Born from the aftermath of the financial crisis, Growth Group is an organization that, since the beginning of 2015, has been dedicated to assisting and encouraging Finnish companies onto a path of growth. Today, the Growth Group is composed of an active community of 250 growth captains who meet regularly to collaboratively seek out fresh ideas and solutions to business challenges.
Growth captains are decision-makers of growth-driven companies that generate at least 10 million euros in revenue, such as CEOs or founding members. They form the core of the Growth Group’s activities.
“Our whole operation is built on this coaching community. We regularly organize meetings for our members, essentially running facilitated workshops where companies facing similar challenges can exchange ideas,” explains Kasvuryhmä’s Chief Technology Officer, Jooel Friman.
Challenging starting point, but outrageous goals
Friman has been with Kasvuryhmä for about four years now, serving as the Chief Technology Officer responsible for development projects. He recognizes the common challenges of organizational work and admits that building a community requires long-term effort and is often not very profitable as a business.
From these challenging starting points, the operations of Kasvuryhmä have also been run with a startup spirit from the beginning, by a small team. Despite this, the targets have been set high, and there has been no desire to compromise on the quality of the work.
Kasvuryhmä isn’t after quick wins, but rather strives to continually develop its operations in a way that makes membership feel as beneficial as possible. This approach is also reflected in customer satisfaction.
“Our overarching idea is to build this community for the long haul while simultaneously helping people connect through our efforts. We’ve facilitated numerous events and workshops, from which we’ve received stellar feedback. A testament to our members’ satisfaction is our Net Promoter Score (NPS), which hovers around the 80 mark,” Friman explains.
Kasvuryhmä’s ambitious goal – or as they themselves put it, an “outrageous promise” – is to harness the power of its member companies to drive €25 billion into Finland by 2025. Achieving this requires expanding and strengthening the community, as well as evolving their operations in a more professional direction.
Towards more professional operations, with the help of Salesforce
In just over six years, Kasvuryhmä has successfully established itself as a peer community for Finnish companies eager to grow. This has required continuous development of operations, where technology has played a significant role right from the start.
“When I started at the organization, we were just beginning to implement Salesforce. We wanted to use Salesforce to diversify our operations, which included improving member recruitment, data collection, and internal processes. The goal was to make these activities more professional,” Friman describes.
Friman explains that Kasvuryhmä turned to Salesforce at a point where they already had a large pool of demanding customers, a wealth of vital customer data, and a need to capitalize on the massive data trove they had accumulated from numerous client interactions and events. Previously, customer data had been collected into separate documents and much of it had to be gathered manually.
“We absolutely needed a CRM system that would allow us to collect and utilize customer data in the most efficient way possible. We also wanted a platform where we could centralize as many operations as possible. We immediately got into Salesforce’s nonprofit program, which provided us with a stack of free licenses. This reduced the cost of our initial investment, which was hugely beneficial for us.”
Friman himself sees technology as an enabler and swears by the mantra “boring is good.” In his worldview, leveraging technology should be made boringly simple and easy, and it must be made useful for everyone.
“I want people to be able to use tools that they are already familiar with and know how to use as much as possible.”
Friman saw that Salesforce, as a broad technology platform, could ease the work of their relatively small team in many ways and enable taking their operations to an even more professional level. At the same time, he believed that adopting a unified platform would make expanding it easier in the future, as everyone would already be accustomed to using it.
“Going forward, we aim to consolidate as many processes as possible into Salesforce, simplifying our operations in the process. This will also benefit our clients, as having all their information in one place allows us to provide them with even more relevant content.”
Community building is the number one priority
According to Friman, achieving the ambitious goals of Kasvuryhmä requires success in two key areas: increasing membership and supporting the growth of member companies.
In both matters, the key position is held by the community formed by member companies, which Kasvuryhmä has actively sought to develop.
“For a while, we had our own community platform, which was expensive to develop and hardly anyone actually used it. We shut that solution down and started from scratch to reconsider how we could manage and develop our community. This led to the idea of building a member portal on Salesforce, which we could develop incrementally based on user experiences and feedback.”
On a practical level, Kasvuryhmä was able to digitalize many manual processes through the use of a digital workspace. For instance, whereas previously attendees were given membership cards to fill out by hand, now that same information could be collected electronically. At the same time, a wealth of ready-made material was uploaded to the member portal, which community members could access and utilize whenever and however they chose.
“We originally wanted to offer our members a comprehensive training program, but due to COVID, we opportunistically rebuilt the entire program on a virtual workspace. The idea was to continue organizing physical events but to shift the workflow to the portal. To our delight, we have noticed that people are logging into the portal more eagerly, consuming more of the available materials, and also completing more tasks.”
Friman reminds us that physical encounters remain at the core of Kasvuryhmä’s entire operation, but with the workspace, the community’s activity has been significantly increased. At the same time, collecting and utilizing customer data has become much easier than before.
“This aspect is also of great importance to us and we will continue to develop it. Our goal is to launch a new type of event page next, where people could directly register for events within the Community. Previously, we have handled many things manually, but now we are able to direct people to the workspace to do things independently.”
Currently Kasvuryhmä utilizes Salesforce quite extensively. In addition to leveraging the community solution enabled by Experience Cloud, they also use Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Tableau CRM for data analysis.
“Throughout our journey, we have continuously learned more and more about Salesforce, which has allowed us to consistently evolve our operations. Developing the system further with twoday Biit has been superb, as it has been easy to continuously test things and then refine them based on our experiences.”