Notion’s Head of Marketing on building a growth marketing engine at a PLG company — Rachel Hepworth

 I thought one place we could start, is maybe talking a little bit how you think marketing fits in specifically to product-led growth. I feel like when people explore the topic, given the name, they tend to be very product-oriented or product manager or feature and functionality oriented.

And so I'm curious, when you think about a product-led motion, how does marketing fit into that? And maybe on the back end you can talk about marketing product, and sales and kind of how they fit together in the work that you've done.

 It's a good question. I've thought about it a lot after spending many years at this point in product led growth companies, kind of running marketing teams. You know, what is our purpose? What is our value? And I think, one of the challenges for marketing at a really successful PLG company is that you have this, quite enormous top of funnel, at least certainly at Slack and Notion, and even at LinkedIn that was the case.

And so for marketing to meaningfully add to that top of funnel, which I think oftentimes is marketing's traditional role, right? Bringing people into the product, building awareness of a company and a product. It can be really challenging cuz your natural base is so large. And so one of the questions is, is there a place for marketing to do that?

I think it notion, we found a lot of really interesting channels and mechanisms to drive meaningful top of funnel growth. things like, affiliates, influencer community, but some companies don't have that as much. Those are often slightly more b2c, strategies. . And one of the things I've thought about is that, marketing doesn't just have to be about the top of funnel.

It can also be about how do you make sure that the people who are coming to your product and trying it out actually stay, which is one of the big challenges for PLG companies. It's very easy to sign up. It's not as always quite so easy to understand what you're supposed to be doing and getting value.

And so with my teams, I've spent a lot of time on the in funnel part of it, education and lifecycle and sort of conversion to pay to make sure your users become customers. Because for a lot of PLG companies, the signup metric can almost be a vanity metric. It's so easy to achieve, just add in your email address that the true company value actually comes later in the funnel through like an activation metric or an upgrade metric.

 And there's a lot of work that marketing can do, particularly around kind of education and lifecycle that adds a lot of value to that funnel. So maybe kind of picking up and pulling on that thread maybe a little bit more precisely in the context of what you've built at, at Notion and the PLG motion there. I wanna learn more about what marketing is responsible for, and I really wanted to talk more about that idea of the role of marketing as user becoming customers, users becoming customers.

But maybe first you could kind of shrink down your worldview of what marketing is responsible for.

 So there's a team notion that focuses on kind of community and comms and brands, like really, really top of funnel awareness building. and just for clarity, that's a separate team from the marketing team. And so I think of the marketing team it's much more of like a funnel revenue focused team.

So things like product marketing, growth, marketing, demand gen and content. International notion is very, very international customer base are all part of the marketing team. But it's really about, sort of driving and controlling a lot of the channels and mechanisms versus more enabling the community, which is a lot more what the brand team does.

In some ways that's a lighter touch. You don't control it as much, you just light a fire under it and give them the resources they need. the community drives itself. The marketing programs are where we take a little bit more control. So one example where there's some overlap is we're building an affiliate program.

And the affiliate program really gets a lot of oomph from the community. People who are already really enthusiastic about notion and who love it and who build templates and who talk about it. But, we manage this program of materials and compensation and tracking in a much more deliberate way.

And that's one of the big differences between the teams, the level of direct control you exert over some of these things. but the marketing team at Notion is fairly metrics based. a lot of it is, how do we understand the value that we're bringing to the business though if we're building up performance marketing or as I mentioned in, affiliates, or if we're investing in s e o, what's the time and, dollar investment that we're making.

and then what's the value to the business that's coming out? And we track that really by customers. So we don't track that by signups because it's really easy for somebody to sign up and then not stick around. And that is not particularly valuable to the business. We track it by the number of people who are actually getting so much value that they are paying notion at that point.

And it's really important that our success metric is that far down the funnel.

 So kind of on this theme of users becoming customers as opposed to, top of the funnel users. if another growth marketing leader came to you and said, I feel like our team and our company is too oriented around just user, just top of the funnel users versus sticky customers, and we wanna shift that, what advice would you give them?

or how would they operationalize that desire to be much more retained customer oriented versus I'm just sending leads in the top of the.

 So the, the challenge is often that you want a really quick feedback cycle. it's most simplistic if I'm creating a search campaign and I wanna know if the people clicking on those terms are worth the amount of money we're spending on those terms. Depending on your funnel, it can take a long time for people to convert from user to customer, depending on how generous your, freemium or free trial, product is.

And then it's hard to iterate because you don't, you have to wait weeks or months to understand if you're really attracting customers, you're just attracting kind of freemium users who will never convert. And so if you're in that, Quandary, which I think is a challenge for a lot of people. The question is, what is the metric that is the highest up in the funnel that is also reasonably correlated to upgrading to paid, if that makes sense.

So what's the, what's the indicator you can get as early as possible that this is very likely to become a customer? so that you can start iterating quickly and getting that feedback loop going very rapidly without optimizing off of metrics that are gonna point you in the wrong direction. And this is often that activation metric that people talk about.

Not always, but often because the activation metric tends to be created based on what is telling the product team that this is, they're encouraging people to become customers. . And so to me it's really important that's a metric that people hit in a week. And for a lot of purposes, you actually want them to be able to hit it within a day because that the speed of the feedback cycle is so important.

So that's generally what I recommend is understand what are the leading indicators that these people are, more valuable than your general user base. they're much more likely to become customers. What are the soonest earliest signals that you can get? So at Notion it's things like, inviting a second person to your team or editing a doc or creating a second doc.

And if you do that within a day of signing up, you're much more likely to be valuable. And if you sign up with, for instance, a professional email address versus a personal email address, like a Gmail, you're much more likely to convert into a customer. And so figuring out what these early stage metrics are and then goaling yourself around them becomes.

possible to do your work and also you have much more confidence that you're generating real value for the.

 one piece that you're kind of getting at is sort of these activation metrics or leading indicators that somebody's gonna be a great customer in this case for notion. when you look out more broadly, when you think about getting in front of the right people, because I would assume you kind of have two variables that are somewhat overlapping.

One is that once you get a, potential user in the top of the funnel, how are you nurturing, converting and activating that person? The other one is maybe there's a lot of Janes out there that are phenomenal potential customers, and there's a lot of Allens out there that are never gonna be great customers and let's avoid them entirely.

and so how does it map back to like who you're getting in front of in addition to once you're pulling them in, what are the actions that you're getting them to take?

 I think that, that comes down to a segmentation or, ideal customer profile question at the end of the day. And those both help who you're targeting and the how to make them effective. So one of the things that is becoming very apparent at Notion, which was, pretty similar at Slack as well, is that thinking about people by, their, their functions is what helps understand what they're trying to do in their jobs.

And so, what are the goals they're trying to accomplish? And then how can you position notion to most effectively help them achieve those goals. So if you think about a marketer and some of the things that they have to achieve throughout their day, it might be like you have to create a launch plan or you have to organize a campaign.

You're thinking about a product manager. It would be, you have to write a P R D and then you have to build a roadmap around it. And so in terms of, outreach and finding these folks, Having those terms, having the templates that might help them, create and produce a lot of this material or get some of that work done, manage some of that work.

It's pretty targeted to what they're trying to achieve and who they are. And so that, when they're searching or when they're looking for things and they spot that, it helps build awareness and interest and notion for them because it speaks to what they're trying to do. And then when they actually create a notion team and then say, well then, how do I get value out of this product That tells us how we should customize that onboarding experience to bring them the value most quickly and help them be successful.

So the two are very, very linked. I think the challenge with a very broad product like notion is that it can do a lot of things. And then it's hard for people to figure out what to do with it. It's sort of that blank page problem. So the more we can narrow the world of possibilities and just proactively suggest how they might get value, suggest the templates, suggest the workspace setup, suggest the docs they might wanna start creating, the easier it is for them to see how they can use the product.

and if you do that from the point of acquisition all the way through your signup flow, all the way through onboarding, people are gonna activate at a much higher rate than they otherwise would.

 what do you think Notion has taught you about marketing that was new to you? you spent most of your career working in different parts of marketing and really phenomenal companies, whether it be Slack or LinkedIn, et cetera. but when you think about your last couple of years at Notion, were there big ideas that were crystallized in working there in this role that maybe were.

New frameworks, worldviews, things that you've figured out for the first time.

 I think the way Notion has encouraged. and supported its community has been really eye-opening to me. When I was at Slack, we had a very similar viral word of mouth engine, but it was something, I think the company more observed and said, this is amazing. We hope it continues. Notion is like, it's amazing and we're gonna help drive this.

And that's something that Notion I think has done much better that companies that I previously was at. And it's been really eye-opening for me. And so, the Camille Ricketts who started the Notion Marketing team, I think her first hire was Ben Lang, who, leads community. And just that understanding and acknowledgement of how critical that is and how you have to invest in it and support it, not control it but feed it.

That was a really critical insight and it's been quite inspiring for me to watch it. it's incredible what notion is built, like the notion community just dwarfs any other B2B company. I know like even if you combine them all, it dwarfs them and it really, it feels it's like a B2C motion for a company that really generates all of its revenues from companies.

So that combination is really interesting and I don't know if I've ever seen it at a company before. I think it's very innovative and has been quite incredible for notion to harness. So that's something that I've really, taken away from my time here is how important that is. And it's not something that you can measure.

I'm a very metrics focused marketer, but you can't really measure community in terms of dollar in, dollar out. How much time do we spend on it? How much revenue did it generate? It's a little bit closer to brand in that way, but the contribution is, is undeniable. despite that. And so it's been pretty incredible to watch.

The other thing that we're still learning about and I'm really intrigued by is the fact that Notion has this very unique model where the vast majority of our users are personal. they're individuals using it in their own time, we don't expect them to pay, we don't need them to pay.

All of our revenue comes pretty much from businesses. And so when you think about the personal side is what builds the buzz, it builds the awareness, just millions and millions of people who are using Notion and talking about notion very vocally and lets notion play bigger than it otherwise would, based on the actual size of the company.

how does that translate into building a really enduring business, with a really strong revenue model. , there's definitely connections and there's a lot of opportunity for creativity and things that you wouldn't normally be able to do if you were just B2C and just b2b. And I think Notion is really pioneering thinking about how to make that combined B2C B2B model work.

 Could you talk a little bit more about that? Like how you operationalize that or how you think about this role of B2B versus b2c, and do you think about that as discreet personas and discrete lines of business? Or do you view it as a different flavor of land and expand? I get somebody who uses for whatever personal use case, for example, and they also have a work life and they're gonna bring it into the office.

Or do you just view those as separate personas?

 so a little bit of both, but much more the latter. We have a lot of students who use us and, long-term students graduate and become members of the workforce, but certainly, For many years, potentially they have a unique persona of students. Um, and it's, that's less about the land and expand.

We have a lot of prosumers who use Notion and are huge advocates and that's also a distinct persona. But for the most part, I would say the thing that's really interesting is watching people hear about notion, use it in their personal life. The way you use Notion in your personal life is often pretty simple and easy to get.

Start with, you make grocery lists, you make to-do lists, you track your week, and then they start to think about, okay, well this can actually help me get my job done. So for my own individual work at a company, you can start using Notion, and then Notion has so many collaborative features. You write a doc, you invite people to it, and then you have that very natural expansion motion into multiplayer.

And so that's the way a lot of it will work, is that people go from personal to like, Personal, but in a professional use case to working with your coworkers. And there's a lot of, modeling that's done where people see what other people are doing and they say, oh, that looks cool. what is that?

I want to use that as well. and that was very similar. Slack also had a modeling aspect to it where, if you sit and you look at what your coworker's doing and you're like, what is that? I wanna try that out too. So it ends up being very important. The way that you can build awareness when you have that personal use case is, there's a lot of opportunities for incredible scale that can be much harder to achieve on the B2B side, and that's something that's really interesting.

So, how do you get this scale and brand awareness that's equivalent to a B2C company? I mean, notion has a top of funnel. It's millions of people. It's just huge. Like B2B companies tend to just, they don't have that unless they're, huge and established. And that's the benefit of that B2C kind of motion.

and then it trickles down into the B2B revenue through the land and expand model over time.

 One thing you mentioned was this idea of this life cycle of personal to business or professional, and then to multiplayer. when you think about that journey, who owns what between product and marketing

 so marketing is responsible for, I would say getting to the signup point, so, And turning in your email address on the website and creating an account with Notion, the product team partners with growth marketing, but I would say the product team is primarily responsible for taking those signups and ensuring that they understand how to use the product and get value out of it.

In those earlier days, that they, that first day, in that first week, they have kind of, um, enough understanding of the product. They hit that aha moment so that they will stick around and return week after week. And the product is the main driver, I would say, of expanding for those initial signups and small teams to add more and more people.

The in product prompts and experience is so powerful, so marketing and a lot of other teams will partner with product and help and drive impact. But if you're thinking about who is the, the primary owner and has the primary amount of impact to any time in the funnel, at that point it would be the product team.

And then once they get to a stage where, we know that they are a mid-market or enterprise company and they're kind of deeply engaged in the product, they have like at least 20 people who are active. Then it starts to transition more to the demand gen and the sales team to reach out to decision makers, champions within those companies and try to engage them for a more enterprise conversation.

So then the responsibility shifts again to a different set of teams.

 Can you talk in a little bit more detail about planning and how product or growth, product and growth marketing work together on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual basis?

 Yeah, so we do quarterly planning, and then the teams meet weekly and the growth product team, for instance, has a couple of different sub-functions, a team focused on acquisition and a team focused on monetization. The growth marketing team has people who are focused on different, channels like, lifecycle or website optimization or affiliates and things like that.

So depending on, where people's mandates overlap, they'll also meet one-on-one. I think the important thing is they operate on a sprint cadence. where you're doing, it's a series of testing and learning and sharing out the learnings. I think the sharing out the learnings ends up being the most important part of these growth teams, because the whole point is most of your tests are gonna fail.

Then how do you take what's successful and expand that so it has even greater impact. So, the growth, product leader, growth marketing leader, meet themselves as a leadership team to make some plans, and then the people on their teams will meet individually and there's a, self-serve weekly meeting that's done.

The growth product team is quite new at Notion. our product leader just joined the team itself is, like basically a quarter old. That's one thing that's kind of surprising about a company like Notion. It's a PLG company that didn't really have a growth product team until very recently. And so a lot of these rituals are candidly still being defined. But I think the important part is gonna be the sharing of insights between the teams and then how do we take what one team discovers and ensure the other teams are leveraging it? How do we focus on the same types of audience? So if Lifecycle is gonna build out an experience for product leaders, the product team, should probably build out a functional experience for product leaders as well, versus an experience for marketing leaders, right?

Where the two are kind of disconnected. So making sure they're sharing like the audience and persona, the goals jointly that things can be cohesive in the entire customer journey.

 Was there a specific rationale on pushing out, building out a more formal growth product team?

 So what's fairly unique about Notion is that the product team itself is relatively new. When I joined about two and a half years ago, there was no product team, which I found very surprising. I mean, that's how scrappy and small. This company was, that had already been very successful.

so the product team holistically is pretty new. A lot of it was being driven by design engineering when I joined. And then the growth product team. I think there have been some internal debates about whether or not we needed that team. can the growth responsibility sit within the core product team?

And, the core product team has a lot of work to do to build the core product. And so it and skillsets are a little bit different, right? Core product folks, they're often building things that take months. it's not a test and learn environment. The velocity is in some ways lower. They're just building different things.

So it's hard to combine those responsibilities. But, I think notion experimented with a couple of different. Concepts before settling on growth product. I think the other thing that probably made it take a little bit longer is there's a strong aversion to anything that resembles growth hacking like notion really wants to build valuable experiences, not experiences that just trigger people into engaging because you flash something up in front of their faces.

And so I think there was a concern that if we brought on a dedicated growth product team too early, could devolve into that kind of work, moving a metric for a metric's sake, flashing a popup in front of people, hurting the overall experience of the product because they're trying to hit some metric.

So you wanted to be confident that people were going to build valuable experiences, help the users access more value from the product rather than do any of this growth hacking things. And that was some of the concerns that delayed the development of the team.

 What do you think . Are the differences between what makes a great growth marketer and a great growth product manager? If you remove technical skills that somebody's figured out in terms of how to do the job, do you think there are orientations or general attributes of the type of people that tend to be excellent in one of those roles versus the other?

 my general feeling is, they are not necessarily that different and I think sometimes it's somewhat luck and happenstance what function you end up in, right? The things that make a growth marketer and a growth product. Leader, great. Are, I think it's like a lot of curiosity, a lot of bias to action and speed.

A desire to experiment. you're not afraid to be wrong. Thinking about what's gonna have the most impact. So, you don't wanna throw random things at the wall. How can you be, disciplined and deliberate about where you invest your time to try new things? is the volume even high enough to make a difference?

Even if you like, doubled your metric, where's the thing that seems to be underperforming? What's the thing that you can do quickly versus the thing that will take huge investment? What are you gonna learn if this fails or succeeds? Do you know what that, what's the next step? I think all of those are quite similar between the two functions.

So I don't know if I actually believe that there's a big difference between an excellent growth marketer and an excellent, growth product manager at the end of the day. versus just kind of where they've ended up. The people I've seen who are really, really great at one have would be great at the other as well.

 Something I wanted to loop back on is the topic of metrics, and I'd be interested to have you talk in some more detail about, if you think about the three, five, or seven metrics that you think are most important in your world, what are they, and maybe why are they important? And are there any that you've figured out in your career that you think are underrated or overlook?

 it's gonna depend on the business. I guess that's my first answer is the metrics are never the same company to company, although there's some areas that you will see pop up over and over again. and one of the challenges is figuring out what's the set that are really important in all the rest are just noise.

Because what you end up seeing is you have these reviews with, people looking at a dashboard with 300 metrics and they're overwhelmed and they just don't pay attention to any of them. It feels good that you're tracking 300, but it's not actionable. you just kind of say, okay, well I saw that, let's go on with our week.

And that's sort of a sign of failure. So when I think about the metrics that I pay a lot of attention to, it tends to be things like, the, um, kind of rate metrics and then there's just the measurement metrics from week to week. So like how many people are signing up? Money are activating and then what is that activation rate in between?

And I often spend more time on the rates than I do on the actual numbers. But both are important and they'll tell you different things. it's really easy to gain things in plg, like if you just paid attention to signups. What inevitably happens is you do something that spike signups and then you realize that your activation rate went down, right?

Cuz the quality is lower. So the signups didn't necessarily give you the business impact that you hoped they would. So things like signup, activation rate activated users or teams is really important. and then the number of customers you're creating and that monetization rate within a certain time period.

The hard thing about PLG is that people can upgrade within a day, a week, a month. And so you have to pick. A timeline when you're gonna measure it. So like what percentage of customers monetize after one week or one month or whatever is the time period that kind of makes sense for your business model. One of the things that I have learned is really, really important in a PLG company that is trying to move upmarket versus stay s and b is to segment your users coming in by like company size. Because what you'll find is you'll say, oh my God, we doubled the number of signups, but they're all at companies that are for people.

That's not actually that valuable for your company and your sales team definitely doesn't care that you doubled those signups, but if you're just looking at number of signups, you'll feel really good. And so trying to, filter some of this to say, I wanna see how many, companies of a hundred employees and more.

how many, new account creations are we generating every week? Because that's what's gonna feed the sales team and that's what's gonna drive our, market business. That number can often look really different than what the self-serve team is measuring, and that helps you get a better read of your business.

And so that's sort of a less typical metric that I think is really, really important for these companies that have kind of a self-serve and sales hybrid model

 Do you have a process for landing on these metrics or adjusting them over time?

 for activation rate, it's what is most correlated. With paid customers. that's what I strongly believe. So what's going to identify the customers or the users most likely to become customers and not over-identify? Like not I, you know, grab a bunch of people who end up never converting. So that's how I think about activation, right?

And then it has to be something that is, within like a one week time spann, because again, that feedback loop is really, really important. You can't wait longer than that. And would often, again, prefer like a day, but sometimes you really need to wait a week, otherwise the number means nothing.

Or how much are we going to be driving the sales business, three, six months from now? I think a lot of this is about feedback from your sales team and then literally looking at the deals you're doing and saying when is the product usage?

Meaningful enough that it helps our team close deals at like a consistent and high rate. And when does it seem like they haven't gotten enough value or engagement that it's, equivalent to doing cold outbound? So that's a little bit less precise because the volume is lower, but that can be as simple as an ongoing conversation with the sales team of like, when are you interested in reaching out to people, what is the trigger that you want to use?

and that will vary. So at Slack it was, we called it qualified free teams, and it was a team that had at least 50 active users on it. That's what our sales team wanted because it, slack is such a, it's a daily use case. Deep, deep engagement. If you didn't have that, it just, it wasn't very meaningful, for a company and the sales team couldn't leverage it.

Notion the number is a little bit different. It's lower cuz we're a different type of use case product. but again, if you have like three users on a team, it's just not that meaningful for sales for a PLG company that indicates they haven't gotten enough value yet. So they wanna see, 20, users for these mid-market companies at least because there's a team then that's really using notion to do their work and that's something that the sales team can have a conversation around.

 Charlie Munger's famous for this idea of incentives rule the world. and you touched on this a little bit when you've been talking about metrics thus far, where if you pick the wrong metrics, you can quickly align everyone around it. They will move the metric and they're incentivize the move, the metric, but it takes you in the wrong direct.

because either the metric is vanity metric in some way, or it doesn't fully capture how you think about creating business value. and

so I'm interested in how you think about that topic. And is it sort of something you're constantly watching and trying to get into the equilibrium, or how is it a consideration when you think about metrics, when you think about managing the team, when you think about sharing context with team members?

642ed5a6f1e4f6e9e9c9f083

Rachel Hepworth, Head of Marketing at Notion and formerly Slack’s first growth marketing hire, shares her high-level frameworks for bringing marketing processes and analytical structure to PLG companies.