Typeform is entering a new phase of its marketing strategy. In recent weeks the SaaS firm, which specialises in online form building and surveys, hired its most senior marketer yet with the appointment of Malinda Sandman as vice-president of marketing.

Formerly senior director of global acquisition and partner marketing at Intuit Mailchimp, Sandman’s role sits within the go-to-market organisation and reports to the chief revenue officer.

“What drew me to the brand was that I’ve always loved being super close to the customer and getting amazing customer feedback,” she explains.

“That is the mission at Typeform, being able to empower customers to get all that data, so that they are able to get closer to their customers.”

Reflecting on her first 100 days, Sandman says her primary goal is to get “crisp” on who the target Typeform customer is and how to reach them.

“How can we build awareness? How can we reach them? How can we show them how Typeform is going to help their business?” she asks.

[AI is] both an incredible tool, a superpower for our customers and also a tool that we’re using internally.

Malinda Sandman, Typeform

However, Sandman is in no rush to overhaul the marketing team’s existing approach.

“In the first 30-60 days, I’m really focused on understanding how I can help amplify the work that’s already being done,” she explains.

“I want to spend this time listening, learning and understanding what my team is doing.”

Sandman plans to work closely with chief product officer Aleks Bass on how to make launches – including the release of new AI features – more impactful.

“I’ve been talking really closely with Aleks our chief product officer and starting to meet, and understand the product team, as well as the product roadmap. We’re now thinking about how to make those product launches impactful,” she explains.

Success, in Sandman’s view, will be measured by customer acquisition, retention and expansion.

“It’s very similar to other SaaS products that I’ve worked on, where it’s really around, how you think about getting customers in that PLG [product-led growth] motion as quickly as possible,” she states.

With regards expansion and retention, in Typeform’s case this means converting free customers to paid and getting paying customers to upgrade to use more tools.

“We’re thinking around creating those moments in the product. So, if they’ve already signed up and they’re a free customer – how can we think about upgrades there? How can we think about coming back to the product?” she asks.

The role of AI

When it comes to AI, Sandman views the tech not as a replacement, but as “a sidekick” to accelerate brainstorming, refine briefs and enhance creative work. In her mind the goal is to remain “human-centred” and “brand-focused”.

“It’s both an incredible tool, a superpower for our customers and also a tool that we’re using internally,” she explains.

Indeed, Sandman believes that during “every moment of using the product” there’s a way to leverage AI to help customers. AI can serve as an “extra data team” to analyse data at scale, as well as help them create the forms central to Typeform’s product offering.

Sandman plans to leverage AI to scale hyper-personalisation, including using AI testing software to automatically optimise campaigns and explore tools for creating videos from written content.

It’s really about being critical, being laser focused on the ‘Why?’ Laser focused on how AI can potentially help us.

Malinda Sandman, Typeform

Instead of AB testing, for example, the idea is to conduct “ABCD” testing and use AI to “automatically sunset variants” that aren’t working.

Sandman also points to content creation as a key tenet of Typeform’s AI strategy.

“In the age of no click, organic search, background SEO, it’s really tough. Google is optimised on video [and] there’s AI tools out there that create video and other content types that have higher preference from Google search and also the AI search as well,” she explains.

However, a risk for Sandman around AI use is creating “content at large” without the human touch. She prefers to use AI as a data-layer or brainstorm tool, not a full content-creation engine, in order to maintain trust and brand integrity.

“AI can help either refine some more of the technical side, or AI can just help to get those revisions going quicker,” Sandman suggests.

“It’s really about being critical, being laser focused on the ‘Why?’ Laser focused on how AI can potentially help us understand more of what the customer is like, but then making sure the creativity runs centre.”

Leadership style

Looking at fostering collaboration within her marketing team and the wider business, Sandman believes Typeform is “set up for success.”

“It’s important to figure out how to find common ground. We’re all trying to accomplish the same goal, so staying close through communication is key,” she states.

Sharing data is essential to break down the silos between sales, marketing and customer teams.

“Ultimately, everyone is hungry, right? And everyone always wants more data,” Sandman states.

She points to data scraped from customer service chatbots as something that can be beneficial across the board, because it provides valuable customer insight.

“People are sharing what they’re struggling with, what their successes are and you start to see the patterns. That’s definitely been part of my onboarding plan, so I understand what success looks like for them,” Sandman explains.

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This customer and collaboration focus has been a pillar of her philosophy since helping to run the Stanford University bookstore in college, where she decided to create pop-ups to drive growth.

“That really taught me how to build brand by getting close to the customer and meeting their needs, which I was then able to build on in my retail and ecommerce roles later in my career,” says Sandman.

Her leadership style has since evolved to focus closely on collaboration within her own team and she believes context is crucial.

“I want to understand what you’re working on and why you’re working on it. For me, it’s super important to understand context,” she states.

“This has been critical in me bringing people along and figuring out how to lead large matrix teams. Everyone comes from different backgrounds, everyone’s been trying to accomplish things and everyone has different skillsets – but ultimately, we need to create one brand together.”