GERRIT RODE - MD and founder at 360 Dialog - Ready to Transform Your WhatsApp Experience?

With over 50,000 businesses sending 4 billion messages, WhatsApp has become more than a chat app—it’s a revenue engine. Gerrit Rode shares how his team helps brands unlock real customer engagement, turning conversations into conversions. Are you ready to make WhatsApp work for you?

Product Launch & Roadmap

“When launching your solution agnostic WhatsApp Measurement Solution 360Pilot, what were the most significant data‑driven insights you relied upon during development, and how did they shape key features?”

360Dialog has been part of Meta‘s WhatsApp program since Day 1 and established a strong business and tech relationship with Meta globally. Approx. 3 years ago Meta shared with us their vision for WhatsApp and the obvious push towards Marketing and Advertising. Looking at an Ecosystem full of messaging tools we identified another ecosystem problem that can be solved with software. The idea for the first independent measurement and optimization solution was born. We‘ve seen +10k clients starting Click2WhatsApp campaigns on WhatsApp and where wondering why +90% of these clients stop the campaigns in less than 10 days. That help us to understand that attribution to campaign, adset and ad and attaching simple funnel views is a missing feature to identify how to optimize things like adcreative, audiences and budgets. We also understood that 8 out of 10 conversions happening outside WhatsApp so we had to build integrations with the MMPs, CRMs and CDPs to enable full funnel views for our clients.

“How do you plan your GTM around something that is completely new in the ecosystem and how do latest features by Meta and Google become growth accelerator?

Very good question! :-) As we are operating globally we also know the markets with highest adoption of WhatsApp but more important on Marketing use cases. Markets like Brazil/LATAM, Middle East and India stand out a lot though I have to say we amazing and growing cases in Europe are accelerating.

GTM for us in 2025 and 2026 is very much focussing on these markets and this comes with an awareness and enablement approach rather than hardcore selling or massive marketing funnel approach. Performance Marketing and Measurement are still super early stage on Whatsapp looking at mid-market and enterprise segments which requests educating rather than selling.

Google, Meta and even TikTok obviously push a lot on product and GTM around these new advertising products for Messenger channels. As we‘ve been able to proof significant performance upside with the help of measurement we are aligning closely with all three on join GTM.

Product Performance & Impact

“Early results show big lifts in ROAS, AOV, leadgen—what's been your biggest success story since launch, and what data/analytics highlighted that success early on?”

From client success perspective I would say my personal highlight is an automotive client where we a) optimized campaign performance to a 50% lower CPL then target CPL given by the client and b) the ROAS has been +10x as 4 cars been sold. Also from a setup perspective with an integration into Salesforce. Media Buying was managed by a Top 6 global agency and with in depth funnel analytics (Impression to Conversion) we identified major hickups on the campaign setup which resulted in crazy CPLs after week 1. Instead of just switching off the agency could derive the obvious optimization adjustments and the campaign performance went up significantly.

The fact that we build something with 360Pilot that makes a Performance Marketer an amazing WhatsApp Performance Marketer by translating a completely new channel with it’s own specifics and challenges into a solution that feels familiar is making me very proud.

“With GDPR and user privacy being critical, how have you balanced strong analytics capabilities with data compliance—especially when building AI-driven insights?”

First of all I think it’s important to highlight that WhatsApp data is 1st Party Data that belongs to the clients. We are looking predominantly at pattern-based data insights for now which already shows significant upside for our clients. AI will come into play as data volumes scale and we need the help of AI for efficiency gains.For now as Meta, Google, etc. already applying AI models for 360Pilot it is way more important to deliver the right signals back to enable the platforms’ AI models for optimizing client performance. This is all happening under DPAs which we have with our clients in place.

AI & Analytics Capabilities

“Looking ahead, how do you envision customer teams using AI-powered analytics within the platform—e.g., auto-optimised message timing, content suggestions, or anomaly detection?”

User behaviour changes drastically and this is something we take really serious at 360Dialog internally and externally. Obviously the user interface user prefer changes super fast and we just see that on the number of leads coming from “LLM Prompts” our way which goes close to 20% already. This is something we want to consider on how we build 360Pilot and make it accessible to our target audience.My bold hypotheses is that there will be very few very large LLM Platforms that every software has to support and if you don’t you either lose the client or won’t get the client. By saying this 360Pilot has to be integrated with all major LLM Platforms/Models to make the data accessible and let the user decided which user interface how to gain the right insights from the data is preferred. SaaS companies have to rethink their kind of closed environment approach completely otherwise they will lose it.

Business Leadership& Vision

“As Co‑CEO & Co‑Founder, how do you balance short‑term product KPIs with your long‑term vision for AI‑first conversational analytics?”

360Dialog is a fully remote company with +130 team members working around the globe. over the years we iterated the company away from a typical military orgchart towards a pure initiative and business value based organization which gives us the freedom to work on a long term vision but quickly react to market dynamics or business opportunities if needed. In terms of how we build RELEVANT products it has to come from client feedback and data which we constantly collect and analyze and derive logical next product decisions/features from it.

“What are the leadership lessons (data‑backed or otherwise) you’ve learned from guiding 40,000+ customers through this product’s growth phase?”

Puh, could write a novel about that. ;-) But in the end it’s some basic principles that helped me personally but also the organization to get to this point. Data First is a MUST means make sure you have very robust data foundation which enables you to analyze whether it’s operational kpis, business kpis or product kpis. if your dataset is messy this will get you in deep trouble.

Bringing the right people on the right problem/task you want to solve. I do believe that there is often still this mindset you need to have a specific profile in your organization otherwise you can’t function. I do believe smart people on specific problems/tasks to be solved can create super powers if you let them iterate towards a specific goal and supervise with a data-backed approach.