An interview with Henrik-Jan van der Pol, CEO at Perdoo
We sit down with Henrik-Jan van der Pol, CEO at Perdoo. Perdoo is the leading software for strategy, goals, and people management.
How did you end up at Perdoo and what problem does Perdoo solve for its clients?
I'm one of the founders, that's how I ended up here 😄 Perdoo speeds up strategy execution by aligning the entire organization with the strategy, focusing teams and individuals on what matters, and engaging employees to achieve goals and feel their best. We're the leading software for managing everything from strategy, to OKRs and KPIs, all the way to 1:1s and Performance reviews, and more. Having this all in one place is very powerful.
As the CEO, what are your main responsibilities at Perdoo?
I mostly focus on the business side of things (Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success) whereas my co-founder mostly focuses on tech (Product and Engineering). HR is of course our joint responsibility.
How do you lead your team to organize and improve the marketing-sales process to increase sales and enhance the customer experience?
1. I make sure to stay involved in marketing and sales myself. Eg, I still take a few demos every now and then so that I know exactly what's going on. 2. At least once a quarter, I go through the entire process myself – starting with downloading a piece of content from our website with a fake email. As far as I'm concerned, it's the only way to ensure the customer experience from start to end is smooth. And to be honest, I always uncover unexpected issues. 3. Most of the content Marketing produces is driven by questions that Sales is receiving from prospects.
At ColdFire, when we look at our clients' Marketing and Advertising strategies, they vary greatly. Some have found a single, scalable client acquisition process while others thrive on a mix of top-of-funnel strategies. How would you summarize the overarching revenue-focused strategy of Perdoo, and what key elements does it encompass?
Our most important focus has always been content marketing (and thus also SEO). We create a lot of blog posts, ebooks, videos, etc. Our Resources Hub (perdoo.com/resources) is extremely popular, as are our YouTube channel (youtube.com/@perdoo) and podcast (Goal Diggers by Perdoo). Up until recently, we never spend a single dollar on advertising, but nowadays we do run ads as we didn't want to rely on one channel only anymore.
What is an efficient marketing technique that you've implemented at Perdoo or previous companies, which you believe is underutilized by most management teams - and why do you think that is?
Re-utilizing your content. It's creating the actual content that takes the most time. Once you have this content, you should try to get the most out of it by turning it into different formats (blog post, video, etc). You'll see that you reach different audiences with these different formats. Some people simply always prefer video whereas others prefer written text.
Has your C-level team experimented with some kind of cold outbound strategy (like cold email)? If yes what was the general outcome and if no, why not?
No, we've never done this. Have you ever received an outbound email or phone call from a B2B company that you liked? Probably not. I think your time is better invested elsewhere.
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