Welcome to the Stack and Growth podcast. I'm Tory Kinlick, Vice President of Demand Generation at Refined Labs, and your host for today's episode. On today's episode, I sat down with Tyler Jones, Director of Demand Gen at Refined Labs, and we covered how to overcome the internal obstacles and challenges that come with switching to a demand creation model. Tyler is one of the newest DDGs at Refined Labs, and the first time I met him, this is actually something that he and I talked about, that he took this approach at his former employer, but that it was a face approach, not something that was just like flipping a light switch.
And so I think it's gonna be a really insightful episode for all of our listeners, anyone out there who is preparing to make the switch, unsure about what stakeholders they should be talking to, and what to talk to them about, but also for anyone that is looking at getting started right away today, what they can be doing to make an immediate impact while kicking off this journey, which can be a little bit more of a longer-term play, which definitely takes a little bit of patience. So I hope you all enjoy the episode just as much as we enjoyed recording it. Thanks. Hey everyone, this is your host, Tory Kinlick, and today I wanna welcome to the show, Tyler Jones.
Tyler, wanna give a quick intro? Yeah, sure, thanks, Tory. Hey everyone, my name's Tyler Jones. I'm the Director of Demand Generation here at Refined Labs, and I think we have a really cool topic today, so super excited to chat about it with everyone.
Awesome, me too. Yeah, I think this is one of those topics that frankly people almost expect from Refined Labs, right? We certainly have a lot to say in the demand-gen space that the whole demand creation versus demand capture, now layering in the demand-daming as well. That might be an episode for the future that we're not necessarily gonna get into today.
What I thought was so great about the topic that you had suggested, which is overcoming these internal challenges that come with shifting to a demand creation model, is that this is something that I know a lot of marketers are struggling with today because the Refined Labs team, myself included, we're obviously all very active on LinkedIn and providing all types of tips and tricks and insights as far as how companies can begin doing demand generation the right way. I'm saying that with AirCoats for anyone who's listening and the right way obviously we're biased is the way that we do things here at EverFind, but we've got some proven methodologies on it and so I do think that this is really the right way to do it. However, it's not necessarily something that can be done overnight. And I think that is oftentimes the feedback, the comments that many of us see when we're posting a lot of these tips and things on social is that it's not as easy to do as maybe some of us are making it out to be.
And so I know Tyler from your background, it sounds like you've got some direct experience in this space as far as making a switch to a demand creation model. It's a journey that I've definitely been on at a couple different companies as well. It certainly is what helps kind of lead me here to refine labs. And so I think a good kind of jumping off point here to pull you into the conversation is do you feel like this switch to the demand creation model?
Is this something that you think can be done overnight? Or is it maybe better to look at it as a phased approach? What are your thoughts there? What's your experience tell you?
Yeah, so it's funny that you mentioned LinkedIn, right? Like I talk about the LinkedIn echo chamber and all that. And I do, I just feel like this has been a topic that's been on my mind because I've been living it for a while. I've also gone through switching over to a demand creation strategy with two companies, right?
And at each of those companies, it took almost a year to like fully make the switch. I like to tell people the folks that I think are running demand gen right out of the gates are the brand new startups. Otherwise, if you've gone to a company that's been around five years, 10 years longer than that, like you have these constructs internally within the organization, how they're used to growing that are really, really difficult for marketers to overcome. And it's to your point, just really understated how tough it can be.
And I think it keeps people from really taking action. So yeah, I definitely don't think that it's a rip the band aid off approach. I absolutely think it's phased and I would recommend giving it probably 12 months in my experience. Yeah.
And I think the caveat that you kind of threw out there, right, is that a lot of times the size, the maturity of the organization, especially the marketing team, can be the determining factor in just how complicated it could be to make this switch. And so my experience, my background, I started my marketing career in the enterprise space. I learned how to do marketing and demand generation by following the serious decisions analysts and attending their events and reading their white papers and all that, that good stuff will call it. And so I think at the time, I thought, this is the way.
This is what all marketers should be doing. And where my journey kind of led me to is at one point, I decided I was done in the enterprise space. I wanted to move into the startup scale-up space. I remember talking to my new boss when I moved into that role.
And this is a smaller company, a much more immature one versus the enterprise one that I've been working at. And I said, what kind of playbook you have in mind? So I kind of went through the whole serious decisions, waterfall and the intent data and how that feeds in and the nurture campaigns. And he said, yeah, I don't think that's going to work.
What else you got? And I didn't really have anything else. But fortunately, I did stumble across Chris Walker and Gittano Denardi, who were just starting up the city to mention podcast. And they were the ones that really kind of shed some light on what other ways there are.
And so for me, at this small company, it was easier, I should say, then at a larger company to make this pivot where it's almost like trying to turn the Titanic as compared to being on a jet ski. I felt that same challenge that you're talking about. These large companies, they do have these constructs, whether it be built on MQLs or the MQLs that feed into the budgets, which feed into the headcounts. And all of a sudden, it becomes like a house of cards.
If you start to pull some of these individual things out or change some of these lead gen programs and goals, whereas the smaller companies, there's not quite as many dependencies on those old school ways of marketing. So I hear you loud and clear on that one. And I think your experience here is going to be super valuable for some of the folks that are listening this episode. So knowing that everything that we just kind of ran through, that you're a person that does think that this phase approach is the right way to do it, what do you think is really the best way to get started?
What are the things that marketers really need to keep in mind here, especially regarding some of the challenges that they should be expecting while making a shift? Yeah. So I think it's funny that the way that you said it, trying to turn the Titanic, it really feels like that sometimes. And I think the big thing here is that the person you have to do is you have to understand that there's implications outside of the marketing team.
And you have to fully wrap your head around that. So it changes the way that your marketing team executes. Sure, you're going to need more from creative. It may have some type of influence on output as far as what your copywriters are doing, or even pages on your website, blogs, and things like that.
But at the end of the day, the deeper that you get into it, the more that sales teams roles sometimes shift. Like your SDRs, what they did in the first month when you go after this, you're phasing them out of these leads that you're getting. So $50 CPLs. We've all heard the story.
SDRs are wasting a ton of time. Nothing's closing. And as you start to pull the rug out a little bit, you're shifting what these roles actually look like within your organization, not to mention the way that this has to be communicated up to leadership team and the board and things like that. So I think that those are the things that they either get missed, or it's such a big pill for marketers to swallow that they don't take action.
And they just know that they need to run a create demand strategy. And they toss their hands up because they feel like it may be impossible to do it. So to touch on maybe some actionable things, I think, the first thing you have to do, what I would say, is two things. Every person that's in demand gen needs to have a deep, deep, deep understanding of how their product is sold.
Just as much as your sales manager understands the entire process, you don't need to know what your sales people are doing every single day, but you need to understand everything that happens through the lead lifecycle. If you're going to be able to properly influence what's happening inside of the sales team on the back end, once this create demand thing actually starts to work. So I think that those things are really important. And obviously, first you need to build a leg to stand on.
And you've got to talk a little bit about this before the show, but understanding your funnel and what's converting, what's not. How do I talk to my VP of sales in a way that they finished the conversation saying, OK, that's not working. Now what? And then we're able to start taking charge toward where we want to go.
You know what I mean? I do. Yeah. And I think from what you're saying here, right?
A huge part of this. And I think this is likely why you're feeling which I agree with, why you're feeling is that this should be a little bit of a longer term play, is because there are some really, really, really important things that you need to do ahead of making this shift. It can't just be, OK, we're not going to focus on a demand creation strategy. One of those big ones is identifying the key stakeholders, who are going to be impacted the most by making this change.
And there's people kind of up the ladder and down the ladder, so to speak, that maybe that's not the right term there, across the aisle, I should say, down the ladder, that need to be notified. So those people across the aisle would be our sales counterparts in marketing. Those are the people that are likely going to be feeling this pain the first, feeling this pain the most. Yeah, so that's a good question.
I mean, beyond the split the funnel, which is something that we talked about a lot, one of the first things that I try to do is to go to your B-YAR manager, right? Because that's your front line, and say something to this effect. What would your SDRs do if we gave them back 25% of their time? So let's say you identified that nobody, there's no close one deal from content syndication the last 12 months.
We're wasting money on it. So you say, OK, look, if all of these leads amount to X amount of time on the sales team, how would they restructure that? And that's really where the face approach comes into. Because at the end of the day, the reason why you phase it is because you don't want people saying, hey, where are the leads?
But because demand creation takes time, you don't want to also have a down quarter and end up having to go back to the lead gen, right? And so what you wind up doing is you go and you level with them, hey, with 25% of your SDRs time, what could they do? Now, the leadership at this point matters. I'll give you an example.
The last place that I came from, our SDR leader and our sales leader both came up only through this company. Company was 20 years old. They had only been within the construct of how to sell at this company. So because we were lead engine before I got there, SDR manager really only understood how to coach to that, not like a true outbound.
So is there technology that we need to implement? Do we need to go out and get Zoom info? Do we need to learn how to teach people to use sales navigator and start to maybe learn how to support strategic accounts, right? And this is something that takes time because SDRs, let's be honest, most of the time, are very new in their career to be their first job out of college.
And they only know what they've been taught so far. So that's kind of the way that I opened the conversation. And you pull the rug, you say, OK, we've got no more content syndication leads coming in, you see how things are going. Because the last thing that you want to do is sacrifice y'all hitting your goals to go to a demand creation strategy and then promising that in three quarters, you're going to be off the charts because no one's going to buy it.
You know what I mean? So well said. And I think here's the rub, though, right? Is that with this approach, this demand creation approach, which does take some patience, which is going to take a little while to show its fruit.
In the meantime, you're still very likely going to have a sales team that might feel slightly over resourced. And so one of my favorite topics is what is the BDR supposed to be doing with their new free time that they have, right? They're not being asked to sell or to follow up on these content download leads. And so here's the answer I love to give whenever people throw this question my way.
For any of those companies that have chatbot on their website, turn into a live chat and get those SCRs active on the live chat. It is a perfect way for them to continue engaging with people. Those people that are going to be coming inbound, sure there's going to be some customers there. Not such a bad thing to get them interacting with some customers.
It would be a great way to learn a little bit more about different use cases, challenges that the customers have. But additionally, it's also going to help the SCRs get a better handle on why people are coming to the website, the problems that they face. And at the end of the day, that's what sales development is all about, right? It's about identifying those problems.
And in most situations, teeing up that problem for a sales rep that is a little bit more well equipped to solve the issue and really get into some of the specifics of the product. And I think the other benefit of that is that it's a better user experience for the people that come to your site. So you're not just chatting with a bot. You're actually talking to a real person.
If all of a sudden they've got some questions that might be answered by some new great content that your team has just put out, guess what? The SCR can directly into that spot on the website. To me, that is such a better user experience than coming on the site and talking to a chatbot. And it also solves the problem of what are these SCRs going to do with this new found free time that they didn't have previously.
So what about you? What are your thoughts? What do you typically say to either a client or in your past life, any of the sales managers, BDR managers that have said, OK, you're going to send me less leads. Great.
But what am I supposed to do with all these reps right now that were previously built a team upon activity targets based on the headcounts that we have? There's probably 100 different directions we could go. First, I really like the idea of putting the SCR at the point of contact. So to you, that's great.
That's not something I have really recommended much of. But what I can tell you from experience, like I said, I've done this at two different companies. Let's say that first 25% that you pull where they need to understand things. This is going to sound crazy.
We had to teach our sales team how to hunt inside of the CRM, which is something that a lot of them didn't, either if they're brand new into the role, they're never messed with. Really, a CRM beyond their daily task list. You have 11 new leads, all the leads, email leads. How do we go in and we find somebody where the conversation is potentially warranted, and not necessarily cold where we feel like we've got legs to stand on with confidence when we reach out.
And so at the very beginning, as we start to pull the leads out, what I like to do is I like to teach our sales teams how to hunt inside of the CRM. And then as you get deeper into it, they start to get their own nuances. Everybody sells their own way. So I'm not like, this is what you have to say when you reach out to somebody on LinkedIn or anything like that.
You can figure that out by yourself. But once we get into the 50%, maybe the beyond that, what it starts to become and what you notice is that things evolve. One, they're more self-sufficient. But two, you have the ability to move into new areas.
Maybe it's verticals. Maybe it's strategic account support. Or actually trying to do sales develop it for somebody who's in your top 100 accounts that your AE is ultimately responsible for, whether you're linked directly to your AE or not. And so really, it's just a shift into something that's more strategic.
I like to go inbound outbound on that structure. That's just a preference for me that I've done that I found success with. So that's kind of the framework, I guess, I'd say, that I usually tell people. I like that.
So now let's shift gears a little bit and say, OK, now we've talked about the implications for our friends and sales. I think the other key group of stakeholders that need to be notified about this, this change, and what to expect are some of the leadership team, whether it be this CMO who ideally is going to be onboard with us already, but not a given. Sometimes we do need to sell our marketing leadership team on the way that we can go on the market is outdated. But additionally, I think that whoever's heading up the entire sales organization, I think that there's certainly impacts on the finance team as well.
And so depending on the size of the organization, however high up you can go in those spaces in marketing and sales and finance, those are people that you want to talk to as well. And so in that respect, a different conversation, right? You're not talking necessarily about what the short term immediate impact is going to be and how we pivot. But rather, what is the more intermediate to longer term impact?
And I think when you're talking with leadership teams, sometimes it's about data. It's about metrics. It's about models and forecasting. And so I don't want to go down a rabbit hole here about forecasting and modeling exercises.
Again, a topic for another day. But I do think it's worthwhile to call out what are some of the key metrics that are very likely to change as you move towards this demand creation model. I think a great example, right, is for companies that were previously working on a cost per lead basis. CPL, in my opinion, is kind of a bullshit metric, mainly because the L in there, the lead, is such a nebula term that the metric itself can just be oftentimes difficult to define or really prove value on.
And so when you think about the impact on cost per lead, you're going to be driving less leads. But ideally, you're probably going to be spending the same amount of money. So in that respect, your cost per lead is actually going to go up. That's not a favorable trend that your financing would want to see.
So you need to pivot away from that CPL and say, instead, why don't we look at our cost per qualified lead, our cost per qualified opportunity, our cost per demo, focusing it instead on the people that are going to be coming in with more intent to buy, instead of just saying, hey, we went and bought 500 leads from a content syndication vendor and we paid $50 a lead. So we've got a $50 CPL. Yeah, well, how does that net out down the pipeline when zero of them turn into a pipeline and qualify pipeline and revenue? And so I think, again, changing the conversation a little bit from those old-school CPL metrics to something more appropriate, like a cost per qualified opportunity or with some of the new terminology that we're finding out is rolling out, like a hero, a high intent revenue opportunity, trying to focus it more down funnel because that's really where the largest impact is going to happen from true and effective demand creation.
So in your experience, what type of metrics or conversations are you having with the leadership team and helping them understand what the implications of changing to a demand creation model might look like? Man, there's so much that I want to say there. I guess the first thing that I want to say is that I've never worked for a leader, where if I went to them and I said, we threw $500,000 in the trash can doing this, would tell me to keep doing it. And so that's number one, right?
A lot of times that the data is going to kind of speak for itself. The second thing is, and here's where I often lean toward, you know, take it for what it is, because this is just what I do, but I lean a little toward over education sometimes. And here's what I mean by that. Your CEO and the board are looking at volume of meetings, maybe cost per lead, very top of funnel, and then they're looking at close one revenue.
They don't know anything that's happening in between there. Your CEO doesn't know what your conversion rate is between stage two and three. Your CEO doesn't understand what a high-tech revenue opportunity is and when it becomes a high-tech revenue opportunity. So if we go to them and we say, we threw all this money out, here's what our funnel actually looks like, right?
We need to be looking, maybe it's less meetings, but they're qualified meetings, to your point, or how much did it cost us to get a qualified opportunity in here? At the end of the day, we have to connect the dots, because in nine months, you're not going to be mad that your meetings are down, because your revenue is going to be up. You know what I mean? So a lot of times, I lean a little bit into that over education.
I try and talk to people as a marketer. I know that's counterintuitive when you're talking to leadership teams, but at the end of the day, what's going to happen is, they're going to say, I don't understand what you're talking about, but I get your point. You've got to shift. You tell me what to look at.
You know what I mean? And then they're going to stick to the metrics that you're giving them. As long as you stick to the plan, things are going to go your way. I think that's a great approach.
That makes a lot of sense. And so I think we're at the point now, where maybe we kind of start to get into a little bit of the wrap-up portion of our conversation. And so typically the way I like to kind of handle this part of the dialogue here is to throw a question out there. And I'll go ahead and answer it myself to just give you a minute to think on it.
But so with all the context that we just provided, right? And I think the underlying statement in all of this is that it's the right thing to do to switch to a true demand creation model. However, this is not something that can be done overnight. And there does need to be a level of patience involved.
You certainly need to take time to educate all the appropriate stakeholders. But at the same time, you know, there's a lot of marketers that want to start making this change, right? And so the question then is, if these marketers can't make the switch overnight, what can they start doing today? And so I'll give you my answer and give you a minute to think on it.
For those of you listening and assuming that you follow along some other refined lab's content, the split the funnel exercise is something that we talk a whole lot about. And when you kind of distill down the split the funnel exercise, effectively what you're doing is you're tracking lead sources from the creation of the lead and looking at the count of the number of leads that came from the source all the way through to opportunity, all the way through to close one. And certainly looking at the conversion points in between and win rates and average sales cycles and pipeline velocity and all that. But what it comes down to is just looking at how many leads from each of these sources, did you create how many converted into pipeline?
How many converted into close one revenue? And so when you look at the data, oftentimes it's going to be a very clear picture, you know, like you called out before, the content syndication leads probably are not going to amount too much. The investment in, I don't know, let's say display advertising, very likely to lead into anything that's going to create a lead and convert into an opportunity and close one demo. But if that data is not enough, I think the other thing that marketers can do, if they need to be convinced, if their leaders need to be convinced is pick up the phone and call a few of the leads from those sources that the data is telling you are not netting out to anything.
If you don't believe the data that's in front of you that's in your CRM, pick up the phone and call that person yourself and find out for yourself just how low quality of a lead it is. And the reason that this one is kind of really, I keep kind of close to my, my heart here is because I started my career in sales in inside sales. I was calling those, those leads and I can confirm they were all shit then and they're all shit now. And so, you know, that is, is not going to change those low quality leads that you're effectively paying for a content download.
There's no quality there. There's no real sales intent there. And it's an extremely uncomfortable situation to have to call that person about a white paper that they maybe downloaded a couple of weeks ago and see if there's any purchase intent there. And all it takes is a couple of those conversations to realize, okay, this is not a good use of money.
This is something we need to stop investing in. That is something that I think can be done right away today. A good way to start auditing some of the past performance, starting to get a better understanding of the current quality of those leads that your, your team is generating. But what about you, Tyler?
What are your thoughts on for these marketers that are interested in starting to make some changes today? What do you think they can be doing right away? Yeah, man. I love what you just said.
I would, I want to tack on first before I move forward. Like, it's not just what you're spending from a marketing budget standpoint. Think about the amount of time that the SD, the opportunity costs that's wasted, like SDRs spend two hours of their day. You have 30 of them.
All of a sudden you've wasted $100,000 in what you're paying these people when their time could be more well spent on something else. So I love your call out there. And I just wanted to tack that on. As far as what you can get started doing today, I think it's really interesting.
Like the tactics, I think for demand creation, as far as deploying them, it's not too difficult to get going. You can stop wasting money today. You can audit your platforms. You can start using bottom of the funnel channels for bottom of the funnel.
You can start using awareness channels to build awareness instead of capturing leads. Right. Like I'm talking about stop using Google ads to send people to eBooks and yada, yada, everything that comes after that. Those are some pretty easy things that you can do, right?
Setting up LinkedIn campaigns and that sort of thing. I think what I would do be one step beyond this, what the funnel was, I would look at playing with quality growth model or whatever you'd like. If you look at sales velocity, what if we started closing deals at X rate, right? How could we hit our goals there at the end of the day?
Like for me, when I've gone through these exercises, that's what I spent a lot of time doing, right? Because you're ending up, you're ending up, it's a balancing act between, we still need to hit our numbers and we want to move to create demand. So what I would say is, split the funnel, get a really solid idea of like the model and how you guys grow and then start to run numbers into what tweaks are going to be happening, right? Like on average, we see contract values go up.
Be conservative. What if your average contract volume or contract value went from 30,000 to 36,000, right? And then what does that look for revenue? If like for revenue, if meetings go down, and these are all things, tools that you're going to use that are going to equip you to one, have the tough conversations that we've been talking about throughout the course of this podcast, but two, just stay on the ball when you're going through this transformation and understanding like, okay, we are in a good spot and now we can take the next step.
So that's a lot there, but I think that's the actual question. No, I love that. And yeah, and I think what you know, what you were calling out there, right, is a little bit of a modeling exercise, right? When you're kind of looking at the inputs of that model as your historical conversion rates and a lot of that will oftentimes come from that look back on it, that split the funnel exercise, whatever you want to call it.
And so you can see the different conversion rates from lead to opportunity, opportunity to sales qualified opportunity, sales qualified opportunity to close one. And then the parts that kind of to your point that you can play around with the variables, so to speak, can be your ad spend, the budget that you're putting towards demand creation, your cost per demo, which can certainly fluctuate based on, you know, some of those new inputs and spend levels. And so I think modeling out a couple different scenarios, if you want something to bring to that leadership team that we were talking about before, that they can really sink their teeth into, it's modeling out a number of those scenarios and bringing them a tool that you can say, you know, hey, if we put in this many dollars, or if we reduce our budget by this many dollars, this is, you know, what the output might look like. And yeah, like you were saying, kind of tweaking that a little bit and looking at a couple different potential scenarios, that I think is a great way to really set the stage for what's ahead, but also, you know, really kind of keep a lot of this, what can seem very aspirational approach grounded in reality and data.
And I think that's what any business leader is really going to appreciate. So well said, I love that tip. And I think, yeah, that is certainly something that marketers can start working on today, as they figure out what the road ahead is going to look like towards starting to, to really, you know, create future demand and not just capture what's out there or, yeah, take $500, and dump it in the trash can like, like, yeah, I thought, so cool. Well, hey, Tyler, this is a lot of fun, great topic.
I think a lot of good actionable takeaways for the audience here. So really enjoyed recording this one. I hope everyone out there enjoyed listening. And yeah, this was a fun episode.
So thanks for joining us today, Tyler. Cool. Thanks, Tori. Hey, I just want to plug this really quick.
And I don't know if this is allowed on the show, but I think you'll let me do it. If anybody wants to talk to me about this, I'm happy to do that. And I'm really active on LinkedIn as are many of the refiners. So it's Tyler, T Y L O R Tyler Jones.
I'm not going to spell that one out for you, but just holler at me on LinkedIn. My DMs are open unless you're trying to sell me anything and, you know, happy to talk to everyone. I'll spell it out. It's J O N E S Jones in case anyone has has spelling issues, which you never know.
Right. But don't just slap them out because that's true. Well, cool. Hey, yeah, like I said, this is great.
Thanks for joining me today, Tyler. Thanks everybody for listening. So until next time.