? Are you always trying to nail SEO no matter where you are or are you really saying like, hey look, if you're in a position where there are these growth hacks that might play out or they may not play out, they might not have long term longevity, how do you approach that?

Yeah, I mean I have no specific bias on SEO. Not SEO. SEO worked for us as an organization because there's tons of keyword volume around our industry. Lots of search, active search. That happens. So first is there active search for your product would be question number one, is that even worth building out? There's many categories, but that's not true, particularly if you're creating a category or something like this. So first is what is the right lever and right channels for distribution that's going to reach your audience in the most impactful way? If it's search and intent based, SEO can be a great part of that strategy. If it's not search intent based and it's more education based, I would be leaning into things like social and content and content distribution through social really be educating a market. And so first it's a foundation of where is the top opportunity from an organizational perspective, if there is opportunity when it comes to something like SEO and search volume and intent based search, there's a whole strategy we go into for how that comes about, particularly at an early stage. The way the starting point I would state is really leverage partners. As we were building out SEO, we had no SEO presence companies around for 20, 30 years prior to US building. 20 years building SEO strategies. And so one way we were really able to get in there was through partnerships. HubSpot posting articles on our behalf and linking back to us Pipedrive doing the same thing and really creating a great partnership network from a distribution standpoint. So I won't go too far into the strategies there, but I think it's organizationally focused and different for every company.

And just to clarify, when you say partnerships, are you talking about a marketing specific partnership or an integration partnership? You guys actually co integrated your products together?

Yeah, there's a number of different partnerships. You know, we only touch slightly on partnerships. You can have marketing partnerships, you have technology partnerships, you can have reseller distributor partnerships and a host of others. As well categorize which ones are great for different types of activities. If it's an integration partnership, really love those. For things like co selling and really driving business that can be referral oriented, there's oftentimes cases where it's better to have a marketing partnership because maybe the technology integration isn't so great, maybe there's no real value on a product side, but it's a great company and you can get and up level your brand by being associated with that company and you and get the positive impact of that. So it can take many different shapes and forms going back to that graph of engagement and market size. Anyone on that engagement side I want to work with. If they want to work with us, I typically want to work with them. If there's a great use case for it and great opportunity for it and then it's what types it's technology and product is it marketing partnership and there's value in all those.

Cool. Thank you. Thank you. Jackie?

Yeah. Hi, I'm Pavian, CEO of Make. We are roughly in this phase that you were describing and you spoke about breaking down the silos. I was curious how you actually did it. I don't know if I'm the expert at breaking down silos. In fact, I think I'm guilty for a lot of them one time or another. My challenge personally is I sit at my desk and I zone in. Going to remote work was like the best thing for my teams because they didn't have to be around me too much. But I think the specific example on the team targets was a really great one. I'll tell you one thing we did on the marketing side. From day one, first off, everybody had variable compensation. Designers had variable compensation on the team. Everyone has variable. They're attached to results because we want the people to care about the results. And so typically how we do variable comp and I think that was one driver but not the ultimate was you'd have your own target and then you'd have a larger target. We call them majors and minors. Majors is what you do. So if you're the inbound lead gen person, your major target is how many leads are you generating. The minor target is who are you? Who are these leads going to? And who's the beneficiary of those leads? Because you have to be accountable to them. So that's your minor target. So that would be the sales organization and how much inbound business are they closing as? We always had majors and minors to make sure there was good alignment from a compensation standpoint and then I think otherwise it's really a cultural element there. The recognizing folks for their successes and their impact and to understanding how they are a part of of the overall vision is something that just gets lost and I was always confused by it but it happens so naturally which is people don't really realize how their work impacts the broader goal. They get siloed and they segmented and you have these swim lanes sort of start and so one easy way is just to show people how their impact how their work is impacting the overall growth target or whatever the main ambition is for the company. If you can do that, highlight those individuals I think that's a great basis to start from. And then I also recommend talking to Gianna right here who is the expert on this topic. Okay do we wrap up? Okay excellent. Well thank you all for your time today. Feel free to come out if any more questions and happy sestering know if I pull that off.