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In this episode of Confessions Of A B2B Marketer, I'm joined by a man that left a very popular comment on one of my recent LinkedIn Posts. I was being a little controversial stating that actually businesses COULD win by just capturing demand... as Fame has grown to $1m ARR with doing just that. In reality, the discussion was more nuanced... and Sam shared his opinion in a calm and knowledgeable manner... I had to bring him on to learn more about this AND lead gen versus demand gen, using paid spend for content consumption and to pitch him a very special marketing campaign I have been planning.
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If all you do is create demand and you don't have a mechanism to capture it, good luck. If all you do is capture demand, but you don't have anything creating it, you're gonna hit that plateau. So that's where those two together lead to the growth goals and how you're going to achieve those.
Good. How's your week been? Good. How are you? Man, it's been a crazy one. It's been long. Good. It's been busy, Productive. I am very glad. The weekend is right around the. How about yours? Nice. Yeah, I would say the same. It's been pretty, been a big week, but a productive one. I feel feeling pretty good about it in general.
Good feeling pretty good about B2B marketing, which is what we're here to talk about, by the way. Yeah. So the things I would like to cover is I wanna learn about first your journey in Refine Labs. I think it's an amazing case study for like a services. And then I want to talk about your thoughts around demand gen versus lead gen, capturing creating demand, which is actually how we met on LinkedIn last week.
Paid spend for content consumption, which I think you have a popular LinkedIn post about. And then I have a special surprise idea marketing idea that I wanna pitch you at the end. Love it. Let's get into it. . So Refine labs, you joined, I think around two years ago, is that right? That's correct. Yep. And how did you, like, why did you join?
How did you. Yeah, so I have up to that. I was, I've been in B2B for nearly 10 years at that point, at a large enterprise software company. It started as the equivalent of an sdr, worked my way up into marketing. I always knew I wanted be more on the marketing side, and essentially I got to the point where I was leading the, the digital marketing team, the paid aspect of it, and was just starting to feel this disconnect between how we were going to the market.
The way that users were engaging with the content and how we were setting up our ads. And it was just this feeling. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I knew it wasn't the best way, the most effective way. And then like everyone else on LinkedIn, and I don't know, I'm sure you've talked to like enter Chris Walker, see one of his posts and I was just like, Okay.
He was able to put into words that feeling that I've just had in my stomach for so long. It's not people wanting to download your rebook and give up their email address. They don't want to attend a webinar when they want to buy. They want to buy, when they want to learn, they want to learn. And we keep confusing these two as what's intent versus what's just someone doing research and going about their day to day of how to do their job better.
So when I came across that with Chris, that led to a couple conversations with he and I, I was at a point where I was ready to advance in my career. It was a great opportunity for me to jump full-time into a, a director of demand gen type roles. Hopped on over when we were less than 10 employees. Um, fast forward two years, we're at 120 on continuing to grow.
Before we talk more about refined labs, why do you think that that change or that shift in how people wanted to buy and how companies were marketing, why do you think that happened? Like recently, last few years? Why not like 15 years ago? Yeah, I think it's been a couple of things. Namely, I mean, it's about last couple years, especially Covid, just everything had to go more digital native, but the way that people buy nowadays is much different.
It used to be you had to talk to a sales rep to get any type of information about a product or service. Everything was very hidden. It was a relationship based, in person, relationship based. Whereas in the last handful of. Information is everywhere online. You can go and find a video for any you, I mean, not that you could become a doctor, but you could become a doctor more or less just by going and reading the amount of research articles and everything else on there.
Not advising that people do that, but the same kind of thing. I mean, go up to B2B and software and you're really not that specially, your product is not that crazy complicated where people are gonna do their own research, they want to learn what you're about, how you're gonna help them achieve better results.
How to get their day to day. There were companies who understood this shift, and they really led the charge of the early adoption of, let's just give our content away for free. Let them educate themselves. Instead of saying, You have to talk to a sales rep to get that, What if we just start putting our white sheets out there?
What if we give them case studies to understand how someone in a similar industry or a similar role solved that problem? And so I think as more and more of that happened, that's what really led to the shift. That expectation started to be set within the consumer. So if you weren't doing that at your company, they were just saying, Okay, cool.
I'll go find another competitor of yours who does have that information that I can access, and then go learn about them more instead makes total sense. So essentially the environment changed because of the internet. And so those businesses that adapted to this new environment of buying were starting to thrive.
And then Refin Labs is like, I would say, the thought leader in this change. And it's educating the market about this change. And then I guess you help your clients adapt to the change. Would you say that's accurate? You've simplified that a lot more than my five minutes civil look. We earlier. I wouldn't say that we're no
I would say we're the amplifiers for this change. It's been done before us. We've just really helped it become more accepted in the business. There were companies that were doing this before. We were about, I mean, drifted a great job of it a handful of years ago, and there's other examples it could certainly be pointed to.
Got it. Okay, so, so you join less than 10 people. I understand you have like a hundred people. Yeah, we're at a, We just passed 120 about a month ago. Congrats. And your role, has it changed? Since I started, so I joined as a Director of Demand Generation, and now I'm one of the VPs of Demand generation. So I oversee a team of Directors of Demand Generation and the performance marketing managers who report to those.
So those are the individuals. We all work directly with our clients to help them craft their strategies and the execution plan within the platforms in order to achieve their pipeline and revenue. And so you are running Demand generation for REFINE Labs clients, not refine labs, correct? Yeah. It's primarily for our clients.
When we say demand gen for refine labs, we got engaged on LinkedIn. That's our biggest strategy honestly, with acquisition is. Educating the market, engaging others in the, the marketing space through channels like LinkedIn, TikTok, and others. So that's always the fun. What's the ROI on that? Like? I'm not get, we're never gonna see an attribution.
I commented on Sam Keeley's post on LinkedIn, but here you and I are having a conversation about something who could say that something couldn't come out of this for our listeners or, or anything else. We do not have an outbound sales motion intentionally because we have, we drive all this demand to our company.
We have a sales team that's com inbound oriented, where they field the people that come in from our request. But yeah, that's a big part of our own demand strategy is the number of voices that you see coming from our team that are helping to educate just the larger B2B marketing. So on that note, you have been killing LinkedIn recently.
Appreciate that. . Can I ask you about like processes behind that? Do you like write out of the weekend and post them every morning? Do you post every day? Any like specific tips related to that? Yeah, so I start off meditating for a half hour and then I go in my Z garden. No, I'm kidding. I'm not one of those gurus that could give you all this stuff.
There's a lot of different ways that people do it. Me personally, I find that content that I enjoy writing the most about. Content that's top of mind for me. What am I experiencing with the client currently? What am I seeing in the market itself? So I could probably do a better job of dedicating myself to sitting down for an hour over the weekend and, and writing out my post for the week.
But more often than not, it's, I'm hopping on in the morning, I'm spending a half hour thinking about a topic or something that's come up, and then starting to write that, distill it down into a consumable way for LinkedIn, and then pushing it out in that way. So , it's not as, Thought theater ish, as you might think.
But that's why I think it's so relevant, because so many people are experiencing those types of things because they are the timely content pieces, not this big fluff about how you should do demand generation. And just saying the platitudes that we all see on LinkedIn, it's like, I like to get more into the how and the why behind things, not just the what.
So you're in like a client meeting, something happens or you, you see some data, you understand something, you're like, I should write a post about that. Maybe that day or another day you'll write it out, bang it out, and then now you're getting like thousands of likes. Not thousands. I wish only Chris gets that.
No. Okay. Couple hundred. But no, I enjoy more, I gauge not the success of it by the likes, but the conversations that come, cuz that's what tells me. I mean you can get all the people like great posts, but that doesn't mean anything. Like, I like the people that ask the deeper questions from it. I can then help them or how they're overcoming something similar.
Cuz to me that's the fun part. I mean, that's what social media is really for at the end of the day. Not to put yourself on a pedestal, but to engage with other. Which is exactly how we met. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna get this post out and because you kind of dominated, So my post for people listening, my post was a little bit, I don't know if it's, I don't know if I should say facetious, but it was a little bit like simplified, right?
Cuz my point is basically that we are fame podcast agency have grown only through capturing demand. And I think a refine labs like motto or belief is that people that create demand are gonna win. And so I basically just. I'll like abbreviate the post business that create demand will win. I call bullshit.
Creating demand is five x more complex and expensive than capturing demand. We've gone from zero to 1 million AR simply through capturing demand. Then Chris, Oh yeah, so then Sam comes in your po your comment 31 likes on the comment. More like, oh, nearly more likes than post itself. So, and it's just a, like a really, really good, like thoughtful response because I like really the answer is, is like size of company, right?
Like we're a lot smaller. Would you agree? Because you're saying here Yeah, it's more complex and expensive and that's why most companies store out for 10 million. Theory to 1 million can easily be done once 10 million is another story. Can you like just elaborate on your answer to my maybe oversimplified LinkedIn post?
Yeah, so it goes to the concept of just how much demand is available to be captured at a current point in time. So a lot of organizations that come to us, they have done a great job running Google ads, or I say, Great job, they've been running Google Ads and other capture demand type channel. What then happens is they start to hit a plateau in terms of how much revenue or pipeline they're generating in a year.
They have their board, they have their leadership saying, We need to increase our pipeline. We have this goal for this year that we're not going to hit. And so that's where it really becomes. You're maxing them out, you are capturing demand in Google. There's only so many searches for podcasting software.
So how do you then go in and bring more pipeline and revenue for your organization? And that's where the create demand comes in. And it's ultimately, it's the snowball that you start rolling that feeds into that capture demand. So what it is, is when you create demand, you're educating your i c who may not know that they even have a problem or that there's a solution to something like this.
Someone could just be thinking podcasting software. I just go on Zoom, I record it, and then I pull the audio from it. And. Yeah, that does work. Is there a better way? I bet there is. But unless they know that there is a solution out there, that's what creating demand does is, is it allows you to get in front of those individuals and then you educate more and more and more of your icp.
And what happens is, say in a month you have. A hundred searches for bass podcasting software. As you continue to educate your icp, you'll see two months later, there's 120 searches for that. Five months later, there's 180 searches for it. So you get more people thinking about it, and that's what fills up that capture demand bucket.
But there's not gonna be more demand ready to be captured if you aren't creating the interest for that type of topic. And so that's why what we say is, A balance between creating and capturing demand. And what you have to do is really figure out what's the right mix for you. Because in order to be truly successful, they both rely on one another.
Otherwise, you're going to hit those plateaus. If all you do is create demand and you don't have a mechanism to capture it, good luck. If all you do is capture demand, but you don't have anything creating it, you're gonna hit that plateau. So that's where those two together lead to the growth goals and how you're going to achieve.
But you would agree at an earlier stage when a company has limited resources in an existing, when they're not creating something new or innovative in an existing market, you would focus on capturing demand first. Yeah, I mean there's, it's the low hanging crew, right? How many people are showing up right now for podcasting software?
Let's go make sure that we're putting enough budget to Google to capture those. What I say and what we usually recommend is it depends on the size of your budget because I think in that, I may have provided an example, or in another post I wrote was say, there's $2,000 worth of search spend towards that type of keyword.
If your total company budget for media spend is $5,000, that's 40% of your budget. If it's $50,000, that's nothing. That's 4% of your budget. What you wanna do is just make sure that you are showing up for it. But I would never go all in 100% on capture demand. Even if you only have $5,000, let's say carve out a thousand dollars, get your true ICP and just get out there because that's the, the brilliance of LinkedIn and, and Facebook on Google.
If you go after the higher educational type phrases, more low intent. So what is podcasting software where they're just looking to underst. I don't know what it is. I want to understand how it could work for us. I would rather spend $35 to get a thousand impressions. So a $35 CPM versus $35 for one click.
And so that's where you just need to think about the scalability, the efficiency of it, and understanding your ICP with how they're going to engage with that. Are they going to convert on it or are there other mechanisms to educate them in a better way that'll lead to longer term? Nice. So I wanna be careful we segregate like the wisdom that you're sharing with the strategy that like led us to this point.
So here, like it's great to have all this knowledge, but what I think is also interesting is the way that you guys go out and share this knowledge, for example, like adding value on other people's LinkedIn posts because we can't tell how many impressions that comment got, but it was probably in the thousand.
Anybody reading that is gonna get educated about the difference between capturing and creating, then they're gonna be like, Oh, who is Sam? Click on the profile. See some other great posts, potentially connect with you. Maybe check out refine labs. Do you know what I mean? And so I think that the way you guys do LinkedIn is really cool and interesting.
Yeah, it's leveraging the platform in the way that people want to use it. They want to go be educated, engage with others. I can tell you, I don't scroll LinkedIn looking for an ad that says, get a demo of our product. Like I've honestly become kind of immune to those. Even though I'm a, a demand marketer, I look for people with interesting points of views, conversations that I'd want to join, either to just be a fly on the wall and observe.
Again, that's the impression. You're not gonna see me like it, you're not gonna see me comment it. I'm gonna consume it though, and you can believe. Or there is a conversation like yours where I want to inject a point of view, have a, a good dialogue about it. And I think that's something that I wish we could be better about in today's day and age is coming from two people of different points of view.
You and I can be like, say, let's talk about it. Let's have a good conversation. Instead of, I'm right, you're wrong. Like that doesn't get anywhere at the end of the day. So I was really glad when you reached out about having this conversation. That's really the way that we like to go about it is just helping marketers improve what they do, and then finding those who are active on the platform and joining in the conversation so they can become a part of our network.
We educate them and also it helps expand our philosophy and approach to B2B marketing. They don't have to hire us to go on and start implementing a lot of what we do, and that's what we're, we're really trying to create is just this next wave of B2B marketers who are doing it. Yeah, and what I love about that is that they can learn and improve their lives, improve their businesses without paying you guys anything.
But the very fact that you are adding value to them means that if at some point they're a CMO at a Series D SaaS company, they're gonna come to you. And they're probably telling their friends that are CMOs at Series D SaaS companies that they need to go to you. Yeah, there's no downside to it. At the end of the day.
It's just us putting in the time, investing that into the platform, and it's not attribution. We could talk all day about that. It's not a direct attribution methodology. It's play the long game. So you mentioned just now about you not clicking on a LinkedIn ad saying, Get a demo of my software. How do you think then that paid budget should be spent on social platforms?
Yeah, that's always a fun one. The way that I like to do it. Do you remember growing up reading the Choose Your Own Adventure books? Okay, so what I like to do is within the icp, so I know I've said that a million times an ideal customer profile in case anyone isn't familiar with it. I like to provide them with multiple avenues to become familiar with your brand.
So the mistake that too many organizations make is that they overinvest in these product oriented ads or the beta demos. Get an a hundred dollars gift card if you come get a demo with our sales. And they treat the ICP as if 98 to 99% of them are actively in market and shopping when the reality is it's the inverse, maybe one to 2% are actively in market shopping.
So what we like to do is come with an approach of a balance way to give them multiple entry points into your brand. So if you're thinking about cold targeting people who've never heard of you, or maybe once or twice, you know, very low familiar. , you can approach it from two lenses. One is the content types themselves, so people learn and consume in different formats.
So you could do product feature highlights. That's what a lot of people do. You could do demo previews showing how the product works. So put yourselves in the, in the shoes of, of I'm the customer. It doesn't have to be anything sexy. Yeah. I love the minute, 32 minute long loom style ads that just show like, Here's how you do this in the product.
It's really cool. It's really simple. And then they get a sense of how it all works and they can see how that would benefit. And then going further from that, you've got things like case studies, educational blog posts, how to do your job better, how to make your job easier, podcast snippets. So those do incredibly well.
So coming up with multiple content types in the beginning to figure out just what's your ICP going to engage with in the beginning. I know people a handful of years ago, love making the general personas. We have four personas that we're going after. Bob, the CEO likes to do this. Jenny, the CFO, likes to do this.
They always consume this type of content when in reality, You could have 10 people in the same world, 10 people are gonna consume content differently. So those days are a little bit past. So that's why we say give multiple content types and then the content mediums themselves. So written, audio, video, short form, long form.
Everyone likes to consume things differently. So these, these generalities don't quite work anymore. So, Investing in ways that you can get in front of your ICP in multiple manners is going to pay off in the long term. And you'll start to see trends around, okay, case studies more often than not do, do better than our educational blog posts.
So we can start to shift our budget where it's not a 50 50 split between those, but let's do a 70 30 and 80 20, and you can get more data driven from that standpoint. But you'll often find that the more routes that you give individuals to become familiar with your product, your brand, the more successful that you're going to.
So what I'm hearing really is trying to sculpt your sales process to how people actually want to buy crazy, right? Is that about right? ? That is crazy, isn't it? Oh, common sense marketing. And so then at any point, maybe further down the funnel, if you have more, I guess, I don't know, like a very warm retargeting audience, would you then have an ad with a CTA to a.
So we'll still do retargeting. You can try that. We've done it with a number of clients where we try the squeeze page. We strive the demo. Is it successful? It does. Okay. You will get some people from it, and then that's also where. If you look at a retargeting audience conversation for another day, it's always going to over report on the success cuz it's gonna take that last touch or the most recent ad that they saw.
So if you do add one that gets unfamiliar cold targeting add two, they only get the retargeting. Of course it's gonna say the retargeting is what influence that view through conversion because it's negating out that first one. So that's why we like to ask, how'd you hear about us? And go more to channel level, but you can try it.
It's, we see some success with clients. We see no success with others. My advice for any client that comes to us is I will never make an. As I make one an always never type statement, I say, Let's try it out. Here's what we normally will see. It's probably not gonna work, but let's find it out. We're every business is unique, every market is unique, so we can figure out what's the right mix for you and go from there.
But generally, we just find that people want to raise their hand when they're ready to talk. You can push them to that page and see if they're ready. You'll, you might get a couple, a little prematurely who will be open to it. Buyers are smart. They, every website has the top right button. You are trained, There is a very clear CTA about how to get in touch with your company.
We all know that there's a reason that they aren't clicking on that when they're at their website and they're going to the resources section instead. So yeah, it's a balance. But yeah, what you can do with retargeting, you can give. More in depth case studies. So if you see that people visited, say you serve four different industries, and you see that they've visited this specific industry page, now you could serve a more in-depth case study specific to that industry.
Or you can do things that lean more towards the insight that you've gotten from them. And then what we say is on the page itself. So if you do wanna go into your website, Give them multiple avenues to get in touch. Make it easy. So you've got the sticky CTA in the top right. As you work through the blog post or the case study, give a couple examples of like, Hey, do you just wanna like chat with a sales rep now and SDR or a consultant?
Cool, here you go. So you can work it in as part of the user experience itself, but that's why I say don't underestimate your buyers. No, I think that could be the title of the asset. Now, Sam, I'm gonna pitch you my idea. So let's, I've got like $5,000 to spend, right? I could spend put all 5,000 into LinkedIn ads saying, Go and request a podcast proposal request from our site to all, all our buyers.
Or I could do this other thing, which I thought of yesterday when I was doing a PERS on class. And I'll explain why it came up in the Patton class in a minute. But before I tell you the idea, I have to introduce two concepts that are like driving the idea. The first is the concept that I learned ages ago about content marketing.
If, if you're thinking about creating a piece of content, maybe if there's actually a better idea to create that piece of content for the influences of the people that you're trying to reach, as opposed to the people that you're trying to reach, cuz then if you do that, then the influencers are gonna like it and share it.
Concept number. Number two is this, I'm playing with the tagline for, uh, Fame, the business. It's called Interruption is the Enemy. And so instead of investing your marketing to interrupt these people that probably don't wanna buy a podcast, we wanna create something that is remarkable like Seth Code would say.
So those are the two concepts. So what I'm thinking, or I got the idea because I was doing a Peloton class and the instructor was saying how it was actually an old class, but it was for the summer of 2021, he created a podcast, No, not podcast, a cocktail for his fans. So what I'm thinking is because the topic of like demand, Jan is very hot right now on LinkedIn, and so what I'm thinking is I'm gonna pay a cocktail expert to design a cocktail that's gonna be like themed around demand generation thinking, maybe call it like the dg, or if the cocktail man, man or woman can think of a better name, we can work with that.
Then, so we're gonna design this cocktail. It's gonna be like the demand generation cocktail, and then I can send it to all of the, or like a little pack maybe, or to like demand generation events or to like big, like demand gen influencers like you guys, for example. And then you're all gonna be like drinking the DG in the summer of 2022 in the sun and it's gonna get loads of traction on LinkedIn.
What do we think? A good use of $5,000? It would be an interesting one. Mm, Okay. Called Kool-Aid. So everyone's singing don't drink the Kool-Aid. Oh yeah. Okay. Nice. Yeah, the dg, I could. Yeah, better. Like you think I could use the $5,000 in a better way and you want to go that influencer route? I think so. I mean, I think it's to just be quite funny as well.
Yeah. Yeah. A little tongue in cheek. I'd say test it out. Why not try it with a handful of people? See what they do with it. See what they put their spin on it. So while you're enjoying your content, Fire up a, a 32nd just like video of your definition of demand gen or what you think needs to change about it, or, Oh, make it a spicy cocktail.
Give us your, your hot take on, on demand gen in the next year. You know, play with it. Have them add, you give the thought leader the platform that them use their voice to project from there, so, mm-hmm. , give them the prompt and then you can see where it goes and, and what they take. You aggregate all of that, and then you have the branded cocktail.
So yeah, put your, your name on it or something else. It'd be different . I think the problem is I'm gonna have to invest up front because I wanna get a cocktail expert to like design this. So I'm gonna have to invest up upfront to pay that person to do that. I dunno how much it costs. I need to research and also I need to do it before this podcast episode goes live because otherwise someone's gonna take the really good idea,
So we'll see. Amazing. Okay, I'm gonna do it. Sam, I wanna thank you so much. It was very seamless, like your comment and then bringing you on the show very fast. And obviously thank you for sharing all the wisdom about Demand Generation and thanks for like banging out sweet link posts. I'm like a big fan of the way Refine labs, markets itself.
And so it was great to learn from you one on one. Yeah. Well, I appreciate this time. This has been fun. We definitely need to, to do it again after those cocktails go out. Thanks, Sam. All right.
And thank you for listening to this episode of The Confessions of the Beat to Be Marked Up podcast. I wanna thank Sam for coming. And sharing all of that demand generation wisdom. It's great to hear from somebody within this amazing company called Refined Lab. So thank you so much. And of course if you have any questions about the show, you can add me on LinkedIn, Tom Hunt, send me any questions in direct message.
If you have any feedback, please leave that in the form of a Apple Podcast rating and review. I'll start reading this out. So if you leave the rating or. And then just ping me saying you've done it with your domain, with your brand. And then I'll read that out in the outro of shows going forward so you can get some exposure to the audience.
And of course, thank you so much for listening.