Hello everybody and welcome to the second day of our post-op, all between one to the first session of today with Megan Bowen, who is the CEO of a fine labs, who I'm sure everybody knows by now from LinkedIn, and the famous podcast from Chris Walker. And today, I think one of the most important topics that we'll discuss is, okay, we know we need to change, we might know that we need to change the way that we're selling, that the way the virus has changed, but how do we actually go about it? How do we get people on board? What are the steps that we need to take?
I'm really excited to go dive into the session. Welcome, thank you for coming. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
I'll briefly introduce myself and then we'll get into the presentation today. I wanted to share a little bit about my background, but I think can be important, especially as we dive into the talk today. So over my 20-year career, I grew up in the New York City startup scene, and so I worked at many different startups in actually multiple different capacity sales, account management, marketing, operations, and one of the things that I witnessed over and over and over again, as I through the early 2000s and in the 2010s and up until recently, was how challenging it was for companies to go to market. I remember executing a lot of these old school tactics that I'm going to talk about today that really require change.
I saw firsthand what worked and what didn't work. Back in 2020 is when me and Chris Walker decided to team up and become business partners. We started Refined Labs, the agency, and we've been building it ever since. Our vision for the company and our work is to change the way B2B companies measure and execute marketing.
From my personal experience, seeing in so many different companies and use cases, using these old school tactics, just not actually resulting in business outcomes, and now having the pleasure to lead Refined Labs, having worked with almost 300 B2B companies over the last four years and implementing our approach, have seen over and over and over again how powerful this transformation can be. So with that, let's get into it. Definitely love to have interactions. If anyone listening has questions, drop them in the chat.
I'll have to tackle those as we go through the presentation or at the end. And so let's dive in. So the first thing that I think is really important to reflect on and understand is how drastically the B2B buying landscape has changed over the last 30 years. And what you're seeing here on this slide is a couple of what we're sort of pointing as eras, where we saw really distinct shifts in technology, in buying behavior, buying patterns, and how people actually learned about new products and services, and made purchasing decisions.
And so I want to speak to this a little bit more. So you'll see here, starting from the 1990s into the 2000s, it was really what we're pointing the analog buying era. This was the time when predominantly the way that people learned about new products and services were from salespeople, salespeople reaching out cold, introducing themselves, sharing information, conferences and trade shows where you could discover new vendors. The internet was starting in the 90s, but not everyone was using it for this type of information gathering and decision making.
And a lot of the information that people now get today online, you really have to get through human to human interaction. As we move into the next era, called Website Era, and this is at the same time when HubSpot really started evangelizing what they were calling inbound marketing. And so this era was really categorized by information being online, rich website content, SEO optimization, the development of a lot of different content because people were using the internet to learn and to discover. So how are you putting information online?
How are you making sure that your website accurately educates your market and makes it easy for them to move through your purchasing process? And this is when there started to be a shift in really the seller or the company driving information and pushing that to the consumers. And this is now where people were starting to realize it can be more independent and looking for information. As we move into the era that we're in today, right?
And who knows how long this will last? I'm sure AI will probably disrupt the dark social era and we'll have a new era in the future as things continue to evolve. And I would say the pandemic in 2020 certainly accelerated this. But social networks, digital communities, trusted peers, this has now become the primary way that people learn about new information and also get recommendations and reviews from peers and trusted colleagues to make purchasing decisions.
When I explain this to people, everybody agrees, right? It's hard to disagree with this when you kind of reflect back and just sort of explain this progression. What's really interesting is, even though people will agree with this concept in theory, they still are unwilling to let go of the tactics that they were using in the analog buying era or the website era and are resistant to adopting new strategies and tactics that we find are most impactful now in the stark social era. So this has nothing to do with refined labs, right?
This is just what's actually happening in the world. And it's important that as any business leader is thinking about their go-to-market strategy, you have to understand and embrace reality. And that needs to be the foundation for how you're thinking about going to market, creating demand, winning customers. So to dig into this a little bit further, it really is a true shift in how we learn and buy.
And so, again, a lot of these things people will nod their heads at, you know, when I speak to a maybe a CEO or a CMO, when's the last time that you downloaded a white paper and then really wanted a sales demo within 24 hours of that? And they'll all respond, never. That doesn't happen. Right, so why are you expecting a different outcome when you're approaching your buyers, right?
That's a hard question to answer. And so the reality is today, all of us are on social media for personal reasons, but ultimately also for professional reasons. This is how we learn and find new things. And because of a lot of the things that have happened over the last few eras, the analog era, the website era, we've now come to a place where buyers trust their peers and their colleagues over vendors.
And that social proof or that recommendation from someone that you trust actually holds so much more weight than anything that they're going to find online. And most of us don't like to be sold to. So independently, we want to find as much information as possible and ultimately raise our hand when we're ready to have a sales conversation. Once we've actually hit, probably, you know, we've gotten through 75 to 80% of the buying process.
All that information is online, we can self-serve on that. And then when we want and need your help, we will reach out and ask for it. That's the preferred buying journey, if you will. So let's look at this from the perspective of a B2B company, B2B SAS, you don't necessarily have to be a software company to have these same challenges within your own business.
And so I actually talked about seven to 10 heads of marketing, CMO, CRO, CEOs per week. And in all of my conversations, a variety of these challenges come up. They'll say, well, our marketing efforts are generating a lot of leads, but none of those leads are actually converting into customers. Or very few of those leads are converting into customers.
I'm spending all this money on Google paid search, but I don't know if it's working. I'm spending all this money on LinkedIn. And I don't know if I'm actually generating opportunities as a result. It's really hard for me to measure marketing.
I'm using this attribution tool, but this is telling me one thing. And I'm just unclear. I'm not sure what's working and what's not working. So I don't even know where to invest or where to stop investing.
There's the constant battle between marketing and sales and the blame game that is very typical. And as a leader, you're left confused. Is it a marketing issue? Is it a sales issue?
Is it both? How can I fix this? What's going on? And especially over the COVID boom era and in different time periods past, when people are actually scrutinizing the unit economics of their business, they might be realizing that their customer acquisition costs is completely unsustainable.
Given the level of investment that they're making and marketing and sales, an actual return that they're getting on that investment. So myself, Chris, we talk about this a lot at Refine Labs. This is the change that marketing must make to be successful. We coined the phrase, we talk about making this transformation from lead gen to demand gen.
The points that I think are the most important to take away from this, if you're sort of digesting the visual here, is just because you can generate thousands and thousands of leads and MQLs, it doesn't mean that that's gonna convert to a relative amount of revenue. And in fact, we actually see the opposite happening in reality, that getting a lot of leads and MQLs is actually really easy to do. If you don't care, if any of those people are actually gonna buy your product. And where your efforts are more fruitful is focusing on finding those high intent leads, those buyers that are qualified and have already taken themselves 75% of the way through the buying process, capturing that demand and turning that into revenue.
And then also recognizing the massive opportunity for maybe the 95% of your market that is not trying to buy today, but who you can be educating every single day in the places that they're already spending their time about your category, your brand, your value proposition, your offer. So when they become in market to buy, your top of mind. And they've already absorbed all this information about your company and your product and are already halfway through that sales process. To dive into this further, we have a firm belief that refine labs that not all leads are created equal.
We run what we call a split the funnel analysis for all of our customers. We actually have the resources for free and the vault available for any company to do this. Every single company should be running a split the funnel analysis every six to 12 months because it's incredibly insightful on what pipeline sources are actually driving pipeline and revenue. This isn't about what marketing initiatives are driving pipeline, which sales initiatives are driving pipeline.
This is a completely different way to look at your go-to-market program effectiveness. And obviously the numbers will vary company to company, but the same trend is discovered every time we run this analysis. What we find is the conversion rate through the funnel per high-intent pipeline sources always will result in a significantly higher volume of customers and revenue from those customers than your low-intent sources. So when I say high-intent sources, this is people that are coming to you, raising their hand and declaring their intent.
They're coming to your website, they're completing your requested demo form, they're completing your contact us form, they're saying that they want to engage with your sales team because they're interested in potentially buying your product. The low-intent sources, this is how marketers and companies have been gaming the system, right? Gated content, give me your email address for this piece of content and I'm gonna call you a lead. I'm gonna assume you want to buy something.
Content syndication channels, again, I'm gonna give you some content in exchange for your contact information so that my sales team can bother you until you buy something. Webinar registrations come to this webinar, oh, you just wanted to come to the webinar? Oh, we thought you wanted to buy our product, right? All of these other sources and events are good.
People should host events and webinars. People should make great content. So the issue here is the desire to call this an actual lead when you're much earlier on in the process and they're not yet ready to buy. So instead of gating your content, just give it away for free.
Let people come to your webinar, but don't put them in a sales sequence after they attend. So all of those activities can still be really valuable and important, but you need to think really critically about how you're engaging your sales team to follow up on these. Further to just drive this point home is taking this particular example is just making the mathematical business case that if you look at high-intent sources versus low-intent sources, you would need to generate, in this particular use case, we typically see the range anywhere from 10x to 30x depending upon the company and their historical data and their context, but you need so many more low-intent leads to actually close the same amount of revenue from those high-intent leads. And so this just goes back to that old cliche of work smarter or not harder.
We should be ensuring that what we're doing is trying to drive more high-intent leads through the funnel because of what the math clearly shows. Running this with the funnel analysis at your company is the best way to convince your leadership team that making this change is so important because it's very difficult to argue with the data and the math here. And so a lot of people will agree with these concepts in theory, but they are afraid to make the change because they feel it's a risk, they feel that it can't be measured as accurately, so that makes them uncomfortable. Or they just don't, they believe that that sounds nice, but show me the data, right?
So this is how we can actually show company leaders, the data that makes a clear business case for why this change is so important. This is typically, this is a typical outcome of this analysis. And when we're walking through this business case with our customers, this is how we want to show them the impact of the conclusions that you can derive from that split the funnel analysis. So what you're seeing here is starting with the declared intent website conversions.
This is, I filled your request a demo form on your website and said I wanted to speak to your sales team. Obviously we're seeing all of the funnel metrics related to this pipeline source, be really healthy and strong, strong win rate, strong lead to win rate, high sales velocity. As you start to move down into these low intent pipeline sources, you are clearly able to see that the net impact on revenue, the conversion rate, the win rate are not as strong. And so again, the level of granularity of going pipeline source by pipeline source here can be quite powerful.
And it's not to say that it's a black and white recommendation or conclusion. It's not to say that you should never do any of these other things, but you should be looking at your total investment allocation and aligning the majority of your investment to the pipeline sources that are most impactful to driving pipeline and revenue to maximize your ROI. Events can be really powerful for brand building, but they're not necessarily a way to just scan a bunch of badges and then have your sales team send 20 emails to everybody who walked by your booth, right? There are just different ways to think about executing on these particular programs.
So our philosophy here at Refine Labs is really about redefining what demand generation is. Demand generation is a misunderstood term. I think everyone has a different definition in their mind of what that means. What we assert is that demand generation encompasses three core pillars of marketing, creating demand, capturing demand, and converting demand.
So let's talk about each one for a moment. So with creating demand, the goal here is the likelihood is at any given time, most of your target market isn't actively looking for your product today. And that's okay, that's true for every company. However, you want your entire target market to know that you exist.
And so the goal here is really around brand awareness, education, continuing to put compelling and interesting content in front of your target audience so that over time you can build up their affinity and their knowledge of your category, your brand, and your product. There's a lot of ways that this strategy can be executed. You can start a podcast, you can have an event series, or put on annual or quarterly events. You can post on LinkedIn, like I'm sure a lot of us on this call do a lot.
You can pay for that through paid advertising on LinkedIn to guarantee distribution to your audience. And all of these things are really cultivating word of mouth about your brand, again, your category, your brand and your product. So we believe that it's important that a significant percentage of your budget is allocated to create demand initiatives. This is a common trend that I see is because this is more of a long-term game, most companies are significantly under investing in create demand programs and strategies.
Let's talk a little bit about capture demand. So if 95% of your market is not in market to buy, but 5% of your market is looking for your product and service, let's capture that demand, right? Let's get those customers into our sales process. And so there are very specific channels where people will engage when they're at this level of the buying process.
So they might actually, they're going to Google and they're searching for solutions like yours. Or in a best case scenario, they're searching for your brand because you've created that demand and they know that you exist and they know that you can help them with the problem that they're having. So whether that's through paid search campaigns, retargeting campaigns, SEO maximization, the goal here is how do I ensure that anyone out there that's looking for a product like mine comes to me first so that I can have that conversation? That's super important.
This is how you hit short and medium-term goals is to really optimize here. Google search is hard. It's really easy to over spend. It's really easy to not optimize for the right thing on the channel and think it's working, but not realizing it could work so much better.
The how you execute on Google search is so critical here to be successful and to be efficient and not wasteful with your budget. And then converting demand. So I talk a lot about the importance of your company website. Your website is your digital billboard.
We talked about those high-intent sources. The goal should be that you are communicating your narrative in places where your audience is already spending their time, social media, and that you are bringing them back to your website to continue their education journey. And then the goal is when they're on your website and when they're ready, that they're going to convert on your website and fill out your forms they'd like to talk to sales. That's the goal.
That's the overall process that we're trying to shepherd buyers through, because that is the preferred path that they would like to take. So we meet them where they are. I can't tell you how many websites are not optimized for the buyer and for that conversion path. Your homepage needs to clearly explain what you do.
Don't be clever, be clear, right? You need to make sure that you have social proof on your website that it's really easy to learn more about your product, to have basic questions that your prospects have answered right away. And then make it really easy for them to book a call with your sales team when they feel that they've reached that particular step. And then what happens after that form is submitted is equally as important, the speed with which you follow up, the quality of the individual that is having that first conversation with the buyer, knowing that maybe they don't need to be just qualified and have another meeting set with an AE, but that they're probably already fairly educated and want to move through that sales process as quickly as possible.
So these are all really important components of your overall demand-gen strategy. And it's really critical to think about developing strategies and tactics for each individual pillar that we have here. Oh, the hot topic of attribution. So let's talk a little bit about attribution.
So a lot of people know that Chris and myself and Refine Labs that we talk a lot about self-reported attribution. That's not the whole story, though. What we really promote and what we implement with our clients and what we recommend all companies implement is what we call hybrid attribution. Let's leverage software-based attribution, where we have confidence that the data that we're getting from that type of software is correct and a valid input to decision-making, while also acknowledging the limitations of software attribution that just exist.
Let's also directly ask our prospective customers how they heard about us. So we can have that important qualitative but also quantitative data point to paint a more holistic picture. The general way to think about it is software-based attribution is really good at measuring attribution for capture demand channels. So for example, paid search is a great channel where you can make direct attribution mapping from leads coming in from your paid search campaigns as they move through the funnel.
And your software will track that appropriately. Great. However, if one of your prospective buyers listened to your awesome podcast episode, attended your great webinar, got a referral from their colleague, and then went straight to your website and said, I want to talk to the sales team, software attribution would categorize that as direct traffic. And you wouldn't have any other details as to how that person came to your website.
So by the simple question of adding, how did you hear about us to your primary conversion form, open text field required question, how much more rich data that you can gather to validate which of your demand creation programs are actually being impactful and driving people inbound to your site to raise your hand. And what we'll typically see here are things like podcasts, LinkedIn, my friend told me about you, a YouTube video, whatever it happens to be. And those are signals that those programs are working and they're effective. So it's not about one or the other.
It's about using both in ways that are accurately measuring and not using data that could be misleading and coming to wrong conclusions. So maybe by this time you say, okay, you've convinced me, I need to make the change from lead gen to demand gen, I ran this with a funnel, I see what you mean from our data, we're ready to make this shift. We know that we need to do this, how do we even start? I have a lot of pressure, I'm running a company, I have to bring in revenue, I have to hit growth targets.
How do we move from this old school lead gen approach to the new way of doing things with demand gen? How do we do that? We have helped many companies make this transformation and what we have realized is it's really a three phased change and you have to go through each phase before you can really effectively get to the other side and begin to see the compounding successes of adopting a demand gen strategy. So step one, this is really embracing reality.
So this is about completing that split the funnel analysis and a revenue performance assessment, really understanding what works and what doesn't work. What happens in this step? So let's get specific here for a minute. No company has a perfect CRM, no company has a perfect data set in their marketing automation platform.
When you're trying to seek the truth and complete some of these really insightful analyses, you're definitely going to realize that you're not collecting a lot of data that you wish you were collecting so that you could be making better data driven decisions. That sucks, right? Because you wanna be able to have that data for historical analysis, but now you know. So let's do something about it.
So when those measurement gaps are surfaced in these analyses, that's a critical step of embracing reality. We actually aren't even tracking certain things, so we don't even know if those things are working or not working. When we move into the phase two on how we're gonna make the shift, we need to close those measurement gaps. We need to take the conclusive insights from the analysis about which programs are not really helping us achieve our goals and begin to stop investing in those or reduce investment in those.
Then we need to realize where we can optimize current programs we're doing. Maybe we are running paid search and that can be a really effective channel. But what we realize is the efficiency isn't where we want it to be. And there's opportunities to optimize how we're using that channel to be more impactful.
In many cases, many companies aren't even deploying any demand creation programs at all. They're just focused on short-term goals and trying to capture demand that exists. So in many cases, we're launching net new demand creation programs. In some cases, they've been running gated content and content syndication and we need to stop those programs and restart new programs that really meet the buyer where they're at.
And we need to find opportunities where we can build and create really compelling and interesting content, where we can create community for our audience to help create a space for fueling word of mouth and referrals. This takes each of these steps to take a long time. But this step in particular takes the longest because you're making a lot of the actual changes in your strategy but also all of your execution tactics. And you really need to give it time to make these changes.
We typically find in step one, that's a one to two month process to really understand your current situation, your historical performance and what your roadmap should be. Step two, this making the shift, this can be anywhere from six months to 12 months to actually make this change and sand everything up. Of course, we're beginning to see positive results before the end of that period, but it's important not to underestimate the time required to do this really well. And then phase three is really once you are finally in a place where you are tracking as much data as possible, you have effectively stood up, capture, create and convert demand programs, you're beginning to see repeatable pipeline and revenue results from the investments that you're making in these programs, you're now ready to stack growth.
Now we can begin layering on new channels, running some new experiments, leveraging some of these tactics for our current customer base to cross-sell and upsell products and services to our existing customers. Potentially develop a new audience or target a new segment if you've enhanced your product to reach a new market and begin to think about ways to diversify distribution. Let's test Reddit, let's test C connected TV, let's try some of these new channels to see if they can be effective as additional repeatable drivers of pipeline and revenue. When we think about running experiments, we like to take a phased, sort of, I would call it a bit of a scientific approach.
What is important to recognize here is, when you're in that phase three of stacking growth, maybe not every single program will work as you would like it to work. However, you wanna think about what is the right framework in order to launch new experiments and understand if those are working or not working. And so what you'll see here is a phased approach on how we think about introducing new channels or new programs, waiting to see if we get some of those positive signals. Those can be self-reported attribution on new channels, then you start to see closed one revenue from those inbounds coming in.
Once you get to repeatability, that's when you can integrate it into your normal go-to-market strategy. And important to realize that these are experiments. So if we find that particular new channel or new program that we thought might work isn't yielding results, that's also the signal that maybe that was not an experiment that worked out, we should move on to the next. I wanna take us through a case study, a real life example of a company that made this change to kind of put this into a real life use case.
And then once we go through the case study, we should have a little bit of time for questions. So if you guys have questions, feel free to start thinking about them or dropping them. And we should have 10 or 15 minutes for that. So this case study is a, it's a beauty sass company.
When we started working with them, they had just raised their series D. They have a product that costs $40,000 a year. And they were pretty long sales cycle, 120 day sales cycle to bring in those yields. So it's sort of the basic parameters of this particular business that we're gonna dive into.
So here is where we started. So when we started working with them, they were generating about a million dollars of pipeline per quarter. And we said, okay, this is kind of the current performance that you're driving. Let's take a look at the tactics that you're using to generate this pipeline.
When we were evaluating their budget allocation across channels, what we were seeing here was they had a certain percentage allocated to Google search. They had a certain budget allocated to LinkedIn and they had a small percentage of that budget allocated to Facebook. As we started to dig into what types of campaigns they were running on LinkedIn and Facebook, what we were realizing was they were all what we would call demand capture or transactional lead gen campaigns, which we would group under the entire demand capture umbrella. So 100% of their budget was allocated to programs on demand capture, just 5% of their market.
That was looking to buy today, while not considering the 95% of the rest of their market, that maybe they're not looking today, but they're probably going to look tomorrow next week next month next quarter. So this is where we started. We then said, okay, let's take a look at when we think about the maturity of your programs, how they're falling here. One thing that we did notice with this particular client was they had a very successful partner channel.
So you'll see there under phase four, that partner channel. They had a great referral network with a key partner that was delivering repeatable pipeline. Awesome, that's great. Let's keep that going, that's working.
Software advice, this is a review site where they were getting a lot of positive reviews and customer testimonials, and that was another driver of inbounds for their product, right? Let's keep doing that. They were starting to see that paid search was working, but they were sure investing a lot of money into it and they thought it should work better than it was working, but it was starting to deliver some positive signals. And they were getting really positive feedback about their events.
They had started doing LinkedIn and Facebook, but again, we're focused on Legion and we're realizing we're spending a lot of money here, but not getting a lot of buyers out of these channels at this time, again, this is where we started with them. Once we got through, taking them through that three-phase process that I walked you through earlier on making that transformation from Legion to the demand gen, we were able to expand their programs to look a lot more like this. And so you'll see over on the right side, we were able to get LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram channels operating and delivering repeatable pipeline by eliminating the Legion tactics and embracing a different approach on paid social. We were able to improve the results from the software advice from the review site to again, get as much capture as much demand as possible from that.
And what we realized as well was once people raised their hand on their website, there was massive amounts of opportunity to tighten up their follow-up process and their sales process. We did a little secret shopping on this client and we submitted a requested demo form and we didn't hear back for four days. Four days, it's too long, right? So we worked with them to implement a much faster follow-up process to convert those hand-raisers into opportunities as quickly as possible.
We were able to also implement Reddit to great success and because they had such positive feedback in their large annual physical conference, we partnered with them to deploy a virtual event series to complement that as well. And as you can see, we're continuing to push different experiments with Quora and Twitter, developing a community of their audience, et cetera, encouraging their employees to be active on LinkedIn to help further the brand halo. And then let's take a look at what happened. Now again, that whole, I just walked through a lot of stuff, right?
We worked with them over 18 to 24 month period to implement all of those changes, reallocate budget, launch new programs, reset different channels and programs to be more effective. And you'll see the results speak for themselves. We see the pipeline beginning to grow. Now you'll notice at the beginning, it was incremental.
And then we begin to see a lot of those compounding effects. This takes time to really build, and this particular customer was committed to understanding the time frame required to really drive those results. And just to kind of bring this point home, you'll see that by the end of our engagement, at the end of that journey, you see the massive difference in budget allocation between demand capture and demand creation programs. You remember at the start, it was 100% demand capture.
And now we're in this percentage hovering around 17% demand capture, about 83% demand creation. I would say generally speaking, I would say 70, 30, 80, 20 is ideal, and it does depend on the company and the market. But the goal here is you should be allocating budget, more budget to demand creation than demand capture, because you're reaching the majority of your audience through demand creation. And that the reach of the audience should be relative to the investment in the budget to really see those short and medium and long-term results that we're all looking for.
All right, thanks for hanging with me. We got through the presentation. I love Q&A, so I don't know guys, if there are any questions in any of the chats, but would love to take a few questions before we wrap up the session today. Oh, first of all, we saw a lot of feedback.
Like people said, this is the best presentation I've seen. They love the session, so funny to share that first. That's good. And then we did have a couple of questions, I'll give questions here in the Q&A section.
Anybody wants to raise another question, just go ahead to the Q&A and you can share it there. Just makes it easier for us to moderate the question, share them out. So let's go through them one by one. Can you talk a little bit about how the paid strategy from an ad type changed between demand generation to demand capture?
Yes, let's talk. LinkedIn is a perfect channel to talk to give you a very specific example here. So a typical LinkedIn lead gen campaign, you see an ad on LinkedIn talking about a particular company or product or service. And the CTA will be get a demo.
And you click on the get a demo form, and it wants you to fill out your information to get a demo right away. Or here's our 2024 annual report filled with insights and benchmarks and great information. To get this report, give me your email address, and I'll give you the report. So you give them your email address on LinkedIn, and they give you the report.
That's a lead gen or a demand capture campaign. What happens then is if you try to follow up with those people, they probably weren't actually ready to buy your product. So instead of trying to just get people to buy now or give you their contact information, let's use the channel for what it is, an awareness and an education channel. So in the examples I provided, let's say you have your 2024 benchmark report, why don't you develop ad creative that actually shares the top three insights from that report to position yourself as a thought leader in the space and immediately provide education and value to your target audience.
And then your CTA instead of giving you your contact info or get a demo is click here to learn more. And they click on that link and they come back to your website where they can actually read through the full report on their own without giving you anything. Now they're spending all this time on your website, they're reading your content, in their mind, you're beginning to develop authority in the space. And again, when they're ready to buy, they'll come to your website and they'll have that requested demo form.
So it really moves beyond short term tactics and into awareness and education. And instead of asking them to give you something, bring them back to your website every time, bring, keep bringing them back to your website so that they're learning more, they're seeing your case studies, they're seeing your pricing, they're seeing maybe something else that they didn't even realize. That's the primary way you should be changing the actual like ad creative and ad strategy on that. I hope that answers your question.
And let's pick up the next one. I love this because I believe a lot of Bit of the marketers face this challenge. The data content part is difficult for leaders outside of pro front and how would you address this? Also the change from quantity to quality.
This is so true. This is really hard because in their mind, we got 2000 leads from that. That's amazing. And they skip over the other truth that only three of those 2000 leads became customers.
So the really the only way to convince a leader that I've found that is effective is by running that split the final analysis. You have to get the data from their company, you have to analyze it and re-present it in a way that shows them in no uncertain terms that it is not economical, that those leads don't actually convert. That is the best way. It is challenging.
And if they are really stuck and are not willing to change their mindset or adopt, it might be a loss cause. But what I found is anyone's mind that I've been able to change has been a direct result of running that analysis, presenting the findings and explaining what could be done to change the trajectory of their results. All right, let's pick up the next one. This is an interesting one.
Did you see any differences in performance when you compared the sales lead versus product lead growth ads or call to action? Yeah, this is a great question actually. So what I would say is all of the tactics that I've described definitely work best with a sales lead motion. So that's one truth that I'll say.
It's not to say that you can't leverage the tactics for product lead growth too. You definitely can. But the primary, this strategy was really for B2B SaaS words that do have that sales lead motion, where there is a heavy education lift, it's a big purchase. They need time to understand and educate and go through the sales process.
Now, if you're a PLG company, it is true that there might be some tactics that work, for example, in B2C or ECOM, or if your actual purchase price is free or low, that some of those lead gen tactics could be effective in getting people to sign up for a free trial or getting them to maybe purchase a very inexpensive product. Because it's not a big risk. They don't have that much skin in the game. And so what I'll say is the challenge that I see is there are a lot of B2B companies that both have sales lead and product lead motions and want to do both.
And that can be really, really challenging. What I tell people is if their product lead motion hasn't proven to be effective in converting into paying customers, they're more likely to want to consider leaning into the tactics that will bring people to speak to the sales team. So this is not like a cut and dry answer. And what I will also say is having dual CTAs on your website is a challenge.
And if you have sign up for a free trial and talk to sales, no one's gonna click on talk to sales. They're gonna click on the sign up for the free trial. So your free trial has to be really, really good. This is where product lead growth comes in, which I like to remind people of.
But really successful product lead growth companies, their product was amazing. And so it worked like Slack worked because people love using Slack. The challenge is I think a lot of people, their products aren't quite awesome yet. And they hope that they can create the same virality and affinity about their product simply through marketing.
And that doesn't happen very often. So I don't know, I felt like I had to answer that question. That's perfect. Let's pick up this one from back.
Do you think the promise of platforms that claim to use Internet data and first part of Internet website behavior is actually enough to actually turn prospects at the high income? This is a great question. So I, you know, there's a lot of platforms like this out there that people use. I would say when you think about like 6 cents demand base, those are those intent platforms.
I would say in my experience, the most interesting use case of those technologies is if you are marketing to a specific target account list and leveraging that platform to run, for example, LinkedIn advertising to a particular group, there is a lot of additional measurement on engagement by target account that you can access in those tools because of how they leverage intent data. And I think that it can be a good signal when you're thinking through maybe an ABM strategy where marketing is marketing to a particular target account list, you also have your sales team doing outbound outreach to the same list at the same time. And, you know, seeing that a particular group of customers have moved from awareness to engagement within like a 6 cents dashboard can be a way for sales teams to prioritize who they're reaching out to first, right? So it's not silver bullet.
It's not like that this like automatically turns prospects from low intent and the high intent, no, it's giving you more granular data and more specific insights to help you think about organizing and prioritizing your outreach and your campaigns. So that's how I would think about that question. All right. Let's shift gears.
This is an interesting one. Do you have a preferred Martik setup? Yeah, Salesforce and HubSpot. That's really all you need.
There's a lot of other tools. And if our customers have other tools, we use them. I will say Salesforce HubSpot and then I would say a tool like ChiliPiper, like the ability for your buyer to book a call immediately from your website is so powerful and important. And so with respect to tech, I actually really encourage my customers to keep it simple.
If you're sub 10 million ARR, you just need HubSpot. Use that for your CRM and your marketing automation platform. And so I think keeping it simple is most important in my view. Love the answer.
And how about direct mail? Do I have any thoughts about that? Yeah. So I think direct mail can be really effective.
But again, I think that it's not. I think that this needs to be part of a broader ABM strategy. So here's our top 100 accounts. We want these 100 companies to be customers.
Let's think about how we're going to deploy a digital ABM strategy to that entire list so that they become aware. They know we exist, social proof. All these different touch points that we can provide. How are we thinking about how the sales team is going to engage and reach out to the same list?
And then how do we think about where in the journey it makes sense to consider some type of direct mail process? I'll tell a fun story about this. This is actually when I was working at Grubhub Seamless on the B2B side of the business. We used direct mail for all of our active prospects in pipeline only.
So if we were actively working with a prospect and taking them through the sales cycle, that was when we found direct mail to be most effective. I didn't come up with this idea. I was a part of our head of marketing at the time did, but we had this really fun campaign where we took our top, I mean, it was our top 50 prospects in pipeline. We sent them a drone and a note that said, we'd love to come by and bring you the control for the drone and talk a little bit about what you're thinking about moving forward with Grubhub.
And we got a pretty insane response to that. Because people were like, I want to use the drone, come bring the remote and let's have a conversation about this. And so that was really fun and a good way. I would say that in my experience, direct mail works with a warmer audience versus a cold audience.
And you can also be thinking about combining the two. There was a great campaign that I saw from G2 where they sent a little pinata. I think beating your competition on G2 is going to be much more interesting than beating this pinata, something like that. But then they had display ads, I think, LinkedIn targeting the same accounts, targeting the same buyers.
We had the same image of the delivered little pinata, whatever. And that was like 20% of the target. I don't know how they targeted them. That's actually very important.
Like you said, what was the level intent? That was the level of awareness how far they were down the bar journey of combining this to work really well for them. Sorry, just wait to add this. Yeah, great ad.
Great ad. So I saw one that was really good. Yeah, I think this is something that a lot of companies experience, a lot of people experience, like balancing the short term versus the long term. Yeah.
So I think, actually, I wrote a LinkedIn post about this recently. So the way to think about this is there are different levers for short, medium, and long term results. So when we're thinking short term results, we were just talking about this pipeline marketing. How are you marketing to your existing pipeline to accelerate those deals to be closed?
You already have traffic coming to your website. So when we think about demand conversion and website conversion rate optimization, if you can make some impactful changes on your website, you'll start to see those results immediately because you're going to convert more of the traffic that's already coming to your website. When you think about medium and longer term results, that's when some of those demand creation efforts can really be impactful and help. But what I would say is on the short term pipeline marketing, website CRO, and paid search optimization.
Almost every single company we work with, regardless of what stage they're at, have opportunities to optimize in all those areas to drive short term improvement. And if you're making those changes along with playing the long game and beginning to implement strategies that are going to help in the medium in the long term, you have to do both, right? I'm a business owner. Like, yeah, I need to hit my revenue plan this month, and a year from now.
They're both equally important. So I understand the need. And there's a way to do so by leveraging tactics that work and not resorting to the things that we've all gotten used to doing over the last 30 years. This is a little bit philosophical about controversy from people saying the demand creation is basically just a new name for brand marketing.
Yeah, I mean, and this is, I do think demand generation demand creation, I think, especially in LinkedIn land, it's easy for these terms to sort of lose some meaning or get conflated with other things. My opinion is there are a lot of similarities with demand creation and brand marketing. Like, a lot of the strategy, campaign strategies that I was describing of what it really means to deploy a demand creation program is really all about generating brand awareness and educating your target market. Specifically, when we talk about demand creation, we're definitely leaning in to digital execution of that.
And when I think of brand marketing, I think of all of the other ways that you can think about doing that. I mean, in fact, we even helped one of our customers actually design an interactive billboard that they put up in Vegas. I don't know. I think it's probably demand creation and brand marketing.
So for me, I see this controversy as well. That's how I think about it. And I don't get too caught up in a lot of the language around that. Exactly.
Yeah. Sometimes semantics don't matter as much as the actual strategy execution. So that's unfortunately, we couldn't go through all the questions. Every more questions that we had the time.
We shared Megan's LinkedIn profile in case you want to connect to her, reach out to her. And she might help you further. But thank you so much. This was an amazing session.
A lot of folks really enjoyed it. Thanks a lot. Thank you for having me. Take care.