Everyone, welcome back to another episode of Stacking Grill. I'm your host, Evan, the VP of Demand here at Refine Labs. I'm joined by my awesome co-host, Ashley. Hi, everyone.
My name is Ashley Lewin. I am a senior director of Demand Gen here at Refine Labs. Today, Evan and I are super excited to talk on the topic of demand metrics align to revenue when you're switching to a demand gen model. This is a huge topic because a lot of times when you're switching from a traditional marketing or a lead gen model into this new demand gen world, there's a lot of questions on expectations and metrics that we should be aligned to.
You really need to set the scene of what you will be reporting on because it'll be very different from traditional marketing metrics. We're going to take you along and actually show you a little bit of a sneak peek behind the scenes of Journey here at Refine Labs when we onboard clients and the journey we bring them along with. It's a nice step to approach and then we'll also outline the metrics that you can report back to on your business leaders and counterparts on metrics that you should be able to be held against. With that, Evan, you have an extensive experience with onboarding clients as a VP of Demand here at Refine Labs.
Walk me through a little bit of what our journey looks like when you're switching or onboarding a net new client because I think it's very similar to when you're switching from that lead gen model to demand gen model. Yeah, no good question. I think I get a good depth of experience and breadth of experience working with 14 different SAS clients right now and just seeing under the hood of each other, business models and how they think about demand. This term demand generation has been used so differently across all of companies, businesses, teams, the assumption of what demand generation is.
It's just turned into this unknown. We're just using it loosely as a term of, okay, we're driving demand. That means lead gen. That means community events.
That means virtual events. But I don't think we really take a step back and think, what is our ultimate goal and project that we're focused on? We focus on metrics that matter and really focused around revenue. I would say phase one of this and there's an episode that talks more specific about the marketing metrics aligned to demand generation strategies that truly depict platform.
What we want to dig into a bit more is what are those pipeline signals and what are those true indicators that you're monitoring? That signal is the demand strategy effective? Are we seeing early indicators of success? Where do we need to pump the brakes and pivot?
Just walking through that journey, I would say phase one of all of this is access to data is going to be your best friend if you really want to do this well. First and foremost, establish what your inbound pipeline sources are. One thing that when we work with the client, the first question we're asking is please outline in your CRM what the pipeline sources drivers are. Think of these as truly those high intent pipeline sources.
Like the contribution to pipeline. These can be the website request demos, any sort of primary conversion point on your website. How are those trapped in the CRM? I would just pause that.
That's the baseline of where you start aggregating the data. I think that's so important. Before we continue on in this conversation, you really need to benchmark your data and you need to know what the current state looks like. You know, like what Evan walked through with the inbound volume, even like different sales metrics along the way too.
Like what's your current win rate along those primary conversion points? What's the average sales cycle? What's the pipeline velocity look like? All those different things.
Step one is just really making sure that you have those benchmarks because we're going to work on improving those benchmarks. These are like those key business metrics as well. Again, we're really kind of focusing on the pipeline metrics here. Not anything marketing related like impressions.
You know, anything on the page side, we're really just looking at the sales metrics here. So that's step one. Evan, step two then. The one thing through, we have all these benchmarks ready to go.
Now where do you go from there? Yeah, I think you really need to validate your strategy. And I think that that's one, you know, demand teams create these kind of constant calendars or programs that they, you know, they're 12 month program of what they're going to focus on and what they're going to do. And little strategy validation is incorporated into that, right?
They kind of set this path forward and along that path they don't sell to kind of pause into it. So that's one thing we do well with clients I think across the team is we set the expectation right? So we go to market with our new strategy, whether that's refining ICP, whether that's cleaning up messaging, targeting, like we have just all the platform signals based on the research that we've done within the CRM. One of the first metrics that we really like to look at, you know, is think about this.
We're putting a demand motion in play. So there's going to take a while to educate the market. So you're not going to be able to see immediate pipeline results, right? So some of the signals and key things that we like to look for, as I mentioned earlier, is the high intent or primary website conversion point.
That should be like one of the first metrics that you monitor after you want your demand strategy. And why is that? That's because that's directly influencing your pipeline, right? So that is truly a high intent prospect coming in saying, I would like to talk to the sales team and learn more about your product.
It's not you shoving a campaign down there throughout saying you want to talk to sales because we know what you want. I think that that's just a disconnect there. So for me, one of the first signals over the first, you know, really two weeks to 30 days is like the demo volume. Are we seeing a gradual increase of demo volume high intent hand raisers on website asking time to talk to sales?
Of course, behind the scenes, you're doing a lot of the optimizations editing, auditing like job titles, doing all of that stuff. The demo comes in. Is it the right ICP fit, right? So those are other nuances there.
But I would say that looking at demo is one of the primary sources that I focus on initially after launch. Awesome. Yeah. So key signal one is demo or, you know, high intent, what we call hand raisers or declared intent of volume.
Signal number one, another one I like to look at too, the kind of piggyback off of this is actually something I'm working through with the client currently is you may not see that high intent volume pick up right away and it can be a little antsy to see that, especially when you're working or talking with your sales counterparts, depending on your business. It can really depend. Some businesses, you can get that going pretty fast. Other times it may take a month or so for that to hit.
So another area or key signal I like to look for with clients is called like a brand aware or brand recall signal. So I look at this as a brand aware user's strength and I like to look at it in Google Analytics, actually. The reason why I like to look at this is it's classifying you basically with how you measure it is you look at direct or organic and then brand a paid search to do a filter that only contains your brand to weed out any other keywords that you're bidding on. Add those together and you can do like a stacked graph to see this and look at how that's trending over time as well as a signal.
The reason why I like to look at this as a signal and I know it's that in the CRM and it can kind of fall into a little bit of the vanity metrics. The reason why I like to look at it is that it's showing the strength of someone who can recall your brand and are coming inbound based on that brand recall. So that's kind of the premise of inbound demand marketing is making sure that you are in the minds of your potential users of when they need your product. They're coming to you right away.
You don't need to sell them on an ebook or anything like that. They just know like, oh my gosh, I need X product. I know exactly the brand I'm going to. They're typing in your name in the search bar or coming in, you know, organically whatever it may be.
So that's another one I also like to look at. If you're not seeing that brand volume or that demand volume coming up really strong in the first month because I've seen it before. It just kind of depends on business as well. Yeah, actually real quick on that.
Just a little bonus tip as you're right. It's balancing potentially vanity metrics, but really that's a signal of quality and then, you know, are we driving the right traffic there? What's our time on site? Right.
So we are using those answer metrics to kind of drive decision making. One little tip with that that is worked well, you know, working with clients is really trying to measure the quality of that traffic in the short term. So let's say we are waiting for that run rate of demo volumes, fundraisers. So I always like to look at like from homepage to demo page.
So first page to second page and can we see a correlation from percentage of users that are moving from one page to the demo page? Does it mean that's a quality index and a quality measure? So it's a little analysis I typically do on the side, but benchmarks and it helps us tell the story like, okay, we built this brand awareness and maybe this person is actually interested in exploring more about the product and how to talk to sales versus kind of going down to more of the content solution or needs to content website. I'm so glad you did that call out because I've had experience too where talking through this quality of traffic is also a huge kind of unlock moment when you're talking with sales as well.
It's something that they totally understand, they get, they're actually advocating for. So if you can say like, hey, yeah, we're in the traffic to the site is doing X, they get really excited about it. And it is kind of one of those core business metrics to show who you're bringing in and how they're performing. So I'm really glad you brought that up.
Another one kind of paying back off of the quality is we can go into like a key signal three and that is hand raiser quality. Evan talked to you a little bit about when you look at when you're looking at, you know, obviously we're trying to increase the volume of hand raisers and declared in tech conversions, but of course we're always looking for quality. So walking through what we look for with this metric and what you really kind of look for with clients. Yeah, I think kind of teased to it a little bit earlier, but one of the, when you launch a demand strategy, you are, you know, using customer research, CRM research, you're looking at what's driving revenue, you're looking at the industries that are contributing to revenue the business, right?
So you're building an true target audience that you want to reach at scale within the paid social platforms or whatever platforms you're using. But for this sake, let's just say, okay, awesome, we've done that pre-research, we went to market, now we are starting to drive these quote unquote hand raisers who are filling up this primary conversion point. Because we're very focused on driving pipeline and revenue for the business, the quality of those matter. And so there's a couple of signals that I'll look for.
First and foremost is what is the disqualification rate by job title? So one of the job titles matching up to the ICP typically, yes, could we like to do a lot of pre scrubbing and working with clients just to make sure that we got that pretty dialed in. So we'll monitor that. But apparently, what are those first couple that are raising their hands asking the top to sales?
What is the path to the next step, right? So are they getting disqualified immediately? Are they potentially coming from a free email that's getting disqualified? So I really try to look at that disqual report and understand a bit more because then that informs, okay, maybe we made assumptions that we shouldn't have.
Maybe this doesn't move for the pipeline as fast. So I think from a quality standpoint, but what's one of the things you look actually from a quality perspective as well for these same reasons? Yeah, I'm also looking at the win rate on these as well. So you want to see if your win rate is improving month over month.
Ideally, we like to look at metrics quarter over quarter. But when you're first starting out, you do need to watch it month over month. You will probably be getting questions during this time too of, hey, we switched this last month. What is happening is it's very hard to be able to go a full quarter without talking about this.
So I like to look at the win rate month over month and even broken down by the job titles and things like that. I think that's really great. The disqualified rate is another great way that you're talking about it there. Even the sales cycle length with it as well, I think is an indicator of quality.
So if you can reduce the time it takes to become a close one deal with those high intent conversions, I think that's another really key signal of quality as well. Those are just a couple of other ones that I'm looking for as well. You could even say average deal size too. If you're seeing an increase in that, there's a couple of nuances in that because it could be a little bit of a different story with the business or things like that.
Maybe you're going through pricing and restructure. But that's another key signal that you can look for with all of these as well. Yeah, and I think that's looking down funnel too. So if you're starting out and really looking at those early quality metrics at the beginning, you want to focus more on the initial, if that prospect hasn't moved through the sales cycle or what is the sales cycle or stage progression even too, I think which is another good key signal would be from hand raiser to medium booked.
That is an important signal that I think a lot of people oversight. They just, okay, my marketing effort is to drive demo requests for lead or in QLs. I'm done. I'm doing my hands clean audio.
But what really happens is like we like to see what is that conversion rate from demo request to a meeting booked. And so meeting booked signals that they have been qualified, they are eager to talk to sales, sales is deemed to somewhat relevant in this early phase. And I think that is again, part of the difference between evaluating pipeline metrics because you're engaged in metrics that the sales team cares about. And so you're influencing the metrics to build a stronger partnership with that team.
So I think that's kind of just not to jump ahead, but I think that gets us thinking about, okay, demo request, great. And then what's the next phase? That's the meeting books. How many meetings are actually being booked?
And of those meeting books, what are those other, you know, thermographic insights from that? What are those job titles? What are those industry insights? All of that kind of is a feedback loop into targeting and refinement.
So again, there's a conflent of conversion rate element that we got to keep a close eye on. And that's usually within the first two months of clients, we're focused on demo requests and qualified meetings or meetings booked. We call them PQMCA, but every company, all the bit of a different definition. But those would be the two first two months of clients.
I'm putting pressure on them to think about those metrics. What are issues that we can flag early on? And is it a conversion rate issue? Is it a job title issue?
Is it targeting issue? All of these later start to unravel as you dig into the CRM. Yeah, I'm so glad you mentioned that. Meeting booked is a huge lever that you need to be watching.
And it's a huge metric, just ongoing too. Like in the first, you know, couple of weeks, months, et cetera, since launching, you'll want to increase those declared intent conversions of, you know, demo requests, et cetera, ultimately, you really want to move down funnel. And that's where we'll be moving to, you know, after validation and scale of the program. That meeting booked is a huge one.
So, you know, the amount, and that's just kind of a quality metric with the meeting book, right? Is how many of those meetings are attended then? And that moved down funnel. So making sure that we're moving the meeting book to number, which marketing can 100% have influence on.
I've heard this before, you know, that's a sales metric. No, it's a marketing metric too. Because it's really dependent on the quality of conversions that you're bringing in. And then how many of those meeting books are becoming a meeting attended?
And that's kind of like a, like if we're looking at the funnel, I would call this almost like the higher end of the funnel, you know, in the sales piece of it. So when you're really launching here, those are the metrics that we really want to watch. And then once we get past and start seeing some movement within this higher end of the funnel, we can work our way down and start looking at the core metrics that you'll be measuring against ongoing. But are we missing anything for when you first start out of metrics, you should be watching or anything like that?
It's one thing just to keep an eye on because when you do your kind of initial audit of the clients, we always benchmark performance. And because we are looking at true pipeline and funnel performance, we always look at cost for demo and cost for meeting booked. So while that will change and normalize over time or stabilize over time, it's good to have kind of the pre and post benchmark. So I'm really gathering that data early on during your strategy validation using those key signals of high-end demo requests, meetings, what is the cost per investment you are making?
Because then that will help you a better line of future forecasting. And that trickles down the funnel, but I would say those are two elements that I really keep a close eye on. Absolutely. One other kind of like a pro tip, I guess, that I would recommend is to make sure that you are capturing this if you want to do it in like a deck format or however you chat within your team and report on this monthly and share it with a greater team.
I think that allows for a little bit more visibility and an idea of where the movement is happening. And so if you're not seeing your inbound pipeline, you know, jumping up right away, which rarely happens, it's we're playing a long game here. We're not playing the short game. So it does take a little bit of time for you to see that up into the right that you're looking for.
So when you report on these metrics, make sure you're doing it early on to set the foundation of the movement that you're starting to see when you're switching. So you're seeing that month over month trend. And it's really just to kind of help level set and show the movement is coming. It just takes a little bit more time.
It takes patience and so on. So this was a little bit of like a pro tip that I found over the years of something to you will get ahead of, I guess. Oh, yeah, you get that question out of time. It's like, well, we've been live for 12 hours and we have zero demo requests.
Let me know, shit. You have to get your adding market and you got to assume that people in LinkedIn aren't sitting on their 24 hours a day. So your frequency and reach is going to take 30 days to 60 days. So just have it setting realistic expectations early and often will save you a lot of these conversations.
So very, very good pro tip there. Actually, I think the listeners will value that very much though because we all love those questions. We are 36 minutes into our campaign being live and what? Oh my gosh.
If anyone wants like to be seen, we all feel this. We all get the questions and so on. I think patience is one of the hardest things. This is going a little off topic.
I think Evan, I can talk about it for hours. The patience is one of the hardest things when you are switching from a lead gen to a lead gen because lead gen is very short term satisfaction versus long term gains of demand gen. So making sure that you are getting ahead and these are the metrics we are chatting through will allow you to get ahead of this conversation because typically I see gosh, Evan, you work with so many clients. I see three plus months sometimes depending on the sales cycles before we see the impact of switching.
That can be really hard because I can be a full quarter of, hey, we switched over here. Why are we not seeing gains or we have revenue goals to hit. We can't just sit here and we are not seeing any movement and so on. So the reason why we really wanted to go through this is because you are going to be getting this question and it's a hard one to answer and I know it's one that marketers are constantly chasing to understand how to effectively communicate what to look for when you are waiting for that spike.
Evan, what do you typically see for an impact timeline? Just like other viewers or listeners that have a general understanding? Yeah, so having, you know, I expand clients that have six to 12 months sales cycles and some that have three to four but I really think that you start to see some positive indicators by month to so 60 days and you will start to see, again, that's like quality of traffic metrics, job titles coming in, kind of interest around the ads but I would say that three to four month mark is when you really start to see that momentum. I always, a terrible analogy but I always use this with clients as like when it snows, there's a same amount of snow on the ground and you start rolling that snowball, it's very small and over time that build and build and build and that's exactly what this strategy should be focused on.
It's like we still have the amount of audience to be captured but how we do it takes time and takes effort. So focusing on that knowing that we can't capture it all immediately. So again, awful analogy but seems to say, so I would say three to four months is like and with those it's not, well, I see a lot though as people just kind of wipe their hands clean. They're like, okay, well it says three to four months so I'm just going to set it and forget it's absolutely not what we're recommending here at all.
So obviously a ton of validation that goes into the strategy. It's not a conversation with the sales team really learning about metrics too, revenue metrics and what are those stage progressions in those first two months? Are there any sort of issues that you can uncover? So the best marketers are ones that flag issues in the sales pipeline before the sales team recognizes them.
And actually how this happened this morning with a client, it's we were like, what is happening here? You know, demo volume is increasing 15%, sorry, but the opportunity to read or sorry, meetings books is flat and none of this makes sense and what they found out is that they had a massive churn on the sales side and marketing wasn't in the loop of that conversation. So it wasn't until that was kind of flagged. All that to be said is it takes time, but it's so people to like continue to push boundaries and ask questions that may be are uncomfortable that they're not familiar with because really the conversation is about revenue metrics and aligning with the sales team.
Absolutely. First of all, the metaphor is not terrible. I'm going to start using it now with the snowball. I think it's really it.
And I'm glad you brought that up to you because another thing to mention is these metrics that we're talking through of what to look for and what to report on when you're switching, these are metrics that will get the entire business excited. If you talk to a sales team and it's like, hey, these are our new metrics that marketing wants to impact, these metrics directly impact them. Directly impacts their money that they're making too. So they'll get excited about it too.
And you'll get a little bit more buy in as well of, hey, marketing is really opinionated about improving the meetings books and the meetings attended. They're like, OK, we're fully on board here. And it allows you to have some of those conversations as a full revenue team. I think that's the biggest thing is to break down the silo of marketing and sales and look at what the experience looks like from the submission all the way through.
Because it's not that marketing just wipes their hands clean as soon as that submission comes through. We should be working as partners to get all the way through. I've had a client where they're brilliant at sales and they found a kind of an issue within their sales process. The sales team just didn't really have an understanding of.
And they're really glad that they brought it to their attention. And it helped improve the overall win rates and everything like that. So marketing was more successful. Sales was more successful.
The business was more successful. So it's a revenue team. So don't think that just because you did your job to get it into the pipeline, you're done. Like definitely break down the silos and look at what the whole experience looks like.
Because that's truly the premise of a demand-gen model as well. A little tangent there. I love it. I love it.
Cool. And then I know that we talked through the major metrics that we're looking for before you start investing impact. Are we missing anything else? Or should we touch on kind of a scale piece or save up for an episode?
We can maybe toss a teaser to out there. I think that the strategy validation is really where the road and teams are going to want to start building that momentum and looking at conversion rates. But I think that it's worth noting that the true demand-marketing revenue marketer, demand generation manager, however you want to define it, is going to be evaluating should be evaluating performance all the way through the final. So yes, we drove demo requests.
Yes, we drove high qualified meetings or meetings booked meetings attended. The next day is that is really those opportunities. What's the stage progression there? And then ultimately snowwelling into revenue.
So I mean, happy to kind of go a little deeper there where we can save that for another episode actually. But I'm sure there's anything you wanted to add for that scale of momentum. No. I think we could go on in a full other conversation about this one because it's a lengthy one.
And it's kind of like an ongoing where your program is and how you should be measuring it. But this is where you get into the fun part of mostly the sales efficiency metrics and what you're going to be reporting against. So for instance, of course, inbound closed one revenue or pipe as we like to call it. You're looking at the close, the pipeline, the velocity, the win rate, sales cycle, ad pack, ad pack payback period, all of those metrics which I feel like deserve a little bit more of in depth on.
I know for instance, ad pack payback period is kind of a huge unlock moment for a lot of our clients that we work with. Honestly, it was a huge unlock moment for me when I first found it as a marketer as well. So we'll go into that in another episode. We're just kind of giving you this little in between.
So you're just switching from a lead gen or maybe you're not even doing a demand gen model. And then you're kind of waiting for those numbers to come in to really show the impact. So you're getting those questions from all over the company of cool, what's happening is this impactful, we're not seeing revenue. The metrics that we walk through today, those are the ones that we would highly recommend going through and reporting on.
And making sure that you're getting ahead of it and showing it to the company proactively as well to show the movement there and the signals that are coming along with it. Evan, anything else that we should leave the listeners with before popping off here? Yeah, no, one last final tip. If you're listening to this and you are a marketer that does not have access to your CRM, pause this episode and go directly email your boss, your manager, your CEO, your CMO.
I don't get to do it is, but get access to the data because that's truly going to inform your strategy. And if you haven't had access to that, you're basing it off of assumptions and you all know what assumptions can do. So we'll leave it at that. This has been awesome to catch up with you actually and talk about this topic.
We'll definitely bring up more of the scaling elements in future episodes. But with that, thank you to all the listeners and be in touch soon. Thanks, everyone.