Hey everyone, it's Sam Keanley and welcome to Becoming A Hiring Machine. This is the show dedicated to fixing recruitment by going beyond saying what needs to change and instead teaches you how to make that change. Today we've got a phenomenal interview ahead of us, but before we get into that, I just want to tell you a little bit about the show. Essentially, we have shows within the show here.
Some days we have interviews with industry thought leaders and others who are shaking up the space while other days we cover things like trending topics. Stop by every Tuesday for a tactical Tuesday episode where we go deep on how to do something that's going to help you drive better results in your day-to-day. Some days we open up for Q&A and other days you get a mic trap episode for Matt where he shares something that he's been thinking about within the recruitment space and wants you to know. If you love the content we share here on the show, make sure that you subscribe for more.
Today we have the fourth of five interviews with the best business practitioners in the game as part of our August series on all things business development. Today's topic is one that's going to resonate with a lot of our solo recruiters here running their own agency as well as those who work with a founder or leadership who have an incredible story to tell as we unpack the power of founder-led marketing and founder-led sales. So what does it work? Why does it matter?
How does it help your company? All this and more with today's guest Megan Bowen, CEO at Refine Labs, the leading B2B demand generation agency. So pull out your pen and paper, you're going to want to take notes. Megan, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Sam. I'm really excited to get into it today and get specific for everyone that's listening. So hopefully you got some good takeaways from this conversation. Yes.
I feel like I was spoiled because you and I got to work together for a couple of years and I got to watch you and Chris just lead from the front with this whole philosophy of founder-led sales, founder-led marketing, what it can do for a business. But before we get into that part, I think it's important to add a little bit of context about your background specifically and why I think that you have done so well with it. So prior to Refine Labs, one, you weren't a B2B marketer. When that's exactly what your company does, that's exactly who you all sell to.
So how did you go about navigating? The new services that you all were selling and understanding, what it is that the people that you sell to your ICP care about. Yeah, it's true. So I like to say I grew up in the New York City startups scene and really, I was COO at startups and I oversaw lots of functions.
But really what I grew up doing was actually sales, account management, customer success. That was really the core focus of a lot of my earlier roles in the earlier part of my career. And so really seeing business through the lens of the customer and really honing my sales skills, both in direct sales role but also in account management where you're renewing and expanding customers. And so when Chris first approached me to team up with him, I was like, I'm not a marketer.
I go find someone else to run your agency with. And he had explained, I actually think your point of view relative to how you look at all business functions through the customer and just the set of skills that you bring to the table are so crucial. A lot of the intricacies of you to be marketing, you'll be able to pick up no problem. But I appreciate the perspective that you come to the table with, which is maybe a bit closer to the customer given the nature of the roles that I had.
So I made a lot of sense to me and we decided to team up and join. But yeah, I remember when August 2020, when I formally joined the company, he actually had me start selling week one. I closed my first deal week three, which I also then delivered what I sold to this customer, which was actually not unlike this, training this person to really build a presence on LinkedIn and podcasting. And yeah, it took I think really about six months when I first joined to really spend a ton of time on the front lines with the B2B marketers and experts on our team and was really able to dedicate a lot of time, but really close the gaps that I had on more specific B2B marketing strategies and tactics.
And I think my experience coupled with my crash course, I like to say now I'm a marketer by association. I think it was a good way to really round out the overall skill set. And it's interesting, probably actually really rely still on more of my sales and customer success background and skill set, even more than some of the marketing stuff, which is kind of interesting. And I believe it.
And I've seen it and I think it's so interesting to say that because you mentioned it took you six months to really get comfortable with it, but you were selling, see stuff from week one that didn't change, but that probably made some of the sales conversations easier. But you already had the skills and knowledge, the frameworks that you leverage from those years of just how do you work with people, how do you develop relationships, how do you maintain relationships that carried you through that. So it can't easier over time, but yeah, I like that it was all honed in on just those original lessons that you had learned from the first roles. So walk to get into, all right, founder of that sales, founder of the marketing, if you're on LinkedIn, people talk about these all the time, but most people, especially recruiters aren't always following like B2B, marketing, B2B sales, LinkedIn world.
So that's just kind of overview real quick. From your point of view, how would you define founder of sales and founder of marketing? Yeah. So founder led sales to me is acquiring customers without really having a repeatable sales process, a clear offer, full clarity on maybe who your ideal customer is and exactly what we'll do.
I think founder led sales is a, it's a really difficult skill because basically you're in this zero to one or zero to two phase where you need to start acquiring customers. Maybe when you don't have everything fully figured out and that could be because you're starting brand new, that could be because there's like major market shifts and dynamics where the things that worked for you yesterday, no longer work and you have to go back to the drawing board and make some adjustments. And so founder led sales, I think is for those people that are so close, so passionate to the problem and the solution that they are able to navigate a lot of the ambiguity and still drive sales as a result. Ultimately, not only just drive sales, but really align with what the customer needs and deliver on it, right?
Because you don't want to just be selling for the sake of selling. So I think it is really challenging. And there's a lot of talk about how founders want to hire their first head of sales and offload that responsibility, but the timing of that is crucial, how you handle that transition is crucial. So many people mess that up and it can really impact acquisition and continuing to hit sales targets.
We can save that for later in the conversation, but that's how I would define founder led sales. The sales side of it. Okay. I'm excited to get in that part of the conversation.
I think the way I would define founder led marketing is as the founder, you effectively become the chief evangelist for your company. You become the face of your company. So there's a lot of ways that you could do this, but if I explain the highest level definition of this, I think it would be you as the founder are creating content that speaks about the problem you solve, the category you're in, how to solve that problem, lessons that you've learned, and then you are effectively distributing that content to your audience, your target market, right? And through that process of the content creation and distribution, you are bringing awareness to your space, your brand, your product, your service, and you are positioning yourself and your company as the leading expert in whatever it is, right?
And again, there's lots of ways you can do that, but that's the crux of it of what I think successful founder led marketing is. And when executed well, I mean, it could be a it could be V way that you drive inbound demand for your services and for your business. Especially on the services side, I think, I mean, we've seen it at refined labs and other places. It's different when you have software and when you have services, when you have software, you're marketing the software, what it does, the features, use cases, but with services, you are the product at the end of the day, what you got up here in your noggin, that is what you're effectively selling or what your team's capabilities are there.
So how you do some marketing standpoint and talk about the problems at the solutions, it's what you're able to share with that marketing is giving the marketing glimpse of like what it would be like to work with you to use the product. And that's why I think it's so unique and not enough services based companies, especially recruiters capitalize on this opportunity. They're just fighting the wrong fight of I'm the best recruiter on the cheapest recruiter. I have the most jobs, whatever.
So like, not am I going to say I'm the best at least show you here's an example. I've gone through how I fix this scenario here is a job I just placed the ways that I took to go about doing it and really showing that because you can only do that in services if you have the experience. Like, yeah, I guess you could have chat, you can write something that people are going to find you out pretty quick if you didn't actually do it. So yeah, I like that you called that out, especially from what it tees you up to do in the long term.
And so you still are heavily involved in the sales process at refined, but you're also leading with this founder that marketing. So tell me a little bit about how what you're doing on the marketing side impacts what you see when people do whether they're coming inbound to you and saying, hey, I want to work with you all or if you go out and do start prospecting, like what's that doing in terms of the ability to recognize you, the sales process itself and the future conversations that come from it. Yeah, absolutely. And so yeah, the founder led marketing playbook that we've really adopted at Refine Labs, you know, when you think about that content production and distribution framework overall, we index on the creation of content through video and we'll typically publish that via podcast, YouTube, take excerpts and then distribute and publish them on LinkedIn where every of the marketer and sales spends a ton of their time, which is our target market.
And so, you know, that's the tactics that we deploy for that overall strategy. Our founder, Chris Walker, really led the charge initially. And even though he, I'm now the CEO, he is still continuing that evangelism. And we are still seeing the benefit from that, which is amazing.
My personal content strategy has also evolved as well from when I first joined and from being a COO and then being a CEO. And what I found, you know, from the beginning until now, even though maybe the types of content that I've posted has evolved and changed a little bit, there's so many benefits. So number one, it's like recognition. People, every sales call that I get on today, people are like, oh my God, it's so fun to meet you.
Like I used to go to DemandGen Live or I've listened to all this, the old state of demand gen podcasts or I just heard your thing on stacking growth. And, you know, I love been following on LinkedIn for years. And so there's this sense of like familiarity and recognition where without doing anything, this person is, this person has a sense of trust with me immediately, right? Then there's that credibility and expertise.
It's funny, a lot of the sales calls I have might not result in a sale and they'll say, like, wow, thank you for spending so much time with me. I really feel like this was like marketing therapy. Like maybe it doesn't make sense for me to hire refined labs, but wow, you helped me talk out this problem or you let me know now's not the right time for us to work together, but this is what I need to be prioritizing and focusing on in my particular business. And I think even though that maybe I lose that particular deal in the moment, this person now views me as credible an expert.
When things change or they go to a different company, they're going to come back, right? And that's happened over. I have so many people I've talked to in 2021 who resurface two years later, right, and are ready to buy or ready to revisit a conversation. So that trust, the expertise, the credibility.
And I think they come to the call and they know what we do. They know what our philosophy is. They, you know, they're, oh, you know, we need to make the shift from Legion to demand gen and you guys are definitely the company that is going to help us figure out how to do that, right? They are, they are restating your content back to you because they have internalized your point of view and it resonated with them.
And they almost effectively are selling themselves on buying, right? And typically, you know, in a standard sales processor and an outbound motion, if you're not doing that, you're starting way behind and you have to build the trust. You have to build the credibility. You have to explain what you do, right?
So it's quite powerful to come to a first call and have a level of trust, have a level of credibility established and have a level of familiarity and knowledge with what your company does and the value that you can provide. And that has a huge impact on how fast the sales process goes, you know, the quality of the conversation because you can kind of skip over a bunch of stuff because you're already ahead of the game. So I, you know, those are, I think, some of the biggest positive impacts when you combine both of them, right? And that's the other thing that's interesting.
Like, I'm doing the marketing and the selling, right? And even with Chris, because him and I produce so much content together, people view us, people publicly view us as a team, right? So even if, oh, I've been following Chris for years, but you've, but I know that you guys have been working together for years. I like get that transference of credibility as well in those situations.
So I mean, yeah, the benefits are clear and I think those are the most, most impactful ones. Mm hmm. Never ends listening to watching this. That sounds terrible.
Why would I ever want to do that? That's, you know, who would do that? Yeah. It's, it's a no brainer and it's so funny, especially that first one, familiarity and trust when I first started talking about this podcast with Matt, I was just like, because he still does, I found that sales also is, I was saying, give it six months and you're going to start having people come in and they're going to say, I feel like I already know you know, I feel like I've sat across the board table, coffee table, something from you and the conversation is just going to have a different tone.
And I couldn't tell you the date. It wasn't exactly six months on the nose. Maybe a little bit before after, but he came back and he's just like, you were right about the podcast. I've noticed the difference and it works.
And he's like, I'm so bad you pushed us to do it. So if anyone doesn't believe you for whatever reason, which they absolutely shouldn't, this does work when you, when you do it well. So yeah, familiarity and trust, credibility and expertise. I really like how you're talking about that philosophical alignment and what that does well, especially with, you know, we're fine, I'm this champion.
You have, you're not playing the word better than all the other marketing agencies in the world. Recurgers are in the same space. There's countless agencies you could choose from, but you have a unique point of view and you win on why you're different, not trying to be that little bit better. So one thing I know you and I hadn't been planning on talking about, I want to get into this a little bit more is you're talking about sometimes you'll turn away prospects that come to you because they aren't ready.
It's not the right time. It might not be the right fit, but tell me a little bit about why you do this and the benefit of it long term to taking this approach. Yeah. And I think it actually really, the why is anchored in our differentiation.
And so when I'm speaking with someone and for example, I'll give you a couple of scenarios. Maybe there's a scenario where they actually are very philosophically aligned. They buy into the premise, but maybe they're just way too early. And as I dig into the stage of the company and what's working and not and the challenges that they're having, it becomes really evident that the number one priority for that company isn't demand-gen, but something more fundamental in the business.
Actually, you haven't really nailed your ICP. You really need to focus on your strategic narrative. You really need to prioritize product marketing initiatives relative to positioning and pricing. And so when I recognize that there's a critical missing piece that they need to prioritize before they invest in demand-gen, I will politely point that out and say, look, yeah, you could buy our stuff and we could help you.
And we probably would drive some results. But really the best thing for your business is to get this and this figured out first and then call me back in three months and let's read this at the conversation or call me back in six months or a year or whatever the timeframe is. And so one thing that I actually say this on my sales calls is I'm not here to convince you to hire me. I'm not here to have a conversation to uncover if working together is going to be the right fit.
This is another genuine tactic that establishes trust and differentiates us from other agencies. And so I think that's one flavor of it. The other flavor might be a longtime follower of a fine labs, a director of marketing, they're super aligned and then they begin to lay out the situation that they're in where leadership really only cares about volume of MQLs or directly attributable pipeline to marketing investments. And it becomes really clear and evident that, okay, we have this champion, but all of the senior decision makers are so far apart and not philosophically aligned that if we don't address that before we get started, it's going to impact our ability to be successful.
And so in some cases, you know, I would say, I will, if I see that, I will call it out. I've had a few instances where it's been like, okay, let's bring these senior leaders into the sales process. Let's discuss this, let's educate them. Let's see if they're open minded to shifting their perspective.
And if we can overcome that obstacle together, let's get started. The other scenario, which unfortunately might be a little more common is this mindset is never going to change. And we would be setting ourselves up for a difficult partnership that likely wouldn't yield the results if we're going to be constantly fighting against a mindset that is just not aligned with how we want to execute marketing. And so those are like, I think two real concrete examples of why we would, you know, walk away from a deal or recommend that the partnership isn't the right fit.
And when you run a services business, it's really key. You know, and you know, I know that, you know, we're talking a lot about recruiters and recruiting agencies. And what I would offer is, you know, I tell people like, hey, if you want 1000 MQLs, go hire a different agency, they're going to help you with that. Right.
If, you know, if you want to pay an agency to run paid ads when you really probably shouldn't do it quite yet, find another agency that'll, that'll take your money and do that. But that's not what we're about. Right. Like we're about driving business results and partnering with the companies at the right time, with the right team, where we have really high confidence that we're going to be successful.
And when you think about a commodity space or a crowded space with competitors, as a recruiter, a recruiting agency, how are you differentiating and differentiating on things like that can be be really powerful, not necessarily just how you recruit your candidate pool, whatever it may be, right? Yeah. And it's that there's a little level of exclusivity there where you're only putting your team and the prospect and then opportunity where we're only going to take a sign if we'll be successful, because especially in the services, your reputation is what people are buying at the end of the day. And so if you have reputation for taking any job that comes, you produce mediocre results, like that's how you're going to be perceived.
But if you turn away, opportunities, you know, you won't be doing as great as you could, and only take on the ones you're just like, you blow it out of the water, every customer is a raving fan about you as a result. That's what the market is only going to here. And that becomes this flywheel that's going to help you drive more and more business over times. And then getting early on and decide which avenue do we want to go to?
We want to take revenue at any cost or do we want to be selective and know, hey, it's going to be slow going for a little bit. We'll have to establish ourselves. But once we do, the market is just going to keep coming into us because they're going to know who we are, what we're about. They're going to trust us.
They're going to have the word of mouth support from peers who've already done this in the space. And it makes such a difference with that. And I've seen a couple agencies who've even done that where they've turned down roles because the company says, I need this role in 14 days. They're like, cool, that's great.
You might want to, but I only fill the role with people I know will be a great fit for you in the long term. But if you want to your point, there's other recruiters who can do that for you. Go find them, but that's not something that I'm focused on. So so many different things that we can translate from what you just shared there to the recruiting space.
Yeah. And also layer those key messages into your founder-led marketing strategy. Some of my most popular posts are five reasons not to hire refine labs or the five things that you should actually figure out before you start running paid advertising, almost like the anti-sell. But really, what I'm doing is I'm trying to communicate to people, this is the right way to think about growing your business.
So then when people do come to me and if I'm like, okay, yeah, now's the time. Like let's do this. They know I'm not just trying to sell them on something because I'm comfortable saying the opposite when I believe it to be true. Yeah, I'm putting a flag in the room with your point of view.
What makes you different? So I love those. So let's get tactical for a quick second. You mentioned that a lot of your ICP is on LinkedIn, recruiters.
They love LinkedIn too. It's a great spot to try to find candidates and potential business. So like what are a few tactics that you do? So you've spoken about social posts on LinkedIn, you've mentioned a few podcasts, you don't have to get super deep.
But how are you going about like, are you just jumping on podcasts, talk about certain things? Are you sharing practical advice? How are you going about this? Because I know part of it for recruiters is also like, I don't have time to do this.
So I want to help walk them into how you approach this. Yeah. So what I would say is if you're going to get started doing this for the first time, I would say here's a really easy road map to think about getting started for the first time. We have again, remember as I was describing before, content production and content distribution.
So you need to plan in a system to do both of those things really well while also knowing that you have a business to run and a lot of other priorities to manage at the same time. And so step one is how can I dedicate at least one to two hours a week for content production, right? And that can be many different tactics. One to two hours a week to start is plenty for this.
Now you could record a long form podcast episode that you then published a podcast channel, YouTube, cut up micro content. You could have a live event where you invite people to that event weekly. Chris and I did that with demand and live in the early days of refine labs. Guess what?
We did a live event. We just took that event, published it to the podcast, added clips to YouTube. We would get five to 15 micro video clips that would fuel social posts. And you basically have one to two weeks worth of content by dedicating one to two hours a week of doing it.
If you're feeling a little intimidated by actually committing to a podcast or committing to a live recurring event, literally just record one to two hours of content with someone on your team, right? Literally, we could just record together. You could prompt me with different questions and we could get the same output of great video content that could be repurposed for many different channels. So those are some very specific ways that you could get started with that content production piece.
If video feels a little intimidating to start, that's fine. Spend one to two hours a week writing thoughtful content via text that you can distribute as well, right? So whether it's video, whether it's writing, honestly, you can even just record yourself on video without even anybody helping you too. So a lot of people get intimidated, but when you actually break down what you really need to do, it's a couple of hours a week building great content.
How do you think about the content? What does your audience care about? What are you an expert on? What are you doing every day?
Those are the things that you want to talk about. And trust me, that will create really great content. Then on the distribution side, right? So whether you have video or text, whatever content you've produced, pick the channel where your audience is spending time.
Like you said, LinkedIn is great for marketers, LinkedIn is great for recruiters. It's the right channel to focus on right now. Go all in on that. Publish, distribute your content, publish your content through your personal profile, upload your video, add some text copy, just post your text post on whatever topic it is.
This is the other thing I tell people. There's lots of LinkedIn gurus and things like that. You don't have to post seven days a week. Post two to three times a week.
If you have a busy week and you don't get to it, that's okay. Just pick it up the next week. I'm a perfect example of an inconsistent poster, but it's still effective. I do it as often as I can.
Sometimes I go through some lulls where I don't do it for a while, then I'm back up to doing it five days a week. They say, oh, if you don't do it every day, just don't do it at all. It's not true. Do it two to three times a week.
You skip a week. It's no big deal. The consistency over a longer term period of time is what matters. The other thing that I would say is on the distribution side, it really matters who you're connected to and who is following you.
Those are the people that are going to see your content. You actually need to invest in a connection strategy. Every single day, you need to spend 10 minutes. You need to send five to 10 connection requests to the types of people that you want to see your content.
You should also be spending a little time finding other thought leaders in your space and engaging with their content, seeing their followers, connecting with their followers. The audience development strategy, the engagement strategy are just as important as the content strategy itself. LinkedIn also has made it really easy. You have some awesome top performing organic posts.
You have a little bit of budget behind that and boost it to guarantee distribution to your target audience. If you're linked in thought leadership ads. Just start there. Really, what you're talking about is a few hours a week.
Over time, you can probably your situation with your CEO. You are an enablement function for him. Here's some videos. Here's some things.
As you get going, you can figure out what you can delegate or outsource to build a support system for you to maintain that content production distribution system on an ongoing basis. I could go on, but I could break it down that simply. I'm trying to make it actionable for people. I'll stop there.
That was a masterclass. I think the big things there are one, it's not as overcomplicated as you think. To do what's comfortable and something that's sustainable for you versus this thought leader guru, hustle porn, everyone sees on LinkedIn now. It has to be all or nothing.
There's a huge range in between. It's absolutely wild. Something I even learned from you on what I liked on the services side was one, I wasn't a fan of being in front of a camera earlier, but I loved to write because it forces me to think and clarify my thoughts. What I would do was I'd be working through a really tough problem that I had with a current client.
Take out the client name. I bet you most other companies have a similar problem to that. You can start to talk about things. Again, this is some service size.
How do you approach problems? How do you solve for them? What are you seeing? What's the progress?
This becomes fantastic marketing material for you to go and share with other people that would potentially be working with you. Taking an approach like that and then I'm hearing that with the other frequency, like you said, you don't have to post every day. I've post five times every day. I'm a big believer in the philosophy of I'm sure everyone's been in a board meeting or leadership meeting somewhere where there's that one person that just talks to hear their own voice.
As soon as they talk, everyone just starts to tune them out. But then there's one person that sits in the room. They'll say two things all meeting, but everyone is quiet as a mouse listening to exactly what they have to say. I post too much and it's fluff.
If it's not helpful, people are going to tune you out as well. So balancing. How often are you posting? Just to post?
Because if that was worth it, are you adding value or are you posting as you genuinely have something to show? You think it's going to help people? Yes, do that. But there's times when I usually try to hold myself out of the post three times a week, but sometimes maybe I don't have anything to say.
So I don't for that exact reason. So you're going to burn yourself out. You're not going to get penalized by the LinkedIn or algorithm gods wherever they may be. So just find what's comfortable for you and make a habit of that.
It's going to go a lot further than trying to force yourself into some playbook from a googer somewhere. It's true. So we did this really well early days at Refine Labs and you, Sam, were part of this at the time, right? We spent time with our team members and basically almost did LinkedIn training with our internal team.
We're like, hey, if anyone's interested in participating, this is good for the company. It's actually also really good for you personally as you build your career and your reputation. We invested a lot in leading by example, but helping other team members cultivate their own strategy for LinkedIn organic. And I think there was probably a time in 2021 and people save us to me a lot.
I remember the time when I'd opened up my LinkedIn feed and it was just only people from Refine Labs talking about different things, right? And that was such a boost to the founder-led marketing strategy because it wasn't just Chris anymore, right? It was everyone chiming in, sharing. And when you think about if you're running a recruiting agency and you have a team of recruiters, it's so cool because I remember doing sales calls, people would be like, can I work with Sam?
I want to get started. Can I work with Ashley Lewin? Can I work with Halison? Can I work with Tori?
They would call out the people that they were seeing and they wanted to work with them because of their point of view, how they express themselves. So it can be really powerful to extend that strategy to other people at the agency as well. And I like your word trust I extend, not force because that was such a big part of it was offer. There was never any requirement, any part of the job that said, if you don't do this, you'll be penalized or have a bonus withheld, anything like that.
I was always lead by example, if you want to do it, we will fully empower you to do it. Yeah, that's key. Don't force people to post on LinkedIn. Okay.
All right. All right. I love that segment on the marketing side. So I want to move over now to the sales because you have such a good story here and you came into Refine Labs early on, you started heavily week one, getting into the sales process, but then as time went on, you started to move more into the COO role and got out of the sales process.
So I'd love if you can team up, just like walk me through that entire thing because we definitely saw some interesting insights there and what happened with Biz Dev, what happened with company growth that I want to let you just walk us through that whole, I guess it was probably a year and a half or two years over the course of it and that recruiters kind of learn a thing or two from this. Yeah. So joined in 2020 immediately was selling with Chris. Chris and I were both selling for 20, basically 2020 and 2021.
Because the company was growing, I say probably about a year and so this was like summer of 2021, we were like, okay, we were growing really quickly. This was like the COVID boom was happening. So like there was an insane amount of VC money being injected. Every B2B sales company wanted to spend a bajillion dollars on paid advertising.
We were probably at the height of our, you know, sort of brand awareness peak. And so the demand for our services was out of control and the market and just the timing, right? There's all this money that needs to be spent in advertising and we were just really well positioned to help all those companies with that. So we ended up hiring a head of growth.
Actually MJ Peters, MJ Smith, CMO at CoLab, such a talented marketer and seller come to find out. She's been on the podcast. Yeah. Yeah.
And so she came in and eventually, you know, I spent about six to eight months basically co-selling with her to kind of get her up to speed. She was a marketer too. She didn't really have sales experience. And over the course of that time period was really able to, you know, help her build her sales skillset to where she was repeatedly closing deals.
And so I would say probably, you know, in the back half of 2021, I started to stand, you know, me and Chris both started to set out of sales a bit and we had empowered MJ to really take that on. We had then hired another director of sales, Carl Ferra, also amazing, amazing sales professional and got him into the mix and he started selling as well. We even had one of our directors of the ManGen, Eric McKinnon kind of almost become like a sales engineer and really helped with that subject matter expertise. So between the three of them in, you know, 2022 and, you know, end of 2021 and into 2022, we really got this going.
You know, combination of having clear customer, clear offer, one package, repeatable, clearly defined sales process, high demand in the market for what we were providing, all of those factors together along with their talent was really working and was driving a ton of sales. Then we have these market shifts, right? Sort of mid 2022, the back half of 2022, we have like the B2B SAS collapse, right? All of these companies are getting trouble, budgets cut, companies shut down, VC money is contracted, the market dynamics are changing.
It's no longer about funding growth at all costs. It becomes, how do we drive efficiencies? How do we save money, right? And so what we started to notice, there was this impact on our customers directly and then a second order impact on our fine labs.
So our customers directly were like literally running out of money, not able to get more, needing to lay off a lot of people, needing to make budget cuts. You know, we often were part of the budget cuts or they would stop advertising altogether. And the demand really started to shift of what companies were prepared to do relative to paid advertising and demand on strategies. So I really attribute this more to the market changes and shift shifts and not like the talent of our team that was selling.
But we got into this position now where what we were selling at the price point with the process, it wasn't working anymore. It wasn't working anymore. People weren't buying, it was too expensive. People were scared.
People were just holding all their money and not making decisions like that. And so what we saw was a decline, like a pretty severe decline in acquisition as a result of this. And again, the team was hustling and doing everything that they could. And it became really clear as we got into 2023 that I was like, I was realizing this.
Me and Chris were like, we're back to founder-led sales. Like, we need to refigure out what does the market need right now? What will they buy? What do they really need?
How do we reposition what we offer? How do we adjust pricing and delivery to match the current market conditions? So you don't really know the answers to those questions unless you're back in it. So immediately, Chris and I, Q1 of 23, we were like, okay, we're back in.
And he was sort of focused on some newer types of projects. And I was really focused on our core services that we had really been delivering up into that point. And so I got back in and I've actually been back in ever since. And it really took about six to nine months to reset the offer, right?
And in the meantime, I was selling different things at different prices and was getting creative to continue to bring revenue in until I was able to really dial back into, okay, who is our new customer? What is the right price? What is the right offer? What options should we provide that will meet the market demands?
And now I'm kind of getting back to the phase where things are starting to get repeatable again. And now that I'm here, I am starting to think, you know, for 2025, does it make sense to reintegrate another person to come in and help support sales? But I just need a little more time to validate that we are back to a repeatable process. If you don't have that, you can't expect a seller to figure that out for you.
It's just not how it works. That's why there's so many horror stories of people hiring heads of sales or trying to transition founder-led sales. But anyway, that's kind of, that was the arc of what we went through and how we had to navigate that. Yeah, there's so many different takeaways in that.
And the biggest one that I get out of it is you see a specialist organizations grow, you hand off different processes to people, you've been out of it for a year, a certain amount of time, and the market changes. But if you're not as involved in it, the default is to blame the sales team, to blame the business strategy, to blame something like that when the reality is, no, you don't recognize the market may have shifted, macroeconomic conditions may have shifted, your entire offer just might not be relevant anymore. So if you're too far removed from that, you're going to blame the wrong thing. So what I love about what you did within that, and this is like Matt to the say, still take sales calls, because he likes to have his finger on the pulse of what's the market need, what are they feeling, what's the sentiment?
Because you can't pick up really from a gone conversation per se, if you just listen to little summaries here and there, or social posts, anything like that, but by being within those, you can quickly shift the overall strategy and recognize it's not the team's fault most of the time, but it is, it's like, what do we need to do to have the right package, to target the right people, to move to just on the fly versus waiting before it's way too late, and then you're digging yourself out of a hole, which hopefully it's not too deep by the time that you come to that recognition. Yep, absolutely well said. Yeah, that's a tough one. So as we get to the, we're starting to wrap up this, but I know you said you're still in the thick of it with someone's sales, you're starting to pull out, so to speak, but what are, I would say, like, what do you enjoy about being in the weeds of some of the different things that you get to learn and help the company with, and then I'll call them, what are some of the necessary evils of it where you just have to roll up your sleeves, get things done in order to do it for the company to be successful.
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, it's really funny because I, we talked about this at the beginning of the conversation. My whole career has been on the front lines with sales and customers. Like, my whole belief is, and I think I've shared this with you, especially when you're here at Refine Labs.
And I think about business, my, my, my formula, my view is people success is customer success is company success. It starts with your team, then you need great customers. If you don't have those two things, you do not have a business. And so, for me, I actually really enjoy the people and the customer components of running a business.
In my, in my belief, it is the business. That is what, that is what business is. And so I actually love, I like doing sales calls and it's fun to close deals. And I like, you know, even get into the weeds with our delivery team to hand customers off successfully or if things get escalated and we need to kind of revisit things.
So I do enjoy that part. I feel like I'm, I do feel like I'm doing what matters and what a CEO or a senior leader should be focused on. So I actually enjoy most of it, to be honest. I think my biggest challenge though is all of those things are incredibly time consuming.
And so it makes it really difficult to balance the time that you're spending in the business versus time being spent on the business. As the most senior leader, it really is your responsibility to be looking ahead, planning ahead, having time to really think through strategy adjustments, different priorities that are going to be important as you move through the different stages of growing your business. And so I would say, you know, that is, that really becomes the hardest part for me is how am I, you know, doing what needs to be done today, but how am I also making sure that I'm thinking six, 12 to 18 months ahead to keep us moving in the right direction. And certainly it means that, you know, maybe, maybe certain things, even if I technically enjoy it or I'm good at it, really needing to know where am I adding the most value and where do I need to really delegate more so that I'm balancing those two priorities most effectively.
But I had someone ask me about the other day, they were like, actually someone that I talked to in 2020, they're like, I can't believe we're still doing sales calls. This is awesome. I'm like, I talked to four years ago. And I'm like, yep, still here.
And like, oh, I, like, you know, I thought you'd be doing other things now. Like, no, I'm here. I enjoy it. I like it.
Like, let's get into it. So yeah, it's funny. So I think I wouldn't still be doing what I'm doing if I didn't actually genuinely enjoy the work. And I think it's like, I think the necessary evil is like, how do you do just the right amount and then delegate and empower the rest of other people on the team so that you're balancing your priorities properly as a CEO.
Yeah. And that balance is going to be different by every CEO based on their strengths, based on what they need to be involved in. So, at that point, all right. Well, this has been fun.
Founded in the marketing, founded with sales, all this stuff. Has you wrapped any last second parting thoughts or places that you'd recommend people go along to give you a follow in and learn more about what you're up to and what you're sharing? Yeah, I think what I'll say in closing as well is when you think about the concepts that we talked about today, getting good at founder led marketing or founder led sales is literally going to help you no matter what you do in your career, whether you run a recruiting agency, whether you're in a house B2B marketer, whether you work in a different industry. So I would also like encourage people to zoom out a little bit.
Like, this isn't just for doing what's in front of you right now. There's so many other benefits to honing these skills, putting yourself out there, building a reputation that can serve you in so many different ways that you're not even thinking about today in the future. So like play the long game with this. There's a lot of reasons to integrate these types of strategies and tactics into your day to day.
But yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. You can find me there. The only social media platform I'm on. And you can check out Refine Labs at Refine Labs.com.
I'm still waiting for the Instagram when you share all your chef's cooking and everything you're up to the kitchen because I know you're so good at that someday, someday, maybe a few people. Oh yeah. Well, Megan, truly appreciate you joining to come on the show and share your expertise with this. I know it's just an area that so many recruiters are struggling with and want to improve.
So hearing your stories, especially how you went about them, how you navigated them is beyond helpful. So looking forward to hearing how recruiters able to incorporate this moving forward. All right. So as we wrap, becoming a hiring machine is a production of Loxo.
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And if you love this episode, make sure you leave us a quick reading in your podcasting platform. It takes three seconds, but it's going to help other recruiters like you find us. So everyone, that's a show. Megan, thank you again for joining us.
I absolutely love this conversation. So until next time, I'll be back.