Growth Hacking with CloudKettle’s CEO, Greg Poirier

Sure. We’re a Salesforce partner and a Google partner. There are thousands of Salesforce partners—probably even more than I realize—so when I started the company, I knew we needed a strong differentiator. I’ve always believed differentiation and following a niche is at the core of good marketing. I also knew I was good at what’s now called sales operations and marketing operations for enterprise B2B SaaS companies—essentially building the machinery that helps them close six-figure deals.

At first, it sounded crazy. Why would these high-flying Silicon Valley companies hire a guy in his basement in eastern Canada? But the internet is a great equalizer, and they did hire me. I spent a lot of time (and will again, once COVID passes) traveling to San Francisco and Seattle. People often ask, “How do you service clients from outside the Bay Area?” But most CMOs and CROs don’t want to see us more than once a month anyway. Yes, we talk to them weekly, but if we showed up in their office more often, they’d start wondering why.

Being so niche worked out great because there’s a strong network effect once you’re in that ecosystem. I already knew a lot of experienced marketing and sales people from Salesforce, and they were being recruited aggressively to build sales and marketing teams at new startups. I was lucky to be tied into that network and to get a lot of great referrals, and that’s how we built our business.

We stay focused on the enterprise side of things and operate in a very white-glove way. Our clients usually invest at least a quarter of a million dollars a year in our services. We work with them on a retainer basis. If a company isn’t big enough to spend at that level, they’re probably not a good fit, because that’s the only way we can deliver that white-glove experience. They sign on with us for 12 months because the systems, processes, and machinery we help build need to be maintained, and it all takes time. If a client can’t commit to a 12-month retainer, there are other consultancies better suited for them.

That long-term, high-touch approach for enterprise clients has been our differentiator. Every client has a dedicated partner with at least a decade of experience, working at a CMO-to-partner level. That’s how we built our flywheel of referrals and repeat business.

Exactly. And when we talk to more sophisticated CROs and CMOs, they understand that. The ones who don’t—or can’t wrap their heads around a retainer—just aren’t a good fit, because they’re expecting some kind of magic we’re never going to deliver. It’s better not to go down that road in the first place.

I don’t think there’s a magic point in time. Some organizations—CloudKettle is a good example—really intend to go enterprise right from the start. There are plenty of great B2B SaaS companies out there doing the same thing; they know they’re focused on the enterprise, that’s who they want to serve, and they build their product with that in mind. If you have the luxury and the runway to do that, that’s amazing. But for a lot of organizations, the founding hypothesis is more like, “We need to start smaller—maybe SMB-focused—and as the product matures, we can expand into enterprise.” A lot of our clients, and a lot of SaaS companies, do that really well.

Often, it’s not so much that they’re “ready” to go enterprise as it is there’s a moment in the organization—like a stair-step moment—where they’re forced to go enterprise. It might be uncomfortable. For example, as part of a Series B or Series C, they might have made a commitment that sales will grow by X and the average deal size will grow by X, and the only way to do that is by moving into enterprise. So there’s a funding hypothesis behind it that might not come from the rank-and-file employees, but from leadership (as it should). It’s often tied to a fundraising effort or a new round being closed, or preparing to IPO, which is common among our clients. That can be the driver.

Yeah, I think I was really lucky—I’ve been incredibly fortunate in my career. One of the biggest breaks was working at a cinema chain called Empire Theatres. It’s a super thin-margin industry, much like restaurants, and really a movie theater is a restaurant with a huge wall and a bunch of speakers. Almost all the money comes from concessions, so they’re very operations- and margin-focused. They’re also heavily focused on content because, in many ways, Disney, Warner Brothers, and Fox are the real customers—if you keep Disney happy, you get the movie instead of the theater across the street.

That mix—understanding how content drives revenue, plus how important operations and margins are—got drilled into my head early on, and it helped shape who I am. It wasn’t like Empire magically knew where the industry was headed; it was just the right place and right time with the right internal pressures and culture. We spent most of our marketing budget on big ads before movies, newspaper showtime listings, TV, and radio. Meanwhile, I was over here saying, “Hey, can I have a little money for AdWords?” or “I think online ticketing will be huge,” and then later, “We should get into mobile ticketing.” To do any of that, I had to justify every penny—show the exact ROI—because that was the company’s mentality. And I wasn’t just justifying the spend; I was taking money from someone else’s newspaper, TV, or radio budget. At the time, it felt tough, but looking back, I realize it made me really good at recognizing where the market was going.

I started pushing for things like Salesforce—“We should be using this new cloud-based CRM”—and then moved on to marketing automation. At one point, I think Empire had around a million newsletter subscribers. All these things I was passionate about—and became good at—were exactly where the market ended up heading. It’s kind of wild to think about all the things we had to do by hand or hire a developer for, like hooking Google Analytics data into our marketing automation. That was all manual back then, using databases and spreadsheets. I’m lucky the industry has caught up: these days, you can buy off-the-shelf solutions to do the same things without reinventing the wheel. That’s the biggest change—now I don’t have to stitch everything together by hand.