Employee Spotlight: Rory Gilmore

Rory Gilmore, Manager, Mid Market & Partner Success EMEA

Rory Gilmore joined the Klaviyo team in October 2021 to run Growth Success in our London office. In March of 2022, he was promoted to manage Mid Market and Partner Success for the EMEA region. We got to chat with him about his new role, what makes Klaviyo so special (spoiler…it’s the people), and the advice that’s made him a remarkable leader.

Enabling wild success

My role is to enable our team to help our customers and partner agencies be wildly successful with Klaviyo. It’s an exciting time for the team: we recently ran our first in person customer event called Klaviyo Connect. Over a hundred Klaviyo customers stopped by throughout the day to learn, participate in workshops, talk with product experts, leadership, and generally get to know the Klaviyo brand. We’re just kicking off a new initiative to visit some of our larger customers throughout the world- I’m actually going to Israel next week! That said, throughout all of this, the thing I’m most proud of is hiring great people and seeing them excel and grow into new roles. It sounds cheesy, but that’s my greatest accomplishment.

The boss that shaped his career

My first boss when I moved to London was hugely influential on me, though I probably didn't appreciate that at the time. He taught me the importance of building meaningful relationships with your team and how this leads to a deeper understanding about your motivations and aspirations. He gave me the freedom and autonomy to give things a go and, to employ an overused expression "fail forward": the philosophy that it's better to aim high and risk failure rather than to have not tried at all. He was transparent and a good communicator which meant you always knew where you stood with him: be it good or bad. He understood the importance of recognition and how much it motivates a team. Lastly, he was an excellent collaborator and wasn't afraid to roll up his sleeves when the chips were down and a job needed doing, which I really respected. I owe him a lot for that experience at that time, he taught me more than he knows.

On his best teachers as a leader

I feel indebted to everyone I've ever had the pleasure of managing. Other people teach you more about yourself than I think you ever could. My team has taught me that a little vulnerability goes a long way: when you give people the space to be themselves, they’ll show themselves to do great things. To motivate a team and get people excited, you really have to understand them on a human level first: what are their motivators? Their intrinsic wants and needs? The key is to get them excited about what they value, and you can’t do that without getting to know and care about them personally.

The traits that make his team remarkable

We're really lucky in this team to work with people from all around the world who have unique challenges and varying understanding of Klaviyo: showing humility, being kind and empathic is key to building relationships with our customers. Openness and curiosity allows you to really learn about what's most important to your customers, then switching gears to innovatively solve for their unique needs enables you to become a trusted advisor for them and make them feel empowered.

This can require us to be challengers, not just “yes” people. It’s easy to agree with customers, but real progress comes from diversity of ideas. Successful Klaviyos are not afraid to challenge their customers and create new opportunities out of those challenges. We’re in an exciting place as a company where we’re not a small startup anymore, we’re in this hyper growth period, where there are so many opportunities for innovation and development, to push the envelope and think about ways to do things more efficiently, always keeping the customer at the center of that innovation.

Want to work with Rory? Check out openings on our EMEA success team!