All right, what's up everybody? Welcome to the Scacking Growth Podcast. I am Tori Kinlick, a VP of Demand, and I have refined labs joined today by my buddy Garrett. Garrett, wanna say hello?
Yeah, Garrett, Director of Demand at Refined Labs. And I'm excited to talk about all things RPA. Yeah, RPA, who doesn't need another acronym in their lives? So a revenue performance assessment is what RPA stands for.
We'll be referring to it as an RPA for the rest of the episode here, so bear with us. But I wanted to bring Garrett on because he's been running through a couple of these with clients lately and had some great learnings to share while we have gone through the nuts and bolts of what a revenue performance assessment is with some of our refined labs clients and bolt subscribers. We wanted to go live here to the public and also record a podcast and talk about things at a little bit of a broader perspective, mainly hitting on things like what is a revenue performance assessment, and then what are some of the key learnings that we have taken away from running through this with clients in the past couple of months? And so, Garrett, I think good place to start here, but why don't you just help everyone understand what is a revenue performance assessment?
Why is it important and why do we do this with our clients? Yeah, for sure. I think that this analysis is like the foundational analysis that should inform marketing investments. It's like a precursor to annual planning in my mind, which is why we've been focusing on it for so much.
The last 30 days or so, and probably will be for the next month or so, but I think it's really important because it creates a unified team level understanding of what the major business drivers are and it can really create alignment for all of your initiatives heading into planning. So with planning, you really want your whole team to have the same set of glasses on, looking at things with the same lens. And so, that's where I think it's really important, although it's high level, but as far as what it involves, it really involves two steps. The first thing is you're going to analyze your pipeline sources, and if you've been following Refine Labs content for a while, you probably know what pipeline sources are, but just as a quick primer.
Pipeline sources are the big bucket categories that draw pipeline for the business. So that might be, like you see on the slide here, it might be a website demo request, event, content download, hold outbound, low intent, lead gen, et cetera. We evaluate at this level because the pipeline source is the best indicator for buying intent. So, attending an event, asking to talk to sales, downloading a piece of content, like these are all not the same thing at all, and they don't drive the same business outcomes down the funnel certainly.
And so, that's problematic, right? Because the pipeline goal that's set for marketing is almost always backed into based on a revenue goal. But these sources deliver dramatically different win rates, sales cycle links, ACVs. And so, if you're calling everything pipeline without regard to the source, and you end up investing in lower intent pipeline sources, you may hit that pipeline goal using initiatives that attract prospects that aren't ready to buy, and you'll end up missing revenue that way.
So, you're gonna pull apart and list all of your pipeline sources, and then you're going to see in a given period by source how much pipeline was created from the source, how much close one revenue was created, what the win rate was, what pipeline velocity was, and that's gonna give you a good idea of what truly drove results. So, that's kind of the first step in the equation. Yeah, and that's, I think, super helpful context though. So, thank you for walking through that.
And for anyone that has been following our Find Lives for a while, you probably heard us talking about the split the funnel analysis. This is effectively a split the funnel analysis, but it's more robust. We've kind of got this thing on steroids right now. And so, that's what we're gonna talk through is really not just what it is and why it's important, but as you're going through this analysis, as you are, whether you're building the reports, whether you're actually analyzing all the data, socializing it, what we're gonna talk through today is a couple of the learnings that we have, and the pitfalls that you should avoid, so that when you're going through this, whether it's ahead of your current planning season, or something that you just decide that you want to do to get a better sense of, what are the sources that are leading to the most pipeline and the most impactful pipeline, that you don't have to learn the hard way, like we have over here.
So, all right, so I think we've got kind of a good sense right now of what an RPA is and the intent of it. And so, Garrett, I think the next visual I wanna bring up here, and for those that are just listening in on the audio-only version, if you could just run through the four pitfalls, and we don't have to dive into them since that's what we're gonna be spending the rest of our session here, kind of going into these one by one, but if you just wanna run through these here, as far as what they are and why you think that they're important for people to avoid when they're going through an RPA on their own. For sure, yep, yeah, so pitfall number one, thinking of the RPA as executive only, and I think for a lot of people, because we're talking widely about the bigger bucket, performance of the business, it's viewed primarily as an executive function, and a lens for executives, but for me, this is for every role of your manager, director, VP or otherwise, like if you could be the one in your organization who's raising your hand and saying, wait a second, we need to understand what our major levers are for the business, and not skip ahead to the smaller level levers too quickly, I think that you're gonna be the one who's really standing out in the organization as a major business driver, so I think that that's really important. The second one here, getting hung up on touches.
First and last, I think we wanna riff on this one quite a bit, and I'm gonna go into it, but the difference between a pipeline source analysis and looking up touches, there's a time and place for evaluating which touch something happened for, but the questions that you're answering are different. For if you're looking at the touches, you're answering the question, who gets credit for this, right? That's the main thing that you're thinking about, and if you're thinking about pipeline sources, you're really thinking about the business, you're thinking about what should get investment, where should my dollars go, where should my resources go? So those are the two big differences there.
And then, number three, failing to bucket your sources correctly. So if you have a lot of different sources, and for a lot of companies, like eight to 12, is pretty common, that's actually quite a lot. You need to bucket them together by intent to make the analysis more digestible, especially by the wider team and making it more able to be circulated. And then number four is not telling the story correctly with effective visuals here, so that's something that we'll look at too, but I can't express enough like how important it is in order to have impact in the organization to come up with very simple, sort of obvious insights with visuals.
So it's kind of the flyover of it for. Awesome, I also appreciate that. And so let's double back. Let's head back to number one, thinking of an RK as an executive only analysis.
So my kind of stance on this, right, is we talk with a lot of marketers, whether clients of ours or just people in our networks, friends, family, whatever, that when they're working in marketing, like it feels like half their job is trying to defend the work that they're doing, and really help people understand that marketing is not just a cost center, that it is a true value added part to the business. And so, this is a great way to really earn yourself a seat at the table, right, is, and when you're familiar with the SLEPHA funnel analysis, where we're talking about the different kind of marketing sources, the reason that this RPA is something that I'm referring to as on steroids or a broader view is because we're not just looking at marketing specific sources any longer. We are looking at anything that touches, creates, drives, pipeline and revenue, and that is a distinct difference between a revenue performance assessment and what we were previously referring to as SLEPHA funnel. With this RPA, we really do want to look at, you know, anything, whether it is something that marketing initiated or sales or, you know, maybe it's a channel partnership, you know, outbound events, it doesn't matter, we're not discriminating here.
If it has an ability to create pipeline and revenue, we want to make sure that it's a part of this analysis. And so, when you're kind of, you know, thinking about something like, you know, like this approach, and it might be a little bit of a departure from the way that you've been operating previously, that's okay, right? And it's something, frankly, that should be encouraged because, you know, marketing and sales have very important and perhaps equal parts in a business because we're both responsible for driving pipeline and really the sales team is the one that's most responsible for closing that pipeline into revenue. But, you know, if you want to earn that seat at the table, if you want to be looked at as more than just a, you know, a team that is building PowerPoint decks and running blog posts, comparing the sources of revenue on a even playing field, one next to another, this is going to be a great way to do it.
And not just, you know, which ones are creating the revenue, but also, you know, which ones are the ones where your win rates are the highest, where your deal sizes are the highest, the ones that have the most velocity to move from a early stage, late stage pipeline deal into close one revenue. And so when you're looking at all these things on that, you'll even playing field next to one another, you know, that is ultimately how you can be looked at as much more of a strategic and valuable partner to the business because you are the one effectively bringing these insights to the table and helping your leadership team really look at things, you know, from maybe a new lens that you had been doing previously. So this is not just for executives only. And I think it's a great way for, you know, mid-level junior level marketers to really kind of level up in the eyes of some of those leaders at the company.
And yeah, and like I keep rehashing here, you know, a great way to stop being looked at purely as a call center. 100%. Yeah. I mean, one of the most important things I think you said there at the beginning is the whole half our jobs trying to defend what we've done.
If I'm a CMO, having my team thinking this way is what I am trying to get to, right? Like I'm looking at the business with a lens of pipeline and revenue. And if someone else is bringing this to me and I'm in the CMO role, then that's evidence that they're looking at the business like more than just looking at it with the lens of trying to relentlessly defend themselves. I think there's like some cultural implications in there for sure too with that whole conversation.
But you know, it provides a compass, right? Like this is the analysis that before in the CMO seat, before a new idea is brought my way, to bringing a new idea, it should be run through this line of pipeline sources. So we all know what it's going to mean for performance. And so I totally agree.
Cool. So let's get into the actual pipeline sources. So I've got another visual I'll bring up here to just kind of help guide our conversation. But so now I think maybe we just kind of, you know, almost like lump these pitfalls number two and three together, right, of like getting hung up on the touches and failing to buff your sources correctly.
I think that there's a lot of connectivity between the two. And let me just say like, man, talking about touches, just I don't know. It's something about it just feels creepy. I don't like the term marketing touches.
It's weird. It feels weird to say. But here we are just continuing to repeat that term. So excuse me if I sound like a creep during this podcast.
I sure feel like one. But when we're talking about building these pipeline sources, Garrett, like this is definitely one of the questions that I have seen asked most frequently from our clients is like, when we're talking about a pipeline source, right? Because this is effectively a new concept to a lot of marketers. This is not first touch.
This is not last touch. This is different than both of those. And so when people are thinking about, you know, going into their CRM and building out a report on pipeline sources, how do they do that? How have you managed this for your clients or how have you kind of directed them to do that?
Yeah. I mean, I think that the big piece is that if you're running a lead gen centric demand program, then you're naturally going to have attribution and you're going to have more of a focus on first and last touch. And if you have something in place like that, like there's a time and place where I think it's totally fine. But the big thing to think about is you're separating out these sources is the source itself is the best indicator for intent.
So like if you look at these, so pipe, ABM, or intent-based, cold outbound partner events and field, and then low intent lead gen, like that's a good set of buckets that are highly differentiated from each other. They're different activities that all create pipeline, right? But we want to understand what percentage of pipeline came from those. And you need to bucket them logically.
I think this is kind of a good maximum, like six different sources in order to evaluate here. We can also bucket them into just like just high and low intent that way. But I think that this is a good starting place for a lot of companies. And so like logistically, when I'm going into Salesforce and building my report, I think in most cases, there is going to be some type of manual, let's call it, aggregation, maybe stratification of the data where you need to take what are currently a lot of different sources and figure out which one of these it falls under.
The pipe, which is your high intent inbound, maybe it is ABM, cold outbound partners, channels, events, low intent lead gen. Those are the primary ones that we're often recommending to our clients and recommending that people start with. Of course, every business has their nuances. And so it's OK to maybe add a couple more on here.
But you don't want to start with too many for fear of really overcomplicating something that is intended to simplify and exercise that many marketers have struggled to keep straightforward and succinct. But yeah, kind of getting back to the actual logistics, what do you recommend for people as far as just like the starting point and pulling the reports to understand what report do I want to pull? What report do I want to look at in order to start grouping these under these pipeline sources that we're recommending? Yeah, for sure.
I mean, for the most part, if you want to look at things like lead to win rate, which is something we include in there, you're going to primarily be using lead reports. But for the vast majority of the analysis, you're going to be using opportunity reports. I always like to export the data because you can much more flexibly manipulate the data. And as you're going about the analysis, you're going to need to do that.
And you can just do it a lot more flexibly than you can within Salesforce directly. But for a lot of companies, it's going to be called something like Campaign Source or Initiative or something high level like that. It's just going to totally depend on your organization and what it looks like. I've seen companies have this separated actually by the form type that they use.
And so the form can be an indicator of what the pipeline source is as well. I think the big thing is that as you're going through it, and we have a lot more detailed instructions and templates and things like that in the vault. But once you export the data, that gives you a lot more of the flexibility to be able to look at the source and look at each column and to be able to look at how you should bucket them more appropriately. Great, cool.
And so the third pitfall that we had mentioned, failing to bucket your sources correctly, anything that you want to add to the conversation thus far or the visual that we've got up here now with these pipeline sources that we're recommending. Yeah, I think the big thing here is there's a spectrum in how you can bucket them. But not to get too granular, not to get too much more granular than this analysis that you're seeing up there. The fewer that you have, the more easy it is to circulate around the organization, which is, I think, a really key part of this analysis.
The most extreme end of it is just to bucket between high and low-intense sources. So we're going to take each one of these, look at win rates, look at lead to win rate, look at the volume of opportunities created, all those pieces. And we're going to bucket them high and low intent. For most companies, between four and six sources is a good rule of thumb, like four different buckets, especially when you have in-between sources, some that might be more medium intent.
Events are commonly, events are all over the board. They can be very low intent. They can be much higher intent, but often they fall somewhere between low and gently gen and a pipe conversion, which you see here. So you may end up with a source mix.
That's the one that you see here on the slide. You may end up with a mix that's more, like, pipe, which is high intent, then lead gen low intent, and then events and outbound. That's a common mix as well. It just depends on how many different pieces you have and where you can differentiate based on intent.
Yeah. And so I think what we're recommending here, right, is what we've seen work for us at Refine Labs for a majority of the clients that we're working with. But this should be a starting point, right? Make it your own, in short, something that is going to be really specific and applicable to your business.
And maybe you do have a really heavy event strategy. And you maybe even need to figure out a way to break apart some, let's say, field events where it's intended to be creating awareness and do some prospecting, or a trade show even, and those which might be much more intimate, ABM-style, or even something with your customers. But what we're recommending here is not meant to be a rigid framework at all. In fact, it should be pretty flexible.
It should be looked at in a way that you can really feel like you can use this as a jumping off point and figure out the right way to categorize and bucket these things for your company. Because ultimately what's going to be most important is that you're able to do this cleanly. You're able to do this in a repeatable way. And you're going to be able to do it in a way that is ultimately going to help you make better, more informed decisions with your strategy and your budget in the future.
So we'll get to some of the action in this information in a few minutes. But first, let's jump into the last pitfall, which you mentioned, Garrett, which is really trying to socialize a lot of these findings and information without the use of visuals. And so of course, we had to use a visual to represent the pitfall and what we're recommending that people do. But Garrett, if you want to just walk through this visual here and maybe take a couple of extra steps here to describe it for any of those that might just be listening in on the podcast today.
Yeah, there's a couple of different ways I like to show this visually. But I think the big piece when you're trying to get others on board in the organization, that simple is better if you can see the story and understand the story relatively quickly. This is one good way to do it. So in this example, we've split all the sources and we bucket them into high intent, outbound, and low intent.
And you can go from left to right and see actually top to bottom within each one and see what the lead opportunity is, what the opportunity to close one rate is. And most companies are going to have multiple stages, but I just like to bucket into whatever the highest intent opportunity, basically what the hero pipeline opportunity stage would be, which is anything that closes at 25% or above, or at least is intended to. And so within each one of these lanes, you can see leads operate, opt to close one rate, and then you can see total revenue. So like in this case, high intent sources and outbound, although the stage conversion rates differ quite a bit, this company that we're seeing here actually has a pretty robust and pretty solid outbound, likely ABM and type of strategy being deployed.
And so you see the overall, at the bottom part of the funnel there, the revenue amount is actually very similar for this company. And then you can see low intent, right? Like this is where you can see the real differentiation between the story, more than 10,000 leads, which is more than five times what the high intent sources provide. And then, but the lead to opportunity rate, 28% for high intent versus 8% for low intent sources.
That's where you see down funnel what or how dramatic those differences are. And then even opportunity to close one rate, being 10% of being half the rate. So 10% versus 20% for high intent sources. So it lets you see without getting too granular yet, like you'll want to later in like channel strategy and things of that nature, what the overall buckets are doing for the business.
Something I'll mention here too, the last thing, is that the win rate at the bottom, for us, it's important to evaluate true win rate, right? Which is not a ratio of opportunities to close one, but it is truly the number of opportunities that closed, whether one or lost, how many of them were one out of the total closed opportunity. So if you're not reporting out on true win rate, that's something that in order to account for your sales cycle length and things of that nature, you need to definitely do. Yeah, awesome.
And to me, this is the money slide, right? Like when you're talking about creating some type of output with this assessment that you are able to socialize to any part of the business, right? The leadership team, your board of directors, your PE firm, or even some of the most junior level employees on the marketing team or just anywhere in the company, having a visualization like the one that you described, like the one that we're displaying here, is going to be absolutely critical to helping deliver your message. Because obviously, there's a whole lot that goes into this assessment.
But the output should be simple. It should be straightforward. And it should be showing you, out of these pipeline sources that you have, the things that are ultimately creating opportunities for your sales and marketing team, having something that you can literally compare them, apples to apples, right? How much is coming in the top of the funnel?
How much is making it through the bottom of the funnel? And of course, pointing out the different conversion rates from stage to stage throughout the way is extremely important. This can be a great exercise in and of itself to just say, outside of prioritizing or stack ranking the different pipeline sources, like, hey, let's take a look at our outbound sources here. We actually have a very strong opportunity to close one rate.
And that's excellent. So maybe we need to figure out how to ramp up the actual opportunity creation, because we're finding that we're actually performing above some of our peers and other benchmarks in terms of how our outbound is actually moving to close one. And so maybe we do have some type of advantage as a business, and this is something that we want to lean into. So there is, of course, these different fringe use cases and benefits that can come from an exercise like this.
And you might be able to just create a visual like this and park on it in a meeting and spend an entire 60 minutes with your colleagues kind of brainstorming around, what do we want to do with all this great information? There's just so much here to unpack. But at the end of the day, simple is best, right? Looking at each of your sources, the respective funnel for each one, the leads, the opportunities, the revenue that comes from them, and of course, pointing out the win rates.
That's really ultimately what you're looking for here in creating an effective visual that can represent all the work that goes into this revenue performance assessment. So love the slide, love the visual that you've developed here. And I think that there's a whole lot that someone could take away and learn from or utilize with this approach. All right, so let's kind of talk through, Garrett, the last part of this, right?
Which is, okay, now that the assessment is finished, what do we do with this, right? And first and foremost, I think, socialize it, right? You've done the work, you've bubbled up some really, really important and valuable insights. You've taken the step to create an effective visual that can be socialized without you there to deliver the narrative that you probably supported.
And so that's great, right? You do want to be able to send this around and share it with anyone who might care and maybe even a couple people that don't, because there's just so much value that can come from it. What else should people be thinking about in terms of what to do with the output of this RPI, Garrett? Yeah, good question.
And I think I've done a number of things with it, depending on the organization. And there's probably not a right or wrong. I think it probably depends on the company. It could be a meeting with your CMO.
If you are the CMO, it's a meeting with your team. But establishing this as something to refer back to, at least quarterly or even in your on-going discussions, that your pipeline source analysis is the compass that we need to run all new ideas and all new initiatives through, right? Like, these are the big levers to pull that will be having resources allocated to them. And when we come up with new ideas throughout the year, whether those be more strategic or more tactical ideas, we have to say, okay, we know that low-intense sources, we have a lead to win rate at this rate, and it can help you understand throughout the year, how you need to create alignment and just be on the same page with things.
I think too, this whole analysis is so high level. Like, I love it. It's not really in the weeds at all. And I think we're a lot of us that are in B2B, SaaS and in B2B marketing, like all of us are data nerds, right?
Like, I think for the most part, that's why we're in this lane. This is an analysis that actually takes some discipline to create, to stop, and to figure out how to articulate how important it is when you are particularly in the planning stages. Because if you're not on the same page about this, like, you'll be running in all different directions throughout the year and coming up with ideas and not really understanding how they impact the business directly. You might have an idea of how they impact leads and like way top upper funnel stuff, but this is the piece that I think for a long time, B2B marketers have been missing.
But I'm curious to turn it on YouTube, Tory, like if you've had different ways of circulating this and like getting others on board. Yeah, so I think you hit the big ones, right? Like understanding the primary source is a pipeline of revenue for your company. And the throughput of those sources is critically important to anything that any marketer is gonna be doing.
But especially right now, right? Where we're at in late October, where many of us are either currently engaged or about to be engaged in annual planning meetings, this can effectively be your kind of, I think Eric called it a compass, right? It's your guiding principles as far as like, where you should be spending the most amount of your time and energy and all of your resources. And it's much easier to do when you know the ones that are most impactful for your business.
And so, you know, having something like this available when keeping it handy, let's say, during those planning sessions, right? Where everyone is kind of having fun brainstorming, throwing a lot of different ideas out there, and just kind of quickly understanding like, all right, with this specific idea, this tactic, where does that fall under these pipeline sources? Oh, okay, you know, this idea maybe falls under the low intent lead gen pocket. All right, it's a really nice idea, but maybe we don't want to put too much money towards it since what we know is that it has a lot of impact on the top of funnel, but more often than not, it's not going to yield something that is going to be truly impactful for the business.
And so, you know, using this tool as a way to assess different ideas and figure out, you know, okay, we've got a finite amount of resources. We can only, you know, there's only so many hours in the day and only so much money that we can spend. So how do we allocate these things? And are people accordingly, you know, using these pipeline sources as a way to figure out what the most appropriate way to staff your team and resource your projects and allocate your budget?
This is a great way to do it. And, you know, of course, for us at Everfine Labs, you know, we have a very, I don't know, it's widely publicized at this point, but a very kind of unique and specific way of thinking. And that it's typically that, you know, we want to recommend to our clients in the way that we run our business that we're focusing a majority of everything that we do on the, you know, those pipe convergence, the high- and tech hand-racers, because we know that those are the ones that are going to be driving the most impact. Not every business operates the same, right?
And so what works for us here at Everfine Labs might be different for your company. And so going through this assessment is a great way to really understand, you know, how we should be approaching our planning, how we should be developing our strategies, selecting the tactics, allocating the budget. And so, yeah, it's just a perfect time of the year to kind of look back, do this audit, and use it as a tool that can guide a lot of your planning discussions for the year ahead, because, yeah, this is ultimately what, you know, what we want to be keeping in mind with every decision we make as a marketer is what's this going to do for the business. And if you have a hard time figuring out what it might do, or, you know, based on your historical performance, you know, this particular tactic that was suggested, might not be something that is really going to move the dial, then chances are you might want to kind of steer away from something like that, or at least, you know, not allocate too many resources towards it.
So, yeah, I would say that's kind of my closing thoughts and, yeah, the biggest recommendation that I could make to everyone out there is, you know, once you complete this assessment, you know, this is gold in terms of what it can mean for insights for your team, and how you utilize this to plan for your head. Awesome, we'll see. Cool, cool, cool. So, I think that probably takes us to the end of our topic here, Garrett.
So, thanks for joining me, breaking this all down. Yeah, I think we'll definitely be doing a lot more of these with our clients over the months ahead. Hopefully anyone listening or watching in today has learned enough that they can go start doing something similar with their company. Really encourage this.
And if you do need any help, feel free to reach out to myself or Garrett on LinkedIn. You know, you can just send us a direct message, or if you're a client of ours, of course, you know, you've got some other avenues to help us and talk through an approach like this. But yeah, with that, Garrett, any closing words from you before we wrap it up here? No, I think we'll say it.
I think everyone does where to find us and find our team. Yeah, if you're new to this, or if you're in the middle of it and stuck on something, we're always happy to answer any questions, but otherwise, I think it's great. Awesome, well, great stuff. Well, thanks everyone for listening and tuning in today.
Thanks, everyone.