I want to welcome today really a special guest that I've been following on LinkedIn and I feel like I know her personally because of so much engagement over the years. And I guess this Megan Bowen and she is the CEO of Refine Labs. She has an impressive track record in the marketing industry and is known for innovative approaches and demand Jen revenue world strategies and more. And she just really understands business through and through.
And so I'm very, very excited to welcome you to the podcast Megan. Hello, thank you for having me Monique. I'm very happy to be here. Thanks for joining.
I have been anticipating this conversation, especially recently with your post on LinkedIn, where you really help bring clarity to the considerations that folks need to make when they are prioritizing marketing and what they need to do and how to spend money, especially in these economic times when folks are cutting back and things are lean. You're talking about how to get in alignment and basically stop wasting money. There's a strategic way to go about this. With that in mind, there was a specific post that you did and I was like, can we talk about this more?
And it was on your post about just the pressures that folks in the market in the department has to like have results like right now have revenue right now and then that causes more decision making on the actual tactics. Yeah, I think if I remember the post you're referring to was really around kind of outlining like the five common mistakes that leaders can make when they're under pressure to hit revenue targets. And before I joined Refine Labs, I had a 17 year career at different B2B SaaS companies. And so I mean, I personally made all of these mistakes.
So I know from experience and I empathize with leaders because it's a really challenging position to be in. And so the reason I share this is because it's in my experience anyway with my personal journey at these different companies. But then when I'm in my seat at Refine Labs and over the last four years, we've probably worked with almost 300 different companies, you literally see the same patterns over and over and over again. And so I think with respect to, you asked me a direct question, which I'll get to, but to like lead up to it.
I'll share a few more things. Yeah, please, please do. Because I think it's basically, and I was sort of sharing this a little bit before we hit record, but marketing is not a silver bullet. Like demand gen strategies, paid advertising, just deploying those strategies without having certain things in place in your business is not going to help you grow.
And I think what I try to shed a light on are a lot of those like root cause fundamental things that any business owner, any CEO needs to be getting in place and have that really strong foundation before they start to make investments in growth programs. And so one thing that one common mistake that I've seen or one trend is really around understanding what is realistic from a growth perspective. I kind of grew up in the growth at all costs era where it was pretty commonplace to have large VC rounds, 100, 200, 300 percent quarter over quarter year over year growth targets, spend whatever you have to get there, no regard for customer acquisition cost. And I think for a while, in some ways, I guess it sort of worked for some companies, which is why it became acceptable.
But I think step one is being really honest about where you are in your stage of your business and using your historical track record to inform your future track record. And it's not to say that you shouldn't place bets or you shouldn't find ways to continue to grow, but doing it in a way that's not based on hope. Hope is an strategy. Hope is an strategy.
Thank you for saying that. So the majority of our audience are not marketing folks. They're the CEOs. They're the business owners.
We still have conversations about the difference between activities when we're describing Legion versus the man gen. So you guys at Refine Labs have really done a great job with defining that for your followers, clients and people who listen to your podcast. I'd like for you to do that for them because I'm still having that conversation that no, that's Legion. That's not a man gen.
Like you need to focus more on demand gen for growing your brand and things of that nature before they invest too much money in Legion and they don't really have the market awareness of what they do, who they are and all of that. So can you really dig into the differences in those two for our listeners? Yeah, it's a great point. And you know, it comes back to because you set that original growth target maybe a bit unrealistically.
You feel like you're in this pressure of like, just get me leads, just get me leads and the sales team will have to convert them into customers and like, that's how we'll hit these unrealistic targets. So I think the root cause of this is coming from a place of feeling this pressure to hit an unrealistic growth target and thinking these short term tactics will help. So really when I explain the difference, what is the difference between lead gen and demand gen? Lead gen is really effectively running paid advertising programs where your goal is to collect someone's contact information in order to basically shove them into your sales process, whether they're ready or not.
So that can take a few forms. Lead gen could be running a paid campaign on LinkedIn and offering up a great resource to your audience in exchange for their email address. And maybe you have 200 people that want that resource and perceive it to be valuable and they give up their email address for that resource, but are not actually ready to buy your product or have a conversation with your sales team. So it's like, oh, yay, we got 200 leads and let's get our sales people to call an email that's 200 leads a million times.
But oh, none of them became customers. Right. Or maybe one did, but that's not a good return on your investment. And it also impacts your brand reputation.
You might actually frustrate or annoy a potential future customer because you misread their intent. Another clear example of this is people spending all this money going to a trade show and just saying, just scan everybody that walks by the booth and then the sales team's going to call everybody who walked by our booth at this trade show. Again, their intent isn't there. So lead gen is really meant to represent short term tactics where the intention is to get a lead regardless of whether this person is in market to buy or has any intent to buy.
When we talk about demand gen, the key difference is how are we deploying programs that are acknowledging where B2B buyers are today, where we're educating and driving awareness and where we're more focused on giving people all the information that they need so that when they are ready to initiate a sales conversation, they raise their hand and come to us. So instead of this like pull sort of pull trying to pull sales in, it's we're more so pushing information out and waiting for them to come back to us. So a couple examples when you think about LinkedIn campaign, don't gate the resource. Just provide the resource or better yet make the resource available on your website, develop a really fun and engaging ad creative, deploy that and have the call to action be bringing them back to your website to consume more of that resource or that content to become more familiar to you without any other ask, right?
Yep. So that I mean, that's really the key difference and data will show that the lead gen programs and frankly, they were a lot more effective 10 to 15 years ago. So it's never worked. They did work.
They just don't really work anymore because things have changed. So the data will show that and it's really acknowledging that reality and focusing on strategies that are more aligned with how B2B buying happens today. That's so good because we have evolved. I always tell clients, I'm like, people are on to the games like now, like the tricks and stuff that used to be really effective in marketing 10, 15 years ago, like everyone knows the game now.
Like they that's why they have email addresses. They've created that specifically meant to put into those lead gen tactics you have out there because they want further emails from you to go to the trash unless they're absolutely interested in buying like at that moment, which we know most people are not. So switching from lead gen tactics to, oh, okay, we need to do more demand and like trying to find that balance of how much to do of what? How do you help clients figure that out?
Yeah, the transition can be challenging for a number of reasons. Number one, sometimes they're just organizational constraints. They'll be the company invested in a sizable sales team with SDRs and account executives, and they're effectively reliant on this lead gen engine to give them a list of people to contact and reach out to. And just shutting off those campaigns and launching new campaigns will create some real disruption within the organization.
So part one is really understanding what is going on today. If we were to make this change, what would really be disrupted? And then knowing that how should we put a plan together that allows us to phase into that change in a way that will be the least disruptive to the organization and continue to move us in the direction over time of phasing out lead gen programs and phasing in more demand gen programs. And so often what that can look like when we work with our customers is there's typically out of all the lead gen campaigns that are out there, you know, people spend money and things like display advertising, contents, and dictation.
So there are some easy wins of, okay, here are some programs that really are giving us no ROI. Let's let's shut those down in phase one, but maybe keep some of the other LinkedIn lead gen campaigns open if we need to effectively like feed the sales team with these leads. And so how can you phase out some lead gen programs, introduce some demand gen programs, then you need to ask the question of, okay, if we move in this direction and we know that we're going to lose a quantity of leads in order to get higher quality inbound leads, how are we thinking about how the role of the SDR or the sales team might evolve if they're no longer getting those lists or those leads each day each week. And so it's really thinking about what are other ways that you can deploy your sales resources effectively to achieve your goals if this changes.
And so talking with our customers about having their sales team share information on LinkedIn to help drive that awareness, shifting their focus to outbound outreach for on a target account list, for example, instead of reaching out to leads that, again, might have walked by your booth or downloaded an e-book. So it is company specific when you get into that, but that's one example of how you can think about it. And what I will say that is consistent across all companies is it has to be a phase approach. It's not like you turn everything off one day, turn off all lead gen, turn on demand gen.
That's not realistic. And I and we recognize that. So you need to phase into that over time and acknowledge the organizational constraints you have and make a plan that's going to work based on your context in use case. I actually had a follow up question to that and you answered it right there because I'm thinking how hard is it to get your clients to not anticipate that dopamine hit of email addresses coming in through their lead gen efforts, even though they don't convert, it feels like they're doing something.
It feels like we're active. And if they have VCs that are looking forward some type of accountability of activity, then they feel as if they have something to show, rather it's some companies have sold just based upon your email list, when able to say, Hey, we have all these customers or folks in our pipeline. And it's even though it's not real. So how hard is it for you all to kind of, I don't know, take the toy away from the baby and say, wait, wait, let's put this down for a moment and let's kind of balance this out more because it feels like we won't have any money coming in if we stop doing that.
It's a big fear. How do you overcome that? It's a big fear and it's people will actually agree when you talk about this conceptually. That makes sense.
I agree. I'm philosophically aligned. So it's actually a big part of my sales process. I'm upfront that it's going to be a challenging change.
Like I'm upfront, even though you're buying into what I'm telling you, when lead volume goes down, you or someone else will freak out. So even though I do my best to set expectations almost always when we're working with customers, we begin to make these changes. They start to see, you know, volume go down, but quality go up. And there's that panic moment.
And it's it really comes down to ongoing education and reinforcement and pushing getting them through that really uncomfortable transition period when we can actually begin to point to the higher number of opportunities that have been created from the lower volume, but higher quality leads that have come in. Once you start to get those wins on the board and they see the difference in pipeline and opportunity creation relative to before, that's when everyone can take a breath. But there's always this, I think at one point I called it like the vulnerable period. It's like three months where it's just like, oh, did I make the right decision?
Period. Yeah. And I can empathize with that. What I try to communicate to people is you can keep doing the status quo and you probably won't lose your job, but you're not going to hit your goals.
Or you can be a change agent and you can push for what is right and fight for what is right and figure out a way to keep to deal with the internal pressures you have, whether it's your executive team, whether it's your board, whatever it may be, and do your best to set expectations, reinforce why we're doing this. It always ends up working, but there's that vulnerable period, that transition period that's really tough to navigate. When you mentioned having quality over quantity, I am assuming that defining what quality is for them, like if you mentioned every customer is of a fine lads, it's different on basically what they value, but really defining what quality means is probably fundamental because they, I mean, if they're, if everyone coming in is at some type of buying intent or they meet their ICP, whatever those things are, defining that upfront would be just a different way to gauge if it's working, quote unquote, working versus email addresses. Absolutely.
And it's both, right? So I mean, quality means, bermographically aligned with your ideal customer profile and a high intent or high interest. And so the way that we ensure that we drive that quality and meet that bar, number one, your audience targeting strategy, your channel mix selection, all of these are really important. How, what ad creative you deploy, all of these things are important to make sure that you're getting to the right person in the right place, communicating the right message.
And then you know you're effective when they come and affect, just raise their hand and fill out your, I want to talk to sales form. So that's the bar of quality. And obviously like for every company that's different, because there's different customers, right? But basically that firmographic alignment and that high intent is what's consistent no matter what.
And how are you deploying your strategy so that over time you're beginning to increase the number of high intent qualified buyers that are coming to you and saying, I want to buy your product. So I want to talk to you about buying your product. Yes. Yes.
Those are the favorite, our favorite calls, right? Our favorite outreach right now, a lot of leaders are struggling with doubling or trickling their growth. They're trying to keep their heads above water on the same budget. So what are your thoughts on balancing growth with budget constraints?
Absolutely. So we see a pretty common theme and there is a way to do this without spending a ton of money. So number one, almost every company had some budget allocated to paid search, like Google ads for instance, you know, Google got to where they got because they make it really easy to spend money on their platform for advertising. And every, yeah, pretty much every company we work with, we're able to significantly reduce their paid search budget and drive the same or better results.
So there's always typically efficiencies to be gained there. And often you can simply just repurpose that budget to then launch demand creation programs on paid social without even spending more, right? So there's a way to be really thoughtful and efficient with your budget. And then additionally, kind of like a page out of the Refined Labs Playbook of what we use to grow, our agency is leveraging organic social.
There is cost to that. There's time spent on content creation, time spent on posting and engaging with your audience, but founders and CEOs should be seriously considering if they should be making that investment to market their company. And if not the founder, CEO or business owner, doesn't always have to be, is there a different company of Angeles or subject matter expert that can commit to doing that? And that can be just as effective or more effective than paid advertising.
So it doesn't have to cost a lot of money. And if you go back to the fundamentals of how am I communicating, compelling and relevant information to my audience where they already spend their time in order to drive awareness and consideration, you don't have to spend money on paid ads to do that. And then we're about taking some from the Google spin and reallocating it to other more effective things is what I'm finding a lot of companies doing, still out of it, still afraid of it. But when it comes to that, is there any drop in website visits, SEO effectiveness, anything like that when your clients do that?
Sometimes, depending upon the specific use case, there can sometimes be a dip in web traffic if you maybe slash a search budget in half. But I would argue that that drop is traffic that wouldn't have converted anyway. Thank you. Thank you for saying that.
Yes. So you've answered a question that comes, that comes my way all the time. You have mentioned about that, you mentioned a couple of times about the creative and the accreative, which it has to be effective. It has to be good.
And I know that's subjective, depending on the company, what effect, what good is, but does the Refined Labs team help with accreative or is this something that typical clients have a team or they iron another agency to do for them? And if that's the case, do they collaborate with you all to help make sure things are in alignment with their overall strategy? No, we do the ad creative and ideally we want to do 100% of the paid social ad creative. Number one, the actual strategy behind the actual campaign is so important to consider.
And then the actual ad creative, the quality of the design, the quality of the copy is just as crucial for driving the outcome that you're looking for. And what I would say is, I understand the point that creative, there's some subjectivity to what is good or bad creative, but what we focus on is looking at all of the data that is available to us to use that data to actually come to some conclusions on what ad creative was effective. It's not about whether it's good or bad to your personal tastes. It's more about is it effective in driving web traffic and web conversions, which is the goal of it in the first place.
And so you can take the subjectivity out of it. It could be a really cool looking fun ad, but if nobody clicks on it or nobody converts off of it, it's not effective, right? And then maybe someone perceives an ad to not be fun or interesting or cool, but it could be really effective in educating and converting. So like that's an effective ad.
So there are ways to actually take the subjectivity out of it and remember what the goal is and be looking at some of those metrics and leading indicators to help come to some conclusions about what ad campaigns are most effective and which ones are not. Great point. I always tell my clients, I'm like, it really depends on who your ideal client is. Some people are more serious than others.
And I'm going to use a stereotypical example. So I'm an engineer. I'm around a bunch of other engineers. My whole career, what we may find funny is different than what some other folks may find.
And in reality, when we're trying to get work done, we don't have time for all the funny stuff, like get to the point. Like that's just typically like more of a personality thing as well as psychographics, like what do we value? And so I always talk about like really getting to know your customers or who you're targeting more than just demographics. So do you all help with that?
Do they have enough data? Do your customers, do they have enough data to kind of determine what that looks like as far as who they're serving so that your ad creative is more on point? So there's a couple of aspects there. I think number one, making sure that you're really clear on who your ideal customer is and being honest about what that particular segment looks like.
That's sort of step one. A lot of times people will want a certain type of customer, but that's not reflective of what their actual customers look like. So step one is like actually clearly defining that. Step two then would be the actual sort of actual technical targeting within platform to make sure you're getting to that person.
Step three is being able to understand that like the psychology of that type of buyer persona and then developing the right ad creative and messaging that's going to resonate with them and actually cause them to take some type of action. And so like all of those things are key and there's and they're all points within the process where there's an opportunity for people to get it wrong in some way. And so it's about all of those steps. And then with respect to data, it's like look at your actual customers that are paying you today.
Are you the customers that you're trying to get? Do they look like your customers today or not? A common thing I see is we sell to mid market or small businesses, but I don't want to sell to enterprise customers. But you don't have any of those.
No idea if you're even going to resonate with them. So that's sort of step one. The next is getting really clear on where are these people spending time and then what matters to them. Sometimes there can be really great ad creative, but there's a disconnect between the ad creative and the person that's actually going to consume them.
And is it really speaking to that individual? So all of these are factors in getting this right. And so and that's why it's what's conceing easy. Let's just serve ads to our target market.
There's actually a lot of nuance and some complexity and why it's important to have experienced experts helping you figure out how to get right. You did a post about collaborative forecasting a couple of days ago and you were talking about basically when companies set these revenue goals, you need to get finance, sales, marketing, and the customer success leaders in the same room. And so I want you to elaborate on that how you've seen it be an improvement to the accuracy in their revenue forecasting. Yeah, absolutely.
It kind of goes back to the topic of setting the right goals. And so yeah, in my experience, the only way that I was able to get that right at a particular company was when we did get all of those stakeholders in the same room that could impact revenue. It's marketing, it's sales, it's customer success, it's the finance team, bring the CEO in. It's only when you have all of those people around the table and everyone has an opportunity to share their perspective on what is realistic to expect with respect to goals and also what could be done and changed to improve results.
That that, and honestly, it usually never happens. Sales goals are typically set in a silo with the sales team retention goals are set separately, marketing goals are backed into because of whatever the sales goals are. And there's no, there's no consideration for reality and there's no consideration for how the whole machine is supposed to work together. And so that's one of the common things that I see and literally just getting everybody in the same room and going through a different goal setting process could mitigate so many of those risks and challenges.
So the revenue forecasting, I've seen that be a really, really big issue because people didn't do exactly what you're describing. It's really a CEO's wish list and then everyone kind of scrambled to try to figure out and a lot of them know like this is unrealistic. So have you seen those situations often with your own clients? Because if you're internal to a business, you're able to bring folks together.
But when someone is a client of yours at Refine Labs, is this something that you encourage or you're able to help influence? Yeah, it's something I've added to my sales process recently is actually asking for historical data on marketing performance specifically because everyone always asks, well, if I hire you, what can I expect with results? And I'm like, well, if I don't know what your current and historical performance is, I can't answer that question incredibly. So I put together a very simple exercise that asks for some key data points for the trailing three quarters and show them an exercise of, well, if this is what you've done so far, there is what levers we have to improve different aspects of the funnel to actually drive better results.
And one thing I always like to point out is based on whatever leads come in and are converted to opportunities, I also want to understand how many of those opportunities are closed one. And that could also highlight a potential area of improvement on the sales team. So what I found that's been most helpful is I refuse to provide any guaranteed results with percentages or this or that because I just don't think it's being honest about what's possible. So that process has been really helpful.
I'm upfront with people. I can say, well, your baseline is pretty low. And if you're saying this is your goal within this timeframe, I'm not sure that's realistic. Now this is what is realistic.
Here's where we can make improvements. And this is what you can see over this timeframe and if that, and that's where we can help. So I think more agencies should be doing that level of due diligence and their sales process because it's not really responsible, I think, to make big claims of results that you can provide without really understanding where the company is. Agree.
Agree. Yeah. What are some of the assets that they should make available to you in order to do your assessment, your initial analysis? Typically, it's just some data within their CRM and marketing automation platform.
So Salesforce or HubSpot or Marketo, it's really about getting data around number of inbound leads that have come in, how many of those that have converted to opportunities, how many of those opportunities have converted to close one, and kind of understanding volume, dollar amounts and conversion rates across the funnel is really just the baseline. And from there, you can have a credible conversation around the levers available where you can drive improvement and how that will materialize with respect to business outcomes and results. So it sounds like these customers need to be using their CRM. A lot of them are messy consistently and accurately so that their data actually is there and it can be made sense of.
Yeah, absolutely. So no one's CRM is perfect. That's totally right. And it's also a huge area of focus for us in our first two months working with a customer.
We typically are always helping them shore up and bolster their infrastructure, making sure that we're collecting all the right data that we're looking at the right metrics, and that's a key foundational element from our perspective. So that's part of our onboarding process and our foundation service to make sure that we can help our customers utilize their tech stack appropriately to measure as best as best as possible. We're not going to be measured perfectly and that's not the goal, but the goal is to collect as much data as possible so that we can make data informed decisions along with using common sense. Common sense is not so common.
I love that you can use data to tell the story these days. So this has been an insightful and engaging discussion, Megan. I could keep you and hold you forever, but you guys have a lot of customers to serve and I've gotten the CEO on the line. So Megan, what is the best way for folks to find you, reach out to you to work with you all?
Yeah. So I'm active on LinkedIn. You can find me there and you can check us out at Refine Labs.com. And again, thanks again for joining us.
It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me, Monique. This is a great conversation and look forward to seeing you on LinkedIn and talking again soon. Likewise.
Thank you.