Welcome to Stacking Growth. Welcome to Stacking Growth, call to action. A show for the trailblazers, change makers, and paradigm shifters. Each week, a different marketing hero who is called to make a change in their field will join us to walk through each step of their journey.
They'll cover the highs, the lows, and what's coming next. Together, we'll help you find the changes needed for your own business to win. I'm Steph Kreniola here with Evan Hughes, and today we are so excited to welcome Loxo's VP of Marketing, Sam Keanley. Sam's dedication to prioritizing demand creation aligns with Refine Labs' mission to redefine demand generation strategies.
And he's here today to share with us his journey from the agency structure at Refine Labs to a VP role. Sam, thank you so much for coming today. Yeah, I'm looking forward to this. I'm a little reuniting with Evan, and then some good chance to meet some fresh blood with you.
Great. Well, I am ready to soak it all up. So if you want to start by just telling us a little bit about your journey into marketing, the experience you've had, especially trying to balance different focuses on lead gen versus demand gen that shift in that mindset change. OK, all right, Sam, let's keep this under three minutes ready.
Good luck. All right. Grew up advertising agency family for three generations. So always surrounded by, there was like traditional TV print radio.
So just like absorbed a lot of that and everything else. Then my sister was a smart one in the family. The very books, I was the one that went to school. I was like, Mom, I don't want to take honors classes.
Just let me go to the normal people classes and get like solid grades there. So that leads me to college where I'm not going to be an engineer. I'm not going to be a doctor. I'm not going to go down like a legal track.
So it's just no business, right? Like, why not? And so follow the marketing track there and notice like, that's why I sort of realize like, oh, all that stuff I absorb growing up made things easier for me here. So it's like, OK, cool.
Like I enjoy marketing everything else. That also plays in Ohio. I don't know if you all know anything about Ohio, but it's cold and gray and not so much fun. So as soon as I graduate, I'm going to a beach.
I do not want to be anywhere in New York, Ohio. So it's your Southern California, Charleston, South Carolina. But I don't know where I got my first job. And that ended up being, it was called an account of representative ADR, but it's a BDR nowadays in a software SaaS company.
So blessing or curse with my first job as a SaaS, I don't know, still, still TBD there. But that got me into the B2B world and everything. That was a big publicly traded company, Blackboard, it's nonprofit software. But that's where I really started to understand the predictable revenue model, how does marketing work?
So I started as a BDR, worked my way up through marketing in there. And that led me to the digital marketing side of things. And it was really interesting because that's where I remember being in these big departmental meetings and you have marketing cheering over here. We just crushed our MQL goals, 120%.
And then sales gets up five minutes later. It's like 80% of revenue, 70% of our pipeline targets. I'm like, whatever that sales, that's not our problem. I was like, marketing sales, that was a lot of this in those days.
So running all of the digital media, I get more and more ad spend because, hey, our metrics are looking great. Look how low our cost per lead is. Look how many conversions we can drive on Google ads. But the more we'd spend and the better results, I'm still seeing my sales doing worse this year and not better with all this great stuff that I'm passing their way.
So that's what led me down this whole path of like, is this really the best winter market? Is this how people actually buy today? And then I don't know if you guys have heard of this dude called Chris Walker or something but started to see his stuff popping up on LinkedIn. And that was the light bulb moment for me where he was able to put into words those things that I was kind of feeling and sensing, something on me to refine labs and finally getting to be like, okay, I've seen the lead gen predictable revenue model.
Now what happens if we do this? How do buyers actually buy today mentality? And I don't have to explain to you or the listeners, the dimension approach and all that came with that. So a little over three minutes did my best to keep it short and snappy.
I'm sorry, this is I just need to interject here. More story is so perfect. We're recording this late December. I know won't come out till later, but this is the perfect plot for a holiday rom-com like hot shot beach digital marketer returns to small town, Ohio to save his regeneration family newspaper marketing for like it's so it writes itself.
It's so perfect. If I ever go back to Ohio, feel free to write a hallmark movie about me because I can play a knock on the back to Ohio. That's what they all say. That's all the hot shot businessmen say.
It's true. Mother in law that loves hallmarks. So I spent a lot of time over Thanksgiving watching these and I think you're it. Absolutely nailed it.
But it's a chat to your club to write that script out. We've got to be scripting ASAP. That's my next post stream on LinkedIn for the next two weeks. We talk a lot about the journey and career journeys.
I think we're fascinated in this marketing world because we all have some sort of different kind of trajectory or something that kind of was the aha moment of us getting there. I think you and I joined to find out about the same time, you know, you had a little bit of time under your belt to learn a little bit more. And for me, it was the first time coming into an agency world after being in-house at large enterprise companies as well, doing the same thing, fighting for budget because my success metrics on the top end looked really great. You know, at one point I was managing a $32 million budget for digital acquisition for AWS and our goals were leads volume, volume, volume.
And I, you know, I also had a similar like aha moment after finding Megan Bowen and Chris Walker and then, you know, started networking with the folks that were fine. But once we started to like work with clients, work in the, you know, consulting almost with clients, like it's a different toolbox that we have to tap into. It's a different skill set. We need to start managing expectations and understanding the, you know, how can we influence without being an integral part of that team or sitting in house.
And I think that's like what's interesting to me about your journey is you kind of went the in-house route agency kind of director to man gen VP of marketing on a client service arm and then now you've stepped into your current role as a VP of marketing. I'd love to learn a little bit more from the listeners and myself kind of like that transition. It's one thing to have the knowledge but then to suddenly take it from like it's consulting to directly influencing and being the sort of core leader within the organization. I think that that's something that creates a bit of imposter syndrome in myself too at their time that I'm a little bit uneasy of what that transition would look like.
So I just love to hear a little bit more about how you, how you stepped into that role and where you started to prioritize to make sure that you succeeded. So yeah, transition, it was an interesting one in the lovely experience at Refine Labs of like just going deep on demand gen and everything else. But I think a lot of people who have been at Refine and also a lot of people listening to this reason they're listening is they have this growth mindset where it's like, I want to learn something I want to grow, I want to get on the track to mastery and then we don't get bored with it. But we're like, what's next?
What can I continue to improve and how do I get that cycle going? So after the demand gen side for me and working with so many talented marketing leaders, advising them at Refine, Kevin Jake with, he was one of my directors of demand gen here. He said this phrase to me all the time with a couple of clients that you tell them what to do, you know what they should do. They don't do it.
And then he's like, they just have to go and skin their knees. They just have to learn the lesson. So after watching that happen a handful of times and then as I was just telling you guys a second ago and apart that probably was cut out of this audio, we've got a little one now and so I was getting ready. I was like, we're gonna have a family.
I love the agency stuff, but I need time back. So I can be here at the family versus trying to meet the 24 hour clock of international clients and everything else. So I want to come back in house with that, but I recognize, okay, I have this mindset where I want to grow. I want to continue to take on more.
I'm pretty well covered, but that means that I need to start better learning product marketing operations, how to work cross functionally with different departments. And that I think is one of the biggest things that I did take away. It refined working with the clients is that cross functional management because it's a combination of how do you work with sales, how do you work with product, how do you work with other marketing leaders and executives, but also most of them are leaders as well. And if you tell them what they should do or what you think, they're not going to take it well.
They're defensive. We've always done the strategy. It works. I have my way it works.
But if you are able to communicate in a way where it helps to lead the horse to water metaphor where however you can raise things, communicate things, show things, let them make those decisions on their own, that's where I found the most success with everything else. So when I was coming back from refined labs over here, that was my number one thing that I was focused on was personally, I need to shore up my product, marketing skills, my app skills, but then with the other leadership, how can I make sure that they understand and are aligned to this new strategy and direction without thinking that I'm just like the new guy that wants to come in and rip everything out, put in their new stuff, but you have to help them get to that aha moment versus just saying, here's how it is, here's how it's going to be. And then think that they're going to accept that without having a little, I don't know, grudge against you per se, but you know how you feel when a new person comes and tries to boss everyone around. So you have to be the teammate to help make that happen.
So yeah, that was kind of the first part of the transition over. I don't know if that perfectly answered your question, but hopefully it doesn't come. It does because it challenges all of us to think like, sure, we can be experts in kind of creating demand, building this demand engine, but there's such a different angle that you have to take stepping into leadership role or transitioning because suddenly it's stakeholder management at scale and it's not a stakeholder consulting where they can say, screw you, it doesn't really matter, like we're kind of going this direction anyway. It's like, you have to build a champion internally and be able to work with them consistently.
So it's like, how do you nurture relationships? How do you understand what's fundamentally working and what's not? I think that those are pieces of the puzzle that oftentimes we go in there and like, you know, we design or craft a resume, whether it's on LinkedIn building our brand or just the way we're communicating with the audience around a specific skill set. And I think some of those other components within the role are so much more valuable to build that trust, be vulnerable, ask questions that are silly to you, but I think that there's so much importance and trust built with that.
And that's similar things of like, why are we, you know, growth seems to be doing okay? You know, what are some of the factors that we think are contributing to this? What do you think some of the failures are? And I would love to hear like, where there are a set of questions are almost like the entry point where you kind of set yourself up for, okay, I'm going to build this trust, but I'm also going to learn along the way and knowing that, you know, maybe they would be a little bit of judgment from the internal team as they learn to you.
Yeah. So there's always a couple of questions that I always like to ask, getting into leadership buying or getting people aligned with something that may be different than they've done before. So the first is it's kind of positioning the predictable revenue model versus this new direction, which is it's like, okay, I'll show you two charts. One's going to be a lead graph going up to the right revenue graph going down into the right.
I'm like, another option is lead graph going down into the right revenue graph going up into the right like pick your scenario, which would you rather have hit your legal, messy or revenue target or messy or legal hit your revenue target. Everyone looks around the room like, I'm an idiot asking this question like, duh, hit the revenue target go perfect. Now, let me ask this next question. Is that what you're actually focusing on with your marketing team?
Because more often than not, it's like, I don't know, we don't track past leads or we go back to that scenario earlier where I was saying like, well, we just went through this over here, we were 120% to our MQL target that revenues off like that doesn't line up. That means I wasn't trending in the right direction. So that's one question that I'd like to ask to set the stage of getting them to think like, okay, if those two lines aren't moving in parallel, that means something's not working quite right. Another question I'd like to ask is just pick a stakeholder in the room, tell me about the point that you used it.
I saw this that you want to podcast or LinkedIn or something. I did a Google search and the point of it isn't to like prove anything per se, but it's to get into like, okay, so there's all these things that weren't just like Google ads, keywords that you're focusing on SEO stuff, but you're having conversations with peers, you're listening to this other stuff that for so long you've been against like, oh, we can't do that. It's not attributable or anything else. It's like, that's what we have to do in today's day and age to buy.
So it's more just to get them to physically say these things that they may or may not have actually said that they were against before and kind of be like, oh, I guess I'm a little bit hypocritical with that because there isn't an ROI and if I just got you to say that that influenced your journey. There's a couple of questions like that that I'll typically go through and then for the CFO, if there's a CFO or financial person in the room, I'll usually say like, all right, we're going to have two scenarios. We're going to focus on, I mean, you're focused on growth at the end of the day. One is a predictable model in the sense that you know exactly how much money you're going to spend, how many leads you're going to get out of it, but it's an unhealthy CAC payback period.
One is a model where it's not quite as predictable, but you know, you're going to hit your revenue target and it has a much healthier CAC payback period, which ones you want to choose. And again, that gets them to look past that initial like lead volume or predictability of like dollar in equals five dollars out, but like what's the ultimate goal? We need to be profitable, especially in today's day and age when VCs aren't printing money left and right. And so that's where it gets under, okay, that's what I'm focused on too, but it requires a little bit more trust because you're not going to have full visibility and everything, but that's what we're all aligned to.
That's what we're focused on at the end of the day. So getting them to speak to that and then you can pair on at the end of it and be like, okay, perfect. So in those two examples, you know, Google ads and lead gem campaigns, that's why I can tell you for every $500 I spend on Google, you're going to get a demo request or every $100 I spend on a lead gem campaign, you're going to get a demo request. But what I'm also going to show you now, and we can get to this later on or share some things about like, what happens when we track that down the funnel?
What are those conversion rates? And that's where you see becomes wildly inefficient, very fast. And so that's what we get into. It's like, it's not always about what you can just see right at the beginning, but you have to track that all the way through.
And that's where the financial leader usually takes. Okay. You have my attention, this person obviously is a little bit savvy and like they're thinking about the business, not just their marketing metrics where you might not win them over entirely there, but you at least have some credibility in their eyes early on. And right.
Yeah. No, no, no, no. And I think that that's where the idea of budget always comes into play, especially as a new leader on stepping into a new part of their journey and they're wanting to kind of succeed across the entire board and recognize that they potentially has to be budget in order for us to scale or potentially there's inefficiencies. Well, were some of those points of tension or those learning opportunities you had having some of those first conversations where you, yes, you had some of the reps under your belt working with the flying labs and consulting, but just more in-house where you really truly were accountable for the budget and the responsible growth of marketing.
Like, were there any points that you learned or your kind of all moments like, oh shit, I probably should have approached this a little bit differently asking for more or changing the direction. Yeah. So setting expectations, honestly, is the biggest thing and caveating that with, look, this is a forecast. This isn't going to be perfect, but this is based on historicals that we've seen, the improvements that I know will come and this is really credibility of like having worked at NAGESC.
Like I've done this across, seen this across 50, 100 different B2B-slash companies. I know that if we insert this GTM lever, if we insert this operational efficiency here, we should expect to see this variable change. I can't tell you exactly what it's going to be yet. That's where we're going to have to let it normalize that over time, but I can tell you okay based on all of our 2024 data, we insert this now.
Here's what we'll see in Q1 of next year. Here's what we'll see in Q3, Q4 as that has time to mature. And so we'll work closely with them to say, here's what we can expect. And usually that gives them some comfort because it's not this black box where they're throwing money and have no idea what to expect and again, being transparent with them and saying, like, this is going to get us close.
This is going to put us in the ballpark and then what we'll do is we'll keep coming back every quarter and we can look at, are we on track or what's going on? And I can tell you, like, hey, I have no idea what's going on. You should probably fire me next quarter. Or hey, this is right in the ballpark of what we were expecting, but being overly transparent, but setting those expectations early because that's always the biggest thing.
I mean, think about today's day-age. We get so mad when Amazon delivers a package on day three instead of day two because they set expectations. On day two. So the same kind of thing happens with marketing.
If an expectation is set, this is where you see SaaS when there's getting trouble. So I'm saying, like, Martek is, oh, we're going to increase your RY by 100 X. It's like bullshit. No, you're not.
That's not real. But you then that's the bar that they've anchored you on. So if you come in at 50 X, that's still phenomenal, right? But you didn't hit the 100 X.
So same kind of thing with your finance team. And Marcy, go be conservative. Like you've already got the job. You don't need to blow them away at this point.
Be conservative and overdeliver versus promising them the moon and then coming in short because that's not a hole that you want to be coming out of. Yeah. I think at some point, you know, specifically that I had one of those, my early gigs here, but you know, you learn quickly and fail fast. And I think this idea to your point of back gathering, it's like modern day show and tell, like for a marketer, right?
You're identifying the facts, you're putting together the right sort of information to share with them and then letting them tell you about it rather than speaking at them. But it's like speaking with them collectively as a group and such a valuable skill set that's not really taught, it's just learned and you have to continue to fail. Yeah. No, I appreciate that story.
And I think it's, it's one that a lot of people are thinking about it as they make their shift and kind of what that next step is like what are some of these potentially that aren't on the job description skill sets and aspects of my career that I need? We marketers love the throw data people. We can take data and spend any story. You can give me a data set and I can tell a great story.
I can tell a terrible story. Just tell me what you want it to go. Right. But what you learn with like CFOs and the leadership is also they don't care about 95% of that data, like pick the one, two items that they care about.
That's what you have your conversation on. Because if you pull up this, I've made this mistake too many times. This, this beautiful forecasted model, right? It's got like 15 different variables and you think you look sophisticated.
They look at that for 30 seconds and you watch their eyes glaze over. They're not even paying attention anymore because it's just too much for them. It's it's inundating them. So before you even get to that, that's what I call like an appendix slide now or supporting like read this after.
I've just downloaded you on all this, but learning to focus more on the context than the data is, I think the biggest thing and Tory, someone that we both worked with or find as well is just like, give them the so what? Don't give them the data points, but like, what does this mean? Why should I care? What are we doing about it?
That's when you're presenting to those types of people are working and communicating with them. That's partly focused on not the not the Excel spreadsheet. Well, so I would love to get into that appendix slide though, because once you've convinced leadership, once you've given them the first part of the deck there on board, we're ready to go. I'm so excited to see what you do next.
What are some of those initial strategy shifts that you put in place to get those? I mean, I know like quick wins don't really exist long term or they don't like they're not fully real, but it's nice to have some like nice quick wins for lack of a better term when you're starting out. So what are some things that you started? What are some tools, whether that's people or software or just processes that you put in place to help kickstart this journey?
Yeah, you do have to put points on the board early on. So first one, I want to say I have a love hate relationship with Google ads. Mostly hate relationship, but love hate sounds better from first company was in a house. I saw some we had I had over a million dollars per month that I could spend across all paid media and so a lot of that went to Google ads because I could see $70 cost per lead.
I'm like, cool, it's done more money and all this stuff. And then coming to refine labs and then working especially with startups, it's like, hey, you remember that million dollar budget? You used to have your $15,000 per month now. So you better get efficient.
I'm like, oh, this is a whole new ball game. And so I started getting a lot more nitpicky with Google ads. And that's where I came up with this, this just like Google spreadsheet to quickly look at Google ads and sorry for anyone listening, you might hear a little one chime in here there. She's about to go outside.
So I pulled the other Google ads spreadsheet and it was tracking because I call it like Google ads is demand capture at the end of the day, right? So the purpose is you want to capture someone who is at 5% they're in market, they're actively searching for something best nonprofit software, best marketing agency, PDB, SaaS. You show up for those terms, you know exactly how much it costs, what the conversion rates are, how many demos you get, and then you follow that through. So I say, okay, if it costs however much money, it's like the conversion rates by keyword set up single keyword groups and you can follow that path through.
And what I would typically see was between like two thirds to 80% so like two out of three or four out of five of those keywords, like you're wasting that money at the end of the day. It's either wildly inefficient to the tune of just like the advertising cap payback period alone is over 36 months or it's not even converting into pipeline. It's not even converting into revenue at all. And it looks great in the platform really though, really low cost per lead, really high conversion rates, but it's not turning anything meaningful for your company.
So when you really starting to get to the weeds of that, I was just like, you're telling me that I could have 75% of my budget back and I could put that towards other channels and like done like take that money out. It's not making a difference for us. And so that's always the biggest one people are scared of. We can't pause Google ads.
What's gonna happen? Let's try it for a month. See what happens. I promise you the moon's not gonna fall out of the sky.
If you're a demo volume, that might dip because if you're forcing people at page, you're gonna see a decrease there. But go look at your pipeline. Go like follow your cohorts and you'll probably see higher conversion rates now to qualified opportunity because these are the people who are truly wanting to buy qualified and everything else. So that to me is one of the biggest quick wins that get a pulse check on your leadership before you go and propose this one because this is probably the extreme end of the spectrum.
So I'm starting at the very aggressive side of things running. Who wants to listen here? Maybe wait until like 30 days in to get a vibe for how open they are to this, but I can promise you you're wasting money. It's just maybe do your research first before going into planning this one.
Don't insult everybody there. Yeah. Yeah. So we're gonna have it refine labs and they were spending, I want to say it was like 25 to 30 million on paid ads on paid search alone.
And I did that analysis. They were the meeting that managers in the meeting. I was trying to be like, how do I lightly tell them like you've been doing a great job managing with the data that you have, but I think it was like 60% of my spend was inefficient. So they took it well.
They took it, you know, from a sense of I do less stuff is like you asked us to just comb through this and find anything. This is no knock on your team. Like the account structure is phenomenal. The execution is phenomenal.
But your team has been stopping where most teams traditionally stop, which is it cost per leave and conversion rate. Like it's no fault of their own. But if you go past that, here's what we're seeing. So yeah, you can save a lot of money there.
So working our way back from aggressive to that's called like the middle of the spectrum now will go. It requires some research, but this is a very easy one. I just call audience tightening. We most marketers just go way too broad with who they go after your segmentation.
It's like, let's go after all B2B marketers. It's like, well, a B2B marketer in US is right from a B2B marketer in Amia. A B2B marketer at a $1 million company is right from a B2B marketer at a billion dollar company. A B2B marketer selling to construction companies is right from a B2B marketer selling to hospitality.
So that is an easy one. At the end of the day, a lot of people think, oh, bigger than big rappers too. It's actually not because if you're for everyone, you're for no one, but just time and again, that was something that we saw more often than not. Go do a win loss analysis, find out who were the decision makers, who were the people that were just involved in conversations over time, hone in on job titles, hone in on the right people.
That's an easy one. Eliminates a lot of wasted spend as well. And then on the most easy end of the spectrum, it's going to require a little bit of tech, but like get a meeting scheduler, chili piper, hubspot has it now. Anything else but the biggest drop off that we see is like, I raise my hand, you send a BDR after me to try to schedule something that's wasted everyone's time more things drop off.
Just like someone fills out a form, when you want to talk, pick your day, pick your time. Boom. So that's the way that I would recommend to everyone that goes to a BDR company that it's 25 when you're listening to this. It's not doing this.
Like just go make this investment. If you have hubspot, it's not expensive at all, but the uplift in that conversion rate pays for itself literally after a week, probably over your conversion rate. So yeah, it's like three quick wins. I'd start with those.
That's great. I love that Google ads feels like such a quick win on its own when you first implement it. And then like the longer you go, the more that turning it off is the quick win. Like that's such a wild.
Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting one. Yeah, we always push that way.
I mean, it's the opportunity to quick win in terms of cleanup efficiency. It's like a lot of times it comes to us, but you're absolutely right too. It's like the fast lever, the quickest lever to pull up for new companies. And I like, I write pour all of this money into search directly, I'm triple rolling.
And that's what brings in folks like us to come in and clean up some of the chaos. I have the fun conversations. Yes. They're fun.
I've been just doing bunny ears for everyone listening. Yeah. I forget the cancel. I talk with my hands a lot.
Yeah. I got to sit on them sometimes for podcasts. So I guess we'll move away from the fun a little bit. We touched on some like errors or mistakes a little bit earlier.
But can you dig a little bit more into some missteps or failures that you made early on that you're willing to share that kind of like made this feel insurmountable? I never fail. LinkedIn, we only share positive, right? Right.
What are you talking about? I never had that one. No, before. We're fine.
Labs are rejected by multiple companies. I remember thinking like this was a time where I've been a blackboard. I knew I wanted to try it. Like there was a better way there was something different or something out there, but I had to at least five or ten different.
Grant, this isn't the 2024-25 climate when it's like, it's really hard to get job right now for tech. I totally feel for everyone there. It was normal hiring, right? Applied to five places you're going to get four interviews.
So just putting that caveat out there before anyone that's listening. It's like, oh, poor Sam, you didn't talk to five people. I recognize times are different right now. But I remember the value added that because I was waiting for a storm of comments.
Yeah. Very, very different market, very, very different hiring standards. Yes, exactly. Yeah, they were actually like five companies.
I love the mission of what they did. They were in industries that I liked or something else. I'm super excited about them. And I got turned down for any number of reasons.
And it's a bummer, right? I want to help these companies do something I recognize. They either just actually hiring, hey, we need marketing help or I would see things with them. I'm like, paid search example.
Like, hey, if you had this keyword, you might get a couple more conversions or something else. But yeah, it was hard not to take that personally, especially when you want to try something new. But whatever I saw myself, it's like, if this doesn't work, it's not meant to be. That's always been my mentality for something because it's so easy to climb into a hole and just take things personally to want to get down on yourself.
But I guess the naive optimist in me always just says, look, something better is coming. Something better is out there. And that had I got one of those rules, I never would have done a fine lapse. So that's why I always say looking back.
Is there, do I believe in fate? Do I believe in a plan? Do I like, I don't know, but we don't know. We have our one universe.
We have our one path that we can see. So yeah, I mean, that's a low point if you want to look at it from from that lens. But I mean, there's plenty of quarters months where like, look, I'm a marketer. Like everyone else, like we don't hit our goal.
We don't hit our target. But it's what you can either take that as an opportunity to pity part of yourself. Whoa, is me? Oh, no, like it's marketing fault.
It's sales fault. I didn't have enough money. I didn't have enough resources or it's like, well, pony up, get your shit together and figure out what can you control out of this? Like, okay, you don't have the resources.
Can you get more efficient with something? Like, you know, you were really excited about starting a podcast. But hey, maybe the podcast isn't working. Not saying podcasts don't work.
This definitely works. But like, you know, one thing I see a lot of companies doing, we've even done this is you try to do too much. You want to test so many different things, so many different channels. And honestly, that's a learning and itself is usually for yourself to do things that are not going to work.
You're not going to put enough time enough energy enough resources into it. And then you think, why try all these things and nothing worked? It's like, well, is it actually the combination of all those because you didn't put the focus and the strategy into each of those to make them work properly. So I'm going to get into, I promise I've experienced almost all of them.
Like, as we say, we're all no one here is a hero. No one here has it all figured out. And that's where I hope people listening list also recognize like, if you see that, it's bullshit. They're trying to sell you a course.
Like don't take it for real. I mean, I would thought your lowest point was going to be joining to find labs and having to work with me. So like, I'm good. That was number two.
Yeah, that was number two. Cut that out. But I think that, well, I think just being real and tangible about where you, you know, something can drop in the ball. But like for me, it's like hearing this too is just a reminder for both of us and everyone listening and like being intentional about how you execute, what you execute, whether it's within your organization or it's in your job search, but like, you have to be able to niche down and fix your targeting, right?
If you want to go into any SaaS vertical, like in your on the job market, like you need to know kind of what really makes you smile, what gets you excited. And I think, you know, all of those kinds of failures and learnings are applicable abroadly, you know, not even just in your journey to like a VP or to a more of a senior leader marketer, but just like in the marketing space in itself. And I kind of want to close like, if we would say like from Blackbod to now, you know, what do you think when I like, what did this journey kind of teach you about yourself or what is one thing that you appreciated most about your skills that you've developed that it's kind of you look back and you're like, I've done what I didn't think I could achieve. Yeah.
I think it was like this better way to market and how people buy today, like it validated all that right. So seeing more leads like more isn't always the answer, but I saw quote not long ago and it's good timing right now for planning season. I saw this in our leadership plan. It's like, plans are great, but the ability to be adaptable is even better because you can have like, don't get me wrong, I've got a plan for every quarter of every month at what we're doing.
But if you're so rigidly locked into that you weren't adapting, like who predicted Jatchy BT two years ago and have that in your plan? You raise your hand a couple of shit. You know you didn't. Like those types of thing like, well, what are you going to do about it?
Right? We're going to keep doubling down on Microsoft ads and Google ads. It's like, okay, and you're going to completely just neglect all the search traffic that's going over to Jatchy BT to perplex the all those. So that was a big thing where it's just like, look, markets change, how people buy change, technology changes.
And that was to me, the main learning there is just like, don't ever be so stuck to a playbook that you like, I guess that's what we saw early on in our careers is you saw people predict people revenue month because for like 20 years that worked. And that's what people came up through their entire career with is like 10 more BDRs means 100 more dials means 5,000 more ops, like whatever that. Those times have changed. They've come and passed and I watched what happened to those marketing and sales leaders who weren't willing to give that up.
So yeah, number one thing I guess I would say there is just like be flexible, be adaptable. And again, that validated that thought that you and I both experienced there with just like, what if there is a different way? What if we marketed, went to market in another way? So there was that side of it.
There was a ironic moment when one of the companies that I interviewed at came in down to us at refined labs wanting to work with us. And I was like, huh, you don't say, didn't become a customer of ours, but I don't know. I got a good laugh out of that one and I kind of validated that like, okay, I was ahead of you there. I'm not going to say bad things about a drop to that company was there anything but I was just like, okay, like that gave me a little bit of validation in that sense.
And then I'm saying, I think just like the change management conversations has been a big one for me as well as like, and that's an ongoing journey with how do I speak to our CEO, to our head of sales, to our CFO, to the customer success team, to the product team, to the VDR team, to customers, to prospects to everyone else because no one wants to be told what they're doing is wrong. There's a better way that they're like, we all know how we feel when we get those prospecting emails when we have those calls, like we get defensive, we immediately want to be like, who are you to tell us what we do? Like our company is unique. We're a snowflake.
It's easy. But when you can show people like, okay, what is the cost of an action here? Like what if you continue current state versus what the other opportunities are? Or like Kevin used to say, just let them skin their knees and learn the lesson and then be there to pick them up.
That's something that you have to be okay to give them some rope to do that with and versus trying to always be right, trying to have the last say and everything else. But patience, I think, is that last bit of it where it's like that is a part that has to come with change management because that group is not in that 5% active market. That's a 95% and you're not just overcoming what current tech do they use, what current software do they use, but they're ways, they're playbooks, they're frameworks. That's what you're honestly going up against more often than not.
And if they think those are working fine, they're not going to change anything else. Yeah. Patience is something we can all continue to refine. I hate using that term working for refine labs, but it's true because whether that is patience around your marketing goals and achieving what you want to do or patience in terms of like your drip campaign, I do this a lot internally with our leadership team.
It's like kind of drip the idea out there and then just keep following up on it. But it takes patience. You just want to do something tomorrow because I mean, you can. So I really appreciate you sharing kind of your journey.
This is valuable for myself to kind of just reflect to but also find together with previous colleagues. I like to close with this question. And it's probably when you're here often now, especially at the end of the year. But what shift in marketing do you expect is kind of coming next and how do you think listeners should prepare for it or what are some of the skills that they should maybe acquire?
I'm not going to say AI because I've been saying AI. Yeah, you're welcome. Hey guys, spoiler alert, AI. No, I would say so big one that I've been on lately is like GTM ecosystems and getting out of this silo view of just like BDR team is going to produce 1 million revenue sales team is going to produce 3 million revenue marketing is going to produce 2 million revenue partners going to produce 5 million revenue.
Like we've got to get out of those silos. And so I always like to tell the story of I remember back in my BDR days, there was a very clear difference. I'm not a pick up the phone. You have one person that goes, Black what?
What do you do? I don't know that company to like, oh, yeah, Black bought. I know exactly what you do. Can you guess which one continued the conversation with me and which one hung up?
And that was a result of marketing brand awareness peers who were speaking to that prospect about us. And so in an ecosystem, each channel plays off of one another and becomes a force multiplier. If you do things in silos and you say, well, BDR is not successful because they're not getting connected with those calls, but marketing is setting them up for success. So that's one of countless examples where they all play off on them.
I could come up with one for events and AEs.I. I could come up with one for partners and referrals where it like, but it's all this giant cluster fuck of a ecosystem where these winding lines, attribution systems aren't going to properly account for it because of like the example we said earlier, I listened to this podcast, I saw their post on LinkedIn, all these things like, you can't track all of that. So I don't have a perfect example of what I expect for coming next. I think there will be something in the tech space where it's like going beyond this attribution 1.0 of like, this happens in the journey.
It gets 5% of the deals worth. It's credit at $500 to just like, what happens if X does or does not happen as part of the journey? What happens if an A goes on site and meets them versus what happens if they don't? What happens if they attend that event or they don't?
Because those are the things that I think are going to help it. And then you can look at the timing and sequencing of it not to create this perfectly sequence by your journey because it's going to be different for everyone. But that's where you can start to understand the force multiplier values of each of these. Okay, if we know that we've been serving ads to these accounts for 30 days before we put them in a BDR sequence, it's 10x more likely that they'll pick up and have a successful call versus if they're not.
So there's some common sense stuff in there that we all I think intuitively know, but I see some data statistical software being able to jump in and validate some of that for us, especially like strategic and long-term deals where it's not just like I'm going to go buy gum at the grocery store counter right before I check out like, these are 10 figure, sorry, 10 figure 10k. So I think that's about 5, 6 figure deals more often than not and SaaS software. So it's all these channels, all these teams working well together that's going to help us be successful versus just like, it's a mess in marketing. It's a mess in partner that started with a program like you can't look at it that way and think that only that one function is going to create this cascading effect and you're you're waterfall.
Yeah, that's amazing. Thank you for leaving that with us and thank you for sharing your journey with us. We're super grateful for your time, your insights, and we hope everyone listening takes a peek out from behind the playbook they've been working out of and starts to explore some different ways to be a marketer. If you like hearing these journeys, make sure to subscribe and share this episode out to your network.
And if you want to donate a marketing hero to come on and chat with us, feel free to get in touch. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much again for your time and we'll see you all in the next episode. Thanks.
Thanks. So