Growth Hacks

Partnerships are at the core of Spryker, a growing e-commerce company. Because Spryker works with customers across B2C, B2B, and marketplace sales, the company’s ability to drive growth for its partners through responsive, agile solutions is of paramount importance. Spryker also values creating a transparent and trust-driven culture both within its organization and with its partners. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” says Edmund Frey, Spryker’s Chief Revenue Officer.

In today’s episode of Growth Hacks, Kunal and Katja sit down with Edmund to discuss how Spryker defined its company culture. Edmund walks them through the three steps that Spryker takes when defining its partnership vision, and how it does so while mitigating conflict between various parts of its sales apparatus. He also breaks down Spryker’s playbook to global expansion and how it diversifies the staff across its partnership teams, and explains how Spryker draws its partners into its community on an ongoing basis to drive awareness, excitement, and shared learnings. 

For many years, the path to market leadership for software companies was viewed as creating a best of breed defined solution, cornering the market, and keeping competitors at bay for as long as possible. But as the pace of technology has accelerated, the companies that are best poised for long-term success are ones that can adapt and work in tandem with their customers to co-create adaptable modular technologies that drive revenue growth. According to Mark McDonald, a vice president and Gartner Fellow at the information technology and research advisory firm Gartner, the key to finding high-growth in an increasingly competitive technology landscape is by creating products that can sit at the center of a customer’s business model, even if it means working on new solutions together. In this episode of Growth Hacks, Kunal and Katja chat with Mark about ways in which high-tech companies are moving away from defined solutions models and adopting generative approaches to unlock revenue growth for their clients, and catalyzing uber-growth for themselves in the process. 

While CRM platforms have been a cornerstone of the sales industry for decades, many parts of the B2B sales playbook can still reflect decision making from decades past. Whether it’s faulty data capture, cumbersome manual data entry, or inefficient forecasting, the digital revolution has yet to fully transform B2B sales organizations away from their traditional practices. While following the tried and true strategies may yield some success, leveraging AI-powered data allows sales organizations the opportunity to better understand their buyers, cut down on time spent attempting to predict the future, and close more deals. 

In this episode of Growth Hacks, Kunal and Katja are joined by Stephen Messer, the founder of Collective[i], the leader in AI-enabled digital sales and customer relationship management. Stephen walks the group through some of the biggest learnings he and his team have seen on Collective[i]’s data-powered platform, and how they can be used to relieve many of the pain points he continues to see B2B sales organizations struggle with. He also breaks down how decision making has shifted in recent years, and walks the team through some of the biggest myths he sees persisting in modern B2B sales today.

Nerdy (NYSE: NRDY), the EdTech leader behind companies like Varsity Tutors, which offer live instruction, online learning, self-study, and enrichment programs, saw its demand grow exponentially over the last few years, as parents and schools looked for ways to engage students throughout the pandemic and months of distance learning. The shift in learning from offline to online was already well underway, and as we’ve seen in many industries, the pandemic accelerated a systemic change that the company was custom-built to address. That demand alone would have been enough to drive demonstrable growth, yet Nerdy also chose to rework its marketing strategy and adapt its core product to be an even better partner to existing educational institutions. Doing so allowed Nerdy more ways to meet their customers – families and schools – where they were at and help address the critical learning challenges faced during these unprecedented times.

In this episode of Growth Hacks, Kunal and Katja speak to Adam Weber, Chief Marketing Officer at Nerdy, about the lessons he’s learned overseeing all aspects of the company’s marketing, including performance, product marketing, content, and customer relationship management. In addition to crafting Nerdy’s external narrative when the company was going public in 2021, Adam led a seismic shift in the company’s existing search-focused go-to market strategy, which helped build customer trust and credibility with pandemic-weary parents, teachers, and educational organizations.

In a competitive sales landscape, throwing out the playbook may seem like a bold strategy. But that’s exactly what Scott Santucci, president of sales enablement consulting firm Growth Enablement, has been advising clients to do. Commercial systems designed even as late as 2019 are often full of friction that can slow down the actual sales process. Instead, businesses should focus on systematically reducing the obstacles that stand in the way of sales progress to accelerate enablement.

In today’s episode of Growth Hacks, Katja and Kunal speak with Scott about how he’s viewing the evolution of enablement and adapting the traditional customer-centric approach to unlock value at a faster pace for both businesses and their customers. Scott provides actionable tips on accelerating sales enablement, and walks us through combining perspectives from sales, marketing, and product to create a route to value. He also shares his strategies for simplifying metrics to measure commercial health, breaks down the importance of including diverse stakeholders from across the organization, and reveals his top tips for salespeople just starting out.

Building out a global communications operation that can create visibility across multiple markets can feel like a wild jumble of storytelling across time zones, especially in a startup’s nascent years. That’s why the marketing and communications team at Cognite, a SaaS company providing data services to industrial organizations, aligned behind a single goal: creating visibility immediately. However, the Cognite team took a unique approach to the task at hand. Rather than blitzing journalists across the globe as its first order of business, the team worked to build visibility inside Cognite, recruiting outside the box spokespeople and identifying unearthed story ideas that resonated with journalists. 

In today’s episode of Growth Hacks, Katja and Kunal speak with Michelle Holford, the Oslo-based global head of public relations at Cognite. Michelle walks us through the power of relationship building both within your own organization and with journalists, and why nurturing those connections are a fundamental piece of Cognite’s PR strategy. She also explains how Cognite keeps employees connected across the globe, how to create a message in a box and how their media strategy helps Cognite constantly mine for creative stories.

When open-source database company Redis decided to undergo a rebrand, their first order of business was to identify what the rebrand was solving for. In Redis’ case, they wanted to connect even deeper with the developer community, and unify the entire Redis community towards a single vision. To harness the power of the developer community, Redis adopted product-focused storytelling and prioritized building a growth funnel to fuel bottoms-up adoption. By building that bridge between the Redis product and its key audiences, the company now has a pipeline to a community that not only knows about early life-cycle Redis products, but whose usage can better inform Redis’ demand funnel as well.

In the latest episode of Growth Hacks, Katja and Kunal speak with Mike Anand, CMO of TCV portfolio company, Redis. Mike explains how Redis derived its product-focused marketing strategy as part of its larger rebrand, and how that strategy has helped Redis build a vocal community of developers. He also talks through his top priorities as he makes Redis’ marketing operations more agile and data-driven, and how Redis has taken a use-case-first approach with analysts to build stronger relationships and garner better coverage. 

Every communications professional has seen it: a tweet or post from a journalist bemoaning the raft of impersonal or irrelevant pitches they receive on a daily basis. So how can companies cut through the noise to place stories that reflect well upon the brand, and move the needle when it comes to brand perception and growth? 

In the latest episode of Growth Hacks, Katja and Kunal speak with Andrew Vontz, VP of Communications at Strava. Andrew, a former LA Times journalist, gives us his insider perspective into what it takes to place a story that reporters are motivated to tell, and how to prepare internal stakeholders on what that story might look like when it runs. He also talks about how organizations can use earned media to drive growth, and how to conduct crisis communications prep before disaster strikes. Andrew also walks us through Strava’s playbook on establishing its purpose-driven narrative both internally and externally.

Community building is the type of phrase that gets thrown around growth marketing so often it can seem like a box to check, rather than a strategic piece of a comprehensive growth strategy. Still, there is a growing stable of modern brands that have created unique, vocal communities, and leveraged the power of those communities for incredible growth and success.

In the latest episode of Growth Hacks, Katja and Kunal speak with Jonathan Mildenhall, the founder and Chairman of the strategic branding firm, TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, and former CMO of Airbnb. Jonathan recounts his experience with building modern brands that resonate with the communities they serve, and explains how to build a strategic blueprint that allows companies to unlock growth. He also gives us his playbook for building communities that can meaningfully drive growth, and why he believes community building has to come from the very top to be truly effective.

As home buying juggernaut and TCV portfolio company Zillow grew, it placed employee engagement and company culture at the forefront of its operations -- treating employee engagement as a central component to future growth. 

In the latest episode of Growth Hacks, Katja and Kunal are joined by TCV Venture Partner Amy Bohutinsky, former CMO and COO and current board member of Zillow. Amy discusses why Zillow focused on employee engagement and treating employees like other companies do end customers as a driver for growth. She also walks us through her unique perspective on navigating corporate mergers, the metric she thinks more C-suite leaders should be paying attention to and what’s top of mind for board members of technology companies.