The marketing movement by Refine Labs. Thanks for listening to the Mastering B2B Marketing Podcast. Today I bring on the show Sam and Sam. We were talking about a pronounce your last name.
It's keenly, Sam keenly for those that are wondering how to pronounce his last name. He has a VP of demand generation at Refine Labs. Sam, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.
I'm looking forward to it. Absolutely. We got the last name, because he was not out of the way. I definitely don't want to chop it up either.
You want to be the first. Yeah, so maybe let's start off how you chose a career in marketing. That's always a really good question. Yeah, I'm a note of family that kind of runs along that thread.
So in our family, we've had an advertising agency for three generations. So I grew up around print, radio, TV, that was always just conversations going on, that going back to stuff. My mom was a journalism major. So I've always just been around that side of the world more or less.
So I think just a lot of it came naturally picking it up in conversation. And then went to school. Sufficiently, not selfishly. I wasn't ready to give up soccer.
So I went to a small D3 school play soccer and I went there. And the school was an incredible, incredible school for pre-med and engineering. I was not smart enough for pre-med or engineering. So I was like, hey, business, I love business.
So I went to the marketing route there and that's the track that I took. And then when I went into the working world, I went to a big company. I wanted to move down south. So I came to Charleston, took a job at the first company I'd offer the role as basically an SDR.
So came up as an SDR. I am a driven individual. So I hit quota, but I did not like having a new quota every month, every quarter. So I was like, the whole world is marketing route.
So it kind of came back full circle to growing up around marketing and advertising and everything. And then from there, it really just moved up the marketing side. So I learned in marketing ops background was kind of how I got my initial start. And then moved slowly into digital marketing from there.
I was working at this publicly traded company. And there was one person running all of digital marketing for an international company close to a billion dollars and running. I was like, I think there's an opportunity there to join that team. So that was the launching point.
And then from there, it's been history just now basically learning marketing as we all go. And since it's always evolving and changing, that's what's most exciting about it. I love that you kind of grew up already with your family already being in the marketing and, you know, advertising industry already. So there's a lot of things that you just pick up at an early age.
Exactly. Yeah. And so I felt kind of bad because my dad goes, so do you want to take on the family agency? I'm like Northwest Ohio running print TV and radio billboards.
I think it's time to let that one go. It's always hard for them. That's their dream, right? Yeah.
So they still love you, Dad. Exactly. Yeah. I think they appreciate it now because they have a vacation spot.
They come to when I want to go to Charleston. There you go. There you go. So how did you end up falling upon or stumbling upon re-finelabs?
I think the same way that just about everyone does, Chris. Yeah. Came across something. One of those people was every day I'm like that came across something on LinkedIn, engaged with them in comments and it was at the time where their company was expanding.
I was at the point in my career where I started to recognize this marketing concept. I couldn't quite grasp. And it was what we don't know about the man John where I was just running all these ebooks and this lead gen hamster wheel that I couldn't quite figure out why isn't this turning into deals for our company. You know, I'm hitting my goals.
This should be flowing through the funnel. It's not flowing through the funnel is expected. So yeah, spoke to Chris and he was just kind of that person who was just like, he could finally put words to what was just sloshing around my head that I couldn't quite pick on. I was like, I get it.
So he and I chat opportunities opened up and then yeah, from there it's been history and really like, you know, being able to have a company that embraces this philosophy of how buying actually happens today, where, you know, once you get out of the trade shows, you have to get our white cheater, talk to, you know, John in order to get your demo. And the world's just changed so much. So yeah, just that atmosphere is really what drove me over here. Now, were you doing demand generation before we find labs?
Yeah. So the way that we were structured at the large company was I headed up the digital marketing execution team. So we were running the Google display ads, the like anything that was online presence had to flow through my team. So there were 40 different products, 10 different verticals served.
So they all had a demand gen manager. And then I would work with them as like the execution number like that happened. Got you got you. So now, well, before you were director of demand generation, every family of now, your VP of, you know, demand generation, every time, labs, one, what did you do?
And how do you, what's the difference between the two? Yeah. So what I did, honestly, it was a young growing company. It was part of when I joined there less than 10 of us.
And then as you scale, only so many people can report to Megan, who was our COO. But as we grow, it's not realistic for her to manage 20 directors. So we have to add in layers of people who understand the role of the director, what's needed in order to support that individual. So we started promoting internally individuals who were the director and who also wanted to go that people management route instead of we have two different routes you can go people management or you can go individual contributor become that true master of demand strategy and everything.
So the way that I'd spoken to Fairbought my career is that definitely was drawn more towards the people management route. So when the time came for the team that need to continue to grow, duty share was our first shoot, like the OG VP for demand gen, it refined labs. And then once her team filled up, we needed to add another. So just through being here for a while embracing that, that's what, what led to me taking on that role.
So the difference between the two, I guess, I'll ask you for clarification. Yes. And for the difference between the two refined labs are just like when we talk about the role in general, just talking about the role in general, I'm sure you're, you're, you're duty's change from director to VP. Maybe they don't, maybe just pay and that's it.
You know, yeah, you know, they, they're definitely different. This is something that I was touched on with Casey Graham over at like, like, where we were talking about this, because we're trying to add directors, our team, he was looking at a VP to his team. And the easiest way to describe it out is, you know, I come up from a sports background, so I use way too many sports analogies and metaphors. But I say that a VP is kind of like the European football soccer coach.
So he brings in the best talent that he can. He or she brings in the best talent that they can. And then they coach them during the week, they give him the tools that we need to be successful. And then on game day, they let them go and do their thing.
They give them the strategy by telling how you need to execute. And then they give it to the team to figure out what's the best way to execute in that given time. Right. So the VP is really like the vision.
How are we doing it? And then I'm going to put you on positions this is key. You figure out what you need to do and your role in order to make that happen. The director is, it's kind of like the quarterback.
So to speak, we flop over to American football, that point where he knows the overall game plan and strategy. But when it comes time to run the play, he's got three different options to throw to or he can hand it off. So he's going out, you know, what's the specific tactics that we need to do in order to make this happen and then giving it to that person they could do. So, you know, wide receiver could be like, you know, paid search or a podcast or, you know, coming up with the different variables.
So to give it to you, how do we figure out, like, how do we accomplish the goals we want to set up to with the strategy? That's good. The other thing that I've been seeing on changing topics a little bit is on LinkedIn. A lot of B2B marketers are posting about, you know, you need a business narrative that drives content marketing.
You need a solid strategy. You need good tactics. But it's the same content over and over. It gets boring.
It's dealt. I'm really curious to know because nobody's really talking about and I don't know if it's out of fear, but nobody's really talking about what are the deep customer insights that you're seeing instead of telling people, talk to your customer. Here's the end. You need the insights.
What are the insights? We don't know what the insights are. So can you provide what customer insights and how analytics combine? And instead of just, here's the data, like what is that you see the customer insights in analytics, you will be the first one who talks about this, by the way.
Hey, we'll take it. Yeah. That's always, I'm very much like you. It's like, I'm like, cool.
That's the concept. How? How do I do it? Tell me how?
What do I do? So yeah, that's something where we definitely get into with all of our clients and their customers as well. So when I think about deep insights, it's going to vary just by the product, their industry, so many different factors can be things such as the common one that we see, especially with startups is there's a price mismatch relative to the product feature value. So you think that your market is small and growing companies, but you price it like you're targeting mid market or enterprise.
And so that's where you might have a mismatch between product value. It doesn't justify the higher sense. So you either have to drop the sense to match the product value or you have to improve your product feature so it can compete with those more established other solution competitors that you might be going against. So that's a big one where sometimes love a tough conversation with a client who they think that their product justifies that price point when the market will tell you, you know, and that's just a simple talk to your customers or run or report and sales for us and see how many deals once they get to opportunity, create or SQL.
If you don't have a DQ reason for losses like cost or budget, things like that, go put that in and then you'll find out if there's a substantial amount falling in there, that's an indicator that there's a mismatch between what your market thinks it should be paying and what you're charging. So that involves talking to customers too. Yeah. Yeah.
And then other simple things are just like, my favorite, what does your prospects or market with the content they prefer? So I'm going to ask them just like me personally, I'm, I love video, but I'm not going to watch it with sound. So also people like, you know, to make you see your stuff or I'm not one to read a PDF that's 14 pages long, give me the TLDR version and a 30 second loom video or something else. So that's going to vary though.
So much by if you're, if your market is very technical or if they are on the go or if they are like nurses, we're just going Facebook. So that's where you say you have to ask them what they like, don't make the assumption of how you like to consume is how your market's going to. So I've got a handful of these. Let me know if you want me to stop or if you're going because nobody talks about this stuff on LinkedIn.
I'm telling you, everyone talks about the concept, but no one gets to the needy, greedy. Here's the tactics that we actually do. Here's what we see. And here's the deep insights that no one really talks about.
Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, content mediums, content topic. So is it, you know, do you want to hear how you should be doing your job better?
If you want to hear a case study, I mean, there's one of the guys on our team about that kind of just came up with a list of 50 other ways to make content. And it's like, everyone's done the white paper, the e-book. So I'll have to share that with you after this for people to go and look at these out, like a word puzzle and stuff. And they're just actually pretty funny.
So things like that. And then, yeah, where are they consuming the content? So I'm sure right now you're hearing all about like TikTok, should we be on TikTok? Like, I'm on TikTok.
I waste on TikTok. My neighbor's on TikTok. Everyone's on it. So not saying that you need to be on there right now, but you need to go where people are spending time.
Some people are more on TikTok. Others are still on Twitter, very much. So a lot of thought leaders and influencers spend time on there. So you need to not just follow the crowd and assume that because that's where market's heading, you need to ask your people and see like clubhouse last year with a perfect example.
Like we need to be on clubhouse. We already have. But so many people doubled down on that right immediately. And I was just thinking, you know, that it validated itself before I'm not saying you have to wait a year, but just give it a couple months and see what kind of traction or if your customers and market are saying, yeah, I love clubhouse.
I wish you all would put more content on there. Those are the things where just discovery calls, you can pick up the phone and ask them just see, you know, where, where are you spending your free time and then let's go to go to that. So the consumer, sorry, real quick, the consumer insects and the analytics that you're seeing, the most common one is the pricing not matching with the market is asking. But it's earlier stage companies that's more common as you really are looking for that validation.
So you're not going to get a series of C, series D if you don't have that already pretty well locked in, but there's always wiggle room for it and things to continue to fine tune, especially if you're product led or something. That's going to like when you compare the market, that can shake things up really quickly. And then that also shapes the strategy and the tactics. Yeah, because it's going to influence.
Okay. Well, if we need to be focused on customer acquisition, what are we willing to spend for it? If they're saying with us for six months, we need to recoup that money before it or if it's a three year deal, we have a longer runway in order to accomplish that. So yeah, there's a lot of different things that can kind of.
For sure. I was just wondering, like, okay, this always seems to be the one that we always find. Yeah. So after in the lifetime value effect of not only having someone that stays longer, but then they will amplify your brand and your product if they enjoy it.
So that's also going to drop acquisition costs. If you get Jenny over here who really loves your services or your product, she people like to validate that they made a good decision. So she'll want to go and recommend it to her, her colleague or someone else at another company is using it. And then have a good customer experience.
And that's just going to make everything way easier in the long run. How do you guys get customers to promote the services that they're in love with your guys' services already? Just deliver value. I mean, the number is not saying an email or call them or you can, but I mean, think about the things that you share or whatever.
It's usually if someone shares something really cool in LinkedIn, you take a screen shot of it, you send it to your buddy or, you know, I was it, there was a company that I get a health supplement from and they wrote me a hand written thing. Like, thank you for buying us from us. You know, we're really appreciative. Who does that anymore?
Like it doesn't take long. But I will tell everyone anytime, like, that you want to talk about a commodity market where you can pick hundreds or thousands of options. All right. I'll buy from them for the rest of my life.
I'm going to recommend my family and anyone else if they ask you, I'll go back to this company. So yeah, just add value for human, you know, don't overthink it and treat people like numbers and say to point, treat them as if like it was you and their shoes. Boom. When I was thinking about, you know, putting myself in the customer shoes, the ones that I actually talk about the most with my peers is the ones that actually have built a personal genuine relationship with me and they don't just see me as a transaction.
They see me on a relational level. So that's another good LinkedIn post idea for you. Yeah. If you want to steal it, yeah, I'd be relation not transactional.
Boom. There you go. I will let you take that one. It's a very real thing where like even us, we compete with a lot of different marketing agencies and stuff in the first thing I would tell my team is, you know, go deep on creating relationships with people because I'm going to connect to keep paid search or Facebook ads.
That's not like they're buying our strategy, but the relationship that you provide is such a stronger latch to keeping people happy with our services than totally months of Google. That's the one thing that I also want to, I don't know, emphasize on what you're saying. A lot of agencies can provide service, even quality service, but customer service sucks. Yeah.
And that is what people would rather pay for to be real with you. Yeah. I have customers that I'm like their therapist and I'm like, we could provide, you know, B2B web development services. And we'll talk and I'm like, there's nothing to do with websites.
Yeah. They've been loyal for five plus years. And I'm just like, wow, like what you're saying is huge and undervalued. And it's just crazy because you would assume people would jump on this.
No, there's somewhere behind it. You can't sell it. You can't sell it, but also people aren't talking to be relationships. So that's another deep insight there into learning.
Yeah. Now I want to dive into one of your favorite topics, Legion versus demand gen. So I'm going to be a marketer, turn CEO. I came from, I've seen companies that do Legion.
Piss is off the sales team because it's a waste of their time. And to the part where the sales team just doesn't even follow up with them anymore, when they get a lead, they're like, I'm focused on my original territory. I don't don't bombard me with this. But then over a course of five, 10 years, they're making like five million or plus from this lead generation company.
So they'll keep feeding two, three K, something five K a month just to put the credit card on file and say, Hey, we'll pay $23, $25 per lead that comes in. You call some of these because I've worked, you know, very closely with these cells people, especially inside sales people. And they're like, Hey, I never felt out of form. Why are you calling me?
You get a lot of that kind of stuff. I know you're rolling your eyes. So my thing is, how do you change the mindset or maybe you don't convince them? Because they should educate themselves on this.
But what kind of why do people still do Legion? I don't really get it. I get it makes money, but it's not like sustainable and your sales team hates it. No, it's still a predictable revenue model.
It's, you know, we can make a model. We can build a funnel. We know that we make X calls. It's going to lead to X leads, which is going to lead to X opportunities.
And you know, they just run it through that, which was an incredible strategy 10, 20 years ago when people still picked up your phone. Like, if you're not my phone book, if I don't have your numbers, save them, I'm screening. I'm not answering the phone. I got everything.
Someone calls your house. So hey, what's that? Like, you know, it's a completely different world. And so nothing has adapted with that.
And so the reason people are still doing it is because they just, we've always done it this way. It's going to work. They don't realize that it's getting harder and harder and harder every year where you study, you know, 10, I was with me make one meeting now. It's a hundred.
I was mixed with one meeting. So it's just a more media hours. Let's keep trying to pump this engine. That's not efficient by any means.
So the best way to get people to switch is a show them split your funnel to show them the impact of when we go specifically on this channel, it's going to take a thousand calls just to get this. Or if we put the money of 10 VDRs into paid media or partnership or, you know, whatever else you want to do and start comparing those flows. Because what happens all too often is exact blend of their funnel into one thing. And then they just assume that everything's going to convert at that blended rate, which is very far from the truth.
You don't look at the people who say, I want to talk to your sales team when they go to your data form on your website, those people, that form is going to convert to an opportunity 30 to 40%. Compare that to that lead gen form. Or someone just wants to ebook that's going to convert to an opportunity at less than 1%. They treat them as the same.
That's the underlying issue. So you have to show them the data of how those are different and how much, I'd say, like cost per acquisition. It's going to cost them because they get so caught up in the big number up top where we get so many leads from it, though. And it's super cheap.
It's like, well, yes, you do. But nothing's converting. So we start to look at cost per opportunity, cost per customer acquisition. That's a completely different story.
And that's where it's not sustainable. So, you know, so let's say a company, a B to B company is, you know, records of five years, seven years, I don't know, I'm just throwing random numbers up. They're getting five to 10 million from this lead generation company, right? So you recommend them doing a blend or eventually doing a blend and then cutting the lead gen off.
I mean, it totally depends on a lot of other stuff. So that's a loaded question right there. Yeah, marketing, stereotypical marketing answer, it depends. We see different instances.
It totally depends on how good or bad because for some companies, I will very rarely make never always statements because for some companies, the lead gen does work. Right. It's not super efficient, but it's a lot better than we usually see. So in those instances, we say, let's take her, you know, let's run this while still working.
Let's start to build this long term engine that's going to be more sustainable for you. And then we'll figure out the right between the two other people. It's just, you know, it's beating a dead horse where you're generating all these leads and nothing's working for saying you're just straight up inefficient at this point. We need to reallocate.
So those are always the fun conversations I'm running for you. You guys come to your freaking out about where are these go? What are these going to do? It's like, well, your pipeline is still the same.
If you haven't noticed, because we've just straight all this garbage off the top, it was never turning into pipeline anyway. So now we're going to reallocate that in a way that's going to be better for you because it's going to turn into more pipeline. So totally big thing there is, yeah, just don't focus on that big number of top. Look at like, you know, the dollar signs of a key to business open pipeline.
The revenue focus on that. And that should be remain roughly flat. If you're the gents really inefficient, that's because it's not impacting a pipeline. I'm curious because the CEOs that have this lead generation, pain and lead generation company, they really don't get marketing.
And I don't mean it in a very critical way, like we truly don't understand it. And sometimes don't even value it. They value sales, you know, they're more of a sales machine than the marketing department. Do you guys also encounter that?
Yes, this is more of a blanket statement because I'm curious to know, like, do you guys really get CEOs that are doing lead gen but are like value marketing and get it and are open to the idea for demand generation? I'm just super curious. Yeah, we've had it before. It's not crazy uncommon.
It's not going to CEOs. It's they know what they know. They don't know what they don't know. The difference between the two is their CEOs who say we're going to reverse our way through this because I dictate everything in our company strategy.
And there's a CEO who say, but I'm bringing you on as a marketer because you know marketing. I don't know marketing. Let me know how I can support you, but you dictate the strategy that needs to happen in order for us to accomplish that. And it all relates to the over urging, like, what's our goal aligning on that?
So that's why we always say start with revenue, not because you have to figure out how every lead equals revenue, but you can work backwards from revenue and that lead number can change drastically just because of so many variables that impact that as you work your way up or down the funnel. So whenever I have that, yeah, so whenever it comes in says we need to handle lead to say why show me what's your goal and they'll usually say, well, we know at least because it comes from XYZ, I'm like, well, what's the revenue goal that started with and that started with that? Because there's a lot of assumptions built into there that got you to 100. Yeah, I bet we can find efficiencies or other ways of doing things that will be better for you on term.
Now the two to touch to see as I mentioned is one is prideful, one is humble, willing to learn to grow. You guys are the experts. You guys teach me. Right.
So if you get the one that's prideful, Eric and conceded all this stuff, I'm going to push my gym, do whatever. I don't even know why the heck I hired you, but I'm going to pay you guys. I mean, to me, it's a no brainer. They're not going to fit, right?
But sometimes you guys take those on. We turn them away. That's one of the biggest things that I love about what we do is we look for philosophical alignment, not just from the decision maker, the VP, the CMO, but down their organization, so their digital marketer, their demand marketers, whoever we might be working with them also across. So the head of sales, the CFO, the CEO, because this is a long term investment.
It's not a light switch. We're going to turn on your pipeline. It's going to take six months to really start to get this thing going. So we will, if there's not alignment, we will say, like, you know, appreciate the interest, but if you're not bought in, then we're going to be fighting up a whole battle the whole way and it's not going to pan out.
Awesome. Last question that I have for you is, do you have any tips for me to be marketing professionals? Tips for me to be marketing professionals. Don't blindly follow all the advice you hear.
Like, yes, we all get on LinkedIn and the show from our soapboxes that you should talk to your customers. You should do this. Test it for yourself. You know, there's a use case.
There's everything is so specific. So I would say here, the advice, but test it for yourself before you just go and implement this thing across whatever it is that you're doing. Awesome. Sam, make sure your time again.
Yeah, thank you. This one. Yeah, I'll keep it in touch.