Achieving a $4.5B Valuation Through Product-Led Growth with Marie Gassée, VP of Growth at Confluent

This episode features an interview with Marie Gassée, Vice President of Growth at Confluent, the enterprise event streaming platform provider that garnered a $4.5B valuation last year. 

Prior to Confluent, Marie served as Senior Director and General Manager of the Online Sales Business Unit at Box, and she holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

On this episode, Marie discusses the heavily data-driven nature of her role, the product-led growth model that she embraces to maximize revenue and ROI, and the leadership philosophies she uses to trust and empower her teams.

Key Takeaways

• SEO and SEM can be some of the lowest hanging fruit and some of the highest leverage tactics in your arsenal. Even small changes can make a meaningful impact on your business
• Data data data. If you’re a data-driven organization, partner closely with your analytics folks or your data science team, and you can also see additional benefit from hiring marketers with a level of analytics proficiency
• Hire great people that you trust, then open the purse strings and advocate for them

Quotes

“I'm really into the product led growth model...we focus on acquiring folks into the product, getting them onboarded, getting them active…Really trying to view it as kind of a pipeline mechanism. If I do my job well, I have a bunch of small teams active in the product, not spending a ton of money, but getting value from the product. And then we focus on handing that off to sales in a thoughtful way where they can add value and they can think about having a longer term relationship with Confluent.”

“The way I approach things is really to build a super strong partnership with our analytics folks, and then do everything in my power to unblock them--to give them budget, to help them hire, to give them head count…Ultimately I'm just going to sign the check for whatever my team says is good. That's my mentality: hire great people that you trust, and then if they say they need something, my job is to open the purse strings and advocate.”

“I think a lot of marketers maybe aren't as close to their data scientists or their analytics partners. For me, the quantitative part of marketing is what my job is, and so we certainly can't do that without our data science counterparts. The other thing I'll say is just a level of analytics proficiency for everyone on my team. That's another way to partner really well, is just making sure we hire folks who can self-serve a lot of their data, who can do high-level analyses, who value our data scientists and who love partnering with them. That's a big part of how we structure our team.”

“On the web optimization side, I enjoy it because it's like a puzzle…It's such a fun tactic, but also crazy impactful. You can make changes to your CTA or to the look and feel of a page and have meaningful downstream impact on your business. Not just in B2C, very much in B2B as well. I find that to be such an impactful, but also a satisfying tactic. You can do an AB test and meaningfully change the direction of your company. That's so insane and should be fully exploited.”

Sponsor

Demand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links

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