GetYourGuide’s VP of performance on creating their growth flywheel

During the first lock down, I took a three hour GetYourGuide Original tour in Amsterdam. My four kids and my parents were with me — plus Cato the Basset hound. And the guide absolutely captivated all of us for the full three hours about something as deep and serious as the life of Anne Frank and World War II.

Another unforgettable memory was in Tel Aviv. I was there with six pilot friends and to mix it up a bit from just partying, we did a full day private tour. The guide was not only extremely knowledgeable, he also knew we needed water after a heavy night out, so he brought a coolbox full. Then at noon, when he saw we were hydrated enough, he said “Would you guys like some beer?”. He had cold beers in a separate coolbox in the back. He took us through Jerusalem, Ein Gedi and the Dead Sea, it was an amazing experience.

My childhood dream was to become a pilot, and I was actually in KLM Flight Academy. Most of the flight hours were in Arizona, and after only twelve lessons with an instructor, they just hand you the keys and let you fly solo. It’s like a dream to feel the freedom of flight at such a young age. Later on, at your first long distance solo flight, they let you go across the state, which is a four or five hour flight including refueling. Beforehand you have to make your flight plan, calculate with the weather information how much fuel you need to get to the other airport and so on. During the flight, you continuously measure where you are and whether you are on track. How much do I need to steer to get back on track? And there are all these other external influences like weather, turbulence or traffic that can influence your plans. To make it a bit more interesting, I planned the whole thing over valleys so I had some company from cows and farmers.

In the end, I realized that the flying that I love is not the flying required nor desired by KLM. The school also realized this, especially after I parked my car in the dormitory building with a handbrake turn, they concluded, “Probably it’s best for all if you wouldn’t become an airline pilot.” It was time I figured out what my next career was going to be.

I started off in a call center, for those of you that know the movie ‘the boiler room’, I was selling subscriptions for anything imaginable from newspapers to energy, telco, lotteries even underwear. The only way out for me was to outsell everyone else, which opened up management roles and business to business account management. After two years, an old friend asked me to join his search engine marketing startup. As employee number one, I became head of new business and applied what I’ve learned in sales. But I also realized that search marketing and performance marketing in general is very much like performing a flight. First you determine your target, with what efficiency you’d like to get there and in what time frame. When the campaign takes flight, you have market dynamics, economical climate, viruses. You need to course correct continuously.

So what I was taught in the cockpit in Arizona is the whole build-measure-learn loop. And that’s what I’m still doing today, albeit with a much larger crew. The flight plan is to become the world’s number one platform for unforgettable experiences, and we’re well underway. That’s what made me who I am and why I love what I do.

The basis was already a good fit for growth marketing: I had an exact science profile in high school, combined with a Psychology Freshman year prior to the flight academy. I got lucky to figure out early in life what made me tick. And that was not flying from A to B, but something more explorative. It was innovating with the new technologies emerging and seeing the impact of what you do right away. With eight years of growth marketing experience at two start ups, I didn’t see the need for a diploma anymore. I had caught up with the market with this experimentation mindset.

Google was looking for a lead for Booking.com, their largest advertiser at the time. The five years leading up to that I was CMO at a direct competitor of Booking, EasyToBook.com. In fact, in all the cities where we had a good offering, Booking was always number one, and we were always number two. So Google saw my experience would be relevant for the job.

And you sense that Booking truly embraces the growth flywheel. They are demand led. The beauty of having such a large customer is they not only want to be in all the alphas and all the betas (who doesn’t?), but they will actually give great qualitative and quantitative feedback to the product teams. So as a Google sales person, I didn’t feel like selling. It felt like connecting all the dots at two very intriguing players in the online Travel industry. You represent the client internally and work across all of the marketing technology products, continuously improving their set up and seeing what’s around the corner.

Besides the co-development of the ad stack, Booking saw a need to build their brand in order to continue their growth in the US. That’s when the performance marketing heroes there started to ask how to build brand campaigns on the Google platform. That was a pivotal moment, how do you measure upper funnel campaigns that are mostly considered ‘spray and pray’? By applying a rigorous testing framework to the geographies and mediamix you unleash, measuring the effect on all metrics ranging from Top of Mind Awareness to queries, clicks and conversions.

The very first thing is to be as transparent as possible. It all comes down to trust. When you are a Google rep that has 40 or 100 clients, you don’t have enough time to build that trust because you have to get to your sales target and hit your OKR such as adoption of new product X, which might not be in line with your client goals. Ideally, you should first meet them to understand their business model, what success looks like, their setup and challenges across people-platform-process. Also important, make sure you have a fun activity as well, asides the mostly transactional meeting. Take them out to dinner or even a fun activity in order to get to know the client personally.

When you have good enough visibility on what the client’s company is like and their challenges, you can come with a joint business plan proposal. This will contain prioritized work streams over 4 quarters, so both companies are aligned and working on the topics that will deliver the results, be it on performance, brand, technology or data. Then you connect internally the right people within your company and theirs and track progress and prioritization on a regular basis. I think that in business the first point of building a relationship of trust is very many times just skipped.

With Booking we had the luxury of regular trips to Mountain View for meetings with all of the different products and engineering leads. This also means that you get to know your client well, for instance over a game of volleyball next to Stan the T-Rex on the Googleplex.