Hey everyone, welcome back to the Stacking Growth podcast. Today's episode features Sam Keenley, one of our VPs of Demand Gen here at Refine Labs. He had a conversation with Tom Hunt a few weeks ago and it had a ton of great insights in it. We wanted to share it for all of you to listen to you.
Hope you enjoy. So the things I would like to cover, because I want to learn about first your journey in Refine Labs. I think it's an amazing case study for like a services business. And then I want to talk about your thoughts around Demand Gen versus Lead Gen, capturing creating demand, which is actually how we met on LinkedIn last week.
Pay spend for content consumption, which I think you have a popular LinkedIn post about. And then I have a special surprise idea, marketing idea that I want to pitch you at the end. Love it. Let's get into it.
So Refine Labs, you joined, I think around two years ago. That's correct. And how did you, like, why did you join? How did you join?
Yeah, so I have up to that. I've been in B2B for nearly 10 years at that point at a large enterprise software company. Started as the equivalent of an SDR, work my way up into marketing always and everyone would be more on the marketing side. And essentially, I got to the point where I was leading the digital marketing team, the paid aspect of it and was just starting to feel this disconnect between how we were going to the market and the way that users were engaging with the content and how we were setting up our ads.
And it was just this feeling I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I knew it wasn't the best way, the most effective way. And then like everyone else on LinkedIn, I know I'm sure you've talked to like Enter Chris Walker, see one of his posts and I was just like, okay, he was able to put into words that feeling that I've just had in my stomach for so long where it's not people wanting to download your e-book and give up their email address. They don't want to attend a webinar. When they want to buy, they want to buy, when they want to learn, they want to learn and we keep confusing these two as what's intent versus what's just someone doing research and going back their day-to-day of how to do their job better.
So when I came across that with Chris, that led to a couple conversations with Enai. I was at a point where I was ready to advance in my career. It was a great opportunity for me to jump full time into a director of demand gen-type roles. So I hopped on over when we were lastly in 10 employees and fast forward two years, we're at 120 on continuing to grow.
So before we talk more about Refine, why do you think of that change, that shift in how people wanted to buy and how companies were marketing? Why do you think that happened recently like last few years? Like 15 years ago? Yeah, I think it's not a couple of things.
Namely, last couple years, especially when COVID just everything had to go more digital native. But the way that people buy nowadays is much different. It used to be you had to talk to a sales rep to get any type of information about a product or a service. Everything was very hidden.
It was relationship-based in-person relationship-based. Whereas in the last handful of years, information is everywhere online. You can go and find a video for anything. I mean, not that you could become a doctor, but you could become a doctor more or less just by going and reading a amount of research articles and everything else on there, not advising people do that.
But the same kind of thing, I mean, go up to B2B and software and you're really not that specially product is not that crazy complicated where people are going to do their own research. They want to learn what you're about, how you're going to help them achieve better results, how to get there day to day. And there were companies who understood this shift and they really led the charge of the early adoption of this, just give our content away for free. Let's let them educate themselves instead of saying, you have to talk to a sales rep to get that.
What if we just start putting our white sheets out there? What if we give them case studies to understand how someone in a similar industry or a similar role solved that problem? And so I think as more and more of that happened, that's what really led to the shift where the expectations started to be set within the consumer. So if you weren't doing that at your company, they're just like, okay, cool, I'll go find another competitor of yours who does have that information like an access and then go learn about them more instead.
Makes sense. So essentially the environment changed because of the internet. And so those businesses that adapted to this new environment of buying without the thrive, and then refi Labs is like, I would say the thought leader in this change. And if educating the market about this change, and then I guess you help your clients adapt to the change, would you say that's accurate?
You've simplified that a lot more than my five minutes a little earlier, I wouldn't say that. I would say we're the amplifiers for this change. I don't, it's been done before us. We've just really helped it become more accepted in the business.
There were companies that were doing this before. We were about, I mean, drifted a great job of it a handful of years ago. And there's other examples that could certainly be pointed to. Got it.
Okay. So you join less than 10 people. I understand you have like 100 people now. Yeah, we're just past 120 about a month ago.
Congrats. And your role has it changed? Yeah, since I started, so I joined as a director of demand generation. And now I'm one of the VPs of demand generation.
So I oversee a team of directors of demand generation and the performance marketing managers who report to those. So those are the individuals we all work directly with our clients to help them craft their strategies and the execution plan within the platforms in order to achieve their pipeline and revenues. And so you'll run into one generation of their refinance clients, not refinance. Correct.
Yeah, it's primarily for our clients. When we say demand gen for refinance, we got engaged on LinkedIn. That's our biggest strategy, honestly, with acquisition as educating the market, engaging others in the marketing space, their channels like LinkedIn, TikTok and others. So that's always the fun.
That's our line on that. I'm not, we're never going to see an attribution icon on Sam Keanley's post on LinkedIn, but you and I are having a conversation about something who could say that something can come out of this for our listeners or anything else. But we do not have an outbound sales motion intentionally, because we drive all this demand to our company. We have a sales team that's inbound oriented where they field the people that come in from our request.
But yeah, that's a big part of our own demand strategy is the number of voices that you see coming from our team that are helping to educate just the larger PDB marketing space. So on that note, you have been killing in 10 recently. Can I can I ask you about like, processes behind that? Do you like right out of the weekend and post every morning?
Do you post every day? Any specific tips related to that? Yeah. So I start off my day meditating for a half hour and then I go to my zangarden and I'm kidding.
I'm not one of those that can give you all this stuff. There's a lot of different ways that people do it. Me, personally, I find that the content that I enjoy writing the most about is content that's top of mind for me. What am I experiencing with the client currently?
What am I seeing in the market itself? So I could probably do a better job of dedicating myself to sitting down for an hour over the weekend and writing out my post for the week. But more often than not, it's I'm hopping on in the morning, I'm spending a half hour thinking about a topic or something that's come up and then starting to write that to steal it down into a consumable way for LinkedIn and then pushing it out in that way. So it's not as a fuck leaderish as you might think, but that's why I think it's so relevant because so many people are experiencing those types of things because they are the timely content pieces, not this big fluff about how you should do demand generation and just saying the platitudes that we all see on LinkedIn, it's like I like to get more into the how and the why behind things, not just the what.
So you're in like a climate meeting, something happens or you see something you understand something you're like, I should write a post on that, maybe that day or another day you'll write it out, bang it out and then now you're getting like thousands of likes, right? Not thousands, I wish. Only Chris gets that. No, a couple hundred.
But no, I enjoy more. I gauge not the success of it by the likes, but the conversations that come because that's what tells me, I mean, you can get all the people like great post, but that doesn't mean anything. Like the people that ask the deep requests from it, like and then help them or how they're overcoming something similar because to me, that's what social media is really for at the end of the day, not to put yourself on a pen as a little bit to engage with other people, which is exactly how we met. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to get this post out and because you kind of dominated.
So my post for people, I think, my post was a little bit, I don't know if I should say for C++, it's just a little bit like simplified, right? Because my point is basically that we have famous podcast agency have grown only through capturing demand. And I think a refined that's like motto or belief is that people that create demand are going to win. And so I basically just say, I'll like, I'll be the post business of a great demand, but when I call bullshit, creating demand is five, it's more complex and expensive than capturing command.
We've gone from zero to one minute. I'll simply through, through capturing demand, then Chris, oh yeah. So then Sam, your post, your comment, 31 likes on the comment, more like, or nearly more likes than post itself. So and it's just like a really, really good like thoughtful response.
Because I like really the answer is it's like size of company, right? Like we're a lot smaller. We do agree because you're saying here, yeah, it's more complex and expensive than that one of those companies brought up for 10 million. Very to one minute can easily be done once 10 million is another story.
Can you just elaborate on your answer to my maybe oversimplified Yeah. So it goes to the concept of just how much demand is available to be captured at a current point in time. So a lot of organizations that come to us, they have done a great job running Google ads or I say, great job. They've been running Google ads and other captured demand type channels.
What then happens is they start to hit a plateau in terms of how much revenue or pipeline they're generating in a year and they have their board, they have their leadership saying, we need to increase our pipeline. We have the school for this year that we're not going to hit. And so that's where it really becomes your maxing about your, your capturing demand in Google. There's only so many searches for podcasting software.
So how do you then go and bring more pipeline and revenue for your organization? That's where the create demand comes in and it's ultimately it's the snowball that you start rolling that feeds into that captured demand. So what it is is when you create demand, you're educating your ICP who may not know that they even have a problem or that there's a solution to something like this. Someone could just be thinking podcasting software, I just go on Zoom, I record it and then I pull the audio from it and it's like, yeah, that does work.
Is there a better way? I bet there is. But you know, and that's they know that there is a solution out there. That's what creating demand does is it allows you to get in front of those individuals and then you educate more and more and more of your ICP.
And what happens is say in a month, you have 100 searches for best podcasting software. As you continue to educate your ICP, you'll see two months later, there's 120 searches for that five months later, there's 180 searches for it. So you get more people thinking about it. And that's what fills up that captured demand bucket.
But there's not going to be more demand ready to be captured if you aren't creating the interest for that type of topic. And so that's why what we say is it's a balance between creating and capturing demand. And what you have to do is really figure out what's the right mix for you because in order to be truly successful, they both rely on one another. Otherwise, you're going to hit those plateaus.
If all you do is create demand and you don't have a mechanism to capture it, good luck. If all you do is captured demand, but you're creating it, you're going to hit that plateau. So that's where those two together lead to the growth holes and how you're going to achieve those. But you would agree at an earlier stage when the company has limited resources in an existing, when they're not creating something you own in an existing market, you would focus on capturing demand first.
Yeah, I mean, there's, it's the low-hanging fruit, right? How many people are showing up right now for podcasting software? That's going to make sure that we're putting enough budget into Google to capture those. What I say and what we usually recommend is it depends on the size of your budget, because I think that I may have provided an example or in the other post I wrote was say there's $2,000 worth of search spend towards that type of keyword.
If you're a total company budget for a media spend is $5,000, that's $40% of your budget. If it's $50,000, that's nothing. That's 4% of your budget. So what you want to do is just make sure that you are showing up for it, but I would never go all in 100% on captured demand, even if you only have $5,000, that's like half out of $1,000 to get your true ICP and just get out there because that's the brilliance of LinkedIn and Facebook.
On Google, if you after the higher educational type phrase is more low-intense, so what is podcasting software where they're just looking to understand like, I don't know what it is, I want to understand how it could work for us. I would rather spend $35 to get $1,000, so $35,000, versus $35 for one click. And so that's where you just need to think about the scalability, the efficiency of it, and understanding your ICP with how they're going to engage with that. Are they going to convert on it?
Are there other mechanisms to educate them in a better way that will lead to longer-term results? Nice. So I want to be careful we segregate the wisdom that you're sharing with the strategy that led us to this point. So here is great to have with knowledge, but what I think is also interesting is the way that you guys go out and share this knowledge.
For example, adding value on other people's LinkedIn posts because we can't tell how many impressions are coming up, but it was probably in the thousands. And anybody reading that is going to get educated about the difference you're capturing and creating. And they're going to be like, oh, who's Sam? Click on the profile.
See some other great posts. Potentially connect with you. Maybe check out our fine labs. I think that the way you guys do LinkedIn is really cool and interesting.
Yeah, it's leveraging the platform the way that people want to use it. They want to go be educated, engage with others. I can tell you, I don't scroll LinkedIn looking for an ad that says, get a demo of our product. I've honestly become kind of immune to those, even though I'm a demand marketer.
I look for people with interesting points of views, conversations that I want to join either to just be a fly on the wall and observe. Again, that's the impression you're not going to see me like it. You're not going to see me comment. I'm going to consume it though, but you can believe that.
Or there is a conversation like yours where I want to inject a point of view, have a good dialogue about it. And I think that's something that I wish we could be better about in today's day and ages coming from two people have different points of view. You're not going to be like, let's talk about it. Let's have a good conversation.
Instead of I'm right, you're wrong. That doesn't get anywhere at the end of the day. So I was really glad when you reached out about having this conversation. But yeah, that's really the way that we like to go about it is just helping marketers improve what they do and then finding those who are active on the platform and joining the conversation.
So they can become a part of our network. We educate them and also it helps expand our philosophy and approach to be to be marketing. They don't have to hire us to go and start implementing a lot of what we do. And that's what we're really trying to create is just this next wave of B2D marketers who are doing it better.
And what I love about that is that they can learn and improve their lives, improve their businesses without paying you guys anything. But the very fact that you're adding value to them, it means that if at some point they see a node a series, the sounds completely come to you. And they're probably telling the friends that are seeing those at series, the sounds companies that they need to go to. Yeah, there's no downside to it at the end of the day.
It's just us putting in the time investing that into the platform. And it's not attribution. We could talk all day about that. It's not a drug attribution methodology.
It's played a long game. So you mentioned just now about you not clicking on a LinkedIn ad saying, get it done by software. How do you think then that paid but it should be spent on social platforms? Yeah, that's always a fun one.
So the way that I like to do it, do you remember growing up reading the choose your own adventure books? Okay. So what I like to do is within the ICP, so I know it's another million times ideal customer profile, in case anyone doesn't feel like with it, I like to provide them with multiple avenues to become familiar with your brand. So the mistake that too many organizations make is that they over invest in these product-oriented ads or the beta demos, get a $100 gift card if you can't get a demo with our sales rep.
And they treat the ICP as if 98 to 99% of them are actively in market and shopping when the reality is it's the inverse. Maybe 1 to 2% are actively in market shopping. So what we like to do is come with an approach of a balanced way to give them multiple entry points into your brand. So if you're thinking about cold targeting people who've never heard of you or maybe once or twice, you know, very low familiarity, you can approach it from two lenses.
One is the content types themselves. So people learn and consume in different formats. So you could do product feature highlights. That's what a lot of people do.
You could do demo previews showing how the product works. So put yourselves in the shoes of the customer. It doesn't have to be anything sexy. I love the minute 32 minute long lume style ads that just show like, here's how you do this in the product.
It's really cool. It's really simple. And then they get a sense of how it all works and they can see how that would benefit them. And then going further from that, you've got things like case studies, educational blog posts, how to do your job better, how to make your job easier, podcasts snippets.
So those do incredibly well. So coming up with multiple content types in the beginning to figure out just what's your ICP going to engage with in the beginning. I know people, handful years ago, love making the general personas, we have four personas that were going after Bob, the CEO likes to do this, Jenny, the CFO likes to do this. They always consume this type of content.
When reality is you could have 10 people in the same world, 10 people are going to consume content differently. So those days are a little bit passed. So that's why we say, you know, give multiple content types. And then the content mediums themselves.
So written, audio, video, short form, long form, everyone likes to consume things differently. So these generalities don't quite work anymore. So investing in ways that you can get in front of your ICP in multiple manners is going to pay off in the long term. And you'll start to see trends around, okay, case studies more often than not do do better than our educational blog posts.
So we can start to shift our budget where it's not a 50 50 split between those, but it's to a 70 30 and 80 20. And you can get more data driven from that standpoint. But you'll often find that the more routes that you give individuals to become familiar with your product, your brand, the more successful you're going to be. What I'm hearing really is trying to sculpt your sales process to how people actually want to buy crazy, right?
Right? Right? Crazy. And so then at any point, maybe further down the funnel, if you have more, I guess, I don't know, like a very warm retargeting audience, would you then have an ad with a CTA to a demo?
Yeah, so also do retargeting. You can try that. We've done it with a number of clients where we try this week's page, we strive the demo is it successful? It does okay.
You know, you will get some people from it. And then that's also where if you look at retargeting audience conversation for another day, it's always going to over report on the success because it's going to take that last touch or the most recent ad that they saw. So if you do add one that gets unfamiliar, cold targeting, add two, they only get the retargeting. Of course, it's going to say the retargeting is what incidents that we with your conversion because it's negating out that first one.
So that's why we like to ask how do you hear about this and go more to channel level. But you can try it. It's we see some success with clients. We see no success with others.
My advice for any client that comes to us is I will never make an as I make one and always never type statement. I say, let's try it out. Here's what we normally will see. It's probably not going to work, but let's find it out.
You know, where every business is unique, every market is unique. So we can figure out what's the right mix for you and go from there. But generally, we just find that people want to raise their hand when they're ready to talk. You can push them to that page and see if they're ready, you might get a couple a little prematurely who will be open to it.
But buyers are smart. You know, they every website has the top right button. You are trying to, there's a very clear CTA about how to get in touch with your company. We all know that.
There's a reason that they aren't clicking on that when they're at their website and they're going to the resources section instead. So yeah, it's a balance. But yeah, what you can do is retargeting. You can give more in depth case studies.
So if you see that people visited, say you serve four different industries and you see that they visited this specific industry page, now you can serve a more in that case study specific to that industry. Or you can do things that lean more towards the insight that you've gotten from them. And then what we say is on the page itself. So if you do want to go to your website, give them multiple avenues to get in touch, make it easy.
So you've got the sticky CTA in the top right as you work through the blog post or the case study, you give a couple examples of like, Hey, you just want to like chat with a sales rep, now we're in SDR consultant. Cool. Here you go. So you can work it in as part of the user experience itself.
But I'm sorry. Don't underestimate your buyers. No, I think that could be the title of the episode. Now, sound going to pitch you my idea.
So I've got like $5,000 to spend. I could spend all $5,000 into LinkedIn, I was saying go and request a podcast, we'll ask my personal sign to all of our buyers. Or I could do this other thing which I thought of yesterday when I was doing a personal class. And I'll explain why I came up in the personal class in a minute.
But before I tell you that I have to introduce you to concepts that like driving the idea, the first is the concept I don't age ago about content marketing. If you're thinking about creating a piece of content, maybe if it's actually about idea to create that people content for the influencers of the people you're trying to reach, as opposed to the people you're trying to reach. Because then if you do that, then the influencers are going to like it and share it content number one. Content number two is this, I'm playing with a tagline for fame, fame, the business, it's called interruption is the enemy.
And so instead of investing in marketing to interrupt these people that probably don't want to buy podcasts, we want to create something that is remarkable like theft, code, and things. So those are two concepts. So what I'm thinking, I got the idea because I was doing a personal class and the instructor was saying how it was actually an old class, but it was for the summer of 2021, he created a podcast, no, a cocktail for his fans. And so what I'm thinking is because the topic of like the man's gen is very hot right now on LinkedIn.
And so what I'm thinking is I'm going to pay a cocktail extra to design a cocktail that's going to be like fiend the round demand generation thinking maybe call it like the DG or if the cocktail man or woman can think of a better name, we can work with that. And then so we can design this cocktail, it's going to be like the demand generation cocktail. And then I can send it to all of the, or like a little pack maybe or to like the big like demand gen influencers like you guys for example. And then you're going to be like drinking the DG in the summer of 2022 in the sun and it's going to get loads of traction on LinkedIn.
What do we think a good use of five thousand dollars? It'd be an interesting one. Okay. Cool.
So everyone's thinking don't drink the cool. Oh yeah. Okay. Nice.
Yeah. The DG. I could see it. Better.
Like you think I could use the five dollars in a better way. And you want to go that influencer route? I think so. I mean, I think it's just quite funny as well.
Yeah. Yeah. A little tiny cheat. I had to test it out, you know, try to handle the people, see what they do with it, see what they put their spin on it.
So, you know, while you're enjoying your content, fire up a 30 second, just like video of your definition of demand, or what you think needs to change about it, or make it a spicy cocktail. Give us your, your hot take on on demand on the next year, you know, play with it. Have them add, you give the thought leader the platform, them use their voice to project from there. So give them the prompt and then you can see where it goes and what they take you aggregate all that.
And then you have the branded cocktail. So put your name on it or something else. But it'd be different. I think the problem is I have to invest upfront because I want to get a cocktail expert like design this.
So I'm going to have to invest a friend to pay that person to do that. I don't know how much cost I need to research. And also I need to do it before this podcast episode gets live because I'm always going to take the really good idea. So it was amazing.
Okay, I'm going to do it. Sam, I want to thank you so much. It was very seamless, like your comment and then bringing on the show very fast. And obviously, thank you for sharing all the wisdom about my generation and thank you like banging out a sweet link in place.
I'm like a big fan of the way refined that market itself. And so it was great to learn from you one on one. Yeah, I appreciate the time. It's been fun.
We definitely need to do it again after those cocktails go out. Thanks, Sam.