Hey everyone, welcome to the March Refine Labs demand expert session. Today we have a really cool topic. We're going to be talking about leveraging influencers and advisors as part of your marketing strategy. Definitely a hot topic right now and B2B marketing land in LinkedIn land.
We have Natalie Marketuow from Nevada, who's joining us today, who has successfully implemented this program. So really excited for our very own Chris Walker and Natalie to talk through the unique approach that Nevada took to implementing this in a way that was actually impactful in driving business results. We have an awesome agenda to cover a lot of tactical takeaways. So you all can lead this session having some inspiration and some ideas to consider making this happen at your company.
And like always, we'll make sure that we keep 15 to 20 minutes at the end for some open Q&A. So if you have any questions as we go, feel free to drop them in the chat and really excited to have Chris and Natalie come to the stage and get the conversation started. Let's do it. What's up everyone?
Great to have you here. Good to have the crew. I see Matt Chanel, I see Brie. Nice to see you.
I'm sure a bunch of other people are here as well. Natalie, looking forward to going into this with you. I think we're going to start more high level just to like level set on an advisor program. Even when you hear the term advisor, I think people could think about a lot of different things.
Let's clarify and some context for people. And then let's get into some of the details about how we can make an impact, how we're actually utilizing these people and get into a bunch of different stuff. So with that, let's just get started. How do you view an advisor program?
I'm sure that there are some nuances and differences. So I'll give you the floor to explain how you see that. Yeah. And I've always had trouble defining this.
It's kind of a visor, kind of influencer, even when we're naming this talk. We're trying to figure out how to put it. But the way I view it is a strategic partner that provides obviously messaging, go to market feedback. And really say the main benefit is if people in our ICP or work with our ICP, that not only obviously help promote Nevada through their own channels and own networks, but also can almost act as like my go to, if I want to get checked from my ICP or people I can talk to my go to like group of people I can just rely on.
Do you see this as different or part of an influencer strategy? Or do you see them as two distinct things? Like how do you view that? Because I think that there can be a lot of advisors that provide a lot of great advice on strategy and how the market is going without necessarily having a personal brand and influencing.
So we'd love to see how you see that. At least for our group, I see it as both. Because yes, they do obviously help advise strategy, all that. But also we did to people who have a brand who are well known in the industry.
So they do also promote Nevada. I think what people often ask me about is, oh, can you tell me about your influencer program? Because they just assume they're just influencers and don't know that actually there's the advising side. It's a little more behind the scenes.
Yeah. And for those that listen to this podcast or been to events, it sounds pretty close to what I've been calling a key opinion leader strategy, which sort of meshes the influencing of where the market is going in addition to bringing in product strategy and roadmap and feedback. So I think that we're more or less on the same page with different terminology. Would you say so?
Yeah. When I saw that post, I actually went and fired this whole talk. I was like, oh, that's a perfect way to describe it. Megan, I know in the prep session, we're almost describing a little bit like a customer advisory board too, like a little bit of a mix of all those ideas.
Yeah. And I think it's, would you tell me, I think it's fair to say that not necessarily everybody in the advisor program needs to be an active customer? Or how do you see that? Oh, yeah.
Majority at this point aren't active customers because they're consultants. They're freelancers. Their full-time job is maybe content creation, promotion, consulting strategy, but a lot of them used to be customers or their customers are customers. And I see when you think about like an influencer program, it's purely promotional, right?
You're leveraging somebody else's audience for distribution and influence and then you're paying for that either on a flat fee or a CPM basis or something like that. How do you divide like the level of effort and how you utilize this group of people between like promotional and strategy? And actually I probably about like 60, 70% strategy and advice and again, that's a part people aren't seeing and then like 30, 40% promotional. So a lot of behind the scenes is, they also kind of play hand in hand.
So for example, if I have an idea, I might say, support guard state, interactive product demo, big report, we put out, I might get their feedback early on, ask what are the most interesting stats or takeaways you had. And then that feeds into the promotion. I know what our ICP thinks is most interesting. And then I'll ask them, hey, can you post about the most interesting stat you found?
So mostly advice, but they kind of play together. I think a lot of companies try to cheap out when they do things like this and say like, Oh, we'll give you like 0.00001% equity that's going to get diluted over the next five funding rounds that we raise. But it's going to be so worth it to you practically how you, what's the incentive structure for these people to remain engaged and financially compensated. Yeah, it's one of the key learnings I've had because I've tried and advised a program at past companies do is don't do a based off of equity if you can avoid equity because to your point, it's way too long term.
And like, let's be honest, if you're using equity as a startup, they might not see payment to like 10 years from now. It's going to be hard to keep a 10-year-long relationship. So we just do monthly payments just like you pay any other consultant, part-time CMO freelancer, just monthly invoices. I also think it's what helps just keep it top of mind.
Right versus equity is just kind of invisible. You're not checking on it frequently versus if you're sending a monthly invoice, it's like, Oh, yeah, Nevada, I should go check up with them or, Oh, right, I should post something. They could just kind of reminder. And then we also do have revenue sharing.
So obviously, if I do also help, they bring in potential customers, so for anyone that they bring in and that's close one, they get a certain percentage of that revenue, just like any kind of a program. So important on the short-term compensation, I feel like, because for anybody inside of your company that's delivering value from the outside should be compensated for the input that they have, just like if they were a consultant or an agency or something like that. So I totally see the value in that. Now, talk me through, like, do you get these people together in a group?
Do you do an offsite? Do you do like a virtual zoom? Is it more one-on-one and ad hoc? Like, what is the flow of how to engage and utilize these resources?
Yeah, but to a few different methods. And I will say, like, when working with the Viders, I think are really important pieces. They have a job outside of advising you. So I try not to fit everyone to one box.
I have a few different methods that they can choose how they want to engage with works best for them. So biggest thing I do when I recommend this to anyone do what they do thinking about this type of program is a monthly email. That's really nicely laid out that says, Hey, here are maybe like two to three big initiatives coming this month. And then here are my asks and big bold letters, whether it is promoting something or whether it's for feedback or something.
And then that's one of my anchors. So I know, can check every single month. The advisors up to date on what's really important about it, what are big initiatives. And anytime someone's like, Hey, can we ask an advisor to do X?
I can usually try to bucket into this app. So they're not just getting a bunch of one-off things. We also have a Slack channel with all the advisors in it, which is really fun because like, then I get to watch them brainstorm and add ideas to each other. Sometimes if I'm stuck on something, like messaging, I'll just post a bunch of ideas and say, what do you like, what do you hate, give feedback?
And then some advisors I do one-on-one meetings with. I've also done a few group brainstorming, but mostly async, just because obviously again, they have a job outside of this. And honestly, if I was in meetings with every single one of my advisors all the time, I wouldn't have time to do my job as well. I'm sure there's a sweet spot in terms of the amount or the total number of people you have engaged with this at any one time.
Have you found what that sweet spot is? I can imagine if they had too many, it'd be difficult to prioritize and collect feedback. So what do you think the right amount is to get this off the ground? So to get off the ground, you can start with two or three.
We started with two for a while. And it wasn't really like a flush down as is now. This has taken like two years to develop, which is also why I feel comfortable talking about now. But at the beginning, I'd say you really don't need a lot.
Now we have about like, well, and I wouldn't go much more than like 15. I was actually talking with a founder who was asking me about this program and they're like, why haven't you scaled this out 200? And I really am beside like, this is not Google ads. You can't just like put more money in and get more results out.
This is a relationship. So I could have 200, but I can't handle 200 relationships. I don't know about anyone else. You can get good for you.
But part of it's getting to know the person understanding what are their strengths. Also, just like, I like the relation aspect side of it and getting to know them. So I don't, I wouldn't advise going much more than like 20 because I do think you're really going to lose that. Yeah, side note, well, it's easy to spend more money in Google.
It's not that easy to spend more money and get equal results out. And that's very clear. And then another point on the cost, like I don't know how much that you're compensating. These people, which is pretend it's $2,000 a month.
If you had five of these advisors, it costs less than a manager level employee fully loaded. And so when you compare it to internal headcount, expense, especially as a small company, that you can get tons more firepower and insights and breadth of skills and experience. It's not necessarily either or but I do think it's important to put into context for people. The comparison between that and spending $5,000 more on LinkedIn ads or hiring a entry level or manager level employee.
Let's make sure we stay on track here. That's important. Do you think that there's, you started this as a small company, I see it as a large advantage, especially with a small marketing team to be able to involve those people, make a lot of the right more decisions, be able to influence and things like that. But I imagine that larger companies are thinking about this or maybe trying to do it, but not necessarily doing it in the same way as you.
How do you sort of think about that between small scrappy marketing team versus large established company? Yeah, I think the benefit of small scrappy is that you could try to test things a little more and maybe get a little more creative. So for example, for our first two advisors, I think we gave them Nevada for free and actually shout out, I think that's the idea I got from you, Chris. And like at a bigger company, you might not be allowed to do that.
So I think the benefits of a small company, just like try more the relationships side, you can kind of try like really throwing the kitchen sink at them and what you have that might not just be payment, right? It doesn't always just have to be okay, I'll pay you more really think about also, can you maybe help them promote their community? Can you spot like them on your if you have some presence like on their LinkedIn or something like that, try to use any angle that you have or really giving them as much attention as possible, like the best angle you might have is time. So maybe you give them your product for free and then you for us, maybe we build them interactive demos.
If that's what we have to offer, we can do that because we're early in the art as many rules versus you're big, you might have more of obviously money that you can just throw out people, but also to like your brand, your presence, right? Invite them to speak at events. That might be big for them. Try to figure out.
I think a really big hack is try to figure out where they want to go in their career, figure out if they want to become more of an influencer, they want to speak more of their goals and then figure out how you can use your network to plug in there. 100% just double clicking on reverse engineer what those people actually want and then figure out how you're able to use your resources and things like that to be able to deliver on it. Back in 2016, I did this when I was working at medical device companies and the advisors were people that worked inside of hospitals that use our product that also did like clinical trials and published studies and spoke at the conferences. And so what did those people want?
Those people wanted the esteem of a lot of people knowing about the great work and research that they did. And so what did we do? We gave them a stage. We flew them to conferences.
We hosted webinars that got 500 people there. And it wasn't actually the financial compensation that was important to them. It was about being able to share the seven years of work that they dedicated to be able to have that type of research and study. And so it doesn't always have to be financial and just double clicking there.
Okay, Natalie, so now we're getting into the age old question, which is pretend we're spending $10,000 a month on this group of advisors and $10,000 a month as a small startup as a significant investment. So how are we going to measure the ROI on like the advice and product strategy like that type of stuff is very hard to quantify in terms of direct ROI. And you said that a majority of the time and effort they put in value they provide is actually on that side, not on the promotional influencing side. But I have to imagine even the small amount of promotional influencing side that they have, you want to be able to measure the ROI of that.
So what is your process for being able to one measure it and understand it and then be able to optimize it and also communicate back to the company, the impact of these investments? Yeah, not surprisingly, it's self-reported attribution mostly. I mean, we also sell to marketers, they tend to give good attribution. But on top of that, too, I mentioned the referral part of it.
We hear a lot of times our advisors will say to us, Hey, I had a conversation with someone about interactive demos. They want to talk to you. They just sometimes give us direct referrals. So the most direct form of ROI is through self-reported attribution that how did you hear about some literally saying ex-advisors LinkedIn post, talked to ex-advisor or also measuring the number of referrals we get from those advisors.
A step level down that which I think is just as important is word and mouth leads. So we get a lot of leads that come from self-reported attribution again that say literally say word and mouth, literally say like from a customer or from a coworker, from a friend, from on LinkedIn. So when we think about the success of the advisor program and we do measure it in terms of ROI, yes, the strategy is a huge piece of it. But we do see that this is ROI positive, especially if we can include the pieces of word and mouth in LinkedIn growth.
Once that I can share with that last year, our word and mouth leads grew 65 percent year over year. And it's now our second high-slee channel. That is not as directly attributable, but I would push if you're thinking about this, don't just measure the exact lead to say they came from that exact advisor, measure word and mouth, measure LinkedIn. Because that's obviously not just me and the company LinkedIn page that's causing that growth.
Clearly, it's partly the advisors. Another double click. I've been saying this for what three or four years now, if you want to do innovative things in your marketing programs like Connected TV that Matt talked about, the advisor program that Natalie's talking about, changing your LinkedIn strategy from a lead gen to a demand creation strategy or any of the other innovative things that we all know intuitively work, that you must fundamentally add new ways to measure things because digital touch point based attribution is never going to pick up your fucking advisory program, never. And we need to be able to acknowledge that and be able to put other pieces in place with the things that we believe in, that we know we're going to work as marketers.
We know that our customer centric and valuable, that we have the simple investments in time and energy to be able to measure those appropriately report back to the companies, we can keep doing them totally love that and love that you've been implementing that and see those results every person that comes on here that mentions important things like that always references self-reported attribution as a means of doing it. And I still estimate that 98% of B to B companies don't collect that data. Therefore, we never see these things. Any other tips for measuring success week we talked self-reported attribution direct referrals, both of those combined seem like incredibly sufficient to me and would be able to demonstrate the ROI.
But any other sort of qualitative or anecdotal sentiments that you found is important to communicate back to the executive team or the company related to these types of programs. I think one like don't do it. And hey, this will work for you. We didn't see it work for us was referral codes.
Like when I talk about direct referrals, that's more someone literally messaging someone on LinkedIn. We had tried a few times, hey, you know, use Nevada code 50% like you hear in podcasts. That didn't really resonate. We didn't really see anyone use it.
So I think part of the point of this strategy that it shows to feel a little more like organic and by adding a code, I think it just kind of cuts through that entirely. So I wouldn't recommend the code qualitative feedback though is huge. And I think that's what going to events conferences. That's when you hear these things.
That's when you hear the things, oh, I checked you out because everyone was talking about you or like, probably these next shows you over X competitor was because of your brand presence. They just seem like everyone used you or knew you. So I would say like make sure you're also asking the market and getting that feedback, not just relying on the data and to start very small, this also have to be like this huge influx because this took two years. You're not going to get a huge influx of leads from the beginning.
But look at the specific deals that came from advisors and look at things like sales cycle like win rates. Because for us, the reason we actually scaled up this program was from a few reps saying like, Hey, our favorite leads are the ones that come from advisors. Can we expand that and that made a lot easier to get buy into? Awesome.
So let's pretend we're outside of marketing, right? So let's try and help some people that sell to other personas, other than marketing and sales. And let's just talk through the process of what would be the steps in order to identify your first two to three advisors in the market in a different industry outside of sales and marketing. Maybe where it's not as prevalent in terms of posting on LinkedIn or other places that are obvious to sales and marketers.
What would be the process to figure that out? And then I'll share some things that work for me as well. Yeah, I think the biggest thing, and I wish we did more of this was find your customers who again, maybe are a little more vocal, who've expressed interest in maybe creating a little more brand for themselves or being a subject matter expert, I think in marketing and sales, we think of this personal brand. But that doesn't mean other industries don't have it doesn't mean other industries don't have people who like want to be thought as thought leaders in their industry.
So maybe they're not posting on LinkedIn, but maybe they go to a bunch of conferences. Maybe they write a lot of industry newsletters or reports like find those people, especially if they are customers, that's an extra plus. And then explain to them how being part of your program will help as we talk about before expand that expertise. For us, we did find people who are like, and again, doesn't have to be LinkedIn, can be any channel who are just like naturally talking about topics that really related to one on ICP and two-arm market.
So found people talking about Transparent, you'd be buying found people talking about showing your product earlier on your website or more in the go-to-market function. And so we also left one off of people just to work customers who had a shared message and not made it really easy for them to also like want to work with us because they're like, Oh, yeah, I believe in that. Your product helps that cool natural alignment there. Yeah, a couple things that have worked for me.
I think looking at your trade show investments, picking out the three that are the most effective and most specific to your area and then looking at the people that speak at the conference on your specific track, I think can be a great way to quickly find some and then additional things that have worked for me, survey your target customers and ask them a variety of questions. But one of them is who are the people that you trust the most or the people that publish content online that you trust the most that can be good and then also qualitative interviews with customers. So going to like, for instance, when I was working in medical and things like that, we would go to the regional hospitals and visit those people for sales conversations and ask like, Hey, how do you decide what to do? And then in the Pacific Northwest, literally every hospital is like, Oh, we do whatever Seattle Children's Hospital does.
And they're like, Oh, who in there is and then we figure out who in there is actually publishing the clinical guidelines, it was Rob DeBlasi and then Rob DeBlasi was in our number one of our number one top targets for this type of program because we know that the clinical guidelines that he puts in place then drive what hundreds of hospitals underneath that do. What are some of the biggest mistakes that you've made? I'm sure in any endeavor, there are mistakes and missteps and so what are some things where you learn something that might be able to fast track some people that are going to try this in the future? Yeah, happy to touch on this.
And I saw in the chat, de-asked about firing advisors. So I can kind of like touch on just how to iterate on the advisor program. So to start, we are touch on equity. I would not recommend equity compensation.
You can have a be part of it, but then maybe do a mix of payment and equity again, just concert reminders versus something a little bit in the background. Like whenever I've done equity in the past, I just feel like it fades off. Another big thing, keep it small and keep it focused or ICP like don't get, I think it'll be really tempting to find people who have huge followings, but maybe don't speak to your ICP as much. And so one thing we implemented from the start is to start with a three month contract.
That way, you can just see if there's ICP alignment and if there's not, it's not, it doesn't have to be this huge big firing or conversation. It can just be like, hey, it's been great working with you. Let me know if I can help in the future in any way. I'd love to work or maybe no future job that might make sense.
In this case, I don't think our ICP is line. And I think that really helped to meet a less of a conversation about I don't like working with you. It's just, hey, naturally, I don't think that our messaging is resonating with your audience or our audience, your audience is best for us. So I'd say really find people based off of how much they are in ICP match, not necessarily like they are your exact ICP, but their messaging speaks to it versus just going after like just follower count.
Because I think it's again, 10-B tempting, but we also found that sometimes people with smaller followers had a more connected, engaged audience. And then third, I think be careful again about not trying to scale up too quickly. I would really recommend, and this wasn't something we naturally did this. It wasn't necessarily a mistake, but I'm so glad we did.
Start with like two or three and figure out what works for your program. Not everything I'm saying is going to work really well for your audience. But once you figure that out, it becomes a lot easier to scale up. And then also, when you reach out to other people, when you have an established advisor program, I've talked to our advisors about this before.
They can tell they want to work with companies who have, to some degree, have something figured out or have another, if I did they've worked with, show that it worked. So it really does help. That's why I generally say start with customers. So those might be the easiest to get or people you have natural relationship with.
Then once you've really figured out your process, that's when you try to scale up. Amazing. When you think about getting the budget to do this, where does it come from? Does it come from instead of buying paid ads, we're going to do this instead of hiring a product marketer, we're going to do this?
Like, how do you use your company and you internally think about how this falls into a typical budget line item? Yeah, I think that's to start. We took a little bit away from ads. And again, if you're starting with one or two, it doesn't happen to me.
It creates expensive. But now we have a whole line item dedicated to events, partnerships, customers appreciation, basically like it would fall all under word of mouth, sort of, and it fits under there. Amazing. Amazing.
All right. I know people have been probably blown up the chat. I can't see it myself, and I'm sure there was. I know we had a bunch of pre-submitted questions as well.
And so with that, Natalie, thank you for the overview. I find that the Q&A is always the place where we start to get really practical and specific. So if you all have a specific situation that you're working on, or you want to bring in your industry or your personas, we can get real practical. I think we should do that and invite you in anyone that's interested to come up for a comment or a question, and we'll take it from there.
Yeah, I want to bring on our good friend, Dia Casa. He was dropping a few questions, not just about how you fire an advisor, that we can answer, Natalie. And so, Dia, I know you had a couple of other questions that you brought up, so I wanted to bring you on so that you can ask one or two. Yeah, I have so many questions, because my camera goes out.
Question is, so when going to leadership, going to founders and saying, hey, I think it's worth investing in this person, whatever it might be, like the idea of a three-month contract, but how have you positioned that internally, especially dealing with a founder who maybe this is new to them, right? Maybe this sounds hokey or whatever you want to say, whatever. However, it's not their wheelhouse. Yeah, first off, hey, thanks for coming.
I think the biggest thing, Chris can't talk to on this, but like, if you can get data that shows your audience follows this person, makes it a lot easier. So for me, I know some of the people we found on work, they're like customer interviews, and we literally just asked them, like, who are the top three people who influence you or who you follow or you get advice from? And so I do think if it can come directly from the customer's mouth, post some data, post some quotes that says, I love this person, no matter what they do, I listen to you. That really helps.
But also, me was like, some specific advisors kind of already posting about the concept of interactive demos before we worked with them, and we could show not just, hey, if we got to leave from them, but we looked at who engaged with that post, and then we found target accounts, and we could stay. Because I feel like sometimes salespeople and like, CEOs really just love big logos or names. So if you could say, hey, you know, this target account, they liked that person's post, they engaged with it. That didn't really help show this isn't just your opinion, but what your customers want.
Another thing I found highly effective is sort of like a level two of what Natalie said is actually bring the founder to a couple of customer interviews and ask the question so they can hear the answer directly from your customer. And so not just taking like a quote like, Hey, I've been talking to this person and here's what they said, but actually taking the founder and asking the question so that they hear it themselves in live in person, it could even ask a follow up, even just one or two of those changes perception because they just haven't asked the question to hear that type of answer before. This is super. I love the founders, love big logos.
I'm actually putting this in chat and then customer mentions, especially close one customer that is both great ideas and it's data. It's somewhat subjective, but it's definitely pointing in the right direction. Thank you both. But super smart Chris and Natalie.
Thanks for being here. All right. I know we touched on budget a little bit, but I'm gonna bring on Matt Chanela. He was curious to dig in a little deeper.
And I know he might have some more questions too. So Matt, welcome. Hey, what's going on? I Natalie, great talk so far.
I'm curious about you talked a little about budgeting and giving them equity or giving them a small payment. I'm curious about the percentage of budget you dedicate towards this against the rest of the discretionary spend that you have. I'm sure it started as a pilot program at first, but then how did you end up integrating that into your quarterly budget as you started to scale it up? Yeah, I think just start.
It was honestly probably about like, I grew up to 1% to 5% of our budget. You can start this small. You can do over a few thousand. It does not matter anything.
Now it's probably about 25% to 30% of our budget, I believe. And I'd say really, what showing ROI after a year of it, basically at our end of your meeting, I did a presentation on like ROI. We've gotten from these advisors, both direct as I mentioned, and then as well as like word of mouth growth, even LinkedIn followers, we 12x the number of LinkedIn followers and everything I could kind of attribute back to the advisors. On top of that, I was going to say this earlier with these questions.
I'd also highly recommend like have a few company brainstorms or chances for also your founders or other members of the team to get to meet the advisors because the strategic angle of it is really hard to quantify. I remember after one time we did, we have one advisor come in and just talk to us generally about a topic. And then suddenly everyone got it. Suddenly everyone eyes lit up and they're like, oh my god, this is what we're paying for.
This person's amazing. We want to keep that. So I do think it helps like justify that much budget when it isn't just the promotional side and the rest of the company's bought into how helpful the strategic side of it is. Awesome.
All right. All right. Alex, I know you had a good question about ongoing management of the program. We'll bring you on next.
Welcome, Alex. Yes. Hey, Natalie. Yeah, I was just curious to see if it was maybe like a good practice or not to try to rotate your bench kind of advisors.
You know, at some point, I don't know if you see like after like two or three years, you get maybe less engagement. So it's kind of a good thing to bring in like new blood and just keep at core, but just try to change at some point the bench of your advisor. So I was kind of curious to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, that's an interesting idea.
I will say I probably add after I got my core, every now, every like six months, I might have like one or two. And now it's really just based off awesome people. I mean, I don't really actively look for advisors anymore, but every now and then someone who falls so perfectly with our ICP or like I've been working with outside advising pops up. I mean, there's something to be said about the reach sometimes like the advisor probably most effective when they first launch when they their audience first sees, but also those people are constantly getting new audiences, constantly people are filtering in and out.
So unless you have a bad relationship with the advisor, or as I said, there's a bad ICP match. I wouldn't actually recommend filtering people out. I would just recommend slowly adding not going too crazy, but like maybe like one every six months one or two. Thanks.
Sort of continuing on that Sidney had to drop someone asked this question on her behalf. She's also said that she's spoken with a couple of your advisors who really just unprompted would rave about the program. So the actual advisors influencers that you're working with are speaking positively about the engagement that they have from you. We talked a lot about some of the monetary sort of cash compensation as the sort of immediate incentive, but Sidney was curious what other value are they getting because of such the sort of unprompted rave reviews.
It's clearly not just about the money. And so no, you touched a little bit on trying to like understand their motivation, what matters to them, but maybe you can provide a couple more concrete examples of ways that sort of Nevada is providing value to them, which really makes the relationship mutually beneficial. Yeah, I think one to start is the way we structure it. And the fact that it's not hey, advisors, here's a LinkedIn post, please post it three times every other week.
Talk to you never. I think part of it is the relationship aspect of it. And the fact that I also give general tips or data that they could post about, I provide insights for them that their audience are fine useful, but I don't tell them exactly what to say or do. So I think one is just they're already trying to think of content for their LinkedIn for their podcast or their newsletter.
So I'm providing helpful content, but not forcing it. No one likes to be told exactly what to say or do. And I would highly also recommend that to anyone. I always say to our advisors, you know your audience better than me.
You're an expert. You know what you're saying. I'm going to give you helpful, like again, guideline or not even guideline, like helpful recommendations or stats or messaging you can use, play around with it. So one, they're getting like content ideas.
Also, their industry leaders, if their clients come to them and say, hey, I'm thinking about interactive demos, not only do they know stats, but they also have their relationship with me. It kind of makes them look good to say like, hey, you want to talk directly to Natalie, you want to talk to someone from Nevada. And then one thing that was really cool was I actually didn't do the Slack channel at first because I was kind of worried it'd be annoying for the advisors. I was like, oh, they probably got a million slack things like do they want to be adding to another channel?
But what they said is the relationship between each other has been one of the most valuable parts of the program. I've actually had one of our advisors go off and start his own advisor program and then use another advisor from the program to the part of his program. The way that they've all gotten to know each other and not really connected. A lot of them has said is one of their favorite parts.
And even just the group brainstorming, it's also people who have a little bit different backgrounds. So it's really fun to watch someone who is a demand an expert, someone who's a product marketing expert, someone who's a growth expert, all try to tackle a problem. And I think we all kind of learned from getting to watch that live. Just a quick drop as well.
I think that LinkedIn will roll out thought leader ads for people that don't work in your company to everybody on April 1st, which is next week. And so that plays in really interesting to something like this where I think a potential part of the value in this is actually being able to take somebody's content externally and then use the company's advertising dollars to boost in a thought we're should be mutually beneficial for region engagement and awareness. So I think that could be another plug. Things that I've found work just as a to quickly note, I think that being able to get those advisors in front of your ICP, like you host the event, you do the promotion, you bring the audience has a lot of value to somebody that's trying to be a consultant or an influencer or a content creator.
So things that you can do to expand and cross pollinate their audience and give them a stage to be able to share their expertise. I found it's always really appreciated from these people as well. Yeah, definitely. We're excited about this new thought leader ad enhancement.
We definitely have some test planned at Refine Labs to try to figure out how to use that best for our clients. It's like UGC Instagram 2018. Yeah. For B2H5 years later.
Garrett, thanks for your engagement in the chat in the session. We'd love to have you ask your question to Natalie and Chris. Yeah, we've got some mix of interesting advisors, people who have invested, I think it's a really great initiative in thinking about how to get some more value out of that. But if looking for new advisors or influencers, so you guys have some good ideas, but what would you look for that would be that next best one in terms of experience?
Could imagine going in as an advisor for, you know, we have a Marta company, but I've never formally advised. And so I might have a different way of working with a company than someone who's been an advisor for a couple companies before. So I guess how do you use those different types of folks who you're bringing into the program and how to work with them? One thing I did is if I saw someone had previously advised when I reached out to them on LinkedIn, I would rather than just like pitching my program, I'd say like, Hey, I saw you guys a few other companies, give them like a basic overview.
So they like, does that match what you're doing? I'd love to hop on a call and maybe like talk to if it makes sense for you. And then we talk live on a call. What do you like from your other advisor programs?
What don't you like? What maybe could we enhance on? So we do have a little bit different relationships with different advisors. I think that's also really important.
It's helpful to have your basic structure for someone to point who is new, who hasn't advised before. They're probably going to want to just do what you set out. But some people, they have a model that they really like. So we'll be flexible and work with them there.
And I think when you first reach out to them, frame it out of the way of, Hey, I see your advisor, the companies don't know if you're looking for any other clients. I think we'd be a good fit because XYZ, would you be open for like just to see if it would be a good fit. So rather than just being like, Hey, here's our advisor program. Say yes or no?
I think it's also about once you like, if you're able to identify them to try and also narrow in on what are the core strengths that they provide differentiated value for, and being able to use them in that way, there's going to be some people that are far more technical and being like, are going to lean far more into giving you advice on your product road map or how the technology works or something like that. And for those people, usually you don't want to take their advice on commercials, like pricing and go to market strategy and things like that. So being able to identify where's this person's experience and where are their core strengths and then how am I able to pull that specific stuff out of them and not focus on things where they might not have that the exact strength or expertise to using the people in the right way as well. Yeah, it makes sense.
And one other question I've been thinking about tapping to LinkedIn and basically their networks, right? And so you can use advisors to your point where there's a lot of different ways to experience your product guidance, go to market guidance. But one of the things to see popular as you start up in their investment firms, you're able to tap into that network and get a lot of referrals. Now you're talking about word of mouth, but how aggressive do you think you can be in terms of working with those advisors to actually tap into their networks for referrals?
One of the things I'm thinking about is, hey, get those advisors into sales navigator. There's like, not the full core seats, but once they're in sales now, hey, you can then see mutual connections and hey, let's get our target accounts and where do they have mutual connections. There's a line probably somewhere where it's going to be asking too much. And so just curious how you thought about that.
I'd say honestly, just ask them, ask them whether or not they're comfortable with because we have some advisors who just give us referrals all the time, which is awesome. Like they just shout like, show people that like, hey, this would be a good fit. This wouldn't. We have other advisors to Chris's point, different strengths who maybe post a little more, maybe just give them more of the strategic advice.
So it might be advisor to advisor who's comfortable with that. But I'd also say kind of depends on the advisor ICP. If some people are really motivated and they're referrals and what gets them really excited, they might be like, yeah, straight my list. I don't care which option versus some other people might not feel comfortable with that.
So I don't know, Chris, if you have experience that, but I would just say that's directly. Yeah, I would say for most relationships, I think having your advisor be a part-time sales rep is too much of an ask. But for some people at my work, and if you're going to do that, just be prepared to pay up. Oftentimes, a strong advisor that does that will deliver more new business revenue than your best sales rep.
So if your best sales rep's making 300, 400k, you better be prepared to incentivize that advisor at a level that's equal or more than that. And most companies just aren't prepared to do that in a variable compensation model, even though it totally makes sense and they do it with everyone else that sells deals for them. And so I think that's just a big takeaway. I think companies try to ask too much from these people and basically take take take and not properly compensate them relative to how they compensate and how they compensate them and how employers sell something like that.
So it just needs to be equitable and properly incentivize for the value that person provides. Yeah, that's a great point. I appreciate you guys. D brought another spicy question.
What about using an advisor for competitive intel? It's your take on that. Amazing. Go ahead, Natalie.
I was going to say, I've never had our advisors necessarily go sign up for a demo or something like that, competitors, but hey, they're leaders in the space, they're going to hear things. So I think it's just going to come up naturally. And then on top of that, one thing you do get, which is really cool is when your advice is post, people tend to be a little more honest in the comments than they may be on your posts. So people probably aren't saying, oh, I don't know, they're probably getting negative about your competitors, but you more might get intel into why people went with you specifically or why they would love you over others.
Maybe people don't frame this as competitive intel, but this is exactly what I've done in the past and what I would do. So at the medical device company, we had our thought leader Rob DeBlasi design a clinical trial and research study comparing our product to our direct competitor. And you could do that in Martec. You could do that in anything and look at what your differentiated value prop is and design a study to measure against that and compare, direct, have somebody externally design a study and compare with data, the performance of your product versus a direct competitor, the main person that you run into or who you want to differentiate from.
And I think that is a really good use case for the technical and product roadmap oriented type of advisor. Awesome. There were a couple of comments and questions. I know we've talked a lot about how these advisors and influencers can help refer business and ultimately help build pipeline and revenue.
We touched on this a little bit earlier, but I'd love to expand on sort of the other more strategic advisory activities. So whether that's messaging validation, feedback on a new product launch, we'd love you both to kind of just weigh in on when you have this sort of active, engaged advisor beyond business, which is important and a primary goal that we're working towards. What are some other really tangible ways that you can extract value and how do you take that and actually positively integrate it into the organization and your strategy? Yeah, I have a few different examples I can touch on.
One, website messaging and not just getting early feedback from them, but I think every single marketer has gone through this debate where like they have this idea for website messaging that may be a little more innovative, maybe more brand focused. And then the sales team and the CEO and everyone comes in and they're like, whoa, that's not what our ICP wants or has a completely different narrative. So I always joke at the marketer, even though we're paid for our opinions, usually no one wants to hear our opinions, they want to hear data or third party references. So it really helps when you can say like, oh, I got this message idea from our advisor.
So we know our ICP respects and it resonates with them. It's not just my idea. Look at all the advisors saying why they chose this messaging and really like it. And then maybe why they didn't like that messaging as much, which I also pitched.
So really helpful for strategic feedback and making sure it's not just your opinion. Another big thing is promotion strategy. I talked about the state like our big report. When I'm going to figure out like what piece of data do I want to pull out in our promotion?
What are the key takeaways? I have my ideas, but it's so helpful and really early stages, right? When it's super unpolished, when it's a messy Google Doc, I can send it to advisors and say what stood out to you? What's missing and get that feedback that depends.
I wouldn't feel comfortable sending that to a customer at that stage. It's like still too early. And then later using that in the promotion. And then truthfully, like a little bit also just to like go check you sometimes when you're special when I was a team of one, just being like, am I crazy?
Is this normal? Is this what happens in other companies? Are we doing this entirely wrong? A little bit of also therapy, getting to talk to someone who's done there before, especially the small team really just helps like on days you're going crazy to have someone to go check with.
Yeah, gut check. What I would also call validation of ideas, I think is super important as a third party, somebody that understands the market to just give you the confidence to keep going and things. I think it's huge. I mentioned the research and data point leveraging these people to be able to create data and insights around the performance and the ROI of your product can be incredibly impactful coming from a third party.
B&B companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to have forced or do that for them. And you could have outside people do a similar thing at a way less, lesser of a cost and potentially even be more believable than the things that Forrester puts together. And then lastly, I think really being able to surface in market competitive Intel's, for instance, hey, I'm hearing as an advisor is between these two products, everybody doesn't like this thing about this product. So you need to not do that and lean into it more in your messaging and be able to have that type of insight that's coming, somebody that's really listening to the market to hear those things and then be able to filter and surface them for you on what's important.
I think are all three really valuable things that an advisor provides outside of promotion. One of my biggest takeaways from this conversation, I think, is the importance to keep this program relatively small. I'll be honest, I see some more famous LinkedIn influencers who clearly have deals with maybe five to eight different brands and are promoting all of them all of the time. And I think that it creates some diminishing returns.
I know personally, when I see that happen too much with one person, I start to question the quality or the credibility of the recommendation if they're endorsing five, eight, 10 different companies. I've also seen this where even in conversations I've had where right now partnerships is a big topic overall and so people are wanting to how do we all refer each other business to help each other out, which I think the intent is pure and it's a good intent. But practically, I think my take is that the most success that will be had from these types of programs is really identifying those like two or three best advisors or influencers or partners, whatever you want to call them, and going really deep with just a small group of people where it really is a win-win for all involved, right? The company, the advisor, but also the customer because they're getting the right information from a credible source.
Curious to get both of your take on that. I think this is one where I would say, I don't think it's about scaling the program and getting 20 advisors and I think it's harder than it might feel like on the surface to really find the right matches. To me, that's what makes this successful from the outside looking in. I would say, I think that's what you really figured out, Natalie, to make this work.
So yeah, I would love to kind of get both of your perspectives on some of those thoughts. Yeah, I think to your point, the benefit, I will say the benefit of having more than three eventually is just different perspectives, especially different areas of marketing, but to start a hundred percent, start small and that's why I also really recommend start with a customer because then, Megan, to your point, once they're promoting you, it doesn't look like, does that person have a connection with that company? It's like, oh, that makes sense. They've used them before.
If they're not a customer, again, find someone who works with your customers or maybe you can still give them the software for free or let them try it. Anyway, you can make sure that they are really involved with both your product and your company. I think helps eliminate that feeling of does it make sense? And the last thing I'd say is don't underestimate the time that it can take.
This is probably probably 10 to 15 percent of my time is in our visor program sometimes up to 20 percent, which is a team of one is a good chunk and it's 100 percent worth it. But if you try to do too much at once, you're not going to develop those personal relationships. And that's what makes it great. And that's when you find out more about that person, what their ultimate goals are and what their strengths are.
Yeah, and then just to flip the conversation a little bit from a different perspective of the advisor, right? For me, I could be a qualified advisor for a lot of different companies based on Natalie's definition. And a lot of companies come to me and say, Hey, and have a similar pitch to what Natalie has, although hers is probably better. And if you want to take on this role either now or in the future, I think some of the core things around having real integrity and credibility around the products that you endorse and the authenticity around that you actually see a lot of value for them that you actually believe in them that you actually think that they're going to be good for your audience and try to be able to as best you can separate the financial compensation and upside from the doing what's best for your audience or the people that believe in you and trust in you.
I think is, I think it's huge. And to Meghan's point, there are people that are like shills that'll take 2000 bucks a month and are a point 1% in equity and share a copy of some other companies promotional posts and just over time lose credibility and trust with you. And so as a advisor, as an influencer, being true to yourself, your authenticity and your integrity around doing what's best for your audience, I think remains a critical thing from the other side of the table. Yeah, totally agree, Chris.
All right, we're coming to the end. I'm going to bring on my question closer. I used to say it was on DGL Arthur, you've closed it, DGL out before, bring us your closing question for the segment. Tia's up.
Yeah, we'll stop course up early. So what I wanted to get your take on is, this seems to be getting a lot of traction where you can use our same thing. Let's look at things with your marketing. And we've seen some companies take those first steps.
I wanted to hear your tastes on like, they're not your scene right now. Where do you think companies miss them or come there? They're influenced to pervents. I think I've talked to a lot of this already, but one, not developing relationships, just paying people and telling them exactly what to post.
I think a lot of times we see these takeovers were just like the same thing that no one over again versus letting them have their own unique voice or why they were interested to. I think just going after followers versus is there an authentic connection? We talked on that a little bit. Does that make sense?
And then I do think just think of it, like in my opinion, Justin, give it as an influencer. Like whenever people approach me, what's your influencer program? I always correct them. It's an advisor program.
I know it's not obvious, but more just trying to get a point. I think it's really hard to just do be influencing because it is such like a personal business in the way that consumer maybe you can just pay people and not have that relationship. So I do try to promote, make sure you bring them into the strategy side. Don't just have it be influencing.
From me, not setting up the measurement to even see whether it's working or not and take those simple steps become like a core challenge for not only advisor program, but many of the other things that I mentioned. I think that selecting people based on reach or popularity instead of their actual influence over your customers and then I think not listening to your customers about who they trust is the primary way to identify those people or three places where people miss step. Just to get your take in terms of the right measurement, what we said, we're looking at your mouth, we're leaning kind of showing that directional trend over time saying, hey, this is lifting. So it's one person but this person is working.
Any other ideas on how companies can connect that from get go? Now we mentioned a couple things but direct referrals are pretty straightforward. Like as long as you have the process to tag that in your CRM and track it, that becomes a very easy way to quantify. And then inside of whether it's self-reported attribution or having your sales rep ask on a call or asking the customer after they became closed one or all the variety of ways that you can get this data, they'll tell you this exact person sent me.
So there's some where it's like, yeah, we can perfectly match that this person had this outcome. And then other ways you'll just see word of mouth colleague friend heard you in the market LinkedIn, which could have been from one person or could have been from another. And I think that companies get so caught up in this, especially in these types of programs with the direct, what did you do for me person and not enough about what is the impact overall on our business growth and our share of voice and how many people are talking about us, which then drives inbound hand raisers and other types of, you know, faster sales cycles and other benefits like that. I think we just need to be able to look at these types of programs holistically across their impact, across the whole go to market, not just that one investment or even just a marketing budget.
A lot of things that we do in marketing actually make a larger impact in sort of opportunity, velocity and other things like that that don't get picked up properly. If you just look at pipeline creation through the website or other places like that. That was going to be my final point. I create a host bot dashboard and have categorized as obviously fine.
Lab says said, like categorized the self-report attribution. And we showed that like deals that were came from word mouth and LinkedIn, they have two X conversion rates or this much faster pipeline and then put them all right next to each other. So ads SEO influencers LinkedIn word mouth so you could see the funnels and it might make it clear like, okay, maybe we're not to start getting as many leads from this channel, but it's two X conversion rate of ads. So I think that also kind of helps put in perspective when they can literally see the results versus all the other channels.
Thank you both. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Arthur. All right, we've come to the end of our expert session today.
Our next one is going to be Thursday, April 18th. We talked a lot about measurement. We're going to have our whole session next time dedicated to marketing ops and measurement of demand programs. We're going to have two special guests from CS2 leading marketing ops agency.
So really excited. Keep an eye out. We'll be sending emails and LinkedIn posts for the next event. Thank you all for joining.
Appreciate all the engagement, all the questions. Thank you to Natalie for taking the time to share your wisdom. Thank you to Chris. Pleasure to see you all.
Make it a great week, everyone. Take care. See you all have a great week.