Do you get a seat at your clients’ strategic discussions? If not, what will it take to get you there?
Ultimately it’s our solution and the success of our customers with Matillion that allows us to help set our customers’ strategic direction. However so much of that is to do with brand awareness as we continue to grow the company. Most enterprises use industry analysts to create a vendor selection list, so we invest a lot of time with Gartner and other analytics to make sure they understand the unique benefits of our solution and our customer base. As an integration company we also invest very heavily in our strategic partnerships, especially Snowflake, AWS, Azure, Databricks and Google. Matillion was named Snowflake’s partner of the year for data integration in 2021 and innovation partner of the year with Databricks.
What are your key areas of focus for the business in 2022?
We have an internal goal to grow to 100M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) this year and be ready operationally for 250M in subsequent years. This will be achieved through a combination of new logo acquisition and expansion of existing accounts. We have a major push this year with GSI (global system integrators) to rollout client-specific programmes including cloud migration and legacy ETL offloading.
Given the ARR growth, we invested heavily in talent acquisition teams in 2021, including onboarding products with a particular focus on hiring and enabling sales and GTM market teams.
As mentioned above we also are focusing on brand building and thought leadership with a focus on enterprise accounts.
We have big plans on the product side this year. This will see Matillion move to becoming a platform sell, with multiple products in the portfolio. So delivering the product with Engineering is a major goal, as is the new value prop/positioning / messaging for Sales.
How do you apply your leadership skills a) within your own business and b) on behalf of your clients?
One of my skills is to create empathy across the company for the most important things that we have to go do. I find that everyone can remember a good story if I can connect them with the real end user or client behind the customer logo. The stories always have a human aspect and a business metric aspect.
At Matillion we work with the Table Group, who are the authors of books including the 5 Dysfunctions of a Team and the Advantage, Ideal Team Player. We are big into having high culture and high performance. In terms of measuring success, we have employed the 4DX (four disciplines of execution). Both of these frameworks help us align the whole company to the most important things we do during the year. It’s hard to commit to something and not to others. As a leader, I think it is one of the most important things that I can do for my team. Make choices.