Martech 360 Interview With Daniel Sztutwojner, Chief Customer Officer & Co-Founder at Beekeeper

Not knowing all the answers is ok, but making decisions quickly with conviction and inspiring the team to steer the ship in one direction is the key for success. Stay humble and always put your teams first.

Hi Daniel, could you briefly tell us about your journey in Tech?

I got introduced to the tech world by one of my flatmates while I was studying at university. He was a very smart guy from Israel that knew how to code from his time in the army. He was very entrepreneurial by nature, and he had already started a tech company. A few years after university, we came up with an idea and decided to start a business: A platform to learn from experts in different fields. That first experience in tech taught me a lot (from Go-To-Market strategy to Customer Success and Fundraising) and made me hungry for more. Three years later I joined my current co-founders to embark on this exciting journey with Beekeeper to digitize the way that frontline teams work.

How has the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped your view of the business environment that your business operates in?

Our business is centered around bridging the communication gap and disconnect between frontline employees (people who don’t work at a desk) and their companies, and transforming the way the frontline works. When COVID-19 hit, businesses with a large frontline workforce found it challenging to provide the guidance and information that their teams needed in order to function. Basic information such as shift schedules, updated SOPs (standard operating procedures) and company announcements during such turbulent times was not trickling down to the frontline workers who needed it the most. A lot of pressure was put on frontline managers with limited resources who had to rely on outdated communication channels like phone trees and bulletin boards to connect with their teams. This lack of business agility increased public awareness of the challenges that frontline industries face. It also highlighted the importance of the mission that we have here at Beekeeper to improve the way frontline teams work through better technology.

What sets Beekeeper apart from the competition?

For the past 10 years, we have extensively researched and worked closely with frontline industries and leaders to understand what drives the engagement, productivity, and the safety of their employees. We have built a solution specifically tailored to frontline workers, from the User Experience, to the features we build, and integrations we enable to other platforms. Having a workplace app that’s easy to use, highly engaging, and provides real value to the frontline has been key. This is why we have average activation rates of over 85% and a significant portion of our growth comes from our existing portfolio of customers. Many other competing platforms on the market are simply repackaging technologies that were developed for desktop users and fail to address the unique needs of frontline teams. They are generic solutions that do not provide enough value for non-desk employees, thus resulting in low adoption.

Read More: MarTech 360 Interview With Chris Hickman, CSO, Keyfactor

How do you see the Digital transformation in the Workforce management sector evolving
over the years to come?

We are at the very beginning of the digital journey when it comes to the management of the frontline workforce. This is a sector that has been neglected in previous waves of digital transformation, but the ubiquity of smartphones combined with the uptick in awareness and appreciation of frontline, essential workers during the pandemic has dramatically accelerated the digital transformation of frontline work — and Beekeeper is at the forefront.

There are different aspects of the employee experience to consider when it comes to workforce management, from recruiting, onboarding, productivity, performance, and employee engagement. Recruiting is top-of-mind for businesses with a large hourly workforce due to the global labor shortage. When it comes to recruiting, we see a significant opportunity for companies to leverage their engaged frontline workforce to help recruit new hires through referrals. Rolling out referral programs directly to frontline teams and tracking data in real time has not been done successfully until now. Using workplace technology like Beekeeper to systematically collect employee referrals from the frontline workforce is an area where we see great potential to help frontline businesses save money on recruiting costs and ensure that their teams are complete in order to meet the market demand for their product and services. Other key areas that maximize business impact are onboarding and training of new team members.

Companies are increasingly using Virtual Reality to ramp up employees faster, and decrease the likelihood of mistakes or accidents. Using technology to safely train employees is slowly starting to get adopted but the road ahead of us is bright.

How do you see the businesses coping with the inherent risks of remote work?

Creating a strong culture is in my view the biggest risk for companies that have gone remote. Culture is key for high-performing, successful teams and remote work is limiting the abilities for companies to allow their employees to build strong connections and collaborate efficiently in larger groups. A strategy that we are rolling out with our own employees here at Beekeeper since we no longer have a central office in North America, is investing every quarter in bringing the team together for 3-4 days to a rotating location to plan, train, and bond. We believe that this will have the right impact for the teams and that this impact can sustain the company culture until the next get together.

As a Business Leader, what is the one piece of advice you would give to those who aspire to the C-Suite?

Passion, discipline, and perseverance are in my opinion, required to grow and build a career. When moving your way up to the C-Suite, leadership skills become more important than functional expertise and having a holistic view of the business is key. Understanding not only the different functions and their dependencies, but also the dynamics of the market is critical. My motto is to stay informed and always be curious. Not knowing all the answers is ok, but making decisions quickly with conviction and inspiring the team to steer the ship in one direction is the key for success. Stay humble and always put your teams first.

Your top pick for a book on Sales that everyone should read?

There are many great Sales books, like SPIN Selling, Fanatical Prospecting, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. One of my personal favorite is the Challenger Customer because it is about disrupting the way a company thinks about their own business, teaching them something new, and providing them with a commercial insight.

Could you name one (or more) marketer that should feature here?

Sarah Moore, Frederik Hermann, Logan Rivenes, Natalie Dickmann

Top 5 apps that you use for business?

Salesforce, Outreach, Chorus, Google Suite and Zoom are some of the apps that our commercial teams use daily at Beekeeper.

What metrics do you use to define success?

As a revenue leader it ultimately comes down to the Net New ARR. That is ultimately a reflection of the perceived value that our customers get from our solution. Hence, tracking the success of our customers is a key metric that will translate into renewal rates, expansions, customer referrals (which is the best pipeline to have) and new revenue.

Thanks Daniel!