Hello and welcome to the show Megan, your back. I must be good at something. I don't know what it is, but if Megan Bowen decides to come back for another round on here, then clearly maybe I'm asking good questions. Maybe there's, cause I know that you're thoughtful and you like to think about things.
And so thanks for joining me again. Thanks for having me Anna. And whenever you ask, I will be there. We've known each other for so long now.
And it's always a chance to have a good conversation with you. So, so long. Yeah, I mean, since 2020, right? So, yeah, and Angel Live Days.
The ManGen Live Days. So, you're CEO at Refine Labs. We just, we're catching up, it's been two years, I cannot believe that. Yeah.
And so, if you have not heard of Refine Labs, it is a B2B demand gen agency for growth stage B2B SaaS. You should also check out episode 78, higher for customer success, not customer support, because we actually talked about customers. During that episode without the show focus being on customers, but when I think of customers, when I think of customer success, when you know how important customers are, you came to mind immediately. So, of course, you're on here.
One thing before we jump in, I want to talk about demand gen, because people use this term, and I don't always think that they're, we're on the same page when we say demand gen. Have you thought about that? Like when you have conversations with prospects, do you use demand gen, do you use growth? Are they the same thing?
Are they interchangeable? Like what is demand gen? It's a great question. And especially if you're in like LinkedIn land, there's so much debate on terms and what to call what.
And so it's a good question and important to clarify. And honestly, when I'm on sales calls, I just try to use like very plain, simple direct language. I find that's the best for people to understand what you're talking about. When we say demand gen, what we're really talking about is your marketing strategy.
And now marketing is a big discipline. So I would say that demand is a core pillar of marketing. One I would say is positioning, which is I know a big focus of yours, which is a key input to a strong demand strategy. But overall, in the demand pillar, what you're focusing on is how do you create, capture, and convert interested buyers to drive pipeline and ultimately revenue.
And so marketing covers a lot of other disciplines, but when we say demand, that's what we're talking about. And it's interesting, as you were describing refine labs, we used to really work with a lot of growth stage companies. And what we found over the last two years is our customer base has really morphed into mid-market and enterprise companies. And what we're finding is what we do best in terms of driving like paid search efficiency and paid social effectiveness to increase qualified pipeline.
These companies are already spending hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars a month on paid. And we can just drive such a dramatic improvement with companies that have already reached this scale and that are already spending a lot on their demand engine. And so it's really interesting to see how our customer base has really evolved, kind of along the themes, I think of what we want to talk about. Kind of we were listening to what we were hearing and kind of following the demand for our services and kind of continue to evolve and sharpen and clarify our offering.
Really found this segment that really gets them probably the most benefit from what we're really good at. So my understanding is correctly, like demand gen is interchangeable with marketing, but you don't want to say marketing agency. Because it's kind of a load, like even more loaded term. And also you guys and Chris Walker like kind of started this whole category defining moment for demand generation and demand creation and how that encompasses marketing, but it's very focused on like what is the role that marketing should play?
Am I understanding that correctly? Yeah, and let me expand on that a little more. You know, we say demand creation, that's another really fun, hot debate that you'll hear. You know, people say you can't create demand.
What we mean is building awareness, right? Demand creation equals brand awareness. The goal of it is how do you make sure that your target market knows who you are? They know the problem you solve, they know your brand, they know your solutions, they know your unique value proposition, they know the benefits and the outcomes that you can drive.
That's the goal. Like the goal of marketing is to make your target market aware of you and have affinity to you so that when they become in need of the thing that you do, they, you come to mind and they raise their hand, they come to you and they want to engage and start a conversation. Like in very plain language, that's how I would break it down. Do you guys follow the, like do you help your clients with brand awareness?
I mentioned yes. Like I think yes, brand awareness, it's like brand. I wasn't asking this after we cover a ton of other stuff, but I think it's like the perfect time to just have the lay of the land here. So I think of like what you mentioned, create an awareness that's brand, right?
Brand is a big part of that. And then demand that's like, now that people are aware of you, how can you hold their interest and create that stronger bond so that they raise their hand or even during that raising their hand process, what else can marketing do, working together with sales, right? And then the last thing I think about is ABM. Like when a company has brand and demand figured out, then they can think about ABM.
It doesn't always happen that way though. I think it's dependent on what is the right bit strategy because some companies want to start with ABM, right off the bat. But is that how you think about, you know, with your work with clients? Yeah, it's a great question.
And yeah, Chris used to talk about this a ton, brand demand and ABM. And so just to break down that overall concept a little bit. So in this context, when we say brand, really the goal is how are you reaching almost, you know, all of the majority of your market with content and messages that's intended to build general awareness of the problem you solve your solution and your brand, right? This is really around making sure that people are aware that you exist and know what you do.
And so those brand awareness or demand creation campaigns, those could be, those can be paid advertising programs, but they can also be things like organic LinkedIn thought leadership podcasts just like this, that were on events, like the old demand gen live event that we met on that me and Chris hosted every week, other in-person events, whether it's like a conference or a dinner or some more exclusive cool, experience that you're inviting people into. So brand really encompasses those types of strategies and tactics and activities with the end goal of problem solution and company awareness. In terms of demand, now what we wanna do is we wanna kind of activate that awareness and we want to bring these people into a sales conversation, right? So again, you know, when you think about demand within brand, you can execute a similar set of tactics, but the goal is how am I compelling someone to take an action, right?
How am I getting someone to come to our website? How am I reaching them with the information that's gonna move them from like awareness to actually realizing that your product can solve an issue that they have and in a way that makes them want to take action. And within demand, there's, you know, we can get into like the subset because you can capture demand for people that are actually actively in market, looking for your thing, right? Paid search, retargeting, there's a lot of different moves there that whoever is in market, let's bring them in for the conversation.
In terms of ABM, I think I view that as almost like a tactic that you deploy in conjunction with sales, my definition of ABM is marketing and sales, collaboratively go after a target set of companies with the intent to bring them on as customers. And there's a lot of different definitions of ABM, but I like to keep it pretty simple there. In a strong ABM program, I think you have multiple components. You have a digital marketing strategy where you're digitally advertising and digitally engaging with that target account list.
You should have some type of in-person experience, whether that's, again, there's so many different types of events that you can do and they're definitely coming back to have that engagement. But then sales also has to be involved. There needs to be some outbound engagement from the sales team, maybe they're attending your events, maybe you also have a gifting strategy that helps start a sales conversation, right? There needs to be a cohesive set of tactics aimed at a specific set of an account to build that awareness and consideration, so that again, when they realize they need something, the thing that you do, you're the first company that's top of mind and they're gonna reach out and initiate that sales conversation when they're ready.
Yeah, there's someone that just built their business around scrappy ABM and that's amazing. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, I mean, it's beautiful because it's such an important part of it can be an important part of someone's business strategy. So, absolutely.
All right, I'm glad you covered that. I didn't mean to start the conversation with all that, but I think it's fascinating to think about, I love like anytime there's three things, it's like something people love, right? So many people can remember. And I think that's maybe where Chris was going with this.
Like he was thinking about like, how do I, he's always thinking about how do I talk about something in a way where it's memorable and so brand demand an ABM, even though he said this in like 2020, or probably you and him talked about this in 2020, it's 2025 and I still remember this. So, it's just so easy, right? So, but what I wanted to actually talk about. It was that, but also like one of the, and you've been on the show before, last time we covered customer onboarding, customer success, customer retention and how those things are so important, but often we create our marketing plan and we leave that stuff out.
It's kind of like, okay, we got our customers, like let's move on guys, we gotta get more, we gotta acquire more customers. We're so focused on creating awareness sometimes and acquiring new customers that we kind of forget about all the stuff that we should be doing with our current customers. And so, with the show, I'm exploring the role that customers play and helping startups build to the next round, I've had some really great conversations around this. Obviously, I care deeply about this.
It's my own point of view, just based on the work that I do, where I kick off client work with customer research and insights before we do anything else. But I'm curious, how have you seen this play out with the companies that you work with? Yeah, and I probably talked about this on our first episode, but my background is actually in like customer success, account management, like my broader professional experience has been in that arena. And I still also fundamentally believe that the experience you deliver for your customer and the outcomes you provide for your customer is probably one of the most important marketing or brand strategies because that is what fuels word of mouth, that is what fuels referrals, it's just so critically important that you can deliver on your brand promise.
And I think to the topic that you're leading us into right now is how can you use information and insights that you get from customer conversations to make really good decisions about your business. And we see this all the time, we see this with the customers we work with, we see this even with our own evolution at Refine Labs. One example comes to mind with one of the customers we work with, they're in the CRM space, they have a CRM for like a very specific type of business that has field sales reps. And the CRM space is very crowded and very competitive, right?
And so in working with them, one of the unlocks for us was partnering with them on having customer research conversations, having being invited to different sales calls or watching recordings and really getting clear on why this CRM for this type of audience or customer. And that was able to surface really why people are actually buying them over the alternative. And then those ended up being the key messages that we ultimately leaned on for all of our digital strategies and have seen such strong results in terms of ongoing pipeline growth as a result of that. So you could take that example and you could probably apply that to any company.
Every company has to answer the question, why are we different and why us? And oftentimes the best way to get to that answer is to actually just have a conversation with your customers. So do you do the research when you work with your clients? Who does the research?
Do you rely on your clients to do that research? Do you do it for them? I'm just curious. Yeah, it's a great question.
So doing the full scale effort of customer research is out of scope for us. But this is how we work with our customers. So number one, we sometimes go a little bit out of scope, especially for our customer that really needs this. So what that means, though, is we will sit on some existing calls or we might write up a set of questions that we want them to ask and then have us report back or share the recording.
Or we find opportunities to leverage other partners and tools out there. So winter has been a really interesting tool in terms of website messaging. And so we'll strongly recommend that they do a winter test so that we can get some feedback through that mechanism. And or we're guiding them through that process and extracting those insights.
That's not really our core competency. Now I just need to tell them to give Anna a call and she'll help them out. I mean, that's what I do. And there are very few of us as I've been scouring LinkedIn.
I'm very open about how I do this work. I talk about my point of view. I talk about how a lot of times companies are lacking this information. They don't know how they were bought by customers.
They don't know how they're doing. And they don't ask questions like, how did you get to us? What was that process like? What did you like about that process?
What did you not like about that process? What were you worried about? These are questions that are fundamental to understanding how to hack your business works. It's at the core.
And time and time again, I'm confused and shocked. And so I talk about this openly, but it's very few of us that do this work. And I found maybe three people so far that are really focused on it. I think that in B2C, this work is so important.
And that's where I come from. I come from B2C. I mean, consumer insights and strategy is like life. You know, like if it's a good B2C D2C DTC brand, like they really do value all of that research.
And use those insights. And that's, I think the reason why it's so valued there is because there's no sales team, right? So like you basically have to rely on your package to tell the message and the message better be right. There's no hand holding with the sales team through this process.
Like, okay, come on prospect. I know you don't get it. Let me just explain everything. There's none of that.
It's like I'm walking down the grocery store aisle. I see something. I see three things on that package. It better speak to me or else I'm not buying it.
I think that's probably what it is. So yeah, so this work is important. And I find that it's missing. And there's like this hole in so many companies.
And so I try to fill that hole. But it's interesting to know that, you know, you sometimes go beyond the scope. If the questions haven't been asked and you like want them to be asked, then you try and get that work going and maybe sit it on some calls that's really fascinating. So it impacts our ability to be successful, right?
And so that's when you think about running like paid advertising programs, there are certain fundamentals that need to be in place. Like your differentiated position, your key messages, like you have a great website, like you have to have these fundamentals in place. So ultimately what happens, you know, I know company is perfect, right? Everyone's doing their best to figure this stuff out.
And so if we identify that there is an issue, like, ah, maybe we don't have the positioning just dialed in right yet. And our messaging isn't landing the way that we want. We want to be that strategic partner that's helping drive a solution for that and not just running paid programs in a vacuum, right? And so like understanding that connection, your point on B2C to B2B is spot on.
I think it's like a common theme, like B2B is just such a late adopter of like core regular practices on the B2C side. And so I'm glad you're feeling the gap. It's definitely needed. And honestly, with AI and like the ability for all these companies to just be created so quickly and copycats, this is gonna become the most important thing.
Wait, Megan, what did you just say? Yeah, it is. I mean, yeah. So the copycat situation has been happening before AI, I think, like there are just so many companies trying to solve the same problem in a different way, speaking to, you know, and so if everybody, and especially remember when everybody was like, you know, increase your ROI or faster or, you know, faster better, faster and faster.
Yeah. Best customer service, save money, save time. And then everyone's like, oh my gosh, we all sound the same. So then you really did have to figure out like, save time could mean 150 different things, right?
Depending on who you're talking to. Yeah. So what does save time actually mean? And digging into that and doing it through talking to customers and even talking to, but you said a really useful thing, which is like, we're just doing our best.
It's not like we're gonna get this perfect. We're just doing our best. And it's iterative. It's not like, okay, we've figured out your positioning and messaging and now that's it.
Yeah, that's the other thing that I can't, don't understand is like, it's not done, it's ongoing. And especially with the early stage startups I work with, like I have seen so much over the past five years, some companies get acquired, company, you know, once we get something going, they have inbound, you know, increasing inbound and that's great. Like we figured stuff out, but some companies have to pivot. So then they realize that their product is a better fit for a different target buyer.
And some companies have to close down and that's just how it is. But you know, at least you're coming at it with your best intention of understanding who you're making this for, how you're different and why that value matters so much for that specific target buyer. Yeah, absolutely. At the end of the day, everyone that's building a product is building it for a customer.
And I mean, me and Chris have beat this drum so much and you do the same, you know, the lack of engagement with your actual customer is often pretty astounding, given that you're basically investing all of this money in all of these resources and building the product for the customer, yet not like acknowledging the importance of truly putting yourself in their shoes, understanding the world from their perspective, connecting the dot, asking the questions, connecting the dots on like what your product is actually gonna mean in terms of their day-to-day experience. It's just one of those things that is fascinating to me that more people don't make this a priority. And to your point, it is an ongoing exercise. You have to be continuously checking in because the market is always shifting, customers' priorities are always shifting, what was true two years ago might not be true anymore.
So it needs to be like part of your ongoing muscle and just like validating your overall position and go to market strategy on a regular basis. I can't believe how much things have changed. And I guess I should stop being surprised, you know? Like over the past couple of years, things have changed so much just working with early stage startups and we talked about this before I pressed record, but like 2022, 2023, and then the shift from 2024 to 2025.
And there's just so much change going on, right? Like even with the election and the impact on, I work with a lot of education technology startups, right? So there's just, that's always gonna be the case, the shifts, the changes and the more that I'm in business, like having my own company, the more I realize that you can't just blame the change, you can't just be like, oh, but the market, well, it's always gonna be like that. There's always stuff that's gonna impact your business.
So you need to be, and I think that the biggest impact is how do you shift, you might have this product, you might have this service, how do you shift the way you talk about it? Given now that you know market dynamics. Right, absolutely, yeah. So we talked about kind of like this linear way to think about marketing and sales.
Like first create awareness, then create demand and get them closer to like raise their hand, and then actually get to the sale. And but is there like, I mean, that's not really how people buy and especially today, like there's just so much change around how people buy. Do you have like any thoughts on that? Like what's changed about how people buy or buy, what's still the same, and how does that, how is that playing out with your clients?
Yeah, that's a great question. Just to clarify, I think like the brand demand ABM, it's not necessarily that it's sort of a linear path. It's more so when you're defining your strategy, you want to think about it through all those different pillars, and you want to have different tactics and strategies that you're deploying for each of them, because they each serve kind of a different purpose overall. I think we all know like any marketer knows that there's like 20 million things that actually influence someone.
So ultimately makes a make a purchasing decision, right? It's never the one thing, and it's never a set of things in a specific order. The buyer journey is very chaotic and non-linear, and that's not gonna change. Yeah, it's been interesting.
When we first started Refine Labs, we talked a lot about the big change from what we dubbed the website era, which I would say is like early 2000s, into leading up to 2015, 2020, the website era, quick definition. I give HubSpot a lot of credit, sort of like the inbound marketing era, right? So it was all about SEO, building a great website, people were pouring a ton of money into Google search, and digital marketing was a very common digital marketing strategy in that era was like, let me give you some great content and give me your contact information, right? Give me your name and your email address.
And that was really successful for a while. We then had sort of the rise of social media, and it like totally changed how people consumed information and learned about things. So we then moved into this era that we like told the dark social era, and that's when a lot of the strategies that we've talked about for the last five years really were way more effective. And so this was treating paid social, not like a direct response transactional channel, but more about telling your story, giving the content without any gates, not requiring people to give you anything, and basically meeting people where they're at, acknowledging that everyone's spending hours a day on social media channels, right?
And picking the right ones based on your business and your audience and making good decisions there. We're now, I think, moving away from the dark social era and into what I've creatively named the AI era. That's so great. I know, right?
What'd you get that? What do you get that? What are way with words? And I think what we're starting to see is a couple of really interesting dynamics, right?
I have not developed like a full perspective. This is one of those things, like when you're in the storm, it's sometimes hard to like clearly see the storm. So what I'm trying to do is acknowledge certain truths, right? So number one, in the AI era, people are using LLMs to find things.
People are using that as an alternative to search, right? That's a big shift. And so that has a lot of downstream impacts. Does it mean that no one's using Google?
No, a lot of people are still using Google search, right? So that's still a very good. Actually, can I tell you a second? Can I interject for a second?
Most people are still using search. So I don't know if you've seen Rand Bishkin, if you watch his stuff, but he's very big on like. I love Rand, yeah. Audience research, audience insights.
And he shared this video and I was like, what, everyone's talking about how people are completely shifting over to using AI to search for stuff, but it's actually a very small group. Totally, yeah. It's the beginning of the shift. Yeah, it's the beginning of the shift.
That's what it is. Yeah, most people are still in that traditional search. And people will still use search for a long time, right? Like that's not going away immediately or even next year.
However, I think what we will see is a rise in adoption of leveraging LLMs, the chat GPTs, right? So we're going to have a lot of different questions that we're going to talk about. And we're going to talk about the other options to start to discover, learn, and ask for things. So it actually means like all of the tactics that we've talked about at Refine Labs for the last several years in terms of how to reach people in the dark social era, those are all still super effective today.
And the goal is not to abandon those, continue to do those, find ways to be more efficient, find ways to be more effective. And this is why too, like I am taking a very measured and thoughtful approach to AI, because just like you said, we are only going to have the early adopters start to like materially change how they engage, you know, we are going to see that try and continue and probably in ways that we don't fully even know yet, right? As AI continues to develop. What it does mean though, is it's an opportunity to start to think a few steps ahead.
So like when you think about content creation, trying to understand how LLMs actually, you know, like leverage the content that's on the internet to provide an answer to a question, right? And so it's just like, now is the time to just start to understand what is changing and what is the, what are the underlying dynamics of that change? And how can I be smart and start to think about, is there a different way I need to create or index or build content for example, that is search friendly and LLM friendly. That's just one example.
There's also, you know, if you look on LinkedIn, it will make you feel like if you're, you know, if you don't have AI fully integrated into your go-to-market strategy that you're like behind, but when I talk to people, nobody has much going on. Like, you know, oh, I'm using AI to make video clips. I'm like, cool, like I'm using AI to do transcripts, cool. You know, I have AI in clay automating this one workflow.
Great, like those are good things. Like we should be using those tools for those things, but that's not a material shift or a strategic change, right? Those are efficiency gains. And not to discount them, like those are cool.
People should continue to experiment with those tactics. We should continue to leverage AI for efficiency and increase productivity. The question that I'm more interested in though, is how is AI going to fundamentally change? How people design a go-to-market strategy?
Like those are the more interesting questions, and I don't have the answers today. We're taking a year of AI experimentation at Refine Labs. So the call to action to our company is to experiment, to test ideas, to try new tools. We have the benefit of working with a lot of companies.
So when we come across something, we have the opportunity to test it across multiple companies and validate if it's going to be successful or not. So right now we are in learn and experiment mode, and we're going to take the whole year to do that, before we have our own POV on how AI should be integrated overall into both marketing strategy as well as marketing execution. How do you think about for your current clients and their go-to-market strategy, what percent is like that experimentation? Do you take like, okay, we decided that we're going to approach, the marketing plan is such that this all makes sense.
We should have a well-rounded perspective on this, and we should be on these channels, but then you have a little bit that you kind of are like, we need to experiment with AI-related go-to-market plan stuff. How do you think about that for current clients? Yeah, that's a good question. In terms of their budget, it's not like a budget allocation for AI experiments.
It's really what we're focused on with our customers is executing on the right strategy for them. What we're beginning to experiment with, I'll give you a good example on the creative side. So one of the insights that we've known this for a while now, and we've published some assets in the vault on this, but in terms of building really good ad creative for LinkedIn, for example, what we found is micro-animated assets overperform a static asset. Having some movement in ad is going to be more eye-catching and ultimately increase engagement, click-through rate, et cetera.
And so we have found this really awesome AI tool that actually allows us to do what we call micro animations in a fraction of the time that it used to take us to do them. So what's the name of the tool? Or king-in-at-time? I think it's called Runway.
Oh, okay. And I can like fact check that, but I'm pretty sure that's what it's called. It's awesome. And what it's been enabling us to do, like we just did this for a client, like we know that this is the better ad format.
However, we used to have to charge more for it because it just took a lot of time, right? For us to develop those assets, we just took a set of their latest ad set. We created these micro animations and we just launched them. And for this specific client, we're gonna say like, we see this across the board, let's see how these perform for you.
And if they perform really well, let's figure out a way that we're integrating this into all of your updated ad sets as we refresh them every four to six weeks. And if there is a charge, it's now a much less incremental cost for us to provide that compared to what we had to charge before, because it just literally took something that used to take us four to six hours is taking us 30 minutes now. And so that's just one very concrete example of like, that's a strategic insight that we know drives better ad performance. And here is a way for us to use this tool to produce a really great outcome in a fraction of the time, right?
I think that's a great use case of integrating AI into what you're doing that allows you to have ultimately a better result of what your strategy is. Totally. Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating. And that also makes sense.
Like you are realizing something that's core to this client that you need to do as part of the GoToMarket strategy, you need to run paid ads, right? And so, but these types of ads, this type of creative works better. So then you're using a tool to help you generate those ads faster. That's awesome.
I actually ask you about paid ads. Paid ads is not my core. I don't work on ads. The clients I work with, early-stage startups, typically don't do paid ads in the beginning.
You're nodding your head because why, Megan, why are you nodding your head? I do think a company should achieve a certain set of milestones before they invest in paid ads. Paid advertising is not like a coin-operated machine, right? It's not like, oh, if I put in a dollar, I'm going to get a dollar back.
It's just not how it works. And so we kind of touched on this a little bit earlier, but before you put any money into paid advertising, you need to have a clear and differentiated position. You need to have great messaging. You really need to have a validated offer.
I tell people that you really should try to get to maybe, you know, three to five million in revenue before you even consider investing in ads, right? And there are other marketing tactics you can do, organic social events. These things are going to be what gets you your first set of customers and validating it in the market. Now, you know, we have worked with, you know, very early-stage companies that maybe were very well-funded and they wanted to accelerate and, you know, find ways to use paid advertising.
And in that case, if you want to give it a try, I say the way to think about it is, it is going to be an expensive experiment and you really should use it to validate your positioning and your messaging. And so if you probably have a hypothesis that this is your position and these are your key messages, but you should see if it resonates. And if your ads don't perform or bring in any conversions, that's a problem. It's a signal, right?
And so I think it can be a way to kind of validate if what you're selling and how you're talking about it is actually resonating with your market. So if you have funds to invest, you know, but that needs to be the mindset. It's not, you know, if you're so early, it's not that this is going to guarantee me, you know, pipeline. It has to be, this is going to be a way for me to validate my product in market, my product in messaging in market.
Beautiful. Thank you for that. It's a tough one because I try to help, like if an early stage startup is doing paid ads, I try to help and obviously try, we try to match the paid ads messaging to all of the work that we've done, voice, customer research, but you also have to get it on the platform where your target buyer hangs out. Sometimes your target buyer doesn't hang out on that platform, but your end user does.
And so if you, for example, are running the sales-led motion, but also product-led motion, that's where it becomes kind of challenging because then you have to be sure that you have both positioning and messaging for both the target buyer and the end user. And I don't love to complicate things for early stage startups because I don't believe that you need to, right? Just focus on your target buyer, make sure you understand that, position message, website, get on the right channels, where do they hang out online, offline, all that stuff. When you bring in another persona into the mix, so early, it's challenging because you got to think about both, right?
Yep, absolutely. But that happens. So my take on what you said is you need a validated, you need to have a certain amount of ARR first. It's an expensive test.
It could validate your positioning and messaging, but it has to also be the right platform to the right target audience on there, which isn't always the case. So whenever I talk to founders and they're like, we tested our way into our positioning and messaging with ads. And we found that I don't like to start from a place of testing our way into positioning and messaging because it's like testing your way into business strategy, which that's not my perspective on how to do good strategy, but it's being done. So I'm not going to tell people what they shouldn't do.
It's just not my approach. But I do think it's important to validate your positioning and messaging as much as you can and see what comes out of it. Any other advice for testing paid ads, and specifically because you had you and Chris, and with paid ads, you kind of flipped it on its head where you said it's not just about direct to purchase. It's also about creating awareness and telling the story.
And that's actually, I also don't know why you would want to put money in to test the paid ads, to tell your story. And there's so many other ways to go about doing that. Yeah, the way that I like to think about it is, I think if you're early stage doing the things that like you and me and Chris did on LinkedIn, back in the day and to the stay, use organic channels to communicate to your audience and tell your story, right? You can do the same testing, if you will, because you can get immediate feedback.
This is the big challenge though, when you're building an organic presence, your target customers may not be directly connected to you. So in addition to building the great content and putting the content out, you have to make sure your intended audience sees the content. So what's also required is that you're sending connection requests to the people that you want to see your content. The beauty of a paid ad is that you're paying for the pleasure to guarantee distribution, to the people that you want to see it, right?
However, I agree with you. I think most early stage companies should hold off on paid advertisement until they hit a revenue milestone, until they really have validated that there's enough product market fit to make that investment. But the great thing that paid advertising does is it makes sure that your story gets in front of the exact people that you want to see it. And if you create and deploy ads in a way that meet people where they're at, that don't ask them to do anything, that are scroll stopping, you can achieve the goal of getting your brand, your problem, your solution, your story in front of the audience that you want.
So I mean, that's the beauty of it. Alternatively though, you know, we're big proponents of the organic thought leadership LinkedIn strategy, but there's a lot of time and effort that it works. It works. I mean, that's how we've grown our fine labs over the last five years.
And spoiler alert, we do run paid advertising for our agency too. But we didn't and I bet in the beginning. We did not, in the beginning, because we didn't have the money to do it in the beginning, right? We only did it once we achieved a certain, once we passed 10 million ARR was when we started investing in paid, because we're like, we know exactly who we're messaging to, we know exactly what we want to say, we know exactly what we can deliver, we know this resonates.
So we're going to put money behind that, right? But then also keep doing the organic LinkedIn thought leadership strategy as well, right? Yeah. And now it's totally, it makes sense.
What would you say is the biggest challenge for the companies that you're working with? I'm just honestly like curious, I like to get a feel for this stuff. There was like maybe five months ago where I sent out a survey to a bunch of like CMOs and VPM marketing, so I was curious what's your biggest challenge right now? And the things you would expect came up, I think it's hard sometimes to be like, what is the challenge when you're dealing with so much hard stuff?
You're not quite sure what the challenge is. Like what's causing that challenge, right? So you might be talking about the symptom, not the problem. So maybe they'll say something like, you know, getting leads, but the actual thing that's like, what's the reason for that?
Well, the reason is probably because you're not resonating with your positioning and messaging is off. So you're not resonating with people and so no leads are coming through. But yeah, what's your thought on? Like what's the biggest challenge for companies you talk to?
It's interesting because as we have gone up market and we're working with some of these larger companies, like a lot of our companies are anywhere from 100 million to a billion in annual revenue. So these are big successful companies. They've been around for more than a decade. You know, they spent hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars a month on paid advertising.
I think that the biggest problem that these types of organizations have is their relative success and the size of their organizations make it very difficult to change how they go to market. So a lot of these, you know, a lot of these companies are kind of stuck and I talked to the CMO and the VP of marketing and they know and agree with all of the things that we've been talking about today, right? How buying has changed, but they don't feel like they're able to actually change their strategy and their tactic execution because they don't have alignment from other people and just because of the sheer size of the company has created this kind of bureaucracy that makes change even more difficult. And so I find that the real problem that we're helping our customers solve is actually like change management.
And paid is a tactic that we're working with them to change, but it's, you know, change management in terms of like, what actually matters in terms of measurement? Like I was talking to another VP later where he said, I know Lee Jen is not good, but I can measure it and defend it. So we're gonna keep doing it. It's like, you know, you know, and you're still gonna keep doing it because you feel like you have no choice, right?
And I get it, like I have a lot of empathy for people in that situation. So then I say, okay, well, what if I can help paint a picture? What if we can look at your marketing measurement in a slightly different way that might open up a conversation to move us in that direction, right? And like, okay, yeah, I'm open to that.
Let's have that follow up conversation. Okay, great. But it's hard. And so it really becomes how can you make business cases?
How can you really understand the dynamics of an organization and how can you be a good strategic partner and help them navigate through that change, right? And a lot of these companies are like, what are we doing with AI? And it's like, we have so many other things we need to focus on first, like core fundamental things for your business and your strategy. Let's get that right.
And then we can talk about AI. I wonder how many, cause there are so many like LinkedIn AI gurus now, right? Cause it's like the people that saw this shift coming and they're like, I need to be on top of this. And I'm gonna be like the go-to resource for AI and adopting AI at companies.
And what I wanna say about that is most companies don't need AI right now. Most companies need to get the fundamental business principles right first. And then let's talk about AI. The other thing that I would say though, is what every company should be focused on now is their data.
AI isn't going to be useless without like a unified sort of data structure and not everything, right? Company financials, go to market data, like even their customer research, even just their internal, their customer, like their customer, the data that they have on their customers, everything. And so there's not enough, AI is only as powerful as the data source that it's sitting on top of, right? And so in my opinion, like business fundamentals and data should be the two priorities for companies cause those have to be in place for AI to do anything useful or strategic or create any type of competitive advantage.
Yeah, the other thing that I'm seeing, the early stage startups adapt and clients that I work with is like automations, automating stuff. Yeah, some of that's helpful. And those are like quick wins, I think. That's a good AI use case, kind of like the animated tool that I mentioned where it's like, yeah, those are good use cases, go for it, right?
Is that gonna meaningfully move the needle? No, is it gonna make it more efficient? Yeah, is it gonna be a new? Sure.
Make it more efficient if you're asking it to automate the right stuff. Cause you could also be asking it to automate the wrong stuff. 100%. Like the data and do we know what we're doing here?
And are we moving in the right direction? Awesome. All right, well, I learned a lot from you and I asked a lot of questions. And I knew that this would happen because you're so, like you're so great Megan, I have so much respect for you.
Is there any question that I can help answer? Any question for me? What would you say, what is like your best piece of advice for a company that's trying to figure out how to improve their positioning? Mm, that's the work that I do.
Of course you asked me that question. So it's kind of a loaded question. Like if you want to improve your positioning, you just, you need to first understand like, is that what you need to improve? Like why do you need to improve your positioning?
What's going on? What's the signal you're getting? And it's usually the signal is like slow growth. And we're trying to, you know, we're running these marketing plays or sales is talking to prospects and it's not landing, right?
But it's usually it's like qualitative and quantitative back to like it's just, we're feeling like it's just not good momentum. So you know, my answer, I think like the best place to start is. Customer research? You got it.
I was trying to set you up. I know we got a wrap up the conversation. I wanted to give you a good one to land on. Well, and that's why, you know, I have loved you all of this stuff from 2020 and everything always kind of centered on, do you understand your customer?
Do you have empathy for your customer? If you don't, that's the place to start. Like that lands well with my perspective on things. And so, round up your make a list, right?
Who are your customers? You want your customer, I always want to talk to customer super fans first. Not because they're going to like gosh about the process. They have other things to say that they don't like.
It's not, it's just that they get over that, especially for early stage startups. They'll get over all of the stuff that sucks because they just love the fact that like, you're adding so much value to their date today. So, customer super fans first, then you know, regular customers, then it, you talk to them. You might also want to talk to warm prospects, right?
Laps buyers, people that bought and then left. Sometimes there's that. And that's where you start. And I have a list of questions and it's no surprise because I keep on repeating this up on LinkedIn, on the podcast too, like know who these people are.
What's their background? Where did they come from? Why are they in this role? What are the responsibilities?
What are the goals and challenges at work? And then the buying process, a lot of people skip over that. I know we're at TimeMegan. I know.
I can go on. I know. I mean, you laid out, like you laid out a fundamental set of questions that people need to know. This was such an awesome conversation, Anna.
Thank you so much for having me. Awesome. Thanks for joining me. I love that question.
And I should just make a solo episode on that seriously because I'm totally covered. I agree. So, thank you. And if anybody wants to reach Megan, she is on LinkedIn, clearly.
Megan might bow in. And if you would like to check out Refine Labs, go to refinelabs.com. Thank you so much. Thanks, Anna.
Take care. You too.