(189) B2B Growth: Fundamentals and Future - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hWG7yY5IMY

Transcript: (00:00) I think B2B marketing and B2B go to market is the most intentionally over complicated subject on the planet. And you guys know how I feel about like this idea of simplifiers versus complicators. And so when I meet someone who's a simplifier and when I meet a company that prides itself on simplifying a complex topic, I just get really excited. (00:33) And uh I've been following what Refined Labs has been doing for a long time. Um I think there's a bunch of alums that I very much have on my radar for talent purposes. So Sydney will be the first of many, I'm sure. Not active employees, alumni. Um I'm not committing to the active People steal my teammates all the time, but I'm at peace. Uh there you can make your job as complicated as you want to make it and you can get down this hole of, you know, three decimal point multi-attribution model digital intent signal driven AI powered stuff. (01:11) or you can have conviction on what works and get really good at a couple of things that really matter and make it a lot easier to find customers, get customers, get customers excited about you. So Megan is one of those ladder people and her team is very very good at that and she's going to talk about what that looks like and she's going to talk about how you can apply those principles not just to marketing but to sales to revops and kind of this whole thing because I think the little secret of the summit is like we kind of all have the same jobs. We're just doing it in slightly different ways. back to my point about (01:50) getting customers, keeping customers, keeping customers happy. So, that's my intro. Sydney's had the pleasure of working with you, which I have not had. So, I'm going to let her introduce you more wholesomely, but we're glad you're here. Thank you. Yeah. Basically, everyone's probably like, "Why is Megan here and who is she and how can she help my business?" It's probably what everyone's thinking right now. (02:18) Uh, and you're gonna kind of get a long intro answer to that question from me, but uh, Megan is customer obsessed, top operator I've probably ever worked for, and one of the most compassionate yet fierce CEOs. And you're like, how do you be compassionate and fierce at the same time? You'll see later. Um, but just a little bit about Megan. So, she started her career in customer success. (02:45) She grew to VP of customer success and eventually COO uh for companies like ZDOC, GrubHub, and Planters. So, in the SAS space. She lives in New York as well. So, if you're local, Ali's in New York. There's a couple other people here. Love it. Um but then CO hit and she uh took a shot on this wild small tiny marketing agency that was like four people. Yeah. (03:13) Yeah. Um, and the previous CEO convinced her to come basically scale and operate the business because that's what Megan's really great at. And I remember you told me one time, "Why would you hire me? I'm not a marketer. Spoiler alert, she's one of the best marketers I've ever seen." Um, so she is a marketer. (03:33) And if you're in sales, she also is a savage seller. She sells all over Fine Labs deals over 30 million ARR. She sold herself personally. So like she's a savage. Just want to let everybody know. And um she recently transitioned into the CEO role a few years ago and is now the majority owner of Refined Labs as well. So now she's an investor and owner. So she wears a lot of hats. (04:01) I think a lot of people can learn a lot of things from her. and she's also been through the good, the bad, the ugly of that transition, I would say, and uh came out on the top. I think she's very honest. She pushes expectations, but she's very fair. (04:23) And as a CEO and owner, she always plays the long game, which I think is similar to um kind of approach that Park takes, playing the long game, winning for the larger investment uh acquisition strategies. So, um, and then here's some fun facts about Megan. This is a great intro. No, I'm loving every minute. I need I need I know. I know. Bring on the fun facts. Let's go. She's certified scuba diver. Oh, yeah. (04:54) And um goes on vacation to do really cool scuba diving stuff. I don't know the technical terms. Um, loves being on a boat. She has a boat. Um, so with her little captain hat on and her dog on the boat and her husband. Um, and she's basically a professional cook. She'll literally cook anything for you and loves to sing karaoke all night out at that bar. So that's neat. Also true. (05:17) Do you mean like a a lousy bar or like where divers hang out? One I know. And y'all know how I feel about owning a boat. You want a friend who owns a boat. So make friends with them. Don't buy. I know. I'm in I'm in my honeymoon phase though, so I'm still loving it. But I think I'm approaching that phase. (05:35) Yes. It's the happiest days are the day you buy, the day you sell. That's what they tell me. That's what they tell me. Well, thank you Paul and Sydney for the wonderful introduction. That was awesome. It's great to be here, everyone. Nice to meet you. Um I'm looking forward to spending some time together. (05:54) I always like if these can be a little bit more of a dialogue versus me just speaking at you for an hour, hour and a half, however much time we have. And so as we go through the concepts, um, I'd love to pause and kind of get your feedback, your reflections, your questions, share maybe an experience that you have that reinforces or contradicts some of the things that I'm talking about. (06:13) Always interested in being challenged if you guys have some good thoughts as well. um kind of what Paul mentioned um we're going to stick to the basics. My belief is you do a handful of things really really well in a business and that's how you actually build a profitable sustainable business. And so we're going to be focusing on that today. (06:32) I want to talk a little bit about how B2B buying has changed over the last 20 years. I think one of the most important things to think about when you're defining a go to market strategy is putting yourself in your buyer's shoes. A lot of us feel this intuitively, but not a lot of us have named it. (06:49) And I find that can be really helpful in making sure you have the context of the buyer at at all times. So, we're going to talk a little bit about that concept. Um, we're then going to talk a little bit about some of what I think are the most important elements to a successful go to market strategy. (07:07) Who is your ideal customer profile? And what is your company's strategic narrative or differentiated position? So, we're going to talk through those concepts and I want to share just a couple of practical takeaways um of things you can think about in terms of validating your own ICP and your narrative and finding opportunities to clarify or bolster that for your own business. Um we'll then go into just my view of a go to market system. (07:29) We'll touch on brand demand expand. So, that's everything from awareness to type gen to customer success and expansion. And we'll also talk about marketing and sales alignment um and measurement. I think about measurement overall. So we should touch sales, marketing, rev ops. (07:47) There's something for everyone in the presentation. Um so how's that sound? All right. So um how many of us were buying and selling software in the 90s or the early 2000s? Yeah, I'm the 80s. So there you go. I need to add that to my chart. Um, I call that the analog buying era. And you know, what were what were we doing then? There weren't a lot of sources of information for people to self-s serve. (08:17) So, you had, you know, cold calling, you had outbound sales, you had big trade shows and conferences and networking groups. And this was how people met each other, discovered new products and services, and ultimately made buying decisions, right, at the end of the day. And that worked super well for a really, really long time. And that's how we all bought and sold. (08:35) That's how we wanted to consume information. We then kind of move into the, you know, 2010, 2015 and I call this the website era. So, credit where credit's due to HubSpot. They essentially created this concept of inbound marketing, right? It was like put all your information on a website, put a bunch of content on the internet and people will find you, right? People are now using the internet to discover new products and services to learn about things to connect with companies. So this is where we begin to see essentially the sort of the birth of (09:10) digital marketing right and it started with get your website up think about SEO eventually moved into you know paid ads on Google etc etc. Now we get into 2020. We have the global pandemic and essentially overnight we move we we accelerate into essentially just being online, right? Every single thing is digital. (09:36) And this is where we start to see the rise of social media also at play. And essentially what are we all doing during during the pandemic? We're on social media all day, right? on our phone, on our computer, even our parents, our grandparents, everyone, everyone is on social media. Maybe the channels of choice are very different, but that's how people are discovering information and and finding things out. (09:59) You know, in the website era, it was like, oo, I'm going to, you know, I can submit my email address and I can get this cool piece of content or this really interesting information. I'm totally going to do that. To 2020, it's like, I'm definitely not putting my email in there. Forget it. or okay, got put a fake email and like get the asset and and move on, right? So, a lot of these tactics just started to lose effectiveness, right? What's really interesting is in the dark social era, uh, dark social era, we also really had, I think, the resurgence of peer recommendations. (10:30) My friend uses this product. It works really well. I think I want to buy that product because I trust my friend and he knows my situation. So those recommendations from peers and and word of mouth, which you know, spoiler alert, word of mouth has been a strategy forever in across all eras, but starts to become even more important, right? Especially when there's so much noise and you're seeing everything um across all your social media channels, etc. (10:57) And so now we're sort of in this new AI era. Um we're at the beginning of it. We're starting to see a few buying behaviors change. Oh, maybe I'll use chat GPT or Perplexity and start discovering some things through that tool. (11:17) By and large, a lot of the concepts that I just talked about in the dark social area are still active and true. Um, but this is essentially the progression. And I don't think we know exactly where things are going to go with AI, but I think what we do know is things like people being aware that you exist, people trusting your brand or your company, and hearing about it from their peers and their friends are pretty much always going to remain important in terms of how B2B buying decisions are made. Really, any buying decision. (11:47) So understanding this, acknowledging this and thinking about how your strategy is acknowledging how people are buying is really really critical. So I'll pause there. Does this resonate with anyone? Um anything anybody would add? Excuse me. So I would say I I think about them as as layers, right? Like you're moving to the right. You're kind of adding layers that you need to be aware of. (12:13) Like you need to have website stuff need to have content online. I think it's not a replacement of the tactics of the past, but it's what is necessary. The list just keeps getting larger, which speaks to the the need to focus and speaks to the need of like need to have conviction around what the couple of things are that you want to do. Well, we're talking a lot about that today. (12:39) So, that I like that that's the theme of what we're going to talk about, but it's also making it more confusing, right? It's like, okay, how do you tap into the dark social thing? How do you tap into the AI thing? All of a sudden, you're trying to figure out three, four, five levers instead of one or two. You just teed me up for my next point I wanted to make. I love it, Paul. (12:56) So, the reality is all of these types of ways that people learn about products and services and make decisions are all still somewhat valid today. But it's highly dependent on who your customer is. Are you selling into an old school oil and gas industry? And are those trade show conferences alive and well and people are attending those regularly and that's actually how decisions are made at those conferences and at the dinners and the bar later, right? Are you selling into a different segment that is spending all their time on different channels? Right? So there's no right or wrong. It's okay. Now that I (13:38) understand the progression and the spectrum and the changes that have happened, when I think about my buyer, where do they fit in? How are they learning about products and services? How are they making relationships? How are they making buying decisions? And my strategy should be defined by that essentially. So there's no right or wrong. (14:05) And in a lot of these frameworks and these concepts that I'm sharing, the intent is to create a way to think about simplifying what you're going to focus on and what doesn't matter. Because the reality is depending upon the buyer, any one of these types of strategies could work or combination of, but what you really want to answer is where are they spending the most time and how can I be there, right? That that's really the name of the game. (14:29) I think about about it as where's my on this maturity curve because I tend to we we're an automotive so we tend to be you know a handful of years behind what B2B marketers and their buying behaviors are but they always kind of get to the same place so I can just look at what's happening now and then track that back a few years absolutely you have an advantage and Megan that's to that point you talked about conferences so this is the other thing we struggle with how to validate like NADA at this Point is, do (15:01) we get good leads out of NADA? Does anybody? Probably not. But if we don't go to NADA, all we get is negativity about, oh, they must be going they must be going out of business because they didn't go to NADA. We have that difficulty with a lot of our businesses that the conferences are not really good anymore, but it's like a million bucks we got to spend because otherwise everybody will say we're going to signal to the market. Yeah, and that's a tough one. (15:26) Like, how do we put enough in so we showed up at the show, but realize or how can we use that show with some new tactic to get better leads out of that show given that we're all just showing up and drinking with the same people that are drinking with our own companies. That's absolutely right. And and it's less about um you know, when you say, "Oh, it's not effective. (15:48) " Maybe it's not effective at generating immediate leads that close, but it could be very effective for building credibility, driving awareness, nurturing relationships, right? And if that's the end goal, you know, maybe I don't need to, you know, spend $50,000 on a, you know, sponsorship for a booth. Maybe I actually just need to show up. I need to have 10 of my team. We need to be in our branded shirts. (16:13) We need to be setting meetings with people that we know will be there, taking people out to dinner, to drinks, building those relationships, showing face because the things that we actually want to focus on is credibility, awareness, and relationships. And there's a way to do that at a much lower cost, which can be very, very effective overall, regardless of the immediate return on leads or pipeline generated within a certain time after the event. (16:38) And if you know that about your buyer, it's like, well, you have to be there. like you have to be there. Any other comments on this? Are you all thinking about your buyer and thinking about Good. That's good. That's the goal. So um you know uh you guys are a PE firm and you guys are all part of this organization and so this is probably not going to be uh this probably will be aligned with your thinking in terms of uh focusing on profitable efficient growth. (17:11) And so, you know, we all just witnessed, you know, the ZERP era and the craziness, you know, from, you know, honestly even like 20, we had spurts of it in the the 2010s and then in in 2020, 2021. Um, but essentially this idea that unit economics don't even matter and we can just spend spend spend spend spend do whatever whatever we need to do to acquire customers and it's the only thing that matters. (17:36) um you know we've worked with over 300 B2B SAS companies in the last six years and many of them uh were operating this way in the not too distant past um and the reality is it is completely unsustainable and it's also totally not necessary to actually build a really profitable healthy business and so we're going to a lot of the concepts that we're going to be talking about today are really all designed to build a business that is efficient and profitable so that you have healthy unit economics. (18:06) Paul was walking me through your uh conversations from this morning. And when you're thinking about exit readiness, like that's what you need, right? You need a profitable, efficient growth engine that you've built and that you can communicate how you've built it and how it will continue to operate and and drive new revenue for the company. So, let's get into some first principles here. So, we're back to basics. This is the theme of the day. (18:32) So, I'll ask the question. How many of you in this room feel 100% confident that your definition of an ideal customer is 100% correct? All right. I like it. It was It was day two for this guy. We go by dog years, you know, like I think I think we're 90 maybe. Yeah. Okay. Okay, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. (19:05) So, what's interesting about this is and and I'll speak from my experience both being inhouse at some of the companies that Sydney mentioned, but also working with a lot of our clients over the last six years. What I find really fascinating is what companies state their ICP is is almost pretty different from what their actual customer list looks like or the companies that are in their pipeline and that's a problem for a couple of reasons. (19:37) Um sometimes uh you know their ICP definition will be aspirational. Well, we want to go up market or we want to you know break into this particular segment. Um, and that's great. Like that can be a goal that you have. Um, however, if you're designing your go-to market strategy for a segment of customers that you don't actually have validation that will buy and use your product, you could be falling into a trap that can be very difficult to get out of. (20:03) And so, and I'm very uh I acknowledge and I think it's great for um customer ICPS to evolve over time. They're not supposed to be static. They should be evolving and changing over time. However, the goal here is if I'm designing a go to market strategy, I need to get really clear on my ICP. And this isn't a wish list. (20:22) This is what is the data showing us. Let's look at our customer list. Let's look at the leads that come inbound. Let's look at the ones that we win and the ones that we lose, right? And how can we more clearly define what that ideal customer profile looks like? There can be adjacent segments of those aspirational segments or other segments that can benefit. (20:43) But going through this exercise is really really important. What we find in the data that we see with our customers is um you know nonICP customers will close at a significantly lower rate. The sales cycle will be much longer. They'll close the customer and then the customer will churn six months later because they weren't even really a good fit. (21:06) and you've spent all of this money and effort and time to essentially acquire the wrong customer. Um, this is more prevalent than I think people are willing to admit. And so, here are a couple of um, tactics to think about how do I go back to my definition and validate for myself with the data that we have available that we have the right definition to go after. (21:32) Because when you simplify a go to market strategy, one of the most important questions you have to answer is who am I targeting? And you need to be able to answer that question with a very high level of confidence. Who are they? What do they use? Who's involved with the deal? These are all questions you want to be able to answer. And whether it's a persona documentation or an ICP definition, you want to get that down. (21:52) And that needs to be a shared artifact between the sales team, the marketing team, the product team. We all need to be working towards building for and acquiring and retaining the same customer. Um, and again, we can work together over time and and evolve that. We had that evolution at Refine Labs. (22:12) When we first got started, only small startups would hire us. We couldn't get business anywhere else. And so, we hired a lot of small startups and we worked with them. We built a reputation over time and now I only sell into mid-market and enterprise companies um uh with much larger budgets um and we have developed a reputation where we can now serve those but that took five years right I'm sure I wanted that in 2020 but I'm like this is who's buying today and what and how I can help them today right and so um and the reality is is we can still help those companies today so in some cases we do. But when I'm designing my (22:49) go to market strategy, I'm designing for the sweet spot. I'm designing for the customer where I can guarantee an outcome because of their scale and our track record. Right. Can you talk a little bit more about how you evolved that ICP and how you thought about now is the right time? These are some things that we want to go do to get to that that next level. Yeah, it's a great question. (23:20) The first signal was closing our first batch of really large companies and really seeing the success. And so, um, you know, for us in particular, our marketing strategy was really focused on how do we get in front of all of our potential buyers so that they can come inbound to us. (23:41) And so what we started to see over time um essentially because of brand building and reputation building, we started to see these larger companies come inbound. We were able to close them. The deal size was much larger. We were also able to see that we were able to impact their program much more quickly because just because of the scale of spending $ 1.5 million a month on paid instead of $50,000 a month. (24:01) Like great. we can we can really show you impact really quickly with that scale of budget, right? And then once we started to get that track record, then we were able to recognize, okay, we're ready and now we're they told us, our customer told us, oh, I've been following you for a while and but now I feel like comfortable bringing you into my organization where I'm putting my reputation on the line to hire you. (24:31) Right? So it was customer-led in terms of that. Now once I started getting the signals then it was like okay we need to spend more time focusing on these types of companies. And so that changed um my LinkedIn connection strategy, our event strategy, um engaging with firms like Parker Gale or other you know Vista and uh Costa Ventures, right? Building relationships with these that work with larger companies. (24:59) Um, and so once we saw the signals, then we started to make those shifts. Okay. But honestly, I would say now probably 80% of our clients are in the new segment. It probably took three years to like move from 80% being startup to 80% being mid-market enterprise. Does not happen overnight, right? And the the process is different. (25:24) So it also created a little complexity like the the delivery experience and uh for a startup and the time to value is very different than these larger organizations and so you also have to be ready to deal with that if you're going to handle these sort of multiple segments. Thank you. Can you talk about I'd love to use that example. (25:47) My question before you shared that story was going to be okay that pulse check that we did with the room. Most people are in this like not quite zone with the ICP. They've started to talk about it. They've done a little bit of analysis but maybe they haven't finished it but they haven't operationalized it yet. And so to me there's two steps here. (26:10) There's like the alignment piece which is the human agreement that like yes this is our bullseye. Then there's the operational piece which is building that into your business processes so that people direct their work towards the ICP. And they're two different things. I think a lot of companies stop at the alignment stage and they don't get to the operate operationalization. Somebody help me with that. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. So talk about that. (26:36) Like you finished the alignment and now we operationalized it. What did that look like for you guys? And what is your recommendation to the people in this room? So they can think about like, hey, the work's not done until we do XYZ. What's XYZ? Yep. And I think I saw a LinkedIn post of Sydney's on this topic, so I might tag her in in a minute. (26:53) Honestly, the most simple and straightforward thing to do is make a list. Make a list of your target accounts and give the list to sales and give the list to marketing and give it to product. Give the list to everybody. It's hard to make the list. Um there are ways that you can use tools and different you know criteria to filter things down but there's absolutely manual involvement in the list. (27:23) And so when we decided to make this shift you know uh we made the list and what am I still doing today? I even did it at LaGuardia this morning sending 10 connection requests on LinkedIn to the people on my list so they can see my content and then decide they want to hire Refine Labs. Right? So, this is going into the long game and it's just doing this the simple things really really well. (27:44) Um, and Sydney, I think, didn't you, am I mistaken? Didn't you spend some time like putting a target account list together? No, they did. Yeah, the cap DB um stands for what is I don't know. Uh, this is a test. Now, I'm failing customer and prospect database. Database. Sorry. Thank you. Failed that way. (28:13) Uh but um is actually one of the previous customers that I worked with Vena operated and implemented CAD DB top down from their uh comp their they're not their business back. So yeah, um but it was like pushed on them and it was like integrated into like all of their campaigns and it got so over complicated and it was basically like a disaster. (28:37) Um and so when we had the same approach, it was like how do we operationalize it in a much simpler way and how do we just start marketing going down the list sales attacking it? Um and then we're right now in the process well also open brand has a strategic advantage because we're a data company so who we could sell to is who we have data on. (29:05) Um, so it's much the alignment was much faster and easier than any other like company I've had experience working with, but we're in the process now of actually expanding that list. And we've actually 4xed that list. Nice. It was like 680. Now we're almost at 3,000 because the product and we reran our data. We have some new product releases. The product's more integrated. (29:32) We have we did a much better approach at going back to the list and validating the brands and uh you know I spent about 10 hours one weekend manually going through each domain and clicking it and validating that the data and the domain is mapped correctly. So did a lot of other people on the team. (29:57) So it's not just me like that's the like crappy shitty ugly work but it makes the HubSpot and Salesforce experience so much better. Yep. So, I will I will say guys, like there's a couple things that we're going to talk about today. I've seen the presentation. There's a couple things. We're just getting started is the magic. And just like putting lines in the water and starting to do the things is where the benefit comes from. This is not that. (30:24) The benefit from this comes from finishing the job. And the last mile of finishing the job which is why I asked the question about how you operationalize it is what you are talking about is getting to a slide in the board deck. I remember this slide. I remember this moment. There's a bar chart from six or nine months ago. This is the list. There's 20 companies in this tier. There's 40 companies in this tier. (30:49) There's 50 companies in tier three. you have a workable list when you can print out the list and not before. And what I noticed is when we got to that point, when you finished the list and you cut off the bottom of it and you printed it out and you put it in the board deck, that is the moment our pipeline creation started to take off because we started to focus on the people on that list and blanketed them with a bunch of really really helpful stuff and not before. (31:21) So, as you think about this as a concept, there's some go to market stuff where the magic is just getting it going. This is one where you have to finish the job and the last mile of finishing the job is tiring. It's annoying. It's labor intensive. It's manual. And it is so easy to not finish the job. And I want you to think about that when you get to the alignment stage and you haven't finished the second part because the second part is actually more important in my opinion. Yep. And now you have Sydney and Natalie who can answer your questions. (31:50) So Megan, just as a what's interesting about our business is an ICP is, you know, we buy founder owned businesses and so a lot of people were brought into these businesses. I will guarantee you that the founders view the ICP is completely wrong. Yes. (32:06) So what happen is they sell to they sell to a million companies below 5 million. They close one Fortune 100 customer and the the founder will say we sell to Fortune 100. And it screws the whole thing up. Oh yeah, I know how that goes. It literally is not true. Like the first time we do analysis with the customers, they find out, holy crap, like most of our customers are here and I think they're here. They cherry pick those stories. (32:25) So that's the initially the fight is they think they're one thing, but they're actually another. Exactly. And that's why look at the data, align on a definition, make your list, right? It can be that simple. Um, we have a lot more to cover. We keep us moving, keeping an eye on time. So we've talked about how buying has changed and you need to think about that. (32:45) We've talked about how to clarify who your ideal customer profile is. And now let's talk about okay, so you know who we want to talk to. Now what are we going to say? What you're saying to your ideal customer profile is really important. It has to be relevant. Has to be compelling. It has to create urgency. It needs to expose a pain that they have. (33:05) It needs to make them go through the mental gymnastics to come to the conclusion that they need to do something about it. and you need to create an association that you're the right company or brand to help them with that problem. So, um, credit goes to Andy Rascin. I don't know if you guys have heard of Andy Rascin. (33:26) Um, he's, uh, this is his like his superpower is develop helping companies develop their strategic narrative. And his fivestep framework is really easy. I actually have this uh like workbook that I can share with you that you can share with folks so that you can easily action this. But essentially, you need to be able to document your strategic narrative and address these five key points. (33:50) The workbook has a series of questions for each of these to help you think through how to articulate um this in a way that's going to resonate with your potential customer. And so I'll give you like the refine labs example and how we think about it. And I'm, you know, I revisit the strategic narrative on an annual basis and evolve it and refine it based on how things are changing and what I'm learning from my customer, right? And so name a big relevant change in the world. (34:20) B2B buying has changed. You guys, you guys got my first slide, which is like my one of my uh you know sales uh call talking points. Things have changed. Your marketing has to change because B2B buying has changed. Show there will be winners and losers. (34:39) The losers do these things and they can't grow their companies and the winners do these things and they're very very successful. Right? Like I want to be a winner. Tease the promised land. Who wants profitable efficient growth? Who wants to feel excited to go into a board meeting? Who wants to keep their job? All of these fun things, right? Um introduce features as magic gifts. Refine Labs can literally fix your marketing. (35:01) We can make you from uh being scared about your job to bragging, you know, in the boardroom. Um, and here's how we do that X, Y, and Z. And offer evidence. Here's uh 20 case studies of other companies just like you that have the same problem and exactly what we did with them and the outcomes that we drove. (35:25) Our track record speaks for itself, right? So that's a quick and dirty review of each of those, but essentially um this is really crucial. Um a lot of people do not have differentiated or compelling positioning or strategic narratives. No. Who in the room feels like theirs is amazing? Not one. Like yours is way better than it was. Yeah. out. So, I'm always like, I could be so much better. Continuous improvement. I love it. But it's no different than real life. (36:00) Most people suck at telling a good story. So, uh you've sat and heard somebody tell a story and you're like, where is this going? And then you've heard somebody who's really good at telling a story, you're like, I listen to this person telling a story because it's it's really compelling and it hits all these things. (36:18) It's just typical heroes journey stuff, right? It's like what's the problem? You know, it's just Star Wars, right? You get a quick introduction and you have to go through the training camp and you get to promised land and you bring it all back together. And I think people buy off stories. People don't buy on features and functions or price. (36:35) Nobody's ever bought a piece of software. Nobody's ever you've never bought a company. We've never uh sold a company without a really compelling story. And then you make the numbers work if they believe the story. It's so true. Shout out to Steph because our our podcast is in the heroes journey framework. People love the podcast. Kevin, I am your father. (36:57) Father and son. I will cut off my hand. The the takeaways here is um because we have some more concepts I want to get into. I'm going to send you the workbook. Um you have to do the workbook and you should really consider involving your CEO in the process. The CEO has to back the the company story. (37:21) Many people will say the strategic narrative is the company strategy, right? And how you articulate it. Um, you answer all of the questions, you convert that into a narrative format, one, two, three pages max, and then you share the strategic narrative artifact with product and marketing and sales. You look at your website. (37:41) Is the website reflective of the strategic narrative? Is our sales outreach reflective of the strategic narrative? is our our LinkedIn ads reflective of the strategic narrative, right? Audit everything that you're doing and make the changes that are necessary so you are telling the same story to your market across every possible touch point. That's what you want to do. (38:06) And you know, and Rasman will not take you on as a client. He's a good follow on not take you as a client unless the CEO hires him. He's like, "I don't get hired by marketing. I don't get hired by sales. I get hired by the CEO." No offense to you guys, but that he's like, "If it's not from the top down, it will not work. It will correct not hold. It will not stick. It doesn't work. (38:24) " But everyone in this room, you can be the facilitator and the influencer. You can do a first pass at answering the questions. You can get the right people in the room. You can facilitate a workshop. You can get people on board. Um, it actually gets really exciting and then it becomes a really crystal clear story that everyone should be telling. (38:42) You need the CEO to talk about this stuff in the all hands and your internal meetings, all of your external. So this becomes the the goal in what I'm trying to show you is you you begin to create these artifacts that really bring true alignment across the organization so that you're building the system and everyone is working towards the same goal. I'm going to keep moving. (39:06) Any final questions or comments on strategic narrative? Okay, this is fun. It rhymes. It's easy to remember. I didn't invent this either. This is just basic go to market 101, right? We like simple things. So, um, we know who our customer is. We know what we're going to tell them. We understand where they are in like the B2B buying maturity model and how to reach them. (39:38) Now we need to design a go to market strategy. You want to think about it across these three pillars and you really should have strategies and tactics that are mapped back to each of these independently. They are all equally important. Can anyone guess which one of these is typically overinvested in? I didn't say demand. No, it's demand. (40:08) In ours, we would say in ours is the the opposite is we have trouble with brand because everybody wants helps with brand starts at $2 million. We're going to help brand you. We're not Coca-Cola, right? So, I think brand is often misunderstood in that market. I agree. And people interpret it as like the department of shapes and colors, not the not the collective impression that you are creating out in the market. Right. (40:30) most when I look at a lot of marketing budgets again and this is sort of you know mid-market enterprise some startup B2B SAS um by far probably 80% of the go to market budget is for demand and a very small percentage is allocated to brand and what's really interesting is most marketing and sales professionals totally ignore everything that happens after they're a customer they don't care But how do you build a successful business? You get customers, you keep customers, you retain, you expand, you renew. Sydney mentioned my background is customer success. I spent the first 12 (41:08) years of my career in account management and customer success. And the reality was I always had the biggest number to hit, right? It's super important. Um, so even if it's not your direct mandate, how are you working with your counterparts and your colleagues and the rest of the company to make sure that this is being given the attention that it needs? So, a quick definitions. (41:36) Um, brand is not, you know, Coca-Cola wants a new logo. Um, brand is how buyers experience your company. This is, um, getting on the day one consideration set list. You want to do your marketing so well that when your ideal customer has a problem and you can provide a solution that they literally think of your brand before they go to Google. (42:01) If you've done your job well in brand marketing, that's what happens and you're successful. Um, we've been um I I was on two sales calls yesterday and two people said, "I have been following your guys' stuff since 2020 and I haven't been in a position where it made sense to bring you in." And I just got this new job. I realized what a mess our marketing was and I was like, I can hire Refine Labs. (42:27) They can fix my marketing. Six years, five years, right? But that's what you want. Like that's that's what you want to cultivate and create. When I say demand here, this is really about how are we building the engine to generate pipeline. How are we driving inbound conversions? How are we converting those to meetings? How are we helping sales close those meetings into opportunities and and customers, right? That's the demand element. (42:56) Um lots of marketing and sales collaboration required here to be successful. And then expand is everything post sale. And what's really interesting is a lot of people think, "Oh, that's customer success's problem, that's account management problem." The reality is is there's a lot of opportunity to look at that through the lens of a go-to market uh operator, right? Um one of our clients is u Notion. (43:25) Everyone in their mom uses notion and they all work at companies. I'm like, we can digitally market to all of your users about your B2B enterprise offering, right? Let's not just try to get net new people to sign up, right? We can get a lot of people that are already customers of Notion to pay Notion a whole lot more money if they upgrade to a totally different service layer, right? Um, I work with we work with a company called Blackline. (43:50) They have eight different products and the average customer uses one. Does that sound familiar to anybody? What if your average customer used four instead of one because they don't know what other seven products I have? And maybe you can hit your number just that way, not even acquiring another customer, right? And so there's so many opportunities that people don't think about because it's like, well, they're a customer, not my problem. Net new, net new only. (44:24) And so it I want you I hope my my takeaway here is I hope you see these three components in a new light and the reality is is each strategy is very different across these but all three are important. Can I make one point on this page? So, this stuff all goes together, right? Like I I can't emphasize enough the power of the list because when you consider these two bullets from your guys' job, how do I shape the buyer experience in a way that benefits us? And how do I build a system that turns interest in the pipeline? That sounds like intimidating work. Here's what makes that less intimidating. (45:05) having a list of a couple hundred companies that you make a commitment to talk to and make a great first impression with and then tracking how many conversations come out of that. That is step one for these two bullets. And so something really big and really complicated just got a lot less intimidating if you have this list. (45:30) This might be the bigger growth lever and I think it applies in ways that I could spend half an hour talking about specifically for every single company in this room. And if Devon wouldn't fire me, I would go to CVS and buy a can of red spray paint and put it on the TV and circle that. That would also screw up her presentation. So, I'm not going to do that tonight. No, it's okay. (45:50) All my important stuff is right here on every slide. Prime Day is over, so we can't give you TV. Everybody has an embarrassing statistic in this room. Yeah, everybody has a metric that looks like we have X products and our average customer knows about or has Y numbers of that and it is a very small fraction. And so new logos are great. (46:15) Outbound is important to get right. Talking to the market is important. There are for most of you hundreds of customers and hundreds of people who already pay you an invoice every quarter, every year that have no idea what else is on the menu. And so don't be surprised in upcoming board meetings, in upcoming caffeinefueled one-on-one chats, and everything in between if I don't want to talk about this because if times get tough in the economy or gets weird, the easiest place to go is right here. (46:51) And we are not doing enough of it across the portfolio. And I want you to see that as an opportunity more than a challenge. It is a huge opportunity for everybody in this room. This also drives new customers as well. Referrals, getting case studies, people are working at your customer account and they leave and had such a great experience. Oh, we got to bring them over into my new company as well. (47:17) So, if you actually the more time you spend here, the more you grow your base, but that it also fuels net new logo as well. So, um I'll give you an example of these of these three for Refined Labs and we'll move on to the next one. (47:41) So, um, actually I'm in town tonight because I'm hosting a dinner at the Dearborn later where I sent out probably I don't know 100 120 invitations to a bunch of people on my target account list and I invited them to dinner and you know there'll probably be about 20 people there at dinner butundred and you know 120 people in this area got a outreach from me and a personal invitation and My first thing that I said to them wasn't, "Do you want to have a meeting about Refine Labs? Can I sell you some marketing agency stuff?" It was, "Would you like to come to dinner with some really cool people at this cool place and have some good food?" Right. Um, at this dinner, I (48:21) actually purposefully will have a conversation focused on fun topics, maybe a little bit of work stuff. This is the fourth one that we've hosted. Everyone that I've hosted so far, by the end of the night, everybody is has their phones out and they're switching phone numbers and they're super excited about the connections they made and I get emails the next day. That's the best like, you know, I know what you're doing. I'm a marketer. (48:44) That's the best one of these that I've been to. Like, that was just really fun. Like, you have great people there, good food. I've always wanted to go to this restaurant. Like, awesome. I'm gonna also give them a business card with my name and number and email and one free year access to the vault, which is all of our strategies and frameworks in a product for free. Come into my ecosystem. Let me give you something. (49:10) Right? That's an example of a brand play. Right? I'm not expecting that I'm going to close these people in Q4, but I'll definitely in 2026. Just a matter of time, right? And I'm patient. I'll play the long game. Demand. I mean, I run I run Google ads. This is like and this is uh a lot of the normal tactics that we know that work really well, but that are often overused. There's a place for that. (49:36) It works. Dial that in. Be efficient. Be effective. And then expand. We aim to get customer case studies from all of our customers. We uh follow them when they leave their jobs and get new jobs and rehire us. Right? So, these are just all ways to think about it. (49:56) So as you're defining your go to market, think about strategies and tactics across all three. Brand, demand, expand. We'll share this with you along with it. There's more specifics here that gives you just um you know more to think about in terms of what to measure, why it matters. We're going to talk about measurement in a moment. (50:18) Um so I think we have about a half hour left. Keep us on track. I notic you still got heroes in there. Um, so, uh, you want to you want to define hero for the room? It's a high intent revenueing opportunity, which means that it closes at greater than 25% win rate on a trailing 12-month uh, TTF redemption. Yeah, I got this. (50:51) What's an example of a hero? Is that a is that just a ICP lead that you're more excited about than average? Hand raisers consistent stage where we know it's going to close. So like uh for us it would be like capabilities, right? So we know it's if it's a target account and it hits capability that's qual it's like it's a tighter definition of qualified pipeline which is like loosey goosey depending on who you ask. (51:25) Um, and you can like automate date, stamp, stages all around that because like it'll change your hero definition will change depending on segment depending on uh how they come in like they can get. So does that relate to cap score too? Are those all your A's and B's or FIT score? Um, no. I look at it kind of globally uh versus like by tier. (51:52) But then you can say like so if someone says, "Oh, we have a hero opportunity." Like Natalie can commit that 25% is going to hit revenue bookings within X period of time. And the X period of time is then looked at depending on maybe the tier or the segment because the sales cycle is going to be much different for uh HP versus like you know a smaller brand like I don't know work with a ton of small brands but like someone that just wants a mind share product right so forecast predictability is the goal with this measurement component and so how are we working with our uh sales and (52:30) finance counterparts Right? Marketing, sales, and finance, everyone wants predictable, profitable, efficient growth, right? And so, are we able to actually use our systems of measurement to create these shared definitions that will reliably behave in the way that we expect? Um, that's huge, especially for a PE firm. They love that. Yep. (52:55) Well, actually, uh, we'll spend a little bit of time on on measurement. Um, and actually I gave the vault example. I can leave you guys with my business card and you have them. Oh, so we can give you guys free access to the vault which has all of these different products in. You can you can hire me later. Um, all right. (53:18) Let's talk about alignment. So before we get into it, um does anyone want to share maybe um challenges with marketing and sales alignment or any success stories? Natalie and Cindy, are you guys like you guys are so aligned at Open Brand with sales? Yeah, actually. Yeah. (53:42) Want to share a little bit with like how did how did you get there? Has it always been that way? Yeah. And then I I tried to sus it out in the interview process that I was aligned with Greg and Natalie on measurement and attribution because if they're going to give me money and we're not aligned on how we think about how I spend that money and show proof of influence and where those dollars are going, what's working and um the one thing about open brand was there's a very there's there's one go to market strategy It's like hight touch custom ABM. There's really no arguing there. So I think that drove like (54:21) initial immediate alignment. Okay. And I would say in the past where I've experienced less u alignment with marketing. It's typically around like I mean what are the typical friction points? These leads are no good from sales, right? Um and we can't do anything with them. marketing, your sales team never follows up on the leads that we send them, right? And I think, you know, Sydney and I are very aligned. (54:48) Like, we want the leads. Every lead should be followed up on. I mean, some of the tactics is where I've experienced the most friction and we're very much in line on kind of what needs to be done and we need to be tight. Yeah, that's great. A lot of common other common challenges I'll see are um oh, marketing hit their goal, but the company didn't hit the revenue goal. (55:12) It's like, wait, what? Marketing celebrating and sales is being chastised in the corner. Um, and you know, no one understands that. So um so in the spirit of keeping it simple um what I found uh in witnessing and being a part of lots of different challenges between these functions that these are the three most important things to drive the type of alignment and collaboration that you want. (55:42) Um so one is common goals. Goals and incentives must be aligned. Um, in many many organizations this is not the case. And so if if marketing hits their goal that means sales should also hit their goal, right? If marketing misses their goal, sales is likely going to also miss their goal. Um, the the goals need to be created uh and uh set together, right? And finance can also be involved. Um, and everyone needs to understand what success looks like. (56:14) there shouldn't be this marketing and sales, you know, divide. Like we're actually we're all on the same team. Um the organization where I started as the director of account management that I eventually became the COO was the organization where I noticed the most like infighting with departments, everyone just wanted to prove that they were doing a great job and then fingerpointing at other teams that well they messed up this or they didn't follow up on that lead or whatever it happened to be. And guess what? The company was doing terribly as a result. (56:45) And so so much of a business performing well is everybody growing in the same direction. And what I realized in my career is it doesn't matter what my job title is. Am I the VP of marketing? Am I the head of sales? Am I the director of account management? If I can do my part to influence creating common goals, then we will be better off. That alone is huge. The next is clear handoffs. (57:16) And so I mean uh Natalie brought the great example like you know marketing blaming sales for not following up on leads, sales saying well the leads suck. I'm never going to call them right. There needs to be a direct and uh candid conversation between sales and marketing on how they're going to collaborate together. (57:36) Especially if you have a target account list. It's not even just follow up on the leads. It actually should be more of an orchestration of how are we going to acquire these companies? What are the key activities that sales are is going to execute? What are the key activities that marketing is going to execute? Um at what point do they move into onboarding and and what does that look like? And how does marketing and sales say stay involved to continue to grow that relationship over time? Um, most of the time there's process docks within a department and (58:07) none cross-dep departmentally. And again, it's just simple stuff, right? But if you fix the goals, you you you define and document the handoffs. I'm a huge fan of documentation. Sydney knows like if it's not in a Google doc, it doesn't exist. Put it in a Google doc. Um, and then lastly, and I think this is where the magic can happen, is how are you actually creating opportunities for the teams to share feedback with each other on a regular basis. (58:43) Sales is talking to customers way more than marketing usually, and that's a ton of really valuable insights. my head of marketing at Refin Labs right now, he listens to like five of my sales calls a week because he's like, "I want to know what people are saying when they're on the phone with you." And he doesn't even just read the AI summary. (59:02) He's like, "I want to watch the call. I want to hear what they're saying and what they're asking." and he's constantly coming back to me with some sales tips, but also like I'm going to change this on the website or we should put out some content about this or let's update our sales pitch deck because we're not directly calling out like literally the last five people you talked to said the exact same thing like let's integrate that into our marketing and what we're doing, right? Simple stuff, but this is the stuff that works, right? And and this is what you need to be thinking about. I'd love to get some more (59:36) involvement with this crew here because I think there's a lot of sales folks and marketing folks in the room. Um, does anyone have maybe a success story that they want to share with the group of something they've done that really helped? Yeah, my previous company we brought in OKRs. (59:55) Um, and I had an idea which kind of, you know, pissed some people off, but salesman put together their OKRs and then they send it to marketing and marketing just craps all over it and then they flip and they meet and they agree that uh on the final OKRs, the dependencies, the deliverable dates, and they're keeping each other accountable because, you know, when sales are growing great, it's because sales know how to sell. And when sales are down, it's because marketing sucks. (1:00:22) And that is like a really bad misconception. Um, and I so I think bringing the the the teams together to your point to have crossunctional goals and to know that I can't do this until you do this and like really helps. And just aligning that there's really only one goal. (1:00:41) Doesn't matter if you have MQLs or you have MR or whatever. Your goal is revenue. That's all it is. Bottom line revenue. Nothing else matters at the end of the day. So that was super helpful. Okay. Well, and you mentioned, oh, you know, maybe pissing people off a little bit, but it was effective, right? It was very effective. Yeah. It's because the CEO had buy in. (1:00:57) That was the biggest thing. And he pushed it top down. And it was like, it doesn't matter if you don't want to do this. It's either you do it or you leave. That's great. You have the backing of the CEO. And what I've learned in my career is the the ways that I've had the biggest influence on business success is by pushing for changes that I knew were right that upset the status quo. Right. (1:01:23) Totally stepped on feet and people get mad, people get territorial and I just basically was like, I'm going to deal with it because this is the right thing to do. But eventually when things start to move in the right direction, people change their tune and now that's the smartest thing that you ever brought to the table or that you did. (1:01:42) Right? So part of all of our responsibility like we have a hard job and part of the responsibility of a leader is going first and pushing for these things even though you know people are going to be upset with you and you just have to trust that it's the right thing to do and that they'll get it eventually. And if they don't, the worst thing that could happen is your business starts performing better. (1:02:06) Well, Tom and Jennifer, Amanda, Kevin, you guys are kind of, I would say, half done with the push on number one. All right. You guys got together to talk about this this week. Talk about that. What were you trying to do? Where you leave it? What's left? It started yesterday. I kind of put together an agenda for us and it was it's just a math equation. (1:02:25) Uh, at the end of the day, we looked at sort of how we've been performing over the last few years. Uh we started with our revenue goal for 2026 and we started to build out what our pipeline goals need to be and how much of that pipeline in order to be successful we need to have come from our BDR marketing CSM sales motions and then defining those common goals and putting our hands together to say like okay we agree on this these numbers this is how we're going to do it next year and even you know sooner than that because we've got long sales uh cycles. Yeah. Um, so it was a great activity I (1:02:57) think we could have spent another five hours, talking through the goals and aligning. Um, and I think the big takeaway is like we got to just keep doing this more and connecting more on these goals and celebrating success when we hit them. Yeah. (1:03:16) And I want the rest of the room to notice the very subtle order that Tom put that in because it is the right order and it is the order that things naturally happen. We agreed on the numbers and then we started talking about how we're going to make it happen. It's very difficult to have a conversation about how you're going to make it happen until you agree on some number that is shared by both of you. (1:03:34) Otherwise, it's just becomes very functional, becomes very abstract. But when you put something out there and you stare at a big ass pipeline number, you're like, "Shit, that's right. So, how do we go get that?" And that's when the conversation starts to turn useful. (1:03:54) But you gota you got to finish the work on number one before you start to figure out what the tactics are. And I'll add on to this just another tactical takeaway because especially um in the PE world, you're probably getting some top down pressure for certain growth targets, right? You grow 40% year-over-year. I just went through this with my head of marketing. We had a great back and forth on this. So I say I'll disagree with that. (1:04:16) Huh? We do we never give our companies a number to go hit. We tell them, "Oh, that's great. Show us what you can do and go give us a number you can go beat." Okay. So, maybe the CEO is giving you a big number. Certainly have goals and we have an investment case. Yeah. We do not sit down and say, "Here's your number for next year. (1:04:41) " The benefit of doing both a bottoms up and a top down forecast exercise here. So if you literally just take your historical data and say if if everything just keep kept happening the way that it's been happening, this is what we're likely to produce in terms of pipeline and revenue, right? But what if we wanted to grow 10% more than that or 20% more than that? What would we have to believe, right? We, you know, we'd have to generate x amount of pipeline to hit that higher revenue target. Is that even feasible? Like what time frame would that be feasible in? Right? opens up the (1:05:11) conversation um instead of just like linear forecasting based on historicals you know what are the things that we can do oh we we've realized that we can clarify our ICP we can implement more brand and expand strategies and if we do that we believe that over x time period we can drive more incremental growth as a result right and so um doing both of those exercises and pressure testing and having that conversation with marketing sales success and finance all in the room together. That's how you're going to develop your (1:05:45) various scenarios, right? Um and and that can also be the pitch, you know, hey, if we got X, you know, dollars and more investment, we could maybe hit this higher target because this is how we would deploy it. So going through that is is crucial. Um and then it's not just about the goals. (1:06:03) It also then dubtales into the strategy and the tactics that you're going to deploy together to hit those goals. I think this might be our last slide and topic. How many RevOps folks do we have in the room? All right. Um so um measurement of go to market is such a hot topic. Um so let's talk a little bit about that today. (1:06:33) Um in general and and Paul was sort of uh mentioning this in his intro. Um, in general, I don't view like attribution as the beall endall of measurement, right? Um, but it is a good input. So, I'm not here to say that attribution is bad. I think if you have various attribution tools in play, great. Use it as one key input, but don't make decisions based solely on that information alone. (1:07:01) And what we found is um there are these four components here that allow us to have um a more balanced and measured view of how go to market is performing overall. So we'll talk a little bit about this. Um let me talk a little bit about share of search first because this really speaks to to brand. How many of you know what share of search is? How'd you explain it, Sydney? Pass fails again or just you know how many times people are googling your brand. (1:07:37) Yeah, it's a branded search. Um and now with AI coming into it, uh it's even harder to measure. Um but I think about it as it's funny because we have a product name Share. Um but I think about it as not only like direct traffic. Are you growing your direct traffic, people knowing your brand, instantly hitting your website, and are you growing people mentioning your name? Yep. (1:08:08) There's this has been a new um measurement focus of ours over the last year as we've tried to work with our clients to help build a better case for brand investments. There's a really cheap and simple tool to use called My Telescope and it essentially aggregates all of the data within Google and you can um input your brand and the competitors in your category and it's going to give you a baseline of essentially your standing relative to your competitive set in your category of how often your brand is being searched relative to your competitors. So number one, this is (1:08:49) really important to know if you're a marketer. You want to know your position in the market, right? Um and and not only your position, but your position relative to your competitors. And then you want to look at this data over time. Who has grown their share of search? Where has it dropped off? Is yours growing? Is it a plateau? Um when you look at the baseline, that's going to give you some important indicators. (1:09:20) It's very typical for people to have essentially flat share of search. And what that means is you're not doing enough to put your brand in your customers mind before they get to Google. Um, which is one of the most common underinvested areas of go to market. Um, beginning to look at this and then measure the changes over time is really fascinating in terms of being able to show that your efforts are resulting in real impact. (1:09:49) Um, so uh strongly recommend that you check that out. Uh, C teams, boards, they love this data. Um, and it's very simple to visualize and tell the story about this. Then based on your knowledge of your category, you'll probably gain other insights. Oh, wow. Someone's market share jumped. (1:10:13) Oh, that's when they acquired that company or released this new product. Um, wow, they're leading the pack. Why is that? Like, what's their positioning? Can we are we differentiated from them? Are we in a position to actually take market share from this other big competitor in the space? So it opens up a lot of really important questions just about your just your position in your category overall. (1:10:40) Um so that you can be making some good decisions and then measuring this over time will allow you to validate whether additional brand investments are essentially driving the outcome that you're looking for. Questions on that? Let's talk about split the funnel. So, um, this is a great concept that the founder of Refine Labs, Chris Walker, kind of, uh, really crystallized in how he communicated it. (1:11:06) Sydney, you've probably done like a million split the funnel analyses. The goal here is, um, not all leads are created equal, right? So, when you're looking at all of your leads um across different sources, um it can be really interesting to actually build your funnel by each pipeline source and understand what those dynamics are. (1:11:31) It doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, you cut off all these programs that generated 3,000 leads but only 36 customers. But you might say, "Wow, this conversion rate is a lot healthier. How can we be making decisions to drive more high intent sources?" um you know or how can we uh invest more in programs that are going to result in these more high intent leads that are coming into us that we know close at a significantly higher rate. (1:12:02) The other benefit of that going back to the documentation point is when you do this you will notice exactly what you laid out which is the yield is way higher for the high intent sources. And so handling them with care, speed to lead, speed to lead, speed to lead is really important. And this can crystallize things for people. (1:12:22) So rather than berating the sales team like please follow up, showing them the data is a very powerful tactic to make the point that like, hey, pipeline falls out of this at a much higher rate if we're doing the right things. Let's talk about what the right things are. Yep. and and and distinguishing between the ones that need the same day, next day outreach and then ones that maybe aren't are are not that hot, right? They can be treated differently. (1:12:48) Validate sales like, "Okay, you're right. I did give you a bunch of email addresses and nobody really wanted to buy our thing." Um, and as as a team, should we be should we be engaging with those people differently and not just, hey, you want to have a meeting? Hey, you want to have a meeting? and you want to have a meeting, right? Um, so while we do the split the funnel, what is interesting is we also think it's really important to look at your blended funnel, your blended inbound funnel in total. And this is where I think I kind of stray (1:13:22) away from direct attribution and and things being perfectly measured. Um overall if your blended funnel is improving over time you are doing things correctly right if it is not improving declining plateauing something is wrong and things need to be reassessed and re-evaluated right so you want to look at the full picture and you want to see the trend you want to dig into the details by pipeline source and understand what the differences are and have that impact impact how uh you action on these things. (1:14:03) Um in terms of pipeline sources um this is and this is a the goal here is based on whatever tools we use HubSpot, Marquetto, Salesforce, how can we collect as much data as possible without driving ourselves crazy in order to assign a pipeline source to every lead that's coming in bound to us. And how are we making sure that that data is flowing through properly from our map to our CRM so that we can do fullfunnel reporting by pipeline source right doesn't mean that again that's the you know that's the only data point that you should be looking at marketing cannot be measured perfectly and that's (1:14:52) not really the goal here. Um, Refined Labs has uh historically talked a lot about self-reported attribution, adding a like, how did you hear about us to your inbound form to begin to collect some qualitative responses that you can pair with quantitative data in terms of of sources. (1:15:12) Um, the fun thing with self-reported attribution is HubSpot will say, you know, direct traffic, organic search, and then they're going to say podcast, event, LinkedIn, or all of these other things, right? that so I've asked people like okay direct traffic how did they know to go to your website what happened that's that's the question we want to answer um so the goal here is these are some um you know uh measurement approaches that we take um that we think are the most impactful in terms of having a holistic view diving a little (1:15:43) bit deeper and also making sure you're looking at brand measurement across a broader timeline and in a different way um and uh not only looking at your your funnel for uh measuring success there. Um and Stephanie has the the vault uh cards we'll give you. You just have to email us and we'll set you up with a free account. (1:16:09) Sydney actually published a bunch of the content in there along with many other Refine Labs folks. Um but we have a lot of content on measurement and deploying all of these strategies that we talked about. So, uh, you guys can access it in case it's helpful. Um, I know we're we're just about wrapping up. So, uh, we'll share the deck. I'll get you the strategic narrative workbook because that'll be a great one to share around. (1:16:31) We'll get you guys bolt access before I wrap up. Any final questions? Yeah. One of the challenges we ran into in my last place of work was we did the cap, we did the fit score and then we figured out like our A's and our high scoring accounts, but then we hit them with BDRs, with sales, with marketing and the these customers would just get they were inundated too much too fast. (1:17:02) It was just too much and a BBR and a salesperson would be reaching out to all the a how we divide and conquer, how how you would uh implement something like that. Yeah. So, you want to think about when you have your target account list and then you think about it from a brand perspective. (1:17:25) It's how do I get our brand in front of all of these accounts, right? And what are the many ways that I can do that? We can have an event strategy to get in front of people and invite them to cool events. We can do paid advertising to our list of target accounts, but not with a CTA of get a demo or book a meeting talking about their talk uh using our strategic narrative to communicate that we understand the big shift in the world, who will be winners and losers, the pain that they're having and how to solve that, right? um you can have some you know uh strategic sales engagement with these accounts but in the right way. Um do you (1:18:10) have information data reports resources that your team can be sharing with a potential prospect? Um, I've been playing with some outbound sales, you know, sequences and emails, and it's not, hey, you want a meeting? It's, hey, we just built this ROI calculator. Put in your ad spend and a couple of other pieces of information, and we'll send you a report on how you might be able to make some improvements, right? Um, hey, have you heard of the vault? You on free access for 30 days to access some of our items, right? How are (1:18:46) you giving value in that sales outreach as a first touch point without just demanding the meeting, right? Um, and that's step one. You have to create that awareness and then of course like yes, you want to be able to convert people into meetings eventually and you can do a lot of the things that you just described, but it should be very thoughtful in terms of like how are we focusing on this brand building? I'm much more likely to respond or open an email if it's from a brand that I've heard about, right? Um, if I've never heard of you and I get my like 30th AI (1:19:21) email of the day asking for a meeting, I'm just going to delete it, right? Or it's already going to my spam filter. So, those types of things need to be really, really intentional. What I would recommend, we just did this for a couple of our customers that was super helpful. We did this like buying committee research. (1:19:45) just get like 10 potential customers or people that uh said no in your sales process and ask them uh basically everything that happened uh leading up to them making a decision. Um we did this for Blackline the client that I mentioned and what was so interesting was we got some really um good insights. They thought their Gartner quadrant uh thing was like that's why people buy from us and nobody that bought from them like ever mentioned it, right? They also had someone say that when a finance expert came on the call, the sales call, they decided that they were going to (1:20:23) purchase that because they were displaying subject matter expertise of the product. Um, and they literally made that one change and started closing way more deals as a result, right? So, some of it is going to be so dependent on your space and your customers, you know, go ask them. And I'm like, literally, you can just ask 10 of them. (1:20:47) This doesn't need to be some like large scale research project, right? It can be super simple in that way. Was a little all over the place, but hopefully gave you a few little nuggets to take away. No, it's great. The aha too is like we agree on the number and then we also agree on the approach to the like the outbound. (1:21:04) So like I think it's exciting and there's ways to do outbound that are value ad. Sure. my event invite. Like I knew 120 people weren't coming to this event, but like they've now have an association of like, oh, Megan, the CEO of Refine Labs, invited me to this cool dinner. And like that's and that's fine, right? And then eventually I'll do something else and then something else. (1:21:30) Um, but it's it's and that for me it's very intentional because I'm like I don't want anyone to ever have this impression that I am pushing them to hire us. right? I want them to believe that I bring all of the best marketers together, that they want to be in our, you know, ecosystem. Um, that type of thing. It was great to spend time together. Thanks for having me, Paul. Yeah. (1:22:00) I appreciate your So, I'm absolutely sure one thing is going to happen. People are going to want to see more of your stuff and people are going to want to hear more about Refine Labs thinks and the stuff you guys do. Where is the best place for everyone in the room to see that? LinkedIn is the best place. You can find me on LinkedIn. (1:22:19) Um my email website and then when you get into the vault um there's a ton of really great resources. Um and again we have free access if you want. Awesome. Thanks for coming. Thanks for that.