Happy Customers Lead to More Customers | Kathleen Booth

This week on the Revenue Insights Podcast, we are joined by Kathleen Booth, SVP of Marketing and Growth at Pavilion.

In this episode, Guy and Kathleen explore community-led marketing and its impact on pipeline growth, how data can be used to drive a community-led GTM strategy, and how to improve customer retention through cohort analysis.

As Senior Vice President of Marketing and Growth at Pavilion, Kathleen leads both marketing and sales departments in their mission to grow topline revenue. She is also a GTMfund Member, as well as an advisor at SkillCat and SmallWorld. 

• Kathleen Booth on LinkedIn
• Pavilion Website
• Ebsta Revenue Insights Newsletter

Time Stamps:

• 00:00 – Introduction
• 00:22 – About Kathleen and Pavilion
• 09:17 – Changes in the Market since 2019
• 13:45 – Practicing Profitable, Efficient Growth
• 18:39 – Working as One Unit Across Multiple Departments
• 21:21 – Taking a Data-Driven Approach from Marketing into Sales
• 25:37 – Managing Customer Retention
• 28:42 – Where to Find Kathleen

Highlights:

How to Achieve Profitable, Efficient Growth

Pavilion is a very network driven business, relying heavily on word-of-mouth and LinkedIn for growth. Generally, their growth is driven by their community, as happy customers lead to more customers, with existing customers acting as field sales reps. When the Silicon Valley Bank crisis happened, Pavilion’s founder made the decision to focus on profitable, efficient growth.

The idea was to lean the organization down so that they are taking in more money than spending and no longer relying on venture capital. One of the ways they leaned down was to reduce the focus on corporate social media, and instead drive the pipeline through individual people’s profiles, including team members and customers, dramatically downsizing the sales team and substituting it with social media. It was a huge change in terms of the company size, but they are still growing as it has forced them to be smarter about how they go to market.

How Data Powers Community-Led GTM through the Customer Journey 

With a background in marketing, Kathleen is very experienced with taking a data-driven approach and has been able to bring this to the sales team. In their enrollment team, they have a well-defined process for working with leads, which is enforced through CRM and pipeline management. By comparing the data of their two sellers on the enrollment team, they have found that the two key factors within their process are the speed and personalization of follow-up.

To support these factors, they have utilized AI tools like Fixer AI to enhance these capabilities, as well as developing tools to de-anonymize website visits, scrape LinkedIn profiles, and draft outreach to reduce the amount of time sellers have to spend personalizing emails.

How to Improve Customer Retention with Cohort Analysis

Pavilion’s internal ops team have taken all of their customer data and put it into machine learning and large language models to develop a cohort analysis that can be segmented along different parameters. In the most recent iteration, they discovered that certain factors increase a person’s propensity to renew, including attendance at salon dinners and summits.

This capability has given them a black and white view on what is driving retention, and they can now invest in building out the ideal member journey to drive retention. 

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