Welcome back to Stacking Growth Snacks, I'm Seth Krenula and I'm here with Evan Hughes, the VP of Marketing for Refine Labs to talk about the Refine Labs philosophy on demand and media. All right, Evan, we're talking about results. What results have you seen with companies that shift from lead gen to a demand generation approach? Results.
So such an interesting and important question when you think about the transition from lead generation to the demand generation, right? So I think that their unique part of this in itself is oftentimes lead generation is anchored in like cost per lead, it's anchored in different attributable marketing metrics that are one to one. And so the first part, like before you even get to results and is you have to anchor in which metrics you're going to define success as. And so when we say like this has been successful, it could be depend on how far along the person has been rolling out their go-to-market strategy, how far along they've been implementing demand generation, how long their sales cycle is, what T-mentimics, there's so many different variables that influence success.
For me, like, a super exciting opportunity was like working with a client, really anchoring on which metrics to evaluate and think about this, this is changing from like cost per lead to demand generation. So velocity of deals, pipeline, speed to lead, how fast are we educating these buyers and they're coming and raising their hands to talk to us. What are the win rates of specific individuals coming in from various sources, whether we're doing paid sources, direct organic, outbound, just really kind of inking ourselves around a benchmark. I had a client that came to us that was traditionally running lead gen, very much a data content capture email, sales outbound.
They have a high pipeline target aggressively high, which we see often when it comes to forecasting year over year change, but not a lot changes on the marketing side, long sales cycle, so that it was greater than nine months. But their marketing team was ready. And I think this was the exciting part. There's still some education to be had on the sales team, the leadership, which we uncovered over time, but really kind of taking that mindset shift from lead and MQL volume to really education and demand creation.
The quantitative performance insights were high. So the first fiscal quarter in partnership, so we worked about two months prior and then the first full calendar quarter, we saw what we always talk about. The philosophy means leads will decline because we are not interested in low quality leads. So leads were down 20% to the trailing eight quarters, leadership was panicking a little bit.
But when we double clicked even further and anchored on the success metrics, the ops created were up 44% to the trailing month average. So when I'm thinking about leadership and what's interesting, MQLs are less valuable to the business, opportunity closer to revenue, that was an area that we use to help just completely get everybody bought into success of what we are going to be doing and how we're going to continue to evolve. Overall, we saw total pipeline rep generated at 115% to the trailing eight quarters. This blue people's mind and it always because one we started with transitioning from lead to demand generation, but educating stakeholders along the way with milestones of success.
You can't run into this with saying, this is what's going to happen. You have to walk them through the journey of your step one, your step two, step three. Does it have to be one or the other? Can a mixed approach work?
Have you seen it work? What are the circumstances in which it could or couldn't? So have I seen it work? No.
Have I seen it doable? Yes. Can you maintain it? Sure.
But when you think about how you define success and how really we're anchoring around pipeline revenue, new revenue for a business, when you have one team running lead gen and you have one team running demand generation within the same organization, there's conflicting narratives taking place. One is champion cost per lead and a silo and circular success metrics, the other champion cost per pipeline, cost per qualified opportunity. And how does the leadership team acceptable for those narratives in one place is tough. So you can do them.
And there are scenarios where maybe you're changing, you're going up market or you're trying SMB versus mid market and you're transition SMB to full demand generation kind of flywheel creating capturing, but you're still not sure about mid market. So you still have some of the gated content, you're still capturing a few of the leads because you're nurturing that audience. That's where I think it can work when you slowly peel back the layers, but I wouldn't say operating both full guns of blazing is super successful because the narrative gets murky when you think about business metrics. That's great.
Thank you so much, Evan. Next time, we're going to talk about paid media. So get ready to tune in for that.