Today on Sacking Growth, Megan Bowe and Injiana's Course Zone cover the practical applications of Refine Labs' Brand Demand Expand Strategy. They break down each pillar and how you can implement it efficiently in your holistic go-to-market strategy, break down suggested budget allocations, and answer audience questions. Hope you enjoy! Welcome, welcome.
Really excited for this event. I'm joined by a dear friend and a bad ass, and in Injiana, I'm super excited to get into the conversation today. We've got lots of people coming in, but we're going to get started. And really the focus of the conversation today is talking more about the Brand Demand Expand approach that I'm sure you've been seeing all of Refine Labs talking about this year.
And we're not claiming we made it up. This is just going back to key marketing fundamentals that are timeless and that always work, and especially as we're all trying to do our best to manage through the AI era. Some of these timeless marketing principles are really where we should all be thinking about in order to drive sustainable growth for our companies. And so excited to talk through this today.
You probably know from our Refine Labs events and content, we are heavily focused on talking about all things demand, and we've really been leaning into more content and events focused around Brand Strategy and Brand Measurement. And I'm really excited today because Injiana is really a customer marketing expansion advocacy expert. And so we're going to really talk a lot about that expand pillar and how customer marketing and customer advocacy is a fuel for your brand and for actually closing deals and getting deals over the finish line. And so we're going to get into it.
So Injiana, welcome. I've known you for years. I'm so glad we're doing an event together, but we'd love to kick it over to you to just introduce yourself and your champion. Thanks so much, Megan.
Hey, everyone. I am at Jana. Everyone calls me G. So if you like I have to say the same, feel free to call me G.
I met Megan years ago back when I was a GM at Air Call. She graciously gave me some of her time as I was really exploring how to grow the customer success, right? So talk about expand function of our business. And you know, my lens has always been looking at SDR BDR all the way through customer success so that full go to market engine.
Prior to Air Call, I had been at a company called Blue Wolf and Mondo where I helped scale it as part of running the RevOps team. And so that's really the lens and which I view things. But today I'm coming to you as a co-founder of Champion, we're a customer marketing platform where we help our enterprise customers grow through their customer base. So really thinking about how do you use your customers as a channel?
And this has been a lot of fun because I bring a lot of the fundamentals that I've experienced through building go to market engines. And now this is really that layer in that piece where you could add in advocacy all across that customer journey as every organization is really trying to find that path to efficiency and profitability. And I think customers are the key to it. But that's no secret.
Awesome. Yes. And for those of you that know my background, I grew up in the world of customer success. And so I love when customer success and marketing can collide and I think more than ever, it's such a powerful growth lever that honestly, I think most businesses haven't really prioritized to date.
The good thing about that is it's a real tangible opportunity to think about how you're leveraging your customers as part of your growth engine. And this is of course, you know, in addition to delivering for your customers and you know, meeting your brand promise and driving results for them. That's table stakes, of course. But there are all of these considerations for how you can use your customers to fuel new business growth and also expansion within your current customer base as well.
And so where, let's jump in. We'll kind of tackle each pillar and we'll start with brand. We'll just jump right in. And so, you know, we've been talking a lot more about this.
Our roots at Refine Labs were originally really rooted in demand gen. And that was our core competency and what we had focused on. And what we're finding is that if you have too much tunnel vision on a demand-only strategy, that you will hit a growth plateau, that you will start to see diminishing returns. And that the two additional pillars that are really required to continue to grow a business is brand and expand.
And so from a brand perspective, obviously, there's things that you can do, you know, from a paid advertising perspective to build brand awareness. But there's so many other programs that you need to be thinking about and implementing for a true holistic brand strategy. And you know, we all know the stats, right? Like we all know that most B2B buyers have essentially a day one consideration set when they're starting a buying process.
They already know a set of brands that they're probably going to buy from. And if you're not on that day one consideration set list, it's very likely you're not going to win the deal. And so it's a missed opportunity for a lot of folks that are too focused on performance marketing or demand gen at the expense of a more holistic strategy. And we just know that, you know, I think it's like 90% of purchases will be from that day one list.
So of course there are ways to get in and people might find you via search or other means. But prioritizing this is really, really key. It's a short list these days too from what I read and I can't remember the exact study, but I think it was something like today's consumer is looking at two to three products as opposed to traditionally about five to six. And it's also a short list that you need to get into.
So it's a double whammy there. Yeah, absolutely. You know, we've had a lot of really great sessions recently with Matt Chanella and Dale Harrison and it's fascinating when you really dive deep into brand how people believe that one program or one activation is enough and that the like the memory decay of one particular brand program is so rapid that this always on brand motion is really required. And so, you know, from my perspective, when you think about a brand strategy, priority number one is your unique point of view and your strategic narrative.
You know, what are what is your story? Right? So, you know, what are your story? Are you telling to the market that is going to make them understand the problem that you solve your solution and have a recall of an association of your brand with that problem and solution?
Getting that story right, making it compelling is much harder than I think people give it credit for. And so that is a key input in order for any brand program to be successful. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting having, you know, we're two years into champion now and about two and a half and, you know, I'd always been at a scale up, right?
And so interesting to build from the ground up and really to build up brand from its infancy and thankfully, my co-founder Jeff Rieger is a brilliant marketer and so he really took the reins here. But it was really fascinating to watch how important it was to survey, right? Speak to thousands of customer marketers. Of course, that was a space that we were selling into to help us understand what those problems were to use their words within our branding, within our messaging, that narrative that you speak of so that we really could show and explicitly be aligned to, right, those problems that we were solving as we're creating a little bit of a new space or a lot of players in customer marketing, but it's still not a major strategic program in the eyes of the C-suite.
And that's where Jeff and I are really trying to change that narrative alongside our customers to say, look at how much impact you can make and do make as a customer marketer. And that's really that narrative, Megan, that you eloquently studied so hard to do sometimes, right, to really create that wave. Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to dig into this more in terms of from your perspective, what are some of the brand programs that you have activated to get your story out into the market?
What's been successful for you guys so far to date? Yeah, so definitely social, obviously, having a presence on social and really being thoughtful about the content, but we wholeheartedly believe that business is human and we are trying to make the buying cycle human again. And to do that, that means that we're sharing human stories, human struggle, human successes, and so we're really bringing our customers to the forefront of this story. So whether that's them helping us really create the narrative and understand the pain points, it's also really amplifying our voice and what they've done.
So one social and utilizing our customers, actual voice stories, et cetera, for that win. But then it's also creating events. So we did a whole series of events. We partnered with another company doing round tables and giving, again, the platform for our prospects, our customers, our main ICP to really create a beautiful environment so that they can share what they're going through.
So we're just like the platform, right, the medium for them to get together. But that in turn builds a brand to show that we are invested in them. And that's part of our core value is really showing this community that we're a part of wanting to help them rise in getting more C-suite visibility. And to do that, it's about elevating each other.
Now that we're kind of past the COVID era, I think we're all noticing and seeing either as observers or participants or hosts in-person events are so powerful, small dinners are great ways to engage with your audience and community. And community can mean a lot of different things, right? It doesn't always necessarily need to be a Slack community, but that can absolutely help. It's like, how are you bringing your perspective customers and your customers together so that they can share and learn?
Don, I love your question in the chat around customer interviewing. And when Gianna gets back on, we'll definitely get her take on this. I think one thing that we've been testing out at Refine Labs in relation to customer interviewing is we've been leveraging the Winter software platform for some really interesting brand sentiment surveys as well as buyer research. And we have been finding that actually having some customer interviews that are really focused on the buying process specifically has been really eye-opening about what they actually care about and kind of piecing together the murky customer journey that we know people kind of go through today.
And so I'll be really interested in hearing Gianna's perspective on what they did for their customers. Don, I'm seeing your response. Yeah. And I think what we have noticed is we have been leveraging both technology for some kind of surveying as well as getting in front of actual people.
And I hear you don't. It's expensive from both a time and resource perspective, but the insights are so valuable. And the reality is, we've been doing these in cohorts of 10 or 15. You don't necessarily need hundreds or thousands to get really valuable and interesting insights.
And Donna was actually really interested to hear more about how you did the customer interviewing that you mentioned for big groups of people. And she's interested to hear a little bit more about that. I was sharing a little bit about some of the buyer committee research projects. We've been running at Refine Labs, but those are on a very small scale, very focused on how people buy, but share your experience with what you've done with customer surveys.
Absolutely. So we actually did these live or when I'm on via Zoom. And so, well, I should say there were different parts of it. How we really got started was booking time and asking for people's time.
So whether it's your customer base that you're doing this with or as we were entering the market building a product, it was really no lies about what the intent was, which was really asking for people's time to help us. And I think that that's really important to explicitly share and that you're not trying to sell them, but you are asking for their time. And so we did one-on-one meetings with people 30-minute time slots, if they could allot 30 minutes, with just very specific questions to learn about their pain points. So if you are exploring wanting to solicit feedback from others, I would say really understand what it is you are trying to gather and create a framework that you could use and replicate with many.
And so we did that for one-on-one conversations. We also threw some events. So we did some happy hour-style events where we gave a very brief presentation to tease an idea. And then within that idea, we were then able to walk around the room, solicit feedback, book some follow-ups that way, which was a great way to go deeper into a conversation.
From a survey perspective, there are great tools out there that you can use to, again, formulate some bigger responses from a larger sample size. And so again, I think it always boils down to really thinking about what outcome you are looking for, what type of information you are looking for, and then create your framework of questions from there, where you can really extract thematically the different responses to drive change. Yeah. Awesome answer.
I love it. I mean, we could go on and on and on about brand, but let's move on to the next pillar and dive a little bit into the demand pillar. I'll speak to this a little, and then we'll love to get your take, Gianna, especially from customer marketing and a customer advocacy perspective. I think this is another area that I think can be so underutilized or underleveraged.
And so when we think about the brand demand expand pillar, the goal of brand is really being on that day one consideration set. That's really the goal that you're after. From a demand perspective, we are looking at that in how do we convert interest and attention into sales conversations and pipeline? And this is where you get a lot of, what I would say is probably the stuff that's become really the go-to in terms of growth strategies over the last five years is how are we thinking about performance marketing?
How are we thinking about our website? How are we thinking about people converting off the website? How are we educating and activating our buyers? How do we make sure if they're searching for us somewhere that we are coming up in that search so that we can be part of the process?
How are we making that experience as frictionless as possible? And what I like to say is usually from a, when you're looking at all of these pillars, the demand pillar is probably the easiest thing to spend the most money on. And so I think you have people honestly over investing in this pillar because it feels coin operated. I'm going to get some customers out.
It's easier to defend with your CFO. It's easier in some ways to measure success and to track. We're not going to get into an attribution conversation today. But the key here is this is a critical pillar, right?
This is how you drive short and medium term results for your business. And it's critically important but should not be over prioritized relative to the other pillars if you're really looking to build a sustainable growth engine. Something I'm really interested in from your perspective, G, is, and things that I wasn't necessarily automatically connecting to customer marketing. But you guys talk a lot about how you can facilitate references or referrals.
And so I would love to you to expand on your perspective there because I do think that is again, something that's underutilized, which for all of us could be an opportunity that we haven't capitalized on yet. Yeah, for sure. I think you nailed it. What is not mentioned often in demand is how do you use your customers to facilitate growth within this segment?
How do you facilitate customers to increase your win rates, decrease time to close? References is a great way to do that. So something that we're doing at Champion is thinking about how do we use AI to pair your best prospect? Right?
With your best customer. It's smart matching. And why I bring this up is not just to say, hey, look how awesome we are at Champion because we are. But it's to say, how are you thinking about what that pairing looks like because not any customer looks exactly the same.
And so you want to have as contextualized as a conversation as possible. You really want going back to the pain, right? Understanding what that prospect? Why haven't they said yes yet?
Right? Understanding what their objection is and then finding that customer that had that same problem they worked through, that's going to be the best conversation. So utilizing AI to be able to pair that is what will actually tick the needle into, um, ticking that needle for revenue, right? And then it also facilitates sales having more time to focus on all of the other things so it can expedite the sales process as well.
Also what we don't think about with references is the psychological benefit that it gives to the customer. They get to share how much they love you. Think about when you do that when you're just talking about a restaurant that you went to or that new product you just tried. It brings joy and so it evokes that emotion again.
So in a way, a customer serving as a reference also helps to expand because they're reminded of how much benefit and value they've gotten from you because they get to talk about it time and time again. Hopefully you're not overusing it. I'm using them though on the reference side. You also ask Megan about referrals.
This again is a really great way to utilize your customer base. I actually put this in place back when I ran RevOps for a tech services company and tech services we grew it from five million to a hundred million when we had our exit and you know you think about what tech services is great at is network and relationship driven sales, right? It's all about growing through the customer base and that was something that was really surprised when I moved over to product side that it's not as mature right of really understanding how customers had to utilize their network. And this is where I believe that referral play comes in.
So when I was at this tech services company, we realized we were amazing hunters. We had grown to about 30 million and then kind of were lolled there and we realized we needed to like crack the code on expansion, crack the code on going wide as we called it. And so what we did was we trained every sales rep to just ask their customers, hey, would anyone else in your network benefit from our services? Could you introduce me?
And that was incredibly powerful for sales reps to really start the engine on a referral introduction basis. And so now think about taking that back on the product side that really is a form of advocacy. We are along that customer journey. Is it applicable and the right time to ask your buyer, your customer for that referral?
I did that at Champion. I just closed a deal. She's awesome. Sadaf, thank you.
And I asked her, hey, would anyone else like, you know, benefit, you're out there, you're in the community. And she introduced me to one of the most favorite clients right now, two year contract, closed it within like a three month timeframe, one of the most recognizable brands that my mother actually knows. So I'm really excited that, you know, when you ask in that right moment, you know, it varies. You could, I asked them right at close and it was a great time to do it.
You know, just think about that breath of network that you could create there. Lastly, what I'll say is it also gives an opportunity for your customers to build their brand as well. It shows their network that they are thought leaders and that they have suggestions and value to bring outside of, you know, just what they're doing within their organization as well. Yeah, absolutely.
I think one of my biggest takeaways is, you know, even myself, if I'm being honest, in terms of references or referrals, I would say it's definitely more of a reactive motion versus a proactive motion. I'm in a sales process, someone asks for a reference and then I'm kind of scrambling to like find the right customer to connect them with referrals happen, you know, randomly and spontaneously, but I don't necessarily have an intentional strategy behind that. And so I think a huge takeaway from everything that you just covered is if you actually have an intentional proactive strategy for references and referrals, it is a massive unlock in terms of not only potential new business growth, but also customer happiness retention and expansion of those customers as well. So I love that.
Yeah. One other motion that we didn't talk about are job changes, right? Like that full flywheel of your customer. So thinking about you've got a customer who has moved on to another organization, are you following them there?
Because that's a great way to generate womb leads. 100%. And again, it's like you sort of have a pulse on that or you hope that they call you when they're in seat at their new company, but having that intentional strategy is key to be successful there. We have another question in the chat.
So before we segue into the expand pillar and Duke, I see you are your video is on. Let's bring you on, Steph. I don't know if you can unmute Duke. Why don't you ask your question live and we can chat about it.
Sounds good. Thank you. So the question of what's the right way to measure and track how strong your brand is, knowing that it's a foundational point of demand and expand. I then went through and read some of the blog posts, evidence sent over.
And what I took from, especially the brand one is it seems like to me is a unique point of view and then content. Are those the two most important components from your perspective? Yeah. And I think I noticed your question was very specific around measurement and tracking.
And so I think from a brand program perspective, I think a core input is like a clear ICP definition and a strong strategic narrative or POV. And then you need to activate those, right? And so you can activate that through content, through organic social thought leadership, through events, through community. And those are probably the big pillars in which you want to get in front of your audience and find different ways to communicate your narrative in those programs in order to build your brand, right?
And build that, that recall being, you know, being part of that day one consideration set. From a measurement standpoint, we've been looking at a few things for brands specifically. And so a really interesting metric to look at is share of search. Now, looking at this requires that you look at it over a pretty long span of time.
And what you want to actually start to measure is what is the baseline of our current share of search? So thinking through this is you're going to have a set of competitors in your market and people are going to go to Google and will search specific brands. And so when you actually aggregate all of the players in your space, what percentage of that sort of branded search is your company getting relative to your competitors. And so there's a way for you to get kind of like a baseline.
And there's pretty high correlation of share of search to market share overall, right? There are other factors that go into market share, but there's some interesting correlations there. Once you have your baseline and understand how you're performing relative to your competitors, then that's when you can begin to implement more focus brand programs and then measure the change of your share of search over time. I typically would recommend looking at this quarterly, but really anchoring on every six months to understand how you've improved that overall metric.
And I mean, really what that is saying is, are the percentage of people that know your brand and putting your brand into Google increasing over time? And if so, you can argue that your brand programs are being successful. Now within each of the programs, there are obviously different ways you can measure, you know, the success of events and your content strategy, et cetera. But I would think at the high level that that's critical.
And then taking a step back, you could argue that your brand marketing has an entire halo effect over the whole business. So businesses that are growing at a healthy clip year over year that have, you know, healthy margins are always definitely running brand programs. And you can argue that overall business growth is a function of effective brand. Obviously sales is an input.
Obviously, you know, every team has their role in that. But that's how you would think about measuring brand, very distinct from if you're looking at, you know, demand gen programs in terms of paid, then you can get much more granular at the program level of how you're measuring success. But you need to have a longer term mindset. I think the other, the last thing that I'll say is we've been testing some of the brand sentiment surveys via winter.
And that's really interesting to get kind of primary research on essentially if you are in the day one consideration set with your target ICP and then running those surveys every six to 12 months to see if you are noticing an improvement there as well. So that's another concrete measurement that you can be thinking about from that measurement perspective. So I kind of, I gave you a lot there. Any feedback or follow up questions?
No, that'll make sense. And again, I'm just going back to some of the previous events you've done with Dale Harrison of again, just talking about, okay, companies trying to invest so much more in the demand when they haven't even done enough on the brand to truly capitalize on both of that. So that's why I'm wanting to just make sure I'm starting from the perspective of understanding that the brand needs to be something that sets the tone for everything else after. Exactly.
And that's why we've been really championing this kind of brand demand expand framework because you really need all three. And you need to be thinking about all three within the context of building a growth system and kind of get out of the weeds of executing programs or campaigns. And that's I think really the difference between great companies that are growing and profitable and the ones that are not. Great.
Thank you. Yeah, thanks for coming on Duke. I appreciate it. All right.
So we've talked about brand and demand. I love the questions. Let's touch a little bit more on the expand pillar. We've been talking about a little bit of that throughout, but I think there's several aspects to this.
And I think from a practical, like digital marketing perspective, there's also some kind of low hanging fruit, in my opinion, in terms of what we can be thinking about in terms of bolstering our demand strategies. And so these are things that we've been doing for a long time. But how are you putting out customer case studies and social proof and testimonials as part of your paid advertising mix, especially for companies that are 500 million. And so there's a lot of people that are trying to get into a billion in revenue that have tens of thousands of customers.
There are meaningful ways for you to actually market your current customer base, because typically at that scale, you have multiple products and services that they can take advantage of where most customers are only using one or two of them. And so there are some kind of table stakes programs that a lot of people don't consider when they're defining their demand or their paid strategy that can be really impactful to integrate, both in directly marketing to your customers, but also taking customer wins and case studies and marketing them to prospective customers as well. There's so much more that when we think about the expand pillar, what this is really intended to represent is retaining your customers, expanding your customers, renewing your customers, turning your customers into evangelists and advocates. That's how businesses will really continue to grow and scale and that needs to be part of your go-to-market strategy.
These are not things that are only relegated to the customer success or customer support team. That is actually a growth motion. And I think a lot of people don't view it in that way. So it doesn't get the relative investment or priority that it should.
And I think it's just because people are not necessarily connecting the dots of the impact that it could have. And I know you have probably a million things to say about this tree. So pass it over to you. Yeah, I think theoretically speaking, I think where a lot of companies get it wrong as they mistake, is the customer happy versus is the customer succeeding?
And this is where I think the focus really needs to land is the, is the customer succeeding on your platform? Are they getting the value, the perceived value? And it's constantly re-addressing this endpoint. So it's thinking about arming your customer success reps, making sure that they do a business alignment, understand what that end result should be for that client and it's constantly evolving.
And so it really is a strategic partner in ensuring that you're aligned with the outcome that they're looking for. There are so many different things I want to say here that you mentioned from, I'll share an example of something that is a little off-cuff that you wouldn't think about. We talked about references in that kind of demand portion of helping to convert pipeline to one deal is think about doing the same for your customers. And again, you talked about expanding multi-product, why not pair a customer with a customer, right?
And really facilitate that growth pattern that you can create and recognizing how some of your strongest multi-product customers got to that evolution, right? And create that journey for your other customers. So one is just that thematic identification of that customer journey and then pairing them with the right customer at the right time for that conversation. Yeah, I love that.
And I think I'd, I'd love to, I feel like we've touched on this throughout, but I know that advocacy is something that you, you talk about a lot, I was going to say something that you champion. Talk about getting a great brand name, right? You know, exactly. Very fitting, very fitting.
But I think the, I think I'd love for you to speak more about that because I think there's, you know, and I think right now there's a kind of a trend in B2B marketing around, you know, influencers and how they can be, you know, essentially marketing your product or influencing purchase decisions. But I think an advocate is very distinct from an influencer. And maybe, you know, maybe there's some overlap there, of course, in some instances. But how would you define that and how, you know, how would you describe the importance of that overall?
Yeah, I mean, I agree to not like a word is just a word and it's really how we define it and really what the meaning that we want to extract from it, the purpose, right? I think B2C has done an amazing job of having influencers and really for utilizing that graph pattern and B2B is starting to adopt that same principle in practice, in addition to right, your loyal advocates. When I think about the difference between an influencer versus an advocate, an influencer is, it has a brand, right? Their own brand and it's utilizing their voice and their platform to say, Hey, I love this thing.
I think that hopefully it's done in a way where they really do love your product, right? I think in genuine. Exactly. I've seen it.
We all get that little cringe in that like, is it right? Verse in advocate. An advocate is your customer base that is deriving extreme value from your product. They intrinsically want to help you.
So if you think about an influencer, you more than likely will have to pay. It is a one to many verse creating a many to one, create many advocates who are going to have one to one very meaningful conversations over and over and over and over again. And this is what will really help you create a flywheel effect of your customers really being that word of mouth for you, building your brand, helping you drive demand and then also expanding. Or in the expanse section, but you can't talk about advocacy without talking about the influence across all three of these pillars.
And you know, and really kind of diving into the expanse portion of it. When you build advocates, again, it's really driving this extreme value. And so then it's thinking about how do you partner with them to better understand the business needs, those growth potentials, the expansion potential. And that's really when you could go from a one year contract to a three year contract or start to push those boundaries, having more and more transparent conversations.
So I think you could think of your advocates as your partners and your growth strategy within that core account, thinking about it from multi product to then also thinking about just a better contract, adding in case studies, utilizing their story to then help you and the other pillars as well. Yeah, 100% well said. So I think one interesting topic related to all these three pillars that I wanted to touch on and then we'll open it up for some more Q&A is budgeting and budget allocation. So we're in budgeting season right now.
Everybody is putting together 26 plans and 2026 budgets. I think the typical, the typical themes that we see as we're working with customers and we're understanding how they're currently deploying their go-to-market budget. Well, we typically find, and again, this is not everyone, but this is sort of general conclusions is we typically see demand is overfunded, brand is underfunded, and there's no real proactive consideration around the expand pillar. So that seems to be kind of the predominant theme across a lot of companies that we work with.
And a lot of people will ask like, well, how much should we spend per pillar or per channel or per program? And so, you know, I think there's no perfect ratio. Every business is going to be different. But I think that as a general rule, we've been anchoring on, you know, the reality is, you know, growing today and tomorrow and next week is going to continue to be super critical for every business.
And so, you know, 50 to 60% of your budget may be as allocated to demand programs. That's really anchored on those shorter and medium term results. But that, you know, then hopefully 20 to 30% is invested in various brand programs. And like, let's get expand to the table at least and allocate 10 to 20%.
Your overall go-to-market motion. And again, these are intended to be ranges to provide kind of a baseline for people to just be thinking about their own budget and first asking the question of like, how are we allocating things today? Are there things that we're just totally ignoring or not taking advantage of that are going to impact our ability to grow in the medium and the long term and should be thinking about making some changes? I would imagine you kind of mentioned this earlier on in our talk, Gianna, that sometimes there's no like budget line item at all for customer marketing or various programs related to customer marketing.
And so I'm sure you have a lot to say on this topic too. But what's your POV on sort of budgeting and how companies need to be thinking about this? Yeah, I think that this is a CRO conversation. It needs to be.
Customer marketing is a core function of making sure that new go-to-market motion runs. Why I say that is because everyone is really tasked with growing more efficiently these days. And the way to do that is to focus on NRR. That means that you must focus on your retention and your expansion of your customers.
It means that you have to have a cute focus on your ICP so that you're not wasting dollars on brand or demand marketing to the wrong people. How you continue to invest in the right areas and understand your ICPs by understanding your customers, making sure that you invest in a cab so that you understand how they're evolving. Therefore, your product or your service evolves with them as well. This is what's going to ensure that your roadmap is always representative of the evolving needs of your ICP.
So, in my mind, I would flip it and say expand really like your customers is where you need to invest in. We're starting to see that customer marketing has more and more influence within this conversation because they're now tools like Champion where you can really tie your efforts to ROI, showing the revenue impact and that of course is what a CRO needs to see. But really thinking about how your customers are that centralized kind of engine to the bigger engine. Yeah, I love that.
And as kind of a customer success professional at heart, I spent the bulk of my career really in that discipline. I couldn't agree more, I think. And love that you're kind of going at it from the CRO angle. I think that's really smart and that makes a lot of sense in terms of who are the right folks on the C team that are going to have a budget authority and influence over these types of decisions.
Yeah. Because you think about customer marketing and really influencing the full scope of the customer journey, right? Everything from brand and utilizing the customer voice to build that brand to demand some of the different practices that we mentioned of references, referrals, tracking job changes to then expand motions as well, creating advocates, understanding who they are and giving them a platform of influence. Yeah, absolutely.
Awesome. Awesome. Let's open it up for questions. We have about 10 minutes left, so we can take a few questions and do a few closing thoughts.
Oh, do you have a very direct question for you, G, in the chat? Are you reading it? I have not read it yet. He was asking, there's no pricing on the champion website.
Is there a strategy behind it? Well, I'm a longtime listener. So I just, I remember Chris talking about this so many years ago. And again, I do advocate for pricing transparency.
Yeah. I was just curious because honestly, after listening to some of the initial parts of the conversation, I immediately forwarded your website link to another team member. And like Megan was saying, I'm going through my own budget right now as well, looking at okay, is this something that I advocate for, just for my team? So I was just more curious than anything.
I love it. I do have written down your name, but you will be getting a reach out after this. But we took it down because we were working on it. So the intentionality is we are revising our pricing structure.
Got it. So the intent, once you have some kind of an updated model, you'll publish it on the site for folks? Yes. Yeah.
Nice. Nice. It's under construction. And it just goes back to kind of the point that I made in the demand pillar section around removing friction from the buying process, right?
And under giving people all the information that they need so that when they're coming in and saying, hey, I want to have a sales conversation, they've almost gone through, you know, a majority of qualification almost on their own by understanding who you serve, what you offer, how much of costs, you know, the outcomes you can provide. So for those that are here, you can look in the chat, but Elaine is saying I'm curious. Do enterprise companies plan their strategies around something like brand demand expand? Maybe that's a silly question.
I'd love to understand if that's actually how it works, asking this, because it's mentioned earlier that there's no budget for allocated for expand. And so it's a great question. So typically what I see in the majority of refined labs, customers are what I would classify as like mid market and enterprise companies. So typically what we see from a budget perspective is there's typically budget allocated for demand and brand.
Those are typically line items. Again, usually what we see is that demand is almost overfunded and that brand is underfunded. Now, when we think about the expand pillar, I think some of the line items that might exist under the expand pillar are things probably related to essentially product or customer success. And so it's not that there's sort of nothing there.
But what I would say is it's budgeted as almost like a cost of goods sold and not a growth investment. People are not thinking about it that way. And even the handful of strategies that G went over today in terms of references, referrals, job changes, there's no intentionality really behind that. Or especially for these larger companies, like how are you actually marketing?
Like you have tens of thousands of customers. You have hundreds of thousands of customers. Like that's a huge audience and you can be marketing to them just like you market to your perspective customers. And so typically what we see is what we're calling expand as a growth pillar is not explicitly budgeted for as a growth motion.
And there could be some line items that are representing, you know, account management or account expansion. But it's typically looked at as a cost center versus a growth investment. And again, even if it is in the budget as a cost center, it's typically underfunded of what I think it deserves. And I think it just becomes I think it's really just a lack of connecting the dots around how these can have an impact.
And what I would say is if you think about like 2020 to 2024, the reality is for most companies net new logo acquisition was the most important thing. And really everything else was kind of put to the side or ignored. But we're moving into a new world right now in a new era. And we're already beginning to see how the erosion of your customer base in, you know, in churn, you know, a lack of flat N.R.R.
or declining N.R.R. has really serious business implications. And so we're at this juncture now where people are starting to see this as a real problem. And this is why we are talking about this because there's actually something that companies can do and they can start to do things differently than how they've done things before.
And I think this is a good thing. Obviously net new logo acquisition is super important and it will continue to be important. But these other pillars are just as important as well. And so my art, I think for me, G and I, I think the hope is if we can just talk about things, educate people, give them a roadmap of how to think about moving from where they are today to the next phase of building their growth engine that we can help more and more companies move in this direction.
G, what would you add? Yeah, I think you're exactly right about that. What I would add is, and this is where it goes back to budgeting, right? There needs to be a budget for expand.
And it's really thinking about if your only focus or your primary focus is on adding net new pipeline, it's constant hamster wheel because you're not focused on the fallout. And so you not only have to grow, you need to grow 15%, but you're losing 10%. Like you've got to make up that 10% and then get to the 15% growth. That is very expensive.
That is what causes burnout. That is what will give you an impact, your brand reputation of potentially not meeting ICP needs. So again, really focusing on this expansion motion, really focusing on your growth through your customers is inherently going to help your growth rate on demand grow because of that word of mouth, because of that success, because of how it strengthens the brand. Yeah, 100% will said.
Any other questions before we wrap up? This is one I need my Jeopardy music playing. All right, we'll give it another second or two for some questions. You have another one pops up and Gee, you can start preparing your closing remarks.
Oh, Duke, come on, come on, come on. One more. That's OK. What's your best advice to create better sales and marketing alignment?
I love this question. My favorite, favorite, favorite activity. We did this at air call. Madeleine Dupree helped orchestrate this session.
We had first team alignment and we didn't do this at the C suite. We did it at my team did this. Right. So again, I shared with you, we were SDR, BDR all the way through customer success.
I had my VPs and director level. We all got in a meeting and we talked about the customer journey. We talked about where there was fallout. We talked about really thinking about where we could catch that fallout and create improvement plans and we had everyone build it together, all of the different department heads so that they had to think about the impact of bum, MQLs or, you know, closing deals that weren't within the ICP and how that impacts the plus one that next team.
So really aligning everyone on the outcome, which is strong NRR, right? And whatever that number might be your goals are and building that program together, really understanding how would we rate ourselves? How would our customers rate us within each of these segments of the customer journey? Where is their fallout and what can we do to improve that?
So it's getting everyone to think about this holistically. The second tip and I don't know if you can, if you can do this, something that I did with, I put a bonus in place so that we were looking at the total growth number. So my goal was, you know, ARR, right? And NRR.
And so it was, you know, putting a bonus in place so that your BDR manager is thinking all the way through customer success. And that way, you know, have whatever that total, you know, whether it's a global number or, you know, P&L number for a certain geography, having them targeted on that to make them think, you know, a few steps ahead. I love that. That's a great exercise.
I was going to just add, I think, shared goals and incentives. I think that a lot of the misalignment that happens can be solved at the leadership level with appropriate goal setting and incentives. But getting everyone in the room and rallied around the customer is how you're going to get like the boots on the ground really invested. I think and I love that recommendation, Gianna.
Awesome. Thank you both. Yeah. Great questions, Duke.
You were like our co-host today. I love it. All right. I think a great event.
We're going to have to do this again sometime. I was so wonderful to have you. And as we're wrapping things up, OK, so if I had to say, you know, what were some of the top, you know, top three takeaways from this conversation that you just kind of want to reinforce for everyone before we wrap up. I focus on expand.
That's what's going to drive the other to strengthen the other two pillars. I would end with that. I love that. So that's one, two and three.
That's right. That's right. I love it. I love it.
I love it. Well, it was awesome to see everyone will be publishing this to the podcast. So check out Stacking Growth. Thanks to Gianna for being here with me and we will catch you next month, which are our next event.
Good to see everyone. Thanks, everyone. Great questions, Duke. Thanks, Pacey.
Thanks to you later.