Coaching story

To level up, it helps to get down with a coach

In business, the key to growth is the ability to “level up,” taking a company or career to the next stage of development.

Businesses may want to grow revenue, market share, or profitability. Employees and executives may be seeking professional advancement, higher salaries, or leadership skills.

Companies and individuals can raise their game by working harder and learning from their mistakes. But that takes time and often means one step backward for every two steps forward. Instead, those looking to level up can jump-start their efforts by working smarter.

Which brings us to Moritz Drews and Stijn Hendrikse.

Helping companies and individuals level up

No less than the number one job placement company in the world, indeed, suggests the top two things that a person—and by extension, a company—can do to level up are learn from a mentor and hire a career coach. That’s exactly what happened here.

Put simply, Stijn helped Moritz—as well as the company he works for—level-up big time. First, some background.

Moritz is the Growth Marketing Manager at DataGuard. With offices in Munich, Berlin, and London, the company is dedicated to helping businesses protect people’s personal data and adhere to ever-increasing data privacy regulations around the world.

Based in Seattle, Stijn is the founder of Kalungi, a leading B2B SaaS marketing agency and author of T2D3, a primer to how SaaS companies can scale to success.

To help the company ramp up its marketing efforts, DataGuard reached out over 5,000 miles to hire Stijn as a fractional Chief Marketing Officer.

Think of him as an expert C-level marketing coach and mentor to the individual members of a marketing team.

In addition to helping the company define its brand position and market differentiation, Stijn helped build DataGuard’s internal marketing team. One of his first hires was Moritz.

Increasing MQLs by more than 700%

“My background is in pay-per-click and website marketing,” said Moritz, “but growth marketing is so much more than that. Thanks to Stijn I was able to refine and expand my knowledge to not just set up campaigns on paid channels but to strategically generate content that optimizes conversion rates."

“In 15 months, we were able to increase our pipeline by 1,200% and our marketing qualified leads (MQL) by more than 700%.”

From his experience leading global SMB marketing for Microsoft and serving as CMO and CEO for several SaaS startups, Stijn founded Kalungi. Based on his proven techniques there he wrote T2D3 to help tech entrepreneurs take their companies to the next level. Out of this “playbook” comes his
approach to coaching companies and individuals.

“Stijn’s mentoring style is based on situational leadership,” continued Moritz. “He spends time figuring out what kind of person you are, how you learn, what stage are you in your career, how proactive you are, how much ownership your show, what you’re capable of, or even if you’re too self-confident."

“Based on what he feels are your abilities, he tailors his teaching approach. It could be as either a mentor or coach where he lets you take ownership with guidance or more directional and hands-on."

“It’s like he has his eye on you, like the Eye of Sauron from Lord of the Rings, but in a good way. His goal is your success."

Practical and personal

“Stijn comes at things from a very practical point of view with such measurables as objectives and key results (OKR) and key performance indicators (KPI). But he also adapts his teaching to you personally.
Rather than just tell you what to do, he’ll guide you with questions to make you think."

“I learned to focus and be clear in my communications. And to simplify. People and especially techies tend to over-engineer things. They think things through but never start. Stijn excels at committing to something and learning from it. Continue if things are going good, tweak if things could be better.”

Motivational, inspiring, encouraging

“Working with Stijn really helped me gain self-confidence, not only on the job but in my personal life."

"I’m able to pass his influence on me to others on my team. He encouraged me to take situational leadership training with was quite insightful and helped me to be a better person in general and a better colleague."

“Stijn is a very charismatic person, and that’s a big plus. You’re really motivated to learn from people like that. He’s inspiring and encouraging, really pushing you in the right direction with a guiding force. He strikes the right balance between being calm and talking to you in a great way. But then when it
really matters, he’s right on point and is assertive as to where you need to go."

“He has such a great and vast knowledge about marketing, which he can teach you. It’s really fascinating how much he knows about all the different areas. He has been definitely instrumental in my career growth as an individual and in helping DataGuard grow its own effective marketing team.”

Moritz Drews, Growth Marketing Manager, DataGuard