An estimated 197 million people made purchases during the five-day period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. While it didn’t lead to record spending, marketing automation software provider Klaviyo claims to have helped clients like Mattel and Liquid Death reach new heights.
Amanda Whalen, Klaviyo’s chief financial officer, shared that more than 15,000 of the company’s customers said they achieved their best sales day over the weekend and generated $3 billion in “Klaviyo Attributed Value.” This value refers to the revenue generated by customers from emails, push notifications and text messages using Klaviyo’s marketing tools.
“Brand loyalty trumps bargains,” said Whalen during a virtual conversation organized by Fortune and Workday, a provider of financial and HR management software. “Consumers expected the brands they love to offer an incentive, rather than just waiting for the absolute best deal,” Whalen explained.
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Klaviyo and its customer-centric focus helped the company achieve seventh place on the annual list of Future 50 companies. Fortune has been developing the list in partnership with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) since 2017 with the goal of indexing companies fast-growing public and private sectors. The data she analyzes goes beyond revenue growth and shareholder returns, focusing on more forward-looking metrics of success.
“Our perception is that we need to go beyond financial metrics,” explained Johann Harnoss, partner and associate director at BCG. “We take an in-depth look at companies’ technology stacks, as well as their talent, organizational and cultural makeup,” added Harnoss.
This year’s Future 50 list was based on the evaluation of 3,000 candidates, with Australian software company Atlassian coming out on top, followed by project management software company Monday.com, which came in third.
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Whalen explained that his team’s investment decisions are squarely focused on ways to improve outcomes for customers, such as offering the product in seven languages, including French, Spanish and Italian, as well as AI-created personalized messages that can be edited. by a marketing professional. “In the case of AI, this is how we help our customers not only send the right message to the right consumer at the right time, but also generate that message,” Whalen said.
The power of investing in AI and remote work
Workday is an example of how visionary the Future 50 list can be. The company was ranked No. 1 on both the 2018 and 2019 lists, and since then its annual revenue has grown from $2.1 billion to $7.3 billion in the last fiscal year, helping Workday enter its first will be on the Fortune 500 list in 2024. Workday has more than 10,500 customers, 60% of which are Fortune 500 companies.
According to Alejandro Mayer, director of strategy and commercial operations at Workday, the company’s initial value was that it built a technology stack around a new technology at the time, which was the cloud, which set it apart. The company is now applying the same innovative approach to artificial intelligence.
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“Today, it is a new technology, but we follow the same concept and DNA of leveraging this technology to help our clients extract more from their human and financial resources, generating value for their companies,” said Mayer.
Atlassian attributes the company’s success to investments in the future of work, which include the adoption of remote work and artificial intelligence. As large employers like , Atlassian takes a “team anywhere” approach, which allows employees to work from thousands of cities, but also visit a dozen of the company’s physical offices if they wish.
“Talent isn’t just in big cities,” analyzed Avani Solanki Prabhakar, people director at Atlassian. “The future of work will be one where you are not collaborating in an office, but online, wherever you are,” he said.
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Prabhakar explained that location independence has resulted in a 20% increase in the number of offers accepted by job seekers. The investment Atlassian is making in AI revolves around the belief that in the future, workers will collaborate with both human and AI teammates.
ranked 11th on the Future 50 list. According to the company, the greater accessibility of generative AI has led to conversations with customers that go beyond traditional IT leaders, and departments like finance and marketing are also looking for use cases. use for this rapidly evolving technology.
“In the company, everyone says they ‘know how to use ChatGPT, so they should be able to access all of an organization’s data and insights,’” said Arsalan Tavakoli, co-founder of Databricks and senior vice president of field engineering.
Databricks stands out for organizing staff by customer segment, enabling employees to become deep experts in AI use cases and solutions for various industries, such as finance, healthcare and retail, he explained. These employees may be experienced technologists, but they also need to be able to clearly communicate the benefits to customers’ businesses.
“The challenging part is teaching them to associate this with technology and differentiation,” Tavakoli said. “This is something we have to do internally.”
Balance between agility and expansion
Atlassian, Klaviyo and Databricks explained that they are investing in ways to make their internal processes faster and more agile, while rapidly expanding their businesses. “For us, it’s about having a constant mindset of thinking not just ‘what am I doing and what is the result today, but how can I make this process bigger, more scalable and lasting?’” Whalen pondered.
Atlassian adopts different planning cadences for its overall operational strategy, performance reviews, and product launches. The company has cultivated a workplace culture focused on speed. “Do you have a culture where people can act quickly, break things and apologize for it later?” said Prabhakar, referencing the Silicon Valley ethos of asking for forgiveness, not permission.
Databricks’ Tavakoli said companies should encourage efforts to think innovatively and allow employees to explore projects that can improve business processes, without suffocating them with too much emphasis on day-to-day tasks.
“When people look at culture, what behavior is recognized and rewarded?” he asked rhetorically. For innovation to work “it’s common for people in the organization to look at a problem and think ‘I can build something from broken pieces’”, he added.
