Today on Stacking Growth, we're excited to release the full interview Meghan Bowen gave with Evan Kirstel on Tech Impact, including extra questions that weren't aired in the TV segment. She touches on the new era of buying behavior, our brand demand expand strategy, and how AI has impacted the marketing agency landscape. Hope you all enjoy. Welcome to this special AI episode of Tech Impact.
Today we're exploring how you can modernize your B2B growth strategy using the latest tech advancements. And with us now is Meghan Bowen, CEO of Refine Labs. They can great to have you here. Looking forward to the conversation.
Thanks for having me. Likewise, tell us about Refine Labs and the history of the company. We started Refine Labs in 2019 because we were observing that B2B SaaS and Tech companies had not evolved their marketing strategies to keep up with the changing conditions of how buyers buy. And so we saw the opportunity to have a broad impact by starting an agency so that we could partner with as many B2B companies as possible to broaden the impact that we could have.
So over the last six years, we've worked with over 300 companies to help them modernize their growth strategy, ultimately driving more efficient revenue growth by aligning marketing, sales and measurement. Amazing. Well, a lot of agencies talk about growth, but very few talk about investment. Why take outside capital now?
What does that actually enable you to do that you couldn't otherwise? Yeah, we initially bootstrapped the agency for the first five years and saw a lot of really successful growth as a result. The investment was actually not something we intentionally went after, but an interesting opportunity that presented itself that we decided to capitalize on. The agency landscape is changing a lot with AI right now.
And I think over the next three to five years, marketing agencies are going to completely transform how they operate. Being an innovator, being strategic and continuing to bring new technologies and strategies to B2B companies is how agencies will certainly survive but thrive. And our new investor, great in holdings, is giving us some additional capital to accelerate our ability to meet that market need. Interesting.
So most companies talk about their funnel in very traditional terms, how many leads can you secure? It seems logical, trackable, quantifiable, easy to show, ROI, but you argue that this approach is fundamentally broken. And you talk about a more modern demand-gen strategy. What does that look like and how does it evolve?
I think the best way to answer this is to tell you about our proprietary split the funnel analysis. And so as I was describing before, we sort of observed these legacy digital marketing strategies no longer producing the pipeline and revenue that they did before. And when we looked into the data more, what we found is there was a marked difference between low intent and high intent leads. Low intent is a volume game.
You can drive a high volume of those leads, but very few will actually convert to customers. If you refocus on deploying high intent strategies, the volume of leads coming in might go down, but the quality is so much higher, that the number of actual qualified opportunities and customers that you acquire is much more. So quick numbers, you can have 500 leads, 30 become opportunities, only two become customers, or you can have 100 high intent leads, 35 of those become opportunities, and 10 of those become customers. So volume is no longer the goal.
It's really about aligning on how buyers are buying and getting actual customers in with your marketing investments. Fantastic. And you recently announced something called the Vault, which sounds very mysterious and intriguing. Maybe describe what that is in practice.
The Vault is our intellectual property warehouse. It really is where all of our strategies, our frameworks, our playbooks, our experiments, our lab reports are all published. We have thousands and thousands of pages of content published. We have hundreds of videos in the vault.
We created it so that anybody that knew that they needed to modernize their B2B growth strategy, if they weren't in a position to hire us as their agency to help them, they can simply subscribe to the vault and get access to everything that they need to do it on their own. That sounds fantastic. Let's talk about the role of trust in the new buyer-seller relationship. You have a really interesting framework that you've developed a brand demand expand, maybe describe what that is and how companies need to change their perspective on trust.
But a lot has changed. And especially with the rise of AI, I think brand and trust is going to be the primary driver for B2B purchasing decisions. The brand demand expand framework is essentially a way to think about your entire go-to market motion. So brand is really focused on driving awareness and preference, relevance, so that you're part of the day one consideration set from a B2B buyer's perspective.
Demand is really focused on how you actually convert that interest into actual pipeline and customers, and then expand things about everything that happens after they become a customer. And a lot of people relegate that to account management or customer success teams without acknowledging the role that marketing can play in customer advocacy, evangelism and expansion. Fantastic. So enter AI.
Gen AI is radically reshaping how individuals behave and how organizations behave. How are you seeing AI reshape your model, your business model, and what should B2B teams be thinking about regarding AI and adoption? Yeah. I think about AI in two distinct ways.
From an external market perspective and then sort of an internal B2B go-to-market execution perspective. So from an external market perspective, what I want to answer is how is AI changing, how B2B buyers are researching and learning about new products and making purchasing decisions. So one key way that's evolving is people are turning to LLMs like chat GPT or perplexity to discover new products. And what's interesting is the best thing that a brand can do to show up in those results is actually audit all of their digital properties on their website for clear brand positioning.
Across all properties. That's how those technologies are trained. And so that's actually how you can influence having a seat at that table and becoming discoverable through these new means that people are using. So it's actually less about trying to hack AI and it's actually going back to fundamentals of is your brand positioning clear.
Is it differentiated? Is that messaging consistent across all of your digital properties? Now from an internal perspective, go on LinkedIn. There's all sorts of hype today around someone built an AI agent or 40 AI agents to just replace their marketing teams.
And what we find is those things break down in practice. So from an internal perspective, the number one thing that people can be thinking about now is cleaning up and centralizing all of their data. That is the foundation for leveraging any AI tool or agent to actually produce any meaningful difference in terms of business outcomes. Most people are jumping to AI tools and tactics without focusing on that fundamental requirement for any of those tools to actually be effective.
So those are some things top of mind that we're working on. Well, interesting insight. Any final inspirational thoughts or takeaways on this brave new world we're all facing? I think with technology advancing so much, I think the marketing fundamentals never change and all marketing strategies should be rooted in.
How is your buyer engaging with content to learn about new products and services and how do they want to buy? And your strategy should be rooted in that as opposed to how can I use this cool new AI tool and or what do I think we need to do to grow? And so goes back to basic marketing fundamentals. I think those are going to become even more important as technology continues to advance.
Well, wonderful advice. Well, thanks so much for joining us on this special AI episode of Tech Impact. And onwards and upwards, congrats on all these success. Thanks, Adam.
And if you'd like to learn more, check out their website, Refine Labs.com. That's Refine Labs on Word.com. Or log on to techimpact.tv.