Six Reflections on 2024 and Some Predictions for 2025

It’s hard to believe we’re already at the end of another year. 2024 has been an extraordinary one for Membrain, for the industry, and for the world. For this holiday article, I want to share with you some of the year’s highlights from inside Membrain, as well as a few predictions for 2025.

1. We Had Two Large Releases

This year, we made two substantial changes to our products and services. On the product side, we launched Elevate, the most human-centered coaching and people growth offering in the B2B software space. Our product team led this cross-functional initiative. I’m very proud of what we accomplished and grateful to everyone who contributed. It marks the start of Membrain, beyond CRM and process enablement to shine the light on people’s growth as well. 
We also repackaged our service offerings to accommodate our growth. When we first launched Membrain, we had a smaller product and a single onboarding service. This year, Brenda, our head of customer success, led an initiative to break our services down and repackage them to make them more valuable and accessible to customers.

2. Team With Superpowers

I may be biased, but I believe Membrain’s team to be one of the best, and I’m proud to work with them. Maybe they don’t actually have superpowers, but sometimes it sure feels like they have them. This year saw some especially exciting team developments.

The biggest change involved restructuring our leadership team. We elevated Henrik to a larger role as my co-CEO, and Nina to Head of Operations and People Growth. As part of that move, we also brought on Lava Kurda to take some of the product management off of Henrik’s hands, and that’s been going well.

We hired quite a few employees in 2024, and they are all great. I especially want to mention Victor on the design side, who has been implementing many updates that make the product more beautiful and the users’ lives easier.

We brought the entire Membrain team to Sweden last summer and engaged in workshops, shared dinners, and had a photo and video shoot when we were all gathered. We meet regularly as a team virtually, but nothing can beat getting together in real life. It’s productive from a business standpoint, and we always include enriching cross-functional meetings. But it’s even more productive from a team bonding perspective, and we had a good time. Nina is the mastermind of our get-togethers, and she did a fantastic job (as always!)

We meet regularly as a team virtually, but nothing beats getting together in real life.

In fun news, we added a voice message from each of our team members on the career page so you can hear what our people think about working here. Johanna was the driving force behind that project, based on an idea from Nina. We also added an audio/video studio to our home office, which helps us do a better job with product videos and webinars.

3. We Updated Our Security Compliance

As a software company with customers all over the world, we’re responsible for meeting a lot of security regulations. Nina has been instrumental this year in our effort to document our compliance with SOC2, and Anders has led the way on the product side. This requires documenting everything we do that involves technology, including how we use our computers, what protection measures we use to safeguard data, risk management procedures, and much more. Documenting these things and ensuring process compliance shows customers and potential customers that we take security seriously. We’ve hired consultants and an auditing company to help check our work, and will get a stamp of approval that shows we’re fully in compliance.

4. We Amped Up Our Relationships with Partners

In 2024, we engaged with our partners more than ever. With Paul leading the charge, we implemented a podcast where we interview top thought leaders and Membrain partners. That podcast, along with some articles from this blog, has been nominated for Top Sales Awards in four categories.

Johanna, Stacy, and Brionna have worked hard to bring a ton of webinars and some physical events to the sales space. Meanwhile, Pam and Jen attended a Women’s Sales Pros event that was a huge success for them and us.

The launch of Elevate has also had a big impact on our relationships with our partners, enabling us to grow deeper and provide more value to them. Elevate helps them with their customer engagement and strengthens their deliveries. It makes it easier for them to coach the coaches, identify performance and skills gaps on teams, and implement changes. 

This year, we also made it possible for partners to build tailored approaches within our platform and then essentially clone those for their clients very efficiently. So instead of having to configure Membrain each time for each new client, they create a template and can quickly customize and implement it for other, similar customers. This helps them implement faster and deliver better. This is a great evolution of the “Membrain Editions” concept, which we launched many years ago - combining process and methodology with technology to drive successful behaviors and growth.

5. We Evaluated Our Market Positioning

With the launch of Elevate, we realized it was time to adjust how we talk about our product and how we’re positioned in the market. We’re no longer simply a Sales Enablement CRM.

With Elevate, we’re making it possible for leaders, trainers, managers, and coaches to get closer to the individuals on their teams and shine a light on their people in a way that no other platform does and certainly no other CRM is capable of. 

Johanna led the leadership team in a series of discussions and workshops to define what we are, and we repositioned Membrain as a B2B Growth Platform.

6. The Industry and Market Experienced Substantial Upheaval

Alongside significant changes inside Membrain, the world, and the industry has seen huge changes in 2024, as well. Probably most notably, it’s been the year of AI. Everyone has been talking about it, and most big technology platforms have been implementing it. At Membrain, we’ve been evaluating where it’s functional and how we want to work with it. We have not yet built it into the Membrain platform for reasons I mentioned in previous posts. That said, we are constantly watching its development and testing things out so we can integrate it when and how it seems best and in a way that provides additional value to what is already being offered in mainstream products from vendors like Google and Microsoft.

2024 was also a struggle for a lot of companies in a lot of industries. The economy hit a lot of our partners and customers hard, and we’ve seen more churn than usual as a result. I’m proud of our leadership and teams for finding new ways to reach customers and provide more value so that we have continued to grow, albeit not at the pace we would have preferred.

7. We’re Looking Forward to 2025

I’m excited and looking forward to 2025. We’ve accomplished so much this year that will serve as a platform for even bigger and better things in 2025. Here are a few of my predictions for the new year:

• We’ll work even more closely with partners as we roll Elevate out on an even larger scale
• We’ll add new features to Elevate to make it viable as a standalone product
• We’ll onboard a lot more people onto Elevate as the world discovers what a powerful tool it is to onboard and grow their people
• We’ll continue to explore the AI side of things and look for opportunities to add value to our platform with it
• We’ll continue to improve the design and ease of use of the platform for both new and existing customers

Finally, I just want to say that I am very proud of our entire team. I was speaking with Henrik recently and we agreed that it feels like our leadership, with the new structure, has really come together in a big way. Our team is very skilled and well prepared to grow this company and have fun doing it.

2024 has been a big year, and I’m so very proud of every single person on our team and so grateful to all of our customers, partners, and others who have joined our mission to elevate the sales profession. Here’s to the end of a great year and the start of what will be even greater.

From me to you, happy holidays and Happy New Year!