🎯 Stuart Balcombe: Arrows, Product Marketer

Market-to-Revenue

Meet Stuart Balcombe, Product Marketer at Arrows. Shifting the pricing model, shifting the ideal customer profile, shifting the positioning, and then aligning. How to use Charlie Munger's inversion, the Cupcake model, and guardrails. Go talk to more customers, repurpose absolutely everything, and look for ways to create proprietary insight.

19 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. View the transcript.

What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?

We have two motions. We have a relatively normal split. We have some inbound and we have some more outbound strategies.

1) Our outbound is a little more interesting to talk about. We use the Happy Customers podcast pretty specifically to have targeted conversations with folks. It is a more top of funnel marketing channel for us. But, we use that pretty specifically to 1) identify and have conversations with ideal accounts that we think should buy Arrows, but 2) we also use it as a research tool to really understand, what are the problems? What are the current pain points and the challenges that folks are having? It's a great way to have a conversation that is not sales-led, but helps align on how we think about the problem-space and the market as a whole. Then, there's no obligation on the back end of it. That's not the strategy, that we're going in, “Hey, this is going to lead to a sales conversation.” But the goal is to, in a very targeted way, have organic conversations that lead to a much more direct sales conversation. That is the primary way that we're doing outbound today.

2) We also have an inbound funnel predominantly driven by LinkedIn organic and educational, SEO-focused content on the website, which drives people into a demo flow. There’s two entry points, but ultimately the experience looks pretty similar. 1) You can request a demo, or 2) you can request a strategy conversation, or a strategy call, which is much more focused typically for folks who are a little earlier in their onboarding, or thinking about their high-touch onboarding program. We can in a fairly hands-on way, help you step through (we’re building a maturity-model around that), essentially answer the questions that you need to have answered before Arrows is actually a good fit for you. So we do that, both if you went to asking for strategy, and also if you come in asking for a demo but aren't quite ready. We are heavier on that education side.

What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?

So the big one, I'm a little past 90 days at Arrows. The big ones that I've been tackling are shifting the pricing model, shifting the ideal customer profile, and then lining up how we think about the things that we prioritize on the marketing and product side to actually align to that.

1) From a pricing perspective, specifically, we moved from a seat-based model to plans as an Arrow-specific value metric. The goal there was to much more closely align the value. If Arrows is working for you, you should be using more plans, and you are happy to pay for more plans. Seats were, in some cases, a proxy, but didn't always map directly to the value that you're actually receiving.

2) On the ICP side, we've made a shift. This is sort of aligned with the maturity-model that I mentioned in the “how we turn the market into revenue” question. Moving from folks who are using ad hoc solutions, are less structured, and have less rigor around their onboarding program, to teams where their onboarding pipeline lives in a CRM. They are looking to optimize how they move people through that pipeline. Measurement and efficiency is much more important to those teams.

3) So that's been the big shift, which obviously comes with messaging changes and some product changes. Probably less changes on the product-side, but certainly narrowing in on: “This is the specific use case. These are the specific pain points. These are the ways that we are very differentiated for that group versus folks who are trying to solve different problems in their onboarding experience.”

What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?

1) The shifting of the positioning and aligning. I think this is just a common early-stage problem. You always have marketing positioning and messaging that’s at a slightly different stage than where the product actually is today. So, making sure that we are, as best as we can, lining those two things up. So it’s clear when you see our marketing, “this is the problem that we're solving.” The first experience with our sales team or success aligns with that, and it's moving you through that journey to bridge the gaps between the things that you wanted to do, and the things the product can do directly, or that you can do directly by yourself in the product.

2) Then, similarly, handling objections. It backs into a lot of stuff around the maturity-model. How do we help you bridge the gap or make sure that you have the things in place to actually adopt Arrows in this way? We found that even shifting to an ICP that is using a CRM (the reason there is that we have deep integrations with HubSpot and Salesforce), everybody sets up the CRM differently. We have found there’s sort of some reasons that setting up your CRM in a specific way helps you do other things, is more efficient. So helping people understand, “yes, you may be using the CRM, but if you are able to make this change, you will unlock this new capability.” Trying to do that earlier in the journey through content and education. That’s certainly always a theme. How do we move things that previously have been only once you buy the product or only once you talk to somebody? How do we move those things earlier? I know we’ve talked about this before. How do you move those things earlier so that by the time somebody gets to that point, they've already answered a lot of the questions that they might otherwise have had?

3) I don't know if it's a roadblock directly, but a very strong positioning angle that we're taking is going after some of the common onboarding metrics. We’ve found that there was a pretty big divide in how Success teams think about onboarding and how an onboarding team that lives under RevOps or under Sales thinks about onboarding, and measurement, and rigor, and all these things around that. So, we're trying to help. We try to have a very strong opinion on how you could do it and then make it really easy to actually do that with the product. Getting people to make that mindset shift is a process.

What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?

1) The Cupcake model. It’s one that I am a huge fan of and it goes by a lot of different names. It’s talked about more in Product, but I like to think about it everywhere. Essentially, instead of going and trying to bake the full cake at the end, and getting there by making an individual slice and then adding another ingredient, and adding another ingredient, which means that the cake isn't actually that tasty until you get to the end… start with just a smaller version of the complete thing. So really trying to think, for anything that we're going to go out and try to do, what is the smallest, complete, valuable version of that? It's really helpful to be able to measure the impact ...