Our CEO, Megan Bowen, recently visited the Parker Gale team to deliver a keynote on the Refine Labs Fundamentals. She covers the way the buying has changed, how marketing needs to change with that behavior shift, crafting a strategic narrative, refining your ICP, and how to more accurately measure your growth. This episode is a great lesson if you want a crash course on our strategy and a master class and insightful delivery from Megan. Hope you all enjoy.
I think need to be marketing and need to be go-to-market is the most intentionally over-complicated subject on the planet. And you guys know how I feel about this idea of simplifiers versus complicators. So when I meet someone who's a simplifier and when I meet a company that prides itself on simplifying a complex topic, I just get really excited. And I've been following what Refine Labs has been doing for a long time.
I think there's a bunch of alums that I very much have on my radar for talent purposes. So Sydney will be the first of any, I'm sure. Not actively employees alumni. People steal my team all the time.
People steal my team all the time. You can make your job as complicated as you want to make it. And you can get down this whole of three decimal point multi-attribution model digital intent signals driven AI powered stuff or you can have conviction of what works and get really good at a couple of things that really matter and make it a lot easier to find customers, get customers, get customers excited about you. So Megan is one of those latter people and her team is very, very good at that.
And she's going to talk about what that looks like and she's going to talk about how you can apply those principles, not just the marketing, but sales to Red Ops and kind of this whole thing because I think the little secret is that some of it is like we kind of all have the same jobs. We're just doing it in slightly different ways. Back to my point of view, keep the customers happy. So that's my intro.
Sydney said the pleasure of working with you, which I have not had. So I'm going to let her introduce you more full simply. What we're going to hear. Thank you.
Basically everyone's probably like twice Megan here and two issue and I have in children businesses. I'm going to represent gig right now. And you're going to kind of get a long intro slash answer to that question for me. Megan is customer obsessed, top operator I've probably ever worked for and one of the most compassionate yet fierce CEOs and you're like, have you been compassionate and fierce at the same time?
You'll see later. But just a little bit about Megan. So she started her career personal or success. She grew up VP of customer success and eventually CEO for companies like Zachnop, Grubhub and Plantors.
So in the South Space, she goes to New York and allows us to be your local. That was New York, a couple of other people here. But then COVID hit and she took a shot on this wild, small, tiny marketing agency that was like four people. Yeah.
Yeah. And the previous EO units here to come basically scale and operate the business because that's what it means really great. And I remember you told me one time, why would you hire me? I'm not a marketer.
So why are there large? She's one of the best marketers I've ever seen. So she is a marketer. And if you're in sales, she also is a savage seller.
She sells all of her fine-lars deals, over 30 million AR. She's sold herself personally. She says she's a savage. She's one of everybody now.
And she recently transitioned to the CEO role a few years ago and is now the majority owner of refined lars as well. So now she's an investor and owner. So she wears a lot of hats. I think a lot of people can learn a lot of things from her.
And she's also been through the good, the bad, the ugly of that transition from the same. And came out on the top. I think she's very honest. She pushes expectations, but she's very fair.
And as a CEO and owner, she always plays the long game, which I think is similar to kind of the approach that her take is playing the long game, winning for the larger investment acquisition strategies. So, and then here's some fun facts about being in. It was a great intro. You made that one.
Not a lot of it. I think we're going to fun facts. Let's go. She's a surfacing guy.
I think she goes on vacation to do really cool scuba diving stuff. I don't know the technical terms. Love being on a boat. She has a boat.
So with her little captain hat on and her got on a boat and a cousin. And she's basically a professional cook to literally cook anything for you. And loves the same carry of the online at that bar. So that's me?
Also true. Do you mean like a lousy boat or like we're divers, I know? One I know. And you all know what I want to put a friend against a boat.
So my friends are begging to talk like this. I know. I'm in my honeymoon phase. I was still loving it, but I think I'm a Persian out phase.
Yes, it's the happiest days are the day behind day seven. Well, thank you, Paul and Sydney for the wonderful introduction. That was awesome. It's great to be here, everyone.
Nice to meet you. I'm looking forward to spending some time together. I always like if these can be a little bit more of a dialogue versus me just speaking at you for an hour and a half, hour and a half. And so as we go through the concepts, I love to pause and kind of get your feedback, your reflections, your questions, share maybe an experience that you have that reinforces or contradicts some of the things I'm talking about.
Always interested in being challenged if you guys have some of the thoughts as well. Kind of what Paul mentioned. We're going to stick to the basics. My belief is you do a handful of things really, really well in a business.
And that's how you actually build a profitable sustainable business. And so we're going to be focusing on that today. I want to talk a little bit about how BWE buying has changed over the last 20 years. I think one of the most important things I think about when you're defining the go-to-market strategy is putting yourself in your buyer's shoes.
A lot of us feel this intuitively, but not a lot of us have named it. And I find that can be really helpful in making sure you have the context of the buyer at all times. So we're going to talk a little bit about that concept. We're going to talk a little bit about what I think are the most important elements to a successful go-to-market strategy.
Who is your ideal customer profile? And what is your company's strategic narrative for differentiated position? So we're going to talk through those concepts. And I want to share just a couple of practical takeaways of things you can think about in terms of validating your own ICP and your narrative and finding opportunities to clarify what will serve after your own business.
We'll then go into just my view of a go-to-market system. We'll touch on brand and demand expand. So that's everything from awareness to the type gen to customer success and expansion. And we'll also talk about marketing and sales alignment on the measurement.
I think about measurement overall. So we should touch sales, marketing, rev-offs. There's something for everyone in the presentation. How's that sound?
We're getting into it. All right. So how many of us were buying and selling software in the 90s? Are there early 2000s?
Yeah. OK. There you go. I need to add that to my chart.
I called it the analog buying era. And what were we doing then? There were a lot of sources of information for people to self-serve. So you had cool calling, you had to have sales, you had big trade shows and conferences and networking groups.
And this was how people met each other, discovered new products and services, and ultimately made buying decisions at the end of the day. And that worked super well for a really, really long time. That's how we all bought and sold. That's how we wanted to consume information.
We had to kind of move into the 2010, 2015, and I called this the website era. So credit work credits due to HubSpot. They essentially created this concept of inbound marketing, right? It was like, put all your information on a website, put a bunch of content on the internet, and people will find you, right?
People are now using the internet to discover new products and services, to learn about things, to connect with companies. So this is where we begin to see essentially the sort of the birth of digital marketing, right? And it started with get your website up, think about SEO, and then to get paid ads on Google, et cetera, et cetera. Now we get into 2021.
We have the global pandemic. And essentially overnight, we move, we accelerate into essentially just being online, right? Every single thing is digital. And this is where we start to see the rise of social media, also at play.
And essentially, what are we all doing during the pandemic? We're on social media all day, right? Our social media, our computer, even our parents, our grandparents, everyone. Everyone's on social media.
Maybe the channels of choice are very different. But that's how people are discovering information and finding things out. You know, in the website era, it was like, ooh, I'm going to, you know, I can submit my email address and I can get this cool piece of content or this really interesting information. I'm totally going to do that.
So in 2020, it's like, I'm definitely not putting my email in there. Forget it. Or okay, I'm going to put a fake email and like get the asset and move on, right? So a lot of these tactics just started to lose effectiveness, right?
What's really interesting is in the dark social era, dark social era, we also really had, I think, the resurgence of peer recommendations. My friend uses this product. It works really well. I think I want to buy that product because I trust my friend and he knows my situation.
So those recommendations from peers and word of mouth, which, you know, spoiler alert, word of mouth has been a strategy forever and all across all eras, but starts to become even more important, right? And there's so much noise and you're seeing everything across all your social media channels, et cetera. And so now we're sort of in this new AI era. We're at the beginning of it.
We're starting to see a few buying behaviors change. Oh, maybe I'll use chat GPT or perplexity and start discovering some things through that tool by and large. A lot of the concepts that I just talked about in the dark social area are still active and true, but this is essentially the progression. And I don't think we know exactly where things are going to go with AI, but I think what we do know is things like people being aware that you exist, people trusting your brand or company and hearing about it from their peers and their friends are pretty much always going to remain important in terms of how you be buying decisions or really getting buying decisions.
So understanding this, acknowledging this and thinking about how your strategy is acknowledging how people are buying is really, really critical. So I'll pause there. Does this resonate with anyone? Anything anybody would add?
I'd say I think about it as layers, right? Like you're moving to the right, you're going to add layers that you need to be aware of. Like you need to have some websites stuff, you need to have content online. It's not a replacement of the tactics of the past, but it's what is necessary.
The list is keeping larger, which speaks to the need to focus and speaks to the need to have conviction around what the couple of things are going to do well. We're talking a lot about that today, so I like it that's the theme of what we're going to talk about, but it's also making it more confusing, right? It's like, okay, how do you tap into the dark social thing? How do you tap into the end?
All of a sudden you're trying to figure out three, four, five letters instead of one or two. You just tee me up for minutes, but you're going to make us know it all. So the reality is all of these types of ways that people learn about products and services and make decisions are all still somewhat valid today, but it's highly dependent on who your customer is. Are you selling into an old-school oil and gas industry and are those trade show conferences alive and well?
And people are attending those regularly and that's actually how decisions are made at those conferences and at the dinners and the bar later, right? Are you selling into a different segment that is spending all their time on different channels, right? So there's no right or wrong. Okay, now they understand the progression and the spectrum and the changes that have happened.
When I think about my buyer, where do they fit in? How are they learning about products and services? How are they making relationships? How are they making buying decisions?
And my strategy should be defined by that, essentially. So there's no right or wrong. And in a lot of these frameworks and these concepts that I'm sharing, the intent is to create a way to think about simplifying what you're going to focus on and what doesn't matter. Because the reality is, depending upon the buyer, any one of these types of strategies could work or a combination of.
But what you really want to answer is, where are they spending the most time and how can I do there? Right? That's really the name of the game. I think about how that is where is my buyer on this maturity curve?
Because I tend to, we're not about it so we tend to be, you know, in a few years behind what we do marketers and they're buying, behaviors are. But they always kind of get to the same place. So I can just look at what's happening now and then track that back a few years. Absolutely.
You have an advantage. Yeah. To that point, you talk about conferences, so this is the other product, like, hey, hey, this is the best way to get good leads out of any day. Is anybody probably not.
But we don't go any day and hope we get as a negativity. Oh, we must be going out of business because they didn't go any day. We have that difficulty with a lot of our businesses that the conferences are not really good anymore. But it's like, I'm not a box we got to spend because otherwise everybody will say, we're going to have to signal to the market.
Yeah. That's a tough one. I have to put enough in so we showed up to the show, but realize it. Or how can we use that show with some new tactic to get that lead out of the show, given we're all just showing up and drinking with the same people that are doing with their own companies.
This is the customers. That's absolutely right. And it's less about, when you say, oh, it's not effective, maybe it's not effective at generating immediate leads that close, but it could be very effective for building credibility, driving awareness, nurturing relationships, right? And if that's the end goal, maybe I don't need to spend $50,000 on a sponsorship for food.
Maybe I actually just need to show up. I need to have 10 of my team. We need to be in our branded shirts. We need to be setting meetings with people that we know will be there, taking people out to dinner to drinks, building those relationships, showing the face because the things that we actually want to focus on is credibility, awareness, and relationships.
And there's a way to do that at much lower cost, which can be very, very effective overall, regardless of the immediate return on leads or type line generated at a certain time after the event. And if you know that about your buyer, it's like, we'll be happy there. Any other comments on this? We're all thinking about your buyer and thinking about that.
So you guys are a PE firm. You guys are all part of this organization. And so this is probably not going to be, this probably will be aligned with your thinking in terms of focusing on profitable, efficient growth. And so we're all just witnessed the zerp era, the craziness from honestly even like 20, we had spurts of it in the 2010s and then in 2020, 2021.
But essentially this idea that unit economics don't even matter. And we can just spend, spend, spend, spend, spend. We need to do what we need to do to our customers. It's the only thing that matters.
We've worked with over 300 beauty staff companies in the last six years, and many of them were operating this way at the not too distant past. And the reality is it is completely unsustainable. And it's also totally not necessary to actually build a really profitable, healthy business. And so we're going to, a lot of the concepts that we're going to be talking about today are really all designed to build a business that is efficient and profitable so that you have healthy unit economics, all those walking through your conversations from this morning and when you're thinking about exit readiness, like that's what you need, right?
You need a profitable, efficient growth engine that you've built and that you can communicate how you've built it and how it will continue to operate and drive you ready for company. So let's get into some first principles here. So we're back to basics. This is the view of the day.
So I'll ask a question. How many of you in this room feel 100% confident that your definition of an ideal customer is 100% correct? All right. I did it.
It was. Thank you for this guy. We go like dog years. I was thinking like what I'm doing.
I think really. Yeah, I mean, maybe good. Okay, that's pretty good. So what's interesting about this is, and I'll speak for my experience about being in-house at some of the companies that Sydney mentioned, also working with a lot of our clients over the last six years.
What I find really fascinating is what companies state their ICP is, is almost pretty different from what their actual customer list looks like or the companies that are in their pipeline. And that's a problem for a couple of reasons. Sometimes, you know, their ICP definition will be aspirational. We want to go up market or we want to, you know, break into this particular segment.
And that's great. Like that can be a goal that you have. However, if you're designing your go-to-market strategy for a segment of customers that you don't actually have validation that will buy and use your product, you can be falling into a trap. And so I'm very, I acknowledge and I think it's great for customer ICPs to evolve over time.
They're not supposed to be static. They should be evolving and changing over time. However, the goal here is if I'm designing a go-to-market strategy, I need to get really clear on my ICP and this isn't a wish list. This is what is the data showing us?
Let's look at our customer list. Let's look at the leads that come inbound. Let's look at the ones that we win and the ones that we lose, right? And how can we more clearly define what that ideal customer profile looks like?
There can be adjacent segments of those aspirational segments or other segments that can benefit. But going through this exercise is really, really important. What we find in the data that we see with our customers is non-ICP customers will close at a significantly lower rate. The sales cycle will be much longer.
They'll close the customer and then the customer will churn six months later because they weren't even really a good fit. And you've spent all of this money and effort and time to essentially acquire the wrong customer. This is more prevalent than I think people are willing to admit. And so here are a couple of tactics to think about how do I go back to my definition and validate for myself with the data that we have available that we have the right definition to go after.
Because when you simplify a good market strategy, one of the most important questions you have to answer is who am I targeting? And you need to be able to answer that question with a very high level of confidence. Who are they? What do they use?
Who's involved with the deal? These are all questions you want to be able to answer, whether it's a persona documentation or an ICP definition, you want to get that down. And that needs to get shared artifact between the sales team, the marketing team, the product team. We all need to be working towards building more and acquiring and retaining the same customer.
And again, we can work together over time and evolve that. We have that evolution of fine maps. When we first got started, only small startups would hire us. We couldn't get business anywhere else.
And so we hired a lot of small startups and we worked with them. We built a reputation over time. And now I only sell into mid-market enterprise companies with much larger budgets. And we have developed a reputation where we can now serve those.
But that took five years, right? I'm sure I wanted that in 2020. But I'm like, this is who's buying today and how I can help them today. And so the reality is we can still help those companies today.
So in some cases we do, but when I'm designing, I go to a market strategy, I'm designing for this week's spot. And I'm going to talk about the customer, but I can guarantee an outcome because of their scale and our track record, right? Can you talk a little bit more about how you evolve that? ICP and how you thought about now is the right time.
These are some things that we want to go do to get to that next level. Yeah, that's a great question. The first signal was closing our first batch of really large companies and really seeing the success. And so for us in particular, our marketing strategy was really focused on how do we get in front of all of our potential buyers so that they can come inbound to us.
And so what we started to see over time, essentially because of brand building and reputation building, we started to see these larger companies come inbound. We were able to close them, the deal size was much larger. We were also able to see that we were able to impact their program much more quickly because just because of the scale, we were spending $1.5 million a month on pay instead of $50,000 a week. We can really show you impact really quickly with that scale of budget, right?
And then once we started to get that track record, then we were able to recognize, okay, we're ready. And now we're, they told us, our customer told us, oh, I've been following you for a while. But now I feel like comfortable bringing you into my organization where I'm putting my reputation on the line to hire you, right? So it was customer led in terms of that.
Now once I started getting the signals, and it was like, okay, we need to spend more time focusing on these types of companies. And so that changed my LinkedIn connection strategy, our event strategy, engaging with firms like Parker Gail or other, you know, Vista and Costla Ventures, right, building relationships with these that work with larger companies. And so once we saw the signals, then we started to make those shifts. But honestly, I would say now probably 80% of our clients are in the new segment.
It probably took three years to like move from 80% being startup to 80% being market enterprise does not have it over. And the process is different. So it also created a little complexity, like the delivery experience and for a startup and the time to value is very different than these larger organizations. And so you also have to be ready to deal with that if you're going to handle these sort of multiple segments.
Thank you. Thank you. So I'm going to take a quick example of my question before you shared that story. It was going to be, okay, that pulse check that we did with the room, most people are in this like not quite zone with the ICP.
They started to talk about it. They've done a little bit of analysis, but maybe they haven't finished it, but they have an operationalized that unit. And so to me, there's two steps here. There's like the alignment piece, which is the human agreement that like, yes, this is our bull's eye.
And there's the operational piece, which is building that into your business processes, so the people direct their work towards the ICP. And they're two different things. I think a lot of companies stop at the alignment stage and they don't get to the operate operationalization. You know what I'm saying?
So talk about that. Like you finished the alignment and now we operationalize it. What did that look like for you guys? And what is your recommendation to people in this room?
So they can think about like, hey, it works not done until we do X, Y, Z, what's X, Y, Z? Yep. I think I saw LinkedIn post of Sydney's on this topic. So I might tag her in.
Yeah. Honestly, the most simple and straightforward thing to do is make a list, make a list of your target counts and give a list of sales and give the list of marketing and give its product to give a list to everybody. It's hard to make the list. There are ways that you can use tools and different, you know, firmographic criteria to filter things down, but there's absolutely manual involvement in the list.
And so when we decided to make the shift, you know, made the list and what am I still doing today? I even did it at LaGuardia this morning, sending 10 connection requests on LinkedIn to the people on my list so they can see my content and then decide they want to hire a fine lapse, right? So this is going into the long game and it's just doing the simple things really, really well. And Sydney, didn't you, and did you spend some time putting a target count list together?
Yes, the CappDB. That's the answer. Yeah. What is it?
I don't know. It's a test. No, like... Customer and...
CrossFit. Thank you. It failed out. But it's actually one of the previous customers that I worked with, then an operated and implemented CappDB top down from their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their back.
So, yeah. But it was like, pushed on them and it was like integrated into all of their campaigns and they got so over complicated and it was basically that disaster. And so when we had the same approach, it was like, how do we operationalize it in a much simpler way and how do we just start marketing going down the list, sales attacking it, and then we're right now in the process. We'll also open brand has a strategic advantage because we're a data company.
So who we could sell to this, who we have data on. So it's much the alignment list much faster and easier than any other company I've had experienced working with. But we're in the process now of actually expanding that list. And we've actually four X that list.
I was like, 680 now we're almost at 3000 because the product and we re-ran our data. We have some new product releases, the products we're integrated. We did a much better approach that going back to the list and validating the brands. And, you know, I spent about 10 hours one weekend manually going through each show main and clicking it and validating that the data and the domain is mapped correctly.
So did a lot of other people on the team. So it's not just me, like, that's the like crappy shitty ugly work, but it makes the top spot and sells more experience so much better. Yeah. I will say guys, like there's a couple things that we're going to talk about today.
I've seen a presentation. There's a couple things we're just getting started is the magic. Just like putting lines in the water and starting to do the things is where the benefit comes from. This is not that the benefit from this comes from finishing the job.
And the last mile of finishing the job, which is why I asked the question about how you operationalize it, is what you are talking about. Is getting to a slide in the work deck. I remember the slide. I remember this moment.
I was in the workshop from six or nine months ago. This is the list. There's 20 companies in this tier. There's 40 companies in this tier.
There's 50 companies in tier three. You have a workable list when you can print out the list and not before. And what I noticed is when we got to that point, when you finished the list and you cut off the bottom of it, you printed it out and put it in the work deck, that is the moment our pipeline creation started to take off because we started to focus on people on that list and blanketed them with a bunch of really, really helpful stuff and not before. So as you think about this is a concept.
There's a going market stuff where the magic is just getting it going. This is one where you have to finish the job and the last mile of finishing the job is tiring. It's annoying. It's labor intensive.
It's manual. And it is so easy to not finish the job. And I want you to think about that when you get to the alignment stage and you haven't finished the second part because the second part is actually more important. And now you have Sydney and Natalie who did not answer questions.
So what's pitching about our business is an ICP. We buy a hundred of these businesses. And so I have to put these businesses. I would guarantee you that the founders of your ICP is completely wrong.
So what happens is they sell to a million companies below five and close one, four to one of the customers. And the founders say we sell the four to one hundred and it screws the whole thing up. It literally is not true. The first thing we do analysis of the customers is they find out holy crap.
Most of our customers are here and they hear. They chair it, they go stories. So that's the initially the funny is they think they're one thing that they're actually not doing. Exactly.
That's why I look at the data aligned on a definition, make your list, right? You need to ask them both. One more cover which was moving, keeping eye on time. So we've talked about how buying has changed and you need to think about that.
And then we talked about how to clarify your ideal customer profile is. And now let's talk about, okay, so you know who we want to talk to. Now what are we going to say? What you're saying to your ideal customer profile is really important.
It has to be relevant, has to be compelling, has to create urgency. It needs to expose the pain that they have. It needs to make them go through the mental gymnastics to come to the conclusion that they need to do something about it and you need to create an association that you're the right company or brand to help them with that problem. So credit goes to Andy Raskin.
I don't know if you guys have heard Andy Raskin. His superpower is to help companies develop their strategic narrative. And his five step framework is really easy. I actually have this workbook that I can share with you that you can share with folks so that you can easily action this.
But essentially you need to be able to document your strategic narrative and address these five key points. The workbook has a series of questions for each of these to help you think through how to articulate this in a way that's going to resonate with your potential customer. And so I'll give you the Refine Labs example and how we think about it. I revisit the strategic narrative on an annual basis and evolve it and refine it based on how things are changing and what I'm learning from my customer.
And so name a big role that changes the world. B2B buying has changed. You guys got my first slide which is one of my sales called talking points. Things have changed.
Your marketing has to change because B2B buying has changed. Show there will be winners and losers. The losers do these things and they can't grow their companies and the winners do these things and they're very, very successful. I want to know who you are winner.
Do you have a promise land? Who wants profitable efficient growth? Who wants to feel excited to go into a board meeting? Who wants to keep their job?
All these fun things, right? Introduce teachers and as magic gifts. Refine Labs can literally fix your marketing. We can make you from being scared about your job to ragging in the boardroom.
And here's how we do that. And offer evidence. Here's 20 case studies of other companies just like you that have the same problem. And exactly what we did with them and the outcomes that we drew up drove.
Our track record speaks for itself, right? So that's a quick and dirty review of each of those. But essentially, this is really crucial. A lot of people do not have differentiated or compelling positioning or strategic narratives.
Yeah. Who in the room feels like theirs is amazing. Not like? Yours is way better than us.
Yeah, but I'm always like, I think you can be some shy. Continuous improvement. I love it. But it's no different than real life.
Most people suck at telling a good story. So you've said and heard somebody tell a story and you're like, where is this going? And then he heard somebody who's really good at telling a story. You're like, I listen to this person telling a story because it's really compelling.
It's all these things. It's all these points. It's just a whole heroes journey stuff, right? It's like what's the problem?
You know, it's just our worst. We get quick introduction. And you have to go through the training camp. You get to promise land and bring it all back together.
And I think people buy off stories. We don't buy on features and functions of Christ. Nobody's ever bought a piece of software. Who knows ever?
We've never bought a company. We've never sold a company without a really compelling story. And then you make the numbers work if they believe the story. It's so true.
Shout out to Steph because our podcast is in the heroes journey framework. We love podcasts. Hey, Kevin. I have your father.
Yeah. You can spot himself. I'll cut off my hands. The takeaways here is we have some of the concepts I want to get into.
I'm going to send you the workbook. You have to do the workbook and you should really consider involving your CEO in the process. The CEO has to back the company story. Many people will say the strategic narrative is the company strategy, right?
And how you articulate it. You answer all the questions. You convert that into a narrative format. One, two, three pages maps.
And then you share the strategic narrative artifacts with product and marketing and sales. You look at your website. Is the website reflective of the strategic narrative? Is our sales outreach reflective of the strategic narrative?
Is our LinkedIn ads reflective of the strategic narrative, right? Audit everything that you're doing and make the changes that are necessary. So you are telling the same story to your market across every possible touch point. That's what you want to do.
And any restaurant will not take you on as a claim. It's a good follow-up. It's not take you as a client unless the CEO hires somebody. It's like a hire by Martin.
You can hire by sales. You can hire by the CEO. No offense to you guys. But it's not from the top down.
It will not work. Correct. It will not work. But everyone in this room, you can be the facilitator.
If you get in fluent, sir, you can do a first pass. At answering the questions, you can get the right people in the room. You can facilitate a workshop. You can get people on board.
It actually gets really exciting. And it becomes a really crystal clear story that everyone should be telling. You need to see your talk about this stuff in the all hands and your internal meetings. All of your external.
So this becomes the goal I'm trying to show you is you begin to create these artifacts that really bring true alignment across the organization so that you're building the system and everyone is working towards the same goal. I'm going to keep moving. Any final questions or comments on strategic narrative? Okay.
This is fun. It rhymes. I didn't invent this either. This is just basic.
Go to market 101. We like simple things. So we have more customers. We know what we're going to tell them.
We understand where they are and the beauty buying maturity model and how to reach them. Now we need to design a go to market strategy. You want to think about it across these three pillars. And you really should have strategies and tactics that are mapped back to each of these independently.
They're all equally important. Can anyone guess which one of these is typically over invested in? I would say demand. In ours, we would say in our opposite is we get trouble with the brand because everybody wants to help us with the brand.
It starts at $2 million. We're not going to help brands. So I think brand is often just under-centered. I agree.
People interpret it as like the department of shapes and colors. It's not the idea of collective oppression that you are creating in the market. When I look at a lot of marketing budgets, it's a big market enterprise. We start at DBSAS.
By far, probably 80% of the market budget is for demand. A very small percentage is allocated to brand. And what's really interesting is most marketing and sales professionals totally ignore everything that happens after their customer. They don't care.
But how do you build a successful business? You get customers, you keep customers. You retain, you expand, you renew. Sitting in my background is customer success.
I spent the first 12 years of my career in accounting management and customer success. And the reality was I always had the biggest number to hit. Right? It's super important.
So even if it's not your direct mandate, how are you working with your counterparts and your colleagues and the rest of the world? To make sure that this is being given the attention that it needs. So a quick definition. Brand is not, you know, Coca-Cola runs a new logo.
Brand is how buyers experience your company. This is getting on the day one consideration set list. You want to do your marketing so well that when your ideal customer has a problem and you can provide solution, that they literally think of your brand before they go to the pool. If you've done your job well in brand marketing, that's what happens.
And you're successful. We've been, I was on two sales calls yesterday. And two people said, I have been following your guys' stuff since 2020. And I haven't been in a position where it made sense to bring you in.
And I just got this new job. I realized what a mess our marketing was. And I was like, I can I can I refine labs? They can fix my marketing.
Six years. Five years. Great. But that's what you want.
That's what you want to cultivate and create. When I say demand here, this is really about how are we building the engine to generate pipeline. How are we driving down conversions, how are we converting those to meetings, how are we helping sales, close those meetings into opportunities and then customers, right? That's the demand element of lots of marketing and sales collaboration required here to be successful.
So the next thing is everything post sale. And what's really interesting is a lot of people think that that's customer success's problem. That's a count management problem. The reality is, is there's a lot of opportunity to look at that through the lens of a go-to-market operator, right?
One of our clients is Notion. Everyone in their mom uses Notion. And they all work at companies. I might be conditionally market to all of your users about your B2B enterprise offering, right?
Let's not just try to get new people to sign up, right? We can get a lot of people that are already customers of Notion to pay Notion a whole lot more money if they upgrade to a totally different service layer, right? I work with a company called Blackline. They have eight different products.
And the average customer uses one. Does that sound familiar with anybody? What if your average customer used four instead of one? Because they don't know what other seven products are right now.
And maybe you can hit your number just that way. Not even acquiring another customer, right? And so there's so many opportunities that people don't think about because it's like, well, they're a customer not my problem, not new, not new only. And so I hope my takeaway here is that I hope you see these three components in a new light.
And the reality is each strategy is very different across these. But all three are important. Really? One point on this.
Yeah. So this stuff all goes together, right? Like I can't emphasize enough the power of the list because when you consider these two bullets from your guy's job, how do I shape the buyer experience in a way that benefits us? And how do I build a system that turns interest into pipeline?
That sounds like intimidating work. Here's what makes that less intimidating. Having a list of a couple hundred companies that you make a commitment to talk to and make a great first impression with. And then tracking how many conversations come out of that.
That is step one for these two bullets. And so something really big and really complicated just got a lot less intimidating if you have this list. This might be the bigger growth letter. And I think it applies in ways that I could spend half an hour talking about specifically for every single company in this room.
And if Debbie wouldn't fire me, I would go to CVS and buy a can of red spray paint and click on the TV and circle that. That would also screw up her presentation. So I'm not going to do that. No, it's only more than this.
Right here. That's right. That's right. That's right.
It's like, trying to do this over a second. Everybody has an embarrassing statistic in this room. Everybody has a metric that looks like we have X products and our average customer knows about or has Y numbers of that. It is a very small fraction.
And so new logos are great. Outbound is important to get right. Talk into the market is important. There are for most of you hundreds of customers and hundreds of people who already pay you in voice every quarter, every year, that have no idea what else is on it.
And so don't be surprised in upcoming board meetings in upcoming caffeine, people who are on one chat and everything in between if I don't want to talk about this. Because if times get tough in the economy, where shit gets weird, the easiest place to go is right here. And we are not doing enough of it across the portfolio. And I want you to see that as an opportunity more than challenge.
It is a huge opportunity for everybody in this room. This also drives new customers as well. Referrals, getting base studies. People are working at your customer account and they even have a great experience.
We got to bring them over to any company as well. So if you actually have more time to spend here, the more you grow your base, but that also fuels net new logo as well. So I'll give you an example of these three for refined labs and we'll move on to the next one. So actually I'm in town tonight because I'm hosting a dinner at the Dearborn Laker, where I sent out probably, I don't know, 120 invitations to a bunch of people on my target account list.
And I invited them to dinner. And they'll probably be about 20 people there at dinner, but 120 people in this area got an outreach for me and a personal invitation. And my first thing I said to them wasn't, do you want to have a meeting about the fine labs? Can I sell you some marketing agency stuff?
Would you like to come to dinner? Wasn't it cool people? I actually purposely will have a conversation focused on fun topics. Maybe a little bit of work stuff.
This is the fourth one that we hosted. Everyone that I hosted so far by the end of the night, everybody has their phones out and they're switching phone numbers and they're super excited about the connections they made. And I get emails the next day. That's the best, like, you know, I know what you're doing on a marketer.
That's the best one that I've been to. Like, that was just really fun. Like a great people there, good food, always want to go to this restaurant. Like, awesome.
I would also give them a business card. My name is NumbroodyNail and one for your access to the vault, which is all of our strategies and frameworks in a product. For free. I'm in my ecosystem.
Let me give you something, right? That's an example of a brand play, right? I'm not expecting that I'm going to close these people in Q4, but I'll definitely in 2026, just another time, right? I'm a patient.
I'll play along with you. I mean, I run Google ads. This is like a lot of the normal tactics that we know that work really well but they're often overused. There's a place where that it works, dial that in, be efficient, be effective.
And then expand. We aim to get customer case studies from all our customers. We follow them when they leave their jobs and get new jobs and bring higher us, right? So they're just always thinking about it.
So as you're defining your go-to-market, think about strategies and tactics across all three brand demand expands. We'll share this with you along with it. There's more specifics here that gives you just more to think about in terms of what's measure, what matters. We're going to talk about measurement in a moment.
So I think we might have our left to keep us on track. I know this is to go up your house in here. So you want to find your own for the room? It's the highest ever-ending opportunity which means that it closes at greater than 25% when right on a trailing stage where we know it's going to close.
So like for us it would be capabilities, right? So we know if it's a target count and a kids capability, that's called, it's a tighter definition of Hall-type pipeline, which is like Lucy Lucy. I mean, you can ask, and you can automate date, stay out, stages all around that, because it'll change your your own definition will change depending on the statement, depending on how they come in. So those are really the caps score too, so it's all your A's and B's or that score?
No, look at it globally versus by tier, but then you can say, so someone says, oh we have hero opportunities, Natalie can commit that 25% is going to hit revenue bookings within the next period of time, and the next period of time is then look at depending on maybe the tier or the segment, because the sales cycle is going to be much different for HP versus like, you know, a smaller brand like, no more. Okay, so that's not so much. Forecast predictability is the goal with this measurement component, and so how are we working with our sales and finance counterparts, marketing sales and finance, everyone wants a predictable, profitable efficient growth, right? And so are we able to actually use our systems of measurement to create these shared definitions that will reliably behave in the way that we expect?
That's huge, especially for a PE firm, they love that. Well actually, we'll spend a little bit of time on measurement. And actually I gave the vault example, I can read you guys with my business card and you have them, so we can give you guys free access to the vaults, which has all of these different products in. We can hire you later.
Okay, so let's talk about alignment. So before we get into it, does anyone want to share maybe challenges with marketing sales alignment or any success stories? Natalie, it's in here, you guys are like, you guys are civil-lined, open brand with sales? Yeah, actually, yeah.
I want to share a little bit with like, how did you get there? Has it always been that way? Yeah, and I kind of sussed it out in the interview process that I was aligned with, great, and Natalie on measurement and attribution, because they're going to give me money. And we're not aligned with how we think about how I spend up on each show proof of influence and where those dollars are going, what's working.
And the one thing about open brand was there's one good market strategy, it's like high touch custom medium, there's really no marketing there. So I think that drove like initial immediate alignment. I'm not saying in the past where I experienced less alignment with marketing, it's simply around like, I mean, what are the typical friction points? These leads are no good from sales, right?
And we can't do anything with marketing. You should have seen their follows up in the leads that we send, right? And I think, you know, Cindy and I are very aligned. Like, we want leads every lead should we follow it up on?
And some of the tactics is where I experienced the most friction and we're very much aligned on what needs to be done and we need to be tight. Yeah, that's great. A lot of common challenges I'll see are, oh, marketing hit their goal, but the company hit the revenue goal. It's like, wait, what?
Marketing celebrating, sales being chastised in the corner, and no one understands that. So in the spirit of keeping it simple, what I found in witnessing and being a heart of lots of different challenges between these functions, that these are the three most important things to drive the type of alignment and collaboration that you want. So one is common goals. Goals and incentives must be aligned.
In many, many organizations, this is not the case. And so if marketing hits their goal, that means sales should also hit their goal, right? If marketing misses their goal, sales is likely not also miss their goal. The goals need to be created and set together, right?
And finance can also be involved. Everyone needs to understand what success looks like. There shouldn't be this marketing and sales, you know, divide. Like, we're actually, we're all on the same team.
The organization where I started as the director of account management and I eventually started as a COO, was the organization where I noticed the most like in fighting with departments. Everyone just wanted to prove that they were doing a great job and then finger pointing at other teams that, well, they messed up this or they didn't follow up on that lead or whatever it happened to be. And guess what? The company was doing it terribly as a result.
And so so much of a business performing well is everybody growing in the same direction. And what I realized in my career is it doesn't matter what my job title is. It might be good marketing, I might have sales, and I have a director of account management. If I can do my part to influence creating common goals, then we will be better off.
That alone is huge. The next is clear handoffs. And so, I mean, Natalie brought their example like, you know, marketing, blaming sales, you're not going to a lead sale, saying, well, the lead suck, I've never called them, right? There needs to be a direct and candid conversation between sales and marketing and how they're going to collaborate together.
Especially if you have a target account list, it's not even just follow up on the leads. It actually should be more of an orchestration of how are we going to acquire these companies? What are the key activities that sales is going to execute? What are the key activities that marketing is going to execute?
At what point do they move into onboarding? And what does that look like? How does marketing and sales say involved to continue to grow that relationship over time? Most of the time, there's process docs within a department and none cross-departmentally.
And again, it's just simple stuff, right? But if you fix the goals, you do define and document the handoffs. I'm a huge fan of documentation. Sydney knows, like, it's not a Google Doc, it doesn't exist.
I'm going to Google Doc. And then lastly, and I think this is where the magic can happen, is how are you actually creating opportunities for the teams to share feedback with each other on a regular basis? Sales is talking to customers way more than marketing usually. And that's a ton of really valuable insights.
You might have marketing at Refine Mods right now. He listens to like five of my sales calls a week. Because he's like, I want to know what people are saying when they're on the phone with you. And he doesn't even just read the AI summary.
He's like, I want to watch the call. I want to hear what they're saying and what they're asking. And he's constantly coming back to me with some sales tips. But I'll say, like, I'm going to change this.
Or we should put out some content about this. Or let's update our sales pitch deck because we're not directly calling out. Like literally the last five people you talk to said the exact same thing. Like, let's integrate that into our marketing and what we're doing, right?
Simple stuff. But this is the stuff that works, right? And this is what you need to be thinking about. I'd love to get some more involvement with this crew here because I think there's a lot of sales folks and marketing folks in the room.
Does anyone have any success story that they want to share with the group of something they've done that really helped? Yeah, it might be previous something we brought in OKRs. And I had an idea which kind of pissed people off. But sales put together their OKRs.
And then they send it to marketing. And marketing just craps all over it. And then they flip and they agree that on the final OKRs, the dependencies, the deliverable dates, and they're kidding each other counter. Because, you know, when sales are going great, it's because sales, not a sale.
And when sales are down, it's because marketing is us. And that's a really bad misconception. And so I think bringing the teams together to point out cross-functional goals. And to know that I can't do this until you do this.
And it really helps. And just aligning that there's really only one goal. It doesn't matter if you have MQL or you have MRR, whatever your goal is, rather than you. That's all it is.