YourRevOrg: How Justworks’s focus on small businesses drives growth

Founded in 2012, Justworks has established itself as a key player in the HR space. What started as a small platform centered on payroll and benefits has grown into a large professional employer organization (PEO) that provides payroll, employee benefits, HR administration, and compliance.

Justworks’s go-to-market strategy centers on the shared mission of helping small businesses succeed through clear communication, personalized offerings, and meeting customers where they are.

The company’s GTM team, led by CRO John Belle, also focuses on functions like marketing (led by CMO Catherine Crevels) and revenue effectiveness (led by VP Lauren Hughes).

Centering on customer success

Joining Justworks nearly two years ago, Belle is leading a GTM strategy that centers on solving customer problems. He assessed the effectiveness of its GTM functions and took the customer onboarding function away from the sales team and put it under customer success.

“What we found was that by moving it inside customer success of having it ladder up to that leadership, but maintain its connectivity to the sales organization’s pipeline, forecasting, and closing, we actually got a better customer experience through that onboarding journey,” he said.

He explained this change made the onboarding process clearer and easier for the customer and “prevented surprises for [the] customer success organization,” allowing them to be more prepared to take care of the new customers.

Belle said that customers can come to Justworks for standalone solutions or the full PEO offerings, which has made the company more attractive to a diverse set of small businesses. He said this has improved overall customer retention, stating on average customers stay for over seven years.

“We’re first and foremost an incredibly mission-driven team, and so everything about our go-to-market rests at the top of the company’s mission, which is to help small businesses grow with confidence,” he said.

Driving revenue effectiveness

Belle also introduced a “revenue effectiveness” arm—which he described as “the marriage of Rev Ops, analytics, and revenue enablement,” focusing on increasing productivity through AI and tech tools—to Justworks’s go-to-market strategy.

“Each of those things typically was managed and rewarded on the basis of stuff that they did, not necessarily the results that they drove,” he said.

Hughes, VP of revenue effectiveness, joined last year to helm the function. Her strategy has been to create a foundation for Justworks’s tech stack after years of what she called “tools spread.”

“We let a lot of these vendors come to us and tell us what our problems were, and we bought the tech, and then didn’t properly implement it, and our adoption has been terrible, so we’re really looking to simplify,” she said. “You’ll see that consolidation happening in the market as well with the cross-revenue technology.”

Hughes implemented revenue effectiveness by measuring tech tools by their outcomes rather than activity. She also stressed time to productivity as another point of measurement, especially as Justworks has onboarded over 100 new hires to the revenue org this past year.

Through AI, Justworks has built a signal and intelligence layer in its tech stack that Hughes said has helped personalize outreach to prospects, which has in turn helped with retention and expansion.

“We really understand what those signals are that are coming whether it’s through expansion opportunities or through pain points or growing pains that the [customer is] working through,” she said.

Bridging the gap

As CMO, Crevels said her job is to build out company messaging and raise industry awareness. She said her marketing strategy is twofold: focusing on building awareness while repositioning how customers view Justworks. In addition to living in the primary digital marketing channels, Justworks also hosts events with small businesses (for example, a dinner with members of the healthcare and health tech industry) to learn more about their needs and offer networking opportunities.

And for its messaging, Justworks has centered on being more than just an HR platform, one that provides resources meeting all the needs of a small business.

“To me marketing at its core is a translation of function,” Crevels said. “We help the business build what will sell and then sell what we have built. It’s this two-way between the market and the inside of the company. We are constantly translating and as such we are a strategic growth driver of the business.”