Previously

Mark Balkenende was previously Director Product Marketing, Talend
Paul Lacey joined was previously Director Product Marketing, Ephesoft

Company

Founded in Cheshire, UK, Matillion solves a critical friction point in established companies accessing the power of the latest cloud data platforms and analytics tools.  As a truly cloud-native data integration solution, Matillion is the only platform designed to leverage all the unique capabilities and services in the major cloud data platforms. Matillion helps a new generation of workers unleash the untapped potential of their data.

Cloud based analytics is an exploding market and Matillion’s growth is in line with this meta shift.  The company has been international by design, serving the mid to enterprise market where the problem they solve is felt most acutely. The quality of their founding team, product and early revenue growth attracted the attention of Tier 1 global investors Battery, Sapphire Ventures and Scale Venture Partners.

Search Background

Significant commercial traction, international market focus and global investors have given Matillion an imperative to grow very quickly which required the founder to surround himself with people who had been on the commensurate journey in similar SaaS contexts.  The UK SaaS market, whilst evolving very quickly, is not yet a sufficiently large executive talent pool to rely upon on their journey to IPO scale.

Therefore, to support Matthew in building his team for scale, he engaged Erevena to draw upon their team across Europe and the US to hire his Chief Financial Officer, Chief Product Officer and Product Marketing team.

Requirements

Reporting to the CMO, Dru Jacobs, we scoped out a Head of Product Marketing role to be brought into the fold to help him close the gap at the critical intersection of Product Management, Technical Marketing and Sales.  Crucially this would involve translating technology capabilities into value-based sales messaging and positioning – to tell the Matillion ’Story’. Matillion were moving more deeply into the Enterprise (which already accounted for approximately 60% of revenue) so needed to tighten the ‘Business Value’.

Our thesis was that the addition of a leader with product domain expertise would increase their effectiveness in enterprise go-to-market. Increasing competitional awareness and general market perspective should also help drive exponentially better messaging, positioning, and sales tooling.

Result

We kept our search parameters tight: mapping out their direct competitors and analogous technologies to ensure we added sufficient technological and industry depth to this hire. Within six weeks we had introduced six candidates and driven three profiles to conclusion – all of which we agreed were hirable, ultimately leading to Mark Balkenende joining from Talend and Paul Lacey from Ephesoft, both as Senior Director Product Marketing.

Matthew Scullion

CEO

Erevena’s value is not only their access to executive talent across the SaaS ecosystems in Europe and the US.  The point of difference is their Partner-led, first principles thinking on the priority order of executive hiring supplemented by their advisor network to validate our strategy to attract industry veterans.  In execution they carried out cross-border searches with a team on both continents who operated seamlessly in the background to access the whole market.

Our expert

Terry Shaw, Partner

Specialisms: FinTech, Developer Tools, Product, Marketing

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