All right everyone, thanks for tuning in today. We are super excited to have another guest. You know what, Megan, I'm just gonna let you introduce yourself a little bit and let the listeners know how rad you are. Sounds good, Tanner.
Thanks for having me on the podcast. I am Megan Bowen. I'm the CEO at Refine Labs. Refine Labs is a B2B demand generation agency.
The way I describe what we do to my mom is we help our customers get more customers. So that's the quick and dirty intro for you. I like that, that's a good explanation for like a short one sentence. What do you do, I think?
The little intro, I love that. So Megan, how long have you been with Refine Labs? Like tell me a little bit more about that story about now becoming the CEO of Refine Labs. So what was it like your career, how did it bring you?
Yeah, so I'll kind of give you the rundown of my quick career arc, which is fun. And I can conclude with how I met Chris Walker and my journey, him and I teamed up as business partners back in 2020. Prior to that though, I had about 15 years of experience in what I like to call like the New York City startup scene in B2B tech, B2B SaaS. I definitely worked at a bunch of different industries.
So I started off in education technology, then I went to health tech, I was at ZokDoc for a while, then I went to food tech, I was at Grub Hub Seamless. Early part of my career was really focused on sales and account management. So that's where I really came up and learned a lot of my skillsets. I was always working with customers, either in sales roles or account management roles to acquire, to implement, to retain, to renew.
When I went to ZokDoc, that was my first opportunity where I actually built out an entire post-sale function. And I realized I was like, oh, I love building teams and scratch that really got me energized. So once I built out that team at ZokDoc, I then went to Grub Hub Seamless. It was post-merger pre-IPO.
And they had a huge B2B business beyond just the normal consumer business of ordering some dinner on Grub Hub for delivery. So I built out the entire B2B account management function at that company and I was there for the IPO, which was an awesome experience, was there for about four years. Then I was getting back. This is the personal question that I'm curious about.
What other stuff did Grub Hub have? Well, they had a corporate food ordering solution. So for example, like all of the big banks in New York City were our top customers. And imagine like JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, they would allow their employees to order food through the Seamless ordering system and have it be paid for and reimbursed by the company.
And we could enforce different budgets. Imagine all the bankers, like, oh, if you work past 7PM, you can comp your dinner on the company. So it was a corporate two-year solution. Yeah, and a lot of the big cities definitely had it.
New York was the hub for sure though. And those companies spent lots and lots and lots of money per year on paying for meals for their employees. Thank you. So yeah, and I mean, there were, I think, one of the biggest implementations we did was feeding a Blackstone office building.
We were feeding like 1,200 people every single day for lunch, like a huge operational system for ordering and delivery and actually getting everyone's lunch to the right person. And so it's harder than it sounds. I mean, I can't even imagine. It's funny.
I'm going to throw this out. This is totally off topic, but it's kind of fun. I think like I've thrown parties at with big, like, probably 100 people. And to get everybody on the same page of like all the food stuff, it's really hard.
So I don't doubt, I believe it. I believe that Grabhoga has has sold the huge main point. It was a multi-hundred million dollar business unit in there, multi-billion dollar company. But I mean, my time there was so formative for me.
It was really awesome to build a team from the ground up. It actually a fairly mature organization go through the IPO experience post IPO. They acquired, they were basically growing via acquisition for the B2B size. They acquired five different other B2B delivery companies.
And then my responsibility was to fold all those customers into the broader Grabhoga brand and like kill all those other brands. And so, going from a 300 million dollar annual business to like a 900 million dollar annual business, post all these acquisitions over a two year period and thinking about how am I going to retain all this revenue and these customers and move them from one tech to another and deprecate brands. Just so much learning with change management and M&A. So that was a great run there.
I learned the time. And the company got really big. And I was like, I like to build some like, what's next? I went to this, I got recruited to go to this company called Manage by Q.
They were selling office services and software to companies to help them manage their office space. Think like cleaning, handyman, painting. And so I went there to build out their B2B account management function. That was another really fun chapter for me.
I started as the director of account management. I ended up as the chief operating officer. And when me and the CEO were out fundraising for the series D, we ended up making a deal with WeWork. And WeWork acquired Manage by Q in 2019, which was really fun until we work bubble burst.
I had to be podcast number two over in Glass of Wine. I mean, not only podcast, they made an entire TV show about it. I think there's two, yeah. Yeah, you're right.
There's two. Adam Newman is the greatest, the most charismatic and persuasive fundraiser of all time, I think. He holds that title. After Manage by Q, I went to a company called Platters, which was in the same space as Grub Hub and Seamless.
It's like, I know the space. I got a great offer. I'm like, there's some NNA play here for get another exit, then the pandemic hit. And Platters was 100% office ordering.
So we were making like $8 million a month. And literally in March 2020, we went from $8 million a month to $0 million a month. That's insane. They had just raised a round.
We tried to pivot. And I ended up saying, this is good luck, guys. I'm out. And so summer of 2020, I quit my job.
Chris and I had met. We both started posting on LinkedIn in 2019. And so we kind of became acquainted with each other on LinkedIn. He reached out, asked to record some content.
He's like, hey, can we record some podcasts together? It's like, yeah, let's do it. So we did some podcasts. He actually came down to New York.
We did like a whole video in person video interview, which is really cool. And then he just reached out in the summer of 2020. And he said, hey, I think you should come build refine labs with me. Come work with me, come be my business partner.
Let's build this agency. At the time, I was actually considering starting my own kind of consulting thing, probably focused on more like sales account management, which had been the bulk of my career. And we got to talking, and ultimately, obviously, we decided to team up. And we built the agency.
And I was in a COO position from the beginning. So he was really focused on marketing and business development and driving innovation in our service delivery design. And I was really responsible for everything else, basically. So we really kind of divided and conquered and co-led the company.
And then as the company continued to expand and grow and mature, we got to the point where Chris was really passionate and excited about this idea, which is now Pissetto. We attempted to launch a service like it within Refine Labs. But it was interesting when we did that, it actually created a lot of confusion in the market of like, well, what services do you offer? You offer this and that.
Where are you? Yeah. And so ultimately, we realized we're like, ah, it really is like a separate company. So that's why we decided to make the change that we did in the big public announcements in January of this year.
But that, we had really been working up to this for about a year. So it was a very well planned, well thought out transition. And I've built the company with him, basically, from the ground up. And so very honored to step into the position.
We're coming out of the gates really strong for 2024, exceeding our key one revenue plan. Things are going well. So I keep the ship going in the right direction, but feeling really good about the change. So that's the story.
That's how I got here. Yeah. OK, I'll cast over. Appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks. So I have a couple questions to follow up with this. One is, it's cool that these different places have led you to where you're at now. But what I'm trying to understand is the piece that kind of brought you to become an agency.
And was that mainly Chris, like bringing this up to you? And you're like, yeah, let's jump in. You already have that kind of idea in your head that you wanted to do. Because it seems like kind of a jump.
Usually, yeah. Because usually the podcast that I have in the past where they're like, oh, I saw a need. And I got really good at one thing, setting up for our company. And then I just started doing that as an agency.
But for you, you're like, let's do it. I mean, no, it's a great question. So it's funny because I know when Chris first approached me, I was like, you have a marketing agency. I'm like, I'm not really a marketer.
Like, I'm the wrong person for you. Go find another marketer to start this marketing agency with. And what Chris and I realized, I had been at all these different companies. And especially when you think about the time frame, from the early 2000s to about 2020.
And I had seen over and over again all of these B2B companies, they have the growth at all cost mentality. They are executing marketing and sales strategies that are not customer centric. I was just seeing how just B2B go to market in general was so broken. And then I would see because of the poor decisions that were being made, the trickle down effect was ultimately employees and the customers were impacted.
So whether it was a round of layoffs, whether it was not delivering on the promise outcomes to our customers. And so I think where Chris and I really had a shared passion, and when I was thinking about, OK, if I start my own solo consulting, what would I do, my intention was to help founders and CEOs not make the same mistakes and define a good go-to-market strategy. And I was going to take all of my experience at all of my different chapters and companies. I was at to really help people do that.
So as Chris and I were having the conversation, I think what we uncovered was we both felt really passionate about that. Obviously, he was coming at it from a very specific marketing and demand gen lens. And I was coming at it from a little bit more of a holistic, not just thinking about marketing was part of it, but I was also thinking about sales and customer success, which was really my primary background. And so that was really what I think convinced me to move ahead.
It was like, OK, this is a way that we can influence and change the way that B2B companies go to market and measure our next-to-key marketing. And that was really exciting to me. In early days, we had big conversations around it, maybe eventually expanding beyond just marketing services into sales or other things. We're staying in our lane.
We're really good with marketing and demand gen. And I like to joke. I'm like, I am a marketer now. And when we took four years working at Refine Labs, to officially become one.
But that was really, I think, the crux of it. We saw, we both saw what had to change in the broader ecosystem. And we both came to that conclusion through our own experiences. And we realized that if we teamed up, we would have an opportunity to accelerate the impact that we could have.
And I think that played out. I think we did that. I mean, it sounds like considering now that you're launching another business out of what you guys have developed, so it's pretty cool to have something like that. Hopefully, I mean, what's cool is we also had Chris on this podcast before.
So that's awesome. And he talks a little bit about it. So if you're curious, go listen to Chris's podcast. But the, so coming back to Refine Labs, over those four years, did you guys develop a specific niche or specialty for a specific company that you've been able to help?
Like something that you've just been able to really nail in and hone in on? Yeah, definitely. I would say that we really help a very specific type of B2B company. You need to have some market traction.
So we use 10 million in ARR as kind of a proxy for semblance of product market fit. Once you hit 10 million, you have a decent amount of market validation that people are buying your stuff, right? If you're sub 10 million, usually there's other things that you need to focus on first before building your demand engine, whether that's positioning and pricing, whether it's your strategic narrative, which is locking down your ideal customer profile, right? A lot of those marketing foundations that get figured out in the zero to 10 journey.
So 10 million plus ARR. We also, our methodologies work best with a higher ACV and a sales lead process. So most of our customers have a 20K ACV or higher. Typically, the range is actually between 50K and 150K per year.
And you have to talk to a salesperson. You're not just buying something off of a website for the work that we're doing. So there's a big awareness and education lift that marketing needs to carry to be effective in creating demand. And then, yeah, I think lastly, then I would say, and this is actually a qualifying question I ask on all the sales calls.
I still do all the sales calls for fine labs, is what is your tech stack? And our preferred tech stack is sales forces. There's CRM Hubspot is the marketing automation platform, because marketing is really hard to measure. Everybody struggles with this.
And so one of the things that we've really figured out is how to deploy demand creation, demand capture, and demand conversion strategies in a way that actually result in higher quality and higher volume of web conversions. People come into your website and saying, I want to talk to sales, requesting a demo. And those web conversions actually turning into sales opportunities and then close one revenue. And not only do we want to design and deploy those strategies effectively to bring in that inbound, but we want to be able to measure the effectiveness of our programs so that we can continue to optimize those investments in those programs that we're running.
And so that's really like the type of company that we serve best and the core of what we do at our fine labs. Totally. And so that's a great niche. That's a great ICP for sure.
And it seems like what the biggest piece for you guys, it seems, correct me if I'm wrong, I could be wrong here, but that ability, that difficulty of creating a data-driven marketing strategy in order to move into Hubspot and then transfer over that data to Salesforce, it seems like the biggest piece that you guys have been able to help on, I could be wrong, is helping create that data for Hubspot. And then it bleeds in naturally into the Salesforce realms. Is that right? Very interesting.
Yeah. I think I can break it down a little bit more specifically for you. Why don't you say it, so me? You're a friend of us.
Yeah, totally. So let's think about what we're trying to do, right? When you think about deploying demand programs, you're basically building awareness with your target audience. And our goal at Refine Labs is we just want to bring all of those people back to your website.
And we want to make your website very effective at educating your prospects, giving them all the information they need, pricing, case studies, what their actual solution does, the outcomes it drives. And ultimately, we're driving people to raise their hand and say, I want to talk to your sales team. Those are the opportunities that are going to close at the highest rate. So that's the path that we're optimizing.
So the first step in data collection is how are we leveraging your website to capture as much data and information as possible. So obviously, we utilize and leverage UTM tracking for a variety of our campaigns to capture as much of that data as possible. So all of those UTM parameters can get fed into Hubspot and captured on the contact record. We also recommend to all of our clients that they add, how did you hear about us to their primary conversion form?
Required field, OpenText field. And we capture that data point in Hubspot as well. So think about this. From just the web conversion and the web visits, we're getting three core data points.
You're getting potentially UTM parameters. This one came in from that paid search program, right? We know that's directly attributable. We're getting self-reported attribution.
I heard about you on Tanner's podcast. I heard about you on LinkedIn, whatever happens to be. A lot of people say that, by the way. Hey, I heard about you on Tanner's podcast.
It's the coolest one ever. I know. Sounds like you've got a good dark social podcast going, a little driving word of mouth referrals and recommendations. I never said that.
You better believe it. Anyways, keep that. I know. I know you're a Hubspot fan, but Hubspot obviously has software based attribution data points, right?
So they're going to capture from their perspective. Right? And typically, that's a few things. It's direct traffic, organic search, paid search.
They're just sort of a handful of software based attribution points that will be captured by the system. So we now have all of this information about where our in-bounds were coming from, right? And now what we do with that data. So one of the things we do with our customers in Hubspot specifically is we build out what we call a hybrid attribution dashboard.
So we aggregate the software based attribution results, the self reported attribution results, and we overlay those because both are actually important. Software attribution will tell you, like for example, they'll tell you pretty definitively if a in-bound came in from a paid search campaign, because it's very easy for the software to pick it up and to make that direct attributable data connection, right? What's really fascinating though is, and you've probably seen this too, so much of the attribution sources will be direct traffic or organic search. So let's think about this for a minute.
Direct traffic, they went straight to your website, right? They knew your URL, they went to your website. How did they know about your URL? They found out about you somehow, right?
And then same for organic search, they just passed through Google though, instead of going straight to your website because they didn't know your URL. So the question then becomes, okay, thanks Hubspot. It's cool to know that they came through organic search or direct traffic, but what happened before they did that? How did they become aware of us?
How did they know that we existed? And that's where the self reported attribution data comes in. So it's so fascinating when you just compare side by side, everything that's tagged as direct traffic, you'll see self reported attribution are typically what we call like dark social sources, podcasts, LinkedIn, referral, community, pavilion, exit five, word of mouth, whatever it happens to be. And so that's going to be really insightful.
So it's not that one is better than the other, it's that you need both, right? Now we want to take that information, which we call a pipeline source. That's how your, that's the source of your pipeline, right? And we want to bring that data from Hubspot into Salesforce.
And we want to follow that contact through the sales process. And we want to make sure that those original pipeline sources and those data points are carrying it, carrying over to your CRM so that now you can begin to report on pipeline and close one revenue by pipeline source and actually be able to begin to really understand what are the biggest contributors, which pipeline sources contribute the most to pipeline and close one revenue and how are we continuing to optimize our strategy based on the data that we're collecting. So that's like the quick high level overview. I'll stop talking for a second.
Let's jump in here. I was in just love, I was loving this, by the way, just to let you know. Just, I think there is a huge disconnect in a lot of different companies, myself included. I'm not, I'm not excluding myself here from to creating funnels that makes sense for people from those dark sources to social media.
Why do you call them dark social media sources? By the way, I'm curious. It's kind of a funny story. We were, there's that term dark funnel that was being used a lot, I think predominantly by six cents, I think they coined that term dark funnel.
And I remember this was at a time when Chris and I were doing our old show, Dann Jen Live, and we'd have like these, this group every week. And I remember on that show, it, instead of saying dark funnel, Chris was going off on one of his brands and then he was like, dark social, like that's what we should call it. That's what it is. And so he started coining that term and we started like using that term kind of instead of dark funnel, they're a bit different.
I think technically according to Chris's like technical definition, but the intent is the same, right? Sources that are difficult to measure with technology today, things that you can't track, right? But that you know are happening. And so how do you surface those insights that are hard to track?
Just ask the customer and they'll tell you, most likely is one way. Yeah. Some in self-reported attribution. Exactly.
But I do like that piece of making sure that each piece is taken care of whether through self-reported, whether through somehow gathering the data that you can figure it out to, I don't know, connect the two between each other and then transfer, you know, where it sails. So I feel like there's a definite need for that in every single company and most companies that I have associated with are just not doing that. It's most companies aren't. And it's a couple of things.
They don't really know what to do. Number one, and unfortunately, measurement projects or RevOps or marketing ops projects typically get deprioritized against other initiatives that leaders feel will drive short-term returns, whether that's an MQLs or pipeline and revenue. And it just perpetuates a difficult cycle because the longer you wait to implement an appropriate data infrastructure, the longer it's going to take for you to collect enough data to make data-backed sound decisions. So like one of the first things we want to do with all of our customers is like, you know, history is the history.
You've tracked what you tracked. We cannot go back and change what you were able to track in the past, but let's change it going forward so that we can start collecting the right data now and ongoing to help us make better decisions in the future. So that's key. A lot of other agencies will typically anchor on, well, we're just going to give you the leads and then it's not our fault what happens after that.
And kind of in our ethos of our company is like, we want to actually help our customers get more customers. It's not just about getting the MQL or the lead. Everything matters. So we want to know what happens after the lead comes in.
How did the sales process go? How can we speed up the sales cycle? And I think that's what really differentiates us at the end of the day. Those results are what actually matter.
And we want to help our customers get to those end results. Love it. Amazing. Well, Megan, we're coming up towards the end of the podcast here and I want to jump into the rapid fire questions if you're okay with that.
Yeah, let's do it. I'm very curious to hear what these are. Yes. It's not going to throw you off too much.
They're good questions. Don't get me wrong, but it's not going to be like, whoa, I've never heard that before. Okay, first question that we have that I typically asked is, what is a HubSpot hack or a feature that you think is underutilized? Oh, interesting.
Oh, well, I will say we've been, we've used effectively a combination of workflows to build this hybrid attribution dashboard that I described to you. Maybe this is like a boring answer, but it's HubSpot makes it really easy to aggregate all of this free form text, appropriately categorize it and then visualize it in a way that you can draw conclusions and act on it. When we think about other marketing automation systems, I won't say their names, they do not make it as quick and easy to use that. Oh, I can give you another fun response to early days of refine labs when we were being super scrappy because we were bootstrapped.
I was in charge of recruiting. I actually leveraged your service ticket workflow to manage my recruiting pipeline because I didn't want to pay for recruiting software. That's hilarious. It worked great.
I'm sure. Yeah. So there's two answers for you. Hopefully that works.
That's funny. I love it. What is a tool that's not chat GPT and not HubSpot that you can't live without? Google Docs.
Oh, okay. I am a Google Doc addict. It was the right word to use here. Yeah.
I use them for everything for internal stuff, for customer stuff. It can be very powerful for alignment, for planning, for strategy. I'm a very like, I have a very simple tech stack. I feel like less is more when it comes to technology.
Yeah. Okay. I love it. Awesome.
There you go. I'm being unique. Yes, exactly. I love it.
Okay. So two more questions. If you had a magic wand to add change or remove something from your business, what would it be? I think what I would want to do is I would want to begin to build out an additional complimentary service to augment everything that we're doing to execute on paid programs.
The predominant programs that we run for our customers are paid advertising and it's super effective. But for example, it's really interesting when you think about how Chris and I grew refine labs, we really leveraged an organic content strategy primarily with like event and podcasts and posting on LinkedIn. And so I think that there's on my long term roadmap for the business. And especially as we're, I would say that we've left the growth at all costs era behind and now efficient growth is all the rage.
I would probably want to think about adjacent services that we could offer that help us get to the same goal that are complimentary to the paid programs that we're running. Cool. I love it. Amazing.
Yeah. I would say you are more than your job and give your job your all, you know, act like an owner in every business that you're in to identify the most impactful changes you can make to improve the business, but cultivate your self identity independent of the company you work for and the job that you have. I've been a part of a lot of layoffs on both sides. I've been laid off.
I've had to lay people off layoffs have been rampant over the last two to three years. And I've had that experience where you feel so sad and worthless and embarrassed and shame after a layoff. And I think a lot of that comes back to it being so easy to just have your whole identity be your work and your job. And so I wish more people made that distinction, not to say that it wouldn't hurt less to be laid off, but that I think I would definitely tell that to my younger self and I think probably other people might benefit from thinking about that.
Yeah, I love it. Great advice. Megan, thanks so much for coming on the show. This has been a ton of fun.
I really have had a good time. Last thing, how can people go and find and connect with you? I'm on LinkedIn. It's actually the only social media platform I am on.
I've never ever had Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. I'm personally not ever. I've never had an account. I did set up.
I know I did set up a MySpace account. I'm dating myself, but I've since shut that down. Yeah. But you can find me on LinkedIn and obviously you can check out Refine Labs at Refine Labs.com.
Cool. I love that. I'm pretty sure MySpace shut down anyways. You wouldn't have to worry about shutting that down yourself.
I think you might be right, Tanner. Yeah. I think you're right. Well, Megan, thanks so much for coming on the show.
It's a ton of fun. Thanks for having me. Appreciate the conversation. See you listeners out.
Next time.