The Growth Leadership Show: Recent Episodes
Sandro
The Growth Leadership Show is a straight-to-the-heart marketing podcast.
Sandro Meyer sits down with growth leaders from around the world for an honest conversation about the successes, struggles, and decisions that have shaped their lives. Together, we dig deeper and peel back the layers of their career-choices, growth strategies and leadership philosophies, so you can apply their hard-earned lessons to your own life and career.
Topics Discussed:
- Why product-led growth matters
- The Foundations of a successful product-led strategy
- Is your business in the red ocean or the blue ocean?
- Can complex products go product-led?
- How to gather customer feedback
- How and where to start with Product-led GTM motions
- Why everyone on your team needs to be responsible for growth
- On product qualified leads: When to go for the sale
- How to integrate smart call to actions into your trial
- Convincing your boss to try product-led growth
Resources:
- Product-Led Growth - The Book
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Topics Discussed:
- Using your skills for a new role
- Learning how to delegate
- Creating brand guidelines for content
- How marketing teams are built and scaled
- 360 Learning’s current main content distribution channels
- How to manage organic engagement on social media
- Co-marketing and how to use it in your business
- Learning to say no to people
Resources:
- Onboarding Joei
- 360 Learning
Follow:
- YouTube
Topics Discussed:
- Ross’ content-philosophy explained: “Create once and distribute forever”
- The role of a content distributor in your business
- The split between content creation and distribution
- The content that is best suited for ongoing distribution
- Why it's important to deeply understand a social platform
- Analysis of your competitors' content distribution tactics
- How to do Influencer marketing in B2B
- How to include your employees in the content distribution strategy
- The system from content idea to distribution
- The early days of content marketing
- Content Framework: Educate, engage, entertain
- Start by understanding where your audience is
Resources:
- Ross Simmonds
- Distribution Pack
- Foundation
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Topics Discussed:
- Louis describes his transformation from following the herd into a radical marketer
- How Louis Grenier defines no bullshit in his marketing practice
- What it takes to be radically different
- Louis process for radical differentiation
- What makes it so hard to articulate our uniqueness
- How to find the triggers that identify your ideal customers
- Why not to rely on demographics to define your market
- Breakdown of radical differentiation case studies
- Why you must define the status quo you are fighting against
- Advice for people who want to differentiate and stand out
Resources:
- Everyone Hates Marketers
- Hotjar
- Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
- The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout
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- Newsletter
Topics Discussed:
- How to manage a team of content writers
- Deciding what content to keep in-house and what to outsource
- How to interview experts to build thought-leadership content
- On hiring VA’s to scale your content operations
- What is product-led content and how to implement it
- How to produce content that links back to your business results
- Why focusing on content distribution is key
- Why user research is at the heart of content marketing
- How to get started with customer research
Resources:
- Hotjar
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- Newsletter
Topics Discussed:
- Kindness is the best community "strategy"
- The importance of a crossover between marketing and community
- How to transform an audience into a community
- Selling community building to executives and investors
- How to make your community less "businessy"
- Building communities around a unifying purpose
- How to integrate events into the community experience
- On growing local communities
- The similarities between parenting and community building
- Rosie’s message for people who want to start a community
Resources:
- Indie Hackers
- Ministry of Testing
- Orbit
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Topics Discussed:
- What is category creation
- How can a company differentiate itself
- Dealing with a boss who doesn’t believe in radical differentiation
- The distinction between missionaries and mercenaries in business
- Category creation for small businesses
- Focus on one thing and be the best at it
- Category designers change the world to their image
- The hero's journey and how you tell a brand story
- Why people love change and how you can capitalize on it
Resources mentioned:
- Niche Down
- Play Bigger
Topics Discussed:
- The role of the marketing department at Teamwork.com
- How to structure a marketing team
- Hiring a marketing team with the future in mind
- RevOps and it’s role in the company
- Things to consider when moving into a CMO role
- Leveling up your career by seeking out and learning from your peers
- Vulnerability: Leading your team by example
- How to plan and communicate a focused marketing roadmap
- How to measure your team's performance
- What to consider when growing and scaling a team
- The art of asking for feedback
- When to bring in freelancers and agencies
Resources:
- Radical Candor by Kim Scott
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David Spinks is the founder of the largest network of community professionals, CMX. In 2019 David sold CMX to Bevy.com and became their VP of community. His book, The Business of Belonging, is described as an "epic journey into the world of community building."
This episode discusses the drive towards using community as a marketing tool to grow businesses, including B2B and SaaS. Later in the episode, David answers questions from our own community.
Topics Discussed:
- The difference between and audience and a community
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Growing communities in B2B SaaS
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Monitoring community activity to identify touch points
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Community led growth
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Build communities around the industry not products
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Companies acquiring communities
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Community builders are creators
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Empowering people in the community to take on leadership roles
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The importance of community founding members
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The use of AI in building and running communities
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Overcoming the crickets and building enthusiasm in the early days
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Advice for new community creators
Resources:
- The Business of Belonging by David Spinks
- Bevy
Liam Booger is the VP of marketing at Scaleway, a cloud infrastructure provider. Previous to that, he led brand and marketing teams at 360learning MadKudu and Algolia.
In this episode, Liam talks about the importance of those first 90 days in a new marketing role, including establishing credibility when you are still learning the ropes, coaching your team as individuals, and identifying burnout.
Check out: Scaleway
Video can still be a bit of a marketing mystery, especially for B2B businesses. During our conversation, Phil offers advice on where to start and how to use video to your grow your brand and create demand even if you’ve never used the medium before.
Prashant Mohan began his career as a software engineer before making a move into marketing.
He's now CMO at Sharesight (an online portfolio tracking software), but it hasn't always been easy for him; he had to leave his comfort zone of data and work hard to build his creative side, something that didn't come naturally.
Prashant came to believe that marketing is a blend of art and science, and throughout our enlightening conversation, Prashant talks about where he sees marketers' roles within a B2B setting and how we can become agents of change within our organizations.
Topics Discussed:
- Dealing with Constraints and Challenges
- Simplifying Messages and Determining Value Propositions
- The Marketer’s Role in a B2B Setting
- Arming a Creative Person with the Right Tools
- Brands Are Not the Hero of the Story
- Becoming a Marketing Agent of Change
- Meta Skills of the Modern Marketer
- What Non-Technical Marketers Should Know
- Allowing Employees the Space and Time to Create
Resources:
- Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
- Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely
- Everyone Hates Marketers
Follow:
- Sharesight
Jimmy Daly is the founder and CEO of SuperPath, a career hub, and community created specifically for content marketers. Formerly he was VP of growth at the content marketing agency, Animalz.
Since starting SuperPath, Jimmy has had to wear lots of hats, but he’s still all about content. During our conversation, we talked about his transition from content and growth manager to founding his own business and what he’s learned along the way.
Topics Discussed
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The #1 Meta skill for Marketers
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Experimenting with User Generated Content
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Using Customer Research to Identify What Content to Produce
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Creating Content Based on the User Journey
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Creation vs. Distribution of Content
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Identifying Holes in your Skillset
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What Jimmy has Learned Throughout his Career
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Sharing Your Mistakes
Resources
- Animalz
- Vero
- Quickbooks
When Nadya Khoja was offered a job at Venngage (a SaaS software that enables users to create infographics) she’d had no previous marketing experience.
With a background in theatre, she knew her creativity would be useful as a marketer, and eventually, her previous training, her desire to learn, and hard work paid off. She is now the Chief Growth Officer of Venngage and part of the management team.
In our conversation she talks about her interesting journey and spills the beans on how she managed to make that transition from a marketing one-man-show into a top leadership role.
Nadya is also an avid writer and speaker on marketing topics and has been featured in publications such as Forbes, The Next Web, Huffington Post, Entrepreneur, Mashable, Wired, and CBC News.
Topics Discussed:
- Nadya’s Journey from One-Man-Show to Chief Growth Officer (1:37s)
- A Managers’ Bottleneck Problem
- Ownership and Accountability
- Hacks and Experiments vs. Strategies
- Challenges and Fuckups
- Communication and One-On-One Meetings
- Advice to Nadya’s past Self
- Analytical Ability: The Metaskill for Marketers
- On Feeling like an Imposter as a Manager
- Nice Managers vs. Effective Managers
- Internal Collaboration between Departments
- How the Venngage Marketing Team is Structured
- About Venngage as a Company
- Education Resources for Marketing Leaders
- What Nadya is looking for in a New Hire
- How Nadya Executes Good Ideas
- About Personal Branding
- Marketing Channels that Currently work
- Product Marketing
- How Nadya is Finding the Right People to Contact
- Favorite Resources and Books
Resources:
- Forget The Funnel
- Shape up by Basecamp
- Venngage
- Reforge
- CXL
- Similar Web
- Ahrefs
- High Output Management
- Creativity Inc.
- Thinking Fast and Slow
Follow:
Website: venngage.com
The Guest
David Arnoux is the co-founder and head of growth at GrowthTribe, Europe's first Academy focused on growth marketing. David is a marketing expert and serial entrepreneur, and throughout his career, he has helped more than 500 companies implement their growth strategies.
Topics Discussed
01:32 - Your Product Reflects How You See the World
15:02 - Meta Skills of Successful Growth Leaders
15:27 - Mental Model of First Principle Thinking
17:22 - Understanding What’s Happening in Other Departments
18:21 - Everyone is Just Winging It
22:54 - Moving Away From Short-Term Goals
23:42 - The Productivity Pyramid
39:02 - How You Can Change the Mindset of a Whole Company
47:53 - Staying Curious and Being a Lifelong Learner
59:40 - Employee Retention
01:05:00 - Recommended Resources for Growing Your Marketing Career
People Mentioned
- Ray Dalio
- Carlota Perez
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- GrowthTribe
Chris Walker is the CEO and Founder of Refine Labs, an agency helping SaaS startups and SME's on B2B Revenue Operations & Growth.
We discuss how he started out in marketing, how his success on LinkedIn came about, and why he believes it works so well for his business. Also, we take a deep dive into why traffic and number of leads are not the metrics for B2B companies and which ones you should focus on instead.
Topics Discussed
- 00:00 - How Chris does LinkedIn Marketing
- 02:30 - Chris’ Four Learnings That Propelled his Career
- 06:32 - Customer Research for Marketers
- 11:14 - Quantity vs. Quality of Leads
- 17:22 - How to Align Marketing with Sales
- 20:05 - How to Align Marketing with Product
- 27:10 - Reporting to Management
- 30:06 - How to Convince Execs of Brand Marketing
- 32:31 - Using Paid Ads to Boost Content
- 34:13 - Strategies when Starting in a new Marketing Role from Scratch
- 38:53 - Advice For Up and Coming Marketers
- 41:01 - Meta Skills for Marketers
- 43:12 - Building a B2B Marketing Team from Scratch
- 46:02 - Content Creation vs. Content Distribution
- 49:35 - Marketing Education
- 53:32 - When to hire an agency / consultancy
Resources
- Gong
- State of Demand Podcast
Follow
- LinkedIn Profile: Chris Walker
- Refine Labs
- Refine Labs Podcast
Ben Harmanus is Head of Brand Marketing EMEA, set up and hosts HubSpot's Digital Helpdesk podcast, and co-authored the best-selling conversion book, Content Design.
Ben took me back to his HubSpot early days and explains how a combination of resilience and determination enabled him to get the podcast off the ground despite his colleague's initial reservations.
In a previous life, Ben was heavily engaged in extreme sports and explains how that has shaped his thoughts about failure.
Topics Discussed
01:23 - Early Days at HubSpot
04:40 - Representing Women in Tech
05:51 - Accepting Challenges and Creating Opportunities
12:61 - Helping People to Work From Home
14:31 - How to Gauge the Success of a Podcast
19:30 - Ways to Improve the Podcast Experience
29:34 - Choosing Sustainability Over Price
40:51 - Learning to Fail
57:45 - Helping Others Succeed
1:07:59 - Using Coaches to Improve Yourself
1:14:01 - Working as a Team
Resources
- Trillion Dollar Coach
- Content Design
Follow
- LinkedIn Profile: Ben Harmanus
- Twitter: Ben Harmanus
- Hubspot
This episode is sponsored by The Growth Report.
Go to growthreport.ch and receive a free weekly briefing on growth marketing and personal leadership.
Summary:
In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking to Peep Laja, the founder of several businesses, including Conversion XL, Speero, and most recently, his newest venture, Wynter. As well as being an entrepreneur, speaker and author, he’s regarded as one of the leading conversion rate optimization experts in the world.
Peep has always had big ambitions. During our conversation, he talked about maintaining multiple businesses, including the elements needed to scale a business, what he looks for during the hiring process, learning when to delegate, and education best practices.
Topics Discussed:
- 04:06 - Identifying When to Scale Your Business
- 12:54 - Playing the Long Game and Practicing Patience
- 15:49 - Doing What You Enjoy and Knowing When to Delegate
- 19:25 - Goal Setting For Teams
- 22:01 - Finding the Areas Where Your Employees Thrive
- 24:41 - The Importance of Having a Good Vendor Manager
- 31: 14 - Key Areas Where Conventional Online Education Fails
- 36:19 - The Bigger the Business, the Smaller the Differentiation
- 42:30 - Next Steps and New Directions
- 56:24 - Advice for Marketing Leaders
Resources:
- CXL Institute
- Wynter
- Adeft
- Speero
- Usertesting.com
Follow:
The Growth Leadership Podcast👉 Go to http://growthreport.ch to receive all future episodes on growth marketing and personal leadership.
Summary:
Read Kevin Indig’s CV, and you cannot fail to be impressed! He’s the current SEO Lead at Shopify and has previously held the same title at companies such as G2, Searchmetrics, Atlassian, and Dailymotion, amongst others.
Despite having a demanding job and a team of 30, Kevin is very in tune with maintaining his energy levels and ensures that as well as working hard he also takes time out to relax.
He has developed an impressive mindset that allows him to see pain as a teacher, which he uses to help him reflect, adapt, learn, and manage his team.
But our conversation wasn’t just about how he keeps himself passionate and motivated and in control of his mental health. We also talked about his previous role at G2, setting company and personal goals, and the major skills that all marketers should have.
More on Kevin's Blog and Podcast: https://kevin-indig.com/
Topics Discussed
00:52 - Remaining Curious and Passionate
02:11 - Identifying What Drains You and What Energizes You
04:33 - Planning and Managing Your Time Effectively
05:58 - The Benefits to be Found in Seasonal Work
08:34 - Maximize your output
11:23 - Learning from both failure and success
16:32 - G2 and Kevin’s Role
19:12 - How Kevin Got into SEO and Marketing
25:02 - Learning from Mistakes
30:20 - Direct Report Restructuring for Efficiency
34:11 - Goal setting, both company wide and personal
38:51 - Where Most Marketers Miss the Mark
41:50 - Tools for Sharing Results
44:12 - Working with Others Through Alignment and Shared Goals
46:33 - Dealing with Conflict in The Workplace
56:38 - Personal Branding and its Impact on your Career
1:04:20 - Kevin’s Content Marketing Fit
1:10:15 - Encouraging Others to Learn and Develop
1:13:29 - Major Skill that All Marketers Should Have
Resources
- Principles - Ray Dalio
- Thinking in Bets Annie Duke
- Alchemy
- Document, Don’t Create Gary Vaynerchuk
- Content-Market Fit
- The Issues Clearing Model
- The Tim Ferriss Show
- The Knowledge Project
- Conversations with Tyler
- Salesforce
- Wavelength by Asana
- Refined Twitter
- David Perell
- Tiago Forte
- Ali Abdaal
Follow
- Website: Kevin Indig
- Podcast: Tech Bound Podcast
- Newsletter: Tech Bound Newsletter
- Kevin's LinkedIn Profile
- Kevin's Twitter Profile
This episode is sponsored by The Growth Report.
Go to growthreport.substack.com and receive a free weekly briefing on growth marketing and personal leadership.
Summary:
Rand Fishkin is the former CEO and Co-Founder of MOZ and is currently building his next company SparkToro. He became famous through his video series Whiteboard Friday and has recently published the bestseller book "Lost and Founder," where he exposes the often brutal reality that lies behind the glorified startup life.
In my conversation with him, Rand discussed his previous failures and what he learned from them. We also talk about when hiring an agency makes sense and why building the right product is a prerequisite for effective marketing.
Check out: SparkToro
Topics Discussed:
03:40 - The impact of not being true to your values
06:12 - Rebuilding after a failure
09:00 - How to explain failure to your team
11:00 - Identifying where you failed and fixing it
16:57 - Don’t put lipstick on a pig!
22:00 - Optimising and investing in three main areas
24:30 - Continuing to have conversations with customers
28:16 - The benefits of hiring agencies for customer research
38:22 - What is SparkToro and Rand’s Future Vision
46:51 - The Wall Street Journal Problem
49:33 - Understanding and Leveraging in Customer Research
53:27 - Using Target Audience Keywords
Resources:
- Lost and Founder - Rand Fishkin
- The “Wall Street Journal” Marketing Problem
- The Cross-Country CEO Swap
- ProfitWell
- Conversion Rate Experts
- Product-Market Fit
- Whiteboard Friday
Follow:
- SparkToro
