Hiral Thakeria’s Modern Approach to Growth in a Legacy Industry

Hiral Thakeria is the no-nonsense Growth Lead at an early stage startup that uses AI to optimize heavy industrial production. She is in charge of everything non-technical, including finance, operations, and marketing. With a background in early stage startups and strategy consulting, Hiral knows how to build businesses and sustain long-term growth. But marketing strategy and execution is something she had to learn on the job.

In this interview, Hiral and I discuss B2B marketing in a highly complex industry, how to evaluate whether a channel is worth investing in, and how to meet your audience where they are.

Interview:

What does growth look like in this context?

For companies at our stage, it's very simply how much revenue are you making and where the money is coming from. So anything that constitutes how you actually get a customer, keep a customer, sell to them, is growth.

It's not very siloed at the moment because there's this whole mesh of [activities]. Marketing, then your whole sales process, which is your entire funnel of how you actually get a lead and then convert them to purchase. Then keeping them and selling them something else, closing them, negotiating, signing a contract — all the commercial part of things. All of that to some degree constitutes growth because it's essentially how are people finding out about us, how are we finding out about people? How are we selling them and how quickly is that revenue growing?

You do everything except write code right? How do you manage all of the competing priorities?

There's no formula to do it. I think, ultimately, there is a case to argue that the most important thing at all times is closing deals. How I define priorities, is by asking "What is the most important problem to solve on any single given day?”

If converting customers is the number one priority, how do you manage upper funnel activities that don’t immediately convert?

That is the thing that starts slipping the earliest because it is always hard to prioritize someone at the top of the funnel if there isn't an urgent need to convert them. There are things we just have to do in the background all the time. There are really easy things for us in this industry that work and the biggest one is just going to conferences and meeting people.

But then you have to be at the right events at the time when the right people are at those events. That means the right people from our team have to be at those events to be able to speak about things that are very technical.

What ends up happening is we need to fill the top of the funnel a lot during a given period of time when we have the capacity to do so. Ideally that funnel needs to be moving. All the time.

I remember a while back you had run some billboards. When you think about your marketing strategy and supporting promotion activities, where do you begin?

We are this high growth, exciting, young, cool, authentic startup, and we sell to some large, complex, archaic organizations that don’t work the same way. We're not a B2B marketing platform, for example, where all of your customers are going to be on the internet. It’s sad because you see all of these cool campaigns on LinkedIn and Twitter but that doesn’t work for us because [our target audience is not] online. I think the most important thing is [asking], Who are these people and where do they hang out? And therefore, how are we going to get to them? For us, like, that ends up being conferences. Conferences are a huge trust builder for us.

[We have] cool edgy branding for one of our products that's worked quite well. So we're also now trying to play with different ideas. The billboard was one idea. We also do a lot of merch that we send them. It actually works quite well because they love that kind of stuff. They’re very old school and want to keep stuff on their desks.

We're starting to do a lot of creative videos, because [we found that] these are people that spend a lot of their time on YouTube learning how to do things. It's just a case of doing something that feels cool and authentic to ourselves at all times.

I think the video series is really interesting. It sounds like a way to introduce prospective clients to the team, the work they do, and also have a little bit of fun. Where did that idea come from?

It was one of the ideas that our founder initially had. We realized that we should be filming because our whole approach to the way that we work is that we're on site all of the time.There's so much that naturally happens that would be so interesting for [our clients]. Also our audience is not on LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok. But they do watch a lot of YouTube. We spend so much time with these people on site and they speak so much about their daily lives. They tell us that they often learn things on YouTube.

And have you ever invested in a promotional activity that didn’t work?

I think it was the billboards. What ended up happening is that we launched a bunch of these billboards and then we didn't really follow through the whole funnel at the end of it. We could see on Google Analytics that [keywords from our billboards had an increase in search volume] and also our website traffic [increased] around those regions. But then because there was nothing that came at the back of it in terms of our funnel. It just was a billboard that people probably saw and forgot about.

To wrap up, if I were a young technical founder and I wanted to build an audience and grow, how would you recommend that I balance building the product and generating awareness of it?

The most important thing is building something that people want. When you build the initial version, it can be super scrappy. It can be a bunch of different things combined; it can be built from third party tools or by you manually doing the work instead of the software doing it. From these non-scalable activities, you can figure out “Is this actually something people want?” It doesn’t have to be the most beautiful product in the world, it just has to do what you’re selling. Once you nail that, you can start to think about how you make people aware of the product on a broader scale.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.