Welcome to Stacking Growth, called to action, a show for the trailblazers, change makers, and paradigm shifters. Each week, a different marketing hero who is called to make a change in their field will join us through each step of their journey. They'll cover the highs, the lows, and what's coming next. Together, we'll help you find the changes you need to make your own business win.
I'm Steph Krenula here with Evan Hughes, and today we are so excited to welcome Refine Lab CEO Megan Bowen. Megan has set our 2025 vision with a continued intention to redefine demand generation and the strategies that make it successful. Megan, thank you so much for coming on today. What an intro.
I feel like I need a stage to like walk on and like put my hands in the air. Some air horns, but I know excited to be here and excited to dig into the conversation. I think change management is probably one of the most important disciplines that every company is going to have to sort of conquer over the next couple of decades. And so I'm super excited to get into the topics today.
Yeah, I'm really excited for this to be our kickoff call to action episode because so many of the discussions we're having this year are about people who've made a change. And it's so easy to say make this change, right? But the actual change management process is so crucial and so important. So to get to hear from you how to how to set those expectations and how to make that work is going to set up the rest of these conversations so beautifully for 2025.
Yeah, absolutely. So let's start with a little bit of the before times. Can you talk to us a little bit about your path into marketing and the experiences you've had, especially getting into the areas of the growth at all costs mindset and the website era of marketing. Yeah, definitely.
We're going to really get a change management, right? So let's start, like you said, with the before picture. So let's paint a picture of what things have looked like over the last 10 to 20 years in BB SAS overall. So I would say, you know, in the early 2000s into the 2000s and 2010s, this is when we saw a massive influx and rise in just VC investments and startups, you know, the boom times, if you will, in BB SAS.
And it was awesome. So many amazing new companies were founded. A ton of cash was invested in those companies to grow and the mandate was grow at all costs. Here's plenty of money.
You can burn money, you can economics are not as important as top line growth. At the same time that this was occurring, we saw the rise of the Internet and I'll credit HubSpot with their concept of inbound marketing was really the emergence of the Internet. And so what we did was we saw the market was really the emergence of what we know today as digital marketing strategies, paid Google ads, paid social ads, and at the time, at the beginning of the Internet, we, they were running a set of what we would, you know, would often call today lead gen sort of tactics and campaigns as a way to acquire leads and convert those leads to sales opportunities and customers. And so these are sort of the two major factors that really represent the last 10 to 20 years in BB SAS.
So optimizing for top line growth, we are beginning to implement digital marketing strategies that, you know, for many, many years were very effective at customer acquisition. And that worked really, really well for, you know, a decade plus. Now, as we move into the 2020s, several things begun to change with regards to these sort of two core factors that really defined the B2B SAS ecosystem. So one of the changes is we're seeing the growth at all costs, the mindset begins to shift into more of a profitable efficient growth.
And we had this, I guess you could call it a downturn in B2B SAS starting in the summer of 2022, when we started to see a lot of VC funding dry up, we saw a lot of companies needing to massively cut budgets to reduce burn to stay alive. We saw a sort of resurgence of people caring about unit economics and a business which, you know, arguably, you should have always cared about that. But so be it, this is how things played out, right? And efficiency, profitability, strong unit economics, you know, appropriate customer acquisition costs, all of these became much more important than they were in previous years.
And then we didn't have all of the capital that we had previously to deploy on customer acquisition. At the same time, you have the rise of dark social, you have the pandemic, which basically turns everything from in real life to online overnight. And a lot of the digital marketing strategies from the website era begin to become less and less effective. We see an emergence of a new set of strategies that are meeting buyers where they're at, that are more effective and efficient in terms of customer acquisition.
And we see a subset of B2B SAS companies, you know, I would call them pioneers or the early adopters begin to make that shift away from Legion and more into what we would call a demand gen go to market strategy approach. So all of this is happening over the last five years or so. It's now 2025. Chat GPT was released in the last couple of years.
The adoption has continued to increase the tools have continued to improve and new use cases are being introduced every day in terms of how AI can be integrated into a B2B SAS go to market strategy. And so I really believe 2025 marks the beginning of leaving what we had called the dark social era of the last four years moving into the AI era, and everything's going to change again over the next five to 10 years. And it's really interesting because when you think about the landscape of B2B SAS companies, I would really put them in really two broad categories. So one is you have all of these brand new companies that are going to be created that have just popped up over the last 12 months and that many, many more will be created.
They're starting in the AI era. So their challenge is really a fundamental business challenge on identifying a great product and achieving product market fit. And a lot of those founders are comfortable with AI and understand the right go to market strategies that are going to work. You then have all of these other companies, these mid market and enterprise companies.
They've been around 10, 20, 30 years. They're at 50 million, 100 million, 1 billion, and annual revenue. They have huge teams, right? Thousands and thousands of employees.
This set of companies, there's actually a huge percentage that are still in what I would call the website era. Still executing those strategies. Now, many of them have begun to move into the dark social era, begin to change their go to market practices, begin that change management process, which is fantastic. But not everybody is there yet.
And so there are two challenges for these, you know, already successful and established companies. If you're one of these companies and you're still executing a go to market strategy that's really relying on, you know, sort of early digital marketing tactics, you need to go through two phases of change. You need to first change into what we would call from the lead gen to the demand gen approach and really begin to drive more efficiency and effectiveness with your digital strategies. And then you need to tackle the whole AI bucket, right?
And skipping over that step is not advisable, in my opinion. Actually, there's significant ROI improvement and business outcome improvement for these companies to make this change now from the website era to the dark social era. And you know, the AI is just beginning. There's a lot more exploration and experimentation that we're planning to do at Refine Labs this year to really inform our POV on how you should integrate AI into your P2B go to market machine and your engine.
But all of these things are happening right now. And the first step is being aware of how reality is changing so that you can, you can define a strategy to deal with a reality in front of you and survive and thrive as a company. There's so much impact there. And I'm sure we could spend this up into six to seven episodes because I do agree that this kind of change mindset of shifting from growth at all costs.
Right. That's what's going to resonate most of listeners. They've often been most of us have been in these roles where these companies where it's like, okay, light the fire. We got to go like grow, grow, grow.
We got to meet the demand of the board. We've got to hit these targets. And oftentimes these targets aren't unattainable, right? There's not something that we can achieve.
And I think that that's that mindset shift to write is you're talking about change management and you're trying to educate your internal stakeholders, whether you're leading the organization, you're on the board and you're rather influencing change. How do you recognize that shift? And it sounds like from your experience and leading refined labs and your legacy and marketing, what was the pivotal moment where you've actually seen this shift need to take place? So yes, you're having conversations, you're leading sales and champion for refined labs, but is there one single moment or a few moments where you're like, aha, this is kind of the light bulb where I knew that I have to not only push refined labs in this direction to make sure that we're continuing to evolve, but I have to change the narrative that I'm having with potential prospects or the network networking broadly to make sure that folks are thinking differently.
I'd love to hear a little bit more of the listeners to understand how you've been approached that because it's a big, big ask. Yeah, so my personal experience prior to refined labs that I think really shown a light on this challenge, but also opportunity was when I was COO at a company called Managed by Q that ended up being acquired by WeWork. And WeWork was almost like a banner example of a company that had a pretty, I mean, I think that they say Adam Newman is the most successful fundraiser of all time. I think he raised the most money for WeWork company has raised for company, maybe OpenAI will be that.
But I mean, it was billions of dollars and the, like being a witness to the amount of investment that went into this company, the amount of people that were hired, the growth goals that were set, the expectation and the pace. It was a front row seat to really, to really watch all of the pitfalls that exist with this mindset. And it was an amazing product and service. It was brought to the market at exactly the right time.
They were the leader in their market by, you know, on paper, everything about this company should have succeeded. But I think that a big reason that they faltered was because they had too much money and they had this growth at all cost mentality, which precipitated a set of goal setting and decisions that ended up ultimately being the downfall of the company. And then, you know, I saw not only the impact of the actual business, which is a shame when you think about what a cool service and offering that they had available, but man, the impact on thousands of people and their livelihoods that was the downstream impact of all of these decisions. Honestly, it like broke my heart.
And it was like, no, like, you know, I love business. I love making money, but people matter so much to me as well. And that really solidified my sort of like this burning desire to be like, there has to be a better way. There has to be a better way.
This is not sustainable. This is, this is not going to be how companies grow. And a big reason why I teamed up with Chris back in 2020 to join Refine Labs was because him and I really shared that perspective. We believed that there was a better way.
And we thought by building the Refine Labs agency, that would be a way for us to address this in two ways. One is being a pioneer and how go to market strategy should shift and how they should move away from growth at all costs to profitable efficient growth. And then also focusing on how the decisions we made and how we built our own agency to basically show that a company can be successful without falling down and making some of these mistakes. I think the irony is we had so much early success.
You could argue we fell into our own growth at all cost trap because we rode the wave of the market in 2020, 2021 into 2022. And then we had the B2B SaaS downturn in the summer of 2022, which impacted our customers, which therefore impacted our agency. We had to lay off some people. It was a very difficult year and it took a couple of years for us to really recover and get back to stability.
So it's really interesting how even though, you know, I was able to see it and see all the issues, you then are in a situation where, you know, you do your best, you make a set of decisions, but you find yourself in the same set of circumstances. So I'm even more resolved today than I was back in 2020 that my responsibility as the CEO is to prevent that from happening and to focus on sustainable, profitable, efficient growth, doing great work for our customers, doing great work with our team and taking care of our people and ultimately trying to be the change agent to help as many B2B SaaS companies as possible navigate this transition. And that's like, that's the hard part. There's a ton of people that can run paid media for you, but the work that we do with our customers is really focused on how you navigate that change management process effectively.
So you're still hitting your goals today and tomorrow, but you're also setting yourself up to hit your goals next month, next quarter, next year. Yeah, I think that foundational component there, right, is having the right strategy in place that allows you to flex with market dynamics. So, you know, a lot of these jobs that we see and kind of these fast growing companies, the CMO role is almost a revolving door, right, because they bring somebody in hoping for expertise and a quick win and oftentimes that falls short because they don't have the right strategy or foundation in place. They don't have that kind of growth at all costs is still effectively driving their strategy versus taking a step back and like, how can we have sustainable growth with our current team or current structure or how do we identify the right partners.
So I think there's two things that you really resonated with me, right? It's like the ability to keep people win business. It has the right strategy in place, but also this idea that you can flex with dynamics as long as you have the foundational strategy that's focused on profitable growth, growth at all costs is out the door, but also recognizing there's an evolution from the website to kind of this dark social word of mouth to now integrating AI, like all of these components, if you have kind of a lens on that or you're working with the right individuals, I think that's the unlock that oftentimes there's blinders that folks want to ignore because they're just kind of stuck in traditional ways as you talk about mid-market enterprise segments. Yeah.
And it's interesting with the AI, I've been thinking about this a lot and there's been a lot of different ideas put out in the market already about this is how you use AI to automate some of your workflows or to help you do this or to do that. And this way you can use ChatGPT4, et cetera, et cetera. And it's really interesting because I think it's going to take another 12 to 24 months to really hone in on what are the ways that AI can truly augment your go-to-market strategy while still being aligned with profitable efficient growth and biocentric strategies. And I think there's a lot of things that people are testing and trying out, which sound really cool.
And like, you can argue the efficiency benefit probably every time with any of these different ideas, but just because AI can do something or do something for you or do something for you faster, it doesn't mean it's actually going to drive the business outcome that you want. And so obviously leveraging it for productivity and efficiency gains, like, yeah, I'm all for that, but leveraging it in a strategic and a creative way to drive go-to-market innovation, that's what I'm interested in uncovering. And I really believe that the only way to do it is to create the space for our team, we have the best marketers in B2B at Refine Labs, you know, give them the space to actually experiment and test ideas with actual companies and validate what actually works, not what sounds good in a LinkedIn post. So I, you know, Refine Labs hasn't sort of put a perspective out yet on, you know, exactly what we believe.
And I think this is one where I'm going to take a little bit of time to work with the team to really dial in what we believe will be the most impactful and long-term or go-to-market AI strategy. So I'm excited for it, but I also, this is an interesting one where there's a lot of urgency and a lot of desire to jump on this. And I think for startups that are brand new, like go for it, there's not a lot of risk in testing that out, but for a lot of these larger companies, I think making sure that they're really ready, that they have a lot more work to do to really be ready for that. And when they're ready, we'll be ready as well.
It's almost like they're falling back into that growth at all costs mindset, but the cost is misusing or not having clarity on what the efficiency of AI is doing for their strategy. They're growing with AI without thinking about the foundation exactly like you were talking about. So these, I know we're talking about growth at all costs and website to dark social to AI is two kinds of different streams, but really it's all connected and having that mindset being stuck in that growth at all costs mindset plays into how people are using AI now and jumping to integrating it in ways that might not be sustainable or efficient in the long run. Yeah, I mean, it's like classic shiny object syndrome.
It's like, oh, yeah, you can have your AI send a personalized email to your whole list, but it's like, do you really want to do that on Wednesday? Is that really the right strategy? Probably not. Like, let's think about it for a minute.
So just because you can do it doesn't mean you should. And I think that's what we're seeing in this first wave, right? Excitement and wanting to try and I'm all for experimentation, but I think it should be done at the right scale. And none of these things at this point should be seen as any definitive best practice or recommendation.
It's still too early. You know, that said, things are going to change in five years from now. How B2B, SAS companies go to market is going to be very, very different. 100% AI is going to be integrated into that.
How agencies support companies is going to go through a transformation. How companies decide to build go to market team. Like all of these things are going to change. And I don't think that's a bad thing.
So yeah, it's exciting, but I'm also trying to bring some of my experience to really think about the right way to begin thinking about this experimenting with it and integrating it into our go to market POV. And I feel like AI too is, you know, it's often an overused marketing jargon right now, which is tough because truly in the true definition of artificial intelligence is not what we're using today. We're using machine learning predictive models, recommendation engines. All of these like companies that are coming together, producing AI for organizations.
So like I'm really excited once we get to that like actual intelligence component of artificial intelligence. And now it's just I think people getting caught up in like this buzz term AI and you know, this AI era is so important to your point is like as we unpack that, that's the important part as we find what works best for our clients. What are the tools and levers that are actually predictable and recommendations that we can make that are stand on some sort of strategy versus just kind of pie in the sky. Hope that it works mentality that I think a lot of grasp at.
So I'm really excited like the evolution for the next five years. I'm also really excited to see like the dot AI buzz. They had a little bit reminds me a lot of the iPhone era or I dot whatever brand but anyway, hi digress. Yeah, it's part of the process, you know, part of the problem.
We're all learning. We're all learning. We're all growing changes, changes scary and hard, but I do want to get into some of those change management strategies because that's something that you especially Megan and refine labs in general are so crucial to in helping other organizations find and navigate those changes. So what are some kind of initial strategies or initial tools to use to help these larger organizations start to think about those changes.
Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, this is what I tell people on sales calls. I'm like, if you if you are looking for someone to run your paid media and that's all you care about, we're probably not the best fit. If you're looking to facilitate an important change in your go to market strategy and maximize our life, your digital programs, that's why we built refine labs and that's how we help the best.
And so in working with, you know, almost 300 companies over the last five years, what we've really leaned into is how do you facilitate this change management process and how long does it take, right? And so we actually have a pretty predictable and repeatable process that we feel confident works. And so, you know, step one is you need to face reality. You need to assess the current situation that is in front of you.
Part of that is looking at your, you know, historical performance, you know, doing a 12 to 24 to 36 month historical pipeline and lead, you know, revenue performance assessment to really understand what, you know, what is driving. What is driving pipeline and revenue taking a hard look at how you're executing all of your paid media dollars, often your digital budget is, you know, separate from headcount, the largest expense in a marketing budget and so getting the right ROI is so important, given that it takes typically a majority of your actual program budget. So doing an audit of how you're deploying those today and what needs to change to not only drive improved ROI, but actually to meet buyers where they're at and to protect and improve your brand reputation on the market. So this reality assessment is really step one.
And that's done through a series of CRM data analyses, you know, taking a look at your paid platform, campaign structure and settings and performance, understanding the digital buyer journey. And if your website is optimized to educate and convert traffic, all of these things are components, you know, making sure that you have the appropriate measurement infrastructure set up in your marketing automation platform and CRM. These are all foundational crucial steps that must be taken before you ever begin to sort of change your paid media strategy. So that's really phase one.
Once you understand what's going on, that's going to number one highlight the biggest opportunities, highlight the biggest inefficiencies, highlight the gaps that you have in the other parts of your marketing strategy that need to be addressed. So, you know, some of those gaps could be things like your positioning and messaging needs and overhaul or revamp your pricing isn't really working. Your website is not effective at converting traffic. You actually have a definition of your ICP that doesn't match which customers are actually acquiring.
So, knowing that those things are true allows you to then fix them. And what I tell people is if you don't fix these foundational elements, you could run the best paid media strategy, but you're not going to get the return that you're hoping for. So phase one is assess that reality to that assessment phase two is build the roadmap for how you're going to prioritize and sequence these changes. Now, I've worked at a ton of different organizations and I've been a revenue leader, you know, CEO, CEO, I know better than anybody and I have the most empathy for founders and CEOs.
So, you have to hit your revenue targets today tomorrow, next month, next quarter and next year, like you have to do it all. You know, and there's a lot of talk about having the long term view and, you know, and I agree with that, but you also have a business to run and you have expenses and you have goals. If you're a public, you've shareholders, you need to answer to. So, like, that's okay.
But as the leader, you need to understand that reality, set appropriate goals and you need to phase in a shift that's going to take into account your, you know, three, six, nine, 12, 18 month goals, your organizational constraints that exist in your current organization and sequence it in a way that's going to make sense. We always recommend focusing on fixing those foundational issues first, positioning refresh website update, ICP, you know, redefinition, you know, potentially producing better content that we want to distribute to your audience. Once we get those foundations in place, then we want to focus on executing all of the changes to your digital strategy that we know will drive and improve ROI. And it's not like you're running one strategy today and a different one tomorrow, we typically will phase into that over one or two or three quarters.
And approach it in a way that's going to drive better ROI and efficiency each quarter without being too disruptive to current organizational processes and goals. Typically, we see within three to four quarters, we can fully manage the transformation from lead gen to demand gen really from those website era tactics to the dark social era tactics and see, you know, massive improvement in terms of pipeline created ROI close one revenue. And so that's over like, you know, I could probably talk forever about all of those different things, but at a high level, that's how we think about the change management process. And I think if you're listening and you're not necessarily in that leadership role, but you want the capacity to help enable your team to make its point about understanding the foundational data that informs decision making going forward.
So assisting where you can pull like historical performance, understanding benchmark data, what are the pipeline sources, what's contributing to revenue, like all of those pieces that you can aggregate in your role and responsibility and push those up to help help guide the conversation. I think it's so impactful. And it shows that you are also thinking long term about strategy and critical critically applying like the new evolution of how we're thinking about demand generation versus, you know, traditional tactics. You might not necessarily influence change, but you can influence at least your leader to have the seat at the table with a stronger point of view.
Yeah, absolutely. You talk a little bit. You kind of mentioned this at the top, you know, some of the challenges or a low point in the journey. And I feel like maybe I read through the lines a little bit, but like when refine labs grew, right, we kind of followed the growth of the B to B world VC funding and then kind of that pulled back.
That seems like a pretty low point of the journey, but I'd love to open it back up. Is there any other aspects that like your lowest point that kept you pushing forward like you're doing now where you still believe in what you're doing, no matter the change. And are there any like missteps along the way that you kind of fumbled a little bit or you're still fumbling that you're willing to share with the audience. Yeah.
And so, you know, when I was when I was back at managed by Q with the we work acquisition, that was really, honestly, it was, I grew a ton. It was such an amazing team there, but I learned a lot of hard lessons in that particular chapter. That was, I kind of described the, you know, having a friend seat to the we work situation and that did have an impact on managed by Q post acquisition. But, you know, I've made all those mistakes like I've, I've set goals that are too ambitious because I want, I didn't want to say no to the CEO or the board, right.
I, you know, put pressure on my teams to hit short term targets, you know, sort of, and prioritize that over the long game and doing the right thing. So it's like, I made all these mistakes and like the mistakes that I talk about, it's not that I have it all figured out and I've never made these like I've made all of them multiple times. The big irony for me and I think why the journey at Refine Labs has been so impactful to me personally is I walked into this and believed that I had learned lessons and then I was put in, I put myself in a situation where I had to learn some of them again. And I think there were times where I was able to take from my experience and make some different decisions that allowed us to actually survive that time frame instead of not survive.
So I think that I was able to apply some of that. But it's so interesting when you think about growth at all costs where instead of you forcing that mindset on the market, the market was almost forcing it on us. And so it felt I can't turn away this business. We just have to figure it out instead of turning away business and prioritizing, you know, more foundational elements of service delivery design and, you know, sort of throttling customer acquisition.
And so it's really tough, right? Like I look back and have a lot of empathy for myself and you know, I could go back and make a different decision. I would. But we can't do that.
And so I think that is why after it was really the summer of 2022, I think was the lowest point that probably continued through the end of 2022, like that six month period from July to December was really the low point and 2023 was a year of trying to get back to basics to practice what we preach to get clarity on how the market was evolving and how our services and our pricing model would have to evolve with it. And we were able to navigate that effectively. And in 2024, we were able to really truly stabilize the business and really get clear on where the market needs our help and where we're best equipped to meet the market, you know, where they're at. And so I'm super excited for the future.
And I think because we went through that painful journey, it gives me honestly more confidence about the future. And in my ability to think three steps ahead, make the right decisions plan appropriately, listen to the market, listen to our team. And so it's been a wild ride for sure. But yeah, I would say that's probably the lowest and luckily we've been kind of climbing back up.
I finally feel this year that we are like in the strongest position that we've ever actually been in as a company. So it actually feels really satisfying after a couple of years and grind to be like, we did it. We got out of the hole and we have clarity on the strategy. We have an amazing set of customers that are going through exactly what we've been talking about today that we're helping every day.
We have the best marketers in B2B here that are doing amazing work. And so really excited to kind of take inspiration from the low moment and only go up from here. I really like though that you called out that you thought you had learned this, right? You thought you were doing something different and you thought that you had learned the lesson and still there was a lesson to be learned.
And so that's why this podcast is so circular. It's why the hero's journey is a circle is because there will always be something next and there will always be something that the market throws on you. Even if you think you're prepared for where we are now, something's going to change and you've talked about change a lot and how you've learned and grown. So I want to just take a moment.
We just talked about the lows. Let's talk about you a little bit, what you've learned and what you really appreciate about yourself as a leader and as a marketer and as a person from this journey that you've taken. Yeah, there's this quote and of course I forget who said it. So we can, we can, someone can look it up and figure it out.
But there's this quote that basically says, you should focus on always being in a state of becoming. So I've learned this lesson before where like earlier in my career, my number one career goal was I want to be a COO. I was like, that's, that's the Mount Everest for me when I'm a COO. I'll have made it.
And I was at Managed by Q. I started as the director of account management. I promoted a bunch 18 months later. I was the COO and everyone was like, oh, you did it.
This has been your goal for like 15 years. Congratulations. And I remember feeling like nothing. I felt nothing.
I was like, I was a lot of work, a lot of blood, sweat and tears. And I'm like, I don't really feel good. And it was such a, I honestly, I was confused too. I remember the CEO at the time told me and he was like, are you happy?
Or he's like, what are you doing right now? Like he told me and I just had this blank reaction. And he was confused. He's like, you've been asking me for this and you deserve it.
And I think it really goes back to that quote that I said, you kind of always want to be in this state of becoming actually achieving the goal is so overrated. I think was at the CTO of Loom released that personal blog article that talks about how lost he felt post the like ridiculous Loom acquisition where this guy, like, is, you know, 500 closest friends never have to work again. And he's just sad and lost and depressed and doesn't know what to do. So it's the big thing that I've been thinking about a lot lately and I think especially getting the first year officially as a CEO under my belt is you're never done.
Like, and it's really fun to be kind of sort of claiming the beginning of the dark social era, seeing it through, watching it sort of end, seeing a new era begin. Like the only constant is change. And so it's, it's playing the infinite game. So how can I just enjoy being in the state of becoming without worrying too much about achieving the goal?
Because time and time again, sort of that point continues to be proven whether you've gone through one of those moments yourself or whether you sort of see another person and share how they respond to that. It's just not as satisfying as you think it will be. So I mean, I'm very goal oriented. Obviously, you should have goals and you should be working towards goals.
But I think for me, it's really, how are you enjoying the journey? How are you making the journey as enjoyable as possible? Because that's really all there is to really all there is. At the end of the day.
So real. The article, I'm rich and have no idea what to do with my life. I believe is like the quote of it. And it's definitely anybody listening to check it out.
It is pretty profound. And like, yeah, I resonate. I don't have a billion dollars exit under my belt yet yet. But I say, but I resonated with a lot of what he wrote in there.
And I think that for me, what got me really kind of re rejuvenated reenergized for 2025 was recognizing like, wow, we're, we're back at the beginning of another set of major changes in the B2B SaaS ecosystem. I have even more knowledge than I did five years ago in 2020. And like, let's go. Let's get on the next roller coaster.
Right? Like, here we go. The kind of plays out to, I was like, we always like to close these with like one final question and really the whole conversation has been around kind of where the market is going. So the perspective might be somewhat, but I still like to ask it, you know, as we think about the shifts that are coming to marketing specifically, whatever role you want to kind of put your lens on.
But what do you expect is coming next for listeners and how do you think the listeners should prepare for it or what are some of the things that they should be thinking about? I've been thinking about this a lot and I'll kind of come back to the whole concept of the AI era. I think really recognizing what humans bring to the equation is the most important thing for the future of work. And everyone should be thinking about what unique creative impactful qualities that they bring to the table, whether you're marketer, whether you're a seller, whether you're an operator, doesn't really matter.
AI is going to absolutely take over a bunch of parts of a bunch of jobs over the next five to 10 years, but it will never be able to be human. And so leaning into your humanity, people, customers, trust, authenticity, emotion, that will become the differentiator, in my opinion, as we move through this. And so I think it's exciting, like embrace the fact that there will be things you do today that you won't need to do anymore, because there will be other avenues to accomplish those jobs that need to be done, and that you can really zero in and focus on what your superpowers are. And so I think everyone might have technical superpowers that maybe arguably an AI can do, but what is the strategic or the creative and innovative mindset that you're bringing to that?
And for me, you know, it's interesting because I truly believe that even though I'm the CEO of Refine Labs, I am not going to be the sole author of the AI era B2B Marketing Playbook. And so I think the goal is how do I create the conditions for really awesome B2B marketers to rewrite that playbook as a team and actually write it from a place of real life, execution, experimentation, implementation, and validating our hypotheses drive results. That is going to be the future. And I'm excited for it.
And that's going to be a powerful thing. I really think is more and more comes in. Appreciate your sharing that. Thank you.
Yeah. We're going to start to count the number of these podcast episodes that I just got a little teary on, especially in this section, like the figuring out what you appreciate about it yourself and like finding the hope in the future. That was really beautiful, Megan. Thank you for sharing your journey with us.
Thank you for your time, your insight. And we hope that everyone listening starts to assess your reality and how strong change management guidance can help unstick you from your marketing past. Get ready for what's happening now and what's to come. And we hope you all start to lean into your humanity and start enjoying your journey.
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Thanks, all.