I really appreciate everybody joining. This is our third B2B Roundtable with Megan and various talents at Refine Labs. We kind of highlighted this honestly, just to help people get ready for 2025. They're planning going on core topics as far as paid search, understanding how to kind of transition from lead gen to demand generation, evolve in large organizations.
And today's one of the topics that I think is like super exciting for me. We talked a lot internally about how do we influence organizations that maybe are interested in kind of making that pivot from lead gen to demand gen, why that is so important now more than ever. It's like budgets are getting tighter, people are scrutinizing kind of their investments. Marketing has a huge lens over them, constantly about their efficiency.
So bringing Megan on who has a lot of the conversations with leaderships and kind of pilots, a lot of our conversations with people that are interested in working with Refine Labs. We're also joined by Kerry, director of demand gen here. She is expert in this conversation. I think it'll be a really good topic, but Kerry, I don't know if you want to say anything or introduce yourself.
Yeah, happy to be here. So nice to meet everyone. I'll extend Kerry's intro. Kerry's working with actually some of our largest customers.
And I think sort of day to day has the experience really helping them navigate all of the change management that's really required. Think about a company with a thousand employees or more, you're spending anywhere from six to seven figures per month on paid advertising. The company's been around for 10, 20 years. There's a lot of organizational constraints and realities and embedded processes and the way that the company has always been doing things.
So we're seeing this really positive trend at companies of this size that are realizing that now they need to really start making this shift, but it's not really as easy as just changing your paid media strategy from one day to the next. There are so many downstream impacts that come into play. And so it's about having a longer term plan, anywhere from six to 12 to 18 months, getting alignment from leadership on metrics, thinking through how you're going to phase in the different changes because there are meaningful, real impacts. And at an organization that large, you have to plan for those downstream impacts.
You have to communicate effectively. You have to make other changes beyond the execution of your media marketing strategy for this to be effective. And so I think we really want to kind of get into how we help companies navigate that. My personal belief, and I've been speaking with more companies in this particular segment, I'd probably label them like mid market or enterprise segment anywhere from maybe 500 to 10,000 employees.
And this particular segment, when you think of a lot of startups or growth stage companies that have popped up over the last few years, a lot of them are adopting a lot of these strategies from the beginning. But this other segment that's more mature, they're just not quite there yet. And we're at this juncture right now, especially after the last few years and all of the market dynamics and crazy things in SaaS where this segment is now realizing they want to make a change and also appreciating the length of time that it's going to take. And so really they need a change management partner.
It's not just about knowing how to run the right media strategy is not enough. It's understanding how to facilitate this change management process. And so I was building on an intro for Carrie and then I just kept going. But that's what I'm excited to talk about today.
I'll pass it back to you Evan. No, those are the best. The Megan Tanshans are what really kind of sets the foundation for a lot of these conversations behind the scenes. So I appreciate that.
I think you kind of nailed the biggest component we see is having conversations whether it's on LinkedIn or with clients really like the conversation comes into how the hell do I do this? I'm stepping in a marketing role or I've been in this leadership role for a while. I want to influence change. And I think that's really where we're going to anchor a lot of this conversation.
Because that for me was one of the steepest learning curves that I'm still learning admittedly. But understanding how to frame around those conversations, what kind of aspects are most important. To have that, I hate the phrase lead gen to demand gen. Because I feel like we beat the hell out of demand gen and now it's just confusing to the market and understanding what that means.
But really it's understanding how to navigate the conversations internally based off of your known glacier, how you define different aspects of the marketing funnel, how you define leads or in QLs. So with that, I think for the sake of this conversation, I would really love to set the stage of why it's important for companies now, more than ever, to start thinking about that transition, carrying like, I would love your feedback as well. Just let's start there. Yeah, there's several reasons.
So thinking back to, I would say, starting around COVID, 2020, this is when the economy started changing and we started experiencing layoffs and we started experiencing budget cuts and marketers were just always being tasked to do more with less budget. It really made us look at what are we doing? And it made us look at these leads that are coming in that we are spending budget on. Are they actually going anywhere?
Are we wasting sales time and sales resources to chase after these super cold leads that are not going to go anywhere and they're just not ready to talk. They just frankly wanted to download the e-book. So that now is the time, especially in terms of the economy and then also in terms of over time, competition is up across most likely your industry and your market. So it is now the time to stand out and that is what this shift from lead gen to demand gen is all about.
It's about that changing your go-to-market strategy and changing your perception in the market and building that brand awareness and that brand education in the market around why somebody should choose your organization to be their product or their service of choice so that when they are finally ready to spend that money and become your customer, like they are in market and they're going to choose you as number one. You come to mind every time. And it's just more important now than ever just because of the tough economic times that we've been in the past several years. And I want to build on that because I think especially for companies that have been around for 10, 15, 20 years longer than that, there's some important history that I think is important to anchor in this shift.
So the reality is these strategies that we're referring to as lead gen strategies that we're claiming are no longer successful in today's market and ecosystem, they used to be successful. They used to work really well, right? There was a period of time when because of the maturity of the internet and social media and the way B.B.B. buying and selling was happening, that was an effective strategy for a period of time and companies that deployed it during that period of time where it was effective, they saw really good results.
And so I think that's so important to acknowledge because that's one of the hardest things in addressing like the shift and what has changed. When you want to get, I think Jennifer asked a question in the chat around how do you manage expectations and how do you have this conversation at the leadership level, part of it is acknowledging that, hey, these tactics that we are deploying today that we've been deploying for five, eight, 10 years, yes, they did work really well in a particular era and sort of time when that was how B.B.B. buying and selling was happening, but things have changed. And I think starting there and explaining the shift and I think primarily the shifts are the rise in social media, which has changed how people consume information.
I think the amount of noise out there which has diluted the effectiveness of pure old school digital marketing strategies and the reality is peer to peer trust and word of mouth and the ability to be transparent and authentic and have become so much more important to just buyers overall and that the growth of all costs era, the ability to just sort of spend more to drive more, that just isn't working anymore. So these three core things are just shifts that have happened in the world. No matter what you're selling, what industry you're in, like this is happening and people need to acknowledge that it's happening and adapt their go to market strategies to that reality, but it's really difficult for leaders who have said, well, this worked for us before. Why are we just gonna completely abandon it and make that change?
I think the key in convincing them is showing them that if they don't make a change, that that's gonna be more detrimental in the long term, in the medium and long term, than beginning to plan for the change. And I think how you execute the change is so important to get everybody on board, to prove out that the new strategy is working before you fully abandon the old strategy and to deal with the other changes that you're gonna have to make within your organization, including goal setting, measurement, maybe how you're allocating resources, across your marketing and sales teams. And so it's not easy. And I think having the conversation about what's happening and why is so important.
And I think it sort of goes back to your question, Evan, of like, why is this shift so important like right now? I can tag onto that a little bit. Like I think that there's historically been this split, like leaders at B2B companies thought that, you know, we don't have to, we can't market to B2B buyers the same way that we go after B2C. But that's not true anymore.
Like the way that we are interacting on social media, it is a mix of brands and it's a mix of whether they're B2C or B2B. Like we are consumers at the end of the day and we are humans at the end of the day. Like we're not just on LinkedIn and getting ready to download an ebook. Like we are ready to watch a YouTube video related to a B2B tool or solution.
So there's like this shift that is happening and needs to continue to happen, to understand that like B2B buyers need to be treated the same way as as B2C. We're in this position now where people are spending time in an online community is like, you know, talking about these B2B solutions and we just need to think about that a little bit differently. So we go down to this, we create these marketing strategies or tactics based off of job titles, right? And from your graphic, like data that we can get in the CRM which is so important.
And we'll kind of go into like the different steps to kind of move the agency or see them move like a good market strategy forward and reevaluate. But I challenge that constantly, right? Like my job title on paper or on my LinkedIn profile does not mean that I only spend time on those predefined like business, whether it's a newspaper, Twitter or LinkedIn, like it's much broader than that. Me outside of my job title is a normal human.
And I think that that's what we're, that's hard to adapt that change, not only the lead generation model that worked previously, but so did like creating these over engineered ICP customer mapping profiles. I think that that's been a challenge too. So it's about just kind of resetting at the beginning. I like to break it into like six phases.
We think about how to architect like what are the key elements from like, I'm joining as a new marketer or I'm an existing marketer that's looking transition. It's really like space one and we'll go into each of these, I think would be important for us. But like understanding the current state, you know, like what is our existing strategy? What are some of the gaps in inefficiencies?
And then use that to have a data informed and data back business case. So you have the data now, you can present it to your close leadership team, get them to buy in would be like phase two. I think phase three that we think about a lot is actually segmenting your approach into phases. People get overwhelmed thinking about it if they don't have that.
People are like, how do I do this? Oh my God, like we got to move the whole business, we got to move the whole organization. We have millions of dollars invested in paid media. How do I transition that?
But you can start segmenting out those. So I think that would be phase three. This four leadership buy in phase five becomes mine shift and then measurement. Like each one of those like, I spend a lot of time, you know, early in my career kind of outlining what success looks like.
And I feel like in order for us to make and moves and educate clients along the way, we have to be able to constantly like anchor them on a certain phase. And I know I hate like building it into compartments, but we need that. Otherwise it just becomes overwhelming. I love that.
And let's go into each of those because I think this is how you facilitate the change management process overall, basically like this is the roadmap of whether you're trying to execute that internally or working with an external partner to help, you know, facilitate this transformation. I know the first phase was understand current state, Carrie, you've been doing this a lot over the last few months with several new clients we've brought on board. So I'd love for you to kind of get into the weeds there and share your experience of how you go into, you know, a new company and what are the steps that you take to assess the current kind of the current situation and the historical performance? Yeah, I think there's indicators that there may be an issue first and foremost that's bringing you to this conclusion, right?
That you need to like make this shift. Just from past experience, I remember a couple years ago, I had a client that was like once paying like $150 per lead on LinkedIn and then like without changing the, like anything without changing the audience or the strategy or anything like all of a sudden six months later, they were paying like $1,000 cost per lead. So you look at it and then you go, because they're gonna shift to the market as competition. Like you start questioning because you see these trends where these costs are rising.
You know, some other things that you might want to start analyzing are like your sales cycle. Have they gone up? Are they too long? How do they kind of, you know, if you ask around, ask your peers, how do they compare to similar companies, similar industries, has that cost per lead risen over time in recent months, recent years?
What percentage of your leads are actually becoming customers or even opportunities? We do what's called a split the funnel analysis at Refine Labs where we look at like high intent versus low intent conversion. So a high intent conversion would be like a trial, a demo, a contact sale. These are lower in the funnel.
People are ready to, they're showing intent to buy and ready to talk to sales in some capacity. Then those lower intent conversions are gonna be like that ebook download, that webinar sign up, you know, just submitting a lead form to get a downloadable asset basically. And what we do is we look at that conversion rate and we'll see that the low intent and the high intent differ so much. And that's expected, right?
Like we know that there's going to be lower conversion rates. So if people that download an ebook, we just naturally know that like they are less likely to actually become a customer. But what we need to also analyze is how much budget are we actually spending on low intent versus high intent? And that is where you have a lot of control.
You need to start looking at how much budget is being wasted on trying to get somebody to download an ebook. And that's because it is so much more expensive to capture a lead when you're like optimizing on LinkedIn or Facebook or you know, even Google you're optimizing to get somebody to fill out that lead form. That impression that click, that click could be $50, $60 depending on like your industry and your competition. Whereas if you were optimizing for brand awareness and educating the market with like a really powerful message and something that's really going to educate your audience on your brand and your offering, that is the impressions of how much that click would have cost.
You know, we see more like less than $10 cost per click in that instance. So you know, you kind of got to look at what is actually converting to customer because at the end of the day, you might have these lead gen goals and you might need to generate tons of leads for sales to chase after, but what are you getting out of it at the end of the day? Yeah. And I always encourage marketers to put on your, put on the hat of a CEO or a CFO.
When you're a marketer within a company and you want to influence a big shift in strategy, you want to think about what are, what is the C team looking at? And so when we think about what are the broader business trends that are happening that are an indication that something in your go-to-market strategy has to change, look at things like pipeline production over the trailing four to eight quarters. Is that staying stagnant? Is that declining?
Look at your total ROI for marketing only or for marketing and sales. Are you having to spend more to basically produce the same amount or less? What we typically see in almost all of these companies, again, in this segment of 500 to 10,000 employees, mid-market enterprise companies, if they have not evolved their go-to-market strategy in the last five years, that's what we're seeing on a consistent basis. And so what you're really seeing there is pipeline stagnation typically flat or low revenue growth, declining ROI, increasing customer acquisition costs, pressure on profit margin.
These are business financial measures that your company really cares about. And so being able to ask the right questions and understand overall how the business is performing is also gonna put you in the best position to make that business case that something has to change. So if you don't have access to that view or that information, you should be managing up and asking for it. And that's how you're gonna get a seat at the table for this conversation.
All of the additional metrics and indicators that Carrie went through were all totally accurate as well. And that becomes the next layer of detail that you go into to actually map out what are the changes that you are really gonna make within your marketing strategy specifically. But being able to point out those bigger business problems and challenges and then map back your recommendation to how it's gonna help solve those, that's you have to do that to get the requisite leadership buy in. Yeah, there was data that I was only had access to certain amount of data.
I think there's like the data to pull and the KPIs to look at, right? We got a friend of those differently in terms of how we're having a conversation with leadership. I definitely understand like lead metrics are so important. MQL is SQL is understanding conversion rate within funnel of current state and historical.
Cause all of this kind of understanding current state naturally flows into building a business case. So I don't wanna know, sales metrics, deal sizes, win rates, I don't understand revenue contribution to total for marketing and as a whole, cause that sets you in the conversation first, right? 40% of our revenue is coming from marketing. So I dug into that and we got a step further.
And then the KPIs, it's really about the conversion rates lead to closes. Kerry had mentioned sales win rate, marketing source revenue. So be intentional with the data you pull, we can easily as marketers get just sucked in and it happens to me all the time where we just go down these rabbit holes and we come out and we didn't really learn anything. So before you kind of dig into the insights, understand what you're trying to build and that is a historical trend analysis, are live by channel, understanding competitive insights.
Cause that builds your business case and sets some urgency for the organization. I think that's a big thing that people miss out on. There's an urgent need here. And if you can frame it up of the revenue potentially lost by what you're doing in the current strategy, that catches the attention of the C Suite a lot faster than putting a strategy there in a business case, if you can kind of demonstrate the potential impact that might have hypothetically, right?
You can back into model and say that if we've made a transition in the Americas for a small subset of industry or sub-vertical, we anticipate we could see a 10% increase in like high- and tight qualified leads. If we prove this out, that's like, oh, there's an experimentation in mind. There's historical data backing this up. I built trust in the conversation.
So I feel like the business case is naturally as part of the current state. I think there is a challenge with these, you know, well-established brands that have been around for, you know, a long time. They've been through lots of tracking iterations. They've been through several CRM systems.
There is messy data and it kind of goes about saying, right, that like data is the most important thing. To what your disposal of that, you need this to like do this kind of reporting and make these decisions and build your business case for this change. So I'll just reiterate like how important the clean data is in order to break down performance by channel, performance by, you know, sales versus marketing, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, and I think what I always tell executives and C teams as well is obviously data is really important.
Part of doing this type of an assessment too will surface gaps in your systems of record and your data that you need to build. But the reality is, you should, you have to use the data that you have so that you can make the best possible decisions and don't discount common sense and critical thinking. Where you have data gaps and it doesn't paint a perfect picture and you know, great, we identify those. We can correct those going forward.
Don't let that be the only thing that drives your decision making. This is when we can get caught into traps with being a slave to attribution data which can lead us down, you know, the wrong path. And so it's balancing using the data that you have and being as data informed and data backed as possible while also acknowledging whether it's data gaps or, you know, the challenges of data like the bias that it can have. So that's also really critical.
I think and as you're having these conversations and building the business case, you need to address both of those. No one has a clean CRM. Everybody has a different amount of messy data, right? So, which is offended.
Yeah, that same face. But you can get what I'm saying. And I think I'm, you know, I love business cases and reporting and data, it's critical. But we also know, like my favorite question to ask a CEO or a CFO is when's the last time you gave up your email address, you know, to sign up for an event or, you know, get a piece of content and then bought that thing within the next month or quarter.
Like, come on. Like, so part of it is just like, don't be afraid to have that type of conversation. Like this isn't a, you know, isn't a black box. I'm tempted to go into some of the questions I've been, but let's go through the rest of the phases that you laid out and then we'll get back to some of the questions.
There's some good questions in the chat. Yeah, I know they're a great question. We can just kind of hammer through these. Cause I think the next one is we think about like, kind of your segment team that change into phases of how to communicate that to your, whether your peers, your C suite, the organization, however you kind of fragment that.
That's the most important case. So if you identify that you actually have a case built, you have some data that's tangible enough to have those conversations, albeit data gaps or infrastructure pickups, I think you just want to frame it as like, your step one is going to be like awareness. You're going to educate the team slowly over time, right? Then you're going to want to pilot the test.
So that's where you're going to use the information. And can we talk about digging into channel specifics or potentially regions or contribution to revenue for certain sub industries verticals and in scale. So like, if you have that as you approach leadership and get buy in, it shows that you're thinking methodically about like the process. And I think that's one of the key drivers in trust and trust is a key component of this to be successful.
If you don't have trust from your leadership team, then there's no way for you to continue to try to push up funnel. It's just going to kind of constantly get pushed back on it and you're not going to see much success. So I think just architecting that is the most important part. But my favorite aspect is like leadership buy in.
I love these conversations. They're the most challenging conversations. They're the most rewarding to if you can get there. And sometimes there's not a black and white.
Sometimes it's not just yes. But if you can lay out some of the financial impacts and projections that in itself will show that you're thinking like a leader and you're thinking in that C-su mindset. So I don't know if you have any kind of ideas on initiating that leadership buy in once you have the data or some tactics maybe that have been helpful for you. Yeah, definitely.
And so to even take one step back and just add on to your phased approach, something that I'm doing with another client right now is they're a large company. They're not ready to rip the band-data, just stop generating leads. So what we're doing is every quarter, we're able to just say, all right, we're going to reduce the lead goal by 10% to 20%. And that means we're going to reduce the amount of budget that we're spending on generating leads.
We're going to take that budget. We're going to shift it to top-of-the-awareness educating the market. And every quarter over the next year, we'll be generating less and less leads. But what we're going to measure is we're going to expect our hypothesis, right?
It's to see an increase in brand searches, to see an increase in demo numbers, to see a decrease in sales cycle length. So there's these indicators that things are working. And that is also very, very important for getting leadership buy-in and making sure that you're setting the expectations with leadership. You have to let them know, we're going to be making this change.
This is exactly what you can expect. We're going to see costs increase. And that is totally normal. But over time, those costs are going to stabilize.
And then eventually, we're going to start seeing a reduction in the cost per customer acquisition. Because we're just attacking our ICP from a better angle. And we're being more strategic in our messaging and our targeting. And we're cutting costs in a really smart way.
So I think it's laying out all the expectations and aligning on the KPIs, making sure that leadership and you are talking about the same things and caring about the same things. And you are building your dashboards and your reports around those KPIs, not just focusing on vanity metrics that no one's going to care about. They're going to want to see ultimately what is the bottom line? And just making sure that you're following.
Thank you for the class. Just making sure that everyone throughout the process is aligned for marketing to sales, leadership, marketing access, really important to making sure getting strapping perfectly. And also just my biggest piece of advice is don't give up too quickly. Don't let leadership give up too quickly and push back and say this isn't working because it is a longer play.
It could take 6, 12, 18 months as Megan said earlier. So it's totally normal that there would be some pushback. So taking the phase approach could be the safest option. Yeah, I would say in minimum, it's usually two X sales cycles you want to give the runway to just experiment.
Because you've got to think about how you can actually know that your demand-gen strategy is influencing some sort of opportunity or prospect to move to the funnel. If you only give it 30 days, but you have a three month sales cycle. A lot of times that's a pushback from leadership, though. They're like, OK, you have 30 days, you have this budget to experiment.
That's impossible to do. If you look at your average from stage one to stage two, 25 days, this goes back to why it's important to evaluate the stage duration as well as you do that current state of the business. But that brings a conversation. On average, it takes three months for 90 days for somebody to move through at current stage.
We at least need that runway times two for us to prove are we able to move people and increase the stage duration, to shrink the stage duration each time? That's a signal that it's working. And you've got to think about the different layers of metrics that you want to evaluate each time. You don't want to go in and drive.
Yes, we're going to drive revenues. The goal. But my first goal is can I get a highly qualified job title or prospect into the funnel at a lower rate that is moving from stage one to stage two or how we define your stages faster than our benchmark. And your benchmark is your historical look back in your current state.
So that's different. I guess a question managing expectations and setting the guardrails around how long. I think you have to just be intentional of each stage. And you want to prove out stage one.
OK, we're seeing a 5% improvement. We have to wait until that stage two. You've got to cohort the data enough to have those signals. Maybe you might have something else to add.
And so I think there's so much complexity in marketing and in digital marketing. So one of the things that I think is really important is how do you simplify the core of the strategy change that you're trying to implement? And how do you speak in a language that the CEO and the CFO will understand so that you can get the buy-in that you need? So a couple of approaches that I've used that have been effective is explaining that we have three core levers in terms of marketing and demand creation.
So the way that we like to explain it is we have demand capture. 2% to 5% of your market is in market to buy at any given time. There's an opportunity to capture that demand and bring that in the short to near term. You have demand conversion.
And so this is about an extension of demand capture. But how are we making sure that if people are interested in coming to our website or searching for us on Google, how are we optimizing and reducing friction to make sure that we are capturing and converting all of the demand for buyers that are in market at the moment? What we typically see is most companies have anywhere from 60% to 90% of their budget only allocated to demand capture and conversion. And the way you can frame that up is you have almost all your budget focused on 5% or less of your total addressable market.
That might be fine for tomorrow and next month and next quarter. But you're not setting yourself up for long term success. Or a couple quarters from now next year. So that's the third pillar, which is demand creation.
When we talk about lead gen and demand gen, when we say lead gen, it really has a lot of demand capture motions. So a lot of people like to use LinkedIn for lead gen or demand capture. I'm just going to put up an ad and say, you know, get a demo and give me your information. People are not on LinkedIn to ask for demos.
That's just not how the platform is engaged with by any particular person. So sure, you can get a lead and you could give that lead to your sales team. But as Kerry brought up earlier in the call, that's very unlikely to convert to an opportunity. What you really want to do is make sure that you're using those paid social channels and other strategies for the 95% plus of your market.
That's not in market today. But that will be at some point and deploy demand creation or brand awareness strategies. And so kind of framing it up simply is, hey, these are our three levers that we have for demand generation, knowing that each of those levers map back to a percent of your total addressable market. And then show them how your current budget is allocated and greatly weighted to the minority of your total addressable market.
And how common sense will dictate that we need to reassess and reallocate budget accordingly so that we're driving short, medium, and long-term results? The other thing is a CEO or a CFO, like they'll get that some marketing activities are going to take some time. But next month, the next quarter also really matters to the business. So how are you aligning your change management recommendations to the real short-term pressures that exist in the business?
One of the things, a couple of things that we like to focus on, for example, like demand capture strategies, Google search. Typically, there are some short-term wins that can be derived from changing your strategy on search. Sometimes you're spending money on campaigns that are literally producing nothing. So there's immediate cost savings that you can show in the short term, in the 30, 60, or 90 days.
Oftentimes, there are opportunities to actually capture more demand, or capture demand more effectively. Or even from a demand conversion lens, identifying the friction on your website or key changes that you can make that can actually convert more of the qualified traffic that you're already getting. So you can't fall into the trap of just needing to convince them that they have to be patient and it's going to take time. How are you identifying some of those short and near-term wins and then executing excellently to see those two fruition while also convincing them that they do need to have more patience, Evan's rule of two X sales cycle is spot on, or the demand creation strategies to really come to fruition.
You actually can improve ROI pretty immediately by reducing costs and eliminating wasteful budget and reallocate that spend or your other spend on demand creation. So you have to do both. It's not easy, but you have to do both. And you have to think like a CEO and a CFO to effectively explain that what that phase approach will look like and get the buy-in that you're looking for.
I love that. The age-old that paid search drives everything, and demand capture, they're plays for that. And I think it's definitely intentional. But even without getting too tactical, understanding bounce rate, understanding time on site, those are things that you can look at by a source that help you signal early on.
Are we actually a higher qualified? Is paid search now, is there going to be more time spent on these key product pages or more about the product and solution? Those are the tactical aspects that you look at as a marketer. And you don't necessarily communicate all those details up, simplify less as more, but it's definitely important to think of the increments and how you're going to break that out in each phase.
So I think we tied it all up. We kind of closed that with phase. I think about measurement and iteration, Megan, thank you for putting a pin on that. I think I'd love to open it up to some of these questions, and just anybody else that has questions within the audience here?
Yeah, I love Jennifer's last question. What are some demand creation strategies everyone is using in 2025? I'll give an initial answer, but then I'd love Kerry and Evan to weigh in as well. Things are continuing to change, right?
Like we at Refine Labs, we talk a lot about organic thought leadership on social media channels. We talk a lot about paint social programs. Historically, we've talked a lot about podcasts and events, being key pillars in demand creation approach. And all of those, I think, are all viable strategies that should be deployed.
Again, depending upon your company, you should be choosing the ones that are going to be most aligned to what you believe make the most sense for your audience and will be successful. But a lot of things are changing. AI is going to be changing a lot. I know that's sort of like a trope, but it's true.
I think it's unclear exactly how that will happen, but people using chat GPT more than Google, or maybe not necessarily replacing it, but having it be a core place that they're going. I'm seeing some chatter online about advertising on chat GPT. So that should be really interesting. You have things like the thought leadership and the personal brand play, which a lot of different people are adapting.
And I think it's still a really important play. But the underpinning on that that really, I think, sets apart successful thought leadership execution with the rest of the noise is actually having a really clear, unique and compelling point of view. And so what's so interesting is, I think, the most important thing you can do for successful demand creation strategies is solve a real problem that a lot of people have in a new and different way. And being able to craft your narrative and communicate that narrative effectively.
That's what demand creation is all about. Now, when you execute that, there's so many ways you can execute that. You can make videos, you can post on LinkedIn, you can post events, you can make a podcast. That does just become execution methods and distribution channels.
And those choices matter. But really, the crux of it is, what's the problem? I'm solving, what's my solution? And how have I crafted a compelling story to reach my audience?
And I think the last thing is, before you pick a channel or a method, you have to start with your audience. Where does your audience spend their time? What does your audience care about? And that should drive program selection, channel selection, distribution selection.
I'll put a pin in it there. I'd love for Kerri and Evan to weigh in on their thoughts as well. Yeah, no, that was great, Megan. I think to get kind of channel specific, because it's necessarily new to 2025.
But actually, new to 2024 was LinkedIn's BTV. I also really like Mountain, the MNTN channel for CTV as well. They have some great targeting and measurement options as well. I think just an overall increase in investment and motion graphics.
Again, these are not new tactics. But as I mentioned earlier, I think there's, leaders are finally breaking down this mental silo that they had that B2B had to be treated completely steadily as B2C when in reality users are open to absorbing content from B2B brands on YouTube and on TV and in these different mediums. So I think a larger investment in video for B2B is going to be pretty prevalent next year. Well, video is absolutely going to take the cake, I think, for any digital advertising.
I'm starting to, this is my own personal, I'm starting to see almost less influence from static image ads no matter how fantastic they are, because LinkedIn is just getting so saturated with videos. They're going to video-type on mobile. They're kind of, they're algorithms favoring videos. You can see some people get a million reaches.
I'll be at the targeting bullshit right now, and there's your scenes ship that doesn't really matter, but it's still showing that they're putting a lot of eggs in that basket. So I think from a creation strategy, if you can build some sort of motion around creating clips or soundbites of video to distribute that are anchored on that core solution that you offer in that unique point of view, that as Megan spoke to, that's where you're going to see a lot of wins. We kind of refine our whole goal for 2025, especially each one is simplification and clarity of our message to the market. So we want to really double down on updating our website copy, making sure that it's clear for people to understand, because if we do think about chat GPT being a huge driver now, that's aggregated by our website.
So we need to be able to feed that in, like, whether we maintain or not, that's going to influence decision-making. So clarity is key. Also, understanding how we're going to communicate our, what is our really our strategy in our vision for H1? Is the whole organization aligned there?
That has to be the most important component to success is your marketing team, if it's operating in silos or has different goals and objectives. Like you have a patient's social channel, you have a paid search strategist, we have brand strategies, if those are kind of talking separately, that's where I think the disconnect happens in the strategy component. So just like encourage you, depending on how big the org is or how those teams are, like, what is the intention for the message to market? Are we all aligned there?
What is our demographic? Where are they spending time? And I don't mean that from like, oh LinkedIn, but like, is it male? Is it female?
What is the age graph? Where are they investing their time from a D to C? Like, what is the shit that they're doing? That means that's meaningful.
Because we only have a small portion of our day in the business mindset or working. If you think about the other components of that, like that's the creation aspect that you need to be authentic and organic about. Bit of a tangent there, but I think video is like the big key and clarity to market. Yeah, awesome.
One other questions, let's see. I can take Jennifer's question. What are some other options you can look at when your organization is stuck in the attribution? Is the end all phase?
I think other reporting sources could be good indicators. For example, you might have heard of people listening to our podcast before. You might have heard us talking about self-reported attribution, the act of like putting a how did you hear about us, a field on your lead capture forms like a demo form. And they feel like you haven't heard about you on LinkedIn.
A lot of times a channel like LinkedIn or Word of Mouth, some kind of dark social source is not going to pop up on an attribution tool. So having this other source of information that shows, listen, this is actually telling a conflicting story. LinkedIn is actually generating a lot more sales than we thought before. I think can really showcase that there's more to just like that first touch that your organization might be looking at.
So like getting these different sources and understanding that there's really not one single source of truth. But using all of these sources of truth directionally and just kind of combining them for a more complete story, I think is the way to do that. Yeah, I think there, we use self-reported attribution and we will use, we'll look at software based attribution. It's all, they're all good data points.
But we all know as marketers, there isn't only one thing that happened that made us hear about the company or the product. And so we, you know, this is a theme that we've talked about a lot over the years here at Refine Labs, but customer research and customer interviews can be pretty impactful here, especially in terms of how to communicate and kind of collect some additional qualitative data, but in a really rigorous way to manage up and share that with a broader organization. So I know, you know, some companies, especially with, you know, customers that just signed on or even in the sales process, part of the dialogue will be to dig into how they became aware of the company and how long ago that was and the different touch points that they might have seen. And so the reality is, there's a lot of things that go into it.
And so how are you capturing as much data as possible to aggregate which programs are being brought up over and over and over again in these different mediums, right? Whether it's software attribution, self-reported attribution, actual conversations. And I, again, will challenge people to say, how do you buy stuff? How do you learn about things?
How do you evaluate options? And I think like reminding yourself that what you do is what everyone else is doing too and how would you want to learn about and engage? I, you know, there's been a lot of talk over the last year about this concept of partnerships and how the partnership ecosystem is going to be a big new go-to-market strategy. In theory, I totally agree with the concept.
I think in practice, it's more challenging to actually completely explain what that means or how to run that type of a playbook. But at its core, what it's saying is people are going to make buying decisions because people they trust are going to recommend certain products and services. What is that? It's word of mouth, right?
And it's word of mouth because they personally experienced your product or service. We've all had that story where we bought the thing and we love the thing and then we told everybody we know about the thing so that they could go buy the thing, right? Like the same is true in B2B. So when I think about that, like I'm thinking about things like how do we invest more in our customer delivery and our customer success?
How do we make our customers experience that much better? That's a marketing strategy. If your customer has an amazing experience and they're going to tell other people about it, how do I think about building the right relationships with the right people that interact with my audience, not for a transactional referral? But because if they know me and what I do, I'm just going to come up naturally in conversation.
And a lot of this is old school, like this is old school stuff, like 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, sort of marketing and selling. I think we're going to be making a real return back to these fundamentals, going back to what I was saying around solving a real problem, having a really good solution, having a compelling story, like the basics just really, really matter. And then in terms of, you know, digital is important. It's how people spend hours and hours of time online.
But when you think about the things that you can be doing, I would bucket this in the demand creation strategies, like the medium and the long term play. I think there's a lot of opportunity there. I know for me as a CEO at our agency, it's one of my priorities for 2025, is how do we do more for our current customers to really deliver great results, deliver a great experience. And my bet is if we do that really well, that that's going to become a primary, I mean, it already is for us.
We get a lot of word of mouth from former customers, but like, I want to grow that channel. And it's funny because it's like, it's not a marketing campaign, like it's fulfilling your brand promise and building a reputation among the people that are giving you their trust already. So that's a big priority for me. And I think a lot of companies don't necessarily think about that when they're thinking about marketing or sales or customer acquisition.
And I think it's something more people should be considering for the next few years. That has to be the number one business strategy is having a product or service that quite literally sells itself and keeps customers from turning, right? It's like so simple, but also it does take a ton of internal work. Product can't suck.
Kind of important. Marketing can't fix, you know, marketing is not magic. Sales is not magic, right? And so I think that's the other thing.
You know, I think it's not always, you know, sometimes it can be a tough pill to swallow, but if there are consistent issues with achieving marketing and sales targets, the things that I go back to are what problem are we solving? Does this problem actually matter? Does your solution actually solve the problem? Is your positioning and messaging clear and compelling enough to communicate to your target market that you're solving an important problem in a real, meaningful way?
What is your offer in your business model? Is it meeting the market where it's at? If you're really struggling to hit marketing and sales targets, you have to look at those things and it's not about blaming or sort of, you know, projecting onto other things, but fixing those things will also greatly improve your marketing and your sales efforts. And so again, that's why I always encourage being like a CEO, think like a CFO, think like a business owner, all of these things play together to drive business success overall.
That's also my best advice for how to have a seat at the table to really influence meaningful change at the company that you're at. Couldn't have said it better. Wouldn't have said it better. Sorry.
That's awesome. Any other questions here? We've just got a couple of minutes, but this has been great. Oh, that's a good question, Tom.
It should be from website. I know attribution from its side company with decent growth. I mean, so I if I interpret your question, I could sort of loosely interpret your question, Tom, as like what percentage should be inbound versus outbound? And if you consider all of your inbound is primarily web conversions, you're sort of abandoning any direct response channels.
And that's the primary way you're getting inbound leads. I would say obviously it depends and it varies. What I typically, what I see a lot is marketing will typically produce anywhere from 10 to 30% of revenue where outbound is producing a lot more. Now, what I will always caveat that with is marketing is still part of the outbound equation because they have to know you exist and typically will respond to, you know, an outbound sales conversation.
And I see a lot of companies that come to us that I have conversations with, basically want to move that to 50 50. And eventually once they get to about 50 and 50% inbound, like marketing source, 50% outbound sales source, obviously want to continue to figure out how they can increase the amount, the percentage of inbound coming in. So I think that's, you know, broad strokes of what I see. It's really hard to say because it is dependent on the business.
One of the things that I always like to ask though is I think a good measure of your current marketing effectiveness is how many web conversions are you getting per month on your website? What percentage of those are converting to opportunities? What percentage of those are moving into closed one? You want to look at that funnel through that lens and understand how you can impact it.
So those are some broad strokes. It definitely depends. I don't know if that's like a clear benchmark, but hopefully that gives you a little bit, a little bit of context for that topic. And Evan or Kerry, please add your perspective.
Yeah, we look at nothing more to add than like loose benchmark, right? And this isn't aligned to any sort of company size or any size, but from like a dared declared intent to high intent website to like a high intent revenue opportunity, so depending on how you defined SQL that could evolve. But we'd like to look at about a 35% win rate. So I use that as the benchmark because it's less about the volume, but it's more about are we actually contributing a higher quality of those and what percentage are moving through at a faster rate or in total?
Again, very loose benchmark, but kind of evaluate that data set first. And then that allows you to kind of look at maybe the different sources and go from there. Good question though. Yeah.
This is a great chat. We covered a lot of ground today. It was awesome. Gary, I appreciate you joining too.
Wow, it was fun. Thanks for having me. Thanks for all the questions and for listening in. I think we might keep these going a little bit into next year.
Evan's the boss. We'll see what he says. One thing. Be back.
Welcome feedback to if you guys are enjoying this conversation or any topics. Well, as we're wrapping up, I just wanted to thank you all for joining us again today. We really appreciate the engagement. We'll get it posted on the Stacking Growth podcast.
For those of you that weren't here, they can listen in later. We will be doing some form of event to kind of keep the dialogue and the conversation going. Stay tuned for details, but I wish everyone a really great end of the year. Good luck wrapping up over the next few weeks.
I hope everyone has an awesome holiday and a happy new year. And I am very optimistic for 2025. It's been a few really weird, wonky years in the B2B SaaS attack landscape, but I really feel like next year, things are looking up. And I think as all of these factors that we've been discussing, it's going to really, I think separate the winners and the losers.
People are going to have to evolve and innovate and change to continue to grow and be successful. That is the game of business, arguably the game of life. So it's an exciting challenge and I'm optimistic and looking forward to continuing the dialogue in the 2025. Thanks again, everyone.
Take care. Thanks all. Appreciate it.