In today’s fast-paced business environment, growth and success are essential for long-term survival. But what does it take to achieve business growth, and how can individuals and organizations stay ahead of the curve?
In this episode, we are joined by Holly Chen, an experienced and enthusiastic business leader, to discuss individual and business growth in the ever-changing business environment.
Holly Chen is an experienced business professional with a diverse range of skills and expertise. Holly serves as the Vice President of Marketing at Mosaic.tech, a Strategic Finance Platform that provides real-time financial analytics and planning to get teams from data to decision faster. She is also the Founder, CMO, and Growth Advisor at ExponentialX, and also the Founder, CEO, and Executive coach at Ceiling Breakers. She has also previously served in other companies including Loom, Google, Gucci, and Various, among others.
Besides product development, customer engagement, and strategic planning, Holly is a passionate advocate for diversity and inclusion and has been actively involved in initiatives aimed at promoting greater representation and equity in the workplace. She has volunteered with several organizations focused on empowering underprivileged individuals and communities and has also spoken on panels and webinars on topics related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
In this episode, Holly shares her incredible testimony of how she has helped multiple companies expand their size and revenue. Curiosity and an unending desire to acquire new knowledge have been her underlying mantra in her personal career growth. She also shares the importance of proper framework in the growth of any company- a focus on the quality of the product is the easiest way to justify an increase in prices.
Topics
- Managing a proper work-life balance and work-life integration
- Setting Milestones and Goals for personal and business growth
- Experimenting New Products and Roles
- Focusing on the execution system and the product
- Product and Growth Frameworks
- Transitioning from enterprise sales motion to a purely PLG product
- Allocating your Marketing Budget
- Truth about PLS platforms
- Executive coaching platform and its importance
Show Links
- Check out Ceiling Breakers and ExponentialX
- Follow Holly Chen on LinkedIn or Twitter
- Connect with Omniscient Digital on LinkedIn or Twitter
Listen to the podcast:
Key Takeaways:
Managing a proper work-life balance and work life integration
When dealing with multiple projects, ensure you intentionally set adequate time for relaxation
[07:43] “It’s like I see it as a dynamic balance. And people talk about, you know, work life balance, it’s, and then work life integration. I think it’s a really dynamic, like a dynamic situation where, like, in certain days, you’re going to work, you know, like 1214 hour days to get something out the door. If you’re at a deadline. In other days, you’re like, well, I need I need to take a break and make sure my mental health is, is nurtured. And or I have space to think beyond my day to day and to be creative. So I think it’s really, really a dynamic balance. And also intentional choice, right? Like, in certain days, you say, Oh, I intentionally truce, to sit in front of my TV and watch trash, you know, like, reality TV. But you know, that’s my intentional choice of relaxing, and in my mind all of all of the day to day that as long as you’re the choice is intentional. That is, yeah, that’s what you need.”Setting Milestones and Goals for personal and business Growth
Growth requires curiosity and willingness to acquire new knowledge
[10:10] “I think for me, two guiding principles is curiosity and follow what’s emerging. Curiosity means like, if I’m curious, like I’m curious, just in general about a lot of things, and that led me to learn new new areas and new spacing, new industry, new, functional, new functional areas, and also the sense of confidence that I can learn anything if I put my mind to it. And two is following what’s emerging. So what’s emerging in me and the market? In when when I see a new trend, just be clear, like, is this something that I want to dive into? And, and follow follow that that internet intentionality. So I would say, the curiosity led me to taking a strategy consulting role at Deloitte as my first job. Because I was curious about a lot of things and and didn’t know what I like actually wants to focus on. So consulting was a really good foundation, about learning things really fast, then what’s emerging in me was the desire to make more impact and see how things are executed. And that led me to start up. And then the sort of the pain I felt, in scaling the startup let me to Google, where I get more scaling experience, then sort of what’s emerging in me have a desire to not commute, let me to Slack. So it’s really like, yeah, like a self self-awareness and acceptance of like, okay, like, I don’t want to commute and that’s okay.”Experimenting New products and Roles
Use your knowledge and experience to scale up and try new things
[14:23] “Yeah, I, I used to be having this like, ideal career ladder as like, okay, cool, like time to become a manager, or time to get promoted to director and like, that was, that was a very linear view of life. And the reflection really, like, let me take a step back and say, What are really important in my life, what I actually care about what would make my life meaningful? And those reflections And like I realized one, what’s really important is my desire for learning and growth. And that should be the guiding principle of any role that I take. And two is I want to be more involved in community. And like that connection is really important to me. So, learning and growth, I learned a huge amount as slack and grew as a person, and also professionally. And my desire at the time was to get even more exposure to the space. So getting pattern matching of different businesses. One question I, I had was like, Okay, I had a lot of success. And so I grew like super fast, or what was it? Because like, everything that I like, did or is like, regardless to Slack is a great product, and it’s been a grow anyways. So like, I want to run more experiments, to see what works, what doesn’t? And is that something that I can I can take to other places, and I really help a wide variety of companies to grow. So that that desire for learning and growth took me to Yeah, to advising and taking interim roles.”Focusing on the execution system and the product
It’s not about the growth tactics, it’s about understanding your product, system, and target audience
[17:00] “I think it’s really, the product is the number one is like, by nature, if you have a bad product, it’s, it’s really hard to do growth. So the product needs to be needs to be fantastic. And of course, there are tactics and strategies we can employ to accelerate those growth. So that is, that is like there are there are definitely patterns to apply. At the same time, I realized every company is different. There are many dimensions. So there’s industry, which has his own dynamic, there is target audience, so like, you know, engineering audience versus a marketer, audience versus a finance audience. Behavior is going to be different. There is a CV, so is like, how low the pricing versus a, you know, like, five figure deal versus seven figure deal, it’s gonna be different. And it also sort of the team dynamic. What kind of team skill sets do you have? What’s the culture? Like, there’s so many different dimensions, it’s hard to say, Okay, this is a silver bullet that’s going to apply to many different companies, even on surface, they all look like pod companies, or even they all look alike, you know, future of work or, you know, like developer tools, it’s still going to be very different. So what I what I really learned is like, okay, like, it’s really the, the knowledge and system thinking that we accumulate over the years. And, like, situational analysis to apply to, to different stages and times of the growth. So yes, it sounds like it’s a, at a certain point, it’s no longer about like the growth tactics or channels anymore. It’s about that, like understanding the whole system that you’re working in, and all those different variables included.”Product and Growth Frameworks
Set a proper framework for a smooth growth
[23:50] “I think a lot of companies want to go to PLG not necessarily, because they’re the best fit for plg. But more like, oh, we heard people talking about it. VCs are all Yeah, so I can VCs are talking about it, or other companies are doing it, so we’d better get on it. So I think the first question is like, why do we want to do plg is our product of good fit to do plg? And then it’s you know, the house in like organizational and product and go to market house? I think that the first question is plg is actually a good motion for products in my mind, for products that are relatively easy to, to understand and to learn. So that like Individual users can quickly you know, this help understand like how to make the how to take the best value out of the product. So ideally, the aha moment of oh, this is what to use this product for calm comes naturally from just there’s just products or some some some educational help their products also have the access issue. You know, for example, if the product has to connect with some internal system was PII or was, you know, financial information or like it writes to your code base. And for those products it can be can be quite hard to do entirely self serve. So at that time, think through, like, what are the motions that we need to create from a product perspective to enable that? Or, you know, ultimately is the question to? Are we a good fit for for plg? Yeah, so that, and then once you once you decide, okay, like our product is relatively easy for people to learn, from onboarding experience perspective, we can get people to get value from the products, and the users can influence the buyers from a from a from a growth perspective, then, how do we think about one, from an organizational perspective and skill set perspective? Do you? Like, do we have the people have the experience to execute this? And to do we have the right expectations of PLG. In the short term impact, what I’ve seen is companies who are traditionally sales lead, that’s already have like a pretty mature sort of MQL SQ all, you know, like a sales process, I’m trying to do PLG, thinking that plg is going to be purely incremental. But what they see is there’s actually cannibalization of existing sales funnel. And in the short term, there’s gonna be a reduction of MPLS. And in the short term, there’s going to be an explosion to low quality free users. And that’s just the facts for a lot of the pod motions. So are we okay with that? In the short term, what are the things that we can implement to make sure we have the quality users? And what are the data and sort of the system enablement, we need to bring on board in order to identify those free users and make the most use of those free users when they are ready. There’s also a tendency of milking those free users as soon as possible. Like, as the moment they sign up, like a salesperson is like salesperson. Awesome. Like we’re gonna we have 1000 new users. So yeah, it’s it’s it’s just not not going to be very effective. So there’s, there’s some patience that’s needed to to get to the point of a value for the plg users. So that that expectation, and like I think for for sales lead going to plg is really important to have top buy in from, you know, the CEO, and the board and say, this is an investment we’re going to make. And we know we understand the short term impacts. But we do believe that long term, it will reduce our costs. And here’s all the enablement we’re going to make to to make that happen.”Transitioning from enterprise sales motion to a purely PLG product
Improve product value to justify the price increase
[33:15] “I think one thing is be really clear, what is the incremental added value to the enterprise plan? Why would people upgrade? I see companies you know, just slap on a SSO or like, you know, some some privacy controls, and that’s it like, and then all of a sudden, it’s like 50x of our pricing. And that’s not a strong enough of a justification. So, like what are the incremental value companies are getting As in having a team plan or a enterprise plan. So that could be, you know, more more visibility on team performance or judging across departments, or it could be one place to store all of your company’s information for easy access. Or it could be, you know, ability to search for, for things when when you need them on from from a company level. Or it could be like generating use insights from the usage of all for our users. So like, there’s, there’s there needs to be added value. So like a 10x value, to justify the 10x increase in in pricing. So that’s one.”Use an experienced or a motivated team to drive the intended growth
[34:40] “And then second one is like for for this, for this motion, there are certain team members, like it really about the team, like the skill sets that we need to hire for. Sometimes existing team, if they are like very used to plg, it’s all about like, like, was not all about is like it’s a it’s a lot about driving volume. And we know that we can scale, let’s say our performance marketing spend relatively similar curve to, to the user growth, so like spend and user growth, pretty, pretty similar. versus in a sales driven market motion, a lot of it is actually takes a long time to build relationships, to actually have like multiple touchpoints, in converting into a six, seven figure deal. And that is a mindset shift to the team. And sometimes your existing team can change that mindset and adding on that. And sometimes you do need to hire people who’ve done the six, seven figure deal experience to run that process. And then it becomes like how do these two teams are structured and working together and handoff and also giving credits or like attribution to each of these teams? I think that is that is like pretty, pretty, pretty critical to figure out. And if you add on other dimensions like geo, right, like do you have a centralized team to run big motion? Do you have a regional team to run Sales Lead motion? Or like how do you think about like structuring your like it all that’s the complexity can can add up pretty quickly.”Allocating your Marketing Budget
Channel growth funds to the appropriate departmet
[39:11] “Yeah, it’s really in this one is really situational. And the initial fit to a pod versus sales lead is the critical deciding factor. So the answer to the different businesses will be different. I do think, in the short term, there is a desire to make sure we manage the burn. And for plg companies, the r&d, like increase, I think, I think it’s tomorrow. So like I wrote a, like a blog about, like, r&d increase is more than like sales and marketing increased in the past few years, I would probably because of the pod motion. So like, for plg, yes, you’re gonna like spend less in your sales and marketing, but the r&d cost is going to be bigger ahead, increase. So like, sometimes it is, like just balances out, you in order to, you know, have a pod, you do have to have like engineers doing the product features. In a down market, I think there’s going to be a lot more pressure on the marketing team, or growth team to do more of as less sometimes, and to deliver more of a shorter term impact than a longer term impact. So there’s going to be a conversation around expectations on return on investment. So the performers marketing and you know, SEO, like organic channels, and the timeframe of the impact could be, you know, like, two to three months down the road. And then there’s other progress like community, or like a brand building efforts, the turnaround is probably like nine months to a year, like, are we ready to do those investment, knowing in the short term are not going to see a direct return on investment. So every company needs to make that decision intentionally. And add to the complexity of now, you know, cookies are going away, and performers marketing is becoming more and more expensive. And so marketers job is, is is gonna be very hard. You know, in the dumb market like this.”Truth about PLS platforms
You can build a PLS system internally or rely on external ones
[45:26] “Yeah, I think those are like, those can be very helpful. Personal opinion? I think we still need to solve how like the, the system of record or the source of truth question. So a lot of these tools are like gather, gather data, and then do some, you know, scoring and signals and say, here’s like, the sales ready leads. And that’s great. If a company already have a, you know, like a snowflake or data warehouse, and there’s also those, like data and what those data say, so should I be looking at a focus every every day to understand it? Or should I like, put a model together from snowflake? And looking at that? So I think that that’s a decision that every company needs to make. So these kinds of PLS tools, we’ll run into that a little bit…Yeah. And what have you know, what are like internal? Like, some, sometimes it’s pretty subjective is like, who says, this is ready, even for like a scoring? Like, oh, engagement score, like 35? is like, how subjective is that? Or is it actually based on incrementality study or, or something that’s more more data driven? So I think that’s the jury’s still out, and how, like, how different companies want to use these tools. But I’m actually like, excited, like, at least there’s an effort in trying this. And this the AI, there’s like, more data going into these companies. And hopefully they can say, okay, across this type of customers, and here’s what we see. And here’s some insights we can offer. So I, I’m, I’m, like, hopeful that like, there’s the product development, and there’s more insights, there’s going to be more mature products, and developments on the road.”Executive coaching and its importance
Affordable executive coaching creates equality in the employment sector[53:39] “Yeah, ceiling breakers are really grew out of just the realization that the system is not set up. Have you like, purely sort of like a fair way for everyone, even when we talk about equality and freedom in, in, in this country, but for people coming from like a diverse backgrounds, it is actually not. And I wasn’t really like feeling strongly about it was like, cool, like, I will just work hard and like, I’m gonna get promoted. And that’s all I care about. But like, you know, Black Lives Matter movement made me like just feeling like, finally got in touch. It was the anger that I had. Like, why we like, you know, like you, you probably also see that right, like, a lot of Asian Asian employees, like, we work so hard. And somehow there is this perception that Asians are not leaders. And, and, or like, they just do hard work, but they’re not like executive material. Is it actually true? Or is it like, a perception. So that’s that. And then at the same time, I also know some of the limitations in my own mindset, that perpetuate like, perpetuates that, like external perception. And I know, there’s a lot of work that I need to do, and we like need to do as the underrepresented people to say, here’s how do we free ourselves and change our mindset, and actually, you know, be ready for that bigger role. So seemingly burgers was was created to help people who are underrepresented, we’re talking about like, people of color, immigrants, women and LGBTQ community, who traditionally may not have access to, like things like executive coaching, that I benefit so much, and unleash so much potential and power in me, and I wish more people would have access to it. But these kinds of things that you cost, like, you know, 20k, every six months, it is not easy to have access to until you get to that director level or VP level. And how do we democratize that. So that’s, that’s why I created ceiling breakers and to give access of executive coaching to underrepresented leaders.”
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