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INTRO
The Demand Generation Club Podcast is back and we're turning up the heat with season three. Get ready for insightful conversation with experts from Splash, TrustCloud, WorkRamp, UserGems, and more as we dive deep into B2B marketing approaches that are making an impact in 2024. This podcast is brought to you by SaaSMQL, the SAAS Growth Agency that helps B2B software companies land seven figure deals with highly targeted multi-channel campaigns. Since 2018, SaaSMQL has helped over 100 SaaS companies generate millions of dollars in sales pipeline and recurring revenue. To learn more, go to SaaSMQL.com.
Franco Caporale:
Hello everyone, I'm here today with Austin Beveridge with the head of marketing at Arc. Hey Austin.
Austin Beveridge:
Hey Franco, how's it going?
Franco Caporale:
Awesome to have you here at the Demand Generation Club Podcast. Jumping in straight away, I want to understand more about your background and how you ended up in your current role at Arc.
Austin Beveridge:
Sure. Grew up in the Midwest, went to college, thought I wanted to be an accountant, realized accounting wasn't for me. I could always see all the rules and all I wanted to do was figure out how I could go outside the rules. For those accountants out there, that's not how that actually works. And then I found and heard about marketing and was always interested in how do products get the people and how do people choose products and the whole psychology around how do they choose the products that they interact with on a daily basis. And in college I got involved in a bunch of different startups and then from there transitioned to a career in corporate. And then I was like, "Hey, this isn't really right for me. I want to get into all of the latest and greatest tech available."
At the time, it was Uber and Lyft and all these companies that had just started taking off and everybody's talking about booms. I had a friend who had joined Bird and he was talking about how they were scaling and launching all these different cities. And I was like, "I need to get on that digital gold rush." We picked up my fiance and I, we moved to San Francisco. I joined Bolt. Bolt at the time was Series B. We had just over a hundred employees. They had nobody in marketing. They hired myself and one other person. He started a couple of weeks before I did.
And when I left we had just over a thousand employees, 45 people in marketing. We had thousands of customers using the Bolt platform. And it was crazy to see that growth trajectory, the truly rocket ship going from a few hundred people to thousands across the planet. And then I had found Arc in 2022 with the mission to democratize access to funding. And since then we've scaled to now offering capital and cash management, venture debt and a suite of other financial products. And it's been exciting to see that growth trajectory going from a fairly large corporation, seeing it from Series B to scale, and then now joining at the pre-seed seed stage and now seeing it to A. And that's been a really exciting journey to be a part of.
Franco Caporale:
And that's a very interesting background because you got to see both the demand generation at scale with large budget, and now back to this seed and Series A startup, which is a very different motion. I'm definitely going to want to learn more about it. Before I jump into that, I want to understand from you, do you have a favorite tech stack that you carry through different companies that you always cannot work without, from a marketing perspective?
Austin Beveridge:
Yeah, a thousand percent. I think the biggest thing is CRM. For me, Salesforce has always been tried and true. I've tried HubSpot, I've tried a bunch of the other tools, and they're just not as robust as I need them to be. You can't customize it as much as you need to be. You don't have all the fields and functionality you need. I think CRM is definitely the core or the foundation. For me, that's always been Salesforce, super expensive, super difficult to configure, but once you've got it coming, it's a train. It just keeps going and going and going. From there, I would say on the marketing automation front, we've used a few different tools. I've used Marketo. I've now started using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, used Pardot. I would say for me, my favorite is probably has been Marketo. It's a bit outdated in terms of the user interface, but it's just so powerful and when you start to get some of the flows and combine it with integration with Salesforce, it just hums.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud, I haven't really got under my feet. I've only had about six months of experience on it, not super familiar with it, but it's been pretty powerful as well. And then in terms of the actual template or outreach for sales, we've used both Salesloft and Outreach. I'm a fan of Outreach over Salesloft just seems to work a little bit more smoothly. It's a little bit more, I like that. And then lastly, on the SEO front, I love Semrush. That's probably my favorite tool now that they have this AI content generation tool. You don't have to use some of the other tools that have now started to pop up over the couple of years. I love that as well. And then lastly, on the ABM front, used a few different tools there, but I think my favorite has been SixSense just because it's so robust.
It's so user-friendly. It shows an entire journey of all the different channels and tactics somebody interacted with, and you can really dig down into the user journey of every account that's closed. And you can go back to the ELT and say, "Hey, this account closed, it had this much GMB. Ultimately it took 10 touch points to get there. How do we want to attribute each of those touch points to contributing to that sale?" And it just gives you that much more robust, holistic picture of exactly who the customer is, where they came from, and what all the different channels they interacted with along the way.
Franco Caporale:
6Sense is becoming very popular across everyone that I interview. Let me jump straight to understand a little more your time at Bolt and how was it to work with a larger budget, larger resources? How do you approach your demand generation strategy compared to then when you joined Arc?
Austin Beveridge:
At Bolt, when I initially joined, we were Series B. There were just two of us in marketing. It was a very much outbound demand generation strategy, meaning we were doing SEM, PPC, we were doing lots of webinars, we were creating content. And then as the organization scaled, we started to bring in functional experts to own all those channels. Somebody who owned DemandGen, who owned ABM, who owned to run comms and paid media, somebody who owned lifecycle. And each of those channel experts or functional experts effectively ran those channels. I was on the integrated marketing front. Basically what I would do is when a campaign would come to light, it'd say, "Hey, we have this new customer knowledge chain, we have this new partnership we want to launch, we have this new initiative we want to launch or new product, a new feature," and create a holistic plan of what are all the different channel activations we have and then orchestrating everything behind the scenes.
The narrative, what are the things people care about, what are the value props, etc. My job initially was more on the demand gen front, but then as the organization grew, it shifted more to a campaign orchestration. And I wasn't necessarily in the weeds demanding budget, but what I will say is the budget went from maybe a hundred, 150K per month to 10 million plus per month across all of our different spend on all of our channels. That was pretty exciting to see. Bolt was very much focused as an organization, as it grew, on awareness, driving top of the funnel awareness, which didn't necessarily translate into the bottom of the funnel conversions, but for us it was all a brand play. Everything we did was focused on how do we drive as many eyeballs as fast as possible to the brand so everybody's talking about it?
Step forward now to Arc, the market's flipped and everybody's focusing on driving revenue. Where holistically we'd focus on driving MQLs and SQLs, but not necessarily revenue at Arc, because we're early stage, we focus exclusively on driving revenue. What are the activities that we can do in the most efficient manner to drive that revenue for the business? And the channel mix that we use or imply here at Arc is very different than at Bolt. Here we're focused exclusively on in-person events, partnerships, channel distribution networks with VCs and accelerators and things that NX or Herculean efforts. You put a dollar in, but maybe you get $10 out. And it's focused specifically on driving revenue. And we've tried PPC, we've tried SEM, we've tried all those different channels, they're just not super efficient for our business. And instead we focus on things that drive direct revenue to the business at a super efficient cost per acquisition.
Franco Caporale:
And at Arc, you track revenue, which I'm going to ask you in a second how you do that. What was your main metric at Bolt, and then how do you see that reflecting down the funnel, you mentioned something about MQL?
Austin Beveridge:
At Bolt, in the early times, we focused almost exclusively on driving MQLs into the funnel. All of our OKRs were set up to drive MQLs. MQLs, if people don't know, marketing qualified leads. That's top of the funnel, people who've expressed interest and somewhat qualified for your product. And then as you go down from MQL, you get to SQL, which typically means you're on the right platform. You had the right tech stack, you could basically work with what we were doing. And then ultimately you got to SQL, which was opportunity. And effectively at that point, we knew you had the right technology, we knew we could integrate it directly, we knew that you were interested and you could sign, we knew that you had the correct budget and could actually pay for it and now you were an opportunity. And because we spent all of our time on top of the funnel driving MQLs, you're doing things like webinars, large event sponsorships because then you get a list, you upload the list, now all of a sudden you have a thousand MQLs.
The problem is the conversion rate from those MQLs to SQLs to SQOs, and ultimately revenue for the business you don't necessarily care about because all you're driving is top of the funnel revenue or top of the funnel MQLs. At Arc, we focus almost exclusively on bottom of the funnel. How much actual net revenue do we drive for the business? And then ultimately what are the channels and tactics that are most efficient to get there? And the channel mix between those two different things is very different. And I think it's a factor of two different things. Number one is the market. Historically it was growth at all costs. You're just borrowing as much money as possible with the idea that you can continue to raise capital. And it doesn't matter if your unit economics are positive or negative because as long as you have more money coming into the funnel, you can continue to do that.
Now the market's flipped. And you have to be super efficient with your spend. You have to generate net positive economics on every single deal you bring, which means you can't spend infinite amounts of money to attract new customers. And I think that's the first factor. And the second factor is as you become larger and larger of an organization, there's this need to push towards brand and awareness marketing. And when you're a small organization like Arc is, it's very much focused on revenue because you don't have the capital to survive. Ultimately, if you don't have revenue and you can't raise more money, your company dies. We're focused exclusively on driving net revenue for the business, which ultimately aligns my incentives with sales incentives, which means that we're much more efficient and effective working together.
Franco Caporale:
From an attribution perspective, do you look first touch, last touch, a combination of the two or how do you understand what is actually working and what is driving revenue?
Austin Beveridge:
It's a great question. A lot of organizations to your point, will either do first touch, meaning what was the first channel or thing that they initiated with the organization at? Some companies will do last touch show. What was the last thing that actually made them convert? What we do is a W. Effectively look at what was the first thing that brought them into the funnel, what was the last thing that brought them into the funnel, and then what was the set of activities that came in between? The way that we do that is through Salesforce campaigns. If they attend an event, if they attend a webinar, if they download an ebook, all of those things, drop them into an individual Salesforce campaign. And then at the closed one level, I'll go in when somebody's closed one meaning they've deposited or they've taken in capital from Arc, and I'll say, "What are all the campaigns that they were a part of? What was the first thing that they interacted with? What was the last thing they interacted with and what were all the set of activities in between?"
And then what we tried to do, and we're not as sophisticated as we should be yet, is assign some lead score to each of those activities. If they attended an event, did that get 20% of the conversion? Or if they attended a webinar, does that get 10% of the conversion? And what we've tried to experiment now is how much of each deal closed should we actually attribute to a specific tactic? But if you don't have them set up in Salesforce campaigns, it's really hard to do that. And that was that foundational groundwork of making sure you have the CRM humming, making sure you're capturing all their activity history, making sure all of UTMs pass through all of your forms and go into Salesforce, making sure that anybody attends an event or a webinar gets tagged with the appropriate campaign, making sure sales is following up and adding notes to each of the deals that they talk to.
There's a lot of it that goes into it. And ultimately then that makes my job really easy to say, "What are all of the different things we did? What are all the different customers that converted? And then ultimately, what was the total sum we spent versus the revenue we drove for the business?" And so long as that's positive at a factor we're comfortable with, then we're going to continue to invest in those channels and activities.
Franco Caporale:
What are some of the channels that work really well today at Arc versus those that were working at Bolt?
Austin Beveridge:
Let me take a step back. It's really interesting because our business has evolved over time. Historically, we were a capital-centric business, we provided capital to people. And for those who don't know capital, almost everybody wants because you need capital to grow your business. The problem with capital-intensive businesses is it's an inverse selection bias. Typically, people who want capital are not qualified for capital, and you'll end up turning away 95% of the customers that come in because they're simply not qualified. Unlike a SaaS product where anybody who has a credit card and can swipe and pay, it's qualified. With capital, it's a very different story. On cash management, it's also a very different story. People don't typically see banking as a problem, and then you have to educate them on why your banking solution is different, better, et cetera. And when we initially launched capital, the channels that worked really well were LinkedIn and Mail because we could target specifically the founders, CEOs, CFOs at startups that had just raised capital.
And we do LinkedIn email messages. Super effective for getting inbound interest, but the conversion rate wasn't very high. We also tried PPC on Google, but the problem was on capital, people would click on it, but almost nobody who's looking for capital is qualified. You drive lots and lots of interest, but nobody's qualified for it. Then on the cash management front, lots of people are interested in banking, but nobody's interested in signing up for an account. You see an ad for a competitor, you see an ad for this bank or that bank, but there's no real reason or incentive for them to switch. You tried competitive campaigns, you try branding campaigns, you tried broad search campaigns and just nobody converts. And ultimately, PPC just wasn't effective because the cost per acquisition versus the LTV of that customer just wasn't there. And then we tried a handful of different channels, and ultimately what we landed on and what was the most effective for us was events.
We would host a dinner, we'd have 25 to 50 people, you bring them in, you have a dinner, it costs you somewhere between five and $6,000. But then the LTV of those customers, if you convert two of them, pays back the dinner by 10, 12, 15 times. You can take a single dinner, get the exact people you want in the room, have a conversation with them, convert at a much higher rate than any other channel, and then the ROI on that actual activity is infinitely better than any other channel.
That was probably the single biggest and most effective channel at Arc. At Bolt, I would say we did everything under the sun, every channel, every activation, every activity, every time demand generation thing, whether it was content, paid, et cetera. I would say the most effective was actually ADM because you could target the specific individuals at specific companies at the right time and continuously hit them with ads until they bought. And for them, it was a very different game around, it's not a short-term sale, it's six month, 12 month sales cycle. You just got to hit them, stay top of mind throughout that entire journey.
Franco Caporale:
How many dinners are you organizing now since they work really well? Do you have a whole system?
Austin Beveridge:
We have probably two to three a week. September has been our largest event month in our history, and we actually hosted two of our largest activations ever. We took over Giants Stadium for the launch of our Platinum, and then we took over Manhatta, which is a skyscraper in New York's FiDi district last week. Those are the two biggest activations in our history. We brought together just over 700 people and it was a ton of fun. We're already seeing some of those accounts convert, which is great.
Franco Caporale:
Do you also see the same success in third party events, like sponsoring conferences or similar or it's mostly your own events?
Austin Beveridge:
Conferences are really tough because you're basically paying for a branding exercise. They bundle it and say, "You can get a booth. Oh, you can have your logo here. Oh, you can have this. We'll give you the guest list." But people attend those events because they genuinely want to hear speakers talk or maybe they want to go network with people. And they're not super effective. And we try a couple of those. They just don't convert because it's not your specific event. Whereas when you host an event that's just for you or with you and a partner, they're coming for you. They're honestly here to interest, in more about your product or whatever you have to talk about. And that conversion is much higher than sponsoring other events.
Franco Caporale:
Before I let you go, Austin, I want to ask you three more questions that I always like to ask. And the first question is, what are some of initiatives that you are now focusing on at Arc for the next year, for the next few months?
Austin Beveridge:
The first one, which I alluded to a little bit ago is Arc Platinum. That's probably the single biggest and coolest product we've launched in a while. It's a re-skinning of what everybody thought of as traditional banking, which banking holistically is effectively the same products. You have a checking account, you have a savings account, you have a treasury account, but there's never really been a truly differentiated offering, something that works for founders. We spend a lot of time thinking about, "What are all of the different things that founders need but don't receive in a bank account? What are all the things that they wish they had but they don't have?" And that's where we came up with this concept of Platinum, and it's been really positively received by the market. We've had over $250 million of inbound interest for this account. And we're processing all these applications as fast as we can. We launched the product last week, and just the amount of interest for this product has been so overwhelming and so cool, and I'm so excited to see all these activations and all of this effort that went into it just explode.
Franco Caporale:
And are you planning more events around this new product from an activation perspective?
Austin Beveridge:
We are. We went pretty big when we took over a skyscraper and a stadium. We have some other cool activations, which I can't share yet, but I will say they're going to be even bigger and even cooler than the last ones. And the idea is you bring together these really premium events with these really premium startups. They should have a really great time, and now they experience premium banking for what it should be.
Franco Caporale:
That's fantastic. And going back to your role and your career trajectory, what is the one thing that you wish you knew at the beginning of your career?
Austin Beveridge:
I think the biggest thing I wish I would've known at the beginning of my career is that you don't have to always have the right answers. It's okay to not have the answers, and it's okay to not know the answer to a question. What's not okay is to just sit back and pretend like you didn't see a problem arise or you didn't see this problem come up. If you see a problem arise or you don't know the answer to a question, go find somebody who does and tag them in and ask their general good advice and guidance on how do you solve it. Because the single biggest thing you can do is help your bosses live or make your bosses live easier.
And I think if you can do that as a young marketer, you'll accelerate your career trajectory infinitely. And the one piece of advice I try to live by is every day I try to be a bit more like the senior marketer I needed as a junior marketer. And being there for people, hearing out what are the things that they're struggling with, trying to figure out what are the things that they need, what are the things that they're interested in, what are all of those different things that will help them accelerate their own career, because that's not something I had as a junior marketer. And I try to give back and mentor people wherever and however I can.
Franco Caporale:
And related to this then, what is one common mistake that you see with junior marketers that they should try to avoid?
Austin Beveridge:
I think the single biggest mistake junior marketers make is spreading themselves too thin. You get really excited about doing a lot of different things, and you try to jump into every single channel. You try to write social copy, you try to write email copy. You try to set up these large cross-functional campaigns. You try to get involved in every single thing you can, and you end up saying, "Yes," a hell of a lot more than you should. And it's really good because it accelerates your growth trajectory, but it ultimately means you have to deprioritize other things in your life, your family, your friends, your partner, and all of those other things. And I fell into that trap. I deprioritized my fiance and we ultimately almost broke up, but she stuck with me and now we bought a house, now we're here together. And I would say that's the single biggest thing, say, "Yes," to a lot of things, but don't say, "Yes," to everything.
Franco Caporale:
That's great. Austin has been really fantastic speaking with you today. Thank you again for joining the Demand Generation Club Podcast.
Austin Beveridge:
Thank you very much for having me, Franco. Have a great day.
CLOSING
That's a wrap for today's episode of the Demand Generation Club Podcast. If you're curious about how we're landing enterprise deals and unlocking millions in recurring revenue using account-based marketing and integrated direct mail campaigns, check out our website SaasMQL.com. That's S-A-A-S-M-Q-L.com. We share tons of content every week on tried and true strategic ABM initiatives that actually generate pipeline from enterprise accounts. Thanks for tuning in.