Welcome back everybody to Stacking Growth. I'm excited because I'm with Carl. Carl, who's been out the last couple weeks, Carl? Two weeks, Carl?
Yeah, technically it was two full weeks. Yeah, I was taking a little vacay. First real vacation. I've had, you know, you take a little, like we do this all at time, Cassidy, right?
You'll take like a long weekend or like a Friday offer. You might do like a staycation or something. But you kind of like are plugged into work, maybe a little bit, which is fine and necessary. But this was the first vacation in a long time that I like, they know my laptop.
I think I slacked you like a couple of times on my phone, but I actually didn't even open my laptop or connect it to Wi-Fi and my verbose at all from Portugal. So yeah, it was refreshing. It was awesome. Yeah, when Carl says he, he slacked me a couple of times.
He's following up on the deals I'm working in the pipeline, like the classic sales leader, making sure his boss is like doing his job. So I love that. Hey, we got an next step. We got an next step on the books there for that one.
What's next? Flash it. I got the other guy. I was like, you threw a hunchbody on my phone.
And I didn't see the next step in here, Cassidy. Yeah, hilarious. It was awesome. So where'd you go?
You might as well. Like, what'd you do? Yeah, yeah. So I went to Portugal.
So I am Portuguese, half Portuguese. So my dad is Portuguese. And we actually went back and went with my dad. I actually didn't go with my wife or my kids.
I went with my dad. It was kind of like a father's son trip. It was pretty cool. And I visited a bunch of older, distant family.
It's probably just older folks. So it's potentially the last opportunity I would actually have to meet them. And my dad hadn't seen them in years either. So I decided to tag along.
And yeah, we were in South Portugal, like the Algarve region. And we hit up a couple of, we did a little day trip at a couple of different spots, like in South Portugal. And then we kind of moved up North to hang out, kind of off the coast of Lisbon, like west of Lisbon, for the second half of the trip. But if you don't know, like, I know you know, Cassidy, if anyone listening doesn't know, like, Lisbon's kind of in the middle ish of Portugal.
So yeah, we didn't make it up north, but yeah, that was kind of the trip. And it was seven days or so gone. And I took a couple of days off on the front and the back end just to deal with jet lag and stuff like that. So yeah, it was awesome.
Amazing food. If you've never been, I highly recommend beautiful beaches, not crowded. It was amazing. It sounds incredible.
I'm glad you got away. Yeah. Like you said, it's always good to get off. I think I haven't get some some rest on the way from the work grind.
So we have a special episode today. We have Sydney waterfall recorded from the full funnel on it. The topic is how to measure demand for the entire funnel. What's that mean, Carl?
Mm, man, you know, I don't know exactly what it means. And I hope Sydney is going to explain it to us really well. She's the expert in the room. But when I listen to her talk, I mean, one of the things that always strikes me is like how many people come inbound to us.
And like they share a whole bunch of their problems and their symptoms and we need more demand and we need more revenue. And man, like root cause underneath most issues. I'm going to say most because it's always some other issues. But like measurement and like ops related challenges, which I'm going to separate measurement from ops.
I want to say ops, I mean, like the technical setup that gives you the ability to measure, that's one challenge that a lot of our customers face. But the second one, which I think Sydney tackles really well, is like, how do you think about measurement? How does that need to be like the philosophy of measurement? How does that need to evolve?
And I think like whether buyers or marketing teams or marketing leaders or even CEOs and executive leaders know it or not, a lot of the problems that their business is having is actually like root cause. Nine out of 10 times is actually a measurement, whether the goals are just the wrong goals or the metrics you're looking at or the wrong metrics or how you're looking at them and what time scales and what way. And so it's just fascinating to me to not only listen to Sydney, a professional obviously the best in the business at this, but also just our experience of talking to customers every day of just like how important this topic is. And it's often like this boring like overlook, yeah, I know we need to clean up CRM.
It's not like a thing you should just like gloss over. Yeah, we'll get to the next quarter. Yeah, but we're working with an agency to like clean up some stuff. I'm like, no, this is actually like core to the reason you fail to produce the results that you want to produce.
And a lot of companies already see it that way. You know, they see it as they have a myriad of other excuses or explanations for failure to hit a number or whatever it is. So anyways, ramble over. That's why I'm pumped about this.
But how do you see a Cassie? I see it in kind of those two ways. I mean, you see the same thing. You're obviously a more seasoned than I am.
Well, I think we've seen this shift that a lot of the conversations we're having now marketers understand the journey that they need to go on. Think of that journey as being going from like a lead gen to demand gen or moving up market or what have you. They understand there's a modern way that buyers educate themselves and buy in dark social. And the question they have is really what you brought up, Carl.
I was like, how do I do it? And how do I measure it? It's I'm pretty confident when I have in place today is not going to cut it. And so I agree, we've seen this shift.
Now we've been talking to customers for the last 12 months. There's awareness of where marketers need to go. Now it's how do I do it? What I love about what Sydney's going to cover is we kind of break this into two pieces.
There's the pipe framework, which is really how we think about measuring pipeline results. And then there's hybrid attribution because we know we're both creating demand and capturing demand. It's easy to measure capture demand. And it's not so easy to measure create demand.
So how do we measure those things? And we have a framework on hybrid attribution. What I find rewarding for me when I hear this conversation in the language around this now and the standardization is I've lived this world before I showed up in refined labs, figuring it out for myself. And what we figured out was measurement starts in the CRM and in the pipeline.
And when you can standardize that and know that what you're doing as a marketer is impacting qualified opportunities, close one revenue, pipeline velocity metrics. That's when you know your marketing is working. And then when you need to dial that in, that's where the attribution comes in in terms of like, how do I dial it in? Where do I invest?
Where do I not invest? And so forth and so on. So the aha, for me, at that time was that measurement didn't start with the programs I'm running. Measurements started with the impact on pipeline revenue.
And I worked my way back out. And so I love it that we have language around this to help other marketers be able to communicate this. So they're leadership team and to their board because I didn't have that. We just kind of made up what I was doing this three years ago.
And so that's what's exciting to me about this is like how far this has come in terms of standardization. Yeah, you know, you brought up an important point because there's like, you know, measuring, creating demand, capture demand, convert demand, all that. And then there's the infrastructure, there's hybrid attribution. That's like a technical conversation for the most part.
There's like technical language in there. That is a responsibility of the marketing team to be subject matter experts in that. But you brought up something that was really critical, which is communication with others. And you have a really interesting hypothesis on kind of why or maybe where?
Maybe you can explain it better than me. But it's when I've heard you articulate, it's kind of like why like communication now breaks down. Like marketers actually doing good work. They've got infrastructure in place.
But they have kind of an immature skill set. I don't want to like offend anybody with that. They couldn't find a better word here on the fly. But just like a they need to develop some kind of a skill set around.
OK, how do I take all this technical, awesome marketing mix, modeling jargon and easily communicate it to a bunch of people who I've never been marketers, probably in their life, don't know anything about marketing, largely know a little bit about it, right? How do you do that? Well, so that you don't get, you know, derailed or get your budget cut or have some other apocalyptic scenario kind of, you know, come to pass to your team. Talk to me, talk us through like your interesting hypothesis on like communication between marketing teams and executives and boards.
Yeah, this is just an observation I've had between you talk to the marketers who are obsessed as you pointed out car with measurement, which is good. You need to be able to measure it with attribution and kind of technical terms, first touch, last touch, mobile touch, et cetera, influence revenue, et cetera. And then you go and listen to what the CEO or the board is asking. And they're asking a much simpler question.
They're asking, how do we know it's working or what is working or what? What's driving the success of our organization? They're not asking for technical answers. They're asking for a story.
They want to hear from the marketing leader with confidence. We are doing these things. This is how they work. This is the impact they're having.
And that's why we're seeing pipeline grow, close one revenue grow and velocity accelerate period, the end. And then what I can do that, well, what happens is the CEO moves on because they have many other things to do in the company. Yeah. But what happens is marketers don't tell that story well.
They get caught up in technical lingo. And this depends and that depends and so forth and so on. And what comes across is a lack of confidence. And then so does the CEO do when he sees a lack of confidence?
He or she drills into the team to understand for themselves and that puts him back and that puts the marketing team kind of on their back foot and kind of a rabbit hole of explaining using more technical jargon and more technical jargon versus backing out a hole and trying to explain it simply. So if you do it right the first time CEO moves on, but that's a gap in terms of what the marketing team is focused on trying to explain in excruciating detail and what the CEO is asking, which is, Hey, Carl, tell me how does this work? Why is it working? Sure.
Why is it working? Is it even working? Do you need more money? Yeah.
I mean, I went and when the CEO never been a CEO, you know, maybe one day, but I imagine like that when you have someone, I've been a sales leader, right? Long enough. Like when a sales person comes to me and explains their pipeline very confidently, very buttoned up, not overly technical, doesn't drag me into the weeds of like what's going on with Cassidy Shield, the CRO in his personal life. That might derail the deal like, but it gives me a good confident overview of their pipeline.
What do I do? I move on to the next rep and I focus on the rep that is, it doesn't give me any confident answers, right? And so I imagine like an executive team is going to feel the same way about their executive leadership team. Like, Hey, if I'm not getting confident answers, there's not a trust being built in like shaky, well, I don't know, we're waiting, you know, time lag on marketing.
You know how it is like, I don't know, maybe next quarter before we see anything where we've got clicks that we're seeing on ads that doesn't instill confidence and trust in me. And so what do I do? Well, it's my responsibility to my company to now micromanage into some degree, right? I'm like, you're responsible for me not to like step in and dig into this more, which, you know, like you said, it's going to put a marketing team on their heels.
Now, now you've got fire drills, extra reporting with the CEO needs, everyone's frustrated for wasting time when really the root cause was like, that clear, we needed a clear, concise story at the very beginning that would have solved for a lot of this. And of course, that really can only happen, though, Cassidy, when results are, you know, positive. What do you think is, I mean, how does a marketing on the third wall here? Like, let's say you have a good communication strategy, but like results aren't like good.
Like, how do you communicate if I'm a marketing leader to somebody like you, a CRO or a CEO, like, how would you set up that kind of conversation and story or narrative? Yeah, it's really a great question. The conversation is just the same in reverse. And that is you need a story based on facts and data, but not overly technical on why things are not working.
And then your hypothesis for what we do about it. Yeah. That's really the role of the CMO. So you kind of need to be able to take an objective view of this is what's working and why this is what's not working and why that's your role as a leader.
It's not to defend and make a story up to prove your existence. It's to be objective about the role of your function and the impact that has on the business, whether that is going well, then you should be able to communicate a story and pat yourself on the back a little bit and then double down for the next quarter. And if it's not going well, you need to be objectively be able to say, this is what we did. It didn't work.
Therefore, this is what we're going to do and try in order to see if it does work. And here's how we're going to communicate that going forward. That's really what leader wants out of their team. Yeah.
Um, a good leader. That is. Yeah. And so in both cases, you need to do, you need to have a system in place for a system like what Sydney's going to outline, which is how do you standardize measurement in terms of revenue within your pipeline and then how do you standardize measurement to be able to explain to yourself first and then others the effectiveness of your demand creation programs and your demand capture programs.
So two pieces, pipeline framework or pipe framework measurement standardization of your pipeline and then the standardization of your marketing using something we call hybrid, hybrid attribution, which is simply how do I measure demand creation programs and how do I measure demand capture programs in order to determine their effectiveness on the pipeline that I'm driving. That's your system. Sounds like a good system to me. Cast out.
You should we go ahead and introduce Sydney waterfall? Let's do it. All right. Enjoy this conversation with Sydney at the full funnel summit and demand full funnel summit city waterfall.
Take it away. See y'all. See y'all. Kyle, one of the most important and hot topics, how to affect the measure demands for the entire final.
So I see it. I'm a super passionate about measurement. I'm kind of a data nerd at heart. Always have been.
So this is a really fun session and I'm excited to be invited and to speak and connect with all of you. So we'll just jump in and get started. Nice to see everybody in the chat as well. Try not to get too distracted with the chat.
We'll jump in. So today I'm going to talk about how to effectively measure demand for your entire funnel. And I'm going to go through a couple of frameworks that we use here at Refine Labs with customers and you could implement at your business too. So towards the end, we have some actionable steps that you would be able to take some of these frameworks and actually start implementing them in your operations setup, depending on what you use.
So let's jump into it. I'm Sydney Waterfall, SPP of Growth at Refine Labs. Been here for about two and a half years, but before that, I've always spent time in SAS startups and specifically around like demand campaigns and measurement have kind of been my like three niche areas that I always gravitate towards. So I love the summit.
I love all the speakers and the content you guys have here. It's awesome. So I'm going to jump in. Okay.
So first, before I get to like frameworks and everything like this, I wanted to touch on why your measurement might need to change and kind of some of the dynamics there. And I also wanted to level set on a couple of terms and how we think about the terms and how we define some things that will kind of set the stage for the actual framework. Okay. So first and foremost, not telling you anything new here, but I just want to kind of level set here B to B buying has changed and so should you go to market strategy.
So previously, what we call the analog buying area era is people had less access information at scale. They had less access to peers. Things you would typically see as more direct field sales, boots on the ground, type of models and buyers who actually relied on the companies to publish and give them information, educate them and a lot of analyst firms, right? And then buyers spent more time with vendors learning and understanding and consuming that information in a more one to one or a smaller setting.
Then you kind of go into the digital buying, which there's two components of this. I like to explain one, the website era, which is just mass access to information. This is the internet era, right? People are early adopters of the internet and over time, everybody's using the internet and you could get more information on the internet.
More people were publishing information on the internet. So you no longer had to like really rely on a human to get some of this information. So this kind of kick started buyers behaving differently. And then now we're kind of in this dark social era, which is more access to information and peers at scale.
So what that is, is just hyperconnection of B to B peers through social networks, events like this, communities, private stuff, public stuff going on, what we call other forms of word of mouth that you might get digital word of mouth versus the traditional human word of mouth. And really today's buyer likes to do their own research, likes to stay de-anonymized before that they convert. So that's kind of why measurement needs to evolve. It needs to evolve with kind of how buyers are buying.
I'm going to touch on dark social. I know it's like a hot and spicy term, you know, everyone has their own definition. But for us and how I think about it, I wanted to kind of go over this definition. So it was very clear.
So we define this as word of mouth channels powered by the maturity of the internet through that scale advocacy sharing of content and other forms of word of mouth that don't get tracked by traditional attribution software and also don't create intent data at the account level that you may have access to. So here's some examples on the slides here, but obviously social network is a huge one. I think probably most of you heard about this event on social networks by your full funnels distribution and promotion strategy. It was all over social, right?
Content platforms. So we have an example here of like podcasts on Spotify or a podcast episode on YouTube or Apple, for example, direct DMs and then even kind of internal sharing of content through other tools like Slack, Zoom, this chat, for example, if I was to share a link or share content in here, that's not probably going to get tracked that I share that in the, in the, in the actual chat. So that's how we define and think about dark social. And I think it's important just to touch on that before I go into the framework.
Another thing I wanted to call out is kind of the difference between lead gen and demand gen and how we think about it. And some of these principles spurred the creation of this framework. So, you know, lead gen really marketing to get a contact for an account, pass to sales or do unsolicited follow up from any marketing or sales for a different department. And when I say demand gen and demand creation, this is kind of the methodology and intent I'm referring to, which is we're trying to educate at scale.
So the buyer comes to us already asking for a meeting. We are not soliciting the out to get the buyer to get a meeting. So it's kind of a nuanced example there. So before we kind of get into the framework, I have a couple of polls that I want to talk about.
So one poll I'm going to launch here is are you like currently executing a demand gen approach? And those who's curious to see where the audience is at before I kind of go into different talking points. OK, awesome. We've got nice of it about 48, 50 percent on yes, just starting 23, 25 percent just starting and we're moving in live time here.
So the first time they're moving cool. A lot of people planning on it or just starting on it and then about half said yes. Awesome. So I think this will be applicable to a majority of the audience.
And then if you're not yet not yet planning on this, I think this is if you were to kind of scope this out and look at this, it would be a good measurement framework to facilitate this transition. OK, awesome. Well, thanks everyone for voting. OK, so most of the people on here are starting thinking about it or actually already executing create demand strategies.
That's the biggest measurement gap that I see in the market. It's talked about a lot. And so that's what I'm here talking to you about today. Why is it the hardest to measure is because when you take a great demand approach, which is storytelling on dark social channels, you're actually optimizing for distribution, consumption, and engagement.
Think of like zero click content sparked over talks a lot about that and Amanda over there. Great resource. And you're not really optimizing 100 percent or majority of your optimizations are not focused on conversion or clicks. Therefore, it's very hard to measure with a traditional touch approach.
And also a lot of these platforms are not incentivized to give you data that you would love to have. I would love to have a bunch of data on every podcast listener, their firmographics, their interests, all of this, Spotify and Apple are not going to give us that legally. They actually can't because of privacy and data laws. So that's kind of where we're at.
I've one last poll before I get into the framework, but of those who are executing or testing with the demand creation strategies, what percent of your efforts are actually spent on creating demand. There's no right answer here. It really depends on the classic. It depends.
But I'm just curious to kind of get a pulse on the audience. Awesome. Wow, we are pretty split here. I like this.
This is good. Totally depends on your stage of company, your entire go to market strategy holistically, like there's so many variables here. So again, there's no right answer. But let's see, I would say the highest percentage so far, which is 36 percent is around 50 to 70 percent.
We got a strong 20 percent, 25 to 50. Awesome. So the reason I asked that question is because typically we find the more effort and percent of your resources, percent of your time. That goes towards creating demand.
The harder it is to track that. And most companies don't have a great way of understanding what's going on there. So it opens and leads to a big blind spot. Awesome.
Yeah, we are pretty split here, which is super interesting. Awesome. Well, thanks for participating in that poll. So now I'm actually going to dig into the framework that we use and have seen pretty good success with that you can implement.
And I'm going to go through a couple of concepts in this framework and then go over some examples of what you're reporting would look like after you implement something like this. So let's jump in. All right. So this is called the pipe framework.
And it's really a framework built for dark social and built for executing a create and capture demand strategy using kind of a new set of KPIs and involved attribution framework that anyone can implement. So one thing I wanted to level set before we go into the actual stages and how you can implement this is it's really focused on a primarily sales lead approach. You'll see that throughout this model. But it also, we are testing with PLG models and we have customers that run this pipe framework in addition to their product lead funnel that they're tracking.
So just kind of wanted to touch on that before we jump in. Because it might lead to a couple more questions. So a couple key components of this framework that I'm going to go into is it's really breaking up your funnel and tracking things by buyer intent and how they are converting and getting captured when they are ready to buy versus department or like a very high level thing like inbound forces outbound, for example, we call that pipeline sources. So we'll go into that.
And then it also encompasses hybrid attribution framework, which we talk a lot about here where you measure both create demand and capture demand programs and will go into that as well. You'll see here on the slide, the main reason we found to separate these out is because it's a much better predictor of sales velocity metrics sales performance metrics. If you actually break your funnel out like this, which leads to better forecasting and better planning. And so that's kind of why we recommend this.
Okay, let's get into it. So here's the overview of kind of the funnel and how the pipe framework works. I'm going to kind of go step by step through this. So you are running create demand programs capture demand programs.
You might be doing some damn demand stuff in there. Right. So it's kind of like the top of your funnel and then right when people are ready to convert, they're going to go through likely the capture demand program or channel to actually convert when they're ready. So that's kind of what this is showing here.
And then when they are ready to convert, we introduced them to what we call pipe. So pipe would be a declared intent form fill on your website that's asking to speak to sales. We call this the pipe conversion. So you can call it whatever you want internally.
That's what we call it. And that is from your own website, normally demo contact us, pricing request, learn more, you know, talk to sales, but the meeting CTA's we want to segment that into this framework. And then we're going to track, okay, of those pipe conversions. Now we want to look at pipe qualified meetings, which is a firm graphically fit.
Pipe conversion that books the meeting with your sales team is going to be the first meeting in your sales process because as we know a lot of sales processes are different. Then we come back. So these people are already in the funnel. They've raised their hands now the meeting.
They've dedicated time on their calendar to say, Yep, here's the time I'm going to talk to your sales team. And then the next step is when they're actually in your pipeline is called pipe high intent revenue opportunity. We call hero for short everybody loves a good acronym. Right.
So we've got PQMs and we've got heroes. And I'll go into these sub stages in subsequent slides that go into a little bit more detail here, but a pipe hero is an opportunity that has a six month rolling, converting it when rate of greater than 25%. And the reason we do that is for standardization of what pipeline and an opportunity is. And then obviously you've got close one from this funnel.
So that's the high level. I'm going to jump into kind of the stages and kind of go get a little bit more nitty gritty to give you guys a little bit more context. So we've got the stage definitions here and then a couple of bullet points of like best practices and recommendations at each stage. So as we mentioned, type conversions perspective of a buyer actively engaged in the buying process with your company through a declared intent, not assumed intent, not intent from a third party tool.
This is first party declared intent on your website by feeling out of form and asking to talk to your sales team. We always recommend you exclude tests and spam submissions when you are stamping like the pipe conversions, for example. And another thing to know, this is not just when we mentioned pipe conversion, it's not first touch, it's not last touch, it's any touch. Don't care what touch it is, we need to know when the buyer raised their hand and declared intent to have a sales conversation.
So sometimes that can get a little nuanced in your technical stack, depending upon what you have or don't have. And then I mentioned this earlier frequently CTA's here pricing request book meetings, you know, chat now with sales, there's a lot of technology that you can literally chat right online on a website with the sales rep. If you have that. All right, pipe qualified meetings.
So this is the first meeting booked from a pipe conversion in your sales process. And it's measured at the time that the meeting is actually booked, right, not the time that the meeting occurs on the calendar, but the day you booked it. So say I fill out a form and I'm on full funnels website I fill out a form and I book the meeting today. It's going to be the date for today, even though the meeting I booked is not for a week later.
We definitely recommend that you track meetings, attended, you know, meetings, rescheduled, cancelled, no show and all that, but it's kind of a subpart of the spring work. All right. And then obviously what team and what type of meeting this is very much depends on your organization doesn't matter, we just want to track the very first meeting that's booked. There might be multiple meetings in your flow.
Well, let's go to the third stage, which is probably my favorite stage, if I had to pick one, which is the high intent revenue opportunity hero. And we have the definition here is opportunity as a rolling six month mean rate of 25% or greater. Why? Well, we use win rate as a quality assurance metric that it is very easy, for example, to, I don't know, incentivize meetings booked or incentivized opportunities, which can lead to interesting behaviors.
And this could vary between organization. So we use win rate because it's actually your data and it's a baseline of your, what is going to win at one out of four deals and we're confident in that. And then we use that to make sure that that's what we're using as a QA metric to hold everybody accountable, the whole revenue team accountable. So when we talk about hero, you're going to have to calculate your hero stage date for your company.
This is going to be unique to each company, depending on their sales process when they create opportunities or deals at what stage in the sales process and all of that. Typically from a primarily sales led SaaS company, we typically see this around stage two or stage three. I have an example up here on the screen. So you can see stage one converts four percent stage two 15% win rate stage three is 27% for this example stage three is going to be my hero date, my hero stage.
So now when we're measuring the heroes, I'm going to say how many stage three opportunities do we have and how much stage three pipeline is generated from those opportunities, for example, and I didn't go over close one. I mean, I think that's pretty self explanatory. Close one equals yes, you have a sign contract signs deal, you're getting revenue from it. The next thing I wanted to go into is a common question we get a lot with this framework is how does this work with other existing pipeline sources or other existing, maybe good in market motions that you have internally that you guys are investing in.
So here's kind of a visual to kind of see. So again, same, you're running creative man programs or any capture demand programs, right? All you got this big funnel going on. The journey's not linear.
People are bouncing around consuming things. And then when they're ready to convert, they're going to convert, you know, hopefully on your website, which we call pipe intent, they're going to go through this tracking, or they may go through, you know, partner motion, maybe they come in through ABM intent triggered outbound, or you also maybe doing lead gen and they convert that way. So this is just to show that you don't have to overhaul everything you can implement pipe and then you can roll out this concept to other pipeline sources as you wish. This is one thing that we help companies with as well.
So the point here I'm trying to make on this chart is creating demand capturing man all these activities. Impact all of your good market sources. It's not just this program only will go into pipe and that's it. That's only how the buyer will convert.
That's just not really how it works in the real life world. It'd be much easier to do it. Okay. So now that we've went over kind of the bones of the framework, I'm going to transition into a core concept of hybrid attribution and how that works because it will show you how we take the pipe framework, how we take hybrid attribution and how we overlay them together to produce the reports that I'm about to show.
So typically current state, I'm just going to use pipe as an example is you have a website conversion. You can see software based attribution, typically first touch, last touch if you're running a basic model out of a basic or out of the box marketing system and you might have a dedicated attribution tool as well where you're going to be tracking multi touch attribution. So really depends on what data you have there, but you're going to have access to that. And then you're only going to be able to really understand the demand capture attribution at the conversion point.
And then that's the only data that you're most people not going to speak for everybody here. Because I know there's some really advanced marketers on revenue leaders probably attending these sessions as well. Most people are traditionally only look at those data points when making strategy adjustments. So basically hybrid attribution, pretty simple concept.
We want to take your existing software attribution. And then we also want to add another data point to look at which we call self reported attribution. And we want to look at both of those data points side by side throughout this framework at the conversion level at the meeting level at the hero level and close one we want to understand how that works. And by doing this, you would be able to look at both demand creation attribution and capture attribution.
So I'll get into it self reported attribution is here, but this will essentially infuse a zero party customer data point into your measurement model, which I think is super valuable. Okay. So here it's just an example of a visual of like how this works. You're going to have your self report attribution side by side with your demand capture attribution and both of the is just showing a final view of this.
So your create demand is going to kind of tell you what's going on. How they hear about you and reveal some most likely untrackable sources and what we've seen from our data, a lot of create demand initiatives that you're investing in. And then your capture demand is going to tell you how they actually came in when they converted. And then again, you're going to map that to these final stages throughout the entire funnel.
So self attribution, some of you may be familiar with it. Some of you may not be familiar with it. And if you never find labs, you've probably heard this before. But essentially what it is, it's really simple.
It's free. You don't really need to need like a software to implement it. There are software out there that help you. And like review it, analyze it and visualize it, but you can do this without software.
Just implementing a field on your declared intent forms that ask how to hear about us. We recommend for it to be required free text field, name the field, self report attribution on the back end, right? On the form you'll have it visible that says how to hear about us with no leader text or hints or anything like that. You know, recommend a split test when rolling this out.
We found in our data doesn't have significant impact on a lot of the tests we ran with our clients, but every company is different. We always recommend take the strategy, take the approach and implement it and customize it for your company. So some people recommend doing a split test before you just completely change everything on the conversion form. Totally support that.
And we've ran that as well. You're going to need to then map this field to the lead, contact and opportunity and ordeal object, depending on what marketing automation and CRM systems you use. Then you're going to need to create a second field, which we call self reported attribution source. And this is a field that's normally a custom field or custom property that kind of groups or tags the raw text into an easier, reportable field.
We have a lot of steps on this. How to actually do this in the vault as well. So that's just the one on one. And I want to get into some examples of what this looks like after you implement this.
What is your reporting life look like? So when you have a hybrid view, you're going to be able to pull reporting and look at both views side by side, which I think is super powerful. So here you're looking at closed one data. And on the graph on the left, I'm looking at, okay, of everyone who said, entered text into the, how'd you hear about a swarm.
And we categorize this, how, what's programs are working well. And you can see here we've got podcasts, LinkedIn, word of mouth, we have communities, maybe have employee referrals. All of the customization of these categories are going to be tailored towards your website. So these are the four companies that are running the program and the programs and initiatives that you're running and what you actually see in the data, right?
So if you see in the data, someone says, you know, let's just say full funnel summit, for example, maybe if you're saying, Oh my gosh, I heard about your full funnel summit. And we're seeing a lot of those. We're going to make sure that's tagged to events. But as full, if I was in full funnel and I was working there and I'm like, This is our own proprietary event.
I want to tag that as a category compared to just a higher level category of all events as well, right? And then the second graph is looking at the traditional attribution, organic search, drug traffic referral, you know, maybe you've got, you've got other ones here. These are just typically what we see in our data. So now you can say, Okay, it's pretty clear that podcasts and LinkedIn are actually driving was getting tagged and converting as organic search.
Here's how people are hearing about us, then they've heard about us so much or multiple touch points a ton of times, and then they come into organic search and convert. So again, we're not pushing these things against each other. We're trying to understand how they work together and take that view. You'll also notice we're not like splitting credit.
Like the podcast gets half the deal size and organic search gets half the deal size. We're not taking a traditional software based approach when looking at this data. We actually recommend that you just look at how much revenue came from these categories on the left, how much revenue came from these categories on the right, and then make strategy adjustments insights together, not fighting over credit. No, like the fighting game.
All right. And then we have the same concepts through hero pipeline. So one thing you'll notice here is like, Oh, man. Like, like organics, like direct traffic has less hero pipeline percentage.
And so does podcast when you look at hero pipeline. But when I go back and I look at close one, organic search has a much higher close one win rate and so does podcast. So now you start getting into, Okay, let's look at win rates. Let's look at average ARR or average MRI by this.
Let's look at all those sales velocity metrics by these data points, which is super helpful to us. Like it was an insight that we had like our podcast leads are our best leads highest ARR and convert the highest rate. Makes sense when you think about it, if you're going to sit down, listen to hours of a podcast, you're very well educated when you come in down, but you know you go with the data. And then you have this conversion and meeting as well.
Very similar graphs here. Another interesting insight that we had when we looked at our data was, you know, we get a lot of word of mouth and the word of mouth also converts at a high rate. We just don't get that much volume of it, right? It's hard to drive volume of word of mouth, for example.
So those are some examples of the end state that you could take. And now I want to give you like actionable steps. So you can do this on your own. You can work with other people to do it.
Like, doesn't matter. Here's how you do it. So, and I'm sure you'll have accesses recording and slides to make sure that you have tangible takeaways here. But step one, you need to set up the foundation to power this.
You need to implement self-report attribution and get that going. Step two, you need to ensure that you're actually capturing type conversions correctly in your CRM and the associated data points that you would want to track throughout the entire funnel with that type conversion. You'd be surprised how many people cannot actively track this that well because their MQL model or their lead model is based on last touch or only first touch where we recommend that it doesn't matter what touch it is. We need to know they filled something out and then sales needs to follow up if they're not already being worked, right?
We don't want to lose that anywhere in the CRM or marketing organization system. So you want conversion date, what type of the conversion it was, source and maybe campaign, right? These are like basic things that probably ever market wants to know. You want to set that up, make sure it's firing, make sure it's working correctly.
Number three, opportunity stage tracking. This is like number three and number five or like even if you don't adopt this, you should just do this, in my opinion. Even if you don't do the right framework, say you hate it. Don't worry.
Do number three and number five here. So, opportunity stage tracking. Out of the box solutions that most CRM's Salesforce stage history table, not super friendly, not designed super well. Even in HubSpot, we create custom opportunity stage tracking as well.
I think HubSpot does a little bit of a better job, but still still for improvement customization. So we say track every stage date through your opportunities, very much like that visual. I went through like stage one, whatever stage one is for you. Maybe it's meeting booked, maybe it's qualified, who knows.
Doesn't really matter the name. You need a date field that says stage one typically is great date, right? Stage two, stage two date, stage three, stage three date. And then those fields get stamped when the opportunity enters that stage.
Meetings booked, we talked about this. If you're not tracking meetings booked, definitely need to. There's a bunch of different ways you can track that and a bunch of different ways. And people do it with a status field, an event field, an activity trigger a bunch of different ways.
And then number five, just require contacts on all opportunities or deals so that your data can map correctly to revenue. Okay, so that's like the foundational stuff. So, you know, you might have some of that done. You might have all of it done.
That's great. Make sure you have those five things completed. And then here's what's next. How do you actually go about implementing the pipe framework by yourself, right?
So, you're that trigger conversions. Those form fields are working correctly. This is very custom to your internal setup. I'm not even going to try to help explain this without getting into the weeds.
You want to create a workflow to create and populate that qualified meeting date. You want to be able to calculate your hero date, which you will need stage dates for, and then create a field for hero date. Because, spoiler alert, it can change over time. And number four is mapping those key data points to the opportunity once you have the contact and opportunity objects locked.
So, you can be any data points, but these are like the basics that we recommend. Self reported raw, self reported category, UTM data, if you have it, doesn't matter for whatever touch you want, you can map all that over. And then the conversion campaign. Then once you have that, you can build those lovely reports similar to I just showed you.
Like I said, you can do some of this yourself. And, or we help clients do this too because every instance in every setup is completely different with different text stacks. So, that's what I've got for you all today. Thank you for listening.
And there's some additional resources. If you want to check out anything more about pipe framework. Yeah, I'm Sharon the link to refine labs wall. So you guys can access it in the chat.
I also pinned Sydney's profile on LinkedIn. So feel free to connect and ask additional questions and make sure the follow as she's sharing actionable advice about the con Oh, sorry, the man generation. I still have a con base market. After the first track we had yesterday.
So, Jackson side guys, I would love before we move to the Q and A. I would love to ask you guys, how did you enjoy the session? Did you learn something new? What's your overall impression?
Shabbas, that's your feedback or just type your favorite energy, whatever you prefer. As you always do. I was asked quick feedback, please. Yes, let me hear the feedback.
At least try to get better provide more actionable steps for you guys as well. I need a deeper dive. Nice. Maybe I'll have a secondary event here with a full one.
Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Thanks a lot, guys. Yeah, appreciate the walkthrough.
18. Cool. Thank you so much. Awesome.
Thank you. Cool. We have a lot of questions in the Q and A. Let's do it.
Luckily, we have 25 minutes. So, in the cross that we'll be able to cover all of them. Let's try. So, let's do it one by one.
And I would stop sharing these slides and share the questions. The first one is coming from Mark. What is the sales process on Sierra and stages that relate to your five framework, not clear as you've used the five stages on the hero slide with the stages between. Yeah.
Yeah, good call out. So every company kind of has their own unique and rightfully so like internal sales process and how they handle and route things. So, for example, companies will have a different, not every company creates opportunity at the state at the same time or same stage in their sales process. So when you create, I'm just going to use opportunity and sales force here just for this example.
But so you create for us like, we'll create an opportunity and we create the opportunity when the meeting gets booked. Not all companies do that. So we have, we have different stages. So for us stage one, we have this outreach initiated stage two is meeting booked stage three is proposal sent stage four is, oh, excuse me, buying group bought in and then stage five is proposal sent.
And then we have close one. Right. So those are our stages. Very personalized to us.
I'm sure you have your own stage names. When we say that, I'm just, I'm just mapping the name to a number so that it's easier to understand essentially. So for us outreach initiatives can be stage one, then meeting booked with the stage two and so on. So that way, we recommend that however you do your opportunity and your stage process, keep that the same.
You don't need to change that. We recommend that you actually label the fields as stage one stage two stage three because as we've seen and as we know, the sales process might change. The name of opportunity stages might change might evolve. You might have different stage names for new business versus renewal versus different opportunity types.
So if you name the date fields as numbers, you don't have to really maintain that in the future, which is great for whoever the sales force happened is they have to go back and update stage names and things like that. So that's kind of the example and point I was trying to make there. Hopefully that makes a little bit more sense mark. Pretty clear, pretty clear.
And there is another question. I really like it. When what do we do with the SDRs if they are not doing cold calling an email outreach, they just have them sitting on the bench. No, that would not be a great use of resources, especially in today's world.
Great question. So I showed a slide where it was like multiple models. We call them pipeline sources. Right.
So pipe is a pipeline source just to track your website declared intent. We have another pipeline source. There's actually a few that you could call it cold outbound, right? Maybe Aes and SDRs are doing outbound.
And then obviously with ABM, we actually separate that into a secondary pipeline source because normally you're using intent data or software or using some tool to trigger an outbound outreach. Typically from SDR, VDR, or depends on your setup. And we recommend that you could track the same type of stages. So you can still track like a conversion.
You could still track how many your conversion definition is going to change a little bit for the different pipeline sources. So for example, I'm just going to go with the ABM intent example. One of our clients runs, they trigger a conversion once they get an MQA based on a bunch of scoring and intent data. They're triggering these MQAs.
They trigger the conversion when the on the person, when the outbound rep is taking that MQA, looking at the contacts and going outbound after the contacts, they trigger that as a conversion. And then you'll be able to see what meeting book you got from the people that you're reaching out to. And then hero is the same. Revenue is the same.
You can run the same hero definition across your entire opportunity based no matter what go to market session, what go to market or pipeline source they are coming from. So that's how we recommend scaling that out. If you're not doing any of that, I would definitely utilize resources to SDR resources to kind of share, engage with communities, share thoughts. Leadership conversations.
And most of their efforts would probably be trapped in those other pipeline sources that I mentioned, ABM intent triggered outbound, maybe events, maybe have them supporting events, and then maybe just pure raw cold outbound, which cold outbound would be, I just purchased a list or I just got lists from cognizant or cement file or something. And I'm just going cold outbound. I have no data that they're in market. I'm just going after them, which we can debate if that's effective or not later.
Absolutely. I love it. That's a good question. I think from Carchett, don't you think the man generation can't market in the current field?
Is that exclusive? Yeah, I would tend to agree with this statement, actually. Like, I'm leaning towards like more agreeing than like disagreeing if I had to say. And the reason being is when I think of demand generation of what it is today and what is required requires a lot of, let's say, traditional product marketing, like let's just book it, product marketing over here.
Like, you need to know what you're saying, how your message in position, how you fit in the market, are you category, trying to create a category, trying to go up against category leader, all those things. You have to have content to do anything in demand generation. You have to have content, actually, really to do anything in marketing. And I think the best demand gen campaigns or demand gen teams, all three of those work as one.
It's what are we going to say to the market? What are our customers telling us? How do we create content that people care about? And then I vision demand gen a little bit more on the distribution arm of it, right?
Like, we've got this great resource and we have all this stuff made now, we have all this great content. And so, you know, I mean, we have to have a lot of people that have really, you know, a lot of people that are getting into personalize it for the channel and for the distribution strategy, but I would say nowadays, like, I'm a big fan of having content in like demand jam, demand gen teams or let's just call it content distribution like on the same team or sometimes honestly it's the same person if you have the small team. So, I think this is very well positioned, and a lot of people are confusing. That's, hopefully this one's for all.
So probably not for all. That's the whole world that are here. especially from your experience working with different clients, what are the kind of most common tools that you see? Yeah, so most common, I'm gonna start with marketing animation platforms that we see are HubSpot is primarily the highest percent, and then Marketo depending on the size and maturity and complexity of the business.
I am a Marketo girl through through, but I do love HubSpot as well. So does everyone have their own personal preference, usually based on their experience? Those are the most common two that we see, we have a very few customers that have Parto or that have a custom solution, and a lot of people are actually switching to HubSpot, is what some decent amount of Marketo tech stack are switching to HubSpot. So a lot of migration is going on.
And then CRM, again the top two, Salesforce, they're the market share market holder and then HubSpot, those are the top two that we see. In terms of visualizing the tech stack and things like that, most of our clients visualize things either in a looker or a, I would say they're more advanced in their tech stock, they have a dedicated BI tool, not many do. So looker, Tableau, the Tableau integration to Salesforce is really nice. But again, those are probably definitely more mature companies and larger revenue bands.
So we're seeing a lot of sales efficiency stack as well. A lot of meeting, speed to meeting, not really speed to lead anymore, but like speed to meeting technologies and like a chili criper, and then like website personalization has been pretty big. So like Mutiny, Qualified, those are kind of the two that we typically see. Outside of that, attribution software is typically they're using what is in that tech stack already, and some have a few dedicated solutions as well.
Awesome, I love it. We have, just for you guys, I know we have more questions, but I believe it's just eight minutes before the next session, so we won't be able to cover all of them. So just to let you know again, I'm trying to link to our Slack community, make sure to join the community. And if we didn't cover your question, just post your question there, and I will make sure that we'll cover it.
So coming back to another one that is coming from April, how do you manage tech and design in a freeform, text field, self-report, or attribution to get that clean-demand gen source report? Yes, we've, the past year and a half, fumbled our way through this, to be honest. And we kind of created like what we now recommend based on some of our errors that we did internally on our data. And historically, we set this up in HubSpot.
We now also use Salesforce, so I'll go through it real quick. There's like a good better best approach, I would say, with this. A good approach is, okay, I am looking at the free text field, and you can build a workflow in HubSpot that, or any automation, Mercado, any automation that says, if contains x, tag the source field with this value, right? But that's a good approach, that's what we started at.
But then that's a free text field to one value field, right? You're like, only saying this is one thing, which maybe most of your responses are. But we found in our responses, we get a lot of variation, multiple things, as I mentioned. So that's a really good approach.
We have actually documented full instructions on how to do this in Mercado, Pardot, and HubSpot in the vault with step-by-step screenshots, so how you can do this. And then I would say, like, what we've architected in Salesforce is definitely, I would say, a better best approach. So we actually have two levels of fields now. We have a category and a category group, so you can get really high level, like social media.
And then you can drill down, like, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, like, drill into those. So how we do it in Salesforce is we've actually automated the entire process, but we're looking at, we're using code-based solution that we've written, and we look at the full free text field, and we can look for multiple things, not just one, and then we can tag the category and category group. So, you know, podcasts, they always just say podcast. They rarely say the name of the podcast, at least in our data, but they may say, I don't know, I follow, this is very common.
I followed Chris on LinkedIn two years ago, and now I've listened to your podcasts. So now we've got a personal brand, we've got LinkedIn, and we've got podcasts, right? We want to be able to aggregate that and look at that and visualize that in Salesforce. So that's more of the, like, advanced way.
But I tell you, most people have implemented it just the basic way, and you still get a ton of insights from it. Like, it is still very valuable. And this is, I mean, of course, I'm slightly biased, but you can look on LinkedIn and you can look at people who've implemented this self who don't work with fine labs whatsoever, and they get value from it too. So, yeah, if you use, if you use, as April, it looks like your HubSpot user, you can head to the vault.
Yeah, we have a free experience there, and then like a premium experience. And then if you go to our website, refinelabs.com, and our product, you'll see if you use Salesforce, you'll see our Watchtower app that we have designed. So if you want the easy button, we're already done, we have you, if you want to do it yourself manually, you can do that too. Awesome.
We have three minutes left, so probably one maximum two seconds will be able to cover. So one more is coming from Diego. I didn't understand how to calculate the hero, could you give us an example, please, one? Yes, awesome.
So I'm going to go through the first, you're going to create an opportunity or deal report, and you're going to look at your create date, right? Create date or stage one date when it was created in, you know, the first stage is stage one. So great date equals stage one day. And then you're going to create a win, you're going to look at win rate.
So when we look at win rate, you're going to look at only closed opportunities. You're not going to look at opportunities in pipeline. So you're going to then filter to close one or close lost opportunities, and then you'll, that hub spot does this out of the box and salesforce, you just create a quick formula field where you can see the win rate. So that, let's say in that example, I think it was like 7%.
It's like, okay, stage one, win rate, 7%. Now I need to go to stage two. So you're going to need to change your filters on your report, and you're going to need to go to stage two date. Hopefully you have that field.
If you don't have that field, you can try to use the name of the opportunity. So like filter to only opportunities that made it to stage two, for example. It's not the, that's, that's an okay to do it if you don't have the data. And then maybe that when you look at that, you change the filter, you change the entry point, it's only going to say 17%.
So you're like, oh, still not a hero. Then you go to stage three, and the example stage three date or whatever your stage three opportunity name is, and that shows you a win rate above 25%. So you're like, yep, stage three is my hero. I have hero date now.
So I will create a workflow that says anytime opportunity goes to stage three, stamp hero date. Hopefully that was quick. And yeah, absolutely. Very good example.
Probably let's try to cover this last one from Paul. What about other based prospects? I think to speak of sales, for example, I'll teach from sales people either via social seller, email or face to face, I will see that in this famous. I love this question.
So we actually go through this a lot here internally. We get a lot of responses where people raising their hands, not on our website in LinkedIn DMs direct at events. So it really depends. So I'm going to go through a couple examples.
So if there's an outreach, so salesperson reaches out to Carl, Carl's been chatting with them. He's our director of sales. And he reaches out to Carl and says, hey, I'm ready to talk. If you got out, you got to think where did that interaction happen?
It happened on LinkedIn, then it's going to get tagged as like a pipe conversion. And we're going to tag the conversion as like LinkedIn and the campaign as something else. We're actively going through this right now to see if we should set up a new pipeline source for this. If they reply to an email, and they say, then we're just going to say, hey, that's sales source outbound, right?
They reply to an email. It gets tagged as sales source outbound. If they're at an event and they declare intent, that's going to get tagged for the event. It's like where they were when they declared that intent, which can happen in multiple areas, can happen in dark social as well.
It can also help in your product too. If you are a product ladder, you have a free experience. So you could have a pipeline source for your product, right? You went outbound in the product and converted them, or they declared intent in the product and you converted them.
Awesome. Thank you so much. That was brilliant. We want to have time to cover other questions because the next session starts.
Thank you so much for this brilliant presentation. Super action about lots of practical examples about blended attribution. Just looking at the feedback folks wanted. Thanks again and hope we'll do more runs in future.
Thank you guys. Thank you for staying here. Thank you. Take care.