Chargebee’s CMO: “Powering Next-Gen Growth Through Rebranding and Repositioning”

I haven't had a chance to see the event. I haven't even said hi to most of our own team yet. Well, listen, I'm also going to be on the coast in New Jersey. So I actually might next— Yeah. OK. All right. Please welcome to the stage Guy Merian, CMO at Chargebee, and Erin Gunnaratna, VP of Product Marketing at Chargebee. Hello, nice to see you all. I'm Erin Gunnaratna. I head up Product Marketing at Chargebee. I'm joined by Guy Merian, my boss and our CMO, and we are really grateful for you for spending the next 10 minutes with us. We are here to talk about something that is probably very meaningful and an experience that many of you have been through, which is rebranding and what that means. How do we do it well? When do we do it? And what is the impact when we do it right? So I'm here to tell you that rebranding is actually not about your logo. And if we do it right, that is a part of it. But that is absolutely not the most important part when you consider all of the other implications to an effort like this. And in fact, if we do make it only about our logo, that's when we have vanity projects like this. And I don't know about you guys, but at Chargebee, we don't really want to be spending this much money on a vanity project right now. So what Guy and I are excited to go through is actually when you do it right, when you consider rebranding and repositioning not a vanity project, but an actually really important company initiative, it can serve not as a vanity project, but a rallying cry. For your whole organization. And as marketers, that's something that's super exciting to us to drive the energy that's required for the growth that we all want. So, Guy, tell us about the secret to a great rebrand.

Thank you. And good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for stopping by. So the secret to rebrand— repositioning. Repositioning is the frame of reference through which the industry, your customers, your partners, the analysts, the press, our own employees view the needs and the services that we're providing and the promise that we're delivering. It's who we are, what you do, what you are representing, the problems and the pains you're speaking to, and why you differentiate within the industry. Because this is so fundamental, it's obviously something not to be done without specific business reason and typically occurring during common inflection points of growth. Uh, we're gonna use ourselves today as a case study. Chargebee's just completed this in May of this year. And in our case, we evolved from being a subscription billing platform and management company for the last 10+ years to acquiring 3 businesses in the course of 18 months in adjacencies like revenue recognition and retention. My own product retention being one of those. We then needed to streamline the messaging for our customers and for our employees as a future-proofed approach that could provide a common framework for our customers to interpret us and build their own strategies with how Chargebee could solve their problems for revenue growth management around their subscription billing platform. So a personal story, I joined as CMO, I became CMO after being a GM of an acquired business 4 months ago. At that point in time, we were about to go out with adaptive revenue management. A key insight was that our customers don't really value our services to the same degree for Adaptive as they do for Growth and Revenue Growth Management. We also recognized that our customer teams, our product teams were really focused around the growth aspect of Revenue Growth Management. And we already had common fit within searches in Google for this as a category as well. We then repositioned and did some rapid work in a short period of time, aligning it with our visual identity. Which in turn we were able to roll out as I'll share now.

Yeah, and the really core thing here and the reason that we're using the bullseye graphic is that if we think about going back to basics and what our customers really, really want and consider us a partner in, it's not adaptivity, it's in growth. And so the best advice that we can recommend is to make the really hard choices to focus on the absolute core of what your customers are trying to solve for. Now, in addition to, uh, to the focus on the core of what they need, you know, we also did find ourselves with a visual identity that it felt like we had outgrown, especially in the wake of making 3 acquisitions and telling a much broader story and solving a much broader problem than we had before. You know, Chargebee has been around for a long time. We were founded in 2011, 2012 timeframe, and a lot of our visual identity looked like it was still coming from that era. And, you know, for those of you in the branding and design side, you know that a lot has changed and there, there's There have been a lot of paradigm shifts in visuals since then. Uh, in addition to just wanting to look a little more current and fresh, the repositioning and the set of acquisitions that we made also brought us into a much higher, uh, market segment than we had been in before. We needed to have a much slicker, more enterprise look. And so all of those considerations, both the bigger story, the set of technology that was bigger than what we had been able to sell before, as well as becoming more current and wanting to go upmarket were part of what we considered when we looked at changing, you know, the visual identity that you see here on the screen. The other piece to the equation, of course, for me in product marketing, very core to my heart, was the competitive landscape. You know, and here is a view quickly at just the simple color palettes that we saw a lot of other vendors in our specific space using. It's a lot of blue. It's a lot of cool tones, a lot of purple. And we wanted to stand out. We also had the desire and the need to appeal both to technical audiences, which is where a lot of our competitors really focused, as well as more line of business finance-oriented folks. So a lot of considerations. And here's where we ended up on the backs of that revenue growth management strategy with a really fresh, visually differentiated, contemporary, new, and human-centric view. You know, for us, we are historically an infrastructure play. You know, we, we power billing operations behind the scenes historically. Obviously now we do a lot more given our repositioning, but bringing the focus in our branding to the humans that are using and benefiting from our software was also a really, really critical point for us. So we wanted to show some examples simply to kind of see the before and after, but the real key to bringing these two things together was the impact that we saw both within our own company and our own organization and in our, in our market and our customer base as well. So I'll turn it back over to Guy to tell us how we know that we've gotten it right.

So the story I like to tell here is— you can go to the next— when our recent, one of our executives who recently joined, our head of RevOps, he actually interviewed 5 of our employees before joining and asked, what is Chargebee? And he got 5 different responses. And this was during that period where we transitioned from being subscription billing to being a multi-product company. Today, as we've aligned around Revenue Growth Management, it appeals to the need of our merchants and our customers to achieve a lifetime subscriber growth and retention. Revenue Growth Management helps our customers acquire, retain, scale their financial operations, and integrate across their product stack. This is a common framework that our teams can all use in a common way with our customers. It empowers our product strategy teams who have developed a whole framework around what features we should not include and what should be on our roadmaps in order to align with this future-proof strategy around revenue growth management. And we can solidify this with crisp messaging both online, in our online channels for acquisition and for growth, as well as in our upmarket outbound motions. Field marketing programs, as well as through our partner ecosystem. So what are the results? We've seen steady growth since we released in May the updated Chargebee branding and positioning, including online. We've started to optimize for new keywords while still preserving the strength we have within subscription billing, and we've identified new opportunities and campaigns to build around our adjacencies and around revenue growth management. Our industry analysts and our press have responded well. While recognizing we're still within our core categories, we're also building out a framework around how subscription billing evolves from being an infrastructure into a full lifecycle growth platform. And from our customers, we're now hearing our customers, uh, some of our top customers coming off customer success, uh, business reviews or giving feedback to our product teams. Sharing that they're now building out their own revenue growth management strategy, and they're really excited about working with us. So many of these anecdotes we're capturing internally and sharing. So early days, but the qualitative and quantitative results are showing that our positioning needs are met, and we're now on this longer-term growth path with our customers and with the industry.

Awesome. So, you know, telling a story of 2 years of work in 10 minutes is obviously no small task. Ask, but we also want to make this useful for you, especially because this is a really common situation that we all find ourselves in. So if we're to think about key takeaways, you know, a few things that we hope to leave you with is that rebranding and repositioning together, when done together and really approached as a, as a company initiative and not a marketing initiative, can provide an incredibly strong rallying cry for the company and really clarify your product strategy, which is incredibly incredibly important if you are in a post-acquisition or post-product launch situation. In addition, you know, there are a couple of specific inflection points where you really want to consider it. We also don't, don't do this lightly, right? Like positioning is not something that you just play around with on a Google Doc and decide to change every couple of months. We cannot caution against that more. So really consider, is it the right time? And you know, the examples we shared of those inflection are where we would recommend really embarking on this journey. And as far as kind of the nerdy grammatical, what should the words be piece, you know, that's really core to my heart. But just get back to basics and get back to your customers. You know, focus on really what they care about. They are, they tend to be better marketers than any of us, is our customers. And the closer your positioning can be to the actual thing they are trying to solve for, instead of some special fluff, that's gonna take you so much further. And most of all, don't go it alone. Like I said, this can't be a marketing initiative. This has to be a company initiative. And when done well, it can be a really, really awesome inflection point. And we're very grateful to have had that experience at Chargebee. So thanks so much, everybody.