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SaaStr 317: How To Encourage, Grow and Track Word of Mouth Marketing, How The Rise of Product-Led Growth Changes The Structure of Sales and Marketing & The Biggest Takeaways on Paid vs Organic Marketing From Seeing The Hyper-Growth @ Slack with Rachel Hep

Mar 16, 2020

Rachel Hepworth, VP of Marketing at Pilot with a background at Slack and LinkedIn, shares her insights on driving word-of-mouth marketing and tracking its effectiveness. She discusses the impact of product-led growth on sales and marketing structures. Rachel emphasizes the balance between paid and organic strategies, examining the payback period for investment in growth. With experiences from the hyper-growth phase at Slack, she offers valuable takeaways on creating customer satisfaction and nurturing relationships for sustained success.

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ANECDOTE

From Cheese to SaaS Success

Rachel Hepworth's early marketing career involved a weather derivatives startup, Weather Bill, which later became Climate Corp.
Despite initial struggles with product-market fit and the financial crisis, the company eventually sold to Monsanto for $1 billion.

INSIGHT

Measuring Organic Growth

Organic growth and word-of-mouth are harder to track than paid advertising, but they are not impossible to measure.
Consider tracking organic acquisition growth, referrals, and NPS as indirect measures of word-of-mouth effectiveness.

ADVICE

Exceed Expectations

To boost organic growth, focus on delivering value that significantly exceeds customer expectations.
Don't just meet basic needs; provide unexpected insights or benefits that customers will naturally share with others.

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Rachel Hepworth is VP of Marketing @ Pilot, the startup that offers the best bookkeeping, tax and CFO services for growing businesses. To date they have raised over $58M from some of the best in the business including Index Ventures, John Collison, Paul English, Drew Houston, Frederic Kerrest, Diane Greene and more incredible names. As for Rachel, prior to joining Pilot, she saw the hyper-growth of Slack firsthand enjoying a couple of different roles including Head of Growth Marketing and then also Head of Self Service and Platform Marketing. Before Slack, Rachel spent 4 years at LinkedIn where she led the product marketing team for content experiences. Finally, before LinkedIn, Rachel spent close to 3 years at Climate Corporation, prior to their $1Bn exit to Monsanto.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

How Rachel made her way from marketing manager at Climate Corporation to VP of marketing at Pilot today? What were Rachel’s biggest takeaways from her time seeing the hyper-growth at Slack?
How does Rachel think about organic growth and inciting word of mouth today? How does Rachel think they can be more accurately tracked and measured? How does Rachel think about the optimal ratio of paid to organic in growth? Would Rachel agree in paid, your payback period doubles every $5M you spend?
With the rise of product-led growth, are we seeing a fundamental shift in the structure of sales and marketing? How does Rachel see marketing move ever close to the function of customer success today? What is the optimal way for customer success and marketing to work together?
How does Rachel think about the importance of getting in front of your customers? Why does Rachel believe that data tells you the what and customer conversations tell you the why? What is the right way to structure your customer conversations? Where do so many people go wrong here?

Rachel’s 60 Second SaaStr:

Hardest element of your role with Pilot today?
If Rachel could change one thing about SaaS today, what would it be?
Who is killing it in SaaS marketing? Why?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

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