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Clara Hoffman
I started my career in publishing. I worked at Springer in Berlin for three years, editing academic journals about, of all things, organizational psychology. It was tedious work, but it taught me something invaluable: how to take complex ideas and make them accessible without dumbing them down. That skill has been more useful in B2B marketing than any growth hacking course.
I moved into tech marketing in 2017, joining Contentful as their third marketing hire in Berlin. Contentful was a headless CMS, a product category that didn't really exist yet. My job was to build awareness among developers and technical decision-makers who didn't know they needed a headless CMS. We couldn't run traditional demand gen because there was no demand to generate. Instead, we built the category through developer education, open-source community engagement, and content that taught people about the architectural pattern, not the product.
That experience shaped my entire philosophy: the best B2B marketing doesn't sell a product, it sells a worldview. If you can get your audience to adopt your mental model, the product sale follows naturally.
In 2020, I joined Personio as VP of Marketing. Personio is an HR platform and at the time was Germany's most valuable startup. The challenge was scaling marketing across European markets that are much more fragmented than people realize. What works in Germany doesn't work in the UK, which doesn't work in the Nordics, which definitely doesn't work in France. Language is just the surface; the real differences are in buying culture, trust signals, and channel preferences. German buyers read case studies. UK buyers want analyst reports. French buyers want to talk to a human. Scandinavian buyers want to try the product themselves.
I left Personio in 2024 after we crossed $200M ARR. I started writing about B2B marketing with a European lens because almost all marketing content is written from a US perspective. The playbooks assume you have a $50M Series B, a TAM of 300 million English speakers, and access to Silicon Valley's network effects. That's not the reality for 95% of B2B companies globally.
I live in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. I have a miniature dachshund named Kafka (he's anxious and has complicated feelings about doors), and I bake sourdough bread with the intensity of someone who used to run enterprise marketing campaigns.
Experience
- VP Marketing, Personio
- Marketing Lead, Contentful
- Editor, Springer Academic Publishing