This month, we were excited to host Jeff Yoshimura for a keynote at our NY Enterprise Tech Meetup. Jeff is a long-time Work-Bench friend and the current Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer at Synk, giving him incredible insight on this month’s topic: marketing tactics for scaling startups (from $0 to $100M in ARR).

Prior to Snyk, Jeff was at Elastic where he built and led global marketing from the company’s early open source roots through its IPO. Jeff also was a founding team member at Zuora, where he helped create the Subscription Economy category. Prior to Zuora, Jeff was one an early employee at Salesforce, leading some of the first large scale SaaS implementations of CRM and working on the team that conceived the AppExchange.

“Not all of the startups I’ve worked at have been successful. Take these kinds of failures into your next venture and you’ll be much much stronger.”

In this keynote, Jeff breaks down his top marketing tactics according to ARR and includes multiple case studies from his time at Snyk, Elastic, and Zuora as they scaled over the years. Check out our recap, the full recording and keynote slides below:

$0 to $10M: The Steepest Hill to Climb.

1. Category Creation: If you don’t need to do this, don’t do it. Category creation is hard, expensive, and takes time. But if you do, go all in. Keep in mind, the press don’t care about you (yet).
2. First Hires: During this time, so much of your business will be changing. Find generalists vs. specialists who are great with ambiguity and problem solving.
3. Early Community: Make cold calls, listen in on sales calls, talk to users, customers, analysts, and even your parents. Find early evangelists. Even test out messaging on your family to determine if its relatable and understandable.
4. The First Pitch: Build it, refine it, iterate it, and have the mindset that this is never done. It’s marketing’s job to own it with your CEO and founder.

$10 to $25M: The Longest Hill to Climb.

1. GTM: Know is the time to think beyond just marketing. Be a part of creating a holistic GTM across sales, product, and engineering. Is PLG part of your strategy? How do you get from 1 to 10 to 100 customers? What segments are you looking at and targeting>
2. Community 2.0: Build community — developers, customers, and partners. Go to them, don’t expect them to come to you.
3. Next Hires: Find a few specialists who are experts demand gen, growth marketing, product marketing, etc.
4. The Pitch 2.0: Messaging needs to be aligned and relatable to users. Add proof points and customer testimonials into your pitch deck, as well as, across your marketing assets.

$25 to $100M: The Trickiest Hill to Climb.

1. Growth Efficiency: Know your growth efficiency levers (aka what moves the needle) and use data to place the next bets for growth.
2. Next, Next Hires: Hire strong people managers. Promote and grow people within your team (people who were with you on the first two hills).
3. Community at Scale: What is required to fuel more momentum into your community, and scale it? Find champions within other, existing communities.
4. The Pitch 3.0+: What is your platform, multi-product, or multi-use case story? What are the tailwinds driving growth?

View keynote PDF in Dropbox here.