Innovation Through Curiosity - Lessons from Baseball and Marketing with Chris Walker

What this episode covers

This episode of The Jake Dunlap Show features Chris Walker, CEO at Refine Labs. A man of many hats, Chris has incredible depth of knowledge in entrepreneurship, operations, engineering, and marketing. He possesses a go-getter attitude and natural curiosity that have developed his expertise in these different fields. Chris was once on the path to becoming a pro baseball player (and even won a state championship!) but would ultimately end up in engineering. Upon graduation, he would hone his skills in operations and as a consultant and integrate his expertise into his role as a marketer. Another lesson to be learned from Chris is the ability to recognize opportunities for growth. Not only has this helped him as a consultant growing other people's businesses, it has also helped him grab opportunities that accelerated his own career. Being on the forefront of innovation inevitably led to his founding of Refine Labs, a company that pioneers practices with a human-centric approach. Chris shares how innovation can be found in unlikely places and how organizations can improve by opening themselves up to new ideas and listening to what the data is telling them. Listen to the full podcast on Chris Walker’s fascinating journey of constant learning and how he integrates lessons from various industries to usher innovation. QUOTES: 16:42 "I was so much more focused on how the technology was being applied to solve someone's problem versus actually developing the technology. " 22:30 "The amount that you can learn as a young person starting a business that has low barriers to entry and low startup cost, just to understand how to run a business, is massive." 34:01 "I just took the consultant mindset that we talked about earlier which is go in, understand the business, talk to a bunch of people, analyze data, talk to customers, and then assess what is the biggest opportunity for this company?" 40:12 "You create alignment with sales by helping them hit their goals by giving them deals that they would have never seen or never sourced, is the way that I see it." 46:50 "If you believe in something, you might see it in a different way that everyone sees it and you got to go with it." More about Chris Aside from making waves as the CEO of Refine Labs, Chris has also become a mini-marketing-celebrity on Linkedin. He has become known for advocating innovation in the way high quality demand gen is generated, which is to share valuable content consistently and, when buyers are ready, they will come to you. Chris' areas of expertise include creating go-to-market strategy design, marketing strategy, demand generation, revenue operations, customer acquisition, social and content strategies, attribution, insights and analytics, and e-commerce. He is a sought-after podcast guest and has even won the Innovator of the Year Award in 2017. Chris consumes a huge amount of content via videos, blogs, and podcasts which he then applies to projects on marketing automation, targeted market research surveys, and optimization, among many others. Find out more about Chris Walker and connect with him in the following links: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-walker-41597028/ Website (Refine Labs) - https://www.refinelabs.com/ Learn more about Jake Dunlap and Skaled by visiting the links below: Jake Dunlap: Personal Site - http://jakedunlap.com/ LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakedunlap/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/JakeTDunlap Instagram - http://instagram.com/jake_dunlap_ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/JakeTDunlap/ Skaled: Website - https://skaled.com/ LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/skaled YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsw_03rSlbGQkeLGMGiDf4Q