Hey, welcome everybody to Sacking Growth Live. Great to see a lot of familiar faces and some new ones. Outstanding. Outstanding.
So today what we're going to do is something a little bit different. We're going to have a Ask Me Anything AMA. I'll let the guests from our fine labs introduce themselves here in a second. This has been a crazy year.
We're wrapping up Q3. We're heading into Q4, at least on the calendar year. This maybe depends on what your fiscal year is. And what we thought we'd do is just open it up to questions that you may have that you're dealing with today as you venture into the last quarter of this year.
And what we see from a lot of customers, and I'm sure where you are as well, is either starting to think about 2023 planning or you're maybe needing to be in 2023 planning. So happy to field any questions about that as well. We have a bunch of questions that we collect over time from other podcasts from LinkedIn, etc. Todd does a great job of putting those together.
We'll start the conversation with a few of those. But what we're really looking for here is active participation from all of you. So feel free to queue them up and start asking your questions in the chat. And we'll have you come on and ask that to the group.
And I'm first going to go to Carl. The question is not going to be Carl. Why are you not out closing the quarter versus sitting on a call with all of us? Oh, well, I guess we don't have to answer that question.
I'm sure all the marketers here are like, why is this guy not out selling closing deals? Getting the quarter wrapped up. But anyway, I digress. Here's a question for you.
We're heading to queue four from a sales perspective. Like what's your mentality as you go into the quarter, going into the last quarter of the year? Like how you drive an urgency? Where are you focusing?
What do you need from others in the organization for you to wrap up the year strong? You can kind of set the tone for this conversation and go through kind of your thought process. Yeah, I it's sketchy for me to be on this call, right? So there's risk associated with that.
I should be any sellers on this call. You probably shouldn't be here. We won't tell your boss. And Cassidy, super unfair because I was like four questions.
So I'm going to try to tackle them one by one. You'll pick the easiest of the four. So, you know, give me a better shot. Yeah, I will.
Going to the end of the quarter, I'm thinking about two things. I think I can. I'm not thinking about two things. I'll bucket one.
I'm thinking about into two buckets or two categories. And that's like short term and long term. A mistake I see a lot of companies make and some of our customers make is a lot of us may be missing or forecast. They're about to are pacing to miss our Q three.
So Q four will look a lot like a fire drill. It'll look like a lot of desperation. It'll look like a lot of short term kind of short, smaller mindset types of practices. So I think like just being able to step back and remember that business just overall is a long game and we don't want to harm the start to 2023 or forget that 2023 is right around the corner.
With a bunch of like really short term minded tactics, high pressure selling, heavy discounting. You know, lots of like super high volume outbound. These are things that companies are going to like knee jerk reaction probably lean into. And I would say shy away from that.
Right. So short term what we're doing here at Refine Labs is we're going to look back. Right. All of the conversations that we had close lost deals, maybe work through some of that.
We're also going to like let's look at like I think sales leaders should be looking at stepping into the trenches a little bit more with their sellers. Their sellers need a lot of support. So executive muscle, executive presence on more sales calls and being more customer facing and supporting sellers in that way is another lever that I think sales leaders should should pull. Okay.
So last short term lever pull that I'm thinking it was comp. And I know this is like a little dicey to talk about comp, but what I don't want or I wouldn't want if I was like a SaaS leader, sales leader is I wouldn't want like some reps are going to be missing their number potentially in Q4 stuff is hard. Right. Buyers are very risk of earth.
So do we need to revisit comp and make sure that my top sellers, even if they're going to be missing or it's going to be a lot more difficult. I want to make sure that they're being comped properly and that might require adjusting bases that might be require like spiffs or bonuses so that they can continue to get paid and they don't go and leave. And then I'm screwed in Q1 and I have to like hire a whole new sales team simply because we had a hard Q3 and Q4. So those are some of the short term things I'm thinking about and to bucket those are just you know comp, revisiting past conversations, etc.
And long term thinking right. The one thing I'll say here so I don't take a whole time is just how can we prevent Q1 from being like you three or Q4 right. What are some of the things that we should be doing now in Q4 to set us up a really powerful 2023 or start to it. And so anyways, hi, I want to thank you feel free to drop any other questions around this happy to address them in the chat.
So I heard a few things from Carl. I heard a cop loud and clear. I think that's a signal to me. And I heard I'm setting kind of the caveats for missing the quarter.
Is that what I heard? Fails guy. Yeah, just give the car a hard time. Yeah, I love Carl on these episodes.
So we can kind of get the flavor for like how sales things for those who are not in sales on this on this call. So feel free to ask your specific questions to Carl in the chat and make sure we get back to him. We have a bunch of questions coming in. I want to go to Grant for his question.
I thought it was a good one. I think they're all good ones, but I'm a big fan of Grant. You're on LinkedIn. So let me see if I can unmute you.
There we go. Thanks Cassidy. So my question is around annual planning and forecasting. I listened to the recent podcast you did on that.
And it's similar to the methodology I've used in the past. You know, I've thought about saying if you spend X percent more and you ask for more budget, then we can expect to get X percent minus Y knowing it doesn't happen exactly in that way. There's diminishing returns, but you can say there will be a direct increase in pipeline or revenue and you can build on in the model say ops, Pi plus one error is going to increase in that kind of estimated percentage. However, when you take a more create demand focused approach.
Spending won't necessarily mean a correlated increase in pipeline in such a linear way. One, because it takes time to build. And two, you might already be maxed on your audiences in terms of frequency and total reach. So how do you think about modeling that type of strategy if you're already reaching your whole target audience or, you know, nearly reaching all of it at the frequency targets you want?
I think it's only fair to turn this one over to Tori. I think Tori, that was your podcast episode. And this sounds like a particularly hard question. So I'd love for you to take a first shot at that.
Thank you so much, Cassidy. No, this isn't an awesome question, Grant. And thank you. By the way, I've been looking at all the questions you can send in.
You might have to have like a grant asked us anything episode. This is enough question here to get us through a couple of live events here. So yeah, I think, you know, what you're referring to right this kind of demand planning model, I think Alison and I had had walked through it on a stacking growth episode. And so like my answer actually is going to be a little bit broader than just the demand planning model, right?
So you're 100% correct. You can't just use a, you know, dollars in dollars out expectation that, you know, if we put $10 in this year and got $100 back next year, if we put in $20 for $200 back, right? We all know that it doesn't work that way as much as our CFOs might want it to work that way. We know that it doesn't.
And so I think the better way to approach it, right, is to really kind of think about like, you know, you're, you're all up number that you have understanding, of course, you know, what percentage of that marketing is going to be responsible for that. That marketing source revenue and kind of, you know, looking at it in terms of the top line that marketing source revenue and looking at, you know, of course, your historicals, let's say from the past year in terms of not just the ads then, which should play factor in there, but also, you know, the demos that you generated, the opportunities that were created from that, the hero pipeline, right? So the high intent revenue opportunities and then close one and looking at those percentages in between each of those points in your funnel. And so ultimately what you're looking at now is, you know, these are effectively all of the different levers that you can have an impact over that you can pull over the course of the year to figure out, like, how am I going to ultimately make up the delta between what we achieved this past year and what we're looking to achieve next year.
And so when you break it down this way, right, you're going to see things like, okay, you know, we looked at, we got 100 demos last year, and we know that, you know, that ultimately led to X amount of revenue. So, you know, what is the, the demo volume that we might need next year? That's one way to look at it, right? That's one lever you can pull.
But additionally, I think it's also makes sense for you to look at things from a broader perspective and say, okay, you know, we're also looking at the demo opportunity conversion rate. And when you take a look at your demo opportunity conversion rate, there's a number of things that could have an impact on that specific conversion rate, on that, that lever that you can pull. Maybe it's your inbound buyer, buyer experience, maybe that there's some, you know, some focus that you can put on improving your buying experience, you know, the calendar booking function, you know, the speed and the follow up of your team, the, you know, who you're actually getting to follow up with the people that are putting those inquiries in. And all these things can have an impact on that specific percentage that's going to take you from the demo to opportunity.
Same can be said when you're looking at opportunities into heroes and of course heroes into close one. And so, you know, I think that I guess my answer here, right is to almost kind of think a little bit more broadly than just the, the, the quantitative inputs into this model, and really kind of think it through of, yes, we can have an impact on demos, maybe that does come from, you know, some different things that we look to do on paid social or the money that we're spending or channels that are exploring, but you also want to be focused on the other parts of the funnel, just the same and figure out what levers you can pull and specifically what tactics, you know, you're going to be placing your bets on in the year ahead to be able to help you pull those levers. So, maybe a little bit of a roundabout answer for you there. I know that you were asking about the demand models and those inputs and outputs specifically but I think when you're talking about something like annual planning right and we know as marketers that so much can change over the course of one year, that it does make more sense to kind of look at things a little bit more holistically.
And that might mean, you know, teaming up with your events team, if you have one of those or, you know, the SDRs and AEs to figure out, you know, the best way that you can kind of create that that seamless handoff between the hand raiser and that first meeting, but I think that that's probably the better way to be looking at trying to close the gap between your, you know, your previous year's performance and what the expectations are for the next year, and not so much of just a, you know, dollars and dollars out formula. You're going to build on that real pictorial a little bit and grand just a answer, or just going to think about it, this is what we're doing with clients, a lot of clients are now is thinking about what is the, from a paid perspective right a lot of you talk about is paid growth, paid contributions to demos, paid contributions revenue, but there's an element of this organic component to that comes with that so at what point can you see a correlation between that say we invested, you know, 30 grand and paid, we seen an uptick in organic direct traffic and can we draw a correlation or assume that there's a percentage there to that percentage of traffic what converts into a demo and opportunity. And that kind of spread a bit wider to when you think about like we don't have narrow focus of just paying knowing what we're doing a lot of the times it's educated and influencing so they're going to come through the other channel so kind of zoom in out a little bit further to look at that we're going to input. Hey, hey, great I'm muted you in case you want to follow up with anything on that.
Yeah, I appreciate those insights thanks for for sharing both looking at that demo to op is something in particular that we started doing more and just yesterday how to meeting for five strategies we're going to take to improve that. And I think including things like that in our annual planning model is a good call up. Excellent. Good question.
Evan, you hit on something there that I want to kind of tie back to a question we have here from Connor. It seems like I'll kind of paraphrase this. Their team has started with LinkedIn organic and they're now testing LinkedIn paid. So kind of our philosophy non non-click content.
How do you know paid working versus kind of organic in terms, you know, think of self reporting attribution and people coming in saying LinkedIn as an example. I assume we see this quite a bit with our clients so lots on that. Yeah, we did. And it's such a good question and it's one that we don't have a perfect answer to right because it is hard when people self report out just more of a generic LinkedIn or search or any sort of paper I might be using.
One thing to think about though is LinkedIn organic is such there's a significantly smaller reach at scale when you post organic so even though you might be posting a fly will every two to four days or two to four times in a week. There's still a small subset of the audience that's going to truly see that message. So when you start to accelerate but paid into it, you're accelerating that reach and that's oftentimes where we'll start to see the correlation of. Okay, we had paid running for about six weeks or seven organic running for about six weeks we introduced paid for about four.
Do we start seeing more mentions that LinkedIn after that paid has been launched and that's where we really start to tie back like we can, again, it's making assumptions but we have to in a scenario. Can we see that actually are increased efforts of driving paid ad for seen an increased volume of people self reporting LinkedIn as the driver there so it's a bit of a hard question to answer specifically but that's how we've been looking at it almost there stepping with clients what are the different levers that we've been pulling on LinkedIn let's say we have employee advocacy, we get more employees involved, we have the brand posting more and we're introducing LinkedIn. What are those there stepping components and every scene like more and more self important attribution like kind of tie closely to those efforts. And I've been answer follow up there, I know it's a mess of the best response but question we ask all the time never by mouse.
That's great. Yeah, kind of feel free to drop any follow up on that. I appreciate that. Evan.
I got a call up on that I'm just curious like I assume at some point we could baseline this in this case you started with organic. There's a level of like I'm thinking this is like an algae can be our business for a lot of our most for demand cons organically. You kind of know over time like how that trends and moves based on like the programs are running. And then I soon when you overlay a page strategy, you should be able to see a delta.
And you should kind of manage kind of the I know this is kind of like speculation. But is this something that you recommend or do you think it's too flawed and kind of thinking through. We know if we have one lever of growth being organic and we're running a program that looks like X and we haven't made major changes about it's on getting trajectory. And then we layer on the next program to stack growth.
We should be able to see the difference between those two. If we don't see any difference and wouldn't we assume that given enough time the page strategy is not working. Yeah, I was going to say that's that's one of the challenges a lot of times is people cast two white event with their page strategy so they build on their LinkedIn organic efforts but they might not see him that volume increase after that page strategy. And that's because they're typically what we see is that the ICP is too broad.
So they're really not influencing that audience that's truly high and taking and razor so they might not actually be self recording LinkedIn because you're getting impression on an audience that are not ready to buy. So I think if you are not seeing that growth or not seeing that kind of incremental gain from a self recording standpoint, maybe reevaluate your audience who are you targeting how big is that town and it is that something that maybe you should reevaluate when you look at this coming in and raising their hands what are their job titles doesn't make sense and as a kind of a mirror to be back to the best strategy. Excellent. Thank you.
Keep dropping into questions I will be calling on folks are seeing if you're comfortable coming on. I have a question that's come up multiple times and I'm going to direct this to Victoria. And that is how do we think about as we plan going forward, we often talk about net new growth in customer bases. But there's also this kind of strategy around like retention churn up selling current customer bases from kind of a standpoint of planning as we think through that how would you recommend folks consider that in terms of like a work that they may want to do for like a plan in the following year, that makes any sense.
Yeah, it does. I actually sort of relates to one of our questions or someone's question I'm pulling deals forward into Q for and if you're scrambling to get a lot of deal flow in and you're just promising. We find like those last companies I've been at a certain like it for you'll just promise anything and everything to get the deal closed. And then you get into the situation starting, you know, they want to be engaged where your promises are not necessarily not into reality or what your team is able to thought they were going to execute on is not, you know, aligned with how they're used to working.
This quarter in particular, but in general is a good moment to say, you know, how are existing clients experiencing their relationship with us. Are we getting a feeling like we generally have a way to satisfy clients on our promises to service their needs. Or are we finding that there's tensions there or what we thought we were supposed to do is not what they thought they were getting because sales can do, you know, can bust their ass and get a million deals in the door and keep for it. But if you start January with a really slippery slope and then you start fighting these battles and instead of having a leaky bucket to retain all these clients next year sales is continuing to add more and work to the business or just having to apply these gaps of people who aren't happy.
So I guess a couple of ways to I'm thinking particularly this time of year and this role and it has roles. It became really helpful from a product marketing and sales enablement perspective to lean in and be, you know, the right hand man for the sales team because you're hearing this messaging for some reason is resonating this quarter. Well, this is a high pressure moment and this is a good, you know, feedback loop that it might be isolated to Q4, but get the insight on why people aren't buying why the pressure is changing their decisions like or accelerating their decision to, you know, move forward with you. And then what can you train like that to other quarters of the year.
There's also elements of what are the questions we're getting, you know, we're trying to move quicker into what's getting in the way of that to close the deal and use all of that to optimize the process against a carl's point. The other three quarters of the year so that those friction points are being hit to four. But again, it's also, you know, the question, what am I going to get or can I see how this works or, you know, why, why should I choose you versus any other you can lean on what you're hearing from the retention side of things. What's working with clients, why they're staying with you, why you're happy clients are happy to not only stream and find the right people to bring in, but also a part of your sales strategy for the results we can bring to you.
And you just speak to a reference customer, see some sort of work or example output. I guess all that to say that if you think about the experience lived inside the door once you sort of get in capture the customer, it has to align with all the things that are being promised and that applies in any other quarter of the year or when you're saying, I'll try to really close deals and get things over the line this quarter of the year. So hopefully I answered the question. Yeah, thanks for that Victoria.
It spurred a question that I'm going to ask Carl actually knows Carl, do you modulate your messaging based on the quarter of the year and kind of like what the customer might be thinking in the sales cycle. I certainly wish that we did to the caliber that Victoria just articulated, but I think that I would say the answers are soft yes, but not as modular as quarterly right, but I think, and unfortunately I think sales teams are a little bit reactive because we have to experience pain for six weeks and then we adjust messaging right this happened to most of our businesses in Q2 where it was like, you know, revenue and pipeline was falling from the sky and we didn't have baskets big enough to catch it all. And then, you know, roll or may hit and it was like dried up and now everyone is kind of scrambling to shift their messaging and reduce risk and more customer references and kind of jump through all these hoops to continue to close business so the answer to your question is again, soft yes, how to do that proactively. I don't know if I have an answer to that but I think like if you can move from a reactive messaging transition to trying to see into the future a little bit and get proactive with that using as Victoria said customer insights from your book of customers and really understanding what pain are they about to experience since we're in CRM with them since we're having conversations with them.
Can that help us to look into the next quarter and kind of get inside the minds of the folks in our pipeline that I mean that is like revenue org 301 type stuff that you know is fantastic and we're definitely not there yet but how do we get there? I don't know. You get Victoria on it. I think Victoria can help you.
Yeah, I think so too. Excellent. So I have a question here from Ashley I'm going to ask it for her and I'm going to come at Evan looks like he wants to take this one. We struggle to get SMEs to collaborate with sales and marketing to provide feedback insight into customer and prospect challenges or FAQs or moving down a ladder to boots on the ground to gather this info for content building what questions do you think would be best to ask for SMEs as we facilitate these calls so I think there's got two things here like one is any tips or tricks to get SMEs just engage into if you get them engaged and what can you ask them to at least pull knowledge out of their heads in order to be able to use that effectively in a content or customer engagement strategy.
I got to chill on this a little bit. I like this question a lot. Troy, I don't know if you have a good jump in with any response here but yeah, yeah, I got you. Thanks.
Thank you. So I think my first reaction is right, you know, understanding like and I guess you know having a little bit of empathy towards those SMEs obviously you know you're looking at them as as a huge piece of your efforts and what they're doing but of course they very likely also have some other pretty big responsibilities at your company and so part of it I think is trying to figure out the best way to work with them and maybe it's something as simple as like hey, you know, can we set up like a 30 or 60 minutes in call. I just read like a list of FHUs from our customer success team and I would love it if you know we could just kind of get you riffing on some of these ideas right and so finding different ways to kind of you know maybe capture some of their their knowledge and insight rather than you know just hoping that they're going to be available bought into you know to kind of jump into whatever you know strategy or podcasts or long events that you know that you're looking to put on. I think that that's probably one way to do it but you know the the other thing I think to look at is like you know once you start to get some of these you know let's say positive signals and it might be few and far between in the beginning that's okay.
You know you really want to try to do what you can to put it in front of these people and for lack of a better term stroke the ego a little bit right you know how they understand how important they are to you know the programs that you're trying to put on but even if it's something that's something that's going to be a little bit more important to do. But even if it's something as simple as like a thank you note from a prospect that attended or you know some really good feedback that you take some snatch snapshots up on social media. You know make sure you put that in front of them and help them understand like hey you're really helping you make a difference here our clients are appreciating it and see if that might be a way to you know kind of fuel the fire a little bit just because like I know it can be difficult, especially depending on the the type of the organization the SME that you're looking to get involved and sometimes it's just a matter of finding the right working style to that's going to mesh with with what you and your team are looking to do and you know get that wedge in there and figure out how to kind of grow that relationship over time. There's two things in there I think Tori said that really resonated with me one is oftentimes when you get subject matter experts involved.
We don't think about the unnecessary work that we're asking them to do that we get to take off the plate. We wanted to write something we wanted to post something we want them to do work versus extracting the insight out of them. And I like how you said that just get them on a video call etc. Ask them the questions and write it up yourself as a classic content marketing strategy.
There's a bunch of things you can do where you're just using the time of the SME to provide the insight not to do everything else. And I think the second one which is kind of maybe more advanced is understanding the motivations of the SME. Do they want to be a LinkedIn influencer do they get excited about getting on customer calls. Do they want to be seen as the expert inside their company so you can take that 15 minute video and the five questions they answered you're going to promote it within the company.
So really trying to understand what motivates that person and using that to your advantage to get them to do work for you. If I could add something there because that's critical to the sales process well first of all Cassidy might allow to add something here. You can definitely allow add something. So getting SMEs into the sales process too is something that we are big on at refine labs.
And one thing that is as helpful as well is just to pray like it could be super simple but praise and public a lot of SME work is like very thankless is very kind of like it's hidden like it's not something that's like spectacularly celebrated with a gong and a dashboard etc. It can really fly like under the radar. And so just getting good at making sure that you're sending a thank you note that you're praising a slack channel for help that some SME supported you with. Not only does that like pump that person up and make them feel good about their contribution but it also creates this culture and kind of this FOMO with the other SMEs that are like dang I want to be like a part of that.
I don't know like what Tori thinks about that and the reason I call out Tori is because he is an SME that I bring onto a lot of my sales conversations. I'm like a hundred percent close rate with Tori right now. You know and so again just creating kind of this micro culture of celebrating SMEs and creating a little bit of FOMO honestly so you could kind of loop in other SMEs and Tori isn't like on 10 sales calls a week is I think something that. On the sale side of the house we've seen success with.
Hey Carl on your history have you ever had an SME say no to you in sales I know this is a struggle market marketer staff I mean I felt that struggle as a marketer. When it comes to sales and calls like have you had have you had struggles getting SMEs to support you or you find that. A push comes to shove and there's a customer on the phone or in person the SME shows up. Yeah I really can't say that I've ever had a no show on the SME side of the house but you have to take what I say with a grain of salt here because my whole career I pretty much sold to marketing and sales leaders and I think marketers like Tori are.
Like they get it like their sales minded so they everybody kind of has like when I was at HubSpot in here or finalize everybody there's a culture of everybody is selling all the time. I think maybe you might run into that in kind of a more legacy industry or something more technical where you've got maybe like a grumpy developer that's like I don't like sales people I don't want to join sales calls so maybe there's like a different vibe in some of those industries but I haven't experienced that myself and I think that makes sense considering the space that we play in. Let's get started. Yeah go ahead.
I think you do a good job and this is what helps is you set the expectation of what the deliverable is from that's me like having people come join the calls you really kind of outline what the conversation is obviously can go any direction when you have a conversation but at least they come in there with a bit of confidence and what's going to be tossed their way and I think that that sometimes it's that fear of unknown that can get people to kind of pump the breaks and not want to join those so just kind of setting the right stage is always helpful. Yeah that's good feedback again I sent you know a list and slack to Evan or Tori and say hey this is what we talked about here some bullet points on this business they specifically are interested or concerned about or nervous about or want to learn more about XYZ topic how we handle creative in the feed of LinkedIn etc. And so yeah that's important to the SME so there's not like a guessing game I think that probably holds true for the content marketing side of the house as well. I would say one thing to add to give Carl some credit here is I don't find you bringing an SME on if it's not a serious conversation and I think this is one of the things I've noticed in past companies where a product organization or an engineer is reticent to jump on a customer call because they've been burned by joining calls that were serious or not at an appropriate stage or do don't just have been done and they're far enough along and the questions being asked were serious and so I think that's one of the things that you got to build a trust with the subject matter expert you don't want to be if they give you their time use it and use it wisely.
And then they'll come back and you'll be able to call them again it's when you're not using their time wisely or whatever effort they put in doesn't get used that they look at this and they say it's a waste of time and not something I'm going to prioritize. Yeah a couple things there from a sales perspective like yeah you don't want to wear out your welcome there there's a transaction happening here I want to make less withdrawals then deposits right. So that's that's critical and another thing too is I actually like to this is like a tactic for the sales fan that's on the call right now but I like to use and gate access to a subject matter expert to gain a commitment from the buyer. So if you want to talk to an SME you are going like I'm going to need something and it's like I don't just bring on Evan and Toria willy nilly onto these calls right so there's an exchange of value that happens or you want to talk to an SME or you want to talk to a customer I get customers even more harshly.
Then I need to know that you are extremely serious and there's certain criteria that that you're going to be this is worth gating content is maybe a little bit more relevant here to where I want to gate access there to gain so that again, Cassidy, your point that it's serious and that really helps me out if somebody's like oh I don't want to do that like don't worry about bringing Toria on yet that's a signal to me that this opportunity is still early stage there's still a lot of risk there's still work to be done and that's okay at least I know and expectations are set. Awesome. I want to hit on this conversation and slack between Charlton and Victoria on PLG. I want to bring it up as well because I believe we have I think for you've done you know you and Allison did some dabbling on a podcast on PLG but let's let me read this for those who don't see it.
So one is our past episode we've talked about strategies for self-reported attribution tied to PLG companies. Charlton's company 90% of their inbound or PLG versus demo plan on adding an onboarding intercom questionnaire that asks the question once they're in the web app or on the site form. This is aligned with your strategy this question doesn't need to be read live. Oh, well we read a live bonus.
So I think two things here I'm going to kind of talk to this Tory first you and having some sure you've experienced this with our clients, but also they're not coming to Victoria because we are you're looking at ways we would do this for ourselves including things like questionnaires and like how do you segment and target the audience or kind of assess qualified the audience as they come in. So Tory, you know, I'll turn it over to you first Charlton, ping me if you want me to unmute you and ask me follow up no pressure. Yes, first the the episode that Allison and I recorded on on PLG actually came from some frameworks that Evan had shared with us so I think you know we can definitely go right to the source on this one Evan has has probably some more experience with PLG motions than I do but related to the sub reported attribution question. I think, you know, there's a certainly been a lot of movement and buzz around just self-qu attribution how did you hear about us over like the past year or so, certainly, you know, within the audience of following that we're fine laughs as we've been talking about it quite a bit.
But I think, you know, companies people can be fluid in terms of how they ask this question so the reason I say that is because if this is in fact product like growth and somebody is inside your web app and is, you know, choosing to upgrade or inquiring about upgrading to a different model or maybe moving off of the free level on to a paid level. So I think that's a really interesting question. I think the way that you hear about you is not an appropriate question right they they're already, you know, a user of yours, but you can find different more creative ways to ask that question. You know, we're working with a client right now who for whatever reason, you know, all the responses that we get with their sub reported attribution data are often internet or Google, which is just not helpful in the slightest.
And so, you know, we've been experimenting with some different ways to just ask that question. They've got like a really fun brand and so we're, you know, trying some new kind of fun language in terms of how we're asking that. And so that's kind of challenge you to do the same right the insights are going to be valuable if you ask people, you know, where they they heard about you from or some variation of that but in this instance, I'm not sure asking a question frame that way is going to really provide much insight and in fact it might just confuse the person, but you know, maybe that there are some some different ways that you can kind of, you know, think about where that person might have heard about some of these additional features that they might be upgrading to or something of that nature. And the place that you want to ask that of course is on, you know, we refer to it as a high intent form, you know, typically referring to the spot on the website where someone's going to come raise their hand said if they want to talk to sales or get pricing information or whatever your CTA is.
And so I would kind of, you know, say that you should probably think through what the right places for for adding that that question so that you can collect insights on that, you know, within your PLG motion are going to be. But, you know, don't force it in there. I think that if there is an appropriate place to ask it's probably on the front end when you're getting those initial signups and not so much when you're trying to upgrade someone. So that's, you know, kind of my, I guess, high level response to that.
And I don't know if you had some additional color you wanted to add there. No, I think the one thing that we kind of etiquette for it is that self-reported attribution as a requirement, but we're testing this with the client now so about 50% of their high-end to hand raise or something we monitor them right are coming through this PLG motion. And so there was some concern if we put this question on the front end, would we see a decrease in signups overall so we are in the middle of an experiment now or keeping that form a non requirement or just an open text field. And the results are actually pretty interesting, right?
We're hearing a lot more about these communities where people are hearing about us that we missed prior to that. So I think that there's definitely value in testing and experimenting that. I would just agree with you, Tori, like once they're in the web app or they're already kind of familiar with the product, that's not the right question to ask. And I think it's more or less like, sir, questions that are going to help that team upgrade them or move them further along in their kind of revenue journey, right?
So what are the supporting questions that you're going to ask? Like what features are missing or what other things are going to be helped with, but those are more qualitative during a discussion and they don't think necessarily in a form. Thanks guys. I'm going to put you on the spot because I actually listened to this podcast episode and was trying to find it and drop it in the chat.
And one of the things I found insightful is this concept of running direct response on a PLG motion versus kind of a brand more of a brand strategy, which we run predominantly for most of our customers because they are high CV, long sales cycle, etc, etc. I personally love that idea, but you know, you, I think, or you now some brought it up and this is something you work with Evan. That might be unusual coming from us as refined labs. So I love kind of Evan.
We will start back to you and just thought process around that and logic into where you get anything you want to jump in on. It would be great. Yeah, I think that one of the reasons that we think about a direct response motion here is because the audience that you're trying to engage with from a PLG versus kind of a sales let motion is very different. So the when we're thinking about a PLG, right, you're advertising to the end user, the person that's actually going to be kind of the advocate for the brand within the company, they're going to be kind of that power user using the product.
So they are going to be the champion that's like internalizing the brand and building the brand up within the organization. So I think that that's one area where it's like we want to get them into the product. And then to start surfacing results or reports or insights to the team to kind of build that motion. We're just kind of that sales lot motion, but we typically advocate here if I'm not just really about building that brand awareness that brand affinity.
We're starting higher up in the final with that buying committee influencing that decision makers there. So it's two different audiences. And if you think about like the end user and the intent of that, that's why to me like this direct response motion makes the most sense because they're actively going to be hands on using the product versus a buying committee purchase of the product and then pass custody that down to, you know, individual contributor is going to be doing more of the work. But that's kind of the high level summary of their obviously go up further into the details.
But I think that it's worth exploring because again, just rooting it back to the end goal and that end goal is a user of the product to help remove them through the motion of acquisition activation adoption and so forth through the process to drive up your business. Thanks. Victoria, anything you want to add? Maybe the different slang given that this is something you're going through and evaluating right now for a brand new product.
I'll speak a little less to the attribution side because I think Oregon did a great job there other than agreeing that right at the moment, you know, you're capturing interest or high intention, some capacity is the best place to do that for us. We have a wait list which is very helpful for capturing not only intent but also information and how did you hear about it becomes very intuitive. The other I guess letter when you think about product when growth the two, you know, common ways you're getting more users is through users and co workers referring the product to each other. So you think about Slack's motion, it becomes, you know, my colleague and I'm talking about it.
And that's why I'm registering. So there is that motion of like upon sign up or creating an account. It's interesting to see if that comes from a colleague, you know, an arcade again, there's sort of an account owner who asks for access. So it's not necessarily relevant in our case, but something to think about.
And then the other piece is of course, you know, virality or word of mouth. And so if you're hearing that somebody else's post or a friend at some other company is using this thing called Slack and again an example, that becomes interesting to tell you if it's attribution, not just your own own to be their paid or organic efforts. But if you're getting the influence and you're kind of driving the momentum that you're hopefully trying to as a PLG motion. The only other thing I would touch on maybe, you know, extended beyond your original question, married around how do you qualify people to be best fits and it actually kind of affects that retention question earlier where you can get a lot of people into your product, but if they're not ultimately successful, it's not great for them.
It can actually backfire again to that word of mouth point where, you know, I just signed up. I tried it either. It wasn't ready. It wasn't right for me.
I couldn't see success with it. It took me too long to get to any value. And so I, you know, and that kind of becomes your brand versus I signed in and I had a great experience. So, you know, probably a longer topic here.
But when you think about product qualified leads, something I've been thinking a bit about is much the product qualifying the user and you qualifying the user to be good for the product. And so, you know, I know what sales and Carl and refined live do a great job of saying like, well, if you're not going to help you be successful, and so maybe we'll continue the conversation, but we'll pick it up down the line and the same thing with products. If you, you know, it's great to get a lot of signups, you know, working through even the trial motion by the people aren't going to be able to succeed in the product. It's actually probably not worth the churn or stress of trying to retain them or long term damage of them not having a good experience and talking about it publicly.
So I would just think about that as well as the actual attribution in the door. That sounds like a great post. I'll go back to right. Thank you.
All right. So I'm going to go to a conversation that we're having in here around organic content. And then I'm going to end the call with the refined labbers to answer a question of what have they learned this year. So this was posed to us as kind of what mistake have we made as a and refined lab so mistake or interesting learning in the first nine months of the year.
I'm going to come around the whole run at the end. First, let's go to this conversation from a failure. I apologize. I say your name incorrectly.
But I like this thought this thread organic content on LinkedIn. We have 1000 followers and started about a year ago with our startup. What should we focus on brand awareness with expertise on the subject and the industry or product features or like what the CEO wants to do promote new hires and other personal business stuff for all of it at once. Pod ring in on this pod if you're able to come on.
That's great. Otherwise, why don't we go to Tori and kind of elaborate on what Todd said and in your twist to it. Yeah, I think a great question. And, you know, some of what Todd was, was answering, you know, is certainly in full agreement with I think, you know, ultimately what it comes down to with, you know, an organic content strategy and trying to build that following is, you know, we say all the time that's right.
Education is, is critical. It needs to be the primary focus of what you're doing organically. But don't forget about the entertainment aspect as well. And I think actually, you know, Todd is a great example of this.
Everything that he has been doing, you know, on TikTok and bringing over to LinkedIn, you know, with some of his kind of video posts that he creates the different characters that he's inventing is an incredible way to keep people engaged with your brand and build that true affinity. You know, we're also, you also see time continuing to kind of dabble in the, you know, the pure educational post with like a, you know, talking head style video as compared to, you know, more of those, those kind of characters that he's assuming sometimes. And so I think, you know, having a mix of those things right but at the end of the day, I think, you know, one of the things that's also of equal importance, you know, with education is trying to find ways to humanize your brand. You don't want to just be following a brand and a logo and, you know, the education is great.
It's a nice byproduct of following but, you know, to truly build that affinity, you know, it's great to kind of show the behind the scenes, the people that are, you know, making that company work and especially for the fine labs right you know, it's all about the people here and so the more that you can kind of put those people front and center, the better you're going to be, you know, you'll probably see, honestly, really high engagement on some of those posts where you are talking about the individuals that work at your company celebrating them and the work that they're doing, you know, we're celebrating them on their behalf but whatever the case, you know, I think that that's a really important part of an organic strategy, but we don't want to do right is just kind of, you know, get into feature dumping, you know, on your organic following, you know, those people chose to follow you for a reason, and it's not because they're interested in, you know, your product specs, right. So, leave that stuff for the, you know, the sales collateral or for your, you know, your sales team, your customer success team, and don't try to sell people, you know, through your organic posting strategy, you know, focus on education but I think entertainment, you know, is a really important addition to that as well. Hey, I would say just one thing to really centered around is what is the objective of you know building this followers what is the goal right so it comes back to community building and ultimately how are you building that community so you're offering value serving content that's useful. I think one thing that people get fixated on though is attaching a branch to this POV and it does much bigger than that when you think about employer advocacy and kind of building that community so equally posting through like your handle on LinkedIn from a brand perspective is valuable but also I encourage you as you build this to have your team start serving useful content as well right because all of that gets that brand exposure out there and you become interested because I see a similar POV across that brand and start to follow it so because much more than just posting a hand load doesn't encourage you know kind of having a strong POV and your message around that.
Yeah, I'll add one thing which this obviously takes a while to get there but if you think about like our strategy and I'm not sure on intentional this is or just hard runs it this way which is great and that is obviously we let our employees go off and talk about whatever they'd like professionally etc we don't police that we just we encourage it make and share talk about whatever but if you look at like the refine labs handle what we do is we curate the best of our employees around a point of view that the company has. And so there's been times where you know our town department is kind of less than hey we want to put something on the refine labs handle and we said no because that's not how it works like post it first get a lot of traction on your personal handle and then Todd will curate that and kind of put it into kind of the voice of refine labs around our point of view and I'm not sure talking answer this on social media or whatever but I'm not sure that was intentional or not it's quite effective because it creates a consistency around the brand the voice and the point of view and it leverages what we know works which is what our employees are talking about on the platform so just a little hack that's helpful. Alright, we're about out of time I'm gonna go around the horn for a start. McArl have it heard from him for a while.
What did you learn what did you learn what's the one learning in the last nine months Carl. Patrick again I'll go quick what did I learn last nine months or so. You know from a sales perspective I think one of the big evolutions that I have made in my mentality from almost 10 years kind of in sales sales etc is just that selling is evolving to becoming more of a team sport whereas previously it was kind of more of a lone wolf type of sport. And I think a couple mistakes that we had made earlier in the year were just kind of holding on to that lone wolf type of mentality I was for sales hire came in and take over things from Chris and it was tough to let go after I took over selling from Chris and MJ and the executive team.
And bringing in our you know our sales team like Eric just kind of letting go of like closing deals alone like working your deals alone and I think we've evolved to a pretty cool spot to where there's a lot of involvement in the team on you know on various opportunities etc. And I think that mistake is just not doing that earlier and I think it's really timely to considering just the economic climate and just strengthens opportunities and just relationships in general that you build with your customers. So that evolution wish I would have done earlier. Yeah, I think similar to an evolution standpoint right with how we worked with all of our clients we experienced so much change over the last nine months right we saw the highs to highs and sometimes some of the lowest of lows with some of the clients we worked with.
So this last night's month really challenged me to continue to pivot and think differently right so we work with all different client sizes we work with different sales cycle links with different complexities. And so each one of those right this playbook notion or this building a select demand creation strategy had to evolve and pivot quickly and so that's one thing I just reacted quickly but still to maintain that long term focus has been a challenge for myself right because as marketers especially when we interact with your reaction But we're trying to think like how does our short term focus impact long term growth and so trying to push back on people that really wanted to drive volume and high and you know just lead lead lead and key three when things are tough. Some of those companies I did that we've seen like kind of this fall off in terms of like our long term momentum so I think it's just continuing to teach myself how to be okay with that change and have better conversations with myself about how to position the message and make sure that we build our story. Yeah, for me I think it's about learning how and watching companies you know really kind of self identify on the spectrum of like are you are you must have for like business continuity or your product or are you a nice to have and effectively expendable and you know the economic climate has really brought about you know some some really tough questions that companies have to answer but if you can answer that question fairly right like am I a vitamin am I a painkiller you know if you can answer that question effectively it can inform your marketing strategy and there are very different strategies based on where you fall in that spectrum.
For those companies that that you know are true you know business continuity offering software platform whatever they can kind of continue business as usual and for those that are more expendable maybe they need to focus more on like retention and up selling and cross selling their existing customer base but knowing where you fall in that spectrum is really important especially right now as spending is tightening up and you know what kind of look in the mirror and answer that question can really help inform your strategy. Thanks story and in Victoria. Yeah. Two things that have become very useful in the last couple of months.
One of the here for six I came and commented on the last line but the first is just you know we talk about a lot but do something instead of you know great about extended plans and plays and other considerations sometimes but if you have a hunch that either you know a message or example might work better in Q4 versus other quarters or you need to try the you know painkiller versus my fantastic and your talk track or your LinkedIn or talk or whatever I think it's figuring out a way to experiment and begin to the question earlier about being a junior team member. And then consider as well to try something and get some data points which leads to my second piece around having common ground the market research background in the formal sense. There's a lot of ways to get signals from the market and especially with even trying to watch something new and understand motions and audiences and IPs and price points and packaging and messaging all of these things. You're never going to have a perfect experiment but look for the places and get creative around where you can find signals or data or you know feedback that will help you inform your strategy and those two things combined you don't have to have.
So you know the research. Motion stood up but you can get the right signal to move in the right direction and eventually formalize things. You know in line with our R&D philosophy that I think there's we can get ourselves bogged down to the formality and you can miss a lot of opportunity because our buyers and the market out there changing quickly. Awesome thanks everybody.
I'll add one that I've learned. And that is the power of a subject matter expert in the sales process in a slightly different way and that is the top seller in Carl steam never sold before he stepped into the role. And so when you think about who our audience is and who we're building trust with and we're not exactly an inexpensive service to acquire. You know the relationship it's all about relationship trust expertise and bringing somebody into the sales process who's done the role before and can talk to senior level marketers or revenue leaders about it has been instrumental.
And that's something that I don't think it's enough talk about on the socials Carl certainly talked about it. And we have on the podcast will be talking about it more. It's been amazingly impactful to our business and something that will continue to replicate. Thanks for joining us with us.
Really appreciate all the questions. We'll be back in a couple weeks. In the meantime you can find all episodes on the podcast and on YouTube. Thanks everybody.