How Airmeet CEO Vinay Jaasti grew to $47M revenue with a 185 person team in 2024.

how you folks doing excellent excellent so this could be 20 minutes actually very interesting because we're going to build off a lot of what Anna just talked about and give you tactical uh toolkits strategies uh to actually Implement a lot of those things he's telling you not to do my name is Mark Killens I'm at a company named airmeat it's a series B company around event technology I was at HubSpot for eight and a half years I was 140th employee I left there's 3 000 people and I was at drift I was around 200 scale to 600 both companies or you know I was about 600 million when I left and drift was about 100 million so excited to talk to you about how I was able to really grow marketing teams at both those companies so there's gonna be a lot of content and you'll be able to get a lot of this content after I speak to online just just keep that in mind so I'm going to break this down to three things people process performance right you can't have a team without great people the team at the end of the day needs some sort of process to be cohesive and you need to create a high performing team right that's how your business is going to grow and it's going to scale so I'm going to break these three things down into these three different uh sections so I'll go through each thing again very actionable takeaways tangible things you guys can do right after this and the caveat is how many of you folks have a team that's mostly remote raise your hands yes most people right remote hybrid this is a lot of the lessons I've learned from HubSpot was purely in person right there was no remote work back in 2010 when I joined today fully remote company so all of these things are have to do with how to actually communicate build a team in a remote first setting as well so just keeping that in mind so first people are everything right if you don't have great people that's for nothing so the first thing I'm going to break down is how to set a vision and a set of values for your team and how are you going to think about using those I'm going to talk about manager sessions this is especially important when you're small but as you scale don't rely on just HR to grow your team I'm going to talk about what we do with manager sessions and then party hats so Vision Values super critical I think of this as the why how and what the why is your vision and you should have a company Vision right Vision or Mission whatever you want to call it but then your marketing team should have its own Vision that ladders underneath that company Vision right and for us that air meet you know our vision is is empowering the world to join together from anywhere so we've built a set of you know values that help bring that Vision to life and how we built these values you can think of them as principles or values you can have them at the company level I like to have them at the company and Team level is how you create really strong team cohesion and the way we did this is we did it together so we got the teams together it's been about three months over the course of a few different brainstorms really understanding what people cared about and these values and these are the actual values that we have on the team are all very specific action oriented and everyone was included in the creation of these values so how do we use these we use them for hiring so when I'm hiring people I'm interviewing people against most of these values when we're doing performance reviews we're using these in performance reviews when we're giving feedback we're using these in feedback sessions when we're doing coaching you get the idea right so vision and values are critically important to set the right high-level guardrails for your teams to operate in gives them autonomy gives them the confidence to do work in the way they want to do it without deviating Too Much from the pack manager sessions this is the thing I started to do my past company you know HR HR is great but you know you can't rely just on HR to man um here we go to uh manage and grow your team you need to take that into your hands so what we do at airmeat now is every two weeks I sit down with my directors and managers there's about six people my marketing team's 24 people right now and we have conversations about these types of topics some of my favorite right now is business strategy managing up and running one-to-ones at the end of the day your managers are how you're going to get those results that you want in the business needs right that's how it's going to happen so if you don't spend time developing your team and you could be doing this as a Founder as a marketing leader doesn't matter you are going to be missing an opportunity to create that cohesion right and that accountability so for example we do a lot of things where we have open conversations none of these are recorded and we're giving practical advice on how to say like look you're trying to work with someone in sales talk me through how you're doing that what are you struggling with and we're all going around the room giving advice I've brought in guest speakers to talk to these folks I've brought in people that are in my network in our CEOs Network and we're trying to really make it interactive and help people understand how to actually do their job better and grow their team because again I'm dependent on my people right so if you don't do some types of these manager sessions at least once a month I highly recommend you start doing it HR is good right you're going to use them and leverage them if you have that but at the end of the day you got to take matters into your own hands and then party hats this goes back to 2017 HubSpot Academy team was like 20ish people so party hats is an idea that if you have a team of like say 10 15 or more people you're empowering people on the team to help you grow the culture right culture is is many things it's many many things right it's it's you know what you believe who you hire how you work together goes back to that vision and values goes back to you know again like hiring for character training for skill something I believe in but at the end of the day like you want to make sure that you're taking the folks that are on your team and empowering them to to spread the the right types of behaviors right and what we've done at air meets at HubSpot at drift is we've gotten people together on the team who want to be become the life of the party of the team so these people are in power that I give them budget I give them x amount of money per quarter they plan outings they do quarterly manager Awards they do all these things and it's not coming from me top down it's coming organically from the team so you really going to think through how you're going to take some of your team members identify those people that are kind of the culture carriers and Empower them to do things like this this is the annual Lake day at my uh parents lake house right actually up in New Hampshire and this is the team having a ton of fun and and we would structure the day right this annual thing is this well-structured event but again like doing it on a monthly quarterly basis and giving people the autonomy to do fun things you don't have to spend a lot of money it's just about the intentionality you put into it all right so now you have a great team you have some some team members that understand why they're doing what they're doing why you're asking them to do what they're doing how they should be executing their day in and day out through values and you're trying to now figure a performance so I break it down into these three things we're going to talk a lot about team rituals as we go along here monthly priorities career growth plans are types of rituals rituals create habits habits are super important I really try to avoid micromanaging my team I try to give them again the right guard rails to create creativity and execute with Excellence if you will these eight are my top eight team rituals team meeting Monday marketing minute which is an email and a slap that I sent to the entire company outlining brand Pipeline and team updates across the entire marketing team pipeline review super important pipeline's a lifeblood of a company monthly priorities I'll get into that in a moment integrated campaigns we'll talk about that career growth plans super important V2 model who knows V2 moms anyone one person wow okay this this should blow your mind and marketing team Awards we talked about that with party hats these rituals develop your own these rituals help guide the team into the rhythm of their day-to-day the rhythm of their work monthly priorities at the very least everyone on your team should be setting two to three high level priorities for their month what are they setting out to achieve and then reflecting back what are the outcomes and the results of those efforts over the last 30 days you might be asking yourself well if they just do that in isolation that's not going to work that well you're right we'll get to how to fix the hat and how to make sure that there is no isolated monthly priority setting in a moment but this is super important and then finally from like a process standpoint giving people the control of their career is super important I started this like over 10 years ago at HubSpot career growth plans I have the templates it's going to be shared out at the end of the presentation you can steal it it's like 12 to 13 slides they give people the autonomy to take their growth into their own hands while you support them this is everything from what are your the competencies you're asking them to develop what are the skill sets they need start stop continues a great exercise I love the one at the top left but you're giving people the ability to actually understand how they're doing where they stand what are the outcomes of their work and they're does you're designing a ritual a system for them to kind of use every quarter and these get updated every quarter all right the last three got about six minutes left told you there's gonna be a lot of stuff positioning altitudes integrated campaigns V2 mods so now you've got a great team you're starting to help them perform together through process the right process now how do you not just get your marketing team to perform but Pipeline and revenue is a team sport it's Marketing sales Cs and product how do you get all of those teams performing together and as a marketing leader you're ultimately my opinion shaping how the company goes to market right ultimately the CEO decides go to market strategy that's my opinion I think the CEO owns that you're acting as the CEO's right-hand person to make it come to life so I'll give you an example of this figuring out how you want to tell your story the messaging the positioning the content how do you land a plane you don't land up playing thirty thousand feet to the runway within two minutes it's not how you land a customer these days either how you land a customer is through taking them through a journey helping them understand your brand we believe in people first joining together we believe that there's a better way to do that something called event-led growth solution level positioning we believe that we've built a great product Suite the event experience Cloud to help them do that we believe we have these great features in these products and ultimately the most important thing is value positioning we have evidence from other customers that they are seeing tremendous results tremendous value right case studies customer stories benchmarks Etc at the end of the day if your company can design your Marketing sales CS to align to these levels of altitude you're going to be able to take people through a journey and no it's not linear it's never going to be perfectly linear but you're going to need to have all of these five levels these altitude levels to really make sure people understand why you're different why you're better and how you're ultimately going to help them solve their problems that whole what's in it for them mentality how do you bring that to life integrated campaigns this is one of my favorite things we use integrated campaigns at drift we kind of did it at HubSpot we're all in on this at airmeat breaks down to the three uh four things the campaign level messaging so I go back to people first that's our Brand level Campaign event-led growth that's the solution level Campaign you could have a product level Campaign too you know we have one around event intent data because we're building and launching a product that is all about using engagement signals from events to drive Revenue so the campaign is the high level messaging story there's usually something that necessitates the need for a campaign a trigger point there's usually a very specific you know specific but not too specific audience for a campaign really specific audience development happens at the program level you of course have a campaign level instead of messaging and then at the program level you've targeted messaging so for us an example of a targeted program is one that's going after CMOS one that's going after maybe a competitive program and that nests within that campaign and then for each of these programs you have different offers events content could you know be plg product offer could be anything right but these offers map into that specific targeted program messaging and audience and then you have different channels that activate it this is a super important thing to align your marketing team not just your marketing team though your sales team as well because everyone now is starting to understand how to take this and turn it into action and every campaign has goals and that's the last thing I'll talk about V2 mods Vision Values methods obstacles metrics it comes from Mark benioff Salesforce we did this at HubSpot we made it you know something a little bit different turned into a cute thing called the M spot mission strategy playbooks omissions targets of course help us about how to do that right m-spot instead of V2 mom but this is this is how you create high performance I see too many companies do this too late we did this you know probably when we were like 50 million at HubSpot we did this kind of when we were at 40 million at drift we're doing this now at air meets even sooner right so this is helping everyone at the company everyone though on the marketing team align to the Top Line targets that I have my ultimate targets are pipeline My ultimate targets are driving more engagement and efficient growth so everyone on the team is going to have one of these filled out and what we do is every week they track their progress and this provides super autonomy and uh you could say discipline around making sure they're focused on the right monthly priorities what am I doing every month and what are the outcomes of those things driving and how do they ladder up from uh from them to me and then to me to the CEO so V2 moms there's a ton of stuff on the internet about these we have these templates we'll share these out it's a critical thing that you guys got to do to create a really high performing marketing team so to summarize you have people are everything on 100 is saying about hiring and not settling all that stuff hire for character train for skill could not agree more with but you got to get people excited you need Vision you need values need that alignment you got to give people training and upskilling don't rely just on HR to do that and you got to make sure they're fun there's there's there's team cohesion psychological safety being born from that mentality of party hats process build rituals rituals are critically important rituals create habits habits create sustainable continuous growth and performance super important and then from a performance standpoint how do you not align just your marketing team but the whole company around what you're trying to do because at the end of the day if you can activate the whole company from a growth standpoint you're only going to grow faster take a picture of this QR code you'll get this presentation you'll check out my office you can book time with me let me know what you think about the experience really appreciate you all listening coming today hope you enjoy the rest of the event thanks so much cheers