Welcome everybody, I'm Cass State, Chief Earth Officer at Refine Labs. Very excited to get into this conversation today with Sydney, Torian, Sam. What we thought we'd cover is just a little bit of a reflection and what to do about the state we're in as a marketing community. So we're entering a recession.
Most of us have probably been asked to reduce our budget. The market for the services and the products we sell is decreasing obviously, so there's fewer buyers out there looking to buy. We're probably getting asked to still hit aggressive targets despite all this. And so what we thought we'd do is given that we hear a lot of this with our customers, we had this experience in the past in prior recessions that we've gone through, you know, think of the pandemic.
We have the situation within Refine Labs. So what I thought I'd do is get a couple experts together and try to provide a structure and a framework for how to think about this, how to tackle it within your own organization. And then also hear from everybody here on, what are you experiencing and seeing if we can help address some of the questions that you're going through at the moment? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask our wonderful co-hosts to introduce themselves.
And I'm going to give them a question. I'm going to put them on the spot. And I would love to hear from them what they're seeing in the market as they talk to prospects and customers. The good, the bad, et cetera, kind of give them their perspective.
And of course, I'm going to start with Sydney. Hey Cassidy, thanks. I'm Sydney Waterfall. I'm the general manager here at Refine Labs and happy to be here and talk with everybody.
The good, the bad, the ugly. So, you know, I would say we've got definitely some good happening. We've got a couple of customers that are expanding budgets, hiring aggressively, taking advantage of top talent that has exited some other companies, right? The bad side is obviously, I've seen almost completely marketing teams downsized 60, 80% budgets cut.
They had to really focus on non-paid activities and things like that. But I would say like holistically, you know, for the median or for the average, probably around like 10 to 20% decreases in budgets and just a lot of things of questioning, tightening up. Should we be doing this? Should we not be doing this?
Which I think is a good exercise to go through every couple of months anyways. But I think everybody's starting to do that all at once right now. So that's kind of what I'm seeing right now. Yeah, I would guess I'm minimal.
The scrutiny is a lot higher. There's probably a point in time when we could just do whatever we wanted in marketing when the market was on fire. But now every little thing I'm confident is getting questioned by leadership. Sam, I'd love to hear a little bit more about what you're seeing as well as well.
Obviously, introduce yourself. Hey, everyone. Sam Keemley, one of the VPs of demand here at Final Labs. So yeah, on top of what Sydney's pointed out, say some of the good is bo-go right now.
Buy one, get one, you're getting CPMs at half the cost that they used to be because people are pulling out. So if you are still spending, your dollars are going a lot farther. The not so good that I'm seeing is that a lot of what's going on is more reactive than proactive though. And so what I mean by that is people are just subtracting budget, things like that, whereas you could also be looking at should we be modifying our offer, our message to more line with what's going on to the market instead.
So I'd say those are probably the two main ones I'm seeing for both sides. I love that. Tori, over to you. Thanks, Cassidy.
Hey, everybody. Tori Kenlick, VP of demand at Refine Labs. Yeah, I think a lot of my observations are similar to what Sydney and Sam just hit on. No matter the type of company, the type of financing that they have, whether the bootstrap, whether they're debt financed, backed by VCs, private equity, a profitable public company, it seems that everyone is just being more conservative right now.
So whether that means that the budgets are being reduced, whether that means that people are keeping a closer watch on burn rate, everyone's focus is on the finances. And I think the good that comes from that is that marketers are being asked to find where they're most profitable, where their investments are going the furthest and find out how to maximize those. That's a good thing. Growth at all cost mindset is a dangerous one to have in marketing.
Sure can be a lot of fun to just kind of be be spending and experimenting all the time. But that's not the scenario that we're in right now. And getting that growth at all cost mindset out of the picture, I consider that good news. I think that that's something that more marketers should be approaching their day to day with is focusing on the profitability of their investments.
Now conversely, the bad that comes from that is that those investments that they're making, the expectation is that they're going to become profitable in a shorter window of time. And that is troubling. I think Sam spoke about some of the macro trends that we're seeing on some of those CPC based channels. Search is getting more expensive because of that short term mindset.
And so social actually is getting a little bit more affordable right now, which is great. But yeah, I think the marketers that are being asked to pivot towards those short term gains and sacrifice the longer term growth strategies, that's bad news. And that's definitely something that we would recommend against. And I'm sure that we're going to talk in depth about some different approaches or how to push back on some of your colleagues or leadership team that's encouraging you to make those tough choices right now.
Yeah, I appreciate that, Torian Sam. I think this idea that search is getting more expensive and social is getting more affordable while true is just mind boggling. And we'll get into why we believe that. So I always found these situations fascinating as a marketing leader when things get tight, because as you all pointed out, it really drives you to be excellent at what you do.
When things are going really well, we're kind of sloppy as marketers. We kind of just throw a bunch of stuff out there and do it. When times get tough, obviously it's tremendously stressful. But it really focuses on really good marketing.
And hopefully we'll talk about that, what that looks like here and more. So what we want to do is start with some kind of framework for the basis of this conversation. I know we're going to dive into that framework. The framework, I was kind of way to think about how do you tackle this problem at your company?
So I'll kind of set up the situation as an example. And I'll turn it over to Sydney, and she's going to walk through kind of how we would think about this. And so imagine you're a marketing leader, a marketing team at a company, you've been asked to reduce your budget. It's called 20, 30, 40% you've been handed that by the CEO.
And so the question that we want to kind of go through in the framework we want to build in the address is like, what do you do? After you get that news. So Sydney, thoughts? Thoughts.
One, two, three, go. There's a couple of different categories that need to be addressed. And I think kind of a five step, five category framework that we can kind of position in here, which we'll probably dig into each pillar in depth. But first and foremost is, you know, if you're CEO, CFO or kind of coming to you with this news, you need to think about the overall business strategy, not necessarily the marketing strategy, but what's going on at the business level, business strategy.
That's got to be number one. So kind of an example of what has changed, what has stayed constant, what should be challenged or what should evolve? And then how is that affecting overall demand currently in the market? And you know, you can serve some of those insights up to your other leaders and business stakeholders.
The second thing is manufacturing demand. So it's a good time to step back and start looking at the categories of demand, create demand versus capture demand. What's the mix? What makes sense?
What needs to change? What, how do you can go about digging into that? Which I'm sure we'll dig into. Who's got a lot of people to call here that are pretty good experts at that.
The third thing is customer insights. This is a huge time to lean into your customers, into your prospects. This is kind of a secret sauce game changer. If you lean into that and take the time, it's free.
It's free to talk to your customers. It's free to do some of this stuff. You just need to prioritize it. And it also often doesn't get prioritized in most organizations.
The fourth one, everyone's favorite topic, budget. That's the first thing, let's just cut budget and see what happens. I think there's some things that you could be a little bit more tactful there and how you go about that and what types of questions you ask. And how you look at your budgets and your performance across whatever channels and spend your overseeing.
And then the last thing would be team. Your team is a huge asset and also a huge resource and a cost. So how do you optimize all of those things to level up to the number one, which would be the overall business strategy? That's what I got for you.
I love that. Thank you, Sydney. Yeah, let me, I'll just start with my thoughts on the first one around kind of business strategy and objectives. When your leadership team comes to you and says, listen, we need to reduce your budget, marketing budget.
This is a time to ask a lot of questions. What are we communicated to the board? How are we revising our revenue targets and profitability? What's the time frame to where you talked about the importance of knowing the time frame of when we need to do what success we need to have by when?
You need to really understand this picture fully because what you don't want to do is just accept a budget reduction without one, understanding the change in the context of the business. And two, accepting that the business results and goals don't change, but your budget does. I mean, that's just an unacceptable mistake. No CEO or board should expect that marketer will just say, well, I can do the same thing with 20, 40, 40% less budget.
This is your chance to really dig in and understand the business and maybe you haven't done that today. And you're just in your world of marketing and driving leads and so forth. But this is your opportunity to really understand the context of what's the commit and the promise that the CEO and the leadership team is making to the board. Okay.
Feel free to ask questions on that. We can get into more detail on how to do that. What I wanted to get into is this idea of manufacturing demand. So let's assume you understand the objectives of the business.
You understand what you need to do as a marketing organization in terms of reducing your spend. The question I have is, I'm going to turn it over to Sam is, how do you go about assessing now what you do in terms of what I would call closing the gap between what the business expects and what you think you can deliver with current campaigns, current budget, current team. So it's called that the demand deficit. Like how do you reduce that?
So that comes back to this idea that City mentioned around manufacturing demand and turn it over to Sam. Any thoughts? I'm like, how do you walk through that? Yeah, it's always a fun one, right?
But I think that this, if you all like our philosophy, I think that now is as good a time as I need to figure out, like this is when you can get leadership to get on board with a true demand generation strategy versus lead gen, predictable revenue. Like Tory said earlier, you can't afford to throw money away inefficient and effective platform strategies that drive volume, but don't really yield any meaningful down funnel results. So how are you going to get them to do something like that? Well, our bread and butter that we're all starting to do is the, like a well-planned and executed demand strategy really is this like do more with less strategy when you think about it.
So for example, we like to do various analyses when new customers come on. And one of them is off from a search analysis. And more often than not, I'll find 50, 75% of search fund is ineffective. You know, when you look past the conversion in the platform or less, like is it driving revenue?
Is it even driving pipeline at the end of the day? And so when you start to narrow in, you can find that there are places where you just haven't been as efficient as you could have been before. So you can get into like, okay, well, what if we just cut that spend all together, we can tell leadership, hey, here's the numbers, here's what the data shows. The spend is driving convergence, but it's not yielding business results.
I'm just going to pull that out and that's going to recoup some less spend. So that's one way that you can potentially think about it. If you want to get into something that's not related to media spend, I'd also say like what do you have in terms of opportunities relative to existing customers? So often this could be things like cross selling, upselling, in a formal organization that I worked out.
We have an employee sales program and basically this leveraged our frontline employees who were talking to customers every day, customer support, professional services. And they're having conversations with each of your customers and they might uncover something that you can help them solve for with a different product, with an upgrade, anything else. And so that's, you don't have to pay in order to do that. I mean, you already have that account there.
And so what you do is you just create an internal process for them to share that information with sales to follow up on. And you can give them the bonus, the percentage of that deal if it does close through. But that's a really easy way to think about how do we make more of the customers that we do have. So that way it's, you don't have to worry about new customer acquisition costs.
We're also going to have higher lifetime values as those existing customers are going to stay longer and spend more with you. I would consider this a pro tip and a non-obvious insight. And that is what you see the best companies do in kind of a down market is lean into their best customers. And so we don't often talk about this on the marketing side, but in this environment, if this is something your company is not really thinking about, bring it to your management team, bring it to your sales team, your customer success team.
This is literally a pro tip. You'll see this in a sales force or any company that's world-class at distribution and sales and success. They're going to go back to the well of the companies that are doing the best or they have the best relationships with and they're going to try to sell more. And that's where they're going to innovate.
They may innovate on service offerings, product offerings, etc. But they're going to do that with their best customers first, not a new market segment. So I love that you brought that up, Sam. You mentioned something else.
Like listen, there's less demand to capture. Like I'm just going to say, there's less demand to capture, which we would argue as a Google search channel. Yet more people are spending money in Google search. Why?
Like if the CPMs are going up and search and there's less demand to capture and you're seeing this big deficit when you go in and audit search accounts where conversion is not happening, what's going on? Is it just lack of expertise and knowledge? Is it people are scared? Then what else do you do?
Like why is that happening? Yeah, it's a little hanging fruit. It's easy to get to. You know, just go into Google.
You see those terms that convert, like I said earlier, but are they really doing anything meaningful for you? So people think that that's where it's like, okay, if we can only focus on what's driving business, they think that a conversion equals business. But that's where it's like, go and do that more down funnel analysis. But when you think about if there is less demand to be captured, like how do you validate that?
Because it's all this punch that we feel. And so I might look at it into two different standpoint, qualitative, so qualitatively, like talk to your sales team. How's prospecting going for them? Are they seeing increased decrease and new deals, active deals, things dropping off?
Just how's it's like looking across the entire company? Because so often you'll get the finger point, marketing is down, what's going on. And if you correlate that with the rest of business, well, the sales also down as BDR, opportunity creation also down. And is this just a larger trend within your market that you should be exploring.
Quantitatively, you can jump into a platform like Google Ads or S&M Rush. Any of these to look at how much traffic is coming to those terms that you want to be showing up for. So say you used to spend $1,000 a month on a few client-tent terms, and you had no impression share of loss due to budget, you were capturing all the available searches. If demand is increasing, you'll see the amount of your budget will need to increase in order to keep up with that search volume.
Whereas if demand is starting to decrease, you'll see that instead of $1,000, $1,000, $1,900, $800, there's just less searches going on. So that's another way we can use data to essentially back our fewer people searching, or is the demand still there. It's just they're pumping a little bit longer on when they're going to be able to afford something like this. So this is money.
I love this qualitatively. I really like this idea. We often sit in our bubble as marketers when we think about the sources that we can control, but go check the other sources. Talk to the sales team.
How's outbound doing versus inbound? Are we seeing the same level of falloff? Chances are we are seeing the same level of falloff? I think that's great.
And then quantitatively, being able to go into one of these tools, guess the M Rush, you're figuring this out very objectively. Because that's really what you need. The qualitative data is great. Your leadership team's going to ask you for quantitative data and being able to play this back and having bumbly these two things together.
We'll really set you up to figure out, okay, what are we doing today that is not working anymore or not working as effectively? And then it's going to come to the next question. Well, if those things aren't working as effectively, what else should I be doing? So I'm going to turn this over to Tori.
So I think we've kind of shown a few examples to say, listen, the capture demand strategy, it's not as much a demand to capture. We're proving that's getting harder to do that. And then the question becomes, we'll talk quite a bit about this. We're always preaching this need to create demand.
And there's no better time than in a down market to go out there and try to create demand. But how do we decide how do we make that decision? Because we obviously have left some money to work with as well, in order to be able to go out and create demand. What are your thoughts on that?
And what you see in the market with our customers, et cetera. Yeah, the situation reminds me of this Warren Buffett quote, the greedy while others are being fearful. It is one of the most opportunistic times for us to be focused on demand creation. And the reason for that is if you just think about kind of like the pure economics of it, that Sam just walked through, you're able to increase your share of voice by spending the exact same amount of money and potentially even increase your share of voice by spending that same amount of money.
And so while your competition is potentially reducing spend, it just, the opportunity just becomes better and better as time goes on, because your dollars stretch a little bit further. You're able to do more with less, which is ultimately what you're being asked of here. So I think investing that money and the demand creation approach in paid social advertising, it's a good time to do it right now. And there's evidence that companies that have invested in advertising throughout down economies, throughout recessions, have seen very strong results on the tail end and coming out of that recession.
It happened in the 1920s. It happened in the early 2000s when we've been going through significant recessions before. I came across a statistic today that I didn't even know. Amazon saw 28% growth in 2008 and 2009.
They launched the Kindle during that last really significant recession that we went through. So there's a lot of success stories out there about companies that have kept their eye on the long-term objectives and continued to see that growth. But I think that there's other ways that you can continue furthering your marketing investments and improving awareness of your brand and your company. And it's not just necessarily about advertising.
So it's a great time to be focused on things like content production and organic social media. Those are things that can be done very cost effectively or entirely free of costs. If you're certainly, there's a time and a place for the high production value content and videos, maybe now is the time to be looking at things like more of the talking head, selfie style videos, getting scrappy with things like that, podcasts, live Q&As. Like we're doing right now.
There's no investment that goes into this. We send a couple emails out to promote it and mention it a few times across our organic social handles. Repurposing your content, finding those pieces of content that maybe haven't had a chance to revisit recently and figuring out ways that you can update it, atomize it, stretch it a little bit further, or even something like a social feed blitz. Get everyone on your team, your sales team, your marketing team, your leaders to all have a timed blitz where everyone is posting something somewhat similar on LinkedIn and try to take over your prospects and tire feed with your brand.
These are all things that can be done with very low investment. And so it's a good time to be thinking creatively like that. But the last thing I'll mention that I really like that I heard from Sam is focus on the customer marketing. Sam gave some great ideas for how you can continue to try to hit those growth targets that you might still be responsible for during this challenging period.
But it's also probably a good time to be just reassessing what your core KPIs are with your leadership team. And perhaps the focus should be a little bit more on customer retention right now and a little bit less on some of those growth targets. Now, I understand a lot of this is not within all of our control as marketers, but like Cassie mentioned, it's a good time to push back a little bit. And if you are able to focus on customer retention and maintain a large majority of your customer base, there's a really good chance that your company, your business is going to survive this down economy.
And so, yeah, focusing on your customers, you know, people that know you, that are aware, that are going to engage with you and your content, help them feel seen and heard and respected, promote the togetherness, maybe offer them a deal or a rebate or something like that too. But whatever the case, let them know that they are valued and focus time and energy on something like that. And it's not going to take a lot of investment to do these things, but they can be really fruitful and they can help your business and your marketing team really stay afloat during a challenging period. Sorry, I want to plug into two things that you said in there that were really interesting.
The first is the free production of the video. So I've been seeing this with other customers we've been running on is the talking head, like you said, Loom style videos. You know, the old saying, like, looks like a dog smells like a dog probably is a dog. Looks like an ad smells like an ad it probably isn't that the just the authentic videos, I phone, I see higher view rates, they're more efficient, more effective.
So I know, sometimes people think, oh, video has this big production. I mean, look at what Todd's done with his iPhone and fly some other stuff, but like he shows that you don't have to over invest in creating something that's meaningful. So that's one thing from the video side. And then the other, you know, joint customer appreciation, there's a company that sends a handwritten note every time I order something from them.
I'm never going to buy from anywhere else that costs them 30 seconds in time to write that. So to your point, there's little things like that that you can add in that go such a long way in retaining customers reading happiness and just adding that personal touch that sometimes it's just the basic little things that show them there's a person on the other side, not just this commonist corporate logo. I love that. That is way more thoughtful and intelligent than anything I would have said.
So appreciate your job. I mean, anything you want to add? I mean, I think they said it. They said it well.
One thing I did throw in the chat was just attribution also kind of handcuffs people to be forced into more create capture demand channels and focus less on create demand. However, I do think this is a great opportunity for marketing leaders to educate people and say, Hey, this is why we need to do things differently. And maybe convince executive leadership that not everything needs to be in the CRM in a capture demand. We also need to look at what is creating demand attribution as well, which we talk about as hybrid attribution.
So I appreciate you. And on that, last time I went through a kind of recession and became a pandemic, I was running marketing at a company. I was in every fine labs. And there is no better time to drive change when things run a downturn.
The ideas you heard here are all ideas that I think marketers would love to do and be more creative about, but things like attribution, things like it's not broke, don't fix it. Kind of mentality when markets are up. Sometimes it's sinus from doing that. But when things start going to hell, it's a great time to prove that the status quo doesn't work and be brutally honest about that.
Because that's going to open the door for you to try new things, be innovative, focus on creating demand, stand up the podcast, do a webinar, create the videos that sanitary outline, build an organic strategy. But things are tough when things are going well, but things aren't going well. All of a sudden people are going to listen to these types of ideas and give you the opportunity to maybe try those things out. So I've seen at work, we've seen at work with our customers for you to drive change as a marketer.
You need something to instigate that change, something to be changing in the market, usually for the worst, not for the better. And this is the time to kind of seize the day. All right. So I want to pivot this conversation a little bit.
And that is, you know, when you're going through a market where there's less than being on the capture, I want to kind of talk about how do you think about identifying audiences as so go after? And I want to also talk a little bit about like, does messaging change at all? And we saw that there was a question in the chat about that. So let me kind of go to Sam, like, how do you think about figuring out what audiences are still right to kind of target versus like not target?
So I'm like, how do we go about kind of assessing that when overall spends now the maybe some industry to get harder than others? Yeah, historical analysis. I know no one loves the media work, maybe Sydney does, but that's where you're going to get a lot of insight into what you should be doing. So pull your historicals for different channels, Legion show that they do slash probably don't work search, you know, hop into that analysis like we spoke about earlier, you can look at pipeline velocity by sourcing a toy talks about that all the time, work backwards, understand how people come in through those channels so you can get more in there, usually it's through creation of demand.
If you serve multiple industries, different persona types, you should be capturing a lot of this in your CRM. So you can start to slice and dice your revenue by some of those. You'll often find that say you serve 10 different industries, probably two to three make up a good 75% of those revenues. So if you do need to pull back on budget, maybe focus a little bit more on retaining the existing amount there, pull back from some of the others.
But a lot of it's just going to come down to give yourself a get into the data, don't expect an answer in the first hour, but as you start to parse through things and sort of pivot tables, charts, all that fun stuff to pull in the visuals, you'll start to see some different trends and threads that you'll want to pull on. And that should give you a sense of which directions you should go with some of your updated strategy. Yeah, I like that. And when you think about this in terms of like the quantitative side, which you kind of outline and kind of think about in terms of the context of like customer insights, what are things that, like I would assume in a downturn is a great opportunity to figure out how to be creative and going back out and talking to customers and getting insights.
So I'm curious, how do you go about doing that? Because a lot of times marketers aren't great at getting customer insights. As much as we talk about the need to do that, we kind of defer that to success, the product, the sales that have those insights, we're kind of getting a second hand. So in a situation where there's a lot of market uncertainty, the out, you know, I would argue it's never more important to figure out how to get your own insights from customers, thoughts on how to go about doing that.
And maybe Sammy's going to address this first and I'll come to say new to me after. Yeah, I know I'm always going to toy for questions on better things. So I'm definitely curious to get his thoughts on that one. Yeah, a lot of us just leave with the relationships.
I'd be like, look, I'm not trying to sell you anything. I just want to know like we're all going through the secession or things and we're all having to change our strategy. So what's important to you? How have your goals changed?
What are you feeling pains in more? And then start thinking about how does our product reflect that? Or are we still too, are we too expensive now? Do we need to adjust our offer?
But really just lead with curiosity before trying to come with solutions and go have 10, 20, 30 different calls to uncover what a big buckets. And then I bet towards probably got some other good questions I can see him grinning over there that he wants to answer some of these. Or are you saying I'm sweating on the spot, man? Yeah, I don't, but I'll go with this one anyway.
So I think, let's see, when when you're talking to your customers right now, right, because that's like Sam pointed out before it is the best time to be talking to your clients. I think ultimately it's about trying to gain an understanding of how your clients perceive your solution as they kind of redefine value, right? Because that's what's happening right now is that a lot of individuals and companies as well are being asked to redefine value. What is value to you right now?
You know, these purchasing habits are changing. And so with that, people's perception of what they need, what they want is changing as well. So I think is there enough that you can get from these conversations that you can begin to get an understanding of how your clients are perceiving your offering? Is it essential to their business?
Or is it a little bit more of a treat, you know, icing on the cake? Is this an expense that maybe your prospects might see as something that they can postpone or just see you as totally expendable? Getting an understanding of where your clients and certainly your prospects perceive your solution to be in terms of that kind of, you know, essential versus expendable scale, it can help you dictate which tactics you should be focusing on and investing in. And perhaps if you know, you are being viewed as a solution and offering that is totally expendable or something that they just don't need right now, it's probably a good time for you to be, you know, investing in a little bit more of awareness advertising and maybe being a little bit more modest about the growth that you can expect to achieve during this period.
But you're not going to know that until you actually speak with your clients and validate those things. So I think that's really the underlying output that you should be after in all these conversations is just getting a better understanding of, you know, the value that they see or expect from your solution and where it kind of falls on that spectrum, because that will be pretty telling as far as how aggressive you should or maybe shouldn't be in this period. Yeah, I really like this other this insight you have in here that not every customer is created equal. So demographically, they may look the same.
But then when you go talk to me, you find one can't live without your products and the other, it's a nice to have. And so like, I think the art to your point, Tori, is how do you dig in and figure out why one customer must have your product, no matter what, it's one of the top one or two initiatives and why, you know, the next customer, it's a nice to have it's priority seven or eight, because that's going to make the difference in terms of how you think about going back out the market and how you think about your segmentation Yeah, I think that the targeting and segmentation is key there, Cassidy, right? Like, you know, there might be if you're a global solution, there might be different parts of the world that perceive your solution differently. And so understanding that behavior, that perception as it differs by geographic market or by whatever other way you slice and dice your audience segments, that can be pretty telling as well.
And maybe it's just about reaching down right now and finding out where you're going to get the most bang for your buck and focus on the people that care most about you and your solution and take a little bit more of a passive approach with the rest of your total addressable market. I love that. I want to kind of take the insights that we're getting and kind of the audience is redefined and those who really lean in to what we do and maybe those who aren't. And I want to come back to you know, debate we've been having on just how or does your messaging change in kind of this market?
And I would love to get each one of your perspectives on this. And I'm going to start with Sydney. Does your messaging change in this in kind of this environment? And how do you determine if it does or doesn't?
So I think the first step, we're going to like beat this over the first step is talking to your customers, just like you said. So I'll give you like a practical example here of how to know when and where or if your messaging or even product offering needs to change. So over the last eight weeks, myself, a lot of the VPs, a lot of the leaderships have been having very direct conversations with all of our customers proactively. Right.
So number one, proactive communication around customer insights is always better than reactive after they tell you, hey, I need to do X, Y, or Z. And kind of asking them, what has changed in your day to day? What's your life like now? Where do you see the biggest value that we can support you or how the product can support you right where it serves as business?
So the people support, but maybe it's how this product can support your team or things like that. And it will become very clear what they value as like the number one thing that you provide to them and what types of customers value that one thing over another component. And then you can start understanding and getting trends of, okay, this group over here really values this. Now I can push this into messaging and audiences, right?
So let's just say they really value feature benefit X because of this use case. And I hear this use case come up all the time. That's now what I'm going to push into my messaging. And maybe even we might look at changing our offering or being more flexible around see increases depending on your product structure, right, to get more people into that.
Conversely, on the other side, if this is less valuable, maybe we need to stop talking about this with this group of customers, or we need to completely reevaluate that. And that's what we've honestly been doing internally here at Refine Labs. And it's opened a lot of this open my eyes, I'm learning stuff every day for my customers. And it's like, how can we better serve you in the future?
And if you take that approach, like, that's the game changer of how you win by changing your messaging, tailoring it to customer insights and taking those customer insights and pushing that out to market. Yeah, what's interesting about the example, which was a great one that you gave is we probably should always be doing this as a business. But when things are going really well, you kind of just gloss over why are people buying your product? You're not really spending time figuring that out.
And when things get tight, obviously to your point, what you really need to do is kind of lean in and really understand the detail of the customers who love you and the customers who really like you. That's the direct question. You got to ask those direct questions. No open-ended questions.
Direct is better for those conversations out there. Say, I'm anything you would have liked to add? Yeah, Sydney was throwing a bunch of thoughts in my head. One that's interesting, as you think about from the prospecting side of it, would be leading with help versus trying to sell.
So I'll just read the room. No one wants to spend right now. No one wants to buy. But if you're able to lead with empathy, I do, I get what you all are going through, understand that you're feeling this.
Here's something that might help that lead with, like the action, how you can do this without a tool, but just give them the framework, give them the insight. And that's going to play out well for you in the long run, whether it is actually shorter and that they do come up with budget or they fee value immediately or once you make it through, but they will feel value there knowing that the relationship is being invested in. And so when they are ready to buy or they understand what you can provide them with, I think that that's going to put you ahead and shoulders above any other competition or anyone else's is really just being able to take a step back and just not try to push your product down the throat a lot more, trying to be like, well, we have to do our revenue figures, but they're going to feel that. No one likes to be sold to at the end of the day.
So just taking a step back, treat them as a person, understand what they're going through. And I think that going the long way around it will actually get you there quicker than you might think about. I like that a lot, Sam, and Tori, I'm coming at you and I want you to kind of take something to Sam said, I mean, I asked you a different way. And that is, it feels like in this environment, you should be leaning in the productivity as a message.
But I would love to hear a big counter to that. Like, I always think, listen, people are trying to do more or less. How's our story as a company, generically leaning in the kind of this notion of productivity and doing more or less to make it feel like it needs to be one of the top two or three initiatives that remain. But what's your reaction to that?
My sense is you may call bullshit on that. Yeah. Yeah. And not so many words.
That is kind of how I'm feeling about this. So I think when you zoom out a little bit, right, thinking about what's going on during a recession, it's all about reducing risk, right? That's why we're being asked to conserve cost and cut budget, because we expect that sales are going to get revenue is going to get and to get ahead of that, our costs should be lower as well, so that we can maintain some level of profitability or at least kind of continue on with the level that the business was operating at previously. And so I think when companies right now are trying to figure out, like, how can we be a part of this discussion?
How can we be positioned as someone that is also helping reduce risk? I think that that's really kind of fighting the wrong battle. Talking about being a low-cost option is not a smart approach. Talking about productivity and efficiency, sure, there's certainly some merit and some value to that.
But more than anything, I think it's an important time to say true to your core strategies, your core philosophies. And if productivity and efficiency and cost savings are not part of the messages that you've been pushing out there before, they probably shouldn't be right now. Getting back to the main challenge here of low-risk, you know what lowers risk is a strong brand that people know and trust. And so if you stick to your core strategy, you continue to stay relevant, right, because out of sight out of mind, I think that's the, to me, the better approach is to just try to weather the storm and stick with what you know has been working and don't just try to chase this shiny new object.
If everyone's going into cost conservation mode, I want to be a part of that too. That's a great way to just kind of get lost in the sea of sameness. And so yeah, my advice would be stick to what has been working for your team. And if it is a cost reduction message, then go with that.
If it's a tool-consolidation message, perfect. But if it's not, then don't try to overcorrect here and just run the risk of being looked at as predatory or transparent with your efforts. That's not going to get you very far and you'll probably have some type of negative impact on how your brand is perceived, which is certainly not the intention of everything that we're talking about and any investments that you may or may not be looking to make during this challenging time. I love that.
That's why Tory, you work with customers, I don't. That's great. All right, folks, I want to add to this, but I want people to start asking some questions. If you have any that you want this group to address, I would say that if you have a strong point of view or narrative, then it stands a test of time and you just keep going.
If you have to change your messaging, maybe they'll say it if way. A hypothesis would be if you have to change your messaging, then maybe your messaging has never been strong enough. Yeah, I mean, I think I goes back to step one when you were still in a seed, like product market fit, your message could be getting pretty well dialed in to a half point. If you have to change your message to like drastically in order to keep up, I don't think that it held true to necessarily your full value prop at the time, re just pandering to a certain thing that everyone is feeling.
But I think the to your point that it should, you might have to make a couple small tweaks to it, but your overall message shouldn't have to change in order to respond to, you know, change in the economic conditions. Yeah, I would say, and I actually asked you this question before I read Maruna's question. So let's let me read this and see if it's way better than what I said. So in these tough times, are you guys seeing B2B SAS going more in the direction of feature selling or in the opposite direction of storytelling and messaging?
Like what else trying to get at Maruna, but I'd love to hear from city sanitories. I think it's no better time to go storytelling point of view narrative, which is tend to be tied kind of more to your kind of brand and brand promise than it would be feature specific. I would always try to lean that way in general. But in this time, I would say lean that direction.
Now I would love to hear what the people who are the experts are who deal with their clients every day, because chances are it could be something different. Who wants to go? Tori looks like he wants to say something. Yeah, yeah, just keep pulling all these out.
A lot of ideas about all these things that I want to do or say. I don't know that I've seen any significant trends as of late that would suggest that people are pivoting in one of these directions versus the other. Of course, I think we would all agree that focusing on that storytelling and strategic narrative is the right approach. That's just better marketing than feature dumping.
I would say if there's any exception to that, maybe if you do have specific features of your product of your platform that are going to be more relevant right now, that can be something that maybe you look to bubble up a little bit or focus on a little bit more. But more than anything, just ensure that you're mapping those features to the perceived value of your customers and your audience. Because when you're just out there talking about features and functions, it's me, me, me, and not focused on what's in for you, the people that we're ultimately trying to get this message to resonate with. So to answer your question, Bruno, I don't know that I've seen people at least not yet kind of moving more in the direction of feature selling.
My recommendation would be don't make that pivot. But yeah, I think if there is any exception in there, maybe it's if you've got a feature that is timely and relevant right now, that's something that you could figure out a way to put a little bit of a spotlight on. I continue on my quest to get Tori to agree with me, but he still hasn't done it, but I was going to answer. Carlos weighs in with this kind of a comment that storytelling tends to lead to longer sales cycles.
I would love Sydney to jump in on this. My experience directly is it actually is a reverse that strong storytelling in a very unique point of view actually increases the ability to create demand for your business. And when you create demand for your business, you often see shorter sales cycles. That's my experience of like a couple of companies.
That's not my experience of working on 20 or 30 companies at a time. Sydney, what's your thought on this kind of comment for Carlos? I think it comes down to the intent of how you're getting that message out. It could still be based on a feature.
There's difference in talking about a feature. Hey, this feature does this by now, sign up now, convert now. Probably not going to work. Or you take a feature and you say, okay, what is the actual value, not the feature benefit statement, but what is the use case and problem and pain point that solves?
And then how do we tell that in a unique way? That's similar to how we run our creative process here. We look at product marketing messages of our customers, key things that they do well, key differentiators, but we try to tell it in a storytelling way. You're getting the same point across, but you're getting it in a more consumable, trustworthy way, rather than here's the feature, here's what it does, here's what it costs by now.
So that's my initial reaction to Carlos's comment. And when you do it that way, we actually do see sales cycles decrease and go down and pipeline velocity go up over a period of time. So definitely hear you Carlos on the urgency now. You may get some like, I don't know, especially if you have a PLG motion or a motion where you can kind of get subscription revenue at a lower price.
You may be getting some quick dollars, but I bet they're probably going to turn or not last have a good lifetime value. So I think you can do feature selling in a creative way that feels not like feature selling. Good push there, Carlos. Appreciate it.
So let me kind of recap where we are sitting. I'll let you look at kind of Zoe's question and jump into that. So we have a few minutes left, let me just give a recap of the framework. So number one, you got to understand business strategy objectives, how they change and the impact on marketing, ask a lot of questions, be very persistent.
Two, strategy for manufacturing demand. We talked about this can be harder to capture, you got to figure out a great customer insights. I think we spent a lot of time on this. Never more important to be able to figure out how you get direct customer insights to inform your marketing strategy.
Two minutes left, I want to talk about budget and team if there's any kind of tips and tricks that we've seen. But before we get to that, Sydney, any thoughts on kind of Zoe's comment on marketing and PLG motion or maybe we come back to that on the next. Yeah, I'll definitely respond in the chat, but I think the shortness is synced is you still have to, whether they're coming into your sales process or they're coming into your product, you still have to lead with value and getting them to an aha moment and reducing friction. So that's a really high level answer.
Yeah, I'm able to get up as a topic for next year of life. So when you kind of hit the panel, you're kind of takeaways and I'll ask a couple minutes on any recommendations on how to think about budget and team because one of the things that you're assessing, obviously when you're overall spends down is like, how do you make budget trade off, how do you make team decisions, et cetera. So let me start with, Tori. Yeah, I think a difficult to answer this one with broad strokes in terms of how all companies should be looking at reassessing their budget.
I think in terms of like, maybe the question about, should you be trimming budget holistically across the board or looking at individual programs and investments, I would much more prefer to be looking at the programs and investments, but more than anything, you know, Sam kind of went into this a little while back. It's about looking at your historicals and understanding what's been working well and what maybe hasn't or feels a little bit more aspirational or experimental and focus on the areas that you know you can win, that you know you're going to be able to drive pipeline, you know, get some potential returns on your dollars because that's what's going to really kind of help you navigate through the troubling times that we're in and that we're going to continue to be working through over the months ahead. Thanks, Tori. How about Sam?
Do you want to add to that? So he kind of just a budget sound say like what can you do for your team or anything to get a little bit, you know, if it's not really to spend what can you do. So now is the best time to just get creative, let people run with their crazy ideas, try something new, try something different. So what this will do is instead of now being worried about my job, the security of it, like should I be concerned about it?
My role might be limited if I'm being tasked to try something really creative and it's coming down from leadership, they're going to feel empowered, they're going to put twice the effort into it to really make something work. So it changes the dynamic of one they're not concerned about their jobs, safety anymore and two, they're going to be like, okay, cool leadership's asking with this, like, this is something fun, it's something different, I get to present it to them and they might run with it, that's incredible. So giving that type of empowerment to go and be creative, I think is the cheap freedom that you can do and it's going to have win-win across multiple different areas. I'll double tap on the team aspect here.
I think this is a really good opportunity to understand what your team is actually spending their time on and helping reduce things that they shouldn't be doing or are no longer needed and no longer in the business. So, you know, focus on like two to three core priorities in your team and then per position and then echo what Sam said, like give them the best ideas normally come from your team, not you. So give them freedom to kind of really help collaborate, help flux their creativity because you'll be surprised what comes out of it. I love that.
So, I take my focus focus focus focus. I focus the budget, I focus the team on just a few things. On the budget side, listen, this is a great opportunity to get rid of all the CEOs pet projects. All the shit that you feel like you're doing and spending as a marketer could be tools, could be campaigns, could be spending on gartner, whatever it is, if you don't believe it works, you can't prove it works and get rid of it.
This is a great time, they cut all the crap in your budget and focus your team by just doing a couple things that you and your team believe in where you can be creative and ignore all the rest. That's my biased feedback. So, take it with caution. All right.
Thanks everybody. Thanks to our hosts Sydney, Sam, Tory, loved it. I'm still my quest for you to agree with me. Maybe next time.
Thank you all for joining. We'll be back in a couple of weeks for another second growth line. We're out. Have a good day.