Scaling from $50M to $500M with a PLG Motion - with Carilu Dietrich, former Atlassian CMO

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Carilu Dietrich, the former head of marketing at Atlassian, and advisor to CEOs and CMOs, helping them navigate their hyper growth journey from 50 million to 500 million dollars plus. And also my first captain of a national qualifying ultimate Frisbee team. Maybe we can talk about that too. But today we're going to be covering four main topics with Carilu. First, marketing priorities in a product led growth company. Second, how marketing challenges evolve once you hit that 50 million and above ARR point. Third, the go to market strategies that fuel hyper growth at scale. And fourth, the role of advisors in the scaling journey for hyper growth companies, especially as they hit 50 million ARR and above. So with that background, Carilu, can you take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast?

**Carilu Dietrich** (1:34)
Well, I'm so excited for the seminal moment in my career. I've had a long and interesting career. I started out in enterprise sales, got screwed on a deal and thought that marketing was where more strategy happened. Moved into marketing and did public relations, analyst relations, decided I wanted to be a CMO and started cross-training my way through all departments in marketing. At one point, I ran awareness advertising for Oracle doing all sports marketing, movie integrations, global airports, online, the initial launch of the iPad advertising, and then was recruited to Atlassian, which was a small dev tools startup where some friends had gone but was a no-name and ended up getting a lottery ticket for a company that was really exceptional. I visited Atlassian from about 100 to about 500 million, helped take them public and had a great journey.
And these days, I advise hyper growth startup CEOs and CMOs because there's so much that changes on the journey rapidly. And it's hard to see around corners and know what the next stage of growth looks like if you haven't been there already.

**Ray Rike** (2:43)
Well, you know, I was really impressed with your background just when I was preparing for the show. When I first met you, I didn't know you were a former sales professional that made the conversion. That's very similar. I was talking to Latnay Conant, who's the Chief Marketing Officer at Sixth Sense. Kind of a very similar journey, Carilu.

**Carilu Dietrich** (3:02)
You know, it's been so valuable because as a marketer, especially in kind of a sales-assisted, B2B world where I generally live, having empathy for the real stress of carrying a bag and having a number month over month or quarter over quarter makes you a different kind of marketer and responsive in a different way to the needs of the sales org. And, you know, I think increasingly with where we're seeing marketing going with account-based marketing, marketers and salespeople see that it's a multi-touch journey for the customers. So understanding both inside and out is pretty important for a marketer to be successful in helping the sales org.

**Ray Rike** (3:39)
You think it's a great experience. Well, you have so much amazing experience, but I want to double-click on the experience you had at probably one of the first leaders in product-led growth, and that was Atlassian. And you came from Oracle, like you said, where you led a lot of the advertising, but you also have traditional sales-led growth, even as a sales professional. So what's the role of marketing in a PLG company versus a more traditional sales-led organization? Does it change much, Carilu?

**Carilu Dietrich** (4:10)
It's very different. It's much more of a B2C model than it is a B2B model traditionally. So Atlassian's strategy was to spend less on sales and marketing overall, and sometimes as much as half as much. We didn't have a sales org for a lot of my tenure, and spend all that money on product and engineering. Because if you spend twice as much as everyone else on product and engineering, you can make more innovations faster, and you can make a product that sells itself. If the product sells itself through a trial and a demo experience, and it delights customers so they end up inviting other people into their instances or talking about it in online forums, you can spend less money on marketing, because you have inbound interests and a product that can be bought without a sales team assisting.