Hey everyone, this is Megan Bowen, CEO of Refine Labs. I am joined today by my new best friend, Adam Robinson, CEO of retention.com. Welcome, Adam. I'm excited to have this conversation with you today.
Hi, Megan. I'm so pumped to be here. We are going to talk about something really cool, this new product, this new tool that your company has developed. I know you're kind of coining the phrase inbound, lead outbound.
I'm kind of liking this outbound marketing phrase. We don't have to get caught up in languaging. We're not going to talk about what we're calling it. We'll save that for another conversation.
But I wanted to set the stage for the conversation and excited to get into it today. So I think that historically at Refine Labs, we have never done outbound sales to acquire customers. All of our new customers that sign up for our agency services, whatever our products and service offerings are, have all come inbound as a result of our marketing efforts, right? We're a marketing agency.
We like to lead the way in showing how you can leverage marketing to really acquire customers. That said, one of my initiatives as the new CEO and as we look to continue to grow the agency is trying to figure out, I do believe there should be some, at least, some of the outbound motion that we think about integrating into our go-to-market strategy. And I'm just trying to really clarify my own thesis of what that should be, right? It's not the old school, outbound sales tactics, but how are we leveraging signals, data, the current landscape of B2B buying behavior to craft the right strategy that's going to be effective for us and by your centric, which is always really important to us here.
So I've recently discovered this new tool that you have created. I am obsessed with it. I installed it a few days ago and it has taken over my mind share in the last few days. I'm not the only one.
No, it's awesome though. So I want to give you an opportunity to kind of break down what the tool is and kind of how you guys are using it. You guys have sort of been putting out some LinkedIn content on, hey, here's a great approach to leverage this tool for some outbound sales outreach. And then we'll go from there.
So I'll kind of kick it over to you. Break down what this new tool is all about. Sure. So the tool is Rb2b.com and it is person level website visitor identity.
So it is unlike Sixth Sense Clear Bit and Demand Base because those stop at the account level or the company level and we'll take you all the way down to the person. We're not guessing. We're not doing it with reverse IP look up like they are. We're using publisher networks.
You can check on our website and looked at them. I'm not going to waste time explaining how we're doing it now. It's US only for all you compliance people. It is not GDPR compliant, but it only exists.
The IP is only fire in the US. So not being GDPR compliant does not matter because Europe doesn't have any jurisdiction over it. So the idea is I could go to your website, Megan, hit it, not fill out a form, leave, and then our tool is going to push my LinkedIn profile into a Slack channel in real time for free, which is pretty rad. And there's just all sorts of possibilities.
I mean, I talk a lot about my journey with Outbound last year and actually, I take this from Chris who I heard it from first. He's like, I hate demand generation as a term because there's demand capture and there's demand creation. And when you lump the two of them, oftentimes you end up scaling the things that you can measure and that's not actually where the demand is created. The demand is created doing things like this.
And very often times the only way you can measure them is what you guys do with the user submitted attribution and then sort of figuring out where they actually heard about you in the first days. So I agree with that. And like, you know, my sales team is, you know, seven, 20% of the size that it was a year ago and it's still producing the same because I'm doing more demand creation and the actual SDRs were not actually creating demand. So I kind of think when it comes to Outbound, like you were talking about, it is you should not send a totally cold email.
Whatever signal you can use, whether it's like job changes in your CRM or I mean, the website visit is my favorite because it's just such a strong signal. You should be, you know, creating demand that gets people to your site and then like engaging people off of that. Like that's, that's kind of the, we're still doing some of the old school outbound, but it's not like SDRs. It's like this new kind of pirate, like very spammy-ish, like use a lot of domains and like, just try to basically send a bunch of email to people and get them to write back to you that they're interested in then off your court domain, like send them a link to your website and try to get them to your site.
Like that's the Outbound strategy we're using. I'm happy to connect you to a guy who can explain to you what this is all about and how to set the infrastructure up and stuff. Yeah, exactly. But it's like, my whole thing with Outbound was like the, the, the, there's so much spray and spray going on, the personalization doesn't really work anymore.
So like, but you kind of still, you can get some value out of this frame. Anyway, back to how we're using using this. Yeah. You guys are using these signals are coming in at your team.
Yeah, exactly. So, so yeah, exactly. I still think email is an okay way to get traffic to your site. Then the question is what to do once you get there, right?
So like somebody, can I do a screen share to like literally show this? Uh, I think so. Can you share? Yeah.
Yeah. So, so I'm going to show you what we have a sales guy named Dave C and he just sits in our, uh, so like this is what you'll see in this account. So you're basically showing like the audio portion of this. You're just showing the Slack channel where we're dropping these profiles.
You have a sales representative on it during the Slack channel seeing who's visiting exactly when he sees somebody who is like, this would be ICP for retention.com, which we sell at E come stores, the founder of their watches. He's going to connect with them on LinkedIn. And then he sends them an email. Uh, and I actually sent you the template, but very, very simple.
It's asking for me. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's aggressive, but that's what he does.
So asking for a meeting and then if he hasn't heard back in 24 hours, sends a LinkedIn message, doesn't necessarily ask for a meeting, but just says, Hey, you know, want to know if you want to talk about retention.com. That's sort of softly asking for a meeting. And then since another one is like, I'd love to share with you the ways that we've helped X, Y and Z retailer, like we have some watch clients. Like that's what he would do that guy.
So very simple. It's like 24 hours of activity, but what he learned is he really started booking a lot of demos when he started acting very quickly on the signal, which every, every sales business I have ever run, the faster I have moved after that initial demonstration of intent, there's like an exponential decay and results the longer that you. So so that that's what we're doing. And it's literally just two channels, LinkedIn and email, sort of semi aggressive touches on both.
And that's selling a $18,000 deal to e-com stores to like, you know, upper S and B and lower mid market e-com stores. We haven't really figured out this product. I launched them right. We don't know where so much for the for the premium PLG product.
I know you're continuing to upgrade this in real time. No, which is awesome. Yeah, exactly. And by the way, I think you're actually very generously paying us $295 a month for business emails.
I think we're going to just give those away and then only have two plans, zero and four and nine five and have zero be everything in the slack app and four and nine five be anywhere else. I like that. So if you want to, it's just simpler, you know, it's like, and you'll be free. No, that's great.
So I've only been using this for three days, but I have a lot of thoughts and already a lot of experience is already. And so, you know, first of all, when I think about this, we talked a little bit about intent signals, right? So at Refine Labs, we always talk about at the end of the day, if people have high intent, when they're on your website, they're going to complete your requested demo, book a sales call, and you know, if they're really ready to talk to you, they're going to raise their hand and say, let's go, let's have a conversation. So these signals that are coming in where I'm seeing, you know, kind of qualified buyers for us that would be a good fit for our agency services, they're not yet submitting our, you know, book a call form.
So I was, I was not wanting to immediately ask for a meeting. In my mind, I'm like, this is like medium intent, right? It's not quite high intent. It's more than low intent.
They're on the website. What I've been doing that I love, one of my favorite things, which is so simple. I immediately send a connection request to strong ICP fit visitors that come in through this channel. And I almost have a 100% acceptance rate.
And to your point, I'm obsessed with it. So I'm doing it like as soon as I see it come in. Can I, yeah, can I add something to that? So like this becomes so powerful if you are as prolific creators as you and Chris are and as I am, because you should not be doing what my guide is doing if you are, because what happens on LinkedIn is if like, here's what I'd be doing if I were you, even for the agency, even though Chris is working on Pissetto, I would have both profiles connect to ICP and then they'll get served both of your content, then literally wait 60 days and send an outbound LinkedIn message to them that is not suggestive of a demo at all.
In their reply will be a star struck reply. Yeah. So this is my, this is my hypothesis, what I want to test. I'm basically connecting immediately to all the right ones.
Yeah. I know what else is fun is seeing all of the random people that come to your website where you're just like, okay, if you have a lot of traffic, you will be overwhelmed by the amount of noise there is. We're building a filter that can like filter out before it even gets in a slide. Cool.
Yeah. Yeah. But it's like, I want to say single digit percentage ICP for everybody that I've seen so far, you know, all the websites, like one out of 10, you know, maybe one out of 20, but still how valuable. It's so valuable.
Yeah. Yeah. It's incredible. Yeah.
It really is. Yeah. And I think so what I want to do is because of just our philosophy on, on intent with B2B buying is because they're not quite at that high intent, how can I engage and follow up with them on a personal basis beyond just the LinkedIn connection and knowing they'll start to get, you know, get content from us. So I have been, I basically have three tests that I'm going to run over the next 30 days.
I, we have a ton of free resources and assets that we provide on our website and the vault and our YouTube channels. I basically can identify the one that is sort of the easiest for people to immediately use and get some value and basically to share a personalized follow up offering those resources up, not asking for anything. Yeah. And just as another touch point in a value add opportunity for engagement.
I've also been really wanting to test like video outreach on LinkedIn. So I'm going to use this as an excuse to start testing some of that. And so I was thinking of having like kind of a prerecorded video that would be easy for me to just send off to the ones that I thought made sense, but maybe for the really, really strong fit. Like we got a really good, I'm not going to say the name, but we got a really good visitor the other day where I was like, I want to work with that company.
Like imagine recording like a custom video where you give like a quick, you know, respectful tear down of their website and the CRO changes that they should make or, you know, take a look at what they're doing on LinkedIn for advertising and suggest, you know, five things that they should do differently to get better results. Like some type of custom value added personalized sort of consulting advice. So those are going to be my kind of three approaches that I'm going to test out and see, see what happens. I literally think though, just by connecting to them and having them see our content that then we might get the book of all inbound 60 days.
Right. You should get Chris and someone who or someone who can help who can do that for him to also just connect the same people because it'll be, it'll be amazing. Right. So I have two thoughts with a, I think your plan is great.
B, one thing that I liked that Dave said in his email was he was like, thanks for thinking about retention.com. And like, I could imagine reading that and then being like, well, because you're, it's not like thanks for coming by the site. But like, what did you say to somebody that messaged? It was after LinkedIn connection, you know, something with that essence that's like peaks, they're like, well, how?
Yeah. You know what I mean? It's an interesting, it's an interesting sentence. That's just a thought that wasn't great.
It was just something that popped in my head. This one is, I think more powerful. So there, I, as I told you earlier today, I work with this guy, Alec Paul, who's my LinkedIn coach who works with 10 B to B Saa CEOs. And his whole business is helping people like me basically do what Chris did and you now do.
Right. So like it's build your personal profile up on LinkedIn so that you get inbound connection requests. And I'm sure you realize it's like, you have a big post, you'll have 250 people try to connect with you. So the whole original plan with us was it's him and then he's got a guy who actually runs the inboxes for him somewhat programmatically.
They sort of build semi automatic, semi manual bots to handle link requests or LinkedIn inboxes. So they'll pick out people in your ICP who inbound connection requests to you. Then they'll wait 60 days. And by 60 days, since we're putting out content, I'm three times a week, so I'm just two, so we're putting out content every day.
They're like, you are a celebrity 60 days after someone's been reading your content several times a week to that first. So then they go in with a very unassuming message after 60 days. And they're like, it's an 80% reply rate. What came to my mind when you're talking about the personalized video or specifically a tear down of someone's website?
What if you sent someone a video tear down their website after you were already a celebrity to them? Like before I knew Chris, if I got a fucking video from him, you know, like, I don't even know how that would have made me, you know, it's this strange power. It's the reason we create content. It's this strange power where you we are making friends with tens of thousands of people over the course of the year, right?
So it's like, I think it's, I think it's one thing to send someone, maybe you do it for your best people or whatever. But I mean, I would try to run this experiment sort of in parallel. It's like, what if you wait till you get your content for a while and then for the best leads to make them tear down or something like that? Like I could see that.
That's a great point. If you're a creator working unbelievably well because like they'll just trust you so much more. Like in the beginning, it's like, who the fuck is this making girl in the first place, right? Or it's just further segmenting because what's up with also is interesting is sometimes I click on a profile that's great to make the connection request and I'm like, oh, they're already first degree connection.
Awesome. Like they're in the flow, right? I'm just gonna chill. I'm not gonna do anything with that one for the moment, right?
Or to your point, maybe they have had more of a history with me so they would be more receptive to some type of message. But I mean, that's a great point on timing. I think for us too, not only do I think about how do I leverage this tool for RefineLabs, I'm also thinking about our customers, right? Because a big thing with our agency customers, obviously we're focused on devising the marketing strategy and executing against it, but we meaningfully care if that turns into revenue.
So we have our hands in all of our customer sales processes and figuring out we're always like, what happens after the request to demo form is submitted? We want to know how can we improve that process. And so I'm also trying to think through how we might be able to get this in front of our customers to help them leverage these insights and signals as part of an overall strategy. I think there's so much interesting opportunity there.
And I think we talked a little bit about this before. I do think it depends on like, what is your product? How much does it cost? Like, what is the timeline for consideration?
Like if I'm talking about agency services that cost $27,000 a month, that's very different than a tool that might cost $15,000 a year, right? Or mine is free. Yeah. I'm gonna use it in a very different way than RefineLabs, right?
There's no question about it. So something else just popped in my head. What's gonna be a really valuable signal for you, which the Slack app isn't doing right now, is when someone comes back to your site, like two and three times during this consideration period. Because then you know that they really care, right?
Yeah. There's actually been two other really fascinating insights. So when the alert comes through, it will provide a refer link. Like where were they before they got to your website?
I've actually discovered all these like random blogs that RefineLabs is being written up about. Like all these places that people are coming from that I didn't know existed, which is super fascinating. So if you're Slack integration, your bot will also tell you this is the page that they like spent the most time on on the website. So whether it's like our vault page, our pricing page, like we have a Chris Walker page, our videos page.
And so it's also been really interesting to see like which pages these visitors are finding like most valuable, right? So it's just like a gold mine of insights before you even start doing any of the actual outreach component as well. So that's like another reason why I'm really having a lot of fun with this new tool. Yeah.
And then, you know, probably for your customers, they're gonna let us Salesforce or HubSpot integration, which you haven't built yet. So when that comes the integrations to Salesforce, for instance, basically what it's gonna do is it will, if they're in the CRM already, it will just find the contact and put in activity that updates, it updates the contact with the page view histories in that session. Yep. Does that make sense?
So like you can start a workflow based on that. And then when they come back three days later, it will, it will create another activity with the pages they looked at during that session. Oh, yeah. Do you know what I mean?
So it'll be really rad once we get those CRM integrations, which I'm super excited about. We have like some of the little guy integrations right now, like instantly and smart leads and Apollo and clay and stuff, but like we just haven't built the big way integrations yet because I think in order to make the big way integrations useful, we also have to have a filter for ICP because I don't think most people are gonna want to put, you know, a bunch of contacts in their Salesforce where 95% of them are garbage. Yeah. Basically.
So anyway, I'm really excited about that because I think once we get those, that will probably be 90% of the value of what this product is for the rest of its life. Like, aside from that, it's gonna be the long tail of integrations and then just probably improving data quality, like improving the filter system. But like, what else is there? Right?
I mean, I think the, yeah, I think what else is there is then on the implementation where like the actual style. Oh, yeah. No question. Yeah.
Yeah. For so many possibilities. Totally. Yeah.
I was talking about from a product perspective and I do think from a business building perspective, like most of my attention starting six months from now is going to go towards exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. By persona, what exactly are companies doing to activate this effectively? Right?
Absolutely. I feel like we need this needs to be like a little mini series because I'm only on like a three super easy setup of your tool, by the way, took me like two seconds. So that was really awesome. Like, didn't have to worry about it.
It was super easy to follow the instructions and get it set up and immediately see that value. And so let's let me run these tests for a month. Let's see what comes of it and we can reconnect into a part two on this and dive into some of the actual findings that we're seeing with some of the tests that we're running. But really awesome tool.
Congratulations on getting this out into the market. I'm super excited to experiment with it, not only for refine labs, but also for our customers as we're always continuing to evolve and find new strategies and tactics. I can't wait till we record some more content again in the future. Thanks so much, I'm looking forward to it.
Thank you so much, man.