Welcome back to Suck in Grid Live. I'm Sydney, one of your hosts, joined with Sam. And we're going to get into a audience question that was submitted to us. So here's the question.
What would the first 90 days look like if you were tasked with implementing a demand-gen and content strategy in an effort to move beyond the traditional lead-gen approach? Great question. And we're going to dig into that in this episode. So we have three key steps.
We're going to chat through. I'm going to kick it off to Sam to kind of get us started. Yeah. I think there's a lot of marketers right now that are kind of bouncing around.
So I'm sure there's a lot of people who are just like, please, can you play book for the first 90 days. So yeah, I think we simplified this down to three three steps. First one would be, get your historicals. Second one is laying the foundation.
And then third one is building the content engine that's going to support the full framework. So the first one, this one's my favorite to totally nerd out on. So I'm going to steal this one. And then I'll let you get into the second one.
But get your historicals. So I think this is something that's absolutely critical, just to understand where you're coming from. So whether you're moving up in an organization and you want to figure out what's going on, or you're joining a new one, you need to get a label to understand the goal. So what I like to do is just get a look back on the last 12 months.
That's going to give you a full year's worth of data, support seasonality, everything else that's going to come in. And then break it out by channel and source. So for this, we're probably going to limit it a little bit more to marketing for the sake of our conversation today, but you wouldn't want to do it across all your revenue channels. But when we say channel and source, think like high intent, low intent, over simplify, but I'd be like, OK, people coming from your talk to sales and people coming from content syndication, people coming from eculaeza.
Just so you can see all of that. The next thing that you want to do is understand the core inputs that went into all of that. And then what you can control is a marketer moving forward. So there's really five big levers I'd say that you can look at from your side.
So one is spend. So how much are you spending? And whether it's ad, whether it's content production, promotion, anything but looking a lot of it from that standpoint, the second one is lead quality. So that's focused on how broad or narrow you're going with your messaging, who you're making your product available to, and going after.
Third one is looking at your conversion rates from, kind of like marketing the sales game, so to speak. So in refined lives terms, it's like the demo to hero, the high intent for every opportunity rate. That's a big one where you usually see a big drop off. Fourth one's win rate.
That one is a little bit more on sales side, but you'll be surprised when you do start to do as analysis by channel source and look into segments, you will see clear trends around those that you win better with, worse with, so you'll want to do more of the former, less of a ladder. Finding ACV, same exact reason. You can do different segmentations if you've got, okay, what industries are driving more, revenue bands, companies sizes, there's different things that you can look into to start to impact what is marketing driving. So you mentioned coming from traditional lead gen.
So what you're probably seeing right now is a bunch of low intent leads that make the blended cost per lead look really good. When you remove those from the total pipeline and revenue numbers, don't be surprised if those numbers don't change much. A lot of it probably is coming from high intent. So that's always a good conversational theory that's actually going to be a good example.
Okay, we had a thousand leads last year, but the hundred high intent was actually driven majority of revenue. So if we strip all this time on this 900, we're not going to change it online, which is good and now we can reinvent that to something that's going to make a difference. I think that's a key insight is to present and look at this data through, we reference like pipeline sources here, but that's really what the concept that you're explaining is like, you have a pipeline source for your low intent and look at that separately, then your high intent declared website conversions. And you should be able to clearly see and present the business case of why you should maybe move away or re-prioritate efforts.
So I think that concept is key when you're looking at that 12 months of data. Yeah, that's a great point. And if I get caught up on, look, it's really low cost, really be like, well, the customer acquisition cost is really high. So which one do you want a bunch of low cost to either don't do anything?
Or a $500,000 customer that's only ever going to make you $50,000 if you're lucky. Yeah, conversation for another time. So another thing that you'll often see when you're coming from LeadGen is the lack of quality, premature conversations that they're really not ready to talk to sales yet. So you're going to see really low conversion rate between demos and heroes and you're probably going to see lower flows rates than other sources as well.
So those are three big signals that you'll be seeing and these are what hopefully you're the reason why you want to switch to a demand-gen strategy, but that's all going to do. So final step in some of the historicals I like to say is I'm like, okay, how do we prioritize all of this when we are making the switch? So there's three, okay, maybe four, four of the levers that we want to pull here and they're going to be in order of how I would approach it if I were coming in. So the first one would be demo to hero rate.
I know this isn't the one on the top, but there is a reason why I want to do this. You can insert some pretty common fixes quickly here. So this is, when you think of the common frustrations of the reason that you have a low rate, it's because you're playing back and forth with the FCR and the prospect of trying to schedule a meeting. Data isn't sinking properly from the form into your CRM.
The initial discovery call with the prospect is answering the same questions they already did. They just want pricing, they want something else. They get aggravated, they found a competitor and they moved along quicker there. So there's a lot of things you can do early on on that stage and usually you'll see, you can bump that up a couple percentage points early on in your first 90 days.
Second one is demo quality or volume. So when you're thinking like coming from this lead gen model, you usually aren't going to see a big impact to this until about one to two quarters of the program's running. You absolutely will include some number, but just because you're going to be educating the market, you're not forcing them into this, you're not going to see the big spikes in volume, you're going to see less more often than not, but also the quality is going to take a little bit for that snowball to start going. Third one, win rate, that's a function of the form when we just spoke about plus your sales cycle length.
So again, that's going to take a little bit. And then the final one is spend. So once you get those above three in a good place, so your demo-to-view rate is good, your driving good demo quality at an affordable rate and your win rate's in a good spot. That's when you should probably see a pretty low that you're throwing more gas on the flyer if we're ready to grow.
So that's the steps. Toss in your revenue target, if you have it, play with your model, have some fun, figure out how you're going to achieve that. I'm going to step off the pedestal now because I've been talking for way too long. And we really want to hear your thoughts on now that we've gotten the historicals here, how should you be laying the foundation with this knowledge to set yourself up for success for the next 90 days?
Yeah, there's a, I would say foundational period, which is going to take most of that 90 days. And a lot of these things are going to run in parallel, right? Like you can do your audit and kind of go through the data and look through that. We call it a running performance analysis and sort of, we call it a revenue performance analysis that you should take you, I don't know, two weeks if you have decent data to run and analyze and make recommendations.
While you're doing that, there's almost like an operational, what we call infrastructure audit that you could do as well, knowing that you're planning to switch from reporting on everything at a lead level, that's direct response attributable, there are key components of the infrastructure that you're going to need to implement within the first 90 days before you even get to launching your first program or your first experiment. So that's like step one is audit your data and then also audit your infrastructure and make those changes before you're even ready to start thinking about like net new programs and start getting all that going. So some of those things around infrastructure is auditing your capture demand infrastructure, right? That's like, hopefully that's in a decent place, but I also see there's a lot of opportunity there.
Sometimes with certain people, with certain clients with just UTMs, forms, passing correct data, especially for Google Ads, you know, you want to get your GC-LID passed all the way to Salesforce, it would be ideal to set up your Salesforce conversions in Google Ads and just making sure you're passing all that data in the CRM at the right level that you might need, which would be all the way to those ones. Secondly, on the more create demand infrastructure, you should be implementing things like hybrid attribution, which is something we talk about a lot, which is self-reported attribution, adding that form on your field, making sure that's mapped all the way to the lead contact opportunity and close one as well, and then making sure your sort, whatever you use for source channel and those types of things, people call them various things in CRM and last converting campaign, things like that. You also want to make sure that is out-mapped to the revenue as well. So audit all of that, do that, set yourself up for success.
The infrastructure and the audit are two key inputs to this framework, which we call revenue R&D. So then you should have an output, after you've done everything, Sam has told you to do, you should have an output of like, here are current programs, and here's where they fall in this phased approach, and I'll just briefly touch on what that looks like. So in your, we recommend using a revenue R&D pipeline for this, there's less more information on our website about it, but we have essentially five phases that your program can go into, experiment positive signals, repeatability, operation scale, and fully integrated. Likely if you're coming into this, you're gonna audit and show that your lead gen program is nowhere near phase three, four, or five, as it should be based on the criteria, exit criteria.
So that's an easy one to just cut, so we're not going to do. And then how you want to formulate what experiments and programs you want to try and start, limit it to one or two, I would say, and make sure that those start in the experiment phase. And basically what that means is you're setting the expectations with your stakeholders, this is an experiment, it's gonna take time to validate. The exit criteria for your experiment is gonna be 10 type conversions, for example.
And that will allow you to have a framework to kind of transition and try new programs and experiments into your mix, while setting key gates, which is exit criteria, to know if the holistic program is working and impacting the business. So hopefully at the end of the 90 days, you have an idea of which net new experiments and programs you're gonna put in market, and then there's probably already existing programs that you're gonna need to change or make optimizations to, which are mainly probably on the capture demand side. You can start those quick wins, or we call them kind of quick wins of existing programs in the 90 days. It's probably gonna take you a little, maybe 60 to 120 days to launch the net new experiments and programs and really set yourselves up for success there.
And the reason I say it's gonna take you a while is one you're new to the organization, but another key input and requirement into your first 90 days of launching programs and taking a look at like, the framework is going to be research and content. So that's, I think, one thing that gets overlooked a lot in the first 90 days, it's going to be an ongoing thing outside of your first 90 days, but something kind of good to think about and start there. So let's get into, that's kind of the step three, right? Yeah, right.
I have a question, I feel like, I'm probably not coming from the person else to know, this may or may not come from other people asking. Say you're joining an organization who hasn't done self-reported attribution, but they've been running Google forever, they've been running LinkedIn ads forever. Would you go and put, say, their Google program, would you be confident saying that they're in phase three or phase two or any of a specific spot without that type of data or would you just come in and say, you know what, everything's in phase one experimentation? Great question for capture demand channels, it's very easy to say, yep, Google ads is in phase two, which means it's delivered pipe conversions, but it hasn't delivered an X amount of pipeline or to get it in phase three, which is repeatability, it needs to deliver that pipeline consistently.
So maybe you're in phase two, we know Google ads is delivering pipeline, we can prove that, but it's not consistent yet. So great, Google ads is gonna be in phase two, and part of the strategy is we're gonna deploy this two tactics over the next 60 days to see if we can move it closer to that exit criteria and obtain the exit criteria to get it to repeatable. So that's an example of taking an existing program you're running where you can report on it and understand where it is, and then making part of your strategy to move it to the next phase. If honestly, if you're running Legion, the data's gonna show you that likely, it's going to be in phase two, maybe, like if you're lucky, if you have attributable conversions, but probably not, the data will show you, it's probably in phase one still, and maybe you've been running it for a year.
So I would shut that off and lead gen, for example, let's say you're running lead gen on LinkedIn. Lead gen is a tactic and an initiative for LinkedIn, right? You're gonna do LinkedIn page, your initiative, and then your tactic is lead gen campaigns. So really you just need to shut down that tactic and redeploy a new strategy to then get the program, which will be linked in two phase two, phase three, and a beyond.
So you, if you're running lead gen, most of your programs are not gonna show data that will make it into phase three or four. Maybe prove me wrong, I'd love to see the data, but that's how I would approach it, is like you're gonna cancel, or you're gonna stop that tactic, and you're gonna deploy a new tactic underpaid, or organic, or whatever, and that's how you're gonna start moving the program forward. And that's where we'd be back to experimentation because it's a tactic within it. Perfect.
All right, I'm gonna kick step three over to you, kick it off and we'll go back and forth. Yeah, for the content, that was the second part of the question, whether implementing a demand gen and content strategy in an effort to move beyond traditional de-gen. So we'll kind of skip the generics that you see everywhere. Go talk to your customers, go develop sales relationships.
We could say all the same things that everyone's heard time and again, so think about some other different things that might help the marketer come out of the gate. So the first one I like to think about is having not just a point of view, but a unique point of view, especially. There's very few category creators. I know it's a big thing right now, but when you think about it, many sales companies are competing in a category, whether it's some competition, heavy competition, but the difference between those that I think are more memorable and stand up from demand gen perspective from the content side is when you have a distinct point of view on how your ICP should be able to be going about doing something or whatever it is that their product or service is solving for.
So having different ways of sharing that instead of just the same plan to, like, come read our ebook on the top 10 ways, drive your revenue by 1000%, like speak to your point of view, like ours, attribution's broken. Like we go on on that and then a lot of people think about this, that's our demand driver. But I found that if you can have or figure out what your unique point of view early on is, that's a big help in guiding, okay, what content do we need to make as part of this? Yeah, I love that.
A lot of companies will have like, here's our messaging guidelines or here's like our top level company messaging and positioning. And if you do it well, that should be your unique point of view, but I don't see a ton of companies doing that well from a unique perspective. So you can take that and as a marketing person to figure out how am I gonna take this hierarchy, like higher levels strategic narrative and then put it into something where I can communicate a uniquely communicate this to the market. And that's kind of what we like to do here and then like bring that into, okay, what is that gonna look like?
How are we gonna distribute that would be, your next point of view or your next thing? But you can start being where your customer is organically first before you even jump into paid and you can learn a lot there too. So I know that was another recommendation that you had was kind of be where your market is. If they're in communities, if they're wherever they are, be there and just listen and learn.
That can also kind of inform like how you might position or change like your unique point of view for the channel or just overall for that persona. Yeah, I think there's a couple things within that that are important. One, there's a massive difference between engagement on personal profiles and company, and especially so that's organic and then layer in ads. I mean, I scroll through the feed.
I've almost become ad blind as bad as that is to say, since that's what we do. But if you're relying on 0.5% click-through rate and I know a lot of people see stuff in feed, but the engagement and when you're thinking about content, you wanna build stuff that's engaging. So aside from the paid stuff, when you look at it from a organic standpoint, more that you can have real people having conversations, engaging in other conversations that are going on, you're gonna become that much more memorable because it's not like, oh yeah, refined labs is a company but like, oh yeah, Sydney just commented on my post-view and I read and looked at her stuff, it was great. You're a lot more stickier when you have someone's face to the company.
So I think that's a really important thing. And then that can all also inform the mediums that you're gonna be creating your content in. So what we learned early on from Chris on LinkedIn is his videos kill it versus the written format that had dominated traditionally for a while. So when we started working with different customers and other people, we put more, I guess we said, you should go in sooner on video in this platform.
You will see it works well, you're gonna have to think about how you view your metrics, click your rate, isn't in the deal. But people like to view it and consume it in feed, you have close captions, everything else, but that's when you help you think about okay, do I do audio written video, could you have this, that, you can start to figure out what are the mediums that people engage with most and then use that to inform when you start to sail with paid or anything else that's gonna help you crack some of those platforms as well. Yeah, and I'd definitely like test that, you know, like obviously, you know, just video in general is a great performing placement either on your personal brand or paid, but you know, we're seeing a lot of cool things with document ads right now. You may have noticed some of us at Refine Labs are testing that on our personal profiles, right?
So, you know, experiment, see what's going on. It also, you know, depends on maybe the video, video is so heavy on the first, you know, 10, 20 seconds. And I mean, it's always anything, but for that motion and that person that's speaking, like, you know, there's a lot of variables. So I would say also test to see what resonates, but you can't just like pick one and just only deploy that and like expect to like iterate and get compounding results.
Yeah, not such a good point. The organic is where you learn to adapt to the platform. Like as I was always playing catch up when you think about it. So that's where it's like, the shift in people like the slides that document.
So now we start saying, okay, like customers, let's go and try a couple of these as we're seeing more and more engagement there. So, yeah, I really like that full circle loop there. What's your take? I've been thinking a little bit about this, but I don't want to call them influencers.
I hate the tournaments, they're sort of in ruin, but trusted voices in the space. So it's kind of community kind of thought leaders, whatever you want to call them, but there are certain people that you respect their opinions and thoughts on certain things. So is that something that we should be thinking about more, like whether it's contributing to a blog or if you have a podcast, like having them on, is that something that I guess more marketers should be looking into? I think so.
I think there's two aspects of that. You should figure out how to, maybe not yourself, but for someone in your company or someone to be that person for your company and like grow the audience. That's like one strategy, right? And then the other strategy is like, how can I go connect and build relationships with other people in the space and kind of tap into their network?
And which a lot of people have done through podcasts, right? Like, yeah, I'm going to interview this person and because they talk about this, my audience really likes them. And they're really respected. So then that will drive people to listen to my podcast.
That only gets to you so far in so many episodes. So we, I would say you definitely want to kind of do both at the same time, build that in-house to kind of own an audience or build an audience for your personal brand or if you're using personal brand for your business and engage with others. So I've seen more frequently people doing collaborations, like co-marketing, but it's not co-marketing from a brand anymore. How you usually think about co-marketing, it's co-marketing from creators.
So I've seen a couple of companies do really cool collaborations to like reach into new audiences or deeper into their existing audience. I've even seen a couple companies, you know, literally partner and they've called them brand ambassadors. Like, yes, they have their own business work for a different company, but I'm a brand ambassador. I'm an ex and I create content.
I kind of rep that brand, but they would only rep that brand if they had good relationship. They believed in the product. They're not going to abuse their audience for something just where like a paycheck. Because if they do that, their audience will not engage with them anymore.
So I think you should do both, whether one you do first and second or at the same time. Yeah, that's a good point. That's interesting. It's like partnering in partner 2.0, so to speak.
It's like you're not getting a commission based on you doing that. But it's something that sits in between that and general word of mouth. Like I had someone who chaps. It's like, hey, I'm starting up a podcast.
I do not have the time or expertise to chop up my videos, do the clips, do you know of someone who can. And from relationships, I was like, oh, yeah, go to this company. They do a great job all that. I'm not getting commissioned off of it or anything.
But because that individual I've been engaging back and forth, that type of trust is there. That's where it's like an adjacent to what we do. So being able to leverage those types of relationships, I think is an interesting one. Yeah, I think.
That's our goal. First 90 days is also true. Like maybe figure out how you might start humanizing your brand more. You can't do it overnight.
It's going to take way beyond your 90 days. But maybe think about that component of at the end of the 90 days or when you kind of present and create your plan. Specifically, when you're thinking about content strategy, it's like, how can I humanize this? Because people want to buy from people.
This is not revolutionary. So it's just becoming more popular. And I think accepted now in content creation than it previously was. So think about that to kind of finish off your content strategy plan.
I love it. Well, there's some good recommendations overall. So hopefully those help in your first 90. I know it's easy for us to have a list for days.
That's like 90 days. There's only so many hours in the day. Yeah, so I would love to hear how this goes for this individual if they get started or if there's other things that people want to add, let us know. Love it.
All right, we'll be back a couple weeks with another episode. Bye, everyone.