How ActiveCampaign Grew to 80k Customers By Focusing On Product First

Active Campaign’s CMO, Maria Pergolino, joins Ground Up to share how the company netted 80,000 customers without a consistent marketing strategy, how she’s structuring the marketing team now, and why they’re leaning into brand and an already established community to grow.

John Bonini on November 25, 2019 (last modified on December 10, 2019) • 1 minute read

Maria Pergolino had never heard of ActiveCampaign.

Which is funny, because Maria is a veteran marketing executive in the software space. She’s worked for other marketing automation giants like Marketo.

Earlier this year, Maria was weighing new CMO opportunities in the marketing technology space.

Active Campaign was one of them.

And though she had never heard of them, as she dug in, she found out why––an almost obsessive commitment to the product and customer experience rather than marketing. (Which, is why they were pursuing Maria.)

They had 80,000 customers, are clear market leaders in marketing automation on G2, have a strong partner community…but up until now, no consistency in communicating all of that. At this point, Pergolino knew this was the opportunity she was going to pursue.

As of this recording, she’d only been 5 weeks into the role, but, she had already re-org’d the marketing team and gotten the wheels turning for leaning more into brand in the coming year.

If you hadn’t already, in another few months, you, and everyone else, will know who ActiveCampaign is.

How ActiveCampaign Grew to 80k Customers By Focusing On Product First

Maria Pergolino had never heard of ActiveCampaign.

The 4 Principles G2’s CMO Used to Grow Monthly Organic Visitors from 500k to 5 Million

Rapid growth is hard—consistent rapid growth at scale is even more of a challenge. Here, Ryan Bonnici explains the 4 principles that helped G2 10X organic visitors.

The 3-Step Approach HubSpot’s VP of Marketing Uses to Set Goals for Continuous Growth

HubSpot’s VP of Marketing, Kieran Flanagan, recently shared the key learnings that helped HubSpot instill a culture of growth throughout the entire company.

Vimeo’s Journey to Full-Service SaaS & One Million Paying Subscribers

On this episode of Ground Up, Vimeo’s Melissa Matlins dives deep into Vimeo’s journey to become a full-service video platform and how they’re repositioning the brand to support that.