Adriana Vîrlan, Growth Marketer at Sessions, shares her insights on growth marketing, GTM alignment, assessing the tech adoption landscape, marketing adaptability, and more.
Adriana, welcome to this interview series. We are curious to know about your journey in this ever-evolving world of marketing.
Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I am Adriana, a growth marketer at SESSIONS Technologies. My marketing career began nearly a decade ago. Being a very energetic person, even throughout my college years, I felt driven to seek out more. This led me to digital marketing initially, then I switched to growth marketing. Currently, I’m fully immersed in both digital marketing strategies and the exciting world of experimentation and growth.
How do you ensure that your marketing strategies remain adaptable and responsive to changing market conditions?
I’d say I’m keeping up-to-date with what is happening worldwide. Moreover, I like to take a holistic look at where the world is heading. When you pay extra attention to details, you might see trends and insights which is called small data. So, you can create and act based on real insights, what happens outside, and what might appeal to the market. Also, flexibility is the key: you run an experiment, launch it, gather the feedback openly, and implement changes quickly. The faster you move, the better.
What specific challenges and considerations do you face when creating marketing strategies for the EMEA region?
The cultural diversity is always super interesting. Each market presents its characteristics, which require both adaptation and agility. I wouldn’t say this is challenging, but it’s essential to understand your ICP and its nuances across all regions.
In the SaaS world that we live in, what strategies have you found most effective for customer acquisition and retention?
The best one is having a product that makes your customer’s life easier. Nothing works if your product is not solving a real issue and is not delivering value for people. Secondly, I’d say creating a community and long-term partnerships work best. Having people who use and love your product will help a lot to acquire new customers, who will finally convert into active users. It’s like a wheel: if you make a person happy, that person will talk about you with their friends, and some of them might become interested in you as well.
“Having people who use and love your product will help a lot to acquire new customers.”
Before launching a go-to-market program, how do you assess the potential tech adoption landscape?
Our founder once said something that is pure gold: “Content is king, but context is God.” We, as humans, have the skill to anticipate. If the sky is dark, you know a storm will come. And so, this principle applies to marketing as well.
If you pay attention to what people want and need, you will create something useful that will be adopted in the end. We, at SESSIONS, are actively doing many customer interviews. These interviews are our main guidance in doing the next releases. We listen to what people care about and need, and we try to solve their issues. And this works.
What advice can you offer fellow marketers on incorporating AI into their marketing programs?
I strongly recommend anyone, not just marketers, to use and incorporate AI into their work. AI is here to make our lives easier—to automate all the boring stuff we need to do so we can use AI for good. We live in the most thrilling times, in which we can do what we want, which makes us happy. There are a lot of tools that can make us way more efficient and productive. After all, we all want to have a good day, and none of us wants to do repetitive, boring, or energy-draining tasks. So, let’s use the powerful AI tools to have that done for us.
How do you approach data-driven decision-making and experimentation within growth marketing?
Mainly, I use the insights from our customers, analyze them, prioritize what’s more important for them, create some hypotheses that will be tested, and launch the experiments. I’d say the more experiments you do, the better. I am not a fan of A/B testing, but I am a fan of A/B/C/D/E testing, especially when you want to deliver the best for your customers. We were taught that the world is black or white. Well, the world has an infinite number of colors, and we need to always search for new ones. As the world progresses, the quest for innovative solutions remains fascinating.
How do you foster continuous collaboration and alignment between marketing, sales, and customer success teams?
When you have the same goals and set of values, it is not hard to be aligned. As a team, we strongly believe in what we do, we trust each other, and we try to get in touch regularly.
I also feel that the start-up mindset helps a lot—the willingness to do everything required to reach that goal—so, this way, a marketing person sometimes might help the customer success team or might do a sales task if that will help the entire team to move further faster. This requires great leadership, for sure.
Sessions offers a one-stop solution for all business needs for webinars, demos, workshops, or training. Additionally, the platform provides a single workspace for teams, simplifying the creation of sessions, sharing templates and resources, and accessing recaps and session assets. This saves setup time and enhances team consistency and collaboration. They just launched a new product – AR2R (Arthur), their sidekick AI, that will help people end all their boring mundane tasks and do what they love.
A growth marketing expert with over 8 years of experience, Adriana Vîrlan focuses on building a start-up that will solve the meeting problem, alongside an exceptional team. She is passionate about the world of digital marketing and growth. Her responsibilities encompass a wide range of BOFU activities, including developing new strategies and tactics to acquire new customers as well as growing activation and retention rates.
