Summary
Perkbox’s marketing team is built around seven core functions: design, performance, online, campaigns, content, communications, and operations.
It has grown and evolved significantly over the past year – half of its marketing hires have only been at the company less than a year. Perkbox is adapting to several large and exciting company milestones including: creating the go- to-market strategy for three new products, creating a customer marketing strategy, and aligning messaging with two different markets as the company expands globally.
The repositioning (and brand evolution) has been executed completely in-house with no agency support. This has required a very high level of expertise, innovating to build and execute campaigns aligned with the product team.
Over the last 12 months the team has grown and evolved significantly to scale with the business. Going from single- product/single-market to a global multi-product organisation meant marketing had to increase the complexity of its team, introducing new functions like customer and field marketing managers. In addition, it invested heavily in areas of scalable growth such as SEO, ABM and offline (outbound) marketing.
“The Perkbox marketing team are certainly a highly talented, outspoken, intellectually curious, humorous and high-performing bunch. Despite the fact that most members are relatively new to the team, over the last year they have managed to band together to navigate increasing complexity and deliver some truly impressive initiatives and results.”
About Perkbox and its marketing team
Perkbox is a platform that provides a unique employee experience, enriching the personal and working life of employees. It offers a suite of products including a platform with access to best-in-class perks, Perkbox Medical, Perkbox Recognition and Perkbox Insights. It serves companies of all sizes from SMEs to large companies such as Whole Foods, Nando’s, Caffe Nero and Levi Strauss & Co. Headquartered in London, Perkbox has offices in Sheffield, Paris and Australia.
Its team of nearly 30 marketers can be described as highly aligned, but loosely coupled. Specialisms such as SEO, events, or social media are arranged into seven functional teams (with leads) that are aligned to a core set of KPIs. Across these teams, members collaborate as part of ‘squads’ to share common objectives such as championing brand, driving acquisition or nurturing leads.
Marketing’s relationship with the wider business is critical, which is why the team keeps the company updated through a variety of channels e.g. Slack, email, and drop-in sessions. Its relationship with sales is especially important, while other team members are aligned to the individual product ‘tribes’ in its P&E team, allowing for better communication around product roadmap and positioning.
Commercial challenges
Launching three new products: Perkbox Medical, Perkbox Insights, Perkbox Recognition, and the new perks feature – Perks GO. As a result, the marketing team was tasked with rebranding Perkbox from a traditional perks platform to a holistic employee experience. It were involved in shaping the end-to-end, go-to- market strategy, including testing product-market fit, defining narrative, and evaluating competitor landscape.
Drive for efficiency: In the past year there became a requirement for the marketing team to be more effective with its spend. It had to think more creatively to do more with less and get more return on investment. This resulted in quadrupled efficiency within a three month period on marketing spend.
It went multi-national: Perkbox expanded into France and Australia and now has offices in Sheffield, Paris, Sydney, with its HQ remaining in London. This created new challenges in that it had to create marketing funnels from scratch and assist with hiring.
“I joined Perkbox not just because of their product and growth, but because of their culture. As a sales leader the first place, I wanted to test the reputation Perkbox has built was with marketing, the team that is critical for enabling sales success (and can often be in conflict with that team instead). True to our core value of 'it's not just a jo,b it's a family' I've never felt such an instantaneous transparency and desire to achieve more from a marketing team. It's been a pleasure over the last year to work so collaboratively.”
Individual contributions
Amy Humpleman (Marketing Operations Manager): Amy is responsible for capturing data, facilitating sales processes and helping with lead prioritisation. She is crucial to the strategic alignment of the marketing team with the goals of the rest of the company.
Alex Sanpera (Head of Corporate Communications): As the first PR hire at Perkbox, Alex leads the communication of Perkbox to the wider audience. Her efforts have resulted in a record-breaking year of press coverage (2018) across top tier outlets including the BBC.
Iona Bryson (Head of Campaigns): Iona leads the campaigns team who are responsible for generating and nurturing leads down the funnel to the sales team via marketing channels such as email nurturing, webinars and events. Iona is also responsible for supporting the outbound sales team with targeted marketing campaigns.
Oliver Matejka (Head of Content): Oliver has led the repositioning of Perkbox from a perks provider to an employee experience platform driving new content for three new products as well as the strategy to update existing content.
Karla Mulder (Head of Design): Karla has led Perkbox’s rebrand since joining the company. This has included changing the colour palette, email testing new design and adding more photography as the brand continues to evolve.
Team working and collaboration
In the past year the marketing team has ensured it’s worked collaboratively as one unit as much as possible, not an easy task given that over 50% of its team joined in the past year. It achieved this through initiatives such as:
Monday Huddles: Allow the marketing sub teams to share their priorities for the week, flagging any potential opportunities for collaboration at the beginning of every week.
Weekly wind downs: This session is to look back on achievements from the week. The team also use its own recognition platform to celebrate each others’ hard work throughout the week with the top performers going to a monthly ‘winners dinner’ with the sales team.
Quarterly brainstorm sessions: To discuss key dates and themes and align on for the upcoming quarter.
For example, Perkbox’s Valentine’s Day campaign involved cross collaboration between PR, Design, Campaigns and Social Media teams. Its level of teamwork is particularly impressive considering it also had a change in leadership with a new Marketing Director taking over the team in the past year.
“It's a pleasure to work alongside such a talented and dedicated team of marketers. Relationships across the team are very close, covering a wide range of skill-sets and key responsibilities. Everyone balances the creative and scientific elements that are key to success. And the Perkbox values are represented in abundance.”
Strategic alignment
Strategic alignment is always a key priority. From the top level, Perkbox sets its quarterly OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) quarterly in line with business objectives. It also has quarterly QBRs (Quarterly Business Reviews) – where it looks back at the previous quarter and shares work with senior leaders across the organisation.
There is a bi-weekly sales and marketing session where qualitative feedback is swopped and metrics are reviewed with the team leads from both marketing and sales. The campaigns team support the outbound sales team with targeted campaign activities such as events and direct mail, which has resulted in over achieving in lead volume and pipeline cover for the sales team.
The data and ops team also sit between marketing and sales and are crucial to achieving alignment. The Slack marketing channel is used to communicate key wins and initiatives to the rest of the company.
Perkbox also recently launched its customer marketing function to support its customer success team to cross-sell new products to existing customers. It created nurture flows and launched a customer newsletter as well as bespoke events, campaigns, and content to inform new businesses about new Perkbox’s features.
Team development and retention
Perkbox works extremely hard to develop a culture of performance, it uses a number of initiatives:
Marketing showcase: Fortnightly sessions where individuals from the marketing team showcase their work to the rest of the team, with an aim of driving education, collaboration and inspiration.
Sales calls listening sessions: To learn how the sales team follow up on different types of leads. This helps alignment as they can ascertain their issues when trying to sell the products.
There is a dedicated learning budget for each employee to spend on L&D and PerkX, a guest lecture series which supports team OKRs.
Freedom to test is also crucial to development, to the extent that one of the business values is “try it, test it, get it done”. It has tested various new channels over the past year including radio ads and tube adverts. It also has an extremely high level of retention in its team due to its emphasis on culture and communication.
