Growing a B2B SaaS Company's Marketing Team in an Era of Rapid Expansion

A few weeks ago I had my farewell dinner together with the marketing leadership team. Concluding a period of almost 3 years in which we achieved a lot of things together, as a team. Now that the strong foundation of a growth marketing engine has been built, for me the time has come to take on the next challenge. But before going there I would like to stand still for a moment and pay attention to what we accomplished. During this period of time the entire organization tripled from 300 to more than 1.000 employees. The marketing team grew from 10 to 80 people and the revenue almost quadrupled. A typical B2B marketing journey within the high-growth SaaS and CPaaS arena.

Welcome Covid-19

In early 2020 I stepped into my new office environment and what a headstart! Covid-19 just kicked in and all of a sudden we became part of an era that in hindsight would be the most bizarre one for many of us. Since CM.com was delivering services for the government we were a designated so-called critical supplier, and with sufficient measures, we were allowed to keep our offices open. So from the start, I was able to visit the office and meet most of my colleagues in person. Especially when starting at a new company to me this felt like a privilege, couldn't imagine meeting my new colleagues only through Teams.

The company's ambitions were clear: accelerate growth, expand our international footprint and boost our sales pipeline.

The company's ambitions to me were 100% clear, explained by the two original founders of the company Jeroen and Gilbert respectively CEO and COO. Accelerate growth, expand our international footprint and boost our sales pipeline. The starting point was also clear. A team of about 10 marketing professionals focussed mainly in the past couple of years on exposing ourselves at large tradeshows like the WebSummit and the Mobile World Congres. Besides the fact marketing is much more than organizing tradeshows, the heartbeat of the entire event industry at a global scale stopped. So no such things as events. A greenfield situation with the full support of the original founders. Time to get started!

Blueprints and structure

So where to start? People who used to work with me, know I like to work based on a blueprint that we all agreed upon. The blueprint itself of course is important but not as important as the fact that it was created in a joint effort with the marketing leadership team. The same for the marketing vision, mission and strategy. I took plenty of time for it, meaning I focused for a couple of days making sure we left the building with a piece of paper with our strategy written down on it. These fundamentals formed the healthy breeding ground to build the new marketing organization upon.

1. Creating always-on marketing programs covering multi-phased customer buying journeys for different audiences to identify interest and buying intent
2. Hyper relevant content production, segmented towards functional roles (personas), industries and key propositions
3. Embedded global scalability based on a state-of-the-art tech stack for data (integration) and tooling
4. Agile multi-disciplinary teams in order to adopt ever-changing market circumstances quickly with 100% transparency encouraging early engagement with other disciplines e.g. sales and product

Fairly quickly we had a clear picture of our soll situation and thus were able to start hiring the required marketing professionals. Within a couple of months, we hired about 40 new marketing colleagues. What was the reason for that success? Timing wise due to Covid-19 many marketing agencies took precautions by scaling down their operations. For many of these people, we were able to offer an interesting job. In particular, younger people who were obliged to work from home felt isolated and were desperately looking for inspiring environments other than their apartments. Also having an insourced seasoned pragmatic recruiter really nailed it. The blueprint, architecture and people were there, now we had to make it work.

People, craftmanship and agility

In my previous life at Exact Software we gained a lot of experience working with multi-disciplinary teams according to the scrum collaboration methodology. Combined with our central for local strategy, having central teams creating best practice playbooks for different segments and phases in the buying journey, the guiding principles were clear. Although the team was relatively young in age but also in experience working together as a team, they picked up really quickly. When providing the teams with clear guidance, and blueprints but also the freedom to 'fail often and fail fast', the velocity increased month by month. Internal communication in such fast-changing environments is key. We paid extremely much attention to explaining why we were doing certain things to the entire team.

Central marketing consisted of a brand, demand generation and marketing operations team

We defined different (virtual) scrum roles on top of the specific craftsmanship and skill sets of the individuals, which strengthened each other. Scrum masters, product owners and tribe masters kept everything we created and rolled it out as a team together. Stakeholder management, people, processes, backlog, priorities and quality assurance of everything we did was covered. Sometimes it was difficult for the team members to understand the full picture. In fact, a modern matrix organization was created which sometimes was complex to understand and to work within. But overall and most importantly it worked. Within 18 months we created a growth marketing engine that was building our brand and creating demand in 23 different countries across the globe.

Marketing craftsmanships: Digital Marketing, Communications, Creative, Data & Automation and Product Marketing

The results

Ultimately everything we do as a marketing team in the end you want to see the proof in the end results. Whether it's the design of an online banner, the creation of a nurture flow or setting up a webinar, all should add up to the overall growth ambitions we have as a company. For some of the elements, it is pretty straightforward to link the end results with the originated activities. For others, especially upper funnel activities it is more difficult and simply needs more time and measurement to determine the proof points. Early 2023 we will have full insights into the 2022 results. Since we are a stock-listed company all of these numbers are public. Our early 2020 financial publication shows a 2019 turnover of about 87 million Euros.

As mentioned in our most recent trading update the issued revenue guidance for this year is 300 - 315 million Euros with some downside risk. What a huge accomplishment as a company consisting of 1.000 employees of which most of them, 700 (!), joined in the last 3 years. That means a high-pressure cooker environment with high expectations in terms of agility of the people. So many things that change or aren't there need to be built. A typical environment for me to prosper. A compliment to the original founders who have to adapt and change but also all colleagues that made it happen. And this is just the beginning, we are just scratching the surface talking about conversational commerce.

What a huge accomplishment as a company consisting of 1.000 employees of which most of them, 700 (!), joined in the last 3 years.

Big thank you

A big thank you to Jeroen and Gilbert, the original founders, who gave me the opportunity to jump on this great journey giving me the trust and freedom to do whatever was needed to build this global international marketing engine. Thanks to the entire international marketing team reaching from The Netherlands to the US and from South Africa to China. It was my pleasure to work with all of you coming from 23 different nationalities and cultures. The nice words I received from all of you most recently after my announcement really touched me. Special thanks to my leadership team consisting of Eefje, Wendy, Niels, Twan, Lawrence and Daan. All I described we did as a team and is a joint accomplishment together with all the talented individuals. This was a hell of a ride and man what massive work we delivered. I have full confidence that regardless of the volatile market circumstances you will continue to grow, learn and further accelerate. The foundation is there technically but foremost the trust and atmosphere, a prerequisite for success. All the best! And about my new assignment? Soon this will be released, I will keep you posted!