I think my nature, though, is to be the doer and the executor and the operator. And the biggest shift I'm trying to make is creating more free space for me to really think critically for me to read and absorb important new, interesting information, for me to make space to build relationships with partners or other stakeholders in the ecosystem that is important for me to have a base time with a relationship, making time for podcasts so that in my own way, I can also evangelize and get refine labs out there in the world. This is Social Paul's podcast agency edition, your go-to guide to solving your biggest marketing agency challenges authentically. I'm your host, Mike Galton, and each episode is an honest and frank look at what agencies go through concerning clients, detecting tech, and ideas that you can apply to your own business.
And now, the rest of today's episode. Welcome back to Social Paul's podcast agency edition, where each and every week we're talking to marketing agencies like you, going through many of the same struggles you're going through and sharing their stories. Subscribe to find in each episode, inspiration, motivation, and the perspiration that go into growing and scaling agencies like yours. No, a statistic shared by Harvard Business Review suggested that within three years, only 50% of venture founders would still be leading their companies as CEO.
And as the years go by, more and more founders transitioned to other roles and projects, leaving vacancies that must be filled. But stepping into the shoes of the company founder is a daunting task to say the least. And while you think tapping an insider CEO, someone who potentially has trained and groomed for years to take over, that might be some of the ceiling. In fact, their challenges are often of the same scope, if slightly different, than someone coming in from outside.
What are some of those challenges? And what should agencies exactly as preparing to transition to be mindful of? That's exactly what Megan Bowen's been talking to us about. Megan has spent 20 years working at B2B Tech Startups leading customer success, account management, sales, marketing, and operation teams.
Currently, making this a CEO with refined labs, additional marketing and demand generation agency I've been working with for years as the CEO. Hey, Megan, welcome to the show. Hey, Mike, thanks for having me. My pleasure.
I'm so glad you're here. Let's start by talking about refined labs. Please just let us in the audience know what kind of agency you are and the kinds of clients that you serve. Yeah, thank you for the opportunity.
Refined Labs is a B2B digital marketing and demand generation agency. We work with any B2B company that is on or above 10 million in annual recurring revenue, with higher ACDs and sales-led motions. As I tell my mom, we help our customers get more customers. And so we ultimately help our customers stand up a modern demand engine to drive brand awareness, capture, create, and convert demand, ultimately to build pipeline and help our customers achieve their revenues.
I love that you've got that explanation that even your mom would understand. We all need that. I think a whole agency can be built around. Let's explain our job roles to our mothers because I know my mom still doesn't understand what I do.
But you're the CEO now, right? Yeah, it's absolutely the king. But you're the CEO now. But you didn't start out at CEO.
What was that journey like? Yeah. So back in 2020, I had actually left a job at a company that was negatively impacted by the pandemic. And I had had a pretty good run in my career.
And I was actually thinking about starting my own consulting company. But in the summer of 2020, Chris Walker, the founder of Refine Labs, reached out to me. Him and I had been slowly developing a friendship off LinkedIn. We had made some content together.
We met one time in New York when he came down to visit. So I knew him a little bit. We were building a relationship. And he basically pitched me on joining him at Refine Labs to scale the marketing agency.
And at the time, I was intrigued, but I was also debating whether I wanted to start my own consulting firm with the pandemic and all the uncertainty. I felt like that was an interesting time. But Chris and I spent a lot of time getting to know each other and talking about the business. And ultimately, it was a great opportunity.
And so I said, yes, let's do this. Let's build this as business partners and get it up and running. He really took on the role as CEO and was really our external face of the company. He's an amazing marketer.
And that's one of the unique things about Refine Labs is our ability to grow was predominantly rooted in the marketing strategy that Chris had developed. I joined as the COO and really took over management of everything else in the organization besides those key CEO responsibilities. We think of company strategy, evangelism, business development. And so even my initial role, my mandate was pretty big.
I was going to come in and manage all delivery operations, all back office support. And him and I really led as co-leaders of the company. We had a great partnership where we really leveraged each other's strengths to grow the agency. So I was in that COO position for a little over three years before we made the change in January of this year.
Chris is huge. Refine Labs is a fantastic agency, but Chris is a larger than life personality. Right? And the scenario you're describing to me, I would liken it to during the inter-check retiring and somebody having to step into lead-baner media.
And the challenge that that might potentially present, I don't think that was one of the challenges that you face, but I know you face some challenges stepping in a CEO. So talk to us about that. Was that one of the challenges? What else was going on there that was a struggle for you?
Yeah. And so I think it's important to kind of talk a little bit about the trajectory of the company between 2020 and 2024. So when I joined, there was about four other employees. We had about six customers.
So it was pretty early days. And so as we were sailing the agency in 2020 and 2021, we were really riding the COVID boom. So there was a huge injection of VC money into the B2B ecosystem. Companies were embracing the growth at all cost mindset.
They just wanted to throw money at digital marketing programs to grow, grow, grow. So the demand for our services just skyrocketed in this time. So in an 18-month period after I joined, we went from 1 million to 20 million in ARR. We almost grew too fast to keep up with the demand for our services.
And so obviously in a high growth environment, it can be stressful and chaotic, but it's also really exciting. And we were driving a lot of momentum, having a ton of success. Then, as we came into 2022, we were starting to see the macroeconomic conditions and the markets, especially in VDP Tech, start to change pretty dramatically. So as a result of that, our customers were really impacted by that funding, started to dry up.
Companies were running out of cash. Companies needed to preserve. So they had all the layoffs. We had constructing of budgets, especially how much people were spending in paid advertising.
So I would say from about mid-2022 until about early 2023 was a really difficult period for the company because the customers that we serve were going through these dramatic shifts and ultimately were canceling their contracts with us. We were a very high-priced agency at that time. Average retainer was in the $40,000 per month range. And we were able to command that price given the demand.
So we went through a really challenging period where we had a lot of customers leave as an agency, our labor costs, our primary costs to serve our customers. And so we did have a couple of layoffs at Refine Labs as a result of that, given that we were a bootstrapped company and didn't have a lot of extra cash to cover that type of expense. So it was a very challenging period with which we navigated that. One of the other things I think that Chris is really great at.
He's one of those visionary founders and is constantly innovating. He's constantly finding new and interesting signals from the market to explore further and to validate. So once we kind of navigated through this really challenging period, and Chris is the first time CEO, I had been a CEO before, I hadn't been a CEO before, but I had worked as a COO and led many companies. And so I was doing my best to kind of help navigate us through these tough times because I had been in similar ones previously.
And I sort of had some pattern recognition around that. Coming into 2023, then we were really trying to read down the company. And Chris was continuing to find some really interesting signals that were more broader than sort of digital marketing and demand gen, which was where we started Refine Labs. He was seeing that there was really a gap overall in looking at companies go to market strategies, how they were using their data to make decisions and to allocate resources and expenses.
So we started diversifying our offerings a little bit at Refine Labs and introducing some new services sort of in response to these signals and trends that Chris was seeing in the market. Ultimately, Chris and I came to a realization in 2023 though, what we realized was we were almost building two different companies within Refine Labs. And it was a very clarifying moment for us. And I remember we were discussing that we were starting to really confuse the market about what Refine Labs offered, what services we provided, who we were, what our market positioning was.
And so in this transition, Chris was focusing more and more on this. And I was stepping in to really manage the entire sort of digital marketing and demand agency space already. I would say starting in the beginning of 2023, I really took over management of the entire leadership team and accountability to the P&L, et cetera, while Chris was doing his evangelism, as well as really focusing on the sort of the next wave of innovation that he was seeing and really motivated by. So it was actually a fairly kind of gradual transition where then we decided he was going to separate this new idea into its own entity.
And we were going to clarify and crystallize the Refine Labs positioning as a B2B demand gen agency so that we had clarity in our positioning and we could really focus on operational excellence and delivering for our customers in that way. And so we did the big announcement in January of this year, but you could argue that really almost for a year I was operating in that capacity to a degree. Another thing to think about or to consider is I really, I recruited everybody on our team. I have great relationships with our team and our customers.
So from that aspect, the transition was relatively, I had built trust over the years of working at the company. The biggest challenge for me has actually really been within myself. I'm an operator and I'm a get shit done kind of person. And so the biggest challenge for me has been shifting from I'm not the COO anymore.
I was able to elevate someone at our company to really take on the CFO COO position from me while I could step in and really embrace being a CEO. I think I'm still in that transition where I just default to the things I'm really good at when I really need to be reprogramming my mindset and having a different set of priorities relative to the new role that I'm in. So that's been the biggest challenge for me and it's been a very intentional about how I'm spending my time, how I'm prioritizing things. I see something and I just want to jump in because I owned it before and I know how to fix it, but I can't.
I need to let the team, I need to trust that the team is going to handle it. And I think I haven't really heard a lot about this or read much about this, but making this type of transition is really difficult because it's a materially different set of responsibilities than if you're sort of operating the day to day versus needing to be more forward thinking. Chris does have a large, you know, Chris has a LinkedIn celebrity. I know that from the beginning.
I'm not intimidated by that. I've built my own reputation in the space. I have a lot of great relationships with people. I'm not trying to compete with Chris in any regard.
In fact, we still greatly benefit from his evangelism and his personal brand and that halo effect that he has. I'm confident in my abilities there and we're just different leaders. We're different leaders with different styles. I post on LinkedIn.
I do podcasts. I have my version of that, which is a different flavor than what Chris is, right? But I think that's definitely one of his superpowers, his visionary and innovative thinking and he's sort of the ultimate marketer, if you will. And so I'm leaning into my strengths at the stage of where the agency is now.
What's actually most important is operational excellence, predictable customer acquisition and retention. And we have this content product called the vault, which we've really struggled to figure out how to leverage and monetize. And so that's another key priority that I have as well. From a challenges perspective, I think making the shift from a COO role to a CEO role is, I don't really think I've actually completed that transition yet.
And I need to continue down that path to really, really, truly embrace what the new role is and really shed all of those other responsibilities that other people at the company are more than capable of handling at this point. What a fascinating set of circumstances. I appreciate that you shared all that with us. You're talking about an agency who was going through these macroeconomic issues and having to lay off and deal with customers who are struggling and that's impacting you.
And you had, like we talked about, essentially a celebrity leader and him going off and taking a different direction and basically starting a new company and splintering a little bit. It sounds like it was all amicable, which is terrific. But that in itself is a very unique situation. He's not retired.
He's still out there working on different projects for a different company. So you having to step in the aftermath of all that. And then you shared something that I think everybody listening is going to be nodding their head if they've been in this situation where you stepped into a new role, but you wanted to fall back to your old role. This is what you did for years and years and years.
And I was wondering why you're doing that stuff. Absolutely. So you're in this new role and you said you have had the wherewithal to realize that, okay, I need to let other people do that. I need to step into this new role and have a certain mindset.
But that's not something you've been trained to do. So where did you figure out how to be a CEO? Were there people you turned to? Were the resources that maybe you leveraged?
How did you figure that out? Yeah, it's a great question. I would say that in almost every role that I've had in my career, I've always worked really closely with the CEO. So even though this is my first formal CEO position, I've had a lot of exposure to how many different CEOs operate.
And I think over the course of my career, I've developed my own point of view of what I, the type of leader or CEO that I would want to be. Of course, I have formal and informal mentors. I'm actually in the market and looking, interviewing for an actual executive coach. So I have someone external to really provide some support and push me and challenge me even more.
I'm a big believer in that type of support system and creating that outside of the company. So you know, overly lean on the people on your team internally. So I think I did have a perspective of the type of CEO that I wanted to be on paper. I can describe like the job that I should have.
Like I know the things that I should be doing, right? Like you're the vision caster, you're the storyteller, you are making sure the company doesn't run out of money. You were always thinking six, 12, 18, 24 months ahead about what's coming, saying up to date on what's happening in the market, what's happening with your customers. Today, I happen to also be selling every new customer at Refine Labs.
I handle all sales calls. Interestingly enough, by doing so, I talked to probably seven to 10 marketing leaders per week, which actually allows me to have a pretty strong pulse on what's happening in the market. And I think that's one of the challenges people are facing, what problems people are trying to solve, what the conditions are within the companies. And so it's interesting.
I think a lot of the ingredients are here. I think my nature though is to be the the doer and the executor and the operator. And the biggest shift I'm trying to make is creating more free space for me to really think critically for me to read and absorb important new interesting information for me to make space to build relationships with partners or other stakeholders in the ecosystem that it's important for me to have a base time with a relationship, making time for podcasts so that in my own way, I can also evangelize and get Refine Labs out there in the world. So I think it's something that I think I just learned from experience and kind of developing my own perspective on the type of leader that I want to be, as well as understanding that there's a certain set of core responsibilities that I believe every CEO should own.
I think for me, my leadership style is really, I lead from the front. I'm a believer that like, if I'm not going to ask anybody to do something that I wouldn't do myself, I'm going to take a first step into the uncharted territory and carve a path for the rest of the team to follow so that they feel safe coming with me. I'm going to provide clarity. We kind of talked a little bit about the positioning.
Clarity is something that I crave so much. I had to train myself to be effective dealing with ambiguity, but I know most people crave clarity and I like to provide that to people. It feels good. It creates trust, incredibleity and psychological safety.
And so those are some of the things that I think are really important. Those things have served me really well. And I think what I need to continue to work on is letting, shedding those old responsibilities, really continuing to delegate more effectively and really leaning into that sort of that set of responsibilities that I just walked through. I think are really the most important areas of focus for a CEO.
I love how you talked about the fact that you had exposure to a CEO for many, many years. I personally related that. I've been with the Goropulse for six years. For the first five years, I reported directly to our CMOs that we had over that course of time.
So I got firsthand experience with how they operated. And I got a tutorial basically on how to be a CMO just by watching them for the last six or 12 months. I've been reporting directly to the CEO. So I'm seeing how he operates.
I'm seeing how he interacts with me. And if you have the way with all to pay attention to that, then you can kind of ingest that. And I really appreciate it. I'm not going to throw out the wisdom that you've shown and understanding that you are not the same person as the previous CEO.
You have your own leadership style, your own strengths, and you're leaning into that. And I just want to kind of applaud you for that because that is a true benefit to your company that you're not trying to be the person that used to build those shoes. If that's not going to work. No, it's not going to work.
And it's funny. A lot of people ask me this privately and another podcast asked it like, oh, were you intimidated by stepping into Chris's shoes? He's got this larger than life personality. But the truth is I wasn't.
And that's not in any way meant to be a diss on Chris, right? He is a LinkedIn celebrity. He's again, he's probably like the best marketer out there right now. And he's proving it with what he does for his personal brand.
But I feel confident in my own ability and my own presence and just the warm reception that I got from the external LinkedIn community to our internal customers, to our internal team, the people that know me and that have worked with me know what I bring to the table. And I really have appreciative to Chris because I think what he realized was what Refine Labs needed for the next phase was more in line with my strengths and where his zone of genius is is in that building phase. That's when he is really on fire and when he really brings new ideas to life and recognizing that we were at this juncture where it was time to make a change. So give him a lot of credit for that because I think it's really hard for some founders to and so I think it takes a lot of courage and self awareness to recognize that and be willing to figure out what the right next steps are to navigate a transition like that.
And he's still, he's still directly, we still do Refine Labs events with Chris Walker, right? Like there's still a lot of things that we're doing with him and together. So he's not completely removed from the company either. Like he still has a role.
There's still a lot of involvement with him and the team and myself. So he's just taken on a different set of responsibility as well. He's also getting his new project up and running. Yeah.
Well, now in all fairness to Chris, like I told you in the green room, you're the one that I've been following for years and I've seen you speaking on stages and I feel they have you on this podcast, not Chris, but what other advice would you give to other agency leaders who might be transitioning into this CEO role? Yeah. So there were a couple of things that I did when we made the announcement. And I think people talk a lot about like the CEO's 100 day plan, like what are you going to do in the first 100 days that you're in this role?
And so a lot of thought and sought out a lot of guidance and advice from my team and external people on how to think about what am I doing in this first 90 days? Really, I'm sort of still in right now. And there were a few key things that came to mind. Number one was really strategic clarity.
If you think about the context I gave you earlier in earlier in this conversation, there was a lot of like company positioning pivoting happening from late 2022 into sort of mid 2023. And it created a lot of confusion externally and internally and some frustrations as well. And so I spent a lot of time and a lot of energy putting together a really comprehensive and clear and specific 2024 strategic plan. I only had five strategic imperatives for the entire year.
And I put an entire deck together because I knew I wanted to present this to my team. So right after the announcement, we brought everybody together for an all hands where I presented the plan so that people immediately had clarity on what I was intending to do and competence that I was capable of executing against my vision and my strategy. We then it was a lot of information, right? So then we did what I call a CEO listening to work.
So after that initial all hands, we presented the information, get an open forum Q&A, but then I went around to all of the individual sub teams into much smaller groups. And we had open Q&A sessions where the team was able to in smaller group settings after they had a chance to digest all the information, ask more clarifying questions or give feedback on what was presented to them. So I did that had several different meetings with all of these different teams to really validate and sort of make sure that they understood the direction and they had an opportunity to share concerns or feedback or ask questions really to get everybody on board. At the same time from an external perspective, I knew I had some more work to do to create more market clarity around what Refine Labs had to offer.
It wasn't uncommon to take a sales call in 2023 and the prospect would come on, they come in down to us, they get on the call and my sales calls would start and they'd be like, oh my gosh, I love Refine Labs, I've been following Chris on LinkedIn for years. What do you guys do? I don't even know what you do. And I'm like, okay, let's start from the beginning.
This is what we do, this is the these are the services we offer. It's been awesome to see as I've been pumping out content that's with the goal of providing external market clarity on our positioning, we are a B2B digital marketing and demand generation agency. This is who we serve. This is what we offer.
This is if this is qualification criteria, you don't meet this, we're probably not going to be a good bit to help you. So just that ongoing and repetitious cycle of getting that content out in the market, my last, I would say 30 to 45 days of calls has been amazing because people get on and they, I'm seeing that clarity come through. I don't get that question anymore. People come in knowing that we're a paid media and creative agency with a unique strategy, sort of overlaying those execution services.
So that's been really awesome. And I think finally in putting together the financial plan and the forecast, especially remembering the context I provided of hyper growth, contraction, layoffs, all these things that were happening, right? It creates a lack of psychological safety. And what was most important to me was that the team felt psychologically safe, that they trusted me and that they had clarity on what we were doing and their contribution to our vision.
And so we put together a achievable financial plan. And it's been awesome because even, you know, we're not even done with the first quarter yet, but we've already exceeded our Q1 financial projections by a meaningful amount. I was hopeful that it would pan out. You don't quite exactly know how those things will happen until the time passes and you're able to put your points on the board.
But that was a key focus of mine. Like we had to start the year strong so I could demonstrate from a financial and revenue standpoint that I'm the right leader to continue to lead this company in the next phase of growth, because I will make sure that we continue to grow. And so I think those were the most important things. And I felt there were probably other things that I didn't do that I should have, but I did those really well.
And I think those set me up for success and I think put me on a good strong footing. Okay. I'm not going to be a masterclass here. I'd be the CEO of a marketing agency whether you're transitioning into that role or you've been in that role for years.
It's fantastic advice. But Megan, we're talking about the challenges that can face agency executives when they're transitioning into that role, even if they've come from within the organization. But we're going to shift gears in a moment and talk more about how refined labs operate. So first, let's hear from a few other agency owners how they're working with their clients.
I actually can't say enough great things about the reporting of the GORE Pulse. I feel like that is my job security every month. My clients aren't that active on social media, which is why they have me manage their profiles for them. And when they get that report, it verifies that they're making a good investment.
The metrics, downloads are so simple and easy to read and it really helps me show where we are doing things right on social and where we need to improve. So I think one of the main reasons why we decided to move to a GORE Pulse is because it's a more comprehensive integrated tool for all of our marketing needs. So rather than what we had to do historically, we sprouted, which is use certain parts of that platform that work really well and then supplement it with other outside tools. By moving to a GORE Pulse, we were able to keep all of that into one technology platform, which is not only a time saver, but it also makes sure that our analytics and all of our reporting's on point because we're pulling all from the same source.
It's a really great platform for agencies. It makes it really easy to manage, but gives me really, really, really robust information that actually helps me develop better strategies for my clients and better plans and actions. Awesome. So we're back with Megan.
I'd love to know more about some of the tools that you guys use at Refine Labs because many of the agencies that we talk to, we're often helping boutique agencies grow beyond that one, two, three, four people phase into that 10, 20 plus agents kind of a phase and multiple clients. And I know many people listening would love to be charging 40k per month for a client who has adjusted since that high 20 to 30k per month range following the market, right? And what the market. Right.
Right. So what's in your MARTech stack? What are you guys using today? It's a really interesting question.
And I would say that actually, I get this a lot from our potential customers as well. Oh, what tech stack do we need to be successful? Do we need to have all these different MARTech tools to run your program? So yes, we have tools internally that help us be efficient and deliver our service to our clients from our, when we work with clients, we predominantly work within their CRM, which is a police sales force, their marketing automation platform, which is typically like HubSpot or Marketo.
And obviously the ad platforms, but our core services and our execution services don't really require some crazy MARTech tech stack to use. I go for us to deliver or for us to like leverage with our customers tech stack as well. And so what I'll say though, in response to that question is AI is the hot topic right now. Everyone's talking about it.
Obviously like everyone talks about chat, GPT, et cetera, et cetera. And the Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, he's famous for saying this quote recently, which is basically like, AGI is going to effectively replace 95% of what a marketing agency does within the next five years. And so putting MARTech tools aside, the thing that I'm thinking about relative to tech stack and tools and how we think about how to sort of operationally evolve over the next few years is what are the right, what are the right AI tools for us to be leveraging that are going to help our teams be more efficient, more effective, but not impact the quality of the work that we're providing, right? Where is it that you want that the human powered work versus the AI powered work?
This I think is the most fascinating question relative to what's your tech stack, what are what's the tool set that you're using? So my team and I were currently just in our exploration phase right now. So we're trying out a lot of different, these AI tools, both with our customers, both within our sort of like internal delivery mechanisms. And we want to figure out what's going to be the right tool set that is going to allow us to deliver better customer outcomes while ensuring that we're having the humans do the things that humans should be doing and really leveraging AI for what's needed.
So I wish I had more detail to share, but because we're still in this exploration phase, we're really just researching, we're experimenting, we're learning, and I think it's going to be a little bit more time while we do this before I'd be able to form a more concrete point of view of what I think a future agency is going to need to operate in this new world that we are just about to enter into. I mean, that's pretty fascinating to read this quote, this altman quote of, in five years, if we didn't change anything with AI, replace marketing agency, probably could. And so I'm thinking sort of a little bit ahead and I'm trying to do my own research and experimentation to come to a perspective on what that evolution is going to look like. And I appreciate that transparency because in reality, no one has answers to that they're literally in the midst of this.
I actually probably know Paul Brooks with the Marketing AI Institute. We had this tremendous conference last year, the Marketing AI Conference in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Huntington Veterans Center was filled with agencies just like you, owners and so on who were there for that exact same purpose. They're asking that same question. How is AI going to impact my agency in the next three, five, eight years?
What I need to be doing now to prepare for that time in the future, whether it's like you said, Martek, Zach, aside or not, it's a lot of us just understanding and preparing ourselves for the reality that, well, we do need to start using AI, but what does that look like? And how can that best serve my client point? Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting because when you think about currently, we basically provide the core part of our service is managing paid advertising for our customers.
And over the course of the pandemic, especially, that was the only way everyone was communicating was on digital channels or social media, right? I am absolutely observing the noise level increase, the saturation increase. This is still going to work for a while, so don't get me wrong. But eventually, there's going to be a new phase that is ushered in just like in 10, 15 years ago, when everyone was following the HubSpot inbound playbook for marketing, and that doesn't really work anymore.
Now we're all doing the sort of social media marketing. Eventually, we're going to move into another era that's going to demand an evolution of the energy, right? And ironically, it's so funny how like what's old is new again. I think when we think about like the expansion of AI, and I think the probably the erosion of trust of what you're seeing online is this real, is this even a real person?
Like, can I believe this information? It's going to be interesting how I think more peer to peer word of mouth is going to continue to be the predominant driver of purchasing decisions because of all the crazy things that people can do digitally, people will become more distrustful of what they're seeing. And social media is, it's a double edged sword, right? And the reason that it's an effective marketing strategy is because everybody spends three to five hours a day on social media.
But from a human and a society standpoint, something is going to give at some point, because there's a lot of negative implications to that as well. So I see this not going to change overnight. It is still the right strategy to reach your audience. People don't want to learn about things other ways right now.
So we are catering to what people want, how people consume information and make buying decisions. But these things are going to change over the next five, 10 years, probably pretty significantly. Yeah, totally agree. Now, I know you've mentioned a couple of times that you're most in the paid side.
So I know you're not doing a lot of organic social media, but I always like to know, and you can ask this question, however you'd like, how are you currently measuring that business impact of social media for your clients at Refine Labs? Yeah. And just to clarify, we do consult and advise on the organic strategy. And we have different partners that we recommend people leverage if they need some help, for example, like using Hatch for podcast post-production and micro video clips that will publish on LinkedIn.
So we absolutely recommend that as part of our customer strategy, we advise on how they should do it. But we really encourage those CEOs and founders or subject matter experts to really own their LinkedIn profile, or should they need to go strider to cure one of those as that's not really our sweet spot based on the skill set that we have on our team. So it is part of the mix. It's just not something we execute, but we absolutely recommend that.
Obviously, that's our entire Refine Labs marketing strategy is that organic play, right? We do a little paid advertising for our agency too. We predominantly rely on our podcasts, UB Revenue Vitals, Chris's podcast, the Stacking Growth Podcast, which is a Refine Labs property. And then obviously Chris, me and many of our employees posting on LinkedIn every single day to drive awareness about our offering.
That said, when we think about how we're measuring success with our customers for the programs that we're deploying, we use an approach that we call hybrid attribution. So hybrid attribution is leveraging both software based attribution and self reported attribution for a more holistic view of multiple inputs into what's driving demand. A lot of people think over fine labs hate software attribution. We don't hate it.
It gives them, it gives good data, but it's heavily skewed to demand capture. All software attribution is going to say, paid search, direct traffic, organic search are going to be the three primary lead sources for all your inbounds that come in. But when the software attribution tells you it was direct traffic or organic search, guess what? If it was direct traffic, someone knew your website address and went to your website.
How did they know about your website? They probably found out about you on social media. So on the primary conversion form of all of our customers, we have them implement, how did you hear about us? Open, text field, not a dropdown required.
And then we'll build a hybrid attribution dashboard within HubSpot or Marketo to basically show them what software attribution measures, what self reported attribution measures. The biggest trends we see is whether it's direct traffic or organic search and think about organic search. If I went to Google and typed in agorapulse, I'm basically just going to your website but passing through Google, right? You didn't know your URL.
In both cases, I didn't find out about you from Google. I knew about you before I went to Google and I entered your brand name into that. And so typically what we see is self reported attribution will say, LinkedIn, podcast, Reddit, a friend, a colleague. I saw Chris Walker's YouTube videos, whatever happens to be.
And you match those answers up and you'll see distinctions between those. So we like to use both so that you can really be in complete picture of what's working and not working. Very insightful. Thank you for sharing that, particularly the point about how not all Google organic search is going to be truly search traffic.
It may be like you said, someone just going to the phone page. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
No. One of my last questions and I like having fun with this and it's just you and me talking. Nobody can hear this. But what shouldn't clients do?
What would actually get them fired as a client? So I think beyond baseline honesty and integrity respect, I don't condone any disrespectful behavior from customers to our team. That's not allowed. That usually doesn't happen with rare exceptions.
I would say the biggest thing and I attempt to really qualify this within the sales process itself is what I would like to call philosophical alignment. Don't hire us if you are going to freak out three months in and force us to run lead gen campaigns with your ebook. That's not what we do. We can do it.
But if we know it's not going to work and we're not going to know we spend your money on things that we know are not going to work, even though you're now freaked out because your CEO is breathing down your neck and you feel like you have to do this to appease him because you're not seeing results fast enough, even though we've only been working together for 12 weeks. And so that's the biggest issue that I would say that I try to do my best to get ahead of in this process and tip to clarify, like there are nuances, there are certain use cases where it actually is a good idea to run a lead gen or direct response campaign. Drive it then signups, newsletter signups, certain other certain other campaigns for certain types of businesses or offers. It can make sense.
But as a general rule, if you are not willing to adopt our philosophy, we are not going to be a good partner to you. And this is how I run my sales processes. I'm like, look, this is a dual qualification process, right? You are evaluating refined labs if we're going to be a good partner.
I'm evaluating if you're going to be a good customer. Here are the things that we need from our customers to be successful. I learned from, I'm talking to a CMO and they're like, I'm CEO, I'm still trying to convince him about this new approach to marketing. He doesn't really get it.
He's not on board. I'm like, I need to talk to your CEO then before you become a customer because this will blow up in our faces if we do not get that alignment up front. And so whether it's doing some due diligence and getting a historical data set in the sales process and then being able to project out results in a timeline that's reasonable and walking through that with the CEO, the CEO, the executive team to be like, hey, you hire us, this is what you should expect. It will take a little bit of time.
But this is typically what we see in terms of incremental lift when we think of more web traffic, more web conversions, more pipeline, more revenue. And how does this match up to your goals? And I'll tell companies, I'm like, your goals are totally made up. There's no way in hell if you're going to hit that, even if you don't hire us.
So I think like crazy goals and a lack of philosophical alignment, we're just not going to be a good fit. And I don't think it's about firing a client for me. What I try to do is make sure that we never start working with clients without vetting out those key criteria to begin with. But most of my career is actually in customer success.
And I have had to fire customers here and there. Unfortunately, some customer relationships don't work out. You're never going to bat a thousand in this type of situation. So if there is a situation that clearly isn't working, I just have a direct conversation with the customer.
Like, look, this isn't working. Let's talk about a transition plan that's going to make sense for both sides. So anyway, that's what I have to say about that. Yeah.
Well, I love how much you focus on that qualification perspective and how it's just as much a qualification of them as it is of you. I know many small agencies who might be struggling, they have high degree of difficulty turning away any business, even if they know, I mean, they just hit them upside down. They know this is not the right job client situation for them. But take it anyways, because they want the money and the long run, they're hurting themselves as much as you're not.
Good revenue. Yeah, it's not good revenue. Yeah. It wins your reputation too at the end of the day if you do that too much.
And we've made some mistakes, right? We've we've we've on boarded some customers where maybe in hindsight, I was like, we missed that or we didn't do enough due diligence, right? So it's not to say that we're perfect, but especially now that I'm doing all I've done 100% of the selling on and off and we've had different people take that over over the course of time, but that's a big one for me is I will say though, ironically, and I tell people to, I'm like, I'm not here to convince you to buy my stuff. I'm here to find out if we should work together, right?
And then you can side if you want to hire us. And by approaching the conversation in that way, it actually lowers their defenses. It creates trust and credibility. They know I'm not trying to like sell them anything.
So that approach actually has really worked in my favor. Yeah. I love the fact that you talked about it being a good fit and you mean it. A lot of people say that and they're really just being sales people, but that's exactly what you should be trying to find.
Is it truly a good fit? The other thing that I want to call out because you really talked about this earlier, but it really stuck with me is how much you're communicating because you reference it again just now. You're talking to your customers, you person, to see all the company. You're on the phone.
It sounds like multiple times a day with customer customers. I think it's having a time to say all the week. Yeah. Right.
And then just a couple months ago, you did a CEO tour of the company and talked to one or small groups with every single person in the company. You're spending a lot of time you're devoting on a energy into communicating and I think that's making you an outstanding leader. Thank you. I am.
I work by the pays off. I feel like especially in this remote setting that so many of us are working in leaning into over communication is and it really comes back to cultivating trust and psychological safety, both for the team and my customers. Right? Like I've been in the customer's shoes where like I get there under a ton of pressure.
They're coming to us because they think we can help them achieve goals that they're not sure how they're going to achieve. And so I get that and I want to be honest with them. I'm like, this is what you should expect. This is what we're going to do.
This is what results will look like. This is the timeline. Is that going to work? If there are some short-term pressures, let's go into this and align on how we might adjust our strategy to drive both short, medium and long-term results without compromising the strategy and the approach that we know is right.
So I get it. I get the pressure that people are under. But at the same time, want people to be really clear about what they should expect if they decide to hire us. Absolutely.
I mean, you have been truly amazing. This has been such a fun interview and I know it's going to impact a lot of people in a positive way. We're focusing on learn more about you or refine labs perhaps. Tell them where to go to find you.
The only social media platform I'm on is LinkedIn. So come find me on LinkedIn, Megan Bowen, and then you can check out refinelabs at www.refinelabs.com. That's it. Fantastic.
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