Paris Talks Marketing

Megan: There's a very targeted connection strategy to make sure that the content that you're publishing organically is actually seen by your audience. When you leverage paid, you are guaranteeing distribution to your audience. And so that's the key reason to do both. If you have a huge organic following and your whole audience follows you, lean into that. But that's the reason why, in my opinion, you have that time horizon. And what I've seen is people that actually do have a significant following or connections that are part of their audience, they can actually see results from organic content posting much faster because that's really the key that people don't always make the connection of. The content can be awesome, but your buyer has to see the content and you need to be very intentional about how you're growing that from an organic perspective, while you're paying for the privilege to guarantee that distribution.

Intro: Every SaaS company plays for high stakes, but what does it take to dominate the market right now? Welcome to Paris Talks Marketing, the podcast where we dive deep into the latest trends and strategies in SaaS marketing that are really working today. I'm your host, Paris. and Our guests are SaaS CMOs, founders and specialists, and we discuss one trendy topic in the industry per episode.

Ready to unlock the true power of marketing strategy? In this theme, we'll explore the world of cutting edge marketing strategies and tactics that are shaking up the SaaS industry. We'll share insights on testing new tactics and uncover the latest developments from digital landscape giants like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

We'll also explore how AI is revolutionizing the digital landscape and transforming marketing tactics. So grab your headphones and get ready for a marketing strategy masterclass with Paris Talks Marketing.
    
Paris: Hi, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Paris Talks Marketing. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Megan Bowen. Megan is the CEO of Refine Labs. Many of you have heard of them. They're a leading B2B demand gen agency that helps B2B companies transform their marketing strategies to generate revenue. It's really great to have you, Megan.

Megan: Thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to the conversation today.

Paris: Yeah. So tell us about yourself. I'd love to hear how you met Chris Walker and you all started Refine Labs together a few years ago. You became the COO and are now the CEO. Can you just walk us through that whole journey?

 Megan: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, kind of start actually and give you kind of the quick overview from the beginning of my career. I like to say that I grew up in the New York city startup scene. And so right out of college, I joined a small ed-tech startup. And actually my first sort of role was an account manager. And I was at that job for actually almost seven years and really developed I think a true mastery of the sort of account management customer success discipline, and I think that was really formative to have in my early career because it really anchored me to the customer and how important the customer is and everything That you do right and that's true actually in marketing and sales and customer success. From there I hopped over to a new hot startup at the time called Zocdoc, a website where you could book a doctor's appointment online.

I joined them in 2012. I was like, oh my God, this is the best idea ever. Everyone's going to do this in the future. That was another really awesome experience. I joined actually their customer support team, but then went on to actually build out their entire post-sale function. From there I went to Grubhub Seamless.

It's actually post-merger pre-IPO, and I built out the entire B2B account management function at Grubhub Seamless and was there for the IPO, as well as post acquisition in their B2B division. And so had a lot of experience with M&A and consolidation of M&A. That was a great ride to just be part of, you know, joining right after the merger, the IPO, and really building out a function at a super successful company that went public.

From there, I really love building things. I think that's what I was really coming to realize. So I was at Grubhub for over four years and the company was getting pretty big. So I was like, all right, I got to go back to building again. So I found this company called Managed By Q. They were providing office management software and services to companies.

Again, I was recruited to build out their account management function, which I did, but my career trajectory really transformed in that chapter. I went from the director of account management and ended up as the COO of Managed By Q. And at the end of my tenure there, while me and the CEO were out fundraising, we actually were able to exit to WeWork via acquisition.

That's another fun story over some drinks we can have about WeWork and all of that craziness. After that, I went back into the food tech space, and had a very short stint at this company called Platters as the head of customer success. Same space as Grubhub. Saw an opportunity there.

I know this space. We can come in and get an exit. Then the pandemic happened and obviously food delivery to the office was not the best business to be in at that time.

 Paris: Everywhere else but the office, yeah.

 Megan: Yes, exactly. So I decided to move on from there. And what's funny is in 2019, when I was actually still COO at Managed By Q, that's when me and Chris Walker became acquainted with each other. We were both posting content on LinkedIn, and we're sort of seeing each other in the LinkedIn ecosystem. And he had reached out and said, hey, let's make some content together. And so him and I recorded some initial content.

And in fact, actually it was like right before the pandemic, February, 2020, he came down to New York and we recorded an in person interview together, which was really fun talking about marketing and customer success. And so we just sort of developed a very authentic relationship over time. And in the summer of 2020, he reached out to me and said, hey, I, you know, started this company Refine Labs.

I was initially thinking I was just going to do my own solo consulting, but seems to be taking off. I need a business partner to help me get this agency up and running. And so we had many conversations, but ultimately we decided to team up. And so ever since the summer of 2020, him and I have been building the Refine Labs agency ever since.

 And then most recently, we made the public announcement that, Chris was gonna be starting a new company, moving into the chairman role at Refine Labs and move me into the CEO position. We worked really side by side to co-lead the company, you know, from the beginning and I would say about a year ago, Chris had some initial ideas that really reflect what his new company Passetto is all about, which was really around how to think about building a new way to look at go to market metrics in, you know, a marketing analytics software product. And so he really spent 2023 continuing to do market research, running some special projects and really validating that there was a market need for this. And so, him and I had planned this for almost a year. And so we knew that it probably would make sense for a software company to be a different company, right? And for there to be clear focus for the agency and his new idea.

And so over the course of 2023, I effectively was, you know, doing a lot of the CEO-like responsibilities as he was exploring this other path and also validating that it would be a smooth takeover and be the right move for the company. And then in January, we made the big announcement and soon after that, he announced his new venture, Passetto, which I know he's working on with two other co-founders right now. So yeah, that's sort of a quick overview of my career and how I met Chris and got involved in Refine Labs. Happy to go into any more detail, but I'll stop talking for a minute.

 Paris: Great story. And I think, well, I'm curious and I know our audience is curious to know, to what degree is Chris still involved? Does he meddle or does he give you enough freedom now as a CEO to take the agency forward?

 Megan: You know, Chris, I would say from day one has always really been the primary, you know, evangelist for changing the way B2B companies measure and execute marketing. So everybody sees him every day, right? Posting on LinkedIn, publishing podcasts, hosting events, you know, really leading the discourse and the thoughts around where modern marketing is going.

And obviously that is a huge benefit to Refine Labs because we are benefiting from the brand awareness, the thought leadership, the evangelism that he is doing in the space, and that has not changed. That is still continuing and is a primary fuel for inbound demand for our business, which is fantastic.

And the fact that Chris and I worked so closely together for over almost four years, side by side running the company, we know each other very well. We know how each other works. We know our strengths. So there's a very strong foundation and a lot of trust there.

And so, you know, Chris gives me a lot of autonomy to execute against the strategy that I believe is best for the company, while also being a, you know, trusted advisor to provide feedback or be a sounding board, or weigh in on any critical or important decisions. So, so far so good, but we're one quarter in, so we'll see what happens.

 Terry: Would you say anything has changed for you since you took on the role and generally the strategy for Refine Labs?

Megan:  Yeah, so I would say like the 18 months leading up to I'll tackle the Refine Labs question first and then me personally. So I would say the 18 months leading up to the announcement we made in January we were experimenting with a lot of different services that Refine Labs could offer, actually some different market positioning, moving away from calling ourselves an agency and testing out different positioning relative to being a revenue R&D firm, being a research firm that also does strategy and execution.

And I think that was really driven by a lot of the kind of visions that Chris really has for the ecosystem and sort of the market overall, and a lot of the opportunities that he sees. What's interesting, though, is I think we had a period of time where there was some market confusion. What is Refine Labs?

I do most of the sales calls for Refine Labs over the entire time I've been here. 2023 was an interesting year. Get on the phone. I love you guys. I love Refine Labs. What do you guys do?

Paris:  I have to admit that I've asked that question too. Is it an agency or is it something...?

Megan:  Is it something else? Yeah. So I would say, I think the most impactful strategic adjustment, I don't think it's a big change, but the adjustment that I really tried to focus on coming into the role and really leading up to this, knowing that this was happening was really creating crystal clear clarity in the market of our positioning, who we are, who our best customers are, what we offer, how much we cost, all of that good stuff. And I personally am seeing the success of that in my day to day conversations. People come in and know we're an agency and, have a pretty clear understanding of our services. And, it has reflected as well in improved business performance coming into this year.

We're actually exceeding our Q1 revenue projections, and have an outlook that we might be able to meaningfully exceed our sort of total 2024 revenue projections as well. If we continue to see the momentum that we're feeling now.

 Paris: Yeah, that's great. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but from my perspective, when I look at the narrative here, most marketing agencies are really for B2B. They're really selling lead generation, let's say, and you all focus much more on sales pipeline. And would it be fair to say that that's one key differentiator between you all and a typical agency. An agency often says we're going to help you get more leads in terms of number of leads whereas your key value proposition is we're going to help you to grow your qualified sales pipeline and that you're closer to revenue than an agency.

Megan:  I've been thinking a lot about how to be more explicit with what our differentiation is. And so this is actually is very top of mind, so I'll share some thoughts on this. I would actually anchor it. What you said is true, but I would anchor it in two specific things, how we think about our team, right?

If you're an agency, what you're really buying is the expertise of people. Right? Because you're not buying a software product. And so we invest so much in the team here that work directly with our customers. They're all from B2B SaaS companies, not from other agencies. In almost every single case, this is the first agency that our team has ever worked for.

And they have 6 to 10 years experience being in house. I found that that is critical for really understanding how to help our customers navigate all of the challenges that exist when trying to get a proper modern demand gen engine up and running. So the caliber of our team and our talent, as well as the ratio of customers to each team, we try to have each team only work with three or four companies.

Most agencies will have, you know, 8 to 10 to 12 accounts per person or per team, which also allows them to charge a lot less than what we charge. So, we are a premium option relative to other agencies out there, but because this ratio is so low, lower than what I would say industry standard is, it allows our team to really dive deep into each company that they're working with.

And in practice actually become an extension of our customers team, to really make sure the strategy is effective. So I think the team, the caliber of the talent and how we've structured sort of our delivery design to accommodate just those few customers, I think is really differentiates us from a lot of other agencies.

The second thing is we are in our customer's CRM. So we're not about trying to claim vanity metrics or these big wins for our customer. If we wanted to get a thousand MQLs for our customer, we could do that and we could easily say, great, we did that. But maybe none of those leads actually become real customers at the end of the day.

So in my view, we've failed if that's the case. The only way you're going to know if the programs that you are running are actually resulting in pipeline and revenue is if you are integrated into those systems and you set up the appropriate measurement so that you can validate that the programs are effective or not effective.

Now, marketing measurement is tough and our measurement model isn't perfect, but we deploy a variety of things to paint the best possible picture we can and collect as much data as we can to help validate what programs are working and not working. And many agencies will not even have access to the CRM or even bring that conversation up in terms of the engagement.

 Paris: Yeah. All right. Let's unpack that a little bit. So first is the fact that you all have a team that basically they're not agency people. These are industry people from B2B SaaS. And I want to ask a quick follow up on that. Do you generally have a pod structure at Refine Labs?

 Megan: So yeah, every customer works with a team of four or five people on our side. So with our kind of core offering, they're going to work with a director of demand gen, a performance marketing manager, a creative director, a designer, and a copywriter. This set of roles really allows us to take full ownership over the execution of the paid demand gen programs. So the director of demand gen, they're the primary point of contact.

They're the strategist. They're the program manager, you know, collaborating with the customer, with our team. They're setting the strategy and they're in charge of Instrumenting the reporting and making sure that we're appropriately measuring success and deriving insights as we go. The performance marketer is the one running the media, obviously.

And then the creative team is focused on developing really strong creative campaign concepts for all of our demand creation campaigns and paid social, and then actually building and producing all the creative content itself. And so what I tell people is if you work with us, you're effectively hiring a fractional demand team to get your full engine up and running.

And so those groups of five people, and we have another option, so sometimes it's four. But we find that it's really powerful. We used to not have creative services and we would have to rely on our customer to give us the creative that we were going to deploy.

 Terry: That's a big bottleneck we know personally. Yeah.

Megan:  It impacted our ability to be successful.

Number one, they have resource constraints and don't give it to you. You know, or number two, the quality isn't there. And the quality of the creative is crucial for these types of campaigns to be successful. That was in 2021. We started building out this creative function. And it's been game changing because we have the ability to own a significant portion of their marketing strategy from beginning to end.

And then that gives us confidence to take accountability for the results that we can drive.

 Paris: Yeah. A big content push that we're making with our clients now is to try to get them to launch podcasts. Is this one of the popular formats that you help your clients with is to get the thought leaders in front of the camera and pretty much do what Chris has done for the last few years?

 Megan: Yeah, so absolutely. Part of our, you know, advising and consulting is training and advising on how they can, you know, post organically on LinkedIn as the founder, the CEO, or whatever senior level executive or evangelist the company has, and we absolutely recommend either a podcast or a live event series for content production.

We know though, that those things take time. They also require true commitment on the client side. So the reason that we take ownership of the paid programs specifically is because as well as the content creation for those paid programs is it allows us to help them stand that up. And drive short and medium term results while we're trying to move them down the path to do what we know works for more medium and longer term results.

But they have to be bought into that or they're either not going to do it or they're not going to do it well. And, it's hard to convince someone that isn't already on board with that approach, that they should spend the time and the effort to do that. But yes, we advise, every client to take a version of that strategy based on the, you know, their company context.

Paris:  I think we do a lot of the same thing and I think it does work best both for agency and client where you have a short-term strategy that's mostly driven by paid and starting with paid search so that you can get out of the gate quickly. You can notch some wins. You can see ROI pretty concretely, in the first, say three to six months. And then you establish trust. You also, generate some profitability that you can reinvest later into the longer term strategies and where we see a lot of our projects fail that are doing either one or the other is that if they say we're going to go all in on performance and paid search is working great and that's all we're going to do because it's clear ROI, you get into the trap that if you do that for a year and you haven't developed any kind of organic strategies, you become much too over dependent on your growth just from those paid channels. And on the flip side, if you're starting only with organic, especially if this company is funded, people are not going to wait around for a year to see your SEO traffic start to take up and they're going to give up. I mean, at month six, they're going to just say, this is taking too long. So it's, in my experience, you're exactly right. A short-term strategy that's mostly relying on paid to deliver them the more immediate results all the while, where you're ideally reinvesting that and working on a longer term organic strategy. So that couple of years from now, you've got this great mix of paid and organic where actually your organic growth is even allowing you to have a competitive advantage in paid, because if your total CAC goes down as a result of your organic contributions, then you can actually be more aggressive in the paid auctions and outbid your competitors, just because you can afford a higher paid CAC due to the contribution coming from organic, but that takes like a two or three year vision for a client to really see that's where we want to be in a couple of years and we wouldn't have to make these sacrifices over the next, say six to twelve months.

Megan:  Yeah, both matter. The ideal strategy is that you're doing both. What I think the key point that I communicate with our clients is even if you nail the content and the thought leadership that you're developing and putting out there, the reason that organic can take longer than paid is the distribution and making sure that whatever channel you're leveraging, for example, LinkedIn, your customers have to be following your account or connected to you to see your content, right?

So, it's not just the content strategy. There's a very targeted connection strategy to make sure that the content that you're publishing organically is actually seen by your audience. When you leverage paid, you are guaranteeing distribution to your audience. And so that's the key reason to do both. If you have a huge organic following and your whole audience follows you, lean into that. But that's the reason why, in my opinion, you have that time horizon. And what I've seen is people that actually do have a significant following or connections that are part of their audience, they can actually see results from organic content posting much faster because that's really the key that people don't always make the connection of. The content can be awesome, but your buyer has to see the content and you need to be very intentional about how you're growing that from an organic perspective, while you're paying for the privilege to guarantee that distribution.

Terry: Even if you have the following, I would say it still takes time to develop an attribution model, which would prove that you're actually getting results from your organic. So that's a whole other topic of how to build that and be sure it works. Even if you have the audience and you're publishing a lot.

Megan:  Yeah, you just add, how did you hear about us to your form and you can actually start to get those inputs immediately. Our clients are always pleasantly surprised by this. We'll, you know, we make them all add, how did you hear about us to the form, we make it required. Let's say we say, okay, we're going to launch a new campaign on Reddit and they've never advertised on Reddit before.

And then three weeks after the campaign launches someone says they heard about them on Reddit in the response. Like, you actually can get pretty immediate signal validation. Now, one, two, three, or four data points, you know, they're leading indicators. They're positive signals. You need more time to collect more data to truly validate that program.

But that's some pretty immediate feedback that at least tells you that it's to some degree, right? So people are often surprised how quickly those types of responses can come up once you add that field to your form.

 Paris: Yeah. Yeah. Such a simple thing. And you just gave me a great thought there because as you go down the long tail of media, usually Google, Meta and LinkedIn, they've got to be there for B2B. Of course, LinkedIn probably comes before Meta, but then when you get down into the longer tail of Reddit and Pinterest and maybe Snapchat, maybe TikTok, you're getting into the people who affiliate more strongly with those communities.

So if I'm a diehard Reddit guy and I see something that moves me to go and do a Google search, because I'm inspired by seeing your ad in Reddit. Well, my software attribution tool is going to say that I came from Google, but I'm going to, on that form field, I'm going to say Reddit because I'm a Reddit guy.

So I think the more niche, the social media, the more likely that the person, especially if it's a first touch, is going to self-report accurately in the form, but you've got to give them the question in the form and that leads me to this concept of hybrid attribution, which I think that we talked about in the pre-show. It's a blend of self-reported attribution, which is the how did you hear about us, and software based attribution. And that is of course, probably more art than science. Cause I think there is no such thing as perfect attribution anywhere. But can you talk to us a little bit more about how you help your clients to find the right balance between the software attribution metrics and the self-reported attribution?

 Megan: Yeah, absolutely. I feel like that's a common misconception of Refine Labs in general. People think that we only look at self-reported attribution and, you know, that's all we care about. But the reality is both are super important and you get really important insights from both software and self-reported.

What we try to communicate as well is only relying on software attribution can be dangerous. So let's break that down a little bit because when you talk about software attribution, there's really only a handful of categories that will come up within HubSpot or whatever your marketing automation platform is.

You're going to see direct traffic, you're going to see organic search, you're going to see paid search, and then potentially you'll see a cohort of pipeline sources that can be mapped back to specific UTMs that you have published, right? To kind of capture a very specific campaign source.

So it's typically what software attribution is going to track. That's it. What that means is you have to really think critically, what do you think happens when a lead is attributed to direct traffic or organic search? So direct traffic, they typed in your website, they went to your website, but knowing that they went to your website directly tells you nothing.

Like that's not actually helpful. How did they know to go to your website? That's what you want to find out. Same thing for organic search. They just didn't know your URL. So they pass through Google to get to your website. Basically it's the same motion. You ask the same question. Okay. How did you know to Google that company name to then click on their website in the search results?

And so that in particular is the most interesting comparison of results from software attribution and results from self-reported attribution. What I like to see is on the same lead, where HubSpot will say direct traffic or organic search, the customer will say LinkedIn, podcast, my friend, Reddit, whatever it happens to be, right?

Because they became aware of you either on social media or word of mouth, or maybe in like a Slack group or peer community, in different conversations. That's pretty much how people find out about Companies, products and services these days. And so direct traffic and organic search as an attribution source in and of themselves isn't actually helpful in making any decisions.

And that's where, when you overlay self-reported attribution, you get so many more rich insights into what is driving direct traffic, what is driving organic search, and then that validates that you should continue to invest in those programs because they're working.

 Paris: That is demand gen. Actually, that's what is generating the demand. And I think with LinkedIn, at least what we're seeing is on the organic side a lot of people are consuming that by scrolling through their feed, stopping and unmuting stuff that's interesting, watching a video and maybe getting some inspiration from it, sometimes engaging, liking, commenting, or sometimes not.

And then moving on, that's not going to get captured in that. That's not coming through any advertising that activity will never be captured in any software attribution platform. But if something that came out of a LinkedIn video, as I'm scrolling through my feed has inspired me to go and do a branded search for that company. Or even a non-branded search, then, there's the connection and then the software attribution is going to say Google organic or Google paid. I have another very interesting case to bounce off of you. We had a client that we ran an experiment, to test whether or not we should be bidding on their brand name in Google ads. So we turned it off for a period of time. And what happened was we got overall the same amount of conversion. So we didn't suffer a loss in conversions, but we saw many more conversions coming from direct as a source. And our theory was that most people who are Googling their name, and had been clicking on the branded ad that we had, they're now coming through organically, but that because they were using the Google app on their phone, it was showing up as direct, so it was just completely wrong because a lot of app traffic is labeled as direct incorrectly in Google Analytics, and I presume that, the software attribution tools also make the same mistake, so that could also lead you really astray in, I mean, a big decision a lot of companies make is how aggressively should we bid on our own brand name? Should we be paying for our brand terms? When we should be getting all of those clicks for free organically. And that's, you know, that's a whole nother conversation, but that was our theory that this is actually app-based traffic from the Google app, from iPhones, because Apple doesn't send through the right attribution signals.

 Megan: Yeah, I wasn't aware of the difference, you know, the mobile desktop dynamic there, what I'll speak though, and share something that has been an interesting insight when we think about, do you invest heavily in branded keyword search or not? And what I found is that I think that the most interesting factor that comes into play on whether a company should or should not invest a significant amount in branded campaigns is the level of the competitive landscape.

So I have one customer in particular, that's in a very competitive market with a lot of other competitors selling the same services. And those competitors actually bid on their branded terms to try to capture or take away demand. Right? So, in that instance, if you're not investing in branded campaigns, you are risking the competition effectively siphoning off that demand if they're bidding on those keywords for you. So what I found is, and maybe it's a little bit more of a defensive tactic than a, you know, sort of offensive proactive tactic, but there are use cases where it is important to have those branded campaigns to defend your position, to capture that demand, to not lose business to competition.

In other use cases where that level of competition just isn't a factor in that particular space or that company. A lot of times, you know, maybe it makes sense to do no branded campaigns. So I think it can really, it really depends. It's been interesting to see how the competition factor can be something that is really important to consider when you're evaluating that particular decision.

 (Midtro)

Terry:  And I think in all situations it's worth testing it and seeing whether it has an impact or not so.

Megan:  Absolutely. Yeah. Paid search is the easiest thing to measure out of everything. So it's very clear when it's working or not working. But it remains actually, you know, the common trend with all of our clients is most of them are spending too much on Google when we start working with them.

And we actually are able to reduce the spend, but deliver the same or better results to really improve efficiency and ROI on that channel. And because of how clear it is to measure that's pretty much an opportunity for everyone. Anyone spending on Google, I would say, make sure you're auditing that and that you're not overspending.

Clearly Google makes it very easy to spend money on their platform given the success of their company.

 Paris: When Google ads is working, it's so hard to not keep going. I mean, it's difficult to identify where's the wasted spend and the decision-makers are usually looking at this and saying, how much did we put in? And because it is so measurable, this is the ROI that we got back and it is profitable or it's ROI positive.

CAC is at the right place. So let's do more of it instead of trying to optimize, just the optimization mindset doesn't come into play until you hit that ceiling in Google ads where there is no more incremental growth opportunity. And you say, all right, now have we squeezed every drop out of this channel? And if so, maybe we need to move to other channels or maybe we need to see where we can optimize. And that's an optimization opportunity. What are we doing on with branded spend? And another reason why I think in some cases, it's a good idea to bid on your brand, certainly to protect it from competition, who's stealing your navigational traffic. It's also, Google will always send branded traffic organically to your homepage. But if I type in Refine Labs, the vault, you probably want to take me to your vault page, the project we spoke about and the Google organic would send that to your homepage and then they'll have to navigate from there to find the vault. Whereas you can send them to a deep page in your website from branded terms that are a little bit longer tail that include other terms in addition to your brand.

 Megan: Yeah, and to speak to the first point you mentioned, I think the reason why companies struggle to understand what the right investment is in Google is they're only looking at in-platform conversion metrics and they're not looking at all of the inbounds that came in and converted via search and then what happened after.

How many of them actually converted to pipeline and revenue? You can actually if your setup is appropriate you can look at campaign-level specifics on which campaigns were most impactful and whether it's branded or non-branded or specific keywords so that's also the missing link is they're only looking at the end platform conversion data and not taking a look at how that compares to their actual business results.

So that's another primary thing that we do because something can look great in platform, but not translate to business results, you know, or the opposite can also be true as well. So that's why looking at both is critical and getting the right measurement infrastructure in place to tell that story is so important.

Paris: Absolutely.

 Terry: One challenge we've encountered is a long sales cycles. So how do you tackle that on your side for reporting purposes? Because I think it's tempting to go for search because the results are quick in platform, but then it may takes months to see a CRM data that can prove the effectiveness of campaigns.

So I think that's a question a lot of companies struggle with.

 Megan: For long sales cycle, I think there's a couple of things that we do to ensure that we're looking at leading indicators before we're able to validate close one revenue data. So typically for long sales cycles, the ACV is pretty high, and typically there will be very often a list of here's our top 300 targets that we want to acquire.

So if you're executing against an ABM strategy, you're able to watch a certain cohort of customers move through the sales pipeline to help evaluate how your marketing efforts might be influencing that. Additionally, we'll anchor on qualified web conversions. So getting to that first step, getting them to come to your site and fill out your form, and then we'll also identify, most companies will have pipeline stages, right? Maybe stage 1 is meeting booked. Stage 2 is qualified. Stage 3 is some level of commitment where we believe, you know, a good percentage of stage 3 opportunities will convert to closed one. So, we'll probably then want to anchor on, okay, let's measure stage 3 pipeline and see how that's growing over time if you have that 12 or 18 month sales cycle. So I would say like target account engagement, increase web conversions, and then sort of pipeline stage monitoring is what we'll look at, knowing that it's going to take some time before we're going to have any close one revenue attributed.

 Paris: And, Megan, all of this relies on accurate data inputted by the sales team in the CRM. If the salesperson is not putting in an accurate ACV, is not updating the probability of winning that deal every time there's new information, moving it into the right stage, then everything really falls apart.

So when you get into these CRMs and you're working with companies with a hundred million ARR and up. So I'm guessing Salesforce, number one, HubSpot, number two. You're requesting access to the CRM, which is an amazing accomplishment in and of itself. And that's something, if we're lucky, we get that half of the time, but when you get into the CRMs and what are you seeing in practice?

What are the most common mistakes that you're actually seeing in the CRM that's preventing this measurement infrastructure from really working?

 Megan: Yeah, so I'll start this by saying no company has a perfect CRM or marketing automation platform, right? It's hard, so no one is perfect at this. It's very challenging. The common mistakes that I see include the following, there's not an appropriate integration or pass through of data from the marketing automation platform to the CRM to bring things over like, you know, pipeline source or attribution sources to help report on that effectively in the CRM relative to pipeline and revenue. The other thing is how companies think about what we call pipeline sources. So, most companies will build the infrastructure to say, okay.

This is a marketing sourced opportunity. This is a sales sourced opportunity because in their minds, they want to know, okay, I'm investing X dollars in the sales team, Y dollars in the marketing team. I want to know relative to the department level investments, what the return I'm getting in terms of pipeline and revenue. I don't believe that's the way that companies should be thinking about ROI on investments. What we try to help companies shift away from is moving away from that model. And instead of thinking it of marketing versus sales, let's look at it by how the buyer converted. So when we talk about pipeline source, we want to know, is it paid search?

If it's paid search, what campaign? If it's, you know, direct traffic or organic, but then self-reported attribution states, a paid social demand gen program that we're running that's listed, whether that's events or a partner channel. And so making that shift is actually taking a look at your pipeline data in a completely different way, but that has you thinking about how to allocate investment based on programs that drive pipeline and revenue versus departments, because the department proxy just begins to break down and isn't actually mapped back to how customers learn about you and make purchasing decisions. The last thing that I'll say, and we work with our clients is a lot of people aren't thinking about implementing rigor around their pipeline progression process in Salesforce.

So we recommend something called date and time stamping. So that at every key juncture in the pipeline process, we are date and time stamping when those changes occur to the point that you mentioned relative to the overreliance on sales people to manually enter information, how can we create workflows and automation to automate as much of that as possible?

Not all of it can be automated, obviously but so for example, in an ideal scenario, let's say an inbound comes in, HubSpot says direct traffic, self-reported attribution says podcast, that lead comes into HubSpot and then is pushed over into Salesforce, the software and self-reported attribution come with it, they book a meeting, an opportunity is auto-generated, the date and time of that meeting is booked, when that meeting is complete and the sales rep realizes it's a qualified opportunity, they move it to the next stage.

We get another date and timestamp that it's qualified as it moves then into stage three or stage four. Again, we're seeing that when you're able to map back and collect all of that data on the pipeline progression, you're actually able to identify where you have strong conversion and where you do not.

And it will actually help diagnose root cause issues that are impacting your ability to close inbounds into revenue so that you can know about it, address it, and fix it, and then monitor if you're getting that fix. I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole. I'll stop talking for a second.

 Paris: No, I mean, so you all are equally sales consultants as much as you are marketing consultants here.

Megan:  It matters. We need the sales team to close the deals, right?

Paris:  Right.

And, one of the, one of the things we're constantly pushing clients to do is to try to transition to what's called value-based bidding in Google ads. Are you familiar with that? The concept of value-based bidding?

Megan: I'm not actually. Probably should be but I'm not.

Paris: Basically taking, if you have a mature CRM and you've got a really well disciplined process where the values that are mostly probability weighted ACVs at every stage are accurate and you believe in those numbers, you can integrate HubSpot has a native integration, Salesforce, it's a little bit harder, but you can integrate directly with Google ads such that you send the values in every stage back to Google, and then you move from a target CPA bidding to a value-based bidding where you tell Google stop bidding for leads and start bidding for revenue maximization. And you can even say, I want a 300% ROAS, or I want you to do this so called maximize conversion value, which is just really trying to train Google's machine learning bidding to achieve a high score kind of in the revenue that it's being fed. And this only works at big, big scale, but, man, when it works, like you'll just never go back to anything else because you stopped talking about leads altogether. That's real ROI because you're giving Google the revenue data from your CRM. Even if you have a long sales cycle, you're pulling in revenue from every stage.

So it's not just the close one deals, but it's demo booked and it's opportunity and it's contract sent. And every time probability goes a 20%, 50%, 80%. And the ACV probability weighted keeps ticking up and up and all that data goes back to Google and Google is saying, all right, my goal in bidding is to just maximize the total aggregate number of total pipeline value. You don't even bid on keywords anymore. And it's the post keyword era of Google ads because you could just give Google a few broad match keywords and you're essentially telling Google bid on whatever keywords you want. We don't care. Your goal is just to maximize our sales pipeline.

So you choose the keywords actually, because we don't even really even know, we can't even guess most of the keywords anyway.

And you do this with this broad match keyword strategy and you aggregate everything into a single campaign so that you pull all of the data to maximize the power of the machine learning basically in AI. And then, you really have Google in perfect lockstep with the sales. And then you can actually sell that Google ads kind of approach to a sales director instead of a marketing director, because it kind of bypasses the whole cost per lead bidding approach.

 Megan: Yeah. It makes sense.

Paris: Yeah, I know we were a little bit short on time now and, we haven't gotten to the topic, which is on all these podcasts now, which is AI and I'm really curious. About how you see, or I'd really love to know how is AI impacting the work, the productivity and any innovation happening inside of Refine Labs and at a broader level with a lot of the clients that you're working with. How do you see AI either disrupting and or moving things forward for your clients?

 Megan: Yeah, it's a great question. So, I would say we don't have any, like, specific AI-supported, like, execution motion embedded in our agency delivery services right now. Everything is still very human powered to a degree. You know, sure, do we use ChatGPT to, you know, maybe get some feedback on copy or this and that sometimes?

Yes, that's happening. You know, at the discretion of individuals. I'm still really thinking through and exploring what I believe my perspective is. It's really easy to say. And I think, Sam Altman put out a quote like, you know, in five years, AGI will replace 95% of what marketing agenices are doing.

Paris:  Yeah. Thanks a lot for that.

Terry: Agency owners sell that one.

Paris: That one had like ripple effects. Everybody in marketing found out about that one.

Megan: Yeah, and maybe it's true, I don't know, right? It remains to be seen exactly what's going to happen. I think a lot of those claims probably overstate the impact, but it definitely is going to change things. But I honestly, I'm still really forming my own opinion. What I will say is we, actually over the next few weeks, we're going to be announcing some really exciting changes to our content product, the vault. The vault essentially is a intellectual property warehouse of all of our philosophy strategies, frameworks, resources, all packaged up that people can access if they don't want to hire us, they can get a subscription to the vault and basically have all the information that they need to implement our strategy on their own.

And so...

Paris: Are you saying that you're going to cannibalize your own services?

Megan: No, I don't think so, because the way I, you know, our mission is to change the way every single B2B company measures and executes marketing. But our consulting services aren't the right fit for every single B2B company out there. We have a pretty, you know, clear niche within the B2B space that we serve best.

But every company can benefit from access to the knowledge and applying that knowledge in a way that makes sense to their context. So, I don't look at it as competitive. I look at it as a way to broaden access to people, based on their company stage. We will be rolling out, an AI-powered chat as part of that content product.

One of the core pieces of feedback we've gotten from our customers is there's so much information in here. I don't even know where to start. And so, the intention now is to release an interactive, you know, ChatGPT bot, essentially. Where vault users can go in and ask a very specific question of what they're trying to solve and the AI tool will search through and aggregate all of the relevant content assets, you know, to their question as a starting point.

So it really gives them a much more intuitive, user-friendly experience to get to the information that's really top of mind for them. So I think that's a great use case of the tool, right? And we're going to be, we're in final development in QA on that. And we'll be releasing that in April. And so we're really excited about that.

It should really improve the customer experience of using the product.

Terry:  Funny you're mentioning this because we have something similar we've been testing as well. It's called HubBot and it's essentially doing a similar thing. We've fed it with information from different conversations we've had, knowledge-based articles that we've written and kind of along the same lines of we want to help people find information more easily.

We've been testing it. It's even on the website and it's interesting to see what type of questions people ask, because it also provides ideas for new content that we can be building. So definitely having an AI consultant to guide you through all the available content is something that would definitely be hot in the future.

 Paris: Yeah.

I think it actually really is a look forward to how a lot of people will want to interact with B2B websites in the future, which is don't make me navigate around and trying to find what I'm looking for. I don't even know what I'm looking for. Let me just start chatting right away. So, hey, you guys work with anybody in the hospital, or I don't know, senior care industry, because that's my industry. You have any clients in that industry. And instead of making me hunt for your case study, that's three levels deep in your website, the vault bot or whatever it's going to be called, it just says, oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, here's a recommended case study and we'd be happy to schedule a discovery call if you're interested to speak to somebody more about this or whatever. I might be thinking too narrowly about this because it can be an amazing lead gen channel when you allow website visitors to engage in a totally different way, immediately with a dialogue and with a conversation, as opposed to a one way monologue, which is how all B2B websites are today. Come to the website and it's my job to find what I'm looking for. I try to put everything there. I try to organize it well, but this is essentially the Yahoo's way of organizing the web in 1995 into categories and subcategories and sub subcategories and everything is here, but you're going to have to drill down and find it as opposed to the Google search bar and the B2B website of the future.

The good ones are going to just be a Google search bar with the chat that's trained with all that company's knowledge. So I can right away just say, do you work with companies like me? What kind of results have you gotten? I'm facing this problem, what would you do about it? And then I'm already actually having a sales conversation right there. And if it's appropriate, you say, hey, here's the Calendly link if you want to talk to Megan, she can tell you a lot more than I can. And then bingo, you've got a really warm lead. Not even a form fill type of a lead because you've given so much already.

Megan: Yeah. That's a great use case. I like it.

Paris: Yeah. I think that this is not this year and it's not next year, but as users and people are going to get more used to chatting with ChatGPT as an alternative to Google searching, they're going to start to gravitate towards that experience when they go to websites too, and the chat bot of yesterday, which is really dumb.

And it has the decision tree logic that's gone. It's going to be a ChatGPT experience where I want to immediately see who's behind this company and what value can they give me right now? I don't want to navigate and read and try to figure out if they can help me. I have this question that I want to ask, but that's really cool.

I'll be checking out, you said April, so it's next month?

Megan: Yeah, we'll have a couple of weeks of some exciting announcements starting next week. So you can stay tuned. I gave you a bit of a sneak peek already though.

Paris: That's awesome. All right. Well, we won't tell anybody because when this goes live, probably the vault is going to be already live and maybe that'll be perfect timing.

Megan: Sounds good.

Paris: Well, Megan, this has been awesome. Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you wish I would have asked you, or is there anything else that you feel could benefit our audience?

Megan:  I guess in closing, what I'll say is what's been really interesting to me is how, you know, I probably talk to 7 to 10 marketing leaders per week and just our normal kind of inbound sales processes that I manage and everyone that I talk to acknowledges and agrees in this broader B2B buying shift that we're seeing.

But they are still hesitant to actually make the change that is needed from shedding old school lead gen practices and thinking about a new way to measure and execute marketing. And that disconnect is just kind of fascinating to me because people see and acknowledge that reality has changed, but they're unwilling to do what is necessary to pivot and move with the changing tides.

And I hope that we continue to see more and more companies, you know, make the shift. It's hard. You know, people are putting their jobs on the line in many cases, so I don't want to discount the challenges, but there's still so much opportunity out there for people to not only adopt the mindset, but change their measurement framework and their strategies accordingly.

 Terry: I totally agree. And I think here education is key when you kind of cut down the necessary steps into small guided process. I think it makes it easier because at first it looks overwhelming if you have to completely change your CRM, the way you think about how you're measuring results, how you're categorizing deals in the CRM as well. So it gets overwhelming at the beginning, but if there's enough education and guidance along the path on how to do that. I think it gets easier. And the moment people start seeing results, it gets even more easier and inspiring to do more changes.

 Paris: Yeah. It's really human nature, I think, to resist change when you're in a relatively cozy space wherever you are. And if things are working well enough, you know, why upset the apple cart, so to speak. And I guess, this is probably for our next podcast, but I imagine that you've sold many, many successful deals at Refine Labs, and I think it's probably for you as much the psychology of why they should change and either you're selling to a pain point or you're selling to opportunity, but convincing them why they need to change is as important or more important than selling them on the concept of your whole approach, that this is a superior attribution methodology, or that we have a better mousetrap here.

They probably believe that from the first five minutes, but then it's really, all right, how do I really get them to make a decision to start to change, knowing that they might be risking their job, they might be risking their next promotion, or on the flip side, they could be the next CMO of the company because of this. So like, that's the real magic in the sales process is. To figure out the psychology of the change management aspect.

Megan: I'll say one more thing. Like, what I find is you need someone at the company to believe, like the CMO or the VP of marketing, they have to believe, and then I can help them convince the rest of their executive team, including their CEO and the CFO and the CRO, that we should make this change using their data and preparing a business case.

But if no one on the leadership team believes in this? It's very hard to cross that chasm, right? So, I need at least one believer. If I have a conversation and there are no believers, they're not read, They're, not ready for us. They're not ready for us. I need a believer and then I can help you make a business case and we can help you navigate that transformation.

If you really don't believe, I don't waste my energy.

Paris:  They go into that CRM category of check back in six months or in a year.

Megan: Not philosophically aligned.

Paris:  Megan, thank you so much. I think we've monopolized enough of your time now. I know you've got a busy day ahead, so we'll leave you to it, but thank you so much. It's been a great conversation. I can't wait to publish this one and look forward to checking out the vault coming next month in April.

 Megan: Sounds great. Wonderful to meet you both. Thank you for having me. Take care.

(Outro)