Hi everyone, we're back with another episode of Stacking Growth Live. I'm sitting at waterfall GM here at Refine Labs and I'm joined by Sam. Go ahead and introduce yourself, we'll get started. Sam, VP of the Mandover at Refine Labs as well, so excited to get in to listen with you.
It's a good question. Yes, we got a question from an audience member, so we're going to read a question and then answer it and kind of give our take on it and that's going to be the episode. So let's get started. Here's the question.
A lot of people are marketers trying to figure out how to get their order to change, but what if you're in sales and don't want any low-intent marketing leads but really want marketing to be focusing more on creating demand. So AKA, the roles are a little bit reversed here than the typical scenario we see. So here's the actual question. Any recommendations on a good pilot program to recommend marketing run, maybe LinkedIn ads focused less on lead capture, but getting your message in front of your target accounts with specific messaging that you know resonates.
This is a cool question. So coming from sales, trying to convince marketing to stop doing lead gen and start creating demand. What do you think Sam is the first thing to kind of hone in on here? First recommendation.
Those sales skills that we're going to start convincing marketing leadership, but there's a better way to do it. Now, kidding. Now, this one's going to hit right for you and I because we're so data oriented. It's like, all right, first we have to understand if you don't want to deal with the lead gen anymore, why can you prove is it not working?
Is it not quality? What is it? You kind of have to build your argument around what is the purpose of why you want to shift in that direction. So, split the funnel.
We talk about it all the time. Almost like do it for the sales side. Go and compare the leads that you've been getting from the lead gen. So, say you get 100 over a quarter or however long it's been.
And look at how they progressed in your own sales pipeline. Have they turned into SQL's opportunities pipeline, anything? And then compare that to your own outbound initiatives, even doing yourself your critical prospecting, anything else interesting. Is there a big gap between one and the other to use that to orient your initial conversation?
What do you think? Yeah, that's you got to you can't just either way. You can't just like cry and whine about stuff. So not that this person is doing that.
But on either either way, marketers can't do that either. You need to be back with data. So, if this person were able to pull lead gen campaigns first outbound and look at you know, outreaches to meetings book, meetings book opportunities, opportunities to revenue. And if you could show that it is, you know, not like similar or maybe outbound is even more efficient, you have a case there to say, Hey, here's why I don't want to waste my time working these leads.
And instead what I want to do is spend my time over here. And again, it's based on data. You're not blaming anyone. You're just saying these are the leads that don't close.
I want to spend time here. So I think that's step one. Love that. And then probably the next component is if this marketing team is running a bunch of lead gen and they're not they don't they probably like don't even know how to run ads that create demand.
Right. That's so say you go and say they're on board and they're like, great, you talk to their marketing counterpart. And they're like, what do you mean you want me to to do that's that create demand like I don't know what you're talking about there get frustrated. They'll be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll see what we can do.
And that will probably be the end of the conversation. So I think the next part is, you know, helping give examples of like what you would like to see, right? So if this salesperson already knows or have seen ads that they like, you can go into any company on LinkedIn and you can view the ads that they're running. You just go to their profile, you go to their posts and you can filter by that.
So you could literally see the ads that they're running. I would pull examples of other brands ads that maybe are more similar to what this person has in mind of running. That way it kind of gives some some guidelines or some examples. Like, hey, I did my research.
I'm not just asking you to do something. I'm trying to give you an example of what I mean. So that that would definitely be one one one area there. But you also the market, the salesperson probably doesn't know about how much they're spending.
What is they don't have LinkedIn access of the campaigns. So how do you think like the salesperson should kind of think about that? Yeah, yeah, that's right. You know, the work with your marketing team on that it's a some interesting ones that you you share there.
So what would you say about I like the other thought around like going they don't have access to LinkedIn ads platform, right? So would you then partner with that marketer to say like, Hey, what campaigns have you been running? Is there any way that instead of running a new experiment and needing more money should be going look at something that's not performing. So maybe using that data we saw earlier on the lead gen.
I've got a hundred leads from this campaign. I haven't had a good conversation. They could be positive for a month and try something different with it. So maybe doing something along those lines where it's just repurposing existing funds instead of going in and trying to create something that new and then having marketing asking why you're telling them to expand their budget on something that's not proven.
Yes, and they probably don't even know how much the leads are costing, right? Like they just don't have access to that data. So I think definitely don't ask for more budget. That's not going to go over well.
Just ask to like reallocate some budget and then have some ideas of, Hey, I'd love to like dig in with you. That might work depending on your relationship with marketing or be like, Hey, I presented this data in this idea. Can you just do a quick audit and like take the highest costing leads of your lead campaigns, just look at your cross-brelead sort by campaign and let's just X the top 25% of the campaigns and then take whatever percent, then take that percent and just reallocate it towards this experiment. I think that's probably a better success rate than asking either for them to completely pause and redo their whole strategy.
It also kind of, like you said, your point was good. You can't just expect people to move forward with an unproven strategy or unproven approach. So I feel like that's a reasonable ask too. Like as a marketer, if myself person said that, I'd be like, Oh, I have 20% of the budget for these things.
Like I'm into that. Like let's try this. Let's see. Let's see how it goes.
Yeah, now that's the next one. I know I've had plenty of these before. You get the sales rep who tells marketers how to do marketing while those sales reps. So you want to make sure that you're treading lightly in that.
So you're talking about that partnership with them earlier. I think another way that you can really lean into that is by creating feedback loops with them. So providing guidance, insight around the sales conversations that you've had that have been working really well, especially early on that first call, the demo discovery, whatever it is. So listening out here is the top five objections that I always hear.
Can we create some content around that? I'll let you figure out like how you want to create it, distribute it, all that. But by sharing things like objections, who are the people that you're having the best conversations with? So I know we marketers love to target C sweet titles realistically, C sweet are not ever taking the first call.
They're going to delegate that to someone on their team. So it's going to go to discovery. So sharing those people that you're having great calls with, maybe it is the individual sales rep, you sell the sales people, maybe it's the head of customer success, whoever it is. But let them know who you're having good conversations with also because they may be just thinking about who is our total Tam.
You know, we see this all time with marketers is just we're going to target everyone we can, highest levels we can and just try to get across the board. Everyone, when realistically, maybe they should be focusing on a couple of specific titles, a couple of specific industries where you have those better conversations. And then to the point that they mentioned earlier is, how do we get in front of the specific accounts where we know the message land wells that our product definitely serves best? Yeah, I think anytime, like you can get messaging insights from people who talk to the customers every day, marketers love that.
So messaging you mentioned and targeting you mentioned. The good caveat that you pointed out is with the messaging, like don't definitely don't go right. The ads and like, you know, be like, here's the ads that I want you to run. Here's what I want this to look like.
Just get the insights that the marketing team probably doesn't have or the most up to date insights and then pass those insights of the five bullet points of like, objection one, here's three bullet points of how I message it and here's how it really resonates and works really well. And then just give that to the marketing team and let them do their expertise of putting that into like ad copy or email copy or website copy, right? It'd be very much the same as like if a marketer came over and was like trying to coach the salesperson in this situation of like how to run a cold call, like, just don't just don't take that maybe unless like you're willing to get on the call and like start dialing for dollars. But I think that's a good caveat for this situation and good recommendation.
And then yeah, if you're if you're like, Hey, like, let's run these objections work really or these messaging works really well with this audience specifically. That will also, you know, if you're only having 20% of your budget, you might need a smaller audience to to run this on and actually get the ads in front of them. Obviously, smaller audiences are going to pay a little bit higher CPM, but is if you're customizing the creative and you're customizing the messaging to that audience, it's worth it. You know, if you're not, then maybe not.
So I think that targeting can can really play. So I think those are two things that are super helpful for the salesperson to provide those insights proactively. So then hopefully the marketer is like, cool, I have all the data or the insights I need. And now like, I just need to think as a marketer, create a, create a campaign plan, campaign brief, whatever you do internally, and like spin this up.
And you could probably push this out pretty quickly versus you didn't take an approach like this. You know, it's going to be three months before someone's like going to make this a priority or they think it's like way bigger of an aspen and actually is. So I think that's, that's a huge, huge thing to do is that the other thing. So you get this to work and you get this experiment running.
I would like also proactively check in like how are, as a marketer, how am I going to know that this is working, right? Especially if you're used to lead gen attribution in platform, and then how is the sales rep going to know if like these leads are better, right? If they maybe, maybe some you get some do through or tag conversions, but probably not all of them, you're not going to get any data on. So that's another advantage of like a micro segment approach.
As you can see, if any of the titles from that we've been targeting are coming through a high intent form, and then the sales person's, you know, getting those people out of those conversations go, the sales person can also ask like, Hey, I mean, obviously we advocate for putting how do you care about us in the form? So you can see immediately that this person come from LinkedIn, but the sales person can also be like, yeah, I've been having so many more good conversations with this micro segment, and two of the 10 people I talked to mentioned LinkedIn or something like that. So I think there needs to be a partnership after you launch the campaign as well. Yeah, yeah, getting that like, how did it work?
How do you hear about us? I know so many companies, when we say implement the magic here about us, they're like, Oh, we already asked that in discovery. Like, do you? I haven't seen that captured anywhere.
Like you may be asking yourselves out to do it, but if they're not doing anything with it, you're not asking them for it. I can promise you that's falling off and they're focusing on what they want to focus on with the conversation. So yeah, that's a really interesting one. And then one thing I realized that you and I think we blew completely by just because we're so used to this is the like, why are the marketing team focusing on running things in this like lead gen fashion to begin with?
And so when we're saying you have to educate them and everything else, one, it's they probably just been countless calls with the platform saying you should be running LinkedIn Legion ads, you should be running our conversation ads. It's going to get you all these leads. And when they focus on leads as their volume goal, like that's what they're orienting towards. So there's no mal-intent to them doing this.
It's just it's what their goals have been for so long. So one exercise that I like to do that I think could be helpful in this type of scenario is working with the marketing team or whoever and just saying, I need to take off your marketer hat for a second and stop thinking about leads and think about when you're swirling through a platform again, you're spending time on LinkedIn on Facebook on Reddit wherever you may be. What's the content that you're engaging with and what gets you to stop and want to read it? Because so many of what these Legion campaigns often are promoting a webinar, promoting an ebook, promoting something else I get a free demo will give you $100 to take it.
But anyone that sees those can spot it from a mile away. So they already have their guard up because they know, okay, I know the process what's gonna happen when you get a sales call. I don't want to answer it. I just want the content.
So this is the difference between and what I think the sales rep is understanding with the leads that aren't turning into anything versus the if you do it demand creation, demand generation strategy. This is what changes that conversation when the sales rep calls them from say it's an ebook download, like, wait, who are you? How do you have my number? I don't remember doing that too.
If you're running demand generation creation and you have people on your team sharing helpful content leading with value goes, oh, yeah, I follow Jenny on LinkedIn all the time. She's sharing great things. I just heard your CEO on this podcast or that podcast like definitely want to talk to you. So it's just a completely different dynamic that leads to that conversation with sales.
And I think that's where the biggest misalignment occurs is that volume will lead to success when in reality, if it's not converting anything, it doesn't matter if you have 10, 100, a thousand leads, if you're still only getting like one to two conversations out of it, you might as well focus on the ones that are working. Yeah, I love that advice. We did gloss over that. So glad you brought that full circle for us.
On that note, you could if you use a call recording software, the sales person could also pull calls that like they did somehow get connected or get a response from one of the low intent leads and be like, listen to how this conversation goes. They don't remember us. They don't. And again, it's not coming at the marketer.
It's just saying these conversations are not the conversations I want to have. These other conversations are the conversations I want to have. So I want to work with you to create some advertising or some marketing strategies that will lead to more of those quality conversations. So I think if you frame it up like that, especially as a sales person in the marketing, I think, I mean, I think if you took this approach, I would be surprised as like a marketing team that wouldn't want to at least experiment and at least test some new stuff out.
Yeah, I'm with you. That's what you could point though. Listen to that recording call and be like, does it sound like a lead to you when they don't know who the hell we are? Sorry.
Right. Literally they don't want to talk to us. They don't know who we are. It doesn't make sense even if he's wasting my time with this.
So educate them first, given that value. So yeah, I think they've got some good tips here. And if they're still stuck after that, just, you know, some of us have kept up so let us do the convincing for you. Yeah, hopefully we dug into that question.
I think we gave some pretty good actionable advice. But find the data, present the data, ask to partner with marketing, give examples of messaging and insights that you can use. And then those feedback loops are very crucial to make this work. Don't ask and forget or set a campaign and forget it as well.
So all right, we'll be back with some more questions on them. Our next our next episode. All right, see you later. Yeah.