Chris Walker is (probably) the father of demand gen as we all know it today. He is also the CEO at Refine Labs and host of the State of Demand Gen podcast. Chris and his team at Refine Labs is not only working with high-growth SaaS companies in the US but are also very present in the EMEA area giving them a unique perspective on both markets.
On this episode we talk about:
Are you ready to join the movement? Join our free slack community where some of the best demand marketers in the world share knowledge on demandgenerationmovement.com.
This episode is brought to you by our great sponsors Albacross, HockeyStack & Riverside.fm.
Chris Walker is (probably) the father of demand gen as we all know it today. He is also the CEO at Refine Labs and host of the State of Demand Gen podcast. Chris and his team at Refine Labs is not only working with high-growth SaaS companies in the US but are also very present in the EMEA area giving them a unique perspective on both markets.
On this episode we talk about:
Are you ready to join the movement? Join our free slack community where some of the best demand marketers in the world share knowledge on demandgenerationmovement.com.
This episode is brought to you by our great sponsors Albacross, HockeyStack & Riverside.fm.
The best b2b SaaS companies in the world have made the shift towards a demand generation strategy focused on revenue and revenue. And Europe is falling behind. What about you? What about? Isn't it about time you made the shift? On this podcast, we interviewed leaders at the forefront of modern demand generation to help you make the shift and join the movement join the movement, we need to drop the MQLs and focus on what matters leading you into the future. This is the demand generation movement. And this is your host, Adam Holmgren.
Adam Holmgren:Okay, welcome to the demand generation movement. And this time, it's my pleasure to welcome Chris Walker, CEO at refine labs, host of the state of the Mandiant podcast and probably the father of demand yen as we all know it today. Great to have you, Chris.
Chris Walker:Adam, thanks for the introduction, and really good to be on the show. And finally, to meet you, it's been great to watch you from afar and what you've been doing for the space, especially in EMEA. And looking forward to talking about this more with you.
Adam Holmgren:Yeah, thank you. And when I think of demand yen, your name is for sure. The first one that pops up in my head. And after working with so many companies in Europe, and I know you have as well. I know for a fact that many of them don't even recognize demand yen as a concept. So I'm really thrilled to have you here and go a bit back to basics really. And maybe we can start there. What is demand generation for you really? And why should marketers care?
Chris Walker:Yeah, so I'll talk through what I see as the current state of quote unquote demand gen in a Mia, which I believe to be just like traditional lead gen confused as demand generation. And so what I see mainly in EMEA, I'm not sure if this is just because the movement is happening more aggressively inside of the US because of how buyers have moved or because of the measurement and metrics that people use in the media or the cultural components of it. I'm not sure what the rationale as to why but I do see a me of being behind the US in this case. And what companies do is lead gen, which is marketing, collecting some level of contact information or creating some type of signals so that their sales team can try to do sales to people that most likely do not want to buy right now. Which was a great, and probably the most effective way for b2b companies to go to market in the early 2000 10s, when there wasn't a ton of contact information available. And so salespeople needed, they didn't have zoom info, they didn't have intent data, they didn't have those things. And so salespeople needed marketing, to build a booth and scan badges to get names and phone numbers, to build ebooks and do SEO so that people filled out this form. So they had email addresses to send emails or to cold call to otherwise buy lists and things like that from trade publications, those are a lot of the quote unquote demand gen things that are actually lead generation that marketers did, you know, five or 10 years ago that still seem to be present. Now, given the ridiculous amount of change and disruption that's happened in the landscape for marketing, which I believe to be like one of the most empowering things that's changed in marketing, b2b marketing in the history of b2b marketing, which is that marketers now do not need the trade publication, they do not need the conference, they do not need to buy the list, they can use tools that are available on the internet right now to go out and actively directly communicate with their target customer using content using paid targeted paid advertisements to get to, for instance, CFOs, at companies that are exactly the size or it exactly this country, or wherever you're going for, with the power of LinkedIn targeting, and even the sophistication of other tools like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, connected TV has become as emerging with better b2b targeting now as well. And so all of these tools are out there now that allow marketers to transition away from collecting contact information to be the initial seed, so that sales can try to go and create demand, which is all that it was, it was that back then marketers didn't have the way to do that. So they collected the email, and then sales went out to buyers that don't want to buy and try to create demand for them. The big shift here now is that because of how buyers have changed the availability of access of information and their peers, that now marketing can do a lot of these things and create demand directly with the buyer. And then sales is way more focused on capturing demand that marketing is creating, in addition to running the strategic personalized outbound to high value accounts, and that's where I think that these clicks sort of dual GTM motions need to get to I see a lot of companies blending them into one and mainly doing lead gen with sales.
Adam Holmgren:I think that's pretty pretty spot on as well and When I searched for, as an example for for Legion jobs in Europe, or in EMA, I get around 30,000 results. And if I do the same for demand yen I get around 3000. So so it's it's pretty clear that there is it's behind for sure what what would you say are like, what's needed for this market to kind of take the first steps to grow.
Chris Walker:The I'll tell you what, what happened for me. And so what happened for me in order to take these initial steps of basically just seeing what's happening in reality and acknowledging it. So one of the first keys is to stop focusing so much on what your competitors are doing, what your peers are doing, and things like that. And stop focusing on that, and instead, focus on your customer. So that's a big shift that I don't see enough b2b companies making, especially in the marketing department, maybe in product, you know, maybe in customer success, but not in marketing. And so taking that shift, where you start to focus on your customer and be like, Okay, what are these people doing? What are they like? What are their goals? Where are they actually looking for information? How do they spend time? What, who, which people? Are they listening to get information about the stuff that we sell? Okay, now that we know all those things, the first step is just acknowledging that it's happening, right. So if you're looking at the marketing persona, they spent a ton of time on LinkedIn, it's been a ton of time on other social networks, they spent a ton of time in communities like revenue collective peak of their sub communities, they go to tons of different events, they get a lot of their information, mainly from quote unquote, key, what I call key opinion leaders, whether people would call influencers key opinion leaders that have leading thoughts that are present on the internet. And so that's where people are getting information. And now you as a company, like, if you are running, SEO, running lead gen building tradeshow booths, you're you're marketing in places where people aren't looking anymore, they're not looking to buy, they're not looking to buy stuff, or discover stuff in those places anymore. And so you need to ship acknowledge that and then shift the marketing to the places where people are looking for it today. And so that was a big thing. For me, I do that through qualitative market research, just asking people those questions that I listed out is super helpful, I record a lot of those calls and insights and then share them with executives at the company. Once I get those qualitative insights, I see a couple of patterns and signals of okay, like, you know, CFOs are getting a lot of their they say they're getting a lot of their information on Twitter and LinkedIn, which is pretend this is made up data. But let's just say we did some qualitative research, we got that as data points, then we need that I would do a large scale quantitative survey to prove that in a much larger sample, that, hey, it's not just these three people that I interviewed that are feeling this, we just surveyed 20, whatever, 2000 CFOs, in the Nordics and found that, you know, 65% of them said that they use LinkedIn once, at least once a day, what are we doing over here, we don't post content on LinkedIn anyway, we don't have a LinkedIn, we don't have a content strategy. And those are some of the obvious insights. Like it's sad that companies need to go through all that work to do qualitative research to put together a survey and waste six months of time when the insights obvious. But a lot of companies need to do that. I've had to do that before as an employee to get executives on board. But it's the if you start with your customer, it becomes really, really obvious.
Adam Holmgren:Yeah, and when I when I told my audience or so that you were joining in my DMs blew up with questions. So you always dabbled a bit into into this question. I feel like I have to ask because everyone, everyone wants to know about it, which is the dark social, of course, as you just talked about, and dark funnel or whatever you call it. But can you also go a bit back to basics on this kind of journey? How, how people buy these days? And how then actually, companies can utilize it in a way?
Chris Walker:Yeah, so generally, this is sort of like what I just talked about. But generally, I just feel like marketers are playing an old game with old rules. And the landscape has shifted. And there's new rules that you could play by if you wanted to, that would help you win the game when a different game better and they're just not not playing with them. So we could talk through it in 2014, or whatever, you know what I mean, early 2000 10s, I was a b2b marketer. At that time, the internet had not matured enough b2b companies did not have a digital strategy. b2b buyers did a lot of research in more quote unquote, traditional ways because the internet hadn't come to maturity. There was no review sites. There was no communities like the a lot of the places that we see whether that's in Slack communities online, like discord or other places on the internet, through social networks, things like that. The ability that you would know all of your different peers so think about you as a b2b professional like you spend way more time engaged on the internet. with other people that do your job way more right now than you did just three years ago, and it was it was non existent seven years ago. And so there's these, the emergence of the Internet has created communication channels where b2b buyers can get access to information from people that they trust, more than the places where they used to get information, the places where they used to get information were search engines, which typically will drive like affiliate type of biased blogs or vendor based blogs, they would get information from analyst firms. And they would get information from technology vendors. And so now the big shift that's happened is that when they were getting information from those sources, those were the most trustworthy available sources that they could get it from. And it's not that those sources are not trustworthy. It's that they, the b2b buyers, trust their peers more. And so now that they have access to peers, instead of going to the website and asking your sales rep a question, they're going to go into a community and they're gonna ask 20 people that they trust that do their job that they think are unbiased. They're going to go to a social network, and they're going to post about it. They're going to pick up their phone, and they're going to text three other CMOS that they trust and ask them, Hey, what's your experience been in this category? Or working with this firm? Or I'm thinking about switching from this company? Who should I use instead? And all of the searches that used to happen through Google Now happened through what I call dark social channels, which are untrackable word of mouth channels that have been created through the scale of the internet, where it's the it's the information highway of b2b where all this stuff is happening. And because companies can't track it, they just think that it's not happening. They just don't acknowledge it. And then they show up and people are buying stuff in there. Like, yeah, Google search is doing all that, that impact for us, because those are the only touch points that that attribution software can measure right now. And so yeah, it would be happy to go deeper. But that's dark social at a high level.
Adam Holmgren:Yeah, I think that's great. And what I hear from any marketers in Ema is that the management team doesn't really get the long game or get marketing in that sense. And even if they do, there is some sort of skepticism around it. They want to see the kind of ROI. And do you have any tips for how to convince the management team? I think this is, you know, relevant for so many marketers. Yeah.
Chris Walker:So first, in the people that are over there in EMEA don't feel bad, most US based businesses have all the same challenges and do all the same dumb stuff. So this is not specific to me, although the question was rooted there. When it comes down to it, we've done a couple of core things that I, I struggled to call innovation, because they're so simple, but they really are, in my view, groundbreaking type of things. So one of the things that we've done is we've added a field to our high intent conversion form, which a majority of our revenue comes through, if you do an analysis, and you look as b2b SaaS company, and you'd say, Where did all of our marketing revenue come from? If you just look at it, you'll see that more than 60%, sometimes upwards of 90% come from your demo, or contact sales type of form on your website. And then you look at all that stuff, and what we did inserted on those forums, because right now all you get as a data point of attribution software that's going to tell you organic search, direct traffic or paid search because of attribution bias the lower funnel channels. And so we added a free text field that's required. And then it just said, How did you hear about our company? How did you hear about X, and we've now we did that in our company. And now we've rolled that out to more than 30 b2b SaaS companies that are collecting insights at scale. And when we do that, we also recommend that companies then take that and push it into Slack so that every qualified buyer that comes through and does this, you're going to see a at the attribution source to come through software and the How did you hear about us so that everyone in the company can now see what's going on? Our entire company gets this data we celebrate when people say, Hey, I heard about you from this employee, or I heard about you from this person. And the data that we're collecting there is incredible. We're getting exactly who's referring us business, we're getting exactly where people are discovering or getting entry point into a long form content show like, like a podcast or LinkedIn or YouTube. So we're getting examples like you did this event with Dave Gearhart, which that exposed me to Chris Walker. And then I started listening to your podcast and then six months later, I'm asking for a consultation. Those are some of the insights that we're getting and then attribution software says direct traffic, which gives you zero insights to guide strategy. And so when I do this, this is not to this is not to go back and prove ROI to executives. This is to drive marketing strategy, which is what attribution is supposed to be for. Some somehow attribution got confused and now attribution is used to prove ROI of marketing to help justify and build business cases for technology vendors, as opposed to using an attribution software to get instant To make strategy decisions that your competitors don't see, which then gives you competitive advantages over a long period of time that help you win. And that's why I think that's what I think we need to move in from. That's how we have to choose about how we use attribution software. And then instead of looking at specific channel level metrics to prove ROI, why don't we just look and assess the overall results of marketing? And the way that I look at that is how much money did we spend in marketing, and how much revenue was generated through our website. And if you can't defend your entire marketing budget against a six to 12 month CAC payback through website revenue, then your marketing is not working. And if you did that analysis in your company, most companies would find that they're based on that, that analysis and those benchmarks that their marketing is not working. And I think that would be an eye opening thing to see, oh, like, we just spent $6 million in marketing last year, and we got $1.2 million in ARR, which is a five year CAC payback on marketing spend. And then you start to think a little bit differently about, hey, is this working or not? Maybe we did, maybe we should think about a different strategy, we should put this on our forum, what's going and dark social, we got nothing to lose our marketing is not working right now. But I don't think that people have the realization of what I just said, because they don't measure marketing in that way. So they never, they never acknowledged that there's an opportunity to do something better.
Adam Holmgren:And what would I go to another question that's very related to this, I feel like would you would you have a different strategy based on where the company are in their maturity level, as an example, say that you, you are serious, a company that is looking to push for a series B in the end of the year versus a company at a later state, as a marketer, you will probably have an immense pressure to, you know, provide ARR now, is that how would you? Yeah, Todd? Yeah.
Chris Walker:It's interesting, when people asked me the question about how to how to go fast, like, the truth is that when you act long term in marketing, you get better results in the short term to, with you defined results as revenue, not vanity leading metrics, like leads, or SQL or pipeline, right. And so this is the thing where, for whatever reason, people have now obsessed about in measuring and optimizing marketing for a leading metric, like leads or MQLs, or something like that, that is often not correlated directly with the outcomes that they're trying to achieve, which is revenue. And so if you shift that, like, yes, if you want, if you're a series, a company, you're looking to do a series B, I think implementing exactly the strategy that I would use at any company would be the fastest path to get there against revenue. But a lot of series A companies that are looking to try and raise a series B are not optimizing for revenue, they're optimizing for free trial signups so that they go back and tell their investors, hey, look, we can get, we can get a free trial sign up for $15. If we just spend $500,000 a month on Google, let's keep doing this come we'll take a series B now. And they literally just drive a bunch of spam garbage into those into those forms and pump up vanity metrics to raise money. And then you end up with a lot of companies that are selling their company after a series B because they don't really have a business. So to get back to it, I I don't believe that they're like doing doing things that act long term when you the things that I do drive revenue the fastest. It doesn't feel that way. Because the lead type of metrics don't pump up like you would get in a performance marketing environment.
Adam Holmgren:And maybe that is one of the biggest misconceptions, at least here in EMA around demand, then, you know, when you want to get short term results you need to do I got
Chris Walker:a really good one for people here. This will help a lot of people we've set up process that I've developed called split the funnel, which is that especially for companies I've done this for several 100 million ARR plus companies that are based in EMEA, for companies in EMEA that are predominantly running direct response lead gen, which is probably most b2b SaaS companies. If you go you're gonna have attribution direct attribution on every single lead source and most likely you have a sales action happening afterwards, you're collecting a lead from paid social, you know gated content, or content syndication, or an SEO blog with a form to a PDF, whatever you're collecting that. And then most likely an SDR is doing some type of outreach cadence whether it's called Email social, some combination of the all of them. And then you should look at each individual lead source and calculate things like the percentage of leads that you win to customers the sales cycle length, the conversion rate from lead to opportunity, the customer acquisition cost by by in each individual channel and when you start To look at these things, and then try it, and then also try and quantify how much time you're wasting of SDRs and Account Executives talking to people that never buy. And when you start to look at those things like I've done analysis with companies that run LinkedIn gated content ads that have more than a five year CAC payback on the ad spent, that just the ad spend, not how much time they wasted SDRs not on not including any sales expenses, not include any technology, literally just the ad spend. And if you see that type of when you see that type of data, it gives you a lot of confidence to be like, Wow, this, like this is it's black and white, this is not working, we generated 1000 leads, we won one customer for 30k Arr. We spent whatever $200,000. And that's where you get the realization which the realization is that not all MQ ELLs are created equal will go in to companies where if they look at just their demo MQLs the wind them at like 11%, raw weed to customer. And then they look at the gated content paid social play, and they wouldn't point zero, what is it point? One? 5%? Yeah, a little more than a 10th of a percent. So one in 750, leads become a customer versus one and eight. Which program would you rather scale? And so that's and then, if you looked at that, and you're like, Okay, our demos win at 11%. And then you've rebuilt your entire demand model that only focuses on high intent conversions that your sales team wants to talk to and wins at a higher rate, you would see oh, wow, like, we don't need 36,000 leads next year to hit our revenue target, we only need 2600. And we got 1800 Last year, so we just need to grow it by whatever 45%. And it creates a much more realistic, much more customer centric and much more sales, person centric way to do marketing.
Adam Holmgren:And I feel like when we talk about we we talk a bit about now about the relationship between sales and marketing, of course as well as it's it's, it's an important thing at the probably all b2b SaaS companies. And I know for a fact that many the solution for many companies right now is let's create an ABM project because that will tie us together. What is your take on ABM as as the glue for sales and marketing or even ABM as a concept?
Chris Walker:Thinking about ABM as the glue to sales and marketing, I think is like a bandaid. I don't think it's actually solving the real problem. The real problem is that companies fundamentally fundamentally do not think about marketing in the right way or measure marketing the right way to be successful today. And so what they do instead of fixing marketing is they have their marketers do sales with the sales team. And that's pretty much what ABM is. And so ton of companies do it a ton of companies have tried it for years, and then come to us afterwards to try and get some help. And the the idea is like, if you want to do that, as a part, like have a singular go to market, where you have some marketers working with some salespeople to focus on high value accounts, that's great, like you can go and run that go to market. But it can't be your only go to market, if you unless you have a tam of less than 100 accounts, you need to have a different you need to have multiple go to market strategies in this in this case, especially for companies that are selling, you know, enterprise mid market and some level of like lower middle market or SMB velocity type of deals, you need to have a one to many demand motion that's driving tons of demand, you need to and then companies so they don't do any of that they're either doing lead gen or they just give up on lead gen and they put their marketers focused on ABM focus on their top 50 accounts. And then they're not marketing to a majority of the companies that could buy from them ever. They're doing no marketing to them. So they're just hoping that those companies come and find them. And it's been an interesting trend lately, especially the companies that do this, where they start to put their marketers into an ABM, they also start to measure the success of marketing against things like expansion, revenue and stuff like that, as opposed to net new revenue. The reason is, because it's gonna it most of it happens anyway. And it's super easy to attribute to marketing success. And so they're like, Oh, we're never going to hit our, you know, revenue target for this year, $6 million, we're never going to hit that net new. So let's get the 1.5 million net new that we were going to get anyway. And then we'll go and just like use influenced revenue and take attribution credit for four and a half million dollars of expansion revenue that come that sales was going to get anyway. And these are like huge traps that get set and get like that marketers get incentivized to do because it supports attribution, but not business growth. We're over here talking about business growth, the way that the way that marketing can contribute the most to driving the business is to do real marketing over a 1224 36 month period of time. Where a month jority of your revenue after that is coming through your website super fast sales cycles, low customer acquisition cost, high sales velocity, high sales rep productivity, like 5060 70% of your business's net new revenue comes through that way, which is super easy, which relieves the pressure of your sales team known needing to go out and hunt outbound hard, low productivity, long sales cycles, go and hunt outbound for like 80% of their quota. It's a losing game, it's like way harder to scale. And so you need to have some level of balance in your go to market and the key is to do real marketing.
Adam Holmgren:And when I when I when I look at LinkedIn these days, I see many of your you, of course, but also many of your colleagues at refined labs that are extremely active sharing kinds of knowledge. Do do you think there is a should accompany incentivize employees to do that? Or have a program? I know certain companies have that? Or how do you view that?
Chris Walker:I think the way that you get this to work is that you don't need to incentivize people to do it, you create a culture where people want to do it because they they feel empowered, and confident to share their points of view with the world. And they recognize the benefit the long term benefits of them sharing information. So more people know what their expertise level is, is high for them, and also high for the business in the short term. And it's a fair trade. I think that companies because they don't create a culture where people feel safe and confident and empowered to share things on their own, that they need to give people gift cards or give them some type of like employee engagement platform or all these other like a band aids a great way to put it. Band aids to get to incentivize the behavior to happen that if you created the right conditions should happen anyway with no incentives.
Adam Holmgren:Everyone, I just wanted to stop you for a minute to tell you that this episode is sponsored by Riverside, one of the leading podcasts and video recording platforms. I was actually using Riverside before they become a sponsor. So when they reached out, it was an easy decision. When I started this podcast, I was simply using zoom to record my interviews, and from there edit the audio as good as I could. But after try their platform for the first time I was blown away, it's as easy to use assume that I can record a much higher quality audio. And what's amazing is that it doesn't matter where my guest is located. It sounds like they're sitting with me in the same room. And after the recording, you can download separate audio tracks that upload separately on all guests computers, which means the Wi Fi issue is non existent. And it's easy to edit all tracks. And today, Riverside is used by big names such as Gary Vee, and companies like Spotify and the New York Times. So check them out, you'll find the link in the description. And now back to the episode. Maybe we can run through that career route a bit more? Because I know you have been hiring a lot of marketers lately. Do you see any any difference between marketers that are really good? And maybe an average marketer? Did like? Can it? Can you give any tips to our audience?
Chris Walker:So in, in my experience, which is pretty high, it's possible that interviewed more demand marketers in the past 24 months than anybody else in the world, it's possible. And in that experience, a couple of things. A couple things that I've noticed is that one, to be a top tier marketer, you must understand Salesforce and your company's business data better than anybody else in your company. You should understand it better than your DevOps team. I'm not joking here. I go into plenty of SAS businesses, and I understand their data at a deeper level than anyone in their company. Because of how I think about how I look at it, they don't even they wouldn't even know what to look for, because they don't think the way that I think. And so understanding the data really well creates insights creates the ability to go and run the analysis to show people what's actually happening in the business to get people on board to make a strategy change. So understanding the data is really important. Not just looking at the data blindly. There's plenty of marketing apps, people that look at data, and then just spit out whatever the data is telling you but you need be able to wrap a story around it about why it's happening and what you should do instead, I think a lot of marketing ops people miss. That's one component. I think another component is people that are finally willing to think differently that recognize that what they've been doing and what they've been taught is not working anymore, and are actively seeking for solutions to do something different and have tried to put those things into practice. It's something big, I would say that there's a majority, more than 50% of people don't even recognize that the way that they're doing marketing is outdated and not focused on what buyers do today. So having an awareness that, that that's happening puts you in the top 50%. And then I think that there is an element of actually doing it, which is hard to explain. When I was when I was about 2324 years old, I built several ecommerce companies from my bedroom, which taught me how to develop a website, do conversion rate optimisation, set up Google Analytics, you know, manage supply chain with vendors in China. Put together brand guidelines manage creatives and photography, test, influencer marketing, on Instagram, run Facebook and Instagram ads, run Amazon search ads, build Amazon product pages with my own money, when if it works, I get more money. And if it doesn't work, I waste my own money. And when you start to actually go through all those things, you see that the things that you're doing that work and the things that you're doing that don't work. And I don't think that a lot of marketers have done that with their own money. They just play with monopoly Monopoly money of their company. And then they go, Okay, another 100 grand on Google search, let's press a couple buttons and blow cash. And having a real like going through that process, especially with an E commerce company that had no revenue. It's like, if I'm getting sales for $60, like the marketing had to have worked, somebody had to go out of their way discover me want to buy the product, like the brand enough, and then buy a commodity product that we're selling. And so it taught me a lot of things I could see easily when you post on organic social with consistency and you build community that you drive business results, you can see that when you run ads on Instagram, people click off the ads, look at the product pages don't convert, but then later come back on a desktop computer through Google search the brand and by with no attribution inside of HubSpot. So there's just like, by actually doing it, you see nuances that other people don't see because they don't actually do it. And they don't actually challenge the what's conventionally thought to do. So that would be my three, understand data really deeply acknowledged that there is that what you're doing right now may be sub optimal. And get out there and actually try stuff, whether that's build a startup podcast, like Adams done, start an E commerce company selling commodity products, build a social media profile, whether that's for you, or for like a brand or some type of account, who cares? You know, what I mean? You know, UK football account where you just commentate on the games, or the team's anything to get into the reps of like, okay, I need to get people's attention, I need to create information that people want, I need to figure out how to do that consistently, I need to figure out how to community manage. There's just a ton of details about how these things work today. And this is the real stuff. People are over there thinking that like the old way of doing marketing as though is the real stuff. And then the community management posting content on social is the sprinkle or the extra, no, it's reversed. The stuff on social, the comments that I leave, is my job as part of my job now, answering comments, running the ads, looking at what people are saying posting the content, think thinking about how to write, copy, offer a post, those are the things that really matter for a marketer right now. Not what people used to do before craft and ebook, think about SEO, like whatever else people do with their time. And I think just switching your like, You got to have an acknowledgement that the most impactful places to spend your time is what we would call dark social social networks, content platforms, communities, third party events, etc.
Adam Holmgren:So if you were, I know there for a fact that so many people right now are starting new jobs looking for new jobs. If you were a demand and marketer starting your you know, at a new company, and your first 90 days, what would be your, you know, the most important points to hit for you?
Chris Walker:Yeah, let's pretend the company's relatively mature. So let's pretend this is a C Series C or D company 50 million arr. And in that case, I'm coming in as a VP, a demand or whatever, it doesn't matter. The level number one thing that I'm doing is I'm going out and I'm talking to customers, I'm not listening to sales calls. I'm not like looking at asking the sales team what they think I'm going out and talking to real customers. When I say customers, I'm talking about people that pay you and people that could pay you but don't right now, the market. I'm going to learn about the market. And the funny thing happens is that if you're actually focused on it, and you're actually curious, it takes very little amount of time to understand your customer better than anyone else in the marketing team and often better than anyone else in the company because nobody else is doing it. And so understanding customers give you the data and the insights to know what to do next, where to market? What what people think about your product, why people use your competitor over you? What people that use your product, think versus what people that use your competitors versus what people use the status quo? What are the differences in what these people think and believe getting those types of insights would be number one for me first fifth, 30 days. And that this goes beyond like, the table stakes stuff like getting to know people in the company looking at that, I then transition to start looking at business data. So I'd be looking at, okay, I'd be starting to build out what is the website on I do the split the funnel analysis that we talked about earlier? All the different individual channels, what are contributing to revenue? What does that data show me? The next piece I can, the data would support this, but I just know it because every company fucks it up. So like you don't I don't need to look at the data for it is I would optimize deeply the inbound buying experience. Which means that when a qualified buyer comes to your website and says, Hey, can I talk to your sales team about buying your $100,000 software tool now that they have a delightful experience, and they move to close one customer at the highest rate in the shortest period of time by doing common process optimization. And so when somebody submits that form, you're selling to CFOs when a CFO and a perfect fit company fills out that form? How do you get them into a meeting as efficiently as possible? Where right now companies convert that into a meeting that like 30%? And how do you get that to convert to a meeting that like 90%? Through nowhere else to say it just common sense? Why CFOs in their their data target customer? Why don't you just let him book a calendar link with your AE or whoever is going to Solutions Consultant, whoever's going to take the call, I'd look at that, because there's a ton of there's at that level of company 50 million Arr, there's a ton of demand, and there's a ton of inbound flow going you to get that far you have to have that. And they just like don't even acknowledge that all these people are coming in want to buy and then just fall out. It happens to us when we want to buy we wanted to buy a new accounting software. And it took we had to submit the form three times to have a company even try and follow up with us. And it's just like, What are you doing if there was if there was a Buy Now button we would have already bought. And they're just like losing losing business by not focused and not focusing on the right things. So focusing on inbound buying experience first, the next step would be on capturing demand review sites, Google search, website conversion rate optimisation, those types of things. And then the top tier would be a duel at that level, I'd be trying to figure out what is my paid content strategy, and what is my community event like community driven content strategy, which I use events, podcast, things like that to deliver content, some of that can move into paid amplification, and then we're going to have product marketing category marketing other other things with paid targeted guaranteed distribution, to create demand, the reason that we use paid to be clear, is to guarantee distribution to exactly who we want to give the content to not to run lead gen. So when companies think about paid, they think about I need to run performance marketing, it needs to be direct response. It doesn't need to be it just what you've been conditioned to think to do, because the platforms want you to see $25 CPL so that you spend $50,000 on LinkedIn ads next month. And so they've created the metrics, and then they've taught your company and your executive to look at the same metrics so that you pour more money into these platforms. And if you challenge that, which by running split the funnel, you would see oh, okay, we're getting $25 leads, but our customer acquisition cost is$50,000 on ads, because they convert at such a low rate. And so going through that process, you would start to, you would start to see that and then you can craft a real targeted paid strategy that leverages content to create demand.
Adam Holmgren:It's so great to hear. And to kind of end this episode I would, I would like you to give our audience one tip that they can actually do like tomorrow to to start working towards a demand the strategy of more than a legion. One thing they can do
Chris Walker:I truly think the number one thing that helps companies get here is what I already mentioned, which is the split the funnel analysis go into every single marketing source. Look at all of your leads, build a spreadsheet of okay by channel you know, paid LinkedIn ads, paid search, organic, direct events, content syndication, have all the rows and just charted out number of lead MQLs or leads if you do it that way weeds collected then MQL then SQL is like your little demand waterfall thing. Qualified ops, close one deals, and then in there, calculate the conversion rates between the steps. Calculate how much you spent on each of those things to generate those leads that you can get cost per lead. But more importantly, cost per qualified opportunity and customer acquisition cost. You can calculate sales cycle lengths, you can get lead to win rates so that you know, okay, for content syndication, we're gonna need to get 890 leads to win one customer, maybe we should just stop doing this, I don't know. And then so you could do that. That would be you could do that in less than a day for sure. If you have a decent setup and ops, and you know, just listen to these the information here, you could get all that stuff laid out and it will present to you Wow. People that come through organic and direct through a demo forum are the people that actually buy stuff, everything else is noise. Maybe we should cut out the noise and focus on scaling the things that actually work. It's so it's funny, because companies because you look at the lead metric, instead of the revenue metric. They end up scaling programs that don't work. And which leads to significantly more investment and not a lot of actual returns on the investment. Because they're optimizing for the wrong thing.
Adam Holmgren:Chris, it was so awesome to have you. Thank you so much for joining the demand generation movement. And yeah,
Chris Walker:yeah, it's a blast. Thanks for having me. I also hope everyone enjoyed it. If you want to hear more, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, Chris Walker, or check us out on the state of demand podcasts on Apple and Spotify.
Adam Holmgren:Yeah, thank you. Thanks.
Intro:Thank you for listening to this episode of the demand generation movement, the podcast where you can learn everything about demand gen and how to make the shift towards revenue. Are you ready to step into the future and join the movement? Subscribe on demand generation movement.com. This is your host, Adam Holmgren, signing off