Inside Intercom Rachel Hepworth, Head of Growth Marketing at Slack

Written on February 14, 2018

My notes & takeaways

A key question for Rachel was "What was the right time to start growth marketing?".

In 2014/15, most of the growth was from a core group - developers. Once this pool was exhausted they needed to appeal to and attract a number of different functions within a company. They didn’t want Slack to be siloed just in dev teams, rather an entire company using it to communicate.

When trying to scale, they started with performance marketing because of how well it can scale. They spent most of 2017 building out data measuremnt, and spent a lot of time and money to set up multi touch attribution. The big challenge for 2018 is to figure out how to sell to people who don’t want to just jump into the product - how do they communicate with these people. Up until now they’ve relied on people to just start a team in Slack, and convincing their colleagues to get on board. To further tap into this, they've worked on how to power word of mouth referrals. New features such as shared channels power this kind of growth, making it easy to get started, and join, a team. This ease also stops you from switching back to the old way.

For Slack's marketing team, the biggest opportunity for growth is the website. Currently it’s a simple site which has lots of potential to be built on.

At GatherContent, we need to address how we make the product easier to get started with, just like Slack currently is. Our buying cycle is much longer, and takes a lot more time investment to get set up with your own content, and your own team. Removing as much friction as possible in this set up process will enable us to grow at a much quicker rate.