Hey everybody, welcome to the stacking growth podcast. On this episode, just me, Tori can like VP of demand at refine labs. I did not have a guest join me, but I did have some things that I had on my mind that I wanted to share with you all. So I'm coming up on the one year mark on my time at refine labs and I realized that there are a couple of common traits between the clients that I have seen had the most success in working with us.
And we get to see a lot of companies and demand gen strategies that come in and out of relationships with refine labs. And after a little bit of self reflection, I realized that there are some common alleys between some of the clients that have had the most success in working with us. And I think that sharing these insights with you all, whether you could become a refine labs customer in the future or not, totally irrelevant. But I think that sharing the insights, it's going to be helpful for everyone out there because I think there's going to be some good takeaways that you can consider for your business, your demand gen efforts, your marketing strategies that might be helpful in your team's journey with demand creation.
So with that, I hope you enjoyed the episode. What's up everybody, welcome to the stacking growth podcast. My name is Tori Kinlick, VP of Demand Generation at Refined Labs, and I will be your host for today's episode. And on today's episode, I will have no guest.
You just got me, that's it. So I probably just lost about 90% of the people that started this episode. You're lost, I suppose. For those of you that are still listening now, thank you for the vote of confidence.
But I do think that this is going to be a great and insightful episode. So what I wanted to cover today was a realization that I had recently. So I'm coming up on about the one year mark at Refined Labs. And throughout that time, I've had a chance to work really closely with probably 20 plus different companies and marketing teams and really get a deep understanding of their demand generation strategies, their entire marketing strategies.
And through this realization, along with a couple of conversations I've had with some of our new clients and prospective clients recently, I realize that there's some common traits between the clients that are seeing the most success in working with Refined Labs versus those that are just seeing some moderate success. And I believe that these common traits are worthwhile to share out with you all, whether you're a Refined Labs client or not, because I think that ultimately, you know, it's really the critical pieces of the foundation that companies need to create demand and certainly capture it, but to have an effective and efficient demand generation strategy. And so I'll just quickly rattle off what each of these traits are. I'm going to go deepen them over the next couple of minutes and throughout the entirety of the podcast here.
The five traits that I've noticed for the clients and just companies in general that are having the most success with the demand generation are the following. Number one, you have a defined ICP. Number two, you have some type of strategic narrative or positioning strategy. Number three, you have an effective measurement system.
Number four, you're able to capture existing demand in marketplace. And number five, that you have belief and trust in the process, we'll call it, also known as having patience. So starting from the top, right, the defined ICP, I think the companies that are doing it well, they have an understanding of the firmographics, the demographics, the technographics, right, those tech install data pieces and really understand what a good customer looks like. If they're able to balance the lifetime value of their existing clients along with all of these different kind of surface level traits, even better, right, I think you want to have a general understanding of who you're able to attract and convert.
But maybe more importantly is the clients are able to retain, which are ultimately what are going to help your business continue to stay profitable after you're creating that new demand and effectively capturing it. You want to make sure that you can keep those clients and that they're a good fit for your company. I think the other area, right, that is really beneficial for companies to have a strong handle on is where do you win the most and why? So some of this kind of ties into that second piece, that positioning strategy, but understanding where you win and why you win, obviously is going to be really, really important for the future of your business.
But I guess the nuance within all of that, right, is that sometimes the places that you've won historically are not where you're looking to win next. Whether your company is pivoting, whether you're expanding, maybe you were acquired or are going through some M&A and all of a sudden you're going to have a different, more robust offering, which means a new ICP. That's awesome and exciting and encouraging. But there are challenges with having and will call it an aspirational ICP.
The main challenge being that you don't know if this aspirational ICP, number one, if you're going to have any success in creating demand with them, but number two, are you going to be able to fulfill that demand? Not just get the deals closed and get someone through the sales process, but if this is a new ICP with a potentially new offering or a new angle for your company, are you going to be able to serve those customers in a way that they are going to have their expectations met, that they're going to get the most value out of your offering and that they're going to stick with you and be happy clients? So I think we certainly work with a lot of companies here that are in the midst of pivoting their ICP or are coming to us with a little bit more of an aspirational view on who they want to be selling into. And the words and other advice that we give them there is oftentimes perceived with caution.
We like to certainly start out focusing on the areas that you've won, mainly because for our clients we want to ensure that they're able to see some positive impact being made quickly. When we have a recipe for success, that's a great area for us to focus on with our clients. We're not having to effectively reinvent the wheel. There are a lot of historical learnings and data for us to go off of.
And so having that defined and established ICP is always a great thing. But for those clients that are looking to break into a new market, we really are just continuing to reinforce how much patience is going to be needed there. But also that these companies need to be ready to invest in demand creation and overall education of the market. If they're trying to change the public perception of their brand, that takes a lot of work and dedication and content.
And not just from the marketing team, the sales team is going to be tied into that, the product team, everybody. And so it can be a very long and winding road for these companies that are looking to pivot away from an existing ICP. It's challenging, but certainly not impossible. And so that's kind of the first of the five criteria for the common traits of clients who are seeing the most success.
The second one that I'll get into is this strategic narrative or positioning strategy. To me, I see these two things as one and the same. I'm certain that experts in this space would love to debate over whether that's true or whether strategic narrative and positioning strategy are in fact one and the same. From my view, they are very similar.
A strategic narrative is certainly much more of a storytelling type of approach. Just understanding what's going on in the market. Has there been some new or significant change? And your story, your company's strategic narrative is really helping your audience understand how you fit into that market or why the change that happened recently is relevant to your company and how you're planning to be a part of that revolution or that change.
A positioning strategy doesn't always necessarily revolve around maybe some type of new changes in the marketplace. A positioning strategy to me is really an understanding of how you're going to win. Are you planning to unseat a category leader? Are you planning to steal a corner of the existing market, the existing category?
You may have heard about the damning the demand strategy where you're effectively siphoning off existing demand from an existing category but just trying to really put a stake in the ground in that category and say, this corner of the market, this is mine now. This is where we're going to dominate. This is why we're different than everyone else in this existing category and although it's a more nuanced approach, it's an extremely effective one. And one of the other approaches, the other common position strategies is designing a new category.
This kind of ties into this whole aspirational ICP that I was just talking about a moment ago. When clients come to us and tell us, hey, we want to create a new category, again, they're met with a message, proceed with caution. This is hard work. You are not only trying to create awareness for your brand, but if you're creating a new category, you need to educate an entire group of people about what this new category is.
There might be some frame of reference, right? If you are trying to compare your new category to something that is existing, some known commodity, but that is an approach, a challenge that is going to take some time to really to break through and help people understand who you are and why you're different and what this category is and why they should care. Those are a lot of things that a company would need to focus on in order to create a new category and they need to do them all well or they're going to fall flat with some of those efforts. The other part of the positioning strategy that is extremely important is the competitive analysis.
In fact, it might be the part that you need to conduct at the front of any discussions around positioning strategy. And the reason for that is because there is no positioning without a competitor to position against. So if you're looking at trying to, let's say, unseat that category leader, you need to know what they are doing, what they've done, how they've won, what messages and creative they're going to market with so that you can find a way to differentiate, so that you can use some of them on minimum that they built and help everyone understand that your offering is related, but it's different, not better, but different. The other approaches within positioning, right, of damming the demand, designing a new category, it's still absolutely critical that you have a very thorough understanding of the entire competitive marketplace and how your solution might fit in because these are ultimately the inputs to help you understand what your differentiators are.
And your differentiators are effectively the entire reason that your company is existing. Now, that's not to say that you should be going to market, focused purely on your differentiating features and functionality because that's not a strong recipe for success. You need to ensure that you're mapping those differentiators to value for your audience. They need to be crystal clear on not just why you're different, but why it matters to them.
Everyone can be out there talking about why they're different, but it's just going to fall on deaf ears if you don't create that connection to the challenges that they go through on a day to day basis and how you can help resolve them. So the competitive analysis, I think, is absolutely a huge part of really the strategic narrative or the positioning strategy, and that is that second of the five different components of what I see as a strong foundation for creating demand. The third system, excuse me, the third part is the measurement system. When I say measurement system, really I'm referring to your CRM more or less.
I'm definitely more of a Salesforce power user than I would say I am at HubSpot. Those are certainly the two most popular CRMs. There's certainly great options for those out there that aren't using Salesforce or HubSpot. Those are definitely my preferences.
But within these systems, you need to have a strong and effective way to measure if you are creating demand or not. And so the questions you need to be asking yourself is are you still using some type of antiquated system, like that MQL waterfall model? If you've listened to any refined-lapse content over the past couple of years, you've heard Chris Walker or any of my other colleagues point out all the flaws in that MQL waterfall model. And so I'm not going to go into that because that could be an entirely separate podcast episode and I'm not trying to go totally sideways right now.
But if you are still using that more antiquated approach, that doesn't mean that you're not ready to create demand. It just means that you're going to have a hard time measuring the impact of an effective demand creation strategy. If you are only focused on MQLs and you have an MQL target and your sales team is expecting MQLs, there are effectively inherent flaws in your go-to-market motion and what you and your company are focused on are prioritizing. And so the main challenge with any type of MQL model is that MQL is a bit subjective, I suppose it's different from company to company.
But the other part of that is it's too far removed from the things that actually matter, which are pipeline and revenue. And the main thing that you really want to be measuring with an effective system is the inbound coming through your website and your ability to track those inquiries to pipeline and revenue. That's the most kind of distilled version of it, right? You want to be able to understand who is coming to your website, raising their hand, and are they making it into qualified pipeline and close one revenue?
If you're able to measure those things, that's the baseline for being able to effectively measure demand creation. And the reason that that's important and different than that MQL model is because it's focused on the people that are coming in and raising their hands explicitly, right? Those are the people that matter the most. And if you are out there creating demand, then the people that you care most about are those that are coming to you and telling you, hey, I'm interested in speaking with your sales team, I'm interested in learning more.
Not so much of, oh, is this person a demographic or a demographic fit? Do we have the contact information? Great, they're an MQL, it's a pass over to sales. That is not an effective approach.
Maybe you're going to hit on one out of every 1000 MQLs that come into your system, but more often than not, it's a pretty wasteful effort. So if you have a strong measurement system, a lot like what you might have heard that or fine lab team talking about recently, this pipe measurement system, you're able to see the volume of people that are coming to your website, how many of those people are converting or raising their hand and saying that they want to talk to your sales team. You're able to understand not just are they raising their hand, but did they meet with the sales person, right? So when you've got a demo as your CTA, that's the example I'll use here.
I want to understand if somebody is requesting a demo, of course, but maybe equally as important, I want to understand if that demo was helped. And so it's not just a matter of how many people are coming to our site and raising their hand. It's also are they good quality? Are they an ICP fit?
Are they confirming, you know, and that they want to meet with your sales team and giving whatever information is necessary in order to conduct that demo? And then does the demo actually take place, right? Because there are a lot of different situations where there's this really large dropoff rate of people that raise their hand and people that actually meet with the sales team or the sales engineer after that hand raise action. From there, you want to be able to look at how many opportunities were created from those hand raisers.
This is effectively going to tell you what your lead quality numbers look like. And not just the people that are being turned into an opportunity, because again, like an MQL, that can be a little bit subjective from company to company, but are those people that are making it through the demo process, converting into a sales qualified opportunity? What the Refined Labs team is now starting to call a hero, high intent revenue opportunity. Really what we're looking for there are people that we know are an ICP fit and that the sales team is interested in talking with and meeting with.
The sales team believes that there is a legitimate opportunity there. They put a dollar amount to it. They put a potential closed date on there. Whatever criteria that goes into the sales team saying, yes, this is a good hand raiser.
This is a legitimate pipeline opportunity. Whatever level that is, oftentimes we see it between 20 to 30 percent, close one rate from that spot in the pipeline. But whatever stage that is in your pipeline, you want to be able to measure how many of those you're generating on a monthly basis. And I'll just do a quick tangent here.
But to measure that effectively, you need time stamping on your sales force opportunities. You need to understand when someone is moving from one stage to the next, because that's effectively going to help you understand how many of your opportunities that you've created are moving into that sales qualified opportunity, that hero stage. More often than not, unless you have a very rapid sales cycle, it's not going to happen in the same month. So if you're looking at the number of opportunities created, instead of the sales qualified opportunities that were created, you're potentially going to have challenges and just understanding the quality of the demos that you're driving.
And you're not really giving those demos enough time to move through the pipeline. So if you've got a nine month sales cycle, is it fair to expect that every demo is going to move into a sales qualified opportunity the same month that demo is held? Probably not. And so that's a little bit of a dangerous assumption to make.
So if you're using timestamping, then you can say, okay, I know that there's xyz threshold for a sales qualified opportunity to be created. And that's what I'm using in order to make that measurement. So again, there's a number of different stack and growth episodes on our measurement systems on the right way to be measuring demand creation and just the overall pipe framework as well. So I won't go too much deeper into that.
But having that measurement system in place is absolutely critical to be able to create demand because that's the way that you're going to tell if you're being effective at it. The next item is being able to capture demand. So what good is creating it if you can't capture it? Now there is certainly a little bit of a chicken or the egg scenario here.
Should you be focused on capturing demand or should you be focused on creating it? We can probably debate in circles around something like that for hours. But the table stakes here, the absolute minimum that you need is to have a functional website with an intake form. When people land on your site and they see enough that they say, okay, this company gets me I want more information.
Are they able to do that? And I'm not just talking about having a phone number in the footer. You need to have some type of call to action. It's going to be a button in the top right corner of your website.
In 99% of companies, that's the approach. And it's the approach for a reason. It's effective. But are you able to capture the people that land on your website so that you can schedule that demo, pass them along to sales, get them into your sales motion?
That is the absolute minimum. The companies that are seeing the most success with demand creation, especially in the early days, are those that have some type of effective search strategy. And I think effective is part of it, but efficient is the other part. So you don't want to be just spending tons and tons of money on search and effectively letting your cash on fire.
You need a search strategy that is focused on high intent inquiries only. And so you're going to be doing your keyword research, of course, and adding those high intent modifiers onto your keywords as the, frankly, the entirety of your search strategy, that's the right way to be utilizing search channels. Now, of course, there's going to be situations where people are looking at capturing more than just the high intent inquiries. That's really where things get a little bit dicey in terms of are you capturing the right people?
Are you maybe spending a little bit too loosely on search? If you were capturing people with moderate or low intent, again, I wouldn't say that this is as much of a debatable topic, at least for those of us working with and for refined labs. But I've seen a lot of different schools with all its approaches there. I am certainly believer in having the high intent focus on your search campaigns, because what that typically means is that if you look at your budget in terms of a pie, it's a very finite amount.
And any dollar that is being spent on search is a dollar that is not being able to be spent on demand creation. And so when you have that kind of mindset and it's all a bit of a balancing act, it's partly the opportunity cost a little bit. If I'm spending too much money on search, then I'm not able to effectively create that future demand. And I might not feel that pinch immediately, but I am cutting down my potential success at the knees just by not investing heavily enough in the right places.
So capturing demand, having some type of capture demand strategy in place before you get ready to start creating future demand, it would be my high level advice there. But that is the fourth point, the capturing demand. And then the fifth point is the belief and trust in the process. And actually, I have my buddy Jojo here who will all bring on screen.
So this is Joelle Honsenby for anyone that's watching the video version here. And Joelleby plays for the Philadelphia 76ers who over the past couple of years, decades really, but over the past couple of years, are probably most famous for the trust the process phrase, which really came from a period of time where the Sixers were playing terrible basketball in an effort to stockpile draftics so that they could build their team up with really high potential blue chip type players. And so there's this entire period in Philadelphia basketball where everyone was just kind of reminding themselves to trust the process because the product that they were putting out in the corner every night was just absolute hot garbage and it was difficult to watch. But if you reminded yourself to have patience and that there was a long term strategy in place here, you were being encouraged to have trust in that long term strategy.
And that is what I'm kind of preaching here right now about demand creation as well. Demand creation takes time. It doesn't happen overnight. And if you're just getting started, your company, your team, whatever the case, it's going to take you a little bit of time.
How much time? It's a great question. And there's not a simple answer to that. I think that companies that have this total green field opportunity and there is recognition about a category, maybe they have a new solution and are really going to be shaking things up, you know, that might be a company that could realize some demand creation impact a little bit quicker than maybe a company that doesn't have any of the boxes checked of the other criteria that I just walked through and needs to do a lot of foundational work and also needs to understand what the message is that they want to put out into the world and figure out the strategy on how they're going to distribute that message, you know, getting all those things in order and then executing them, you know, is certainly going to elongate the timeline in which you can expect to see any fruit from your demand creation efforts.
And so there is, you know, a lot of variables that come into play in terms of how quickly a company could realize any success from demand creation. Loosely put, you know, I think you're looking at like a three to six month effort, sometimes a little bit longer and, you know, especially if you're focused purely on revenue and you've got a longer sales cycle, you know, these things take time, right? But having trust in this process and knowing that, you know, even if you're not seeing all the right leading indicators after, you know, maybe even two or three months, but that if you stick with it, the results will come, that patience is absolutely critical, maybe more important than any of the other items that I already ran through here. What you don't want to see, right, is a company that is ready to make short term sacrifices, where, excuse me, I guess it'd be more of a long term sacrifice for short term gain, right?
So it's happening a lot right now with the looming recession. A lot of companies are trying to go into call savings mode and saying, well, I'm going to cut ties with the demand creation efforts and I'm just going to focus on demand capture and get all the demand that's already out there in the marketplace just to make sure that, you know, my company is maintaining some level of profitability. That's what that is not a very innovative strategy and many companies have already made that pivot as evidenced by the rise in CPMs across really all the search platforms. And at the same time, the drop in CPMs across a lot of social platforms, those two trends suggest that there's a lot of companies out there that are spending more money in the kind of auction related channels like Google search and Bing and you name it, the PPC channels and the paid social channels where you're seeing CPMs drop it's because people are pulling money away from it.
There's less companies that are investing in competing for mind share and keywords, excuse me, and target demographics and all that. And so those trends suggest that there's a lot of companies that are making that pivot right now and all they're doing is hurting themselves in the long run. A little bit of short term gain and maybe a small boost in your dashboard metrics is not worth the trade off of continuing to consistently put your messages out there and create that future demand. You might not feel the pinch immediately but you will in time.
And so that is a great example of not having full trust in the process. One of the other areas that I've seen a bit of a shortcoming is some clients that are focusing too much on pipeline acceleration, right? Saying like we don't have a huge issue with generating pipeline but we need to focus more efforts on closing it. And I get that, trust me, it is a very extremely important part of any sales and marketing processes being able to move your deals efficiently through the pipeline.
But one thing I've noticed is that a lot of companies that are putting a lot of time and energy and finances into pipeline acceleration efforts are not actually seeing much lift on the metrics that they would use, especially when comparing to the benchmarks and the starting point before they were making a lot of these investments. So there's a lot of tools out there that might help you better identify where a deal is in the pipeline so that you can create a segment and share with them the most applicable message and content out there. And what I'm saying is that the companies that I've seen do this have not seen much lift from it. Certainly not enough lift that would justify the amount of resources that were put into it.
Of course there's a time and a place for these tools. I just don't think that making some type of sacrifice to focus on pipeline acceleration in lieu of focusing on demand creation efforts is a smart move and a worthwhile one and one that is going to pay dividends. And again another example of not having trust in that process. So the other area that I think kind of ties into this right is having a strong content production engine.
I consider this part of the demand creation process and having trust in it because content is not something that you're going to be able to show a short term ROI on. Or frankly, probably a long term ROI either. It's just very difficult to prove out return on investment for content related investments. And the reason that's difficult in my opinion is because the right way to produce and host and distribute that content is in an ungated fashion.
And when you don't have gates around your content, there is oftentimes no way for you to create any type of direct attribution for that piece. And you're not able to justify whatever people or finances that you put into creating your content. You're not able to see exactly what that content yielded in terms of pipeline and revenue. And that's okay because your content engine is an absolutely critical part of helping companies and your audience understand who you are and what you bring to the table and that you get them.
And it's not something that you should necessarily be creating just so that you can prove that there's an ROI on it. That is a very self-serving approach and producing content, helpful content, should be something that's done in order to benefit your customers. Because the more that you do that, the more that you can benefit your customers and future customers, the better reflection it is on your company. And the more top of mind your brain is going to be when that trigger event occurs, when they're ready to get into a sales motion or be ready for an upsell or whatever the case.
And your content engine is really the flywheel that makes it all work. And so having that content engine is critical and is a good example of having belief and trust in the process. So, like my man, Joelle Hansen-Bied would say, trust the process because that's a huge piece of making this all work. So to close it all out, five traits that are going to determine if you are ready to create demand and do it efficiently and effectively.
Not saying that all those companies out there that can't check all these boxes aren't ready. They're just not going to see the same results as all the rest. And so the five common traits of companies who are ready to create demand in an efficient and effective way are that they have defined their ICP, they have a strategic narrative or positioning strategy, they have a measurement system, they are able to capture the existing demand in the marketplace and ready to trust the process. So with that, I will say farewell.
Thank you all for tuning in and listening to my insights, my rant of sorts today. Sorry that I couldn't bring a guest on to come talk through some of this stuff with me just had a lot that I wanted to get off my mind. And so I hope that it was helpful for all of you that have listened to all or a portion of this episode. And thanks for tuning in.
So until next time.