Today on Stacking Growth, we've got an appearance of our CEO, Megan Bowen, on the attributed podcast. Megan walks through the strategy that she believes is now essential for businesses to survive and grow. She talks about the growth at all costs era being over and what's coming in its place. A more sustainable, holistic, go-to-market motion that she's calling Brand Demand Expand.
Megan lays out the specifics of each pillar, including the key metric that makes Brand Performance measurable, a proven formula for reallocating ad spend, and strategies for turning existing customers into your best growth lever. Hope you all enjoy. Hi, I'm Laura. Hey, I'm Stephen.
And you're listening to Attributed, a podcast library by Green There. The purpose of it is to store and share all the knowledge that we have gathered across Dream Data employees through our LinkedIn Lives, podcasts, and webinars. The typical topics you'll find here can be stuff like marketing, sales, B2B ads, operations, social selling, maybe. Hello, hello.
Good morning. Good afternoon. Everybody who are joining us today for another LinkedIn Lives session with Dream Data and today with Megan Bowen, CEO of Refined Lives. I cannot be more excited to meet Megan on this live.
We have been trying to set this up for quite a while now. She's a busy person. I'm very excited for this because it's kind of, if you make for it, it could definitely be a very good coaching session for any company trying to get how to do demand generation in the modern way nowadays. So Megan, welcome to the show.
And can you tell us a little bit about your background, your role at Refined Lives? Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Laura. It was so fun to meet you in person earlier this year at that dinner in New York City.
And I'm really glad that we're finally doing this today. I'm very happy that you're having me and lots of really good topics to dive into today. A little bit of background on myself. I'm the current CEO at Refined Lives or B2B Demand Generation Agency.
However, I spent really the first 17 years of my career in the kind of B2B SaaS startup scene in New York City. And so I had roles across lots of different teams. I've been a seller. I've been an account manager.
I have led marketing operations, sales and account management teams. I've been the chief operating officer. So I really, I feel like I have a very well rounded background in terms of actually executing all of the kind of distinct go to market functions, everything from sales, marketing and customer success and account management, and also leading those teams as a leader in those companies. In 2020, I decided after a really long career kind of in that space, I was really interested in kind of figuring out how I could share my experience and help B2B SaaS companies.
And that's when the founder of Refined Lives, Chris Walker and I started talking and he convinced me to join him as the CEO of Refined Lives. That was back in 2020 and we started building and scaling the agency, really focused on B2B marketing and demand gen specifically. That was really our area of expertise and specialty and how we wanted to help other B2B SaaS companies go to market. It had a really awesome growth trajectory.
You know, there was that weird period in 2022 and 2023 when the market got kind of got a little wonky, but we navigated that as best as we could. And then starting in January, 2024 is when I took over as CEO. And I've been running the company from that position since then. So that's kind of my quick back story for you and everyone listening.
And congratulations with taking on the CEO position, Megan. It's like if you're thinking of companies and the shoes to fill of a role of a CEO filling in Chris's shoes, it's not an easy toss, especially since he was the owner of Refined Lives fully by himself back in the day. So it's a very big acknowledgement for yourself too. And he's trust in running this.
You've got this. And you have been scaling this since taking over the position on so how to see you. So how to see you? Yeah, it's been a lot of fun.
I think I was running, you know, as part of running it as a COO, but it's different. You know, the roles are very different. And so it's been a really fun learning opportunity and being able to kind of build on the track record that I started in that other position. But yeah, it's been a great ride.
You've got this. You've got this. Also for me, I love to see women in these high positions. We aspire to see that every single day.
So thank you for taking this on. To kick this off, please introduce Brand de Monde, X-Mon. Like, framework, what is it? And then we're going to unpack it.
Absolutely. So I'll preface this with I'm not really claiming that we have made up this framework. This is really just a way that we have evolved our own positioning as a marketing agency to communicate to our target customers. What we feel is really required to be successful in 2025 in terms of defining your go to market strategy and how you're executing that.
And so we talk about this concept of brand demand expand because it encompasses three really important pillars of any go to market strategy. So I'll kind of start with like a high level explanation and then we can dive into each one one by one. So brand is relatively straightforward and falls squarely within the marketing sort of ownership area. And that's really about investing in a set of strategies and programs that's intended to drive real brand awareness with your target audience.
And so, I mean, that's everything from what your core positioning and messaging is from how you're actually going to develop programs such as event programs, content programs, organic social programs, of course, paid advertising programs can be part of that. To really find your audience and get your message out and begin to build that memory recall in terms of the problem you solve your solution, your company brand, right? Demand is really focused on, and that's been really where Refine Labs has played the most, right? But this is really focused on how are we actually converting attention into pipeline, right?
And so these are often more tactical plays. People will refer to it as performance marketing or demand gen programs. And essentially, you know, in addition to everything that I just described on the brand side, the demand piece is really focused on how are we capturing demand via, you know, intent channels? How are we creating demand through awareness channels?
How are we converting demand effectively by making sure our website is set up properly to educate and convert in a seamless manner? And everything related to sort of the create capture and converting demand piece. You need brand and you need demand, right? You need them both.
Expand is really now that we're kind of past this growth at all costs era and kind of the zerp era. I think it's really we're finding that's really important for people to give just as much attention to their current customer base. So that's what expand is intended to represent. And so that's everything from things that you're going to do for customer retention, customer expansion, customer advocacy.
There's actually a lot of crossover. People say, Oh, that feels very much like, you know, customer success or account management. But there's a lot of crossover into marketing, right? Thinking about customer case studies and advocates and customer advisory board programs, thinking about how you can leverage digital marketing to your customers.
And so you can leverage digital marketing to cross sell and upsell to your customer base, especially if you're a large B2B SaaS company with thousands of customers and, you know, six different product lines that people can take advantage of. And so the consideration here is that you need to be thinking about how you're building that brand awareness to get in front of your total addressable market, converting demand effectively to hit your short term goals, and then nurturing your current customers so that you're continuing to solidify and retain and expand your customer base. And if you do all these three motions correctly, that's really what is required to actually grow is environment. You know, you can kind of fast or rewind back to 2020 or 2021 when the conditions were so different that you could literally just spend all your time on customer acquisition and hit those growth targets.
But the conditions are so different today. It's a lot harder to execute. It's a lot harder to not only grow, but retain. And what's the point of growing if you have a leaky bucket, then you end up in this growth plateau that so many companies are stuck in right now.
And so the intention of kind of communicating this updated narrative to the market is to, you know, to be that thought leader of hey, things have changed over the last five years. What worked in 2020 or 2021 or 2022 isn't working anymore. And these are the core pillars you need to think about if you want to be successful as a company. Now we're fine lab.
I'm not claiming that we're experts in all of these areas. We really focus on the demand piece and we can kind of play and brand and expand in supporting motions without owning those pillars completely. We want to be helpful to our clients and be trying to essentially inspire the next phase of change that we think is required for these types of companies to be successful. That's a lot of talking.
I'll stop for a minute. I'd love to hear that. Well, everybody knows you for the demand piece from back in the day when we were very loud on creation of demand. But I love that expand is being added to this too because we are in this market.
We have to make sure that we are harnessing everything that we can from the already existing clients because it's a different market. But if you were able to think back at the beginning of your days at Refine Labs, when we were everybody was still talking lead gen and forums and like get them out and quantity, you are the ones speaking about the man. You are the ones speaking about like stop everything that you're doing. And let's start to figure out how do we create demand.
And then you can start capturing it instead of just flooding it up with leads. When did you see and what happened of that tipping point that people started to actually listen and instead of just throwing forms at all of the market, focusing on the. That's a great question. And I would actually say that there is a big segment of the market that actually is still kind of stuck in that era.
And so let me share what I've observed because it's a bit nuanced and it's pretty interesting. So yes, we were very much known as like ditch lead gen start demand gen at the time. It was very common for 80 to 90% of someone's budget to be for demand capture programs, whether it was search or lead gen on LinkedIn, very little to brand awareness or demand creation campaigns. And we just saw that over and over and over and over and over again at every single company.
Right. So it was this like massive shift that we were trying to inspire. What we've noticed over the last five years is I would say earlier stage companies have been more adaptable in evolving and adopting those types of principles. So I would say, you know, any company today that is I would say 20 million in revenue or below that probably got started in the last five years or so are kind of grew up in that era.
And we're realizing that they needed to start building the engine correctly from the beginning. And so we see a lot of those people adopting a lot of those classic recommendations that you would remember us making, you know, back in 2020 to 2022. What's been really fascinating and even what's been interesting in terms of how our customer base has evolved, because we used to work with a lot of early mid stage startups when we got started. What I found is that through that kind of 2020 to 2022 era, a lot of larger mid market and enterprise B2B SaaS companies kind of coasted through that because they were huge.
We're talking companies anywhere from, you know, 50 million in annual recurring revenue to a billion in annual recurring revenue, some publicly traded companies, right. And what was really interesting is because these companies were so big, they had so much media, you know, sort of advertising budget going. They had very large teams. They had been running the same playbook, you know, since 2010 for 10 years, almost 15 years now.
They didn't feel the pain. They didn't see a need to change. And at the time, even when there was all of this volatility in the market, they were relatively big enough to kind of coast through that volatility. Now what's been fascinating is, since like 2023 and 2024 and into this year, I have been, we have been helping almost exclusively that segment of customers, because what they're now noticing is when they look back and look back at a four quarter, eight quarter trailing period, they are seeing 30% to 50% decline in pipeline production and a plateau in revenue.
And again, these are massive companies, right. So they're still closing a lot of business, but relative to what they were able to do before growth is eroding. So now that segment of companies are really feeling the pain. It's crazy because you spend, you know, you spend a day on LinkedIn and you would think, oh, no one's running lead gen anymore.
It's doing the increase and it's just not true, right. Of course, a lot of people are, but there's hundreds and thousands of companies in this segment that I just described that have basically gone this far without making any material changes. And we're talking companies that are spending, you know, 200 to a million dollars a month on paid advertising. So this is not insignificant investments.
And so what we found is these companies really need our help in making that switch. And like anyone I'm sure can understand, the bigger the company is, the much harder it is to change. The change management process is so difficult. There's so many people.
There's so much bureaucracy. There's so much red tape, right. And so it's not just about, you know, changing the strategy. It's bringing the whole organization along for what that change is impacting throughout the organization.
And so we have found that we're still like really focused on our sweet spot, just with almost like a new segment of customers that really need that right now. And what we're doing, especially as we're kind of kind of going into this new AI era where everything is being kind of, you know, thrown on its head, is we're saying like, great, we're going to continue to help this segment of customers make this change. If they do not change now, it actually is a threat to their long term survival or short term survival, right. So there's plenty of companies that need that help.
We've done this over 300 times now, like we can help them navigate that change management process and drive dramatic improvement in terms of ROI on paid advertising specifically. And then at the same time, just like everyone else in the market right now, we're continuing to really evaluate what is required to hold a real effective and efficient and sustainable go to market engine, because it's going to continue to change right the only thing that we all know is things will continue to change and the reputation that we've always had and that will continue to lean into is how can we be at the forefront of that change and what that is and then whatever companies are on the journey, help them evolve and adapt so that they don't die. Love that. And to take a step back, looking into brand, then for companies that either want to do it or want to get back to basics and figure out how brand is working.
So usually brand is a very untangible thing, and especially if you try to explain it to the leadership and then they don't want to throw money at marketing. Can you explain to us what brand means for you when you define it for your clients and how do you make it more tangible so they know what it is that they're looking after as a gold standard. That's a great question. So you'll read all of these studies and research surveys now and if you actually ask yourself how you buy, you would probably answer in this way, which is almost all B2B buying decisions happen before they get on a call with a sales person.
Ultimately, people will experience a set of problems and they will have various recall for typically only one or two brands in any particular category at any time. And when a need or problem arises and they're now tasked with figuring out how to solve it, the first thing that they're going to do is go to the thing that they recall or they remember, or that their friend recommended. And this is a fact, this is a fact of life, this is a truth. And what that means is if you do not invest in strategies so that people know the problem you solve, know how you solve the problem and associate your brand name with that problem and solution, but you will never be considered for a huge percentage of purchase decisions that are out there.
And people say, oh, this is hard. Oh, it's hard to track. And you know, it's all fuzzy. It actually doesn't have to be.
So what we've been doing to get the requisite buy in with our clients and their leadership team in terms of brand is look at a couple of interesting things. So for example, you can look at really interesting data on share of search for your brand and all of your competitors in the category that you play in. And you can do a look back over a one year, four year period, and you can get some really interesting data about how you stack up against your competitors in terms of share of search. So share of search is basically when people are typing in your brand name into Google search, right.
And they can track how that changes over time, what that looks like in comparison to your competitors. And you can get real data that's going to tell you if people know that your brand exists and therefore are searching for it. So that's been really insightful when we've been able to bring that data to the table and show our customers where they stand, how things have changed, where they're ranking relative to their competitors, why their competitors might be performing better than them, and what the risk or the opportunity is for the customer in order to close that gap and increase their share of search. And then we can begin deploying brand programs, both from the paid side and they can also do things from events, content, etc.
And we can measure over time, whether that's having the intended effect, right. And of course, you also want to measure an increase in your inbound funnel. We also have been recommending that people do twice annual or quarterly brand surveys that will collect both quantitative and qualitative data, in terms of brand recall and brand preference as well. Not only do they need to recall you, they need to prefer you right in order to be seriously considered in a purchase decision.
There's actually what we've begun to do is really integrate a lot more data backed evidence based strategies to help make the case of why this is important, and then have mechanisms in place where we can measure the change of share of search. We can measure the change in these regular brand surveys over time, and it no longer is a fuzzy or non quantifiable metric that you can measure. Very interesting, because before in time, everybody associated refine labs with dark social, unattributed touch points like, trust me works, that's how it sounded back in the days, but it seems like the now you can measure so much more from the data that you have gathered. Do you have any examples how focusing on brand has ultimately helped clients to increase pipeline or any types of those numbers for search.
Totally. So I'll comment on your first point. So number one, we do still believe in dark social people absolutely take recommendations from their peers. We still implement and recommend what we called self reported attribution, which was intended to really get some of those insights into what dark social channels were most effective.
So that never went away. And a lot of people are doing this now right this has become a very common measurement strategy, and we still stand behind that we recommend that we implement that for our clients. Those dynamics are still absolutely true and we still believe in those things. However, what we found was that wasn't always enough to prove that more investment should be made.
So in response to that we did our homework to evaluate how we could make this more quantifiable and have more of a business case discussion about it. So I can definitely give you some examples. So I can't share the client specific name, but I'm going to give you the scenario here. So we had a lot of people who are doing this stuff.
And so I had an idea about what we looked at, what we were talking about. And we were talking about the kind of a business map we were with who predominantly focused on demand capture and lead gen activities and kind of had the same conundrum that a lot of our customers have our leadership doesn't want to fund brand awareness. Programs, they feel like we can't measure it. They only want to put money into something that is, you know, we can measure it very clearly.
we're able to pull some data that we can through public sources, whether it's SEMrush or different sources that we have available. So basically say, look, your competitors are getting a higher percentage of share of search because more people are aware of their brand. And look at the data we've been able to show about how they are investing in various brand awareness programs when you are not. So if you want to close this gap and you want to have numbers like your competitor, this is what's required to make that investment.
And a lot of advertising and programs are also very public things, right? So you're able to point to those types of campaigns on LinkedIn, for example, at the LinkedIn library. You can get a lot of data from SEMrush in terms of how people are bidding on keywords, people search, et cetera. So that has probably been the most effective way for us to build the case.
We'll actually show them that data in relation to their competitors and that their competitors are investing in those types of activities. That becomes a pretty compelling case for people to understand and start to make that connection. But if they don't do that, that they could not only remain stagnant in their share of search, but it could decline. And they start to lose market share.
What's important to remember is when we have this kind of like COVID boom era, and then we have this kind of downturn, there's only a certain total addressable market. And in a downturn or kind of a rough economy, really the only thing you can do to grow is to grow market share. The only way to do that is to take market share from your competitors. Like that's basically it.
And so it's having that conversation and pulling in some of those data points. And that has been the most successful and quickest way that we've been able to make the case, get the buy-in and commit it and then move forward with implementing better brand strategies for our customers. That's very interesting. And if we're moving into the demand piece, so now you're saying that the biggest branch that you can pick up is what is coming from your competitors rather than creating one.
But there is still that demand piece that you're talking about like creating real demand, which is not probably not necessarily just picked up from your competitors. Can you explain the definition between creating real demand and instead of just capturing the demand? What do those two have in common or very different? And in general, what are the fundamentals here to have that sustainable growth that you're speaking of?
Yeah, definitely. So when we always have used the term demand creation, it was just a way to describe brand awareness. Demand creation equals brand awareness and everything we were just talking about. Now when we say demand capture, the key difference between demand capture and demand creation or brand awareness is demand capture is intended for intent channels.
So this is like, if you want to think about like the 95, five rule at any given time, 5% of your market is in market right now looking to buy, then we want to capture those in market buyers. And you want to do that through intent channels like Search. Interesting now, we're starting to see the rise of LLMs become almost an intent channel, right? People are going there and asking chat GPT, like, hey, I mean, I had a sales call earlier today where the person said, I asked chat GPT for a marketing agency that could help me modernize my marketing strategy and you came up.
I was like, fantastic. We've actually been working on that. So I don't hear it. But my point is the demand capture piece is that really small sliver of your market that's actively looking to buy today.
And we want to capture that demand. Typically on Search has been the primary channel, the primary intent channel that we do that. There are other intent channels out there too. Now, brand awareness or demand creation is for the other 95%.
They don't need to buy your thing today. But maybe they will next week, next month, next order, next year, but kind of building on what we were talking about earlier, you're not going to be part of the consideration set if they don't even know that you exist. You have to put budget and programs to build awareness with your total addressable market. And especially that 95% that isn't in active buying mode right now.
And the truth is you need both. You need to build that awareness. And then you also need to spend money so that when they're actively in buy mode, you're coming up in a search result in an LLM, whatever it happens to be, right? So that you're constantly putting yourself in front of your buyer.
And so when we did talk about demand creation, it was really a languaging approach to shed more light on brand specifically. So today, you'll notice, and as I've evolved to a company positioning and messaging as the new CEO, I've been leaning into terms and language that is more traditional or recognizable by the market. We, early days with dark social, demand creation, we spend a lot of energy. And it was very helpful at the time to differentiate us, right?
As the market conditions have changed, we have found that shifting into being more clear and direct has been beneficial in order to communicate how we can help and what's required to succeed. So it's actually a lot of the same stuff, but kind of set a little bit differently, if you will. Right. And can you share a couple of specific strategies, examples that your clients are seeing that it's working right now to create real demand so they don't lag on leads.
Absolutely. So a big shift that probably 85% of our clients go through is they were spending most of their budget on demand capturing lead gen. And so over the first two quarters of working together, we begin to diversify the budget. So obviously it's a bit different for every company, but the core theme that we see is typically 80% on demand capture or lead gen 20% on brand awareness or demand creation.
That's how their paid advertising budget is allocated. Very heavy on capture, which only 5% of the market is in. Very little percent on demand creation or brand awareness, which is the 95% of the market. So the biggest shift we make is a total rebalancing and reallocation of that paid advertising budget.
So we want to actually move it to about 40% demand capture and 60% demand creation or brand awareness. So what that means very specifically in terms of the strategies that we're deploying is we're going to spend less money on Google search, we're going to be more efficient, less wasteful. We're going to stop all lead gen or demand capture strategies on any paid social channel. People are not on LinkedIn or Meta or Reddit to sign up for a demo with you.
However, they'll read your stuff and look at your stuff. And so we redeploy and revamp the entire paid social strategy. We are very intentional on leveraging strategic narrative, differentiated positioning in our creative and our content. So the content is scroll, stopping and stands out.
We laser focus on targeting so that our target we're getting in front of the right people with the right message at the right time. And if we rebalance the budget and redeploy and rebuild those strategies and how I just described, what we've been able to do for 90% of our clients, we see a 30% to 50% increase in qualified pipeline at six months after six months of working together. And that is the pretty predictable result that we're able to drive when you make the changes that I just walked us through right now. That is very impactful.
And when you re-shift your budgets like that, I would guess that team structures also have to re-shift. For the sizes of clients that you're working with, there are teams working with those specific channels as well. Do you see any specific changes that needs to be done for teams as well, not just the budgets? Yeah, and that's part of that change management process I was kind of bringing up earlier, especially for these larger companies.
I think the biggest immediate shift that we see is we typically see a drop in volume in leads and but we see a higher quality of conversions coming in. So typically there could be maybe an SDR or sales function that is used to receiving a certain volume of leads to work. And so really what we just need to do is we need to partner with them to reset how these resources are being deployed. So the most accessible kind of redeployment of these types of resources that we see and that we typically recommend is we, especially for these larger companies, we always highly recommend going through the exercise of developing a target account list.
What are the top 1000 accounts, 2000 accounts, 5000 accounts that you wanna go after? And then instead of generating these low-intent, low-quality leads, divide your target account list across your sales and SDR team and develop really strategic and valuable and impactful outbound strategies. So instead of feeding them these leads as the people to follow up with, have a more intentional strategy for a list of target accounts. And oh, by the way, of course, we're gonna advertise to that list of target accounts as well so that have more brand recognition.
So when the salesperson reaches out, there's already hopefully some recognition there as well. So it really goes back to thinking again about, and we've always talked about this at Refine Labs, it's what is best for the buyer and the customer and put yourself in their shoes. Don't ask for a demo if they signed up for a webinar or downloaded some content, right? However, if you have like strategic and valuable outbound crafted, reach out to them and see what happens, right?
We know we're not gonna get a response to a lot of those at first and that's okay. In many ways, I've almost looked at it as outbound marketing too. Like even just getting an email from a brand as long as it's valuable and it's not pushy or too sticky, you're creating that recognition and it can be just as impactful. So that's just one example, but that's probably the most common like downstream impact when we make the strategy change that I described.
And it is a very big change because most of the times in those companies, there is the disconnect of outbound is done by sales, but also picked up leads are by sales, but there's like where do they come from and what are the lists? And I love to hear how close marketing is working to work on that outbound list because it has to work together nowadays for you to be able to do that. I mean, and that's, people talk about ABM a lot. That's basic ABM, which is have a target account list, sales is reaching out to them, marketing is marketing to them.
We have a focus and we're more likely to acquire the companies on that list if we have coordinated, strategic efforts to acquire them. Yeah, and then it's even easier to measure as well. Are we hitting the accounts right? Are we seeing intent from them?
Are we seeing email, open clicks and finally conversions further downstream if those journeys are really long? That's much easier. Very exciting. Let's talk about expand a bit as well.
And for me, expand usually is like upsell cost sell. But I think it's a bit different in your mind. So tell me what is in the expand bucket and how does marketing work with it as well? So upsell cost sell is definitely part of expand.
I would say the other aspect of it that I would add is retention as well. So I think there's a few components of that. And when you think about retention cross sell and upsell and the expand bucket, I also like to include essentially what I refer to as like customer advocacy or customer vandalism. And so the goal here is how can you make sure that the customers that you acquire get the outcome that you promised?
Have an amazing experience, are not thinking about churning because they're getting regular value delivered to them from you, right? In a best case scenario, being your evangelist or your advocate, whether that's committing to doing a case study for you, which is a core marketing asset that we love, right? Whether that's participating in a customer advisory board, whether that's coming to your VIP executive dinners and essentially selling for you at the dinner table because they're engaged with prospective customers, right? So marketing should always pay more attention to the current customers.
There's so much rich information and value that can be created when marketing and customers collaborate together. And then from just a business perspective, like retaining and expanding your customers is a primary driver for growth. And so how are you thinking, obviously, you're gonna have like an account management or customer success function that's gonna be working with those clients, but there are ways that marketing can support. For example, we have a lot of clients again that are in the 500 million to a billion in annual revenue.
I mean, they have tens of thousands of customers and they typically have four to six different products. And most customers are only on 1.8 products at a time. And so we can actually deploy very personalized and targeted advertising programs to drive awareness for these other products that are available. And so from a digital marketing perspective, there are ways that we can also advertise to the current customer base in terms of product adoption.
So there's just a lot of opportunities that a lot of people don't even consider or think about. And if you allocate a small amount of your budget to that, and again, it's not just marketing, right? You do need the account management customer success function doing their part as well, just like you need sales doing their part to bring new revenue over. But how are you thinking more strategically about how all go-to-market teams can impact all of these different pillars of brand demand expand?
And so I would say that's kind of what I think about when we talk about that word expand. It's really retention, cross-sell, up-sell, but also evangelism and advocacy. And that kind of rounds out that pillar. Are there any specific channels that you see that work to grow that expand section?
Because it's very relevant for everybody right now. Yeah, so I would say, I think the two things that we're seeing that are being most impactful are one is events. So I think if whether it's virtual or in-person events, getting your customers involved, you can leverage digital marketing for event promotion and registration, but really the program is events. I mean, we're even doing this at Refine Labs.
We're hosting these dinners in different cities and inviting our customers and prospects to the dinners and having great success in both retaining our current customers and almost having our customers do the selling for us because they're describing what their experience is like. And many other of our customers and companies that I've heard from are seeing huge success from events overall by integrating both customers and prospective customers. I think the other piece of it is, again, a lot of people do not allocate any budget to current customers from a paid advertising perspective and the same concept supply for customer acquisition. And so there are ways, especially if you have a very specific customer list where you can deploy very targeted messaging and creative that's focused on product adoption, cross-sell, upsell, expansion.
And it just becomes like just the same principles that you would use to acquire a new customer, apply to a current customer as well. You just have different objectives for a current customer, but you can use the same channels to communicate with them, to reach them and to make sure that they're aware of these things. And so I think that's a very specific example in terms of paid advertising or digital marketing. The last thing that I'll say is like the advocacy piece, like everyone wants social proof.
Any prospective customer wants to read a case study or see that another company like them has had success. And so I think it's always underutilized and you can never have enough testimonials or case studies as social proof. And so typically that's a marketing-owned initiative and those case studies can and should absolutely be deployed in any paid advertising or digital strategy as well. Now to wrap this all up.
If we were to set up KPIs for each stage, can you do that? And what type of KPIs would you set for each of the three states? Totally. So from a brand awareness standpoint, we want to look at things like change of share of search over time.
We want to measure the brand survey, qualitative and quantitative results. And we also want to look at that self-reported attribution data as another data point for brand. In terms of demand, we really like to look at the core inbound funnel and improvements both in quantity and quality across web conversions, conversion rates. We also want to look at efficiency metrics like cost per conversion, cost per meeting, cost per opportunity.
So it's really all those standard inbound funnel metrics that you want to be taking a look at. Of course, things like return on ad spend or overall ROI on digital spend are important metrics to be looking at as well. In terms of expand, you want to be looking at things like NRR, revenue retention. You want to be looking at things like customer acquisition costs, lifetime value, things like monitoring, improvement across seller upsell over time.
So each of those distinct items do have KPIs that ladder back specifically. So you know, if you're being successful in each of those areas in the business. Yeah, I love how your KPIs are going all the way down into revenue and goes back into the same numbers that sales would be working after as well. It's about looking at the business as a whole.
That's the intent. Obviously, we play in a certain lane at Refine Labs in terms of the services we provide. But like, my mission and vision at the end of the day is to help B2B companies grow sustainably and profitably. And we don't have to do everything.
But if we can help educate and drive awareness for what the right strategy is to grow as a business in today's market conditions, we want to do that. And then we want to help where we have expertise and special teams. Definitely. Oh, thank you so much.
You have spent so many good learnings for a lot of companies. And if you were to leave them with one thing, everybody needs to do in order to be just as little bit as successful as all of the Refine Labs customers, what should they do? What should they change today? I think I'll kind of stay in our lane.
I would say that in terms of if you spend any money on paid advertising, I would challenge you to look at your budget allocation across both intent and awareness channels as well as what strategies, whether you're doing demand capture or brand awareness or demand creation. Almost every company has an opportunity to make really strategic changes across those factors to materially improve the return on investment. That's the secret formula that we do with every customer to drive that outcome of that 30% to 50% more qualified pipeline within six months. It doesn't have to take a year.
It doesn't have to take 18 months. You can make changes that you will see within a six month time frame. Nice. Nice.
Great. Thank you so much, Megan. That was an amazing session. Where can people find you if they want to talk more about this?
I'm active on LinkedIn. So you can find me on LinkedIn. And then you can always check out our site at Refine Labs.com. We also have our content product, The Vault.
It's $149 a month. And you can get access to all of our strategies and frameworks. And actually, on our website, for free, you can go to Refine Labs.com and use our demand GPT at the bottom of the site. And you can actually ask up to 10 questions.
And you can get free access to vault resources and answers. And so if you just have a question, go to the website. And we can help you out for free. This is so smart.
I didn't know you had this. We just talked about maybe a month and a half or two months ago. So it's pretty new. I need to make another LinkedIn post about it.
But yeah, we did it as a way to just help out marketers. And so if you have a question about how you should be thinking about Google Search or paid social or you're interested in any of the things that we talk about, you can actually interact with the chatbot on the site. And it'll give you answers and access to some resources, totally for free. What a way for both thought leadership, but also for giving back all of this.
This is the perfect way to finish this off, Megan. Thank you so much. It was an amazing session. Thank you so much for having me, Laura.
It's great chatting with you. We hope you like listening to us, subscribe to our podcast and the ones that we have been guests on. And if you have any feedback for us, just do let us know and should there be a guest that you think we should be talking to, then like pitch us. We're looking forward to seeing you.