Early stage Growth Secrets with Alex Vale

Hey folks, welcome back to another awesome episode of Smooth Operators' Guide! Here, we deep dive into the tech trenches, thanks to some top-notch industry pros – think CTOs, CEOs, CMOs, CROs, and Growth gurus – who are here to spill the beans on the apps driving their success. In these exclusive chats, we're getting the lowdown on the apps that keep their businesses ticking, straight from the mouths of the movers and shakers themselves.

So, who's stealing the show this week? It's none other than the amazing Alex Vale, Head of Growth at Attio. Brace yourselves for some seriously game-changing insights! Let’s get into it:

1. Tell us a little about yourself. Introduce yourself to our audience; talk about your current role, when you started Attio, and why.
   ‍I’m Alex, I lead the marketing team at attio.com. For us that spans product marketing, community and social, paid performance, and visual design plus design engineering. We throw in a little bit of brand marketing now and then too. Five and a half years ago, I joined a 5-person CRM startup making a CRM for VCs. I was straight out of university and looking for any role I could find at a London startup. I was tasked with taking new customers’ data exports, cleaning them up, and importing them to our platform - I loved every second of it. As we grew my responsibilities did too and I started working on all things marketing. We soon realized the scope of the opportunity was much larger than just VCs, and we’d made some key architectural mistakes, but eventually, we pivoted and Attio was born.
2. What does your stack look like and what are your go-to tools for running your day-to-day?
   ‍Unsurprisingly Attio’s at the center of our GTM stack - all product, billing, and top-of-funnel data is synced there - it’s the entire team’s command center. Attio also covers all of our data enrichment and lead triage/surfacing automation so we reduce our tooling overhead there as well. Beyond that, we have a very classic stack: GA/Mixpanel for analytics, Customer.io for email, Circle for community, and our marketing site’s built with NextJS Developers and Storyblok.
3. What growth verticals or channels are you bullish on and why?
   ‍It has to be community and by extension word of mouth - real people saying real things. Every marketer has heard ‘content is king’ before and I think that was completely true. The problem is that we’re now approaching a point in history where digital content, be it video, text, or audio, has essentially zero production cost. Zero cost means infinite production and when you can make infinite things they lose their value quickly. Real people saying real things will be the only signal that matters.
4. What metrics, KPIs, and numbers tell you whether you’re headed the right way?
   ‍From a marketing/growth perspective, we only really focus on a few key metrics. The first is the number of MQLs, the second is our paid channels’ CPA, and the third is our average ACV. The growth rate for MQLs gives us a great idea of how the top of the funnel is increasing and how busy our sales team will be. We also have aggressive spending ramps planned for the foreseeable and monitoring CPA ensures we focus on spending that money sensibly. And watching average ACVs is a great counter-balance metric. It would be incredibly easy to manipulate the first two metrics by pumping the funnel with high volume/low-value leads but by keeping our ACVs high we ensure that can’t happen.
5. Every leader has that one metric that tells the whole story. What’s that one metric for you and why?
   ‍For me, it’s our marketing site visit to web app sign-up CVR. We’ve modeled the funnel many times and every time this is by far the biggest sensitivity factor. Essentially, every person who experiences Attio is captured within this metric, and its health tells volumes!
6. Rapid fire round. Which tool(s) would you say:

• Is your Swiss army knife: Google Sheets - for crucial forecasts and quick calculations

• You cannot live without in your stack: Attio

• Undiscovered gem: Passionfroot - it’s fantastic for finding and working with creators

• New to your stack: @Customer.io - a much-needed upgrade from Intercom Series + Intuit Mailchimp

What’s one unobvious tactic, tool, or piece of advice that has worked wonders for you? It’s cliche and also very true, but David Ogilvy’s quote about advertising to moving parades has always been a great aid for making decisions about what we should be doing next. Ultimately it just boils down to making sure you have the right message and then shouting it over and over again - the people that hear it will be different every time.The most counterintuitive channel applies to social. People get too easily into their heads worrying about posting similar things too frequently and ending up with a monotone profile feed. It doesn’t matter! Shout the same message over and over and you’ll see more success than if you change it every time.

About Alex Vale:

Alex is the Head of Growth at Attio, where his role extends across product marketing, community, and social engagement, paid performance strategies, as well as visual design and design engineering.

Alex's approach to growth is marked by innovation and adaptability. He thrives on identifying untapped opportunities, leveraging data-driven insights, and deploying creative tactics to propel our company forward. From optimizing conversion funnels to cultivating strategic partnerships, Alex's strategic vision for growth and hands-on approach are key to driving Attio’s success.

Alex’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexjvale?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app

Attio’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/attio/

Attio’s Website: https://attio.com/