The role of the Head of Growth and how to set up a data-driven culture

Different data champions arise from teams that are close to data and want to make it an everyday team sport. A couple of months ago, we met with Hugo, Head of Growth at Klox. He was asking a lot of very interesting questions like what data tools should we be using at our stage? What are the best ways to measure the sales funnel? We already have some stuff in our data warehouse, how do we scale that

At some point, as the Head of Growth, he decided to structure Klox with a lot of metrics for both customers and internal teams.

Let’s take a look at his role and how he did it!

Can you describe your current role and your responsibilities at Klox?

It’s been more than a year since I’m in charge of Growth at Klox now. Our initial focus was to make our Sales (BDR) more productive and allow them to spend more time on selling and not on finding the good contacts, enriching them and also cleaning their CRM (I know you know!).

Another challenge was to confront sales teams with their performances, personal and team objectives. That means making data visible and accessible to the whole team through dashboards.

Today, as it’s going well, my main priority is to develop new acquisition channels - with a special focus on content and distribution. We need to empower everyone to participate in this huge project. From the client to the marketing team for the customer.

You actually worked as a Guitar teacher and then progressively moved to digital marketing, ad-tech, and the data space as a Media Trader and Head of Growth. How did that happen?

Well, to be honest, my father is a guitar teacher and I needed to support his structure for personal reasons. It was my first internship where I was giving guitar courses, improving the website, and applying for grants in order to get public funds.

Universities don’t help people to develop their passion, curiosity and don’t entice them to have professional experiences. It’s only mandatory from the Master’s Degree and it’s been a huge problem for me.

But I had the chance to work at Ubisoft Montreal for my last 6-month internship. It actually changed my life (if I can say). I totally found myself.

I used to work with the Media team where they were started to internalize the Business Intelligence and media activities. I didn’t know anything about digital advertising and I worked so hard for catching up. I didn’t want them to see me as a burden.

A big thank you to Simon Joly, Marie Vidal, Karine Meillat, and all others in the team for your support and patience.

You have a handful load of certifications in web analytics and data, can you explain a bit how do you decide to learn new skills? How do you cope with your everyday job?

A lot of people inspire me, including my brother who was always right against me for a looong time. And I think my competitive nature (from football I guess) wanted me to overcome that.

Another important trigger was this internship at Ubisoft where I finally started to know more about business, sought skills in the market, and then I had a better sight of where to go and how to do it.

From there, I started reading tech news every day, learning new operational skills in order to make up for the delay. I think that I’ve done all of this because of a strong impostor syndrome - that I still have today. I’m always comparing myself to the best-in-class people.

Any tip on how to take certification courses while having a full-time job?

Know why you’re doing this certification. It shouldn’t be for showing to other people you’ve done that (it was a bit my case). Be focused on your learning, be steady, and be patient.

Identify your careers or business opportunities (personal-oriented vs. corporate-oriented) and choose the good training and certifications accordingly.

Can you detail a bit about how Klox is organized today from Sales to Client delivery?

We currently have three main business teams: Marketing, Sales (BDR and SDR), and CS/AS (Customer Success / Account Strategists). I consider Growth as a binder between these teams helping them generate revenue.

Our SDRs are in charge of finding good contacts to prospect with the help of the growth team and cold calling them when it’s relevant. They also can help the BDRs launch several outreach campaigns.

BDR needs to close deals and then an introduction is done with the good CS/AS - who will be responsible for supporting and advising our client.

On the other side, marketing works closely with the Sales to provide them with good content in order to better convert in our outreach sequences or ABM strategies.

Marketing also works with the CS/AS to produce the content needed for our customers in order to improve retention.

How did you design the right metrics for Sales, Growth, and Client teams? What was your data roadmap?

The main objective was to have all our business KPIs in a single view, a single dashboard, and stop having up to 10 standalone dashboards.

Our analysis is actually quite simple: we need to track opportunities, the first talk (that we call “demo”), strategic recommendations sent, and closed deals.

And for a micro perspective, we also analyze outreach campaigns and cold call performances and try new experimentation based on these data.

What are the highest frictions when implementing a data-driven culture? Any hot tricks on how to overcome them?

According to me, the main friction is communication. Everyone who owns the data has great ideas but neglects the impact that its own implementation could have on the whole data system (duplication, broken workflows, broken dashboards…). Data governance is essential.

Another challenge is nomenclature. It brings clarity and scalability to your operations and business. And we have still work to do! :)