the gtm engineer Lessons & Battle Scars Building Rippling's Marketing Machine with Brandon Camhi, VP of Marketing @ Rippling
Brandon Camhi has played a pivotal role in Rippling's extraordinary growth journey over the past six years. He joined Rippling in November, 2019 when the company had 150 employees and had just hit $10 million in revenue. Starting as their first growth marketing IC, Brandon built out the new logo sales growth team, took on cross-sell to existing customers, and for the past 18 months has been leading all of marketing at Rippling. During his tenure, Rippling has grown from a $250 million valuation to over $16 billion—a 60x increase.
Brandon's career began with a content marketing internship at OpenGov, where he learned to get inside buyers' heads and write compelling content. He then joined Hearth as their first marketing hire, helping scale the business to tens of millions in revenue before discovering Rippling's Series A memo and joining what he recognized as a company with massive potential. In this conversation, Brandon shares the tactics and strategies that drove Rippling's growth, why he believes understanding customers trumps growth hacks, and the key accelerants to career growth.
In this podcast, we discuss:
* Why deeply understanding your customer is the foundation of effective growth, and how to best understand customers
* How Brandon prioritized his time in the early days of Rippling’s growth and how the team recovered when their top of funnel collapsed during COVID
* The biggest wins and mistakes during Brandon’s 6 years at Rippling
* The challenges and thrills of working at a hypergrowth compound startup
* Brandon’s top career advice
* How to balance AI automation with human judgment in modern GTM
Episode highlights include:
* Brandon transformed Rippling's automated outbound program from 10-15% intent-driven demos to 60-70%. He talked to sales and studied customers to learn what signals prospects gave when they were ready to buy.
* During his time at Hearth, after digging around roofer Facebook groups to see what content got the most engagement, Brandon discovered that memes were overwhelmingly popular. By creating ads that followed the same meme format, performance reached all-time highs overnight.
* Rippling shifted from purely automated outbound to investing in human SDRs to augment their automated programs. This drove higher yield on the accounts that they were targeting.
* To create true sales and marketing alignment, both teams report to the CRO and Rippling is working to eliminate language like "marketing sourced" vs "sales sourced."
* People often underestimate the importance of the company they join when looking at their career. The right company will feel chaotic and if you can lean into the chaos, you will often find career magic.
* Rippling has a principle called "go and see" to encourage everyone up to the C-Suite to go gather qualitative evidence instead of just looking at dashboards. Following this approach, Brandon still listens to 3-5 Gong calls weekly. In listening to calls, Brandon realized how much Rippling’s brand investment was being undervalued in attribution.
Where to find Brandon:
* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bcamhi/
Transcript details:
(00:00) Intro
(03:41) Brandon's career journey starting at OpenGov and why he decided to join Rippling
(06:04) Why Brandon chose Rippling
(08:12) Early challenges and building intent driven campaigns
(12:09) Why intuition beats experimentation frameworks
(14:28) Understanding your buyer
(16:40) How Rippling navigated COVID and the top of funnel dropping to zero
(18:10) A COVID growth hack gone wrong
(19:43) How Brandon thinks about standing out in a competitive market
(24:28) The most important decisions driving Rippling's growth
(28:33) Why Rippling decided to invest in human-led outbound
(30:46) Creating true sales and marketing alignment
(34:40) What excites Brandon about Rippling's future potential
(37:30) Brandon’s top career advice
(42:10) The "go and see" principle at Rippling
(43:48) Building business intuition in marketing
(46:43) Operating principle learnings from Rippling and managing imposter syndrome
(50:04) Brandon’s takes on AI in go to market
(54:42) Underrated software tools, favorite growth hack, and conclusion
For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast and to recommend any guests, email noah@thegtmengineer.ai
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thegtmengineer.substack.com