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How Webflow achieved its sales-led growth goals with LinkedIn
Founded in 2013, Webflow grew initially by embracing a product-led growth (PLG) model powered by self-serve customer acquisition. As the business matured and secured additional funding, Webflow developed an enterprise product to accelerate its growth. Acquiring new customers in enterprise meant that Webflow needed to shift their marketing strategy in order to generate and capture demand from enterprise decision makers, while also adopting a sales-led growth (SLG) strategy. Doing so required significant investment - from building out an enterprise sales org to implementing and documenting processes for successful customer acquisition. Webflow also hired its first enterprise marketing leader, Aubrey Morgan, to grow and mature demand for its enterprise product. Morgan turned to LinkedIn’s combination of skill, interest, company, and title targeting to solve this challenge.
Director of Enterprise Marketing at Webflow
"The LinkedIn team played a crucial role in identifying and optimizing our top-converting marketing and sales strategies. They regularly surfaced trends in job titles that had higher sales conversion rates and helped us experiment with various tactics like Conversation Ads and Lead Gen Forms to increase cost efficiency as we scaled."
Director of Enterprise Marketing at Webflow
Objective
Shifting from product-led to sales-led growth
- Webflow had strong brand awareness and market penetration for its self-serve product, and its internal teams were optimized to deliver against this PLG model. The Webflow team needed to build a productive sales-led growth (SLG) muscle across multiple teams from scratch - ensuring alignment across key functions like marketing, sales, product and finance.
- As they worked to uncover the right audience for their enterprise offering, the Webflow team also wanted to test and optimize product positioning, pricing, ad copy, creative, and audiences before investing heavily. The insights they gathered from their LinkedIn ad campaigns would inform how to evolve their demand generation approach over time.
- With a shift to an SLG model, Webflow’s marketing team turned to LinkedIn’s skill, interest, company, and job title targeting to gain a deep understanding of their ideal customer profile (ICP). While they knew that they wanted to reach decision makers within in-house creative teams at companies with more than 200 employees, they wanted to explore new tactics to engage other members of the emerging buying committee across functions, personas and seniority levels to book meetings faster and accelerate time to close.
Approach
Establishing cross-functional alignment with sales and finance
- Shifting to sales-led growth required the Webflow team to look closely at how they empowered their organization to effectively capture, qualify, and close enterprise leads.
- The LinkedIn startup team partnered with Morgan’s team to make sure that Webflow’s key cross-functional partners, like sales development and finance, were on the same page and ready to deliver success together.
- This included defining and aligning on sales lead outreach service level agreements (SLAs), standing up new reporting and attribution for measurement, building out new enterprise-specific lead scoring and organizing a sales and marketing alignment workshop to enable Webflow's sales development representatives on best practices for engaging LinkedIn-sourced gated content and demo leads. "I'm very grateful for the LinkedIn partnership. The team held us accountable and it was critical to our success." noted Morgan.
Quickly unlocking SLG insights to capitalize on efficiency & ROI
- With LinkedIn, Morgan and her team gained a deeper understanding of their ICPs and messaging, as well as their pricing and resonance in the market. They also leveraged LinkedIn’s Account Based Marketing targeting features to identify individuals who worked at target enterprise accounts that were already using Webflow’s self-service offering.
- Once the team aligned on top-converting personas, the insights they uncovered from the performance of their LinkedIn campaigns allowed them to identify the most relevant messaging for each persona. For example, campaign performance insights from LinkedIn showed that ads promoting content downloads to enterprise audiences significantly outperformed those that promoted product releases.
- This understanding allowed Webflow to evolve its approach and optimize towards top performing assets and messaging. The team then doubled-down on what was working with a multi-product LinkedIn strategy, leveraging Sponsored Content, Lead Gen forms, and Conversation Ads to effectively create and capture demand.
Creating bespoke messages for relevant ICPs through unique targeting
- Morgan and her team intentionally built content for the different personas they were trying to reach. LinkedIn’s unique targeting capabilities allowed them to deliver bespoke content to the right audiences, something other more intent-driven platforms failed to do.
- For those who weren’t already aware of Webflow’s enterprise product, Morgan’s team leveraged content downloads instead of contact sales forms to more thoughtfully generate awareness and demand. They also built content specifically for marketers, who they uncovered were Webflow’s highest-performing audience persona. LinkedIn insights allowed them to hone in on UI and UX designers specifically, who ended up being another high-performing audience for Webflow.
- They also tried refreshing ads and experimenting with formats like video to see what converted most efficiently. "With LinkedIn, we were able to see new audiences very clearly. We quickly learned what messaging resonates with each audience, too. And we tested it up front before we invested significantly," said Morgan.
“The LinkedIn team was invaluable in helping us identify and optimize towards our top-converting marketing and sales strategies, like identifying the job titles that were converting to sales meetings at a higher rate with Conversation Ads and Lead Gen Forms. The LinkedIn team also helped ensure that our sales team leveraged LinkedIn Sales Navigator to engage leads with outreach that complemented our LinkedIn Marketing messaging.”
Director of Enterprise Marketing at Webflow
Results
• After ramping on LinkedIn by Q4, Morgan and her team had their highest marketing-sourced revenue quarter to date, generating more than enough pipe coverage to confidently close their targets for the subsequent quarter.
• LinkedIn has become Webflow’s top performing paid pipeline acquisition channel, contributing to quarter-over-quarter record breaking pipe generation numbers Webflow had ever seen.
425%
year over year increase in MQLs
200%
increase in sales accepted opportunities in Q4 (vs. previous quarters)
71%
year over year revenue growth
“LinkedIn’s audience targeting has so much power – I’ve been impressed by the types of people that engage and the executive decision-makers that we’ve been able to capture there. This helped us drive hundreds of sales meetings in the first quarter we activated a paid strategy on LinkedIn.”
“On LinkedIn we can target specific people, specific companies, specific interests – nothing really compares to that.”
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Headquarters
San Francisco, CA
No. of Employees
750
Industry
Software Development
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