How do we embrace learning culture at Advance B2B?
Here's some of our common learning practices
Weekly learning hour
→ “Learning hour” is a company-wide open learning session that anyone can arrange if they feel like it, and attend when they feel it’s relevant.
→ The idea behind this is to encourage us to share knowledge & ideas with a low threshold.
→ Learning hour can be about anything: learning a new skill together, giving a presentation, sharing customer cases or best practices, working on a tricky task, holding a Q&A session, etc.
→ Sometimes we invite an external speaker that we find interesting.
→ Takes place every week (except Sprint planning weeks) on Fridays from 14:00-15:00.
Some of our recent learning hour topics:
→ Guest speaker: Everything about SaaS metrics w/ Niko Laine, Calqulate
→ Guest speaker: Growth engineering w/ Richard Makara, Paddle
→ Experimentation with paid advertising
→ Road to product/market fit
→ Customer management best practices
→ Low/No-touch sales model in SaaS
→ Guest Speaker: Secrets of Sales Innovators w/ Jan Ropponen
→ Google Analytics IP Anonymization
→ Content: from idea to concept
→ Attribution Modeling in Google Analytics
→ [Customer X] – Experiences from 2-week sprints
Example learning hour recording
Learning budget & allocated learning time
→ 10% of our time (that’s half a day every week) should be dedicated to learning something new. It can be watching webinars, reading books, taking online courses, meeting a mentor... Whatever feels relevant.
→ We have a personal learning budget for every employee with only two basic rules: 1) Choose something that makes you and the company grow, and 2) Don't settle for mediocrity.
Slackity Slack
#fuckups_and_learnings
We embrace failure and open culture around the fuckups and bad situations.
That means we share our fuckups and learnings at the #fuckups_and_learnings Slack channel and let others learn from them as well.
(We chose here a harmless example screenshot that includes no personally identifiable information - most of the things at this channel are actual learnings. → )
#stealthis & #show_and_tell
#stealthis is our curated newsfeed a.k.a Slack channel for external benchmarks, great content examples, cool new tactics, proven best practices (and generally all the interesting links we find from the internet).
#show_and_tell is basically the same, but for internal use: this channel is used for sharing things we did for the customers and that might be useful for someone else too.
Competence leads
To support the learning curve in our organization, we have recently introduced a new Competence Lead role.
The role includes...
→ Arranging meetups & workshops regarding the area of expertise
→ Ensuring substance competence when recruiting
→ Updating & keeping up the role-related onboarding materials
→ New employee onboarding to the role in question
→ Maintaining the freelancer network related to their area of expertise
→ Participating in the development of service processes, productization, and pricing related to the area of expertise
→ Other role-specific tasks
Some concrete examples of things our competence leads do:
Internal mentoring program:
Content marketers learning track:
Developing skill mapping tools:
Proof that it works
"Joining Advance B2B was a fast lane to accelerate my B2B SaaS marketing learning curve. 3+ years at Advance truly allowed me to develop as a marketer and build on my strengths."
Anna Holopainen
Head of Growth at Kide Science, previously a Growth Marketing Strategist & Team Lead at Advance B2B