CEO Today - November 2022

THE DISRUPTORS Yoav Vilner –Walnut Kicking off our list we have Yoav Vilner, CEO of Walnut, an award-winning startup that has designed a revolutionary “sales experience platform” specifically intended to help SaaS companies extract maximum value from product demonstrations, and in fact, sparked an entire landscape to emerge afterward. According to TechCrunch, at the tail end of 2021, the company grew by a staggering 700% (in annual recurring revenue), which helped the company land a further $35m in funding from a Series B financing round. In recent months, Vilner has been successful in his mission to establish the Walnut brand across social media, particularly LinkedIn, which is where he launched the company’s now-viral #WeAreProspects movement. The campaign highlights the glaring inefficiencies in the B2B sales customer journeys, such as the fact that salespeople are often so focused on closing deals that they forget the most important part of the equation: the prospect. By humanising the prospect and making them the focus of the brand, Walnut is quickly gaining a reputation for being customer-centric, which is music to the ears of any prospective buyer. Of course, it helps that they have got an excellent product to back this up with. When asked about his approach to branding in a recent interview, Vilner had this to say: “It’s like a puzzle with a million pieces. It’s not just a logo, it’s not a blog post, it’s not just the way you launch your product, and it’s not the way you answer your customers. It’s pretty much everything all at once, so it takes a lot of time to build out. It takes a lot of time to experiment, and you should do it from day one because it’s going to take a while.” By the looks of things, Yoav’s puzzle is well on its way to being solved. Melanie Perkins – Canva Next, we have someone youmay have most likely already heard of, Melanie Perkins, CEO of Canva. Canva is a popular online design platform that makes it easy for anyone to create beautiful visuals for their business or personal brand, regardless of their design experience. Founded in 2012, Canva has seen phenomenal growth under Melanie’s leadership, with the company now boasting over 75 million users across 190 countries. And when you consider that Canva is squaring up against the likes of Adobe and Microsoft in the design space, it’s safe to say that Melanie is doing something right. Perkins is a firm believer in the power of branding, and she has built Canva into a company that is synonymous with beautiful design. From its stunning website to its sleek and user-friendly app, everything about Canva screams style and sophistication. With that said, she clearly understands the importance of having a killer product to back up the brand, and that’s exactly what Canva has. “Our key focus has always been on building a product that solves a real problem. That’s by far been the biggest driver of our growth. Once someone has used Canva, they help to spread the word. We have had an incredible number of tweets and blog posts from people who say how much they enjoy using Canva, which is very encouraging,” said Perkins in a recent interview.

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