All right. Hello, hello everybody. Welcome back to a live edition of the Stacking Growth podcast. My name is Matt Wicks.
I'm a director of demand gen here at Refine Labs. And I'm so excited to be involved in this episode here. We have got an awesome panel lined up for you today to do some AMA style questions. Ask us literally anything.
There is no question too hard, no question too difficult, or too weird. We're taking it all today. So wherever you're watching from, Zoom, YouTube, LinkedIn, hop onto the chat, add your questions into the comments. We're going to be taking them live.
So just before we jump in and meet our talented panel, I've got a little announcement. Our friends over at Spark.com are gearing up for the Spark Together event on November 10. Spark Together is their first ever story focus marketing event. It's a day long virtual summit that will not be recorded.
So attending the event live is what you want to do. It's your only chance to hear stories from people like Ross Simmons, April Dunford, Will Reynolds. There is a list of amazing other people that are presenting. It's a six hour webinar style summit with a Netflix type experience, no session longer than 30 minutes, 10 presenters, 10 presenters, if I can talk today.
Moderated Q&A, live chats. If you've been to one of Spark Tour's office hours, then you're already familiar with the quality of the content that you can expect from Amanda and Rand. Really cool if you don't know this. This is the team that led their own fact checking initiative on Twitter's bot count.
That's pretty cool stuff. In fact, Amanda, even if you've been listening to the Stacking Growth podcast, you would have heard her episode, hopefully, back in the beginning of September, where she and our own Sydney Waterfall and Tory Kindle, we're talking about zero-click content. If you haven't heard that episode, go add that to your playlist. It's an awesome one.
At any rate, this is the quality of content that's going to be there. So you don't want to miss this. To register for their event, you want to go visit sparktoro.com slash spark together. That's sparktoro.com slash spark together.
OK, let's jump into this thing. I'm so excited about this. Let's introduce our panel. Jonathan, why don't you kick us off and introduce yourself and then hand it off?
Sure thing. Thanks, Matt. Hey, everybody. I'm Jonathan.
I'm a DDG here at Fine Labs, based out of Raleigh, North Carolina. Been here for about nine months. I made one appearance on the Stacking Growth podcast before alongside Matt, which was a really great episode on talking to the VCs about the man-John. And yeah, I'm excited to make my second appearance.
Looking forward to hearing all your questions. So let's see, Bob, you want to go next? Certainly. Thanks, John.
Like John, this is my second appearance. I don't think the first one aired. It was a panel about Google and all the other things automated in the paid media industry. So with Adam, I'm up here with three fine labs, I'm pulling number 100.
I'll throw that in there. And yeah, there should be a fun one. I mean, hey, like Jonathan said, there's no question that will go unanswered to weird or the better. Hey, what's up, everyone?
My name is Matthew Schnell. I've been with Profine since March of this year. Some people may know me from TGL. I must be one of the TGL OGs.
But yeah, I'm really excited to be here. This is my second second growth. But I'm really excited. I love these formats.
I love these fireside chats. And so really excited for you all's questions. I love thinking on the fly and just being on my feet when it comes to this kind of stuff. So really looking forward to getting some of these things delivered, hopefully giving you all some good feedback and helping you all with your strategies and tactics as you all end this year.
And I can't believe this year is almost over. We have, what, 60-ish weeks left and kicking off 2023, which is shaping up to be a really interesting year for a lot of reasons. For sure, for sure, it is that we are almost at the end of this year. And that seems to be what's on the mind of a lot of people looking at some of the questions that have come in.
So why don't we just jump into this? Let's take some questions. Galen here from Harshita. And I apologize if I said your name wrong.
Harshita says, what should we be thinking about through budgeting for next year? How should it change from last organic channel mixes, et cetera? A little bit of a broad question about budgeting. But if you guys think about the clients that you're working with, how are you currently thinking about budget allocation with them here?
What types of changes are you talking about? Any changes in how you split it up between channels? What are your thoughts? Matthew, you want to kick us off there?
Sure. I was going to let you on the go first. But I'll go first. Yeah, so I'm probably looking at it at a program level more than a channel level.
And I think that anyone on here should be looking at it that way anyway. So with my clients, it's really looking at what things programmatically are you all doing? And what are you all getting out of it? The first thing you need to determine is whether you have the proper measurement systems in place to measure at a program level.
But you really got to look at it that way. I've had one such client who was, for instance, when we did an audit of their programs that were spent in something to the tune of 100 grand a year on G2 PPC and hadn't had a single dollar revenue from it. And looking at things on a program level like that and being able to look at what you all were putting money into and what you're getting out of it, either using the self-retatribution or even if you're able to use the UTM strings to get that into your CRM. But really, for me, it's looking at it at a program level determining whether it's driving pipeline or revenue or even high-intent leads at the end of the day that are converting into pipeline and then pulling that budget back.
So I think it's really looking at what's working for yourselves, doubling down on it, being ruthless with the things that are not working, especially things that aren't working that you've given a lot of time to. It's one thing that would be having a program in place that's been running for three or six months. And maybe it's not getting you pipeline or revenue yet, but you're seeing good signals and you have reasons qualitatively to keep it going. But if you've got programs you've been doing 18, 24 months and you're just getting the same results out of it, those are the kinds of things you need to be looking at and what are we doing here?
We could be making so much better use of this money, I think, based on what we're getting out of this current spend. So look at it at a program level, assess how long you've been doing it for, and then just be ruthless with the things that aren't working. You will see it not working in your CRM, and even more so that you're gonna feel it not working in your gut. And I think that's something that you've got to trust.
Definitely, it's Jonathan, you want to? Yeah, and I mean, Matt, that was an awesome answer. I think the only thing that I would tag on is just the piece on measurement. So before you start getting into budgeting for next year, like take a step back, make sure that you actually can measure what you think you're able to measure, make sure that you understand your CRM data really innately, and that you know exactly when you're pulling these reports to build some sort of budget plan, that you know what other different data means.
So that sounds really obvious and foundational, but I see so many people head into budgeting and be led astray because they don't exactly know how their CRM data is pulled, what the best way to access all the different information is that they need. So yeah, just I would tag that on as kind of a point of warning for people as you head into the budget process. Yeah, you know, it's a good add-on too, because one thing we talk a lot about looking at is a hybrid attribution with software plus self-reported. I think our colleague Sam, Sam, Sam Coonley had a really good LinkedIn post a week ago where we talk about also adding the sales to the sales insights on those SDR discovery calls as sort of like that tertiary layer of attribution because people can always stop report something and then say something different on a call.
And so ultimately, keep yourself the measurement systems in place to look at it like holistically, almost think of it like your triaging attribution at the end of the day, just to make sure you're getting a full picture of your programs and what are driving things. Because ultimately, there's not gonna be one single source of truth here. You're gonna be looking at multiple sources. It's just a matter of whether you can reliably look at those sources and have confidence in what you're looking at.
Yeah, another thing I'd say is like on the gut instinct point that you made Matt, like trusting your gut on what new channels might make sense for you. So do your audience research and time in those different channels. And just like don't be afraid if you think that something's gonna work, maybe it's TikTok, then like commit to that, right? So and make sure that you set aside the experimental budget, whether it's for paid media or for content creation or do hires to be able to support that.
So I do think like while the measurement aspect and the historical performance is extremely important, you do have your marketer at the end of the day, you have gut instincts so far through them as. Yeah, 100%. Bob, anything you wanna add in on that? I was just gonna say what Jonathan just finished with, make sure you leave some budget for that experimentation or new channels that you're gonna test out because yeah, that's thing.
It's always gonna be something that comes up through the year or if it's like, you're coming like, hey, we're gonna finally start that podcast next year. All right, well, what kind of budget you have split out for that and how are you gonna attack it? So if you don't set that budget aside to begin with and you're fighting up the battle from the beginning. Yep.
Prashita, I hope that your question, if you have other questions about budgeting type topics, throw them in, we will get to them. Got an next question here from Anita. Anita says, if you're starting from zero, what's the recommended strategy for LinkedIn ads? Starting from zero.
Starting from zero. Starting from zero. That's what you're asking. That's what zero dollars.
Well, that's a good question too. Let's assume there's a couple of dollars in the bank at least that they have to spend on the ads. So I'm gonna take it as starting from zero means they've never used LinkedIn ads before. They wanna get started with it.
I feel like we should have Bob start this one. He's the performer. He's the performer. You're good, Bob.
I was gonna say, Matt, yeah, I was thinking the same thing. You guys zero history. I mean, history is always good to guide you for future stuff for making optimizations and adjustments. I mean, I think, I mean, this ties into some other questions I saw from the preliminary ones.
I mean, if you're starting from scratch, you've never done before. Yeah, you really gotta think about probably the one of the most important things about your audience, who you wanna reach, cause the audience creation is a big part of obviously how much you need to spend to reach that audience and then what kind of content should you create for that audience. So I mean, that's gonna dictate what kind of a content creator design team you need to put these ads together, working with your sales and marketing team to create the content. I mean, do you have content on your website?
I mean, are you creating a podcast that you're gonna repurpose some of stuff? So really start with that audience. That's probably the biggest thing. Know how many people you've got to reach from there.
You can back up, you can get estimates on what your cost per thousand pressure is gonna be, how much is it gonna be to reach that audience and then put your ad campaigns together from there and start testing. And then also give you an idea, like, to take one step further back is linked and adds the right place to be. Like maybe there was a reason why hasn't been done before. So you'll find that out all during that audience building phase, which I think that's totally right.
The point that Bob made that that's the place to start. So you might see in building out the audience that actually the potential isn't there or that it's gonna cost just like an exorbitant amount to reach you you wanna reach so you have to narrow things down even further. So that's the place to start. Yeah, so Anita, assuming, and I see you're on here, which is awesome.
Thank you so much for joining us live. Assuming that you're coming from zero experience, I would actually, even before I started with the audience and all this stuff, I would just start with the conversions that I've set up for yourself properly and make sure those, I've seen a lot of companies that don't have to version tracking set up and they were missing stuff as a result. So make that simple for yourself. Do it around high intent.
If you're gonna do lead gen, make sure you have those conversions set up properly too. But yeah, start a conversion tracking, make that easy for yourself. To echo what Jonathan and Bob are saying, audience is so crucial. It really makes a breaks the campaign at the end of the day.
LinkedIn's new audience builder is just really nice. So I'm gonna give you a really tactical tip on how to get in there because I've been doing a lot of work out of that the past couple of weeks and really weeding out bad fit job titles and bad fit industries from the audience. And I got a couple of pro tips here that I got from my LinkedIn rep too recently. So the first thing is when you get to your campaign manager, you can build an audience like straight from starting a campaign but there's a little on your left side menu, there's right under your favicon logo, there's the first thing down is called plan and then there's audiences.
So make sure you go to that on that tab and then you'll go to the audiences that you can build and you can go to saved audiences as the sort of one tab on the right and then you can create an audience there. The thing you wanna look at a lot is the audience summary that exists in LinkedIn. So when you build an audience, you should try to start with job titles assuming you have an ICP that fits what you're gonna be doing. And that audience summary like, let that really guide it for you.
So if you scroll down on the summary and it sees like what some of the attributes are and you go to view all, it's gonna show you functions, but if you scroll all the way down, you're gonna see specific job titles. And so go down to that bottom pane on that menu and go look through is like 10 pages worth of data on the job titles that are gonna show up in your audience and start looking for things that are really bad fits. LinkedIn's gonna gonna lump a bunch of job titles in there that don't fit what you're targeting and you should be excluding those, in my opinion, rather aggressively. There's a couple that'll show up like business strategy specialists and I know this from speaking with a LinkedIn rep recently, that's a catch all title from LinkedIn's algorithm.
They basically group something like around 250 different distinct job titles into the business strategy specialist. So you may wanna pull that out for yourself because it's gonna be things like co-founder or like senior associate of business development or like all kinds of kind of titles like that. So decide whether those are right where you are not and see how that impacts your overall audience. And then the other thing is you can see the companies also.
So look through the companies, you'll get 10 pages worth of data on the companies that are gonna show up and see if those are also the fits or the kind of companies your company wants to work with. And then weed those out and I would do the same also for industry. So if you sell to banking and wealth management and financial planning and stuff like that, but you're seeing stuff for like automobile manufacturing or like heavy machinery or stuff like that, it's because you have people who have multiple job titles in there who haven't like updated maybe their profile. So if you wanna probably pull those out and make that decision pretty small, there's people probably not that active on LinkedIn in the first place.
So that's really not gonna do much for you at the end of the day. And then the other thing is simply add inventory. So just make sure that you are, I recommend using brand awareness as an objective. If you're gonna do more of a create demand category halo style campaign where you're trying to just get content in the feed and have people consume it.
And then you're relying on people to make it to your website either through the rectum branded organic. You'll be using brand awareness. It'll be cheaper inventory for you to get there. It'll make the most use of your budget.
If you're gonna do things where you're gonna send people to like case study pages or stuff like that, use use website as it's as an objective there. So fit the content up to the objective and that makes the best use of your money. And then a video also you can use video of use or brand awareness in that instance. So I know I just said a lot there, but hopefully that was useful and will help you get on a good start overall.
Really, really great stuff there. And if anybody else was furiously trying to take notes and copy all of that down, don't worry, episode will come out later. So you can listen to that multiple times. There is some really great information there.
Matthew actually shared a LinkedIn post about this exact thing last week or the week before, something recently. Find them on LinkedIn, it's in his history, but really, really good stuff there. I would say literally like every person on this call that's running LinkedIn at, if you go after this call and check out that new audience builder, there's going to be something interesting that you find, maybe it's something that you could exclude, maybe you can put some additional job titles or expand it from graphics in and see where that puts you. But I think that's kind of a, it's like a must have.
It's a newer tool, but it's been super, super useful in some recent audience builds for us and also evaluating your past audiences. Awesome. Another one from Anita, this is a different, we're going on a different track here into the CRM. She says in HubSpot, HubSpot's being set up for the first time.
Do you set up two pipelines, one for people who express some sort of engagements by reading and clicking in your E-M PDFs, and another one for people who booked the meeting as a stage one of the sales pipeline? Or are these people entered into as an opportunity in the same pipeline? So the question is, do you have one pipeline where you throw all your contacts, all your opportunities, everything into everything? Or do you separate it out into, there's a pipeline for the actual sales opportunities, and then there's a pipeline over here for the people who are either just contacts or maybe have shown some type of interest?
What do you guys think? Yeah, I think maybe there's some nuance here with the term around pipeline, because I wouldn't set up two separate sales pipelines necessarily. I would give myself the ability to track which opportunities have come from which contacts and what those conversion points and pipeline sources were. So then you're heading towards more of a split the funnel analysis, and of course, we would recommend that you want to be able to tell performance of your high-intent inquiries that are coming in versus anything you've done through other lower-intent sources, webmaras, gated content, et cetera.
So you do want to make sure to be able to track that through from the contact object to the opportunity objects, but I wouldn't necessarily set up two separate sales pipelines within that spot to reflect that. Hopefully that answers the question. Yeah, I would echo what John was saying. I wouldn't have two different pipelines either.
What you could do, I've seen people do this pretty common, but you could set a couple of stages prior to what a sales stage would be for those high-intent leads. It's like a parking lot stage or a stage zero, and then that can be for the high-intent submissions before they get qualified and then they can move into a stage one. I think one thing to look at is to make sure you're date-stamping every single one of these stages in your pipeline. So when they move to a stage, it's time-stamped, and then you can see what the progression looks like from a cycle standpoint.
But that, in my opinion, I always defer to like, simplify as much as you possibly can, in my opinion, having two different pipelines running parallel and your hub spot is just inviting a lot of complexity that your team probably cannot manage. Yeah, that's a good point. Like maybe it's the pipeline really means like lead status. So it's like before something becomes an opportunity, what are the lead statuses?
Once every just a stage one off, where does it go from there? Yeah. Anything you want to add onto that one? Yeah, just echo what everybody else said.
I mean, that's definitely the way that the demo fills out the demo request form on your website. I mean, there are a lot more high-intent than somebody that signed up for your email newsletter. So you don't need to separate them out. I mean, they're all going to be in your CRM.
But if you got that parking lot for the high-intent form, like yeah, you can treat them differently. They'll probably move through into your pipeline a lot faster anyways. Yeah, I would say like in that regard, like help yourself out using the lead statuses. Like, you know, use actually, it's the subscriber versus lead versus marketing qualified lead.
Use it correctly. If you want to make high-intent marketing qualified lead before it gets qualified by sales and moves to SQL opportunity, that's a good route to go. People who are doing content downloads or sign up for your webinars, keep that at lead until they get scored or until they make a high-intent submission. And if you know people are in your newsletter or your email subscription, keep them at the subscriber level.
So use those lead status levels appropriately. And then also, if you want to even further do that for yourself so you can measure it. I mean, just separate high-intent versus low-intent for all your leads coming in. I mean, I said one client that does that.
Anyone that comes in from demo or contact us asking to talk to sales gets immediately put the high intent as long as the permigraphably fits. And then almost everyone else that comes in with the content download or webinars, this relation just sits at low intent until it moves into high intent. And then sales doesn't even bother at that point. Yeah, awesome.
The only thing that I would add is if you're from, if you haven't SDR team and your SDRs are gonna be responsible for nurturing some of these contacts and developing them, developing the relationship with them, you want to make sure that they have the ability to set a status with those contacts that reflects where they are in the pipeline, I guess, of building that relationship. So it's not a pipeline. It's maybe more of a report. But as you're building out your stages, think about that for your SDRs.
So they have an ability to keep track of where the people are through their talking to. Okay, let's go to the next question. We've got one from Nicholas Manzine. He says, how would the speakers manage to create demand and service niches or niches?
Maybe that's the next question we'll handle, is it a niche or niche? How would you manage to create demand and services where competition is really high? So but broad question, but if you think about an area, lots of competition, lots of competitors, if you're thinking about, if you're approaching creating a new demand, gin strategy, what are some of the things that you guys, just top of your mind, some of the things that you start thinking about? But I mean, if I were to think just right off the top of the head about it, like how do you, I mean, if it's crowded, how do you differentiate yourself?
Yeah, that's where my head goes, is differentiation right off the bat is, what is different about my company, my products, what's different about our team? What are those things that I can stand on that I can talk about differently? I'm not looking at all the competition, you see a lot of similarities especially. Oh, we're losing Bob there for a second.
I'm losing you, man. I can shine in real quick here. I actually worked for, and I don't know what service this person is in, so I can't speak to that specifically. I can say that I mean, I worked for an agency previous to working at REVINE, where we were at a time like kind of a dime of dozen service, we were a marketing agency.
And one of the things that we did, that was really smart, was we, when you're in a niche industry, you have to just niche further down, I use niche, not niche. So like we were a marketing agency, that's a pretty dime of dozen agency, and we only worked with companies in manufacturing or industrial. And so we oriented our entire content strategy around that, really deeply understood those specific pain points regarding industrial, a couple of things that we knew, for instance, like none of them used CRMs. So we had to do a lot of coaching, make a lot of content around YCRMs or Vital as a business tool, a lot about creating content and how to distribute it for 2022 or 2021, but really it comes down to just niche you down and then building your entire go-to market around that.
It's an organizational sort of decision to make, but I think ultimately you need to like, before you can have unique POV and you actually need to have sort of a unique focus, and I think you need focus is kind of where you need to actually treat that for yourself. Yeah, I'd say you could talk about like the positioning topic for hours that could be several different sessions live, but if you want to refer back to like a really good resource on that, there's a talk with Chris Walker and April Dunford, Matt mentioned April during the intro to this where they talk about like establishing your unique point of view and looking at competitive alternatives, your unique attributes, what value per you provide. So I'll just refer you all back to that as a really good resource. Definitely great content.
There we'll go ahead and move on to the next question. We've got a couple here from Michael Henderson. Michael says, where do you find inspiration for ad copy and creative working with a client that has no existing demand? So this would be a client where they are creating a category from scratch, never existed before.
Where do you get inspiration for ad copy and creative? How do you guys think about this? How do you think about, where do you begin with messaging? I don't know that it would differ based on whether the client has existing demand or not.
I mean, in terms of like where to look for inspiration, we're lucky or fine-lapse that we get tons of different campaigns out the door constantly that are always inspiring us, but I mean, just keep your eyes peeled and your feeds. I mean, make what I like to do is just grab screenshots of things that I find compelling, keep like a running list of those over time because it's easy to forget things that you've liked. So just in terms of like general creative inspiration, I think just like make sure you're documenting things. In terms of like messaging points of what's working, like make sure that you're digging into whatever demand that you do have captured within your CRM, talk to your sales team, try to elevate some of those pain points that have been particularly relevant in closed-line deals.
There's so many different ways that you can kind of find inspiration for your overall like messaging that you want to bring into your ad copy, just some like initial start. So keep your eyes peeled, look into CRM, talk to sales. Yeah, I think in this instance, you got to be, I mean, I don't really distinguish if you have zero demand between ad copy and just messaging at large, because like they're neither kind of one and the same, you may not even necessarily add copy at this instance. I would get as scrappy as I can, do a lot of hand-to-hand combat, like people who are active customers, like what do you think of us when you think of company X?
Like just get an idea of how your customers think of you, that helps certainly position and message you a little bit. Or also look at that vis-a-vis the idea of what you all want to be and ask yourself like, all right, are we actually like projecting the kind of messaging and POV that we're trying to message out to our customers and the way our customers think about us? You got to use basically all the tools that you're disposable, I think to me it's just understanding what you all want to be as a company, what category you want to create, what demand you want to create, how you want people to think of you, and then just trust and verify whether your customers think of you that way and if not, there's a mismatch in your positioning versus who your customers are and something you have to actively shore up. It's a fun project.
It sounds like something where you'll be doing just a lot of stuff like that in order to figure out what can dial that in and look at it as a continuum. I mean, it's something that you're going to see shift over time, like what you all are using as your primary messaging in the first 60 days, probably won't be what you all use in the next 60 days and it's going to be a continuous iteration. So don't get married to a certain positioning on ad copy or any kind of messaging, especially when you're that early and you have no demand. You got to have to just understand and just accept the fact that you need to be flexible with that a little bit as your company matures.
And the other thing is like, is it even the right time to even take that position? I mean, if you're that early, aren't you better off kind of playing in an existing category or playing in a place where demand exists and then staying it off when you go to a company to a certain point? I don't know, I mean, that may be an easier way to get to a certain valuation before you can actually try to create a manner or create a category for yourself. Bob, did you want to add on to that?
I can try, hopefully, the internet is stable enough for a little bit. But I mean, yeah, I think to Matt's point, hopefully if you've got some customers, you've got a CRM you can rely on, you've got a win loss analysis, that's going to tell you how your actual customers view you. I think that's certainly important. That's going to guide your messaging and your ad copy or just messaging period.
I know the win loss analysis can be used for a lot of other things as well. I had that written down for some of the other questions, but it's like that's one thing that shows you, are you actually creating a new category or do your customers view you a specific way? Why do they use you? So I mean, that can give you insight to, too.
I mean, to Matt's point, too, are you playing in a big sandbox or trying to break out or, I mean, do you actually have, are you breaking out and that's what your customers feel as well? I was talking to somebody on our creative team here at Refined Labs a week or two ago about this exact topic and was asking where does she get her inspiration from? And she didn't think about things that are in the market necessarily. I mean, you might look at competitors, you might look at that stuff, but inspiration was coming from all over the place.
Don't be afraid to go to B2C companies and look at what they're doing. And you can find inspiration in all kinds of things. What if you're building a new category, if you're existing in a category, do something different. Be different.
If you're saying the same thing as everybody else, if you look the same as everybody else, it makes it really difficult for a buyer to figure out why they should buy from anybody, much less you alone. Okay, so different question. This is related more towards career progression and marketing. Michael says, have any of you made it from performance marketing to demand generation?
If so, are there any resources you could share that help with that transition and what skills from your performance marketing experience shines through on the demand-gen side? But I hope your signal's working for this one. I mean, follow Refined Labs. That's probably the biggest resource.
I mean, I've been in performance marketing doing Google Ads and other paid media and played on the lead Amsterdam wheel forever. But yeah, by shifting to demand-gen, you really, I mean, it's a mindset shift and it can't be hard when you're trying to convince other people to do it, but from a performance marketer perspective, I mean, yeah, you got to have that buy-in and know that like, yeah, that gated content and those MQLs, they're not turning into leads. So if you have the data behind it, I mean, I love looking into the data and if you can say, hey, yeah, we generate a thousand leads. How many sales did those actually turn into?
I mean, if you can prove the case that it's not that juicy or the squeeze, it's like, hey, you've got this gated demo video on your website, 3000 people went to that page, but we got 10 people to fill out the form and actually watch a two minute demo video. Is it worth it to try to gate that for those 10 people, those 10 emails or should we just let all 3000s people view that video? So the mind shifted. We lost him there.
He was on a roll with it. Right, right, right, where I would have gone. The mind shift, you definitely have to take a different mindset on how you're viewing the activities. Guys, what do you want to add?
Go ahead. I was going to say like, this isn't necessarily a resource, but what helped me in like what I feel like was a turning point in mind, we have a journey from doing performance marketing to more demand gen was being able to like be an active participant in a lead like a CRM implementation. So like setting up the HubSpot instance, figuring out how that data flows, the Salesforce, and then you naturally get involved with the sales team, you get involved with customer success and all the different parts of an organization that rely on that like marketing automation to CRM link and that technology. So if you can join an organization that's small enough, where that's still in kind of like the foundational stages, you can be a part of building that out, you get to see really like how pipelines work, what's the right data to look at, what a different stakeholders with an organization care about because like at the end of the day, demand generation is not just like a marketing activity, it touches all the different parts of like the go-to market organization.
So I think it's really, that's an awesome thing to get into experience with. And if you do it at a place where it's small enough that you can talk to the heads of sales and pre-sales, then even more beneficial. So yeah, I started out with like paid search and was like really, really tactical and then switched to a smaller startup and that's really where I built that kind of skill set out just from that career development standpoint. Yeah, I'll add I did not come for performance marketing into demand I was probably more of a content marketer actually before I went into today, which I think is an interesting progression in and of itself because you understand what you actually need to deliver like with ads and with programs and stuff like that.
But to echo a little bit on John's, I think every performance marketer, if you do well in performance marketing, if you know how to navigate around Google ads or analytics or anything like that, you have all the raw skills already needed to honestly be a demand gen manager demand director because you understand reporting and database management in a lot of ways. So for a performance marketer trying to push into demand gen, you're almost taking that like 3000 foot view and you need to like elevate yourself to that 20,000 foot view, right? So you need to look at it at a higher level and how your activities are impacting the greater business. But to echo your point, Jonathan, it's understanding how to work in a CRM, whether that's HubSpot or Salesforce, understanding reporting and dashboard builds, but then also having an understanding of content and how content performs in certain sort of instances and understanding how to double down on what's working and understand what's not.
But I think performance marketers have all the raw skills and tools set to be a demand gen director in almost any use case or instance. It's just a really a matter of mindset and then getting yourself out of being overly tactical and thinking more strategically about things. That was a shift for me career wise that took maybe about two years to fully sort of understand getting out of being so tactical and getting more strategic overall. But yeah, if you're a former smart trying to get a demand gen, you have everything in your toolbox to do it already.
You just got to find the right environment to go learn and fail a little bit and iterate and scale up. Totally. Great advice. We have got a handful of people that are willing to come on and ask their question.
So let's see, we've got Connor, if you're still with us, you want to unmute yourself and ask your question? Sorry, my video's not working, but I was curious. How would you convert the revenue R&D model that Chris talks about to B2C? Like I'm a B2C marketer, I've followed and implemented all your stuff.
Like the self-reported attribution, hybrid attribution and just I love it all. But just curious, you would scale that or if you can scale it down to something like a $200 ACV instead of 40K, if that makes sense. Anybody want to jump in? Are you, Connor, are you mostly asking about like the different exit criteria?
I think just to say like the stages of the framework should still fit regardless. I don't think that there is too much of a difference between B2C and B2C. I guess the difference would be like you're pointing to like the just the volume and the average sale size. So you might need to adjust some of those like exit criteria from stage to stage.
But I think that's totally valid way of going about it with certain experiments that we started to run within the framework. It's not like you always have to stick to X number of high-income conversions or X dollar amount in ACV. Hopefully I'm not stepping on anything that Chris would disagree with, but I think he would echo that. Yeah, yeah.
So something, because I know like, yeah, it's mainly about the exit criteria where he talks about 500K in pipeline. Oh, yeah. And that's like 2000 deals, if you're selling something at $250, like does that scale down? Yeah.
You guys look at it to like maybe you only do 100 because we're getting so much more traffic than B2B. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, it has to be a sliding scale that's contextual to your business.
It's like that starting exit criteria that exists around your R&D right now is largely just a starting framework that we even understand internally will be iterating on and applying on a case-by-case basis with our own clients. So you have to look at it in context to your business and determine what is an appropriate exit criteria to go from stage one to two to three to four to five based on what my ACB is, what sales I'm doing. I'm assuming you're doing a lot of ads and B2Cs, probably a lot of Facebook, probably a lot of, maybe some TikTok and stuff like that. But yeah, it's a sliding scale.
Like you need to just look at it on a program level and instead of proper expectation around it for yourself and then just stick to that criteria, honestly. Like don't edit it. Don't edit it to fit a new program unnecessarily. So if you're doing Facebook ads and it's already operationalized at stage five, don't slide that scale to accommodate something like TikTok if it's not, let's say working quite as well.
Okay, no, that really helps, especially looking back at things that we know we're working like Facebook and seeing how it compares to a TikTok or Instagram. So. Yeah, so I mean, if you already have something that's operationalized, I mean, that you should just reverse engineer the exit criteria from there. So if you have it at stage five, really stage five is simply stage four, but with process behind it or it's super repeatable.
So you can almost look at it as almost stage four-ish, but just reverse engineered the stages from that point. And that's gonna tell you very clearly what stage one should look like. Cool, that's great. Thank you.
Awesome. Thanks Connor. Appreciate it. Let's see next up we have Alexander Hudzik.
Alexander, you with us still? Yeah, how's it going? All right. Okay, so I'm in self development.
I've been leading teams for eight or 10 years and I've been listening to Chris Walker's content for three years, very much resonates. I've sat under marketing many times at different companies. And so sort of my question now and I'm at a bigger company now, where we agree that there's programs that generate MQLs that are not converting through the funnel. And so we literally have millions of dollars that we can shut those programs off that I'm advocating for.
But sort of struggling with how would you recommend? We think about figuring out what are the marketing programs that will generate those sort of, you know, what he calls those high-intense, you know, contact sales requests to the website because obviously I agree that the way software attribution is measuring how we're getting those is not actually what marketing needs to do to generate those. And I've been listening recently, he's been really big on the self-reported attribution. So I imagine that's part of being part of the answer.
And I get that, I was hoping if there was anything else that we should be looking at to try to figure out what are the types of marketing things that are working such that we get the right, I qualified people in our sweet spot persona that are interested in what are the sales. Awesome question. So for myself, I'll give a short answer and then I'll kick it off to our panel here. So one of the things that we do with every new client that comes on board with us, one of the very first activities, we get into the CRM and we do an exercise that we call split the funnel.
We go into and essentially you start down at the bottom with what's been one, what's turned into revenue. And then you follow that all the way back up the pipeline to what are the drivers of actual revenue, not one of the drivers necessarily of the MQLs at the top, but what are the things that are driving revenue? And you'll notice some things really quickly. Chris Walker talks about this all the time.
The lead gen activities, ebook downloads that can bring in tons and tons of MQLs, a lot of the times you're gonna find out that that's a lot of wasted money, that it's not generating revenue most of the time. So you're gonna find those types of activities by doing this type of split the funnel exercise. That's typically where we start and then we start having conversations kind of off the tree branches of that of, okay, what's behind this? If there is no self-recorded attribution, how did you hear about this type field on your signup form?
Then there may be a lot of questions about what is actually driving that? And then you've got some homework to do from there to start digging into it. Guys, what would you add to that? Or what would you just agree with all those things?
So where would I start to dig into that to go through that out? So for us, it's in the CRM. So we're gonna go into the CRM and we're gonna start pulling reports on revenue. So is that what you mean?
I guess I would ask Alexander, like how are you determining the programs that are inefficient right now? Like what are you looking at to tell you that? And is there not a way to do the same kind of analysis to show what is working? Or is it just that there simply is nothing that's working right now?
Well, so I mean, we don't proportionally, you get a very small number of those really high intent ones. And it looks like those things are direct organic or SEO or whatever. But like obviously just throwing a bunch of money at that is not gonna solve the problem. So I guess the answer is ask that question on the form and then start to go through that out.
But if it's a different answer to go figure out how to get more of those types of leads or how to start to investigate where to go through that out. I feel like, go ahead. What are some of the things that we're doing programmatically right now to try to try to try to try to kind of kind of conversions? Well, a lot of, I mean, everything, all the typical, be-to-be tech programs, kind of authentication, webinars, events, everything.
But a lot of those programs kind of are aimed at optimizing for the MQL. So we have some obvious things that we can turn off but we can't figure out the obvious thing to go, to go double down on. And maybe that's just the billion dollar question. And if we could figure that out, then we would all get promoted and our companies would all be extremely successful.
So maybe there is no methodology to go figure that out. Besides that the self-report attribution is a smart way to investigate. I didn't know if anyone had any other ideas. But you guys keep a note, like when you guys do discovery calls, sales teams asking how they heard about you guys too.
You can like that tertiary level for yourself as well? Certainly not in like a clean way that we can report on it. So that would be another good way to start too. Yeah, that makes it a little bit more insight into like other ways people are finding out about you and give you a sense of like, okay, we should explore and investigate these programs if we're not doing it or we could put more dollars towards that.
I think some of it is just talking, just talking to your customers. Like I mean, you do have a good feedback loop to talking to customers and asking like, how do you find out about products or solutions or how do you do your research just in a sense? You have to kind of get your hands dirty, you may already be doing that. But just things like that to kind of surface some new channels for yourselves that you can run programs to.
Exactly. Yeah, that's a great call. We're not doing a great job of that. Yeah, so I would say, emphasize that for yourself, emphasize talking to customers, like total non-sales environment, non-sales setting up on the cross-zone bullshit like that.
You know, like I just want to learn about my ICP and just want to learn about how my customers are discovering products and how they're doing research and try to get eight to 10 of those for yourselves. And that'll give you a good hypothesis for ways that maybe some new programs or some new channels that you can look at that you haven't already. And then you kind of set it a little bit where you guys are optimizing a lot for NQLs. And I would say some of the programs you're optimizing for NQLs, pull down and pull some of that back to optimize for high-end and see if you see a lift from those programs.
I don't know if you can take some of that, pull some of that budget away and say, hey, I want to take 25% of that budget we're optimizing for just a direct response conversion or an MQL. And I want to try to take a different approach to it in terms of how we deliver and how we message and see if we can do self-proctibution and see if we see a lift from that channel as a result. Cool, thank you. Well, goodnight.
Awesome, thank you so much for the question, Alexander. Let's see, still got some time. We've got Julie Runes. Is Julie with us?
All right. I think our company actually sounds like Matt, it would fit into your previous company's niche. We are a small to medium industrial company. We design and build original manufacturing equipment.
Thank you. I'll try with this question. So since this is a company that started as a one-man, one project at a time company and now is a multi-million dollar annually with 15 full-time employees, there's been sort of some difficulty in convincing leadership, which actually boils down to one person, that it's really important that we have a CRM, that sort of tracks all of these things that should be reportable. And they don't really see the value in setting really specific targets and goals.
I sat down the other day to have a meeting about our marketing direction for 2023. And I asked what the main goals for 2023 were. And they had nothing to do with marketing. The answer was we want to be on time or ahead of time for all of our in-house projects.
And that was really the entire answer that I got. So is it worth in that situation sort of making that case for really pushing CRM and targets? Or are we not there yet? Do they want to grow the revenue in the first?
They do. OK. Do they have an ERP system? No.
So they don't have an ERP system to help figure out when things will go out on time either? What are they using, Excel? Well, I guess we are sort of tangentially using Microsoft Project, but not really to its fullest extent. So right now, yes, our entire production schedule is in Microsoft Excel.
OK. So this company sounds pretty immature in processing the way they want to do things. I mean, even the manufacturing component and the lead time around assembling and shipping the product is pretty immature. So you probably would have an easier time committing to get an ERP system before getting a CRM.
But I'll make the case for CRM right now for you. I mean, I worked at a company where we had a really immature Salesforce instance and I was fortunate enough to work with the Sales Director who understood the value of CRM and pushed it really hard. Your best friend in getting a CRM system at your company is going to be your sales leader. So you don't have a sales leader?
No. We don't have a sales department because everything that we do is project based. It's very, very custom. And so we're not really selling products.
How are people coming inbound to buy your products? Or how are people buying your product in the first place? So right now, we have a business development leader who she and I sort of are narrowing down our target market and we're really trying to start creating content. Really, before I started with the company, it was just her alone.
And her CRM was also an Excel file that she was going out and finding companies we'd love to work with and then finding their ideal customers within that company and sort of cold reaching out to them. And we really tried to change that entirely and just sort of switch it around to putting content out that would attract that audience rather than pick them up. How many contacts do you all have? Can't be that many, right?
Right now, we've got about 700. OK, so look, I would go with your business development leader and just make the case, I mean, say, hey, I want to use part of my budget to get as low rent as year round as possible, whether that's like HubSpot starter or Freshworks for yourself or something like that. But ultimately, the case for it is like, look, this is a business tool. How are we going to assess the health of our company quarter by quarter and frankly year by year?
If we don't have good data in here where we could do appropriate forecasting or we can look at our historical win rates or we can even look at who our best fit customers are based on who we're selling to and how much money they make for us. So you have to look. So I mean, I would be framed just as a business tool and away from the company to get visibility across all sales and business activity that happens as it pertains to creating revenue for the company and helping you all get more projects than beyond time for in the first place. So I think you need to have a united front with your business dev leader.
You all need to come to them with a solution already in mind, a cost already in mind, how it will fit in your budget already in mind, and how you all will utilize it in the first year already in mind. And if he still says, if he or she still says no, you probably aren't going to get it. And I would consider looking elsewhere as a company in the next 12 months or so. But that's just my honest answer.
I've run into people who do not believe in CRMs. I think it's unfathomable in 2022. But those people still exist. Those people will end up not winning in the long run.
But that's the tech that I would take. OK, thank you. Thanks, Julie. OK, couple of quick minutes left.
We'll bring on one. See if we can tackle this one real quick. Obai Durani. I'm so sorry if I missed your name.
I know it's all good. What's up, guys? How are you guys doing? Doing great.
Cool, cool. So just some real context. Some quick context before I ask my question. I'm the first known only marketer at a new SaaS company, our average deal size is like 15k, and our buyers are SaaS-Aes.
And there's also no demand that exists for our category. So there are things that I'm doing that could lead to us getting new users right now in the short term, cold, outbound and stuff. But I'm also planting the seeds for a demand creation engine. But there are things that I'm doing before I could get that going, like message testing, nailing our positioning, and updating our home page to reflect all those results.
I've also got video content going from my CEOs LinkedIn profile and a podcast that I started with him to talk to other sales leaders. And I'm working my way up to in-feed LinkedIn ads. So what I want to ask you guys is, what are some things that I need to be mindful of as I build this system out? And what do you guys think is a good path for me to follow if I want to recreate a demand creation engine similar to refines or something that you guys would do for one of your clients?
First thing that came to mind is you're running through all the different stuff that you're working on. Maybe I missed this, but it was really around the inbound buying experience. So making sure that that's just super frictionless for people who do actually come to the site and are interested. So the upfront forms and what the process looks like for actually booking a demo through to what the first demo actually looks like and making sure that that is as sort of this possible.
It sounds like you're doing a lot of good work on the demand creation front. But you want to make sure that you don't have that leaky bucket that you're driving folks into. So just the first thing that came to mind is you ran through those priorities. Well, yeah.
So I mean, on that front, we only have one seller, which is our CEO. So our main CTA is just like a cowling link to his calendar. And then so if you book a demo, you can just book a call with him straight away. And then he jumps on a call and walks you through everything.
Other than that, I created a profile on G2. I hired this SEO agency to get two blog posts per month going just so we can show up for the little demand that's already there on search results. And yeah, we have a pretty good MQL criteria system as well. We manually approve each workspace before it's created, just to make sure that it's someone actually within our target audience and ICP.
And then we also help every single person on board set up their entire workspace and stuff. And the founder will literally go out to their office and sit down with them and help them set up the product and all of that. So yeah, I just wanted to know before I get to the LinkedIn ad stage, is there certain data I need to be collecting? And just one of the processes I need to be setting up to where when I get to that stage, I'm not like, it's like, oh crap, I could have done this before.
And now I'm scrambling or something. Can I ask a qualifying question here real quick? Are you guys investor backed? Are you a bit strapped?
Yeah, we're investor backed. And we're pretty small right now. We're nowhere near being able to afford you guys. But hopefully down the line, that's yeah, I'd love to do that.
That'd be super cool. The reason that I ask is that when you are investor backed, even if it's just an angel investor or two, and even if it's relatively not that much money, there's pressure behind that that can sometimes wear down your ability to have patience for a long game. So something that is good to start doing now, if it hasn't already begun, is to have conversations with your investors about how you are playing the long game. Because you have to have patience when you're creating demand.
The demand creation tactics that we would guide you through are not the things that are going to fill the pipeline next month. It's the stuff that's going to be helping you to scale your business well next year. So you've got to be doing the short term activities to start filling up your pipeline. And those may be things that are completely unstable like later on, but you've got to do those things right now to start generating wins, get your investor excited.
But start having those conversations about the patience of the activities that you're going to be doing to create demand. No, that's like a really, really good point. You're totally right. I mean, I had that conversation with my CEO and got him totally on board, but I didn't consider convincing him to convince the investors or if he's even like spoken to the investors about this.
So that's really helpful. I appreciate that. Thank you, Matt. Yeah.
One thing I'll add also is be mindful of like introducing new programs before you've really got a process behind a program that you're currently doing. You all sell the AEs, basically, you know, people in sales. So I would also be really mindful of the level of content that you have to have. People see a lot of content.
They tend to act well to certain times and not so much to others. So you got to be with sales, you got to be entertaining on top of being educational. We got a guy like Todd here who knows how to do that pretty well. Which one do you know?
But yeah, be rigorous on the standard of content that you all are creating and distributing as well. I think that's another thing to be mindful of, because the bar's high with that ICP. Yeah. No, that's a good point.
I appreciate that. Thank you, Matthew. All right. Thank you so much for the question.
Everybody, thank you for your questions for today. We are at time. So we're going to wrap up this session today for this live AMA. Really appreciate all of you joining us that logged in here to be a part of the discussion.
Keep sending your questions, email them, post them on LinkedIn, post them on YouTube if you're watching there. We'll be watching for them and we'll get back to you on them. So thank you so much. This was fun.