How Alex Kracov made Lattice a go-to name for HR professionals
How Alex Kracov made Lattice a go-to name for HR professionals
Alex Kracov (00:00):
I was trying to find a silver bullet. Can I just dump money into Facebook ads and grow this thing? But that definitely did not work.
Peep Laja (00:12):
I'm Peep Laja. I don't do fluff. I don't do filler. I don't do emojis. Well, maybe sometimes on Twitter. What I do is study winners in B2B, because I want to know how much is strategy, how much is luck, and how do they win?
Peep Laja (00:27):
This week, Alex Kracov, former VP of Marketing at Lattice, a people management platform providing solutions to develop engaged and high performing teams when everyone is remote. In a market dominated by a few players with similar products, Lattice is in a constant battle to stay one step ahead.
Peep Laja (00:46):
In the five years since they launched, they've grown to a head count of 240 people with revenues of around 21.5 million dollars, almost doubling year over year. So how did they compete? How did they win? In this episode, we talk about mental availability and the importance of being the first name potential clients think of.
Alex Kracov (01:05):
Someone's like, "No, I don't want to buy Lattice. I'm not interested." We said, "Oh, no. No worries. Join our community." And it was a way to stay in touch. And then we had a conference with 42,000 people RSVP, 22,000 attended.
Peep Laja (01:18):
We hear about building and supporting a community of professionals.
Alex Kracov (01:21):
It's not a Lattice community. We actually don't even let our sales team in there, even though the people are talking about potentially buying.
Peep Laja (01:28):
We talk about standing out in a world of similar products.
Alex Kracov (01:31):
You would stand at a conference booth and an HR person would come and laugh because they'd be like, "No employee loves performance management."
Peep Laja (01:38):
Well, let's get into it.
Peep Laja (01:42):
So, Alex, it's 2016, Lattice has just launched, you're employee number three, and you guys need to go to market. So what was the initial landscape? What was your initial assumption of which product you're going to lead with? What was the opening, the opportunity? What was the initial go-to-market strategy?
Alex Kracov (02:02):
So when I first joined Lattice, Lattice was actually a goal-tracking company and it started with OKRs, and it was this idea of, how can you build operational excellence as a team?
Alex Kracov (02:11):
And when, that first summer, we were trying to sell Lattice, we noticed when we were selling the OKR product, teams would probably start internal infighting, right, trying to align all their different goals. But while we were talking to customers, we kept hearing this trend that was coming up in a adjacent space around continuous performance management.
Alex Kracov (02:30):
And there was this big shift in HR at the time, where people were moving away from the traditional annual performance review and moving towards this model of continuous feedback, right? How can you give feedback in the moment when something happens? We pivoted the product pretty quickly and started building towards that goal.
Alex Kracov (02:48):
And so later that year, we launched a lightweight performance review product. Then we built feedback and other things to help enable managers to have those conversations with employees.
Alex Kracov (02:59):
Betterworks was the big OKR provider at the time. They were doing big enterprise customers. But there was a company called Reflektive who was doing this more continuous performance management stuff and led the industry at the time. So we started to kind of build actually a similar product to them.
Alex Kracov (03:16):
The big difference, though, was design. We really believe that you needed to build something that employees and managers love to use, not just build for the HR persona. So that's the early story of how we built the product and tried to differentiate it.
Peep Laja (03:29):
So that idea of continuous performance review, you weren't really thinking about that. So you learned that through your sales demos, your pitches?
Alex Kracov (03:39):
Yeah, basically. It's our CEO and sales rep and then me in the corner overhearing calls. But we would talk to people, and they'd start fighting about the OKR thing, and you could just tell this... They weren't wanting to buy your software. They were fighting. And then you would hear them say, "Oh, well, we have this other adjacent problem." And so, yeah, it was all customer calls.
Alex Kracov (03:58):
And then there was also a lot of market research and articles that were happening at the time. So I'd look at Deloitte's HR tech landscape report, and you could see that this emerging trend was coming.
Peep Laja (04:09):
So you decided to go down the simplicity, ease of use, it's-a-beautiful-experience-to-use type of route. So the competitors that you mentioned, so were there more like, then, enterprise-y, clunky, selling to HR and...?
Alex Kracov (04:22):
Yes, they were trying to appeal to a bigger enterprise segment, and, naturally, there's a lot of customization that needs to happen in those segments, so that I think the experience just was not the same.
Alex Kracov (04:33):
And the interesting thing about the HR tech landscape is you have these direct competitors, like I mentioned, Reflektive, 15five, at the time, but then there's all these HRS providers, right? Your core HR folks who also... they offer payroll and benefits and system of record and all the core HR stuff. And then they kind of did what Lattice did, this more performance management stuff or employee engagement, but they just didn't invest in it. It wasn't a core competency of theirs. And so it lacked some of the customization, it lacked the user experience. And so we were able to start to steal customers from our partner with them. There's probably a better way to say it.
Peep Laja (05:10):
If you're disrupting incumbents, attack from below. This is the classic market disruption advice from Clayton Christensen. Go for the segments and products, the low margin for the incumbents. They are likely not to fight you there, and instead focus on upmarket, and you can increase your market penetration. Get a toehold there first.
Peep Laja (05:29):
If you go for the incumbent's high-margin customers, they will fight you and likely crush you unless you have a strong base established. Even if you have innovation advantage, they will quickly copy you and catch up. They have deep pockets and can throw money at a problem. Brands that aspire to take over some existing, big thing need to pick one thing they do and do it better. Preferably the one the big guys don't care much about.
Clayton Christensen (05:54):
It was the dilemma that General Motors and Ford faced when they tried to decide, should we go down and compete against Toyota who came in at the bottom, or should we make even bigger SUVs for even bigger people? And now Toyota has the same problem, as Koreans in Hyundai and Kia have really won the low end of the market from Toyota. And it's not because Toyota's asleep at the switch, but why would they ever invest to defend the lowest profit part of their market, which is the subcompacts, when they have the privilege of competing against Mercedes?
Peep Laja (06:32):
You were a small startup. There were bigger players already there, probably deeper pockets at a time. What was your plan to win? And how were you planning to get the word out about Lattice? What worked and what didn't?
Alex Kracov (06:44):
On the product side, it was, how can we make it as easy as possible to use while giving HR flexibility to make a process that they want? And that modular but easy to use approach, I think, really worked well in the market.
Alex Kracov (06:57):
And then on the marketing side, honestly, we experimented with a lot of different channels, right? I was trying to find a silver bullet. Can I just dump money into Facebook ads and grow this thing? But that definitely did not work. And so I invested a lot into building a brand, building a community. My overall approach and guiding light for Lattice was how can I make the marketing team almost like a little media company that operates inside of Lattice where there's a single advertiser, and that's Lattice?
Peep Laja (07:24):
Specifically then, what did that look like, the brand building and the media machine?
Alex Kracov (07:28):
One of the first things we did was actually interviews like this. We would have Jack sit down with heads of HR who were not customers of ours, like the head of people at Reddit, the head of people at Asana. We would do a really high-produced video, go into the offices, film a long thing, and then do a lot of video snippets and promote those over social.
Alex Kracov (07:48):
And it did this wonderful thing for the brand, because people started to associate Lattice with these much bigger brands. And I think people thought that they were customers at the time, but they actually weren't. So we really focused on just how do we engage the HR community. And then funny enough, they all became customers. So in some ways it was the best way to start an enterprise sales cycle.
Peep Laja (08:07):
If your company has an unknown brand with no marketing support, and your sales reps make a hundred dials a day and send generic cold emails, this is not doing sales at all. It's telemarketing. And it will fail. If you sell to B2B and your annual contract value's five figures or more, take an account-based, marketing-like approach.
Peep Laja (08:28):
One, make a list of every company that should become a customer in the next five years. Two, involve them in your media machine. You interview them, feature them, get them to speak at your event, get them to join your community, and you join theirs. Three, create and distribute a ton of unique insight to that audience. This way you play the long game. When the target customer, one day, has a need and a budget, you're more likely to be in their consideration set. This is called mental availability. Or when the time comes to pitch somebody via outbound, it's already a warm relationship, or at the very least, they know who you are and what you're about.
Peep Laja (09:07):
People do podcasts because they want to like, "Hey, that person should know that I exist," so they invite them on the podcast. So was there a similar play, we want these companies to know we exist?
Alex Kracov (09:18):
Exactly.
Peep Laja (09:19):
And so 2016, you were a continuous performance review company, but then rather quickly, you guys started to ship new products, additional products every six to twelve months or something.
Alex Kracov (09:32):
The big thing that happened, I think the time was, what, September, 2018, we launched engagement surveys. So in the past, you had a performance management provider and a performance data set, and then you had your engagement data set, right? These are the surveys that people send out to a company. Do you like working here? The people? And then they have an aggregate total to give a feeling of employee sentiment. And we were the first company to combine the two.
Alex Kracov (09:54):
So now, for the first time ever, you could answer questions like, are my top performers happy? Because we could see who your top performers were from the performance side of things, and then we could see happiness data from the engagement side of things. And so that was, I think, a huge pivotal turning moment. It changed the competitive landscape, because what happened was all of the other point solutions started trying to catch up.
Alex Kracov (10:15):
And so you had Culture Amp, who's Lattice's biggest competitor today. They started on the engagement side, but then, six months or a year later, they actually bought a performance company to start competing with us. And then you had Reflektive trying to build their own engagement product. So there was this interesting game of catch up.
Alex Kracov (10:33):
And today, you really can't be a performance company without offering engagement, too. And we rebranded it as people management, because we really thought about how can we help companies with their management? How can we help them build high-performing and engaged teams? That's what it became all about.
Peep Laja (10:50):
So tell me more about the product strategy there. Shipping new products, expanding your suite. Was it to increase net revenue earned by client per year, so expansion? Was it to attract a new type of customer, so you're expanding the market? Or was it about winning competitive deals that they have these features, so we also need to have these features?
Alex Kracov (11:12):
It was honestly a little bit of all of those things. A big story with Lattice was how do we increase our ACV, right? We had started in an SMB segment and wanted to move upmarket. And so a lot of our marketing changed to, okay, how do we do more EBM-style marketing instead of just inbound? And that was a thing that was happening.
Alex Kracov (11:31):
And then the product was another element of that of, okay, we're charging nine bucks, now, per seat, can we charge twelve bucks per seat? And all those things were this big plan to how do we, okay, basically, get more out of our existing customers?
Alex Kracov (11:43):
And then it helped our customers, right? These were things that they wanted, and it made their lives easier, helped them consolidate systems, they got better data, they got better information. And so there's a real benefit to that.
Alex Kracov (11:54):
I think it's the classic bundling, unbundling thing in software where we had started in a really unbundled space, we were a point solution. And then now Lattice's product strategy is going more towards bundling where there's more of a front-end platform.
Peep Laja (12:08):
Gotcha. So you guys launched on Product Hunt, have done on Product Hunt. On numerous occasions being number one, daily number one. Doesn't really do much for the business. It's nice juju, a good feeling for the team. Did any of it have any real business impact?
Alex Kracov (12:24):
The biggest business impact, which I think is maybe even more important than leads, is from a talent and recruiting perspective. You get the internal energy, as you said. Everyone is so excited. It's amazing to see Lattice on the NASDAQ in Times Square. It's just so exciting, and you just feel the buzz and energy in the office and in Slack.
Alex Kracov (12:43):
But then externally, right, it helps with recruiting. And to make these companies work, you need to get really good people. And my team would always joke, because one of my favorite sayings was, "Oh, we're a real company now." And I keep saying it still, but you have these moments where it's an inflection point where holy shit, we are a real, real company. And each of those awards make it happen.
Peep Laja (13:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. At first, you have startup t-shirts, because are you a real startup if you don't have t-shirts? And then name on the building and, yeah, all these things.
Alex Kracov (13:11):
Exactly.
Peep Laja (13:12):
What were some specific things that really had an impact on attracting talent and building a great culture of how that contributed to the massive success?
Alex Kracov (13:22):
Lattice is a interesting culture company because we sell HR software, right? So I think it is more top of mind than probably most companies. The joke I always give is it's hard for me to have a bad one on one with a person who writes articles about how to have a good one on one. And I think it also self-selects for the type of people who join the company, right? These are people who are really interested in building a modern culture that is really focused around people, right?
Alex Kracov (13:47):
And I think we believe that as business has moved online, it becomes more about the people. It becomes more about the information and people's brains. That's where the creative and the next generation of great companies is really built off, off talent, and creating those spaces. And I think the thing that I think we've done a little bit differently is it's not about benefits, it's not about ping-pong tables and snacks and all of that stuff. It's about giving something that people really want to work on and something they believe in and giving people the ability to grow.
Peep Laja (14:18):
Do you think that was different than, let's say, your competitors, Culture Amp? They did not do any of those things.
Alex Kracov (14:24):
I'm not sure. Culture Amp, specifically, is an Australian company, so I think they maybe looked at it from probably a different viewpoint because of that international side of things. And I think that made them probably more complex because they had way more offices, so I'm sure their culture was probably more like a remote culture.
Peep Laja (14:40):
You mentioned you got into quite a bit of feature war with the competitors. Catch up. Who's copying whom? If you look at any mature SaaS category, there's very little objective difference between the tools. Everybody has every feature. What's your view here, and how was Lattice thinking about this on the inside? Was it that you doubled down on a particular segment of the market that others maybe weren't so interested in? Did you have a particular use case or a [TEDx 00:15:08] feature for a particular subset that others weren't building? What was the product-based differentiation play?
Alex Kracov (15:14):
It was a very interesting and debate-sort-of conversation, internally, where it basically settled was we need to focus on our strengths and double down on our strengths. And for us it was performance, right? We had Culture Amp who was a really good competitor of ours, they had this amazing engagement product. It would take years, honestly, for us to catch up from a product perspective to get there. And so we looked at it and said, "Okay, how can we really outcompete them on our strength?" which was performance management and this idea of continuous performance management, which we believed was more important, right?
Alex Kracov (15:43):
You don't just work at a company to sit around and be happy. You work at a company to achieve some end goal, whether you are a hedge fund and you want to make money or you're a nonprofit and you want to end poverty, you want to have a high performing team that's going to help you reach this end goal. And so we thought from a marketing message standpoint that resonated more with everybody, right? A CEO wants that, the HR person wants that, and managers and so on and so forth. And so that was what our product positioning became more about. That's what we focused on from a product perspective. So not to say we weren't building engagement and trying to catch up, but from an investment perspective, we wanted to make sure we kept that lead.
Peep Laja (16:20):
Many, many people have said product-based differentiation is going away. David Cancel, 2017, and so on.
David Cancel (16:26):
In this stage, it's really around how do you differentiate? How do you build brand? Why is a customer going to buy from you? And why is this better than anything else? You cannot hide behind trade secrets, because anyone can read what the unit economic should be in a business. Everyone can copy the tech. That's easy to figure out, but really, now, it's how do you build a brand?
Peep Laja (16:46):
So while you're building these features and trying to maintain your leadership position in certain areas, were you also actively thinking about moats, building moats, I don't know, whether switching costs or any other type of moat that would make you win the feature war or the product war?
Alex Kracov (17:03):
So on the product side of things, I think the moat was just how do all these different products connect, right? And if we can get your performance data and your engagement data and your development data in one place, and then the way it's all interconnected in a native product is way more powerful than if you're trying to connect it through a bunch of APIs and show up in a Looker dashboard, and we're able to show you more interesting insights about your business. And so we believe that as we build more product surface area, it brings more value to the customer.
Alex Kracov (17:33):
On the marketing side of things, our moat became our community. We had built this community, Resources for Humans, and it started in a Slack channel and then evolved into a bunch of different other properties. Newsletter. We had a huge conference, both in person and virtual. We would have lots of other little events and we'd have, I think, 11,000 HR folks in the community.
Alex Kracov (17:55):
And it's not a Lattice community. We actually don't even let our sales team in there, even though the people are talking about potentially buying Lattice. And so over time that community, that media company idea really help to build up our brand in the market. And I think that's a hard thing to copy, because we are becoming this destination for HR just to learn. You don't have to buy Lattice to get access to all these things. These are all free for the community.
Peep Laja (18:24):
Being at the center of an active community is a great way of building mental availability. If HR professionals are going to Lattice community for discussion and advice, Lattice will be the first name they think of as a potential customer.
Peep Laja (18:36):
What if you built a community around your customer base? The fact that you aren't necessarily offering advice and it's all community-generated content doesn't matter. As long as the content is high quality, curated and relevant, it will build an association with your brand as a useful, trusted resource. As time goes on, you can start to leverage that community as customers or launch e-learning resources to further grow the community and attract a new demographic or capitalize on what you've built.
Peep Laja (19:04):
When we launched CXL Institute, we had a huge head start due to the engaged community we had built. Two essential ingredients of a successful community. One, they have a shared identity, so we're all HR people or product marketers or startup founders or whatever. Two, there's a shared destination. Everyone in the community has a similar end game in mind. Getting their business to X million dollars on revenue or becoming a CMO or just getting excellent at their craft.
Peep Laja (19:39):
A lot of companies are trying to build communities that are remote and brands that's remote. And we see a lot of ghost towns, a lot of communities that, not exactly dead, but not quite alive either. It's at a zombie status. So what do you think Lattice did specifically about the community building that it got right? Was it that there was no existing community for these people to hang out?
Alex Kracov (20:03):
So there was existing communities, and some of our competitors actually had them. I think there was a couple interesting learnings along the way. The first was when we first launched it, we tried to make it really an executive-level community, right? How do we get CHROs in there? And it completely tanked, because we found that the executive did not have the same sort of time in their life.
Alex Kracov (20:22):
And so we relaunched it as a general HR community, and it started to really take off. And I think the best thing we did was make it feel very VIP, so you had to apply. You couldn't just join. There was an application form. You had to explain why. And that was really helpful in getting the right people in there and creating this aura around it.
Alex Kracov (20:44):
The other thing was continual growth. Because I think what happens with a community is a lot of people get into a Slack channel, they forget about it, and so we are constantly adding new people into there, and then we built it into our entire process. So in an outbound sales email, someone's like, "No, I don't want to buy Lattice, I'm not interested," we said, "Oh, no. No worries. Join our community." And it was a way to stay in touch. And then we really kept it alive by doing things outside of the Slack channel. So it became not just about, okay, are you posting in there? Because it gets really messy quickly. It becomes, are you engaging with our newsletter? Are you coming to our events? So on and so forth.
Peep Laja (21:18):
So what also happens in high growth or saturated categories that eventually all the companies start saying very similar things, their same benefits and same go-to-market message. And so if you're new to the category, you're not a category connoisseur, you're competing, it's very hard to tell them apart. What was Lattice's go-to-market and marketing message early on, and how has it evolved while still differentiating against the competition?
Alex Kracov (21:47):
Yeah, it was a very frustrating journey as you continually update your messaging, and then you go look at other people's websites three, four months later, and it's like, "Oh, this is vaguely familiar." I think our approach, generally, with competitor and messaging was we would keep an eye on it, but really just our messaging came from within us.
Speaker 5 (22:05):
Whether you're a fast-growing startup, healthcare company, agency or enterprise it's time for a performance management process that's focused on the employee experience. Get started with Lattice.
Alex Kracov (22:16):
And so our early messaging was performance management employees love, because it was a counterintuitive thing. You would stand at a conference booth and an HR person would come and laugh at it because they'd be like, "No employee loves performance management." And so that was a fun twist on an old school message. And that was, let's say, phase one of Lattice.
Alex Kracov (22:36):
But then as we expanded our product from performance and doing engagement, we changed it to develop engaged and high-performing teams. So that change really was about, okay, how do we marry these two concepts of performance and engagement in one place? And then you'll notice that all the competitors, as they change their products, that it converged on a similar messaging with switching out a word here or there.
Alex Kracov (23:00):
And so what we really tried to do was probably two things. One was design. We think we could outcompete people with our brand design, and so we did some interesting look and feel on our website. So at the very least, even if the words are the same, the feeling is really different. And so we'd come up with this cool, visual language of real live models, real life people, right, because we're a people company, but marrying it with CGI backgrounds and stuff. And so it wasn't just the sea of illustrations that you see on most SaaS websites or just shitty stock photography. It was this blended CGI plus people design. And I think that helped us stand out a little bit.
Peep Laja (23:44):
For cold traffic, website copy is the number one conversion driver. It's twice as effective as good design and should constantly be adapted, tested and improved. It's why we started Wynter.
Peep Laja (23:56):
But design and copy are inseparable. The role of design is to help you communicate the message. It takes just 50 milliseconds for a visitor to form a judgment about your website. If they don't like what they see, they'll be scrolling past it quickly. You need to hook them right away with non-generic, non-boring copy and design.
Alex Kracov (24:16):
I think the other way we were able to innovate was how can we... Even if the messages are the same, if you put it in different places are unique places, that's really interesting. And so we would put the message in billboards, or we actually wrote a book recently. And so, our messaging is getting out there into different ways.
Alex Kracov (24:36):
What's interesting, actually, as I bring up the book, is our messaging just became more complicated or more robust over time. So another big concept we talk a lot about is people strategy. We believe companies need to have a people strategy in the same way that they have a sales and marketing and product strategy. And so that's why one of the reasons why we wrote a book to encourage more companies to do that.
Peep Laja (24:59):
Lattice leads with people strategy in their messaging, and it might not be a hundred percent clear right up front what that is. Contrary to what you usually keep hearing, you want a bit of cognitive disfluency in your messaging. When you say you're a CRM, I put you in the CRM box in my mind, let's stop paying attention to the details. CRM, got it. You're like Salesforce, HubSpot, yada yada. I fill the gaps with assumptions.
Peep Laja (25:23):
If the messaging in your ads sounds like something your competitor might say, they might actually attribute the ad to them. Category leaders often get the mental attribution for other companies' ads. Challenger brands need to work a little harder to get through. That's why you need to make people work a little harder to process information about your brand, making it harder activates the slow thinking part of the brain. They'll code your messaging more deeply, remember it longer, understand it better, and in the process, learn more about you. Of course, use it sparingly. People disengage from overly complex language.
Peep Laja (26:00):
How did the target market change as you started growing? You said you targeted SMBs early on. Were you going upmarket? Did you have to abandon the earlier market and then go upstream? And what happened there?
Alex Kracov (26:14):
So we were moving upmarket and I think... We didn't abandon it. So today, Lattice really serves companies between, let's say, 25, 50 employees all the way up to 3000. So it's a pretty big market. And what happened was we basically optimized our go to market. Our sales teams go after different segments, but the persona definitely really changed, right?
Alex Kracov (26:34):
And so the bottom end of the market, right, you have a persona that I like to think of as an accidental HR person, somebody who is getting stuck with all the HR. It could be the founder or the CEO, it could be the office manager. And there's a point of time in a company where everyone's like, "I need a performance review. I need to do this thing." And you're like, "Oh God, how do I do that?" And then you scramble and figure it out online.
Alex Kracov (26:54):
And so these people want to be told what to do. They want to be say, "Here's the best way to do a performance management," and they want your product and your services to guide them through it. But then as you move upmarket, the HR org becomes more professional. It becomes bigger. You have HR people who really know what they are doing, right, and they want to implement it their way. They have a belief of how they think performance management or employee engagement should be run at the company, and so your software needs to be flexible enough for them to be able to run their program. And so it's more prescriptive early on, more customized later.
Peep Laja (27:31):
What's Lattice's marketing like now? Where's the growth coming from? How much is paid acquisition versus SEO versus brand content, like media, like videos, and things like that?
Alex Kracov (27:43):
Lattice, early on, was all inbound, let's say 75% inbound driven. And so a lot of it was coming from word of mouth, organic search, a lot of things from our brand and community, right? I think of it as a lot of indirect marketing where people join our community, they read an ebook, they take an action, and then they eventually come back to demo when they are ready.
Alex Kracov (28:07):
Over time, we've been trying to shift the mix from inbound to outbound because we know that enterprise buyers don't quite buy in the same way. We started to have more efficiency in our sales team, as well. In a lot of ways I think of it as alley-oop, right? So marketing creates a campaign, creates an awesome conference, and then is really working closely with the sales team to follow up on those different leads.
Alex Kracov (28:31):
And we're doing a lot more of... I think of it as scaled account-based marketing, where we have, let's say 10 to 20,000 accounts that we want to go after, right? Direct mail became a big part of our toolkit where we're sending out mass direct mail to different folk, start the conversation, get it going. And then pairing that with outbound sales emails or so on and so forth.
Peep Laja (28:52):
Lattice has raised quite a bit of money. Investor expectations about certain milestones are probably pretty ambitious. So considering the numbers you need to hit, what kind of bets is Lattice is making in terms of product or so marketing?
Alex Kracov (29:07):
It's a funny thing. Every November, December you look at the annual plan for the following year. Oh my God, that is insane. How are we going to do it? Especially when it starts getting into million dollar months and multimillion dollar months, you're like, "How are we going to possibly do this?" And, knock on wood, we've been able to do it. And I think it's being pretty bold and ambitious.
Alex Kracov (29:28):
So on the product side of things, it was really scaling up the engineering team, right, and building out pods. And we hired an awesome VP of engineering and our COO actually changed and is now a chief product officer and president, and he's leading that. And so there's a massive product investment, because ultimately, we believe if we can build the best product out there, the rest will fall into place. So it's spending just a lot of money on R&D and being really aggressive.
Alex Kracov (29:55):
And then on the marketing side of things, it is, how can we just uplevel? Basically, every year we did the same things, but we just upleveled the ambition and scale of it. Back in 2016, I was struggling to do maybe a webinar every month, and I could get 100 people to show up at that webinar. But then last year during COVID and there was a long journey to get here, we had a conference with 42,000 people RSVP, 22,000 attended. We had Trevor Noah as a headline speaker.
Trevor Noah (30:25):
I would encourage companies, especially through this period to take the time and take the effort to look after their employees the way they've expected their employees to look after their companies for this long.
Alex Kracov (30:37):
You just scaled up the ambition and that costs a lot of money, right? We spent money to get him. We spend money on ads to get those people. And over time, my budget would increase and increase and increase, and you just have to be able to think bigger and bigger. And you have to do things that you're uncomfortable or unknown. We spent money on billboards and things like that without knowing whether it would quite work.
Alex Kracov (30:57):
And the trick with all of it though, was I had a really good relationship with our CEO and founder, Jack. We were able to really meld and agree on different things, especially on these more, I don't know, brand-y, marketing things that are harder to track the ROI. I was really fortunate to have a CEO who believed and supported those different and ambitious projects.
Peep Laja (31:17):
Awesome. Alex, it was a pleasure. Thanks for coming on.
Alex Kracov (31:20):
Awesome. Thank you so much.
Peep Laja (31:24):
So one of the three key decisions that Lattice has made in order to grow and succeed. One, they focused their company on its strengths against the competition.
Alex Kracov (31:33):
We looked at it and said, "Okay, how can we really outcompete them on our strength?" which was performance management, right? You don't just work at a company to sit around and be happy. You work at a company to achieve some end goal, right? A CEO wants that, the HR person wants that. And so that was what our product positioning became more about.
Peep Laja (31:51):
Two, they built an engaged community, which is not sales focused.
Alex Kracov (31:55):
We had built this community, Resources for Humans. It started in a Slack channel and then evolved into a bunch of different other properties.. Newsletter. We have a huge conference, both in person and virtual. We have, I think, 11,000 HR folks in the community.
Peep Laja (32:11):
And three, as they grew, they kept investing more and more into R&D to build the best product and uplevel their marketing ambition, improving their customer acquisition game every year.
Alex Kracov (32:23):
Marketing creates a campaign, creates an awesome conference, and then is really working closely with the sales team to follow up on those different leads.
Peep Laja (32:31):
A final takeaway from Alex.
Alex Kracov (32:33):
You just have to be able to think bigger and bigger, and you have to do things that you're uncomfortable or unknown.
Peep Laja (32:40):
That's how you win. I'm Peep Laja. For more tips on how to win, follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Thanks for listening.
