Hey everyone, welcome back to the Stacking Growth Podcast. Today's episode features a recording from the Demand Gen Chat Podcast. One of our general managers, Sydney Waterfall, was a guest on this podcast several weeks ago and the recording was awesome, so we figured we would share it with you all. Hope you enjoy.
Welcome back to Demand Gen Chat. I'm your host Tara Robertson. I'm really excited to have everyone listening today and very excited to introduce our special guest for today. So I'm joined today by Sydney Waterfall.
Sydney is a VP of Demand Generation at Refined Labs, a demand accelerator for B2B SaaS companies. Sydney, thank you so much for joining us today. Yeah, of course, happy to be here. Big fan of the podcast.
Listen to it, so I'm happy to be on it now. Great, and we're here, a chance of everything content-wise that Refined Labs puts out. So I'm really excited to have you. And why don't you tell us a little bit about your role at Refined Labs and what customers come to you for help with?
Yeah, so Refined Labs, we help customers kind of get off the MQL hamster wheel and really deploy a Demand Gen strategy across their go-to-market engine. So we work primarily with B2B SaaS customers anywhere from Series B on up and really help them transform going from MQLs to qualified pipeline, which we call Hero Pipeline, as their main KPI and ultimately driving quarter-quarter increase in Hero Pipeline and ultimately revenue. And so we do that by following a lot of the tactics that you see Refined Labs doing, but also deploying paid media and consulting on a wide variety of high-intensity topics for our clients. So that's a little bit of Refined Labs.
And me specifically, as a VP here, I managed some of our account teams, so that would be our directors and performance marketers that manage clients. I help them with strategy and I'm really focused on client strategy and miniature. We're customizing our Refined Labs Playbooks to the customers' business and looking at how we can drive long-term growth for our clients. Great.
And I'm really interested in the pipeline specifically because we are huge believers in the not tracking data metrics, not focusing on MQLs. Kind of that whole story, we're bought in on that actually, but I'm curious if there's any other top of the metrics that you do recommend the customers look at? Yeah, I definitely look at MQLs. We define an MQL as a high-intent conversion, so that's going to be a demo request or your main conversion point.
Someone coming to your website and asking to talk to someone from the company about your product. So normally it's a demo, it could be a pricing, contact us, whatever you label it. That's the metric that we look at is how many of those are we getting per month by all channels? And then how are those converting throughout the pipeline?
So how many meetings are being booked? And then from that, how many, what we call a hero opportunity, which is a high-intent revenue opportunity, really what that means as you know, every company. It depends on opportunity and when they create an opportunity and stages differently. So we like to kind of streamline that as an opportunity that converts to revenue at 25% or greater win rate.
So one in four of those deals are going to close, so we have confidence in those closing. So that's what we call as a hero, a lot of people will call us duo, have a bunch of different names for it. But we like to standardize that. And then a lot of the other metrics that we're looking at are going to be, I would say, key indicators or things we monitor, but they're not main KPIs for our clients and for that, we measure ourselves internally on success of how we do with this client.
So we look at obviously our demo conversion rates, we're just monitoring and understanding site traffic. We don't really look at clicks from paid media or we have a very different viewpoints on how to deploy paid media. We're going for consumption and engagement in the feed, which usually leads to less clicks directly off the platform, but more engagement and education. So, and then obviously in other more captured demand channels, which would be your review sites or your paid search, we're monitoring conversions in there because we're only optimizing and monitoring high-intent conversions.
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And do you help your customers figure out what that hero opportunity looks like for them? Because one for close rates sounds great, too. But I'm sure it's a little tough to get there.
Yeah, it's a different for every client. It's actually part of the work that we've been doing in the last couple of months with our clients is, for one client, opportunity created is meeting booked. For another client, opportunity create is after the second demo and they've got pricing out. So those two things are going to convert and have very different, everybody has their own sales cycle and partnership with sales of what is the when do AEs create opportunities and all that.
All their opportunity data, we look at the stage history, we're looking at what stage for them, does it hit that threshold? And then we say, boom, okay, for you, so like chili, Piper, your stage X is going to be, maybe it's your stage three or your stage two. I was assuming a six stage, six stages in your opportunity stage model, you assume six or five to six, it's normally stage three that we find that converts consistently to 25% to revenue. And that's specifically like demo requests as well.
So we're looking at that high intent type one and not necessarily like trade show leads or something like that, we're looking at a very specific section of that. Yeah, just the hand raisers. Yeah, just the hand raisers. Yeah.
And like what are those conversion rates? Great. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. So kind of opposite spectrum of hand raisers is just along the topic of dark social or dark funnel, you know, calling it kind of both these days, but I'm really curious, right from your perspective, how you tie kind of that data driven approach of knowing one of these types of ops can close to working with customers and getting them to do more on the dark social side of things, because those are obviously very different approaches, but you kind of need both to win in marketing today.
So just curious how you approach that with a new customer. Yeah, I think the concept of dark social is it's how buyers consume information on the internet and it cannot be tracked by, as you know, you guys do a lot of great dark social, this podcast, right? And I've seen your videos, clipped and I've even seen them in ads. I've seen them just on organic.
I know that you guys are also very involved in communities, different Slack communities, things like that, all of that's dark social sharing information peer to peer that cannot be trapped. So a lot of the channels I just mentioned, but even word of mouth, even ad hop meetups, a lot of people just go meet up, that's going to be kind of a word of mouth channel. So now what really drives the high intent hand raisers, like learning about you, understanding your product and coming back to your website and knowing your brand, knowing the brand even come to first is going to be how do you educate people in those channels that they're in. And a lot of people don't because they can't track it.
They're like, well, we want the click or we want, we need to be on this channel and do this activity because I need to show success. So if you move your metrics of success and you're only looking at pipeline, you're allowed, you're not handcuffed, you're allowed to, because you're not handcuffed to how many clicks you're driving to the website or how many form fields you're getting from that campaign, you're then free to actually market and push out content where people are consuming it and then we're at shareable. Think about Slack, like how many times have I like sent, hey, this ads really cool or this product's awesome or that's just how people share their these days. So when we move the metric for success and we kind of reframe the funnel for people, especially their clients, they're more engaged to run programs like that.
And so we help consult on like, hey, you should be doing this and let's stand some of this up. And even though we're not actually executing on like their organic strategy or their, you know, event strategy or something, there's a lot of content you can do that drives that. It's funny that you brought up Word of mouth because I brought dark social app to a few marketer friends just kind of locally just here and there and a couple of them have said, well, isn't that just Word of mouth? Like what's the big deal about dark social and like from my perspective, at least I think the difference is in beta marketing, we pretended that we could track everything or we tried to track everything and dark social is kind of us saying, you know what, we actually can't do that.
So here's what we're going to call it and label it something new. But I'm curious if you ever run into that feedback from people that, hey, this isn't really anything new. It's just word of mouth. No, and I think the difference is the distribution and like, for example, I think dark social fuels word of mouth.
Like there's other things that are word of mouth. Like I listed, for example, like meeting up with a coworker or peer and talking about a solution that's like pure word of mouth. That's not necessarily dark social. Dark social is having LinkedIn DM conversations.
Like how did I get on this podcast? Like, hey, do you want to come on this podcast? I'm like, yeah, sure. You know, that's dark social.
What's happening in social. So I would say, you know, even personal posts that I post on social that people just view, they don't like or engage with, but they're consuming that information. That's dark social. I'm educating somebody about something who knows what I'm talking about.
Depends on the day, probably obviously something related to marketing most times. But so I would say that's the difference between dark social and just word of mouth. Word of mouth, there's other channels as well. And other avenues, text message could be word of text maybe.
You can't even talk about that. Yeah, I'm getting cool text. Yeah, so I think if you're distributing video content, people are reading or listening to it. They're not clicking on it.
They're just scrolling. That's dark social. You can't measure that. You can't measure that person came back to your website and converted.
Right. Yeah, we have, we've tried to track some of this on Slack. We'll just share screenshots, but the most probably marketing to marketers example, I could think of it. We have a great marketing channel on Slack.
Pretty much every team I've been on has had that where we just kind of have a place to dump like, oh, I saw this great ad. I saw this great interaction online just so that other channels are a little bit less crazy. But I got a screenshot from a friend of his great marketing channel and one of our blog posts was in it. So I shared that on our marketing channel and it's just like there's no way we could possibly track that if that opportunity ever closed.
But you're right, it's not where to mouth. It's something slightly different. And I think it's really cool that people are kind of putting a name on it and figuring out what we can do to drive more of that. Yeah.
And I think, you know, if you think about the funnel, right, obviously refinance, we talk about creating demand, capturing demand, like dark funnels, even above create demand. It's like, how do you create demand? You need to be in dark social to get people into their event to drive them into intent and drive them into more capture channels. So that's kind of how I personally look at it.
But yeah, we have a we have ad labs channel where we share really cool, creative, cool ads, cool different things are whole creative team shares, like all the creatively produced for our clients just so everybody can see the great work that they do. So yeah, that's one of my favorite channels. That's funny. Yeah, I love to poke around on this channel.
Sometimes I have to mute them so I can go check in later. But it's great to stay up to date. Since you mentioned creative, I'm curious because we've been undergoing a bunch of CRO work on our website and I'm curious if you've ever seen any customers or if you've done any work on integrating any kind of dark social campaigns that you're running or just something specific that you're trying on offline channels. If there is any way to optimize that for conversion or if it's just something that you have to say, you know what, this is just a totally different goal and we're not going to try to optimize that for conversion.
Yeah, as your point about dark social, you can't optimize for conversion because you're in the wrong intent mode. You're then just doing it to get something out of it and to make dark social and even just like content and pushing your brand out there or creating demand. You have to come at it from an angle where you're not expecting a direct conversion or you're not even expecting something immediate. You just want people to consume it and possibly get some qualitative feedback on it.
But when it comes to websites specific, we have implemented a lot across a lot of our customers, how did you hear about a form field and that has really been able for us to understand the impact of the channels that they're on that are dark and if those channels are resonating with people. And you guys call that self-reported attribution, but I'm curious because we've started experimenting with that a little bit on our thank you pages. So I was personally very worried about our form conversions. I didn't want to put it on our demo form.
So we have it after the fact if someone successfully gets through the flow, but we're getting very minimal details from people. So I wonder if it is because they've already gone through this whole flow that they're giving us information. But I'm curious what type of information do you get on a form like that or that your customers get? So I'm not surprised that you're getting minimal information on the thank you page.
We've had probably four to five customers implement that the same way against our recommendation, which is fine. And then they later switched and just put it on the floor. So what we recommend is if you can just replace a field on your form. So typically we don't tell our clients to go out there and just start changing your main conversion point and see what's happening.
It's bad advice. We definitely like, okay, let's roll this out an A-B test for like two or three weeks. Just to ensure we're not, something is tanking the conversion rate. All of my clients that have rolled it out, we roll it in a two to three week A-B test.
You're not going to get stat-sig, but you're not really looking for statistical significance. You're looking to make sure it doesn't really drop the conversion rate a noticeable amount that you might be uncomfortable with. So phase one is always make it required, free text. And if you can replace like job title, do you really need that right up front?
You probably get that enriched that. Use a data enrichment tool, a cognizant or something to enrich that. Or you can get that information when you get the meeting booked, you know, hopefully it's really paper. But yeah, so we've tested that out and we don't see any difference in conversion rates across a couple of different clients.
We're actually hoping to publish some of that data soon because it's the number one objection we get. Yeah, I'd love to hear more about that because I'm personally getting pushback on that we have an open field for it. But for me, if we give people a dropdown, they'll pick either the first option or whatever comes to mind first. So yeah, I really push back inside.
We need it to be open, but I'd love to see some of that data. I'm sure people listening would love to see that too. Yeah, so we, one of the first clients that ever implemented this, it was a picklist. And we mapped that all the way to the opportunity in close one.
And at least they were doing it as better than nothing. Right, definitely see some really cool trends. They had a podcast, right? They had all these things that they were doing and over like 28% of their close one and over 35% of their qualified opportunities sent other.
It's like, it's still not helpful, right? And so they actually tested it like, okay, well, what if we, you know, they're both required fields, one free text versus one picklist didn't see a difference in the conversion rate. I'm sorry, I'm not going to tell you exactly what their conversion rates were, but I was there data, but didn't see a noticeable difference in their conversion rates over the time we maybe tested it. And now they're getting much more enriched and insightful.
And these are not marketers. Like these, you know, I feel like marketers might be a little bit more, you know, give you more information because they're marketers too. But these are the ones of the spectrum. We get to go to one word and then like an essay.
I'm so glad. They're like, let me tell you my multi touch 17 step journey in this field right here. Great. How do we get everyone to do that, please?
Yeah, you're like, how do I do this? So, I mean, for one of our clients, we launched a new channel and they told us exactly where on that channel they saw that it was wild. I was like, how do you remember that? Some things where we get in and stuff that's not even related to even some of the work that we do with the client, but it's so helpful.
So, hey, I heard it from this webinar. It wasn't even a sponsored webinar or anything. It was just something that their brand happened to get mentioned on and now it's like, hey, let's go maybe explore like some partnerships with that brand because if your audience is already there, like that's a win. Podcasts come through referrals like, hey, I heard you from this customer or I heard you from this community.
You get like a lot more specific data rather than social media. You're still going to get someone that says social media or web search, right? And so typically we do, we roll that out, we gather data for about a month and then we do a month like an analysis for our customers. We take all that data free text form and we kind of look at it and we start creating buckets for them based on what they are getting in their business, not necessarily like the exact buckets we recommend based on our business.
So like they don't have a podcast, they're probably not getting podcasts submissions. They don't need a bucket for that right. It's example. And then we say, okay, here's how we're going to, here's the larger seven buckets.
We're going to classify all these responses into and then we create a field, you know, any marketing automation system can do it. We've helped customers with it. You create kind of like a category field or bucketed field. And now every time that's automated and it gets into a bucketed field.
So now you have, you can put that in your CRM, you have reports, right? It's a little bit more manageable to read like social media, events, community, whatever. But you still have that core qualitative data that's the most insightful that can lead to a lot more better business decisions. And I mean, I was talking to a CMO yesterday and they said, I know that I can't show direct attribution to that, but I'm okay with that because when I go to my CEO and my C suite, like I'm telling him I'm hearing this from customers and I'm telling them I know this is working because I'm hearing it directly from them.
And it just is like a little action point in the whole journey. But if, you know, that's how you really need to justify that this is working and you know, and they have an attribution software that costs, I don't even know how long that we still look at it, but she knows that's always match up. Yeah, that's actually a good segue into my next topic. But I think that's a really great approach to getting buy in on dark social because that's one thing I've heard from a lot of people is I'm on board manager level.
Everyone gets it. So I'm going to go up to our VP or CMO. It's just a hard sell because they've really bought into our fancy automation tool or they really want us to buy a fancy automation tool. So bringing the self reported data in there and showing them like, there's some gaps here and maybe we can try to marry those.
But I'm curious from your perspective, I know you had a similar post on LinkedIn about not over-complicating attribution. So with this in mind of trying to layer on the self reported plus attribution, you already have, how would you approach that knowing that there might be some hesitancy on the dark social side and we're trying to make a case for that? Yeah, everyone's going to have attribution software or solution, you know, all the automation systems that you have already have one and then you might even have another one to layer on top of it. That's totally fine.
You, I think, just have to understand that there's stuff that you cannot track that no technology can track. There's no product going to sell for it. And so you're like, okay, if you think about this logically, how do I understand what I can't track? How do I understand what's going on?
Well, you could do that with the self report distribution field. You could ask your customers on gong calls. You can ask them after they've been customers. Like you can literally just ask.
So that's a touch point. Then you can understand, okay, of all the other things that I could track. How does that fit in? And so that's kind of how I look at it.
But when I simplify it, I mean, there's so many different attribution models that anyone can tweak any data to like make their department or their campaign look good. It's actually pretty easy to do, honestly. Yeah. If you don't want to play with first touch, yeah.
Yeah. I mean, you could be in here making a visible touch point record and it could be any touch point ever in the entire lifecycle contained content. Oh my God, our content is like, you know, pulling it off the charts for the revenue, right? This is an example.
When I say basic, it's the main touch point I think people need to be like focused on is the conversion source. And when I say conversion source, it I don't care what touch it is. I don't care if it's the first touch or the 17th touch. All I care about is it's the hand raised touch.
So it's the point where they raise their hand and I want to know what happened there. Where did that come from? And then I want to be able to track that map that to the opportunity and down. That's the main thing I'm looking at when we look at with our clients.
And of course, we're still looking at, okay, what's driving net new acquisition of first touch? How does that first touch compare? Do we see any trends first touch for like all of these in this bucket? Do we see any other, you know, things that we could pull out of the data that we could be useful?
But I've seen so many wild attribution models and I'm asking basic questions. I think that post there's like three basic questions where I was like, if you can't answer things like very quickly, like you're over-complicating it. Right. And one of those questions was like where your demo requests coming from, for example, which hopefully you have a report that shows you that isn't too complicated.
But if you don't, I think that's a great place to start to your point. And most people, or most companies can say, oh, how many contacts did we get or, you know, leads contacts, whatever you work out of? We got this many demo requests that's their first touch. I'm like, you have like how many form fields?
How many total people filled out this form? And they're like, oh, well, they're known contacts. So that would be like last campaign, but that field like updates and like isn't locked. So I'm like, okay, just let me get into automation system.
I'm going to see like how many people fill out this form this month. Yeah, I'm like having to have fun or whatever. Again, we'll care what touch it is. We want to understand like how many people asked to talk to ourselves team this month.
You can answer that and then you can answer how many of those went to meetings, how many of those went to qualify opportunities. That's a problem. And I think it's just because like in guilty of it too, like, I mean, I am a marketo visible girl back from like 10 years ago, you know, like I loved it even visible. It's just starting.
I was one of them, a company that was one of their first customers. And I was like, I love this. This is amazing. But I just think over time, it's changed.
So. Yeah, I think in the meantime, since they came out, communities have just blown up. I mean, not that they didn't exist before, but to your point around Slack, I can't even tell you how many Slack communities I'm in and half of the posts are saying, what's a great attribution tool? What's a good tool for this?
And that just didn't exist. Five, 10 years ago, people were following a little bit of a more linear buying journey versus just doing a lot of their own research. I think everything on the, or most of the things on the internet were on your own domain, right? They were on your own website, your own domains that didn't own.
So you get that data. Well, now how many applications do you have on your iPhone, right? Like that don't serve ads. Some of that people obviously do serve ads, but how do you get information?
You don't go to the company's website anymore. I'm just going to ask community or if I have a question about chili paper, I'm going to be like, Tara, LinkedIn or email, like, Hey, here's my question. Can you answer it or someone I know that uses the product, right? You're not going to go to the website.
I mean, you might go eventually to the website when you're ready to convert or look at pricing or something, but more not in the discoverability phase anymore. I would say more when you're ready to actually like research your buying decision, almost like buy your enablement. Yeah. So the difference now too is you know that when you do put up your hand and say, Hey, I'm ready, you're not going to get a break.
You're going to be sounded by someone who's trying to show you the tool. So you're going to do as much research as you can outside of their domain because when you're ready and you raise your hand, you know, okay, that's it. My schedule is going to be busy with demo. So it's a thousand percent and like, you know, it's kind of also on B2B created that environment.
Like how many ebooks have you followed up and then you got the email, you got the phone calls, like everybody is does not want that because they are not ready for that. So hence why, you know, I believe you should be getting your content anymore. But that's a whole, you know, that's another episode. Yeah, that's another fun topic, but hello, episode.
And one thing just really quickly is on the topic of just that touch before the demo request, we're actually shifting our model into what we're calling booking context. So instead of what caused them to fill out any form on our website, which is a little bit of what we're doing now, which isn't perfect. It doesn't give us great insights. We're really looking at what happened right before they booked that call, whether it was like the channel, the campaign source, just figuring out how granular we can get.
And I think we'll hopefully have a lot of insights to share once we do roll that out. But I think that's a new approach that we've heard a couple other people thinking about to where to your point, nobody needs to track 20, 25 different touch points. So we need to know what caused them to raise their hand and what was that final thing that really moves in need also curious to see how that self-reported data will line up with what we're finding internally. I mean, between that and your self-port attribution field, you're going to be using your own it.
But yeah, that's the goal is to figure out what we can learn from and teach people. So great. I'm going to be sampling from one. That's important.
I think you needed, but sure. Yeah, no, that's great. Anything else on just a topic of multi-touch attribution? I feel like we covered it pretty.
Yeah, I mean, you know, people think like, I don't know, everybody at Refine Labs is like, so against attribution, it's like we're not. We just like need to have another way to capture dark social attribution. And I think at like many things, marketers, myself included are like, not your attribution could be like campaign set up in your platforms. Like we love to just overcomplicate things.
And it's like been bred into us. So just simplify when you can simplify, simplify, simplify, simplify. I think that's great advice. And if you're simplifying and also asking people what pushed them to book a demo and try to do that again.
And again, I think, yeah, he'll be set up for success. So that's great advice. Cool. Well, before I let you go, I do have a couple of quick higher questions for you, if you don't mind.
So first one, is there another marketer you follow that our listeners should go follow and take advice from? I mean, I think Nick Bennett is doing a great job talking about community and personal brand. He's got a community that's really cool. I mean, honestly, if you want to know anything about TikTok, it's like a shameless plug for Todd.
He works at Refine Labs, but the guy's like so talented at TikTok and his strategy around it. It's wild. I've already talked to him about trying to do TikTok. It's just, it's on my list, but I have not made enough priority yet.
Those are the two, we had the first two that come to mind, but I'm like, there's so many. I feel like I could be like an Excel sheet. No, those are fun ones. That's good.
It's good to have something fun to follow up with. And what's an under the radar, either channel or tactic that your team is really loving or seen, wants to success with right now? I don't know if it's like super under the radar, but video content specifically like podcast clips, we've been putting the paid spend behind that and getting those guaranteed views. And that's been working really well.
There's some of our highest engagement from fee rate and video engagement rate with some of our clients. That's really kind of helping to drive their podcast acquisition strategy, linking straight to the podcast that you could listen to it. That one's a good one. And then literally like today, we just rolled out LinkedIn.
You can now do story sizes on images on LinkedIn. So take up more of the feed. And it's designed for a mobile placement, but we've been taking some of our Facebook story creatives for some of our clients and just rotating that into LinkedIn to see if we can get more engagement off that placement. Because the Instagram story placement gets by far probably the highest engagement off of that placement of Facebook or Instagram, not including video, but like a more static placement.
So we're transferring that over to LinkedIn just to see how it goes, see if we can get more of that feed taken up. Yeah, that's a fun experiment. I haven't touched LinkedIn stories yet on paid. So I'll have to check that out.
That's not on the LinkedIn stories, not like the sponsored ones, but you can take of course, I'm forgetting the actual image size, but it's the same size as the bigger. It's the mobile version. And we put that in and it'll get served on mobile for LinkedIn. So it literally takes up the entire phone when you're scrolling.
So we're just testing that against the vertical like square size, the 1080 by the 1080 size. Great. That's a good tip. And lastly, where can our audience go to find out more about your content, what channel are you most active on?
I mean, no surprise here. LinkedIn. Yes, another audience are so far. Yeah.
And waterfall in LinkedIn, you can find me there and maybe one day I'll be on TikTok. That's a goal for me. I'm seeing it on this podcast, so I will actually have to do it because people will call me out now. Great.
We'll keep an eye out for that. Thank you so much, Sydney. Thanks a lot for your time. And thanks everybody for listening today.
Hope you can join us on the next episode of Demand Gen Chat.