Hello everyone. Welcome to our fireside chat on what fuels rapid business growth. My name is Jes Kirkwood, and I'm a Senior Content Marketer here at Twilio Segment. Segment is a customer data platform that helps every team access clean and reliable customer data to make real-time decisions, personalize their customer experiences, and ultimately accelerate business growth. To better understand how best-in-class companies build and operate their growth organizations, Twilio Segment recently interviewed the leaders of a dozen high-performing growth teams. We then performed a thematic analysis to identify trends in the data. Today, we're going to share our top three takeaways, and our panelists will discuss why they think we're seeing these trends in the industry. Looking over our agenda, we're first going to introduce our panelists, then share the key takeaways from our 2021 Growth Report, and then do a quick audience Q&A.
If you have any questions during the webinar, feel free to leave a comment in the chat, and we'll address them during the Q&A at the end of the webinar. On to introductions. I'm joined today by three remarkable growth leaders, Mona Nasiri, James de Feu, and Grace Bacon. Mona, do you wanna kick us off with your introduction?
Hi. Sure. Thanks, Jes. I need to apologize to everyone for my voice. I have a little cold, so as a result, I think I need to keep it short and to the point that I think some audience might appreciate. Mona Nasiri here. I'm Director of Growth and Monetization at Zendesk. I've been at Zendesk for close to four years now. It has been an amazing journey. When I joined Zendesk, we were at 1,200 employees, $400 million ARR. We are at 5,500 employees, over $1.2 billion ARR right now. Obviously, not all of it comes from self-service growth. As we will talk about this more, as the company has matured, there would be a shift to sales enterprise motion.
I've seen the company getting to this size and scale, and it has been an amazing learning opportunity, especially as my recent focus on growth has matured with the company's growth. That's it for me. Thanks for having me.
Awesome. Thanks, Mona. James, do you wanna introduce yourself next?
Yeah, of course. I feel like maybe Mona and I might have the same thing. I also have a sniffly nose today, so I apologize. Yeah, my name is James. I head up the self-serve growth function at Klaviyo. Klaviyo is its own marketing data warehouse in itself, so we offer everything from email marketing, SMS marketing, et cetera. When I joined 10 months ago, the Klaviyo team, we didn't have a growth function. We didn't have a self-serve function. We noticed that we had a massive chunk, massive percent of our revenue was coming in through self-serve, but that was all organic. I was tasked to actually build out the team from scratch. From there, we were able to build up different sub-functions on the team.
When I joined, I think it was around 29 in marketing total. We're tipping 92 at the moment, which is massive over the last 10 months. Growth team has gone from zero. We're at 10 now, with headcount to go up to 15. Yeah, looking forward to talk all things growth. My background is kind of diverse, kinda like the people that we've brought on. Spent a lot of time originally in analytics, then moved into sales, and then held probably half a dozen roles across marketing and growth functions.
Awesome. Grace, we'd love to hear from you as well.
Yeah. Thank you, Jes. Great to be here with you all. I'm Grace Bacon. I'm the VP of Growth at Showpad. Similar to James, I'm actually in the process of establishing growth function at Showpad. I joined eight months ago, so I'm working with the executive and leadership teams to sort of identify what our core priorities will be heading into next year based on some of the initial learnings we've had this year. Really looking forward to kind of building out our team.
We are presently a team of three, but expanding that, and really looking forward to the part of the discussion where we talk a bit more about the sort of ideal structure of a growth function, because I think as we look at it at Showpad, we're really seeing this as something that will be highly cross-functional. I'm looking forward to hearing the perspectives of the other members here today. Thank you.
Awesome. Thank you all for being here today. That's awesome. I just see in the chat that someone's asking, could we briefly explain what self-serve growth is? Do any of you wanna take a stab at that just to clarify for our audience?
I can jump in 'cause I think, that's actually in my job title, so I thought it would be able to answer that question. Yeah, so growth obviously has so many different meanings across the industry. Growth hacking, growth marketing, self-serve growth. What that is, the term growth is obviously continuous across all those different functions. The self-serve aspect is looking to ways we can actually drive almost like product-led growth, so conversion and actions through self-serve mechanism that don't have to go through a person. It's one to many, if you will. It's a scaled approach to engagement and conversion.
Awesome. Thank you. I'm sure our audience appreciates it.
Yeah. To add to that, I think that was a very good explanation. Yeah, you may see the title of growth in, for example, sales or the different parts of the org, but the focus of this panel, and especially as of recently, I've seen when folks use the term growth in our space technology. It's more referring to the product-led growth, as James explained. We basically automate the process of bringing customers on board through building that funnel in product. We'll talk more about it, I'm sure, with Je s, but it has that product dev flavor to it. You can expand it to retention, onboarding, and bring the full circle together.
Awesome. Perfect. Let's now dive into the key takeaways from our 2021 growth report. Our first takeaway is that the discipline of growth is maturing. You know, as we were just talking about a second ago, you know, what started out as growth hacking has evolved into a legitimate discipline. Executives and board members are now hungry for growth leaders who are known for being methodical, yet agile team leaders who consistently deliver results. Let's turn it over to our panelists. My first question is: What is it about growth leaders that makes them such a hot commodity today?
I can start. As James introduced himself and Grace, and you might see in my background too, we usually come from a very diverse background, and we have absorbed different sets of skills throughout our career. That's what I think makes a fit growth leader, as you put it, a hot commodity or hard to find, because you need to have a combination of variety of skills and experiences. One is product and productivity, as I said, with product-led growth, understanding that product-led dev cycle. You'll have PMs and designers and engineers. You build things in the product as part of the self-service funnel. One is analytics. It's very based on data and trends constantly. I've been in core product and growth.
Obviously, everyone wants to be data-driven, but growth is another level, how much you want to keep a close eye on your trends. The other one is financial revenue, really understanding that. It's very close to bottom line, everything you're building, and you have to understand how much uplift you're bringing, how much uplift you're planning to bring, or how you're contributing to that self-service revenue. On top of all of these three that I mentioned, you need to still be very strategic. It's very easy for someone who comes from analytics background to get into the details of the data and not be able to step back and see the full business picture. I think for a good growth leader, you need to be able to balance all the four, as I mentioned.
Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. Grace or James, do you wanna go next?
Sure, yeah. I think that Mona did a great job explaining that. Really, that is the criteria, is really being able to have both that well-rounded background, but to be able to tap into that, but also being willing to invest the time it takes to work incredibly cross-functionally and be very methodical about that approach. I think that's one of the things that we've been focused on this year at Showpad, is really narrowing in on what the framework and, like, methodology is for how we, one, define our priorities, but then two, sort of execute those growth experiments.
How do we do that in a way that we're working cross-functionally and taking in the different perspectives as well as the different expertise from different divisions and sort of synthesizing that and being able to prioritize that. I would say the ability to do that level of methodical prioritization and execution, but also be able to understand the cross-functional impact that you could have, so whether that be on the product strategy and adoption or retention or on acquisition and the way that this connects, you know, directly connects to the company's bottom line. I think being results-oriented and having a really methodical approach to it. It also is, you know, an interesting time to sort of bring in companies.
I mean, individuals within companies who can accelerate and serve as these accelerators, especially given how the past couple years have been and the sort of business climate that we've all been in. To be able to come in at this point and add sort of rocket fuel to a company's trajectory, that being your sort of underlying KPI, it's exciting. It also takes a lot of prioritization and focus, and I think that ability to be able to focus and have a clear approach to how you do that and have buy-in on that approach is really what I'm seeing as sort of our path forward and what I think is what sort of unites everybody in that growth function.
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. James, what about you?
Yeah. I think Grace and Mona answered that really well. I try and do my best not to repeat anything, but yeah, I think probably from my experience, when I think about growing out different teams, the reason the role is such a hot commodity in itself is because it's perceived to be difficult to hire because of everything that the team said already around the different skill sets, the diverse backgrounds. A lot of time, if you go looking specifically for growth experts, that's it. You're competing against the top names in the industry, and it's really hard to attract that talent. When you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, I always think of all these.
Most people having, like, a T set of knowledge, where you're really deep on some certain expertise, and then you've got a wide periphery or broad understanding around other parts of the business. When you think of really impactful growth professionals, in my eyes anyway, they're the ones that maybe approach this with that deep T in analytics and numbers and be data-driven, and you can be passionate and interested and always ask the questions why and try to problem solve where possible, and that should excite you. It's having that broad spectrum view or that like landscape view of your environment. I think that comes with a bit of experience, it comes with curiosity. When you can marry those two together, you're an incredibly powerful person for your industry and for your company that way.
Overall, what makes a hot commodity is that curiosity and that interest to actually solve problems and make impacts in your product's life cycle or product roadmap.
Awesome. Yeah. Thank you all. It sounds like, you know, we're really looking at growth leaders as hot commodities because they're able to both dive in deep and have that big picture view. That's really what I'm hearing across your answers. That cross-functional piece as well, as Grace mentioned. You know, being able to work across the company, and I think having a diverse skill set is definitely helpful with that. Perfect. Yeah. On the screen, you'll see a quote by Thibaut Imbert, who's the VP of Growth at GitHub. He was another participant in this report. You know, he said, "People think that growth is a shortcut, but there's a science to growth and a strategy, a very clear understanding of the outputs and inputs." My next question is really around that.
Like, how can we overcome this growth as a shortcut perception about our industry?
Yeah. I can jump on this one 'cause I know, I think the rest of the team will have similar thoughts on it, but growth doesn't just happen overnight, and that's something that people think that this is a band-aid solution. You can just build out a growth team, make money straight away. That idea goes totally against the whole ethos of a growth team. If I think about how to be truly effective, you need to actually build on learnings and create iterative testing frameworks. Establishing that foundational loop of analysis, hypothesis, test, learnings, and then right back at analysis again, that's the best and only way you're really gonna unlock reliable growth within your business, I think.
Yeah, I agree. Establishing that growth cycle and making sure that it is informed by data is so critical. I think the word hack gets misinterpreted because I think the concept is that we're looking to extract faster learnings, not to cut corners. I think the word hack has sort of been misinterpreted as, like, sort of take the fastest approach to the desired outcome versus taking a methodical approach that gets you faster learnings, not compromising on the quality of those experiments, but driving forward like an effective process that gets you there and gets you to faster learnings.
Yeah.
Yeah. I would probably say as well there, Grace, it's about having your leaders need to be vocal in that message as well, 'cause I think it's a new concept, a new discipline, so I think you need to have really vocal and organized leaders to actually communicate that. It's really important.
To be a little devil's advocate here, I think, not that it's true to look at growth as a shortcut, but you can get quick wins in smaller startups. That's probably why some of the mentality is coming from. In smaller companies, there are so many low-hanging fruits, and it has been there not under the title of product-led growth per se, but building that self-service funnel, building a trial and then the self-buying experience and then in product onboarding. Usually, it has been maybe part of the product and product marketing now. In our industry, we see the past couple of years, it's coming more together and we have in a lot of companies, a business unit focused on it and all of that.
As the company grows, it becomes harder and it takes longer because all the low-hanging fruits you have, like, gone after. Also, overall, as any company matures, the motion from C-suite and executive goes towards enterprise sales. That's where all the eyes will turn from self-service growth. Actually, that's the right path of maturity. When you're smaller, you cannot afford to go build for the needs of one enterprise company and lose sight of everyone else. You want to build that bottom-up motion, your self-service funnel, and bring the consistent, however small, revenue. Then any company after that, as they mature, they turn their head more, focusing on enterprise sales, like expanding their sales, org, and their enterprise motion, how to go after those bigger companies, land bigger deals. That's the part of maturity of any company.
Because of that, it becomes increasingly harder. It takes longer. Okay, what else we can do in self-service motion to increase, and bring uplift that would be even noticeable with the uplift that, we get from our enterprise sales that they can land multimillion-dollar deals constantly, right? There is that thing, I think, when you talk about, quick wins. I think the bigger the company becomes, the harder it gets.
Yeah. Thank you for all those perspectives. I think, you know, as we attempt to overcome that perception, like you said, you know, there is a requirement on behalf of like leadership and whatnot, to, you know, really communicate that well. It definitely does change across companies and, you know, different sizes, different industries, things like that. Awesome. Let's move on to the next takeaway. Our second takeaway is that growth leaders drive organizational innovation. Our report really revealed that, you know, thanks to their expertise in digital transformation, best-in-class growth leaders are rewarded with the freedom to make key organizational decisions. With this power, they leverage cutting-edge organizational designs such as cross-functional growth squads to maximize their team's performance.
My question for panelists is just like, what is it about cross-functional growth pods that are so transformative?
I can jump in if you like. This topic is quite close to my heart just because, yeah, I've had to do it in two different companies. I've only managed to get 50% over the line in my current company, so we're like, right in the throes with the Chief Product Officer at the moment to get resources for this. When I think about what's so transformative about a growth pod, it's the agility that they offer. That's what makes them so effective, and the opportunity also to go deeper and optimize experiences without potential shackles of maintenance.
When I think about agility, every company, I can't remember, I think it was Grace or Mona mentioned this at the top, like, of the call, but every company likes to think that they can act fast and respond in real time and that they're agile, but the truth of it is we're all a lot more siloed than we actually want to believe. Each sub-team or each sub-function has their own objectives, their own KPIs, and that usually results in this kind of pull-push relationship when they're trying to, for example, drive or introduce their own new meaningful experiences for users, but we are focused on potential monetization or optimization of the user experience.
It's super important that setting up a team that has the agility to shift their focus as they learn and iterate allows you to connect with users in that kind of in their real-time, emotional real-time, actually, is the way to think about it. On the maintenance piece, like growth teams should never, like growth professionals are like we talked about a minute ago, they're really skilled, cross-functionally knowledgeable individuals. They shouldn't be spending time on fixing bad tech or maintaining experiences. That's part and parcel of what the product team is part of their remit. By having that delineation between a growth pod and a product owner, you basically give the freedom to that growth pod to solely focus on high revenue or high impact initiatives.
Yeah, that's a really good point. I would also add to that that in addition to their ability to be agile, I think one of the reasons that this cross-functional nature actually came to be was it allows you to access cross-functional insights, perspectives, and expertise. In addition to that, you can now source growth opportunities with a diverse background and a diverse team, as well as like the skills to then deploy and act on those. I think that's one of the things I've noticed. Of course, I'm in the, you know, early stages. We've just formed our growth team in the past eight months.
That's one of the things that I've really learned is like the more cross-functional we make the team, the more diverse perspectives that we get and the way that we look at problems we're trying to solve through different lenses. In addition to that, it also sort of grounds some of the growth priorities that we have in mind or that we're aligning with our executive team on in their cross-functional impact. Like in the impact that they would have on our roadmap, in the impact that they would have on our go-to-market strategy, so that way we're understanding like the full influence both on the product side as well as on the go-to-market side.
I think and again, it varies. Growth is something that every company does it differently in terms of org structure. When companies are smaller, I see more cross-functional, and then when they mature, they have the matrix model. At Zendesk, we have gone through all of that, and right now we have that matrix model that we have PMs and designers and engineers. I saw you mentioned it in your report too, Jes. Each of them roll up to their respective orgs, like to head of design, to head of engineering, to head of product. They are part of the growth team. In that sense, if you think about it's not any different from any other product dev team, right?
It was the same when I was in core product at Zendesk. You have PMs, engineers, designers, each of them, they are part of their own org, and they come together for a launch or for an initiative. In this case, it's product growth. The piece that I've seen is a little different from core product. It's just that heavy dependence on data and analytics. We also have a dedicated analytics team that support us. Does that answer the question, Jes, do you think?
Yeah, I think you know.
I probably jumped the next question as part of this.
Yeah, it definitely does lead into our next question. Just to kinda summarize, you know, it sounds like cross-functional growth pods are transformative because of their nature of being cross-functional, of course, but also because of their agility, and just generally their
I like the word agility. Yes, that's.
Yeah
the main difference.
Yeah.
Usually, with any other thing in a product, you're talking longer life cycles and with growth, it's very agile, it's very fast. You're constantly, for example, testing, A/B testing or experimenting or looking at your trends and then prioritizing something and then shipping something. Usually they are, they require, usually not always, shorter. They're like quick launches also, a little different from what you see in your core product of.
Yeah, certainly. Yeah. You kinda lead us to our next question, which is why do you think matrix organizational structures are so popular today? Because what we're seeing in our report was both that, you know, these kinda cross-functional teams exist, but also that they're matrixed up to their own organizations, you know, within the company, despite coming together as a team. Yeah. Mona, since you were just talking, maybe, you know, let's start with you and then we can go to James or Grace.
I think I covered it. I pass it on to the rest of the speakers.
Okay, great.
Yeah, definitely. I think that a lot of this was covered previously, but I think Grace really called it out that communication is, or collaboration I should say, is probably one of the biggest advantages of it. I mean, it helps with alignment with other organizations. It also helps with lobbying. When you wanna get stuff done, having an insider who's intimate with your roadmap, with your plans, it really helps you fight your case on getting stuff done on time. Also another big advantage I think of matrix is, it's kind of the learning and development of your people. If you think about it, up their hierarchy, like if I have data scientists, for example, on our side, but I do not have a data science background. I can only offer that person so much.
Them being in this matrix structure, they're learning from experts in their fields all the way up that hierarchy. Across horizontally, they're also being exposed to PNM, they're being exposed to product analytics, they're being exposed to like all different avenues of experimentation. It almost builds those super professionals, like those. That plays back to that T formula I spoke about earlier, where you have a really deep understanding and knowledge set in one area, but you're branching out, and it makes you an incredibly attractive kind of candidate or employee.
Yeah. I think James makes a really good point that, cross-functional growth teams and this sort of matrix structure gives those team members, those growth team members, the ability to sort of benefit from the exposure to the sort of rapid experimentation and the cross-functional nature of this team, and the focus and way in which this team can have a sort of bigger reach.
They then have the benefit of sitting within their own discipline and having the sort of structure and learnings and mentorship from being within their own discipline, and sort of reporting into someone who also has that, who has a more sort of deeper, as James used the example with analytics, a sort of deeper expertise in that area, so that way they can keep learning and sort of bring those learnings and that exposure back to the growth pod, so it doesn't become its own siloed thing.
Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. It's definitely something that, you know, we're able to grow these super professionals. I liked that term that you used, James, you know, where we have this expertise, you know, in that T, but also that like breadth of knowledge and experience that just kinda creates this like, yeah, magnification almost, of a professional. And yeah. Thank you guys for sharing those perspectives. Our third takeaway is that quality data fuels rapid business growth. Our report revealed that to grow faster than the competition, high-performing growth leaders recognize that both their teams and their technology need near constant access to accurate real-time data. For this reason, growth leaders prioritize implementing quality data infrastructure and governance early in their tenures.
Panelists, like, what would you say are the benefits of having accurate real-time data available to every team across the company?
It's very important. It's, as I mentioned, one of the foundations of any growth team. Different companies do it differently. If you have the resources, you have the data team in-house, you build your dashboards, you instrument data. One piece that is very important is that you need to build it into your dev processes that, for any launch, the data is instrumented right, that you can later report back on it. One process that I established as when I joined the growth team at Zendesk was. Again, bringing the experience from core product here. You define what are the checklists that, for example, your growth PMs go through as they think about a launch. Obviously, there is like hypothesis, solutioning. They go through all of these stages.
Very early on, especially for growth, they need to also think about what is my success metrics? Do I have the data to track against it? Do I have the baseline? Is the right data instrumentation in place that they have to work with the data engineers to make that happen? Because a lot of times you may end up with having the launch and then, oh, we cannot even track that piece of data, for example. That's key. I know that there would be probably another question about external tools, but I leave it at that for now. Data instrumentation is very important.
Grace, do you wanna go next?
Sure, yeah. Echoing what Mona said, incredibly important, crucial, both in the growth team's ability to probe for growth opportunities and make sure that they're making informed decisions about what is prioritized, but then to be able to track the efficacy of that, whether that be within the product or on the acquisition side of things, and making sure that everything that we're doing is through the lens of being data-driven in a way that we're sharing those insights, not just amongst this team, but sharing those results outward too. I think that having that access to that real-time data allows us to be more informed in the way that we both identify, but also the way that we sort of report out and show the impact of the growth experiments that we're running.
Yeah. I think this one's like everyone said, a bit of a no-brainer. Like to me, above all else, accurate data leads to better decision-making. Like, that's when I think about what we do overall. It's better decision-making, which is absolutely crucial for the business. With good data, you can accurately wrap your head around maybe user or things like user behaviors, which then unlocks user pain points, which then leads to optimizations. When we think of how all that plays together, it all drives better engagement, increased revenue, and you make a case it reduced costs as well. When you think about if you have like you could save money, for example, that would otherwise be spent on ineffective decisions, poor strategies, poor tactics, so it fuels every corner of the business.
Yeah. Yeah, I think, like I loved what Grace said about, you know, you're kind of using this data to, you know, figure out where the problems and gaps are, where the opportunities are and whatnot, but you're also using it to like, report into leadership and make sure that you're communicating those results across the organization. Yeah, I guess I'm just curious, like Mona, you had kinda mentioned this, what technologies are must-haves when it comes to your data infrastructure?
Because we have a lot of resources, we are fortunate. We have a big data team that support us, and we build a lot of what we need in-house, like the dashboards that we need. Again, that's why it's important that you have the right processes, that the data is instrumented right, and everything is documented and everyone knows what's going on because it quickly becomes an ocean of flags and fields that people cannot make sense of it, very clean data instrumentation and documentation. In addition to what we have and build in-house, we use other tools too, obviously Google Analytics, Pendo. We have our own dashboard for visualization, data visualization called Explore that we also sell. On top of that, we also use Tableau.
Yeah, these are some of the tools we use.
Yeah, I can jump in. Yeah, similar to Mona, I've been really fortunate my last two companies, so Klaviyo currently and Dropbox previously, we've been relatively spoiled for choice on what tools we can get our hands on. To be truly effective, I mean, once you can trust your data, that's the only thing that matters. How you get your hands on it is the next thing. I always see it in two tiers, is your data trustworthy and is it accessible? If you can do those two things, you can get your job done. You can also go out and spend millions of dollars on loads of tools, obviously, and it makes it quicker to get to both of those. To like, to get the ball rolling for us, I think of like a central operating system.
You're thinking about GA, Salesforce, Zendesk, Heap, anything like that. You wanna be able to move data from, for example, those systems into your warehouse. You're looking at ELTs, ETLs, anything around that side of the business. You have your centralized data warehouse. You need to be able to pull stuff out of that. We use stuff like Snowflake and Redshift. Then you've got your data modeling layer. This is all things kinda probably a bit more into the data engineering side of business, but being able to manipulate that is really important. Having that visualization aspect. Like when I was talking, we use Tableau, and you can use things like Looker or Chartio, anything like that.
Yeah. For the sake of not being repetitive, since I'm sure we all actually probably share a pretty similar tech stack, echoing the use of many of the tools that they said, we are also reliant on Looker and Tableau and leveraging those two tools. Of course, we're using the you know traditional tech stack of Salesforce, Marketo, you know Datadog. Pendo is a great resource for us as well. Google Analytics, of course. But one of the sort of newer data tools that we're using that we're really impressed by more on the earlier, like if...
When I think about data, just looking at the sort of full customer life cycle, so both in that acquisition stage through to retention, and one on more of the acquisition side of things that we're really sort of seeing benefits around the 6sense, so that helps us with lead scoring and predictive analytics there, and that's one that I think is quite interesting, and a sort of newer one that we've adopted within the past year. But again, yeah, we are similar in terms of the tech stack that we are using to Mona and James, and I think that's because those tools work, and because there's now a shared language of how those tools work in different companies.
When different individuals come from different teams or different backgrounds, like the cross-functional nature of a growth team, they then can have that familiarity with those tools. As part of our tech strategy, we're really trying to consolidate the data coming out of these tools into one single place. Of course, if we all sort of did an audit, we'd probably have a fairly long list across the go-to-market and product sides in terms of the sources of data. How can we sort of see that in a more unified place? That's definitely a core strategy and focus for our data team right now.
Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. It sounds like there are a variety of tools that you guys use to make sure that data is, you know, clean and reliable. You know, James, I love what you said about, you know, having it accessible and having it trustworthy. You know, those are two huge things that, you know, we really focus on here at Segment. I think that, you know, it's just, it's great to hear that you guys are using so many different sources and destinations for your data. Excuse me. Next we're gonna do a quick audience Q&A. We've had tons of questions come in throughout the webinar. If you haven't already, please add your questions to the Q&A section of Zoom, and we'll direct them to the appropriate panelist. All right.
Let's see. All right. Someone has asked, "What's the biggest challenge you face as growth directors when it comes to using data to fuel insights for action?" I'll say that again. "What's the biggest challenge you face as growth directors when it comes to using data to fuel insights for action?
Obviously, I think similar to every other function with data, it is not that hard to twist the story. It's important to have clarity in your narrative and look at the big picture, again, I emphasize. You may just zoom in on what this trend is telling me and lose sight of, oh, there is something bigger going on outside, and that's why we see this. There is nothing wrong with this part of the funnel. That comes with partnering with your peers in marketing, SEO, like the web traffic that comes. Sometimes there is like a big campaign running.
You see a big increase in your traffic, but it's not high quality traffic, so if you're not converting them at previous rate, there's nothing wrong with your funnel. It's just you are bringing a bigger traffic that is not high quality leads. It's not only data. You need to have qualitative also understanding. Sometimes there are things that you cannot even answer with data. You need to have UX research. The bigger questions, the whys and hows, you can run a UX research study on them. Even with the things that you look at the data to get answers for, it's important not to only zoom in the data and get the other pieces and the big picture outside too, not to be misled by just looking at some trends.
Yeah, I like that answer. I think that's really important as well. Like, whenever we set up an experiment, we've always outlined our primary and secondary metrics, but then we'd also look to include something along the lines of guardrail metrics. We're seeing are we damaging the rest of the user journey in any shape or form. I think one of the challenges we face sometimes is more so on how long to keep that net open for because there are impacts that you can make when you run experiments or tests that can have knock-on effects that can take weeks to actually materialize. I think that's something to be really cognizant of. For us, though, it's if I think about what's the biggest challenge, it boils back to what we talked about. It's the data integrity piece.
Before anything goes up to, for example, leadership, we wanna make sure things are triple-checked, and we are sure that they're accurate. In our current setup, we've had issues with our GA. We've had to clean it up a few times. That leaves that doubt and questions then, are we being successful in our experiments? Are we making the right decisions? For me, above all else, it's the data integrity.
Perfect. Yeah. Thanks for answering that.
I want to take, if you don't mind, Jes. I saw a couple of really good questions that I want to make sure they get answers, especially for attendees, with like coming from smaller startups or smaller companies. I hope that we can help them here. One is, what if my product is only focused on SMBs and not on enterprise? Self-service product-led growth is your primary focus, especially when you're smaller. SMB is usually for enterprise motion is when you need the sales on the ground. For SMB, especially when earlier on, this product-led growth and focusing on that should be what you should move forward with. The other one was, I think I read somewhere in the questions, how can I...
I have a small startup, how can I get it from 0 to 100? With product-led growth. I want to clarify something. Sometimes, people obviously, you, even if you go Google, you see. You start with, for example, your SEO, search engine optimization, and you can have campaigns. You can pay for ads, paid search. It starts with bringing traffic, right? You bring the traffic to your website, and then, in your product, you build, am I offering a trial? How would I engage these, this traffic that I brought to my website, and how I can transition them to become a paid customer or a customer, maybe even if you're a smaller startup, you're fine with a freemium, just, you want to increase your user counts.
Before you invest in your paid search SEO campaigns, first, at least polish a little your website, whatever your self-service funnel, however it makes sense for your business. You don't want to put all of that money and resources, bring the traffic, and users these days, they usually have high expectation. They can easily, "Oh, this is like, this is slow," or like the page is not clean or polished. You may just lose them right there. Your money and investment is gone. Start with, first building something that is at least good enough. I know with smaller companies it's harder, but at least good enough that you're confident you can convert some of the traffic that you bring. You can focus on SEO, paid search campaigns, and all of that. Hope I could answer those two questions.
There are some that, sorry, Jes, I pass it on to you. I just wanted to make sure I get those two.
That's okay. Do James or Grace, do you have anything to add to those questions since they were brought up?
No, Grace, if you wanna, I can jump in if you like. Yeah, like I think Mona covered that really clearly. So I think if I remember correctly, the first one was what if my product is only SMB? That's the only space I've worked in, to be honest with you. Like, growth doesn't fit as well for enterprise. I know when I was at Dropbox, for example, that was our key segment. We were focused on SMB. At Klaviyo, we branch more into the entrepreneur, upper entrepreneur, lower SMB segments. But that's the way to unlock that potential within that audience. You don't wanna spend a lot of money on resources and salespeople, et cetera.
Instead, you can actually put a really tight, I hate that term, tiger team, but you can put a really tight tiger team or growth pod in place. It starts at the top. It's to understand your users, find out their pain points, understand their buying motivations. Once you get that level of research and insight, and you have your product market fit, then it's just customizing those experiences and trying alternative versions to see which resonates best with those users. You'd be amazed how you can bootstrap this at the start. I know that's what we did at Dropbox. We got something out the door with almost zero resources. It's just trial and error. It's that elite dose around growth, which is learn, test, learn. Learn, test, analyze, and then repeat.
Perfect. Yeah. Grace, if you don't have anything to add, that's kinda what I'm sensing, but-
Oh, yeah. No, I was just gonna say, this really goes back to what Mona was saying in the beginning, is that focus that James highlighted on agility is a lot easier when you're smaller, and it's a lot easier when you aren't targeting enterprise, where there's slower sales cycles. There's a lot more that goes into that. The expectations, the bar is a lot higher, a lot more customized for those types of accounts. It's actually a really exciting place to be, if that's your core focus. Probably allow you to have a lot faster experimentation, and also be able to see results in a shorter period and have a bigger impact on the company at that time in their trajectory too.
Yeah. Perfect. Awesome. I think we're coming up to the end of it. You know, there's so many good questions here that we could answer. I'm thinking maybe we can, you know, answer some of these, async. A big thanks to our audience members for submitting those questions and, of course, to our panelists for sharing their two cents. Just before you all go, we have two quick offers for you today. One is just if you're interested in getting actionable insights about how to build and operate a high-performing growth team, download our latest report. You know, our panelists today were some of the participants who contributed to this report.
You know, really were able to get some of those actionable insights that are just, you know, gonna be helpful for you to grow and build and develop, you know, your growth team, and help that growth team, you know, drive success. Then the other thing that I just wanted to say is that if you wanna speak with an expert about how Segment can help you drive rapid business growth, just respond to our poll, which I'm setting up right now, and we'll connect you with someone. We'll have someone reach out to you just to make sure that we can consult on, you know, what your business case is, how we can help. Yeah. Thanks for everyone for attending. Super appreciated. You know, I think it's been lovely to hear from you all today.
You all have such great experience and insights, and it's just we so appreciate you sharing them with us today. Yeah, that's about it.
Thank you for having us, and great to join you both on this call.
It was great meeting all the other panelists too. Thank you, Jes.
Yeah.
Yeah. Much appreciated, everyone. Thank you.