Customer onboarding + HubSpot | Growth @ Arrows

Hi 👋

1️⃣ Building AccountScout - a HubSpot native app to help companies enrich, research, and segment their accounts with the right data, not just more data.

2️⃣ I write a weekly email for 2,300+ RevOps & GTM leaders with tactical HubSpot playbooks to steal. 

For the last 2.5 years, I led growth at Arrows, a customer onboarding SaaS product for teams using HubSpot. I joined as the first marketer and helped Arrows grow to more than 7 figures in ARR.

I’m a dad to 2 boys - struggling competitive golfer - and lover of cooking (or grilling). 

Previously, I’ve run both product and growth at early-stage startups and started three of my own.

Stuart Balcombe

🎉 ConnectedGTM has been acquired.

Almost 2 years ago I started this niche little newsletter with a simple goal. Build the most practical resource to help the HubSpot community build more connected experiences. 

Today, I couldn't be more excited see Ryan Gunn run with that mission as ConnectedGTM joins Attribution Academy and becomes part of with the Hubsessed newsletter.

If you're in the HubSpot world you know Ryan so when we started talking about his plans for turning Hubsessed into the go-to resource for HubSpot strategy and execution it made this an easy decision.

What this means for subscribers:

→ Free Subscribers: No action required, subscribers will stay on the free tier and will begin receiving emails from Ryan with new content.

→ Paid Subscribers: Automatically transition to the Hubsessed Pro tier with  current pricing and billing schedule.

*Ryan has also launched a new premium tier with access to courses and coaching so definitely check that out!

I'm proud of what I built with ConnectedGTM, the level of content shared and the growth of subscribers and revenue over the last 2 years but it's time to pass the torch.

I have no doubt that Ryan will take educational content in the HubSpot ecosystem to the next level and help GTM teams adapt with the rapid pace of change in the space.

To all the subscribers, supporters, and cheerleaders of ConnectedGTM. I’ve loved building this newsletter in the HubSpot ecosystem and I’m forever thankful for your feedback, ideas, and encouragement over the last two years.

For everyone who's reached out asking where I went the last few months, I'm sure I'll be back to sharing what I'm up to soon.

On to the next chapter 💪

Currently building and scaling the next wave of AI-enabled services and products in the HubSpot ecosystem as founder and CEO of The RevOps Shop.

Expert operator providing sales automation, data, and marketing automation solutions for B2B companies looking to win more business, more often.

Trusted by America's leading sales and marketing executives to modernize and operationalize GTM best practices.

Michael Grinberg

I don’t know about you, but I’d be nowhere without some really strong women in my life. There’s way too many of you to tag, just know I’m grateful.

Two heavy hitters:

Yuliya Grinberg thank you for giving me life, raising me, and inspiring me daily.

Katherine (Katya) Medianik you’re the best wife, momma bear to our amazing kids, and CEO of our family life together. Did I mention you’re also a badass attorney???

Career Builders:

Amy Senew, Michelle Benfer, Leigh Brown, Alison Bridgman O'Toole - thank you all for believing in me and lifting me up when I didn’t always believe in myself. 

Peers, Clients, Friends and others that inspire from near and far:

Anya Taschner, Kristen Ribero, Isabel Ganovsky, Manuela Londoño Jiménez, Maina Bianca Azcueta, Yenma Herb, CAPM®, CDMP®, LSSBB, Courtney Muller, Jen O'Neill, Gemma E. Versace, Tessa Whittaker, Tanvi Gala, Hannah Goldberg, Justine Anderson…

And so many more.

Happy International Women’s Day!

CEO, Founder at RevOps.Shop | AI sales and marketing strategy expert for B2B companies looking to win more business, more often.

Recent college graduates are having the hardest time breaking into corporate jobs that we've seen in years.

Even when they do land a job, the gap between someone with 2 years of experience and someone with 5-10 years of experience is widening faster than ever.

The people who should be teaching the ropes, mid-level managers, senior ICs, experienced practitioners with 5-15 years under their belt, are in an all-out race to future-proof their own careers.

AI is disrupting workflows. Job security feels uncertain. 

Everyone's trying to figure out how to stay relevant in a world where automation is accelerating.

And that means they have less time than ever, and frankly, less desire than ever to invest in mentoring the next generation.

New grads are entering the workforce at exactly the moment when the people they're counting on to teach them are the most distracted, the most stressed, and the most focused on their own survival.

When you're worried about whether your own role will exist in 3 years, spending hours coaching a junior employee on the fundamentals feels like a luxury you can't afford.

Which means we're creating a generation of young professionals who are entering the workforce at a massive disadvantage.

So here's my question if you’re mid-career:
Are you able to mentor the way someone once mentored you? And how do you think we can be better mentors?

I genuinely want to know where people stand on this.

The best ‘AI bootcamp’ over the next 3-5 years won't be a bootcamp at all. It'll be working at an agency.

Remember when everyone was doing a coding bootcamp?

5-10 years ago, everyone thought they'd found the answer: learn to code in 12 weeks, land a developer job.

This worked for a lot of people.

But now, these coding bootcamps are less popular. (You guessed it. Because of AI.)

Everyone's trying to figure out: "How do I become AI-literate? How do I future-proof my career?"

And I think the answer for most people, especially early in their careers, isn't going to be a certification program or an online course.

It's going to be working somewhere that actually lets you use AI to solve real problems.

The perfect place to do that isn’t a big company. It’s an agency. 

At a big enterprise, no one is giving a 24-year-old the latitude to experiment with AI agents, build custom workflows, or test new tools on live client work.

There will be compliance reviews, legal sign-offs, risk assessments, complex security requirements. 

The barriers to experimentation is too high at large companies.

At a small agency, the appetite for ROI is just as high. But the barriers to experimentation are lower.

Small agencies have less to lose and more to gain from successful AI implementations. 

They're nimble enough to test, iterate, and ship fast.

So if you're coming out of college, working at an agency in 2026 might be the best education you can get.

Hot take: I think you'll learn more in 2 years at an agency than 5 years to learn at a Fortune 500.

#agency #AI

A lot of the conversation around AEO focuses on making websites more readable for machines. That matters.

But I think the bigger opportunity is helping machines understand the business itself.

Most mid-market companies already have a huge amount of context sitting inside their CRM, call recordings, calendar events, support tools, ERP data, and sales activity.

Inside that context is the real story:

What buyers actually ask.
What objections repeat.
What use cases convert.
What signals suggest intent.
What customers expand into next.
What language shows up in real deals.

For years, content strategy was built from the outside in.

Keyword research.
SERP analysis.
Search volume.
Competitor pages.
Long-tail queries.
Useful, of course.

But now many companies already have something more valuable than a keyword list:

their own operational truth.

So the question is no longer just, “How do we make our site easier for LLMs to read?”

It’s:
How do we turn our internal context into content that machines can understand and trust?

That is where things get interesting.

I think the companies that win in the AI era will not just have better content teams.

They’ll have better context layers.

And over time, I think RevOps, CRM architecture, and content strategy are going to converge much more than most people realize.

#AEO

Hot take: A lot of AEO advice feels like early SEO all over again. 

Rewrite the page.
Add structure.
Answer questions clearly.
Make it easier for machines to parse.

All good advice.
But it also feels incomplete.

Because the real advantage is probably not on the page alone.
It’s in the context layer behind the page.

Most companies are still creating content from external guesswork.

They brainstorm positioning.
They study competitors.
They pull keyword data.
They infer buyer intent from search behavior.

Meanwhile, inside their own systems, they already have the raw ingredients for better content:

CRM notes
Call transcripts
Meeting history
Win/loss patterns
Support tickets
Product or purchase data
Expansion trends
Sales objections
Implementation friction

That data tells a much more honest story than most content briefs ever do.

It tells you what people actually care about, what slows deals down, what outcomes customers buy for, and what language shows up when real money is on the table.

So to me, the next frontier is not just content optimization.

It’s context extraction.

The future winners in AEO will not just be the companies that write clearly.

They’ll be the companies that translate proprietary operational truth into market-facing narrative.

That is a very different game.

#AEO

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The Battle

Stuart Balcombe

Michael Grinberg

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Stuart Balcombe's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreStuart Balcombe's LinkedIn Performance