#40: How to make marketing bets, a scientific process for generating revenue, & scaling marketing programs with Chris Walker (Refine Labs CEO)

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Free SEO consultation today right from demand. Well that's demandwell.com FOMO FOMO and you'll get a free SEO consultation today. 1, 2, 3, 4. Exit, exit, exit. Chris is here. We're going to talk about revenue R and D. And before we talk about that, I just have been observing. Can you just take me into the behind the scenes of the. I'm just interested as a company perspective. It seems like you all have kind of made like as an agency, as a company you've made this strategic shift and you've gone in this new. I don't know if it's a new direction or it's a different angle or it's a bigger angle. Can you just, can you talk about like how you got here and we'll get into the tactics of revenue R and D but I'm just curious from a brand and company building standpoint, like how this whole thing came to be.

Yeah, let's go way back. So when I started refine labs in 2019, the goal was to build a professional services company that allows you to generate profit, to collect customer insights and to build a brand while developing a product. And so we've been working on through a product and the goal, the long term play, is to convert a professional service company into a technology company with hyper specialized customer success. We're well on our way there. We have a technology platform. I think we're doing about 50k a month on that platform. Customers are happy. We're continuing to sort of develop and grow there, which is cool. And then I want to take a step back and talk through like some of the learnings I had with category creation. I think a lot of companies try to do this and my experience hopefully helps some people. We initially started this sort of endeavor when we were about 1.5 million ARR. And the reality in hindsight, the reality looking back on that is it was far too early to consider that we had nothing tangible. We had 10 people at our company company. We had no product. We had a unique point of view but generally just didn't have enough infrastructure customers time to create something that was really meaningful and truly different. And that's been an ongoing pursuit that I've been working on for the past two years. And it finally clicked on August 26, 2022. I felt it and we started to move forward with it. But we've taken tons of different deviations Demand acceleration. What else do we try? Demand Sciences Institute, Demand Sciences Laboratory. We went in a lot of different directions while we try and figure this out. I think the take home is that you need to be open and you need to trust the process and not put it inside of a defined time window. Because if we put it in a defined time window, we would have ended up launching something and committing to it. That wasn't really the right appropriate thing for us. So I guess taking, making sure that you're at the right stage of your company building, I truly think somewhere between 20 and 40, 50 million is an ARR is probably the right time to be working on this. You should be thinking about it in preparation for that. You should have a vision, you should be working toward that. But I think when the market can truly accept it, you want to have some level of organizational maturity.

It's hard to do that though, to be patient, right? Because you're like, you have this existing business, you're also thinking longer term about how you're going to change this existing business. And it can be tough to be patient and like take the right swing at it. And even if you're ready to take a swing, you're not necessarily guarantee that it's going to land. Like how did you have the discipline to not go and do this a year ago?

I think there's a fine line between being patient and not iterating or moving forward. So we were always moving forward. We updated our, we update our website every three, four months. But when we did it, we didn't come along with the $500,000 event for a lightning strike or those types of things. You really have to plan and know when you're ready for that. But the ITER is part of the process. So I think that companies go and spend a lot of money and do a website update and then never touch their website again for two years and then just do it again. I think there's way more of an agile iterative functionality. We use Winter to do some testing and so it's gotten good results in how we refi, like either get feedback on core messaging or refine messaging that we know works. It's not like you just sit there and wait until you're at the right stage, you're moving forward. But I wouldn't put all your eggs in this basket or count on it making a big impact for us for a long period of time.

You mentioned using Winter, but also, don't you think this is one of the reasons for like building an audience through Content as you've done is like, you basically get these signals all the time. And so through your live show and through social media and through customers, it's like, it's tough to explain this to people until you've done it and you're in the middle of it. But all these insights are just like coming to you all the time. And it might just be a one customer call or one customer email. I think that it also gives you a huge advantage to have had an audience and to get those signals along the way way as opposed to being like, let's go get customer insight. You can validate things with Winter, but I feel like you're already plugged in because of the audience and brand that you've created.

100%. I attribute a lot of our business success and the way that our strategy is developed to the activity in the events and the podcast and social and comments because it gives you real time feedback and it gives you qualitative insights that you can't really capture in a survey or NPS or stuff like that. I was going to go in an interesting direction here.

Wait, hold on.

Yeah, go write that down.

So you don't, so you don't hear. But how do you define category creation? Because I, A lot of companies are obsessed with it and I think, I worry sometimes that they define it in the wrong way. Like creating a category only means that X analyst firm has validated that this category exists. Where like, I believe in all of the like play bigger category creations. That stuff is fantastic. But I've almost like, I guess revisionist history in my mind has been like, I, I've just kind of simplified it. Like, what do you want to be known for? And so I'm just curious to hear your approach because I, I know you're not waiting around. Like, our category will only be validated once Gartner writes about us. Right. So how do you think about it?

Definitely not waiting on Gartner for this one. I think that there's a huge difference and I've experienced this in our company between being better and being different. And so if you think about some of the ways that our company had initially grown, we had grown through being a better marketing agency or a better revenue firm or whatever you want. Call it lead gen versus demand gen. Thinking about how to do attribution differently, those are all just better ways to do things that are already existing. And then when you get to a place when you truly are different. And this was the thing that I was going to mention, like the way that I knew that this was the thing is that I talked to 10 different prospective customers inside of sales calls and just felt the reaction, like, these people get it. And then some of the questions that come back are like, so what do we do with our agency if we work with a revenue R and D firm like yours? Wouldn't you get the realization from people where they really see this as a different thing? I think that's when you know you got something. A lot of people pander to analyst firms like Gartner spending those subscription dollars when you're a series a company for like, basic advice. And the reality is that, like, when you enter into a Gartner category, they create the category for you. They define the category for you. And I've watched companies that get fit into a category that doesn't fit by Gartner, that doesn't actually fit them, and it does them no good at all.

Yeah, it's so interesting. I was having a conversation with the founder like, two weeks ago, and they were like, Forresters putting out this report. We kind of have to fill it out because our customers think we're in this category. But we don't want to, like, we don't want to fill it out in this way because actually what we're building is something different. And it's like, man, I just see this over and over again. Like, you get forced. And then like, the fear is like, well, what if, like, we get like, a shitty, like, placement in this report? And, you know, I go back to like, Drift, the company that I was at, like, in the early days. It was interesting. We intentionally didn't want to be seen as live chat. And so, like, we didn't want to be in any reports because we were creating a new category. And I think it takes some, like, conviction to, like, say no to those things. I think part of creating a category is to, like, be okay with the fact that there's going to be people and analysts and whoever that might not understand it the way you do. And it's why I think I'm such an advocate of like, building your own audience. Because, like, be. Be in a position where you don't have to rely on the wind blowing in a certain direction and like, Forester writing a certain thing. It's like, if they're going to put you in the category, like, fuck it, that's how they're going to put it. But, like, we have our own audience, we have our own publishing channels. You can, you know, we're going to get our message out. We don't have to rely on somebody else to like properly convey this. And I even see this on a different level now with G2. Right. Like, people are concerned about which category their software product reviews will be under and it doesn't perfectly match what the way they see the company. Where I think the way is like to lead with a strong vision and go and build that and build the audience around it. And in the case of Drift, for example, like, we ended up. Ha. Like G2 ended up coming to us and be like, hey, we're going to add a category for conversational marketing. Because that was the thing at the time. And. And I just, you know where I'm going with. It's like, this is the dance that you have to play between like fitting in these existing boxes versus, like going and trying to create your own thing and having strong enough conviction to go and do that and not care where you're going to get placed.

Yeah. Like, why would Drift not want to be in the live chat category? It's a $4 billion category. There's tons of existing demand. There's a hundred thousand search queries per month for people searching live chat. Why wouldn't you want to be in there? This is the core thing that people don't get about category creation. Even many people inside of my company struggle with this part. In order to actually create a category, you must leave an existing. Where people fit you in an existing category that has existing market demand, where people are searching and people know that they need that thing and you must leave that place and you must go into a place where there's zero market demand, there's no search volume, people aren't looking for it, and then you have to go out and create it. And the challenge that most companies have in category creation, I mean, there's many lack of customer insights and other things like that from a strategy perspective. But it really breaks down if you can't create demand for yourself, if you can't create demand for a net new category, you're going to perpetually have a category that's worth $0 billion. It's not growing, and nobody's out there trying to grow it except for you. And so I actually, it's interesting to think as companies rethink their category creation strategy, I think that you should actually be building the audience to create and building the capability to create demand in advance of the category creation so that when you actually develop that thing, then you have all the firepower and ammo to go and make that stuff happen whenever you choose. So yeah, those are a couple thoughts and learnings.

That was exactly the thinking. Like the marketer in me was like, shouldn't we be trying to like capture some of this live chat audience? But it takes the, I think you need the strong conviction and the vision from the founders. And like at Drift, like David and Elias, the founders of that company were like, yeah, that's great, but we're building something new. And so you need the people at the top to like give you the confidence to be like. And I think typically where I see category creation be challenging. Well, it is challenging in general, but it always comes down to like the internal stuff. It's like maybe the, the CEO is bought in, the VP of marketing is in. But like there's the, the VP of sales who just like, wow, you know, we're going to keep doing it this way. And it really does take the organizational alignment. How did you drive that? Because you know, did you just say like, I'm, I'm the CEO, this is what, this is what we're doing. Like, because if you have, and everybody, everybody that's listening to this has, has had this at their company, you're in a management meeting, there's, let's say four or five VP level people. There's always going to be one or two people who are like, I'm not sure this is the right approach. Need to have a culture where you can disagree and commit. I'm just curious to see like inside of your company how you, how you made this happen.

Yeah. One quick note on capturing demand that I'm going to get to that there's a third strategy called damning demand that I think is very interesting where people are searching for live chat and then you say, hey, you thought you wanted live chat, but what you actually want is conversational marketing. Let me tell you about it.

Nice.

Hey, you thought you wanted a growth B2B growth marketing agency, but what you actually want is a revenue R and D laboratory. Let me tell you about it. And so there's a way to take existing demand and diverge it to a net new category. And then getting into the. I truly believe that after doing this that if the CEO isn't leading this, then it's not going to work. I think that you need to have that level of accountability, you need to have that level of buy in and you need to have that level of vision in order for this to really work. Otherwise I think it's just a creative marketing messaging exercise.

I love the example that you shared, which is like to me, that's the fun part of marketing. That's the genius part of marketing is like, we don't have to play in the live chat category, but how could we, like, could you be running ads and creative. That's all about, like how you're not live chat and you're basically drafting off of like that category to go and shift people to your new thing. I love that example.

Yeah. And then when you think about driving this as an executive, the realization that you have to have inside of your organization is that fitting into this existing category doesn't serve us. It doesn't serve us. It doesn't serve our customers, it doesn't serve our team, it doesn't serve our vision. That's something. There's a realization inside of our company and a lot of people, like a lot of people inside of our company know that when people come in and they think that we're a B2B marketing agency, they're our worst customers. So being able to clearly say, hey, if you want an agency that's going to run LinkedIn ads and get you leads and report on paid social metrics and do that shit, then go over there. If you want a company that's going to build you programs, going to drive millions of dollars of pipeline for you, and then we're going to teach your team how to execute those on your own, then you need a revenue R and D laboratory. And so being able to create a choice also will allow customers that are good customers that want to be your customer to opt in and for bad customers that are going to churn after three months to opt out. So I think there's a lot of positive stuff here.

Was there something specific that happened on August 22nd that led to this?

I remember the other day better. I think it was August 26th.

26Th, yeah.

On that day, it probably been two weeks of sort of like iterating on this revenue R and D concept. I've slapped together like eight slides in a deck the best that I could. It looked terrible. You know what I mean? I'm not a designer. Put it together a little bit before, pitched it to three companies. There was one where there's just me and a CEO. There was another company where it was an SVP of revenue and a director of Demand Gen. There's a third company where it was a head of sales CRO. And the reaction to the story was immediately it was like, this is it. This is the way we're going. The sec, the, the other piece is that it. It sort of categorizes and pulls together all the stuff that we're working on. We had a product strategy and we had a service strategy, and this deeply integrates those two together. It's funny, we were actually thinking about breaking them into two initially thinking about breaking them into two companies, and really what was missing is the story. So that's an interesting learning. Like, once the story was figured out, it was very clear how the two companies fit together and became one company. But when the story was missing it, like, these need to be two separate companies.

Okay, let's dive into the framework. Because I was listening to this the other day. I think I had messaged you about it, and I said, this is great. This is thought leadership. Keep going. And I messaged you before that. And then like, 40 minutes in, I heard you shared my name in some way. So I loved it even more obviously, because that's nice. No, I'm just kidding. But the reason why I love this. So I want you to, obviously you'll take us through the framework, which, like, you're probably just doing a roadshow for the next six months, so giddy up. The reason I liked it is because you. You have a way of coming at things, I think, like, like an engineer, like a scientist, which I'm not. And you articulated one of the things that really, I really struggled with, which is, you know, this balance between, like, the channels that you're using today to. To drive the business and, like, where you need to get to. And I'm, for better or worse, I'm an ideas guy, which is like, I got this idea, we're going to do it, you know, and the team used to hate me for that. But what you have is basically a framework for, like, how do we go and test this? Okay, so, like, you, we. We want to go and try to grow our company page or do LinkedIn organic or do a podcast or do an event. This seems to be, like, a way that I could actually use that to systematically test and scale into that and then make better decisions about, like, how am I going to fund this? Who am I going to hire to do that? And so that was what caught my attention, which is like, wow, this would have been a really useful framework to have, as opposed to, like, hey, we got this idea. Let's go see if, like, hey, short form video is eating the world right now. Let's go. Let's launch a TikTok channel. It's like, you have a better approach to making that real and helping people scale up. And so one of the reasons I wanted to have you back on is I know that that would be valuable for everybody that listens to this show.

Yeah. I think one of the core challenges that I face as a marketer and I just hear in the communities and different things that marketers face is like, we can't get new programs off the ground because people don't give them enough time to work. We don't know what's working and what's not. So we can't prioritize them effectively. We can't seem to innovate and different things like that. And that is the sentiment that comes at the C level and moves down to the marketing department. And so the gap here is being able to communicate to the executive team. Here are the things that are working and here's not. Here are the bets that we're placing. Here's what we're going to be able to commit to for our goals and have a framework to do that.

Well, I also like the way that you use the word like signals.

Yeah.

Because I think so many times in the early stages of launching and scaling one of those channels, the only metric that seems to be acceptable is like, did it drive sale? Did it drive demos? And it's like, well, no, it's not going to. It's going to take a while. Like, if you started posting on LinkedIn, for example, you know, two years ago, and the only metric you had was like, are we getting new business right now from this? It. It would have never worked. And so I think you. You give people a more useful way to say, like, you're not looking for it to drive business in this, in this minute. Look for these positive signals.

Right. I'm gonna, I'll break down the framework, but it basically breaks it down to micro chunks so that you as a marketer can commute or a revenue professional can communicate micro wins. We used to not be doing this. Now it generated 10 demos. Now it's generating $500,000 in pipeline. Now it's generating $500000 in pipeline every month. Now we're looking to scale it up. We need more budget. Now we're doing a million in pipe. So these are the. By breaking them into micro goals. Because the reality is that when a CFO hears, okay, we need $25,000 a month to go and try this thing, they're putting it in the plan for next month, that it's going to drive an impact. And so there's a misalignment in the planning. So. Let me. Let me back up a sec. I studied engineering in college I was in product management for the first four years of my career, mainly on upstream. So developing new products, moving them through to launch, enabling the sales team and driving revenue and competitive advantage by understanding customers and developing the right products. And I was fascinated by how companies can have a five stage development process for their product where they take an idea and then through some level of investment over time they're able to come out with a product the market wants that's on time, that's on budget and different things like that.

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Able to say, okay, this product is no longer a priority or this product is no longer delivering or it doesn't meet the strategic objectives. We're going to move it out of the pipeline, we're going to defund it and we're going to stop doing it. And the realization is that why don't companies execute R and D for their revenue system the same way they execute R and D for their product? Why don't they have a five stage development process? Why don't they think about at every single gate making it have measurable results? Why don't they think about measuring the ROI of net new programs in a different way? The companies that the product development team is developing a product is not getting measured on cac. So why are marketers that are developing new programs that are in phase one? That's just an idea getting measured on cost of acquisition or cost per lead in the first month.

Month.

And so the best things about this is that executives truly understand it. It creates a high level view for the marketing team to say, okay, we got these experiments over here and these are the things that are really working for us. And I typically show a screen share at this point so people can sort of see the stages. But it's basically you could build it in Asana Monday.com, it's a five stage kanban. Here are the programs that we're running. Set objective criteria, objective, measurable criteria against each one. I can talk through that if you want in detail. Dave?

Yeah, let's do it.

And then be able to monitor and move programs through. And there's a couple of places where people get caught. One of the things is that you can't like, it's very difficult to run a bunch of experiments if you're not generating results to begin with. So like you gotta figure out how am I gonna get one or two core programs into phase four or phase five commercial where they're generating tons of pipeline which then allow us to say Here are the things that we know are working and here are the bets that we're placing in the future. If you're a marketing team and all you got is a bunch of bets that aren't doing anything and there's no progress, you're gonna struggle.

So you're saying this is more of a framework to help you add and scale new programs as opposed to like, if you have nothing right now, then putting this system in place is not gonna help you. You need to blow everything up and just focus on like one or getting one or two core channels. But in the past, I've gotten stuck for like, okay, so for a year we've grown entirely through this way. Now all of a sudden, you know, and this is good timing, right? Because people are planning for 2023. Most people's plans are going to go up despite what's happening in the market and despite what's happening in budgets. People are like, okay, if you, if you delivered 10 million in new revenue this year, you're going to be responsible for delivering 15 million in new revenue next year. And typically the way that teams go and approach that is they just drag a spreadsheet and assume that all these all channels are going to grow. But where you're saying is like, no, no, here's a way to actually like create a system for thinking about which channels are going to get you there. And where I've been behind the eight ball in the past is not doing that early enough. And then by the time it's like, I wish I invested in SEO and maybe I should have spent 30 grand and hire, hired, done this SEO project last year, because if I had done this last year would have already been contributing to this year.

Right? 100%. I mean, another thing, and you mentioned, like, if you have no net new programs, like, this may not be appropriate. I actually think that it's appropriate at any point. But just when you think about executive expectations, like if you're just running experiments all day and not showing results, you're going to struggle. And that's sort of the point. You got to figure out how to make things really work and move. Another thing that's, I think really useful in this framework is that it challenges you to scrutinize all the places where your money and resources are being spent. Right now, the first thing that we do with customers is we do a revenue performance assessment, which breaks down their top level business performance, their marketing performance, and then each individual program based on attributable impact. Attributable meaning by software by hybrid attribution by customer research. This is not only a software conversation. Figuring out new ways to measure programs based on what they need, so application specific measurement, so to speak, and then being able to look and say, okay, We've been running LinkedIn ads at $200,000 a month for the past 12 months and we've generated 300k in pipeline so far. This is in phase two. We've spent $1.4 million. I think it's time to shut this shit off. And the sad part is that those conversations don't happen enough. Inside of companies there are so many programs and so much investment and so many resources that are running programs that drive no attributable impact and nobody's challenging them.

Why do you think that is? Like, it seems obvious like, and everyone that's listening is going, oh my God, spending 200k a month. But it happens at every company. Why do you get to that point?

You get to that point because the programs have been accepted by the executive team. So things like a trade show booth or sponsoring a webinar or doing things like doing SEO. So like executives that don't really understand marketing have now seen, okay, HubSpot grew their company by SEO in 2007. That's what's going to work for me in 2022. And so you have executives that don't really understand what they're doing that then are driving those types of priorities based on subjective opinions. And the second place is because of how marketing or revenue measurement is flawed inside of companies, especially in marketing, to favor short term early funnel metrics like clicks, leads, MQAs, shit like that, that doesn't actually correlate perfectly to results, but is able to get performance marketing. The $200,000 in LinkedIn ads per month, it got us 18,000 leads that year, it got us 18,000 content downloads. The sad. But most marketers aren't looking that it only drove 21 opportunities and two close one deals. So those are, I think the core places where this falls down. People get comfortable with the things that they've already been doing. They put together their plan. They just, like you said, just extend out the spreadsheet for another year and just plan on doing all those things or the measurement just doesn't facilitate a conversation about is this actually working or not.

Can you go through each of the five? I think it's five each of the phases that you have.

Yeah, it's a five phase process right now. We'll see where it ends up. So phase one is experiments. It's an idea. It's a concept. You haven't even started executing on it before. So you get up and you say okay, I want my company to try and figure out have our CEO post on TikTok. That's the experiment. And what we're going to do is we're going to try and post three day, three times a week and have this strategy and blah blah blah. So phase one, you're actively doing something, it's just an idea and there's no attributable impact in order to move from phase one to phase two. Phase two is positive signals. So the exit criteria of phase one is that you have to have 10 attributable high intent website conversions that come attributed to that program. So for instance, we're running TikTok and then a CEO comes in to our website and says hey, I want to work with you all and I found you through your CEOs content on TikTok based on self reported attribution. That would be one. You need 10 of those. Once you get to 10, you move into phase two which is you have positive signals.

Okay, wait, let's pause there for a second. Is 10amade up example for the sake of this or do you like 10? Someone's going to ask.

We are going with 10 and then as we collect data and we're going to have tons of large scale insights, we'll be able to normalize this. It's most likely going to be a calculation customized to the company's existing data, but at the moment we're just using arbitrary numbers.

And is there, do you have like a time box on this? Because it could take all year to get to 10.

No, there's no time boxes in these. But in time intervals you should be saying hey, we've been posting on TikTok for the past six months and we've only gotten three attributable demos. Is this worth our time anymore? So you should be scrutinizing the programs on a monthly or quarterly basis, but there's no time constraints to the exit criteria.

And in that example, could one of the okay answers be like even though it's not working yet, I feel really strongly, I feel like this because there are some signals. Give us another quarter because we're going to take a different approach to creative. Like is it okay to keep iterating on that?

For sure, yeah. Inside of the program, like changing. Okay, we want to switch LinkedIn from video to images, right? Like there's micro adjustments that you can make inside of the program at Any point.

You know what's funny though? I think I totally believe in this approach about driving the 10 high intent people from TikTok. I just think that you have to be able to understand that like it's in using that TikTok example, what's going to work is not going to be you saying making TikTok videos about now go to our website and request a demo. It's going to be like association, like how did you hear about us? And so I think another thing that you've been advocating for is this idea of the, of self reported attribution. But, but because more people are hearing about you on TikTok, they're going to come to your website and maybe come inbound. This doesn't mean like everything is going to be this perfectly linear funnel. And I think that's another like nice piece of this that you've been talking about for a while.

Yeah, Self reported attribution or a hybrid attribution framework is critical for this to work because it enables marketers to do things that don't require direct response conversions. So then from phase two, positive signals, in order to get to phase three, which is repeatability, you have to have a cumulative amount of $500,000 in attributable pipeline that your sales team wins in greater than 25%, which we call Hero Pipeline. And so more than 500K. And then you move into phase three, which is repeatability. The goal of phase three is to say, okay, now we generated $500,000 in pipeline cumulatively. Now we have to figure out how to do this in a repeatable way every month. So that might require more processes, that might require other things that you need to think about. And then you're figuring out, okay, now I can do this in a repeatable way. So now we've generated $500,000 in pipeline for the past three months in a row. And that would be the exit criteria to move from phase three repeatability to phase four operationalize and scale. The reality is if you generated $500,000 in pipeline over the past three months, that means you've generated 15, 1.5 million in pipeline, that your sales team is going to win at greater than 25%, which is like 300, 400K in revenue. So at that point this is some serious shit. And your company should be on the operationalize and scale phase. You should be thinking about what talent do we need to hire. You should be thinking about what technology do we need. You should be thinking about do we have to have new processes that we haven't built before. Do we need to think about how to get Chris, the CEO, available for three more hours on Thursdays to do our TikTok live? Unfortunately, most of the time right now, they happen in phase one. Before companies even start the experiment, they're thinking, oh, what technology do we need? My device is struggling.

It's okay. We lost Chris. He'll come back. I'm not going to edit this part out because it's just. It's real life.

It's just a podcast.

It's just a podcast. Oh, my gosh. But how? You know, people will be upset. Chris, we sell to the enterprise. We can't. We can't have this type of stuff happening.

Ready?

Yeah.

Action. The types of conversations that they're having in phase one, or like, what technology do we need to buy? How do we get the most budget and things like that. The reality is you should be thinking about those types of questions far later stage. You should know the program works. You should be able to do it repeatably and then hire the people and then buy the technology and then do those things. So then you're in the operationalize and scale phase. And then in order to graduate from operationalizing scale to phase five, which is fully commercialized and fully integrated, you must have. There's a checklist of things, qualitative things. Do we have a process? Do we have this? Do we have this? Can we forecast appropriately, et cetera. So there's a checklist of like five things. We'll have templates for those so companies can use them. And additionally, the program must drive at least a million dollars in attributable hero pipeline every single quarter repeatedly, or it will move away from phase five. And if you're able to get one, two, three programs into phase five, like my company has LinkedIn organic live events podcast. Those three things are driving more than a million dollars in pipeline per quarter for us that our sales team wins at greater than 25%. Cumulatively, those three programs drive about 10 million in pipe every quarter. You need that type of stuff. You need. And Dave, you probably know this. With portfolio management thinking, you need a couple of those workhorse performing channels that are going to deliver for you consistently, repeatedly, and be able to scale. You really do need those to grow a business.

Yeah. And you need to be also, like pushing those things, right? Like, just because you have LinkedIn organic working, podcasts, working, live events working, it doesn't mean that your team just sets and forgets those things. It's like, how do we keep them Relevant, right? What's the new version of this? How do we get more out of this?

I gotta drop this. It's so crazy that, that if companies were scaling an outbound team and they wanted 30 more meetings, they'd hire four more SDRs. But when companies are scaling marketing programs and they're growing up, the idea of adding more people to it is a foreign concept. It's just, okay, add dollars, here we go. And the reality is like it takes five people to run my content now. And so I think people really need to start thinking about, not only about the ad spend, but the incremental cost of the people that are required in order to actually deliver. Ad spend's one of them creatives, another one of them strategy is another one of them video production might be another.

So that your, your SDR example is not even always going to be true. Like so you don't just magically hire 10 SDRs and because you hired them, you're going to hit their number.

Like you need process so you just.

Hammer on outreach and magic happens. Like doesn't work that way.

Yeah, it's so crazy. I guess like the, the, the, the point is that companies look at scaling out sales with headcount, they look at scaling marketing with program budget. And there needs to be some level of a middle ground. You actually need both if you're, you could run revenue R and D with your outbound, function with intent data with your event, with your sales led event strategy. So this is really like, it's another evolution in my company. Like this is a revenue program. CROs are our best customer for this. So yeah, this just. You could use the same methodology, the same thing about how do we get outbound to generate 10 meetings, how do we get outbound to generate $500,000 in pipeline? And then we think about process, technology, all those things. It's a really interesting way to think about net new revenue programs generally.

And if somebody doesn't, doesn't have those three workhorse programs like you have, would this framework be a good place to just start from zero? Like if you're listening to this and I'm like, I don't have any of those.

Yeah. First step, assess everything that you're doing right now. Where's like if even if you're a series A company, you probably have five to seven sales reps, you got a couple of marketers, maybe your CEO or co founder might be doing some marketing, you're doing stuff. And so the first step is to assess and honestly look and use the criteria that I mentioned. 10 demos, 500,000 in pipeline, $500,000 in pipeline, repeatably, et cetera. And use those to say, here's where what we're doing right now, where we're investing money or resources, here's where they stack up based on attributable results. Now where do we go from here? I think that's a really great starting point and it's a great level set. Like if you're a new marketer coming into a bigger, a small company to do that analysis and level set with people of this is really where we're at and what you're going to find. We're doing a bunch of shit that doesn't make any impact. We should probably stop. We're doing some stuff that might work, but we don't measure appropriately. So we don't know. And here are a couple of things that we might be doing that are working.

One of the final reasons I really love this is because it gives marketers the framework to think like an executive or to be seen like an executive, among others. Right. So you're not just presenting about things you did that led to direct sales, which is not realistic. You're able to lead with a strategic discussion about what can help drive revenue and say, hey, yeah, in six months we want this to deliver X pipeline. But here's how we're thinking about it now. And that's totally fine with presenting the CEO. They don't always expect it to deliver revenue now. It's. You don't have a framework when they can't see your thinking, when they can't see the process.

Yeah, it's, it's truly the visibility that's the game changer here. A CEO can log in at any point and see a roadmap for okay, these features are coming out soon. These things are on the roadmap, but they're six months away and they have a bird's eye view of where is our product going and where are things, where are things sitting. We need the same thing in revenue. The CEO should be able, or CFO or anyone should be able to log in any point, see how things are actually performing, be able to see, okay, these are the bets that we're making. These are the things that are working. Here's the data that supports the impact of these programs. The visibility is one of the biggest advantages here.

Would you like to see somebody owning this full time as part of a marketing org?

So we actually opened up an internal role yesterday for a VP of revenue, R D. Oh, I love that.

Another part of category creation, like when you start to hire, like another measure for your own company's measure of. Is this category being created. If you look a year from now and you find 50 other companies or 20 other companies who are hired for this role. So. So long term, yes. Ideally it's someone's job. How do you. How would you suggest, like at that series A company, how you make it part of everybody's job?

I think that you got a couple of options. What I see in most series A companies, unless they're incredibly well funded or very thoughtful, is that other people are doing the marketing. You might have one or two marketing managers. You don't have a leader and it's mainly like a sales organization. That's pretty much what I see in most companies. You got a couple of options there. If you have a commercial co founder, one of those people could lead it. I think that's a really good strategy. It's basically what I did. I led it for my company from when we had just me to now we have over a hundred people. So like a co founder could lead it. It's hard to argue that doing this to develop your product is not as important as doing this for your revenue system. Like they're both equally important. And so that's a really interesting sort of angle from an executive standpoint then that's actually, as I talk through it, what I'd recommend. Because the only alternative is pawn this off to the head of sales manager that we have. And so I think that executive leadership on this and starting it from the beginning and setting the right foundation in your company to continue to grow and think like this, I think is a really good move.

You know, if you're like the series A marketing leader, this could basically be how you run marketing moving forward. You're going to run it. This is the system that you use to figure out what you're working on.

Exactly. How do you. How would you say that people run it right now?

Not this way.

Interesting to think there's. There's really not even a system. You know what I mean? There's not really a system to scrutinize programs on an ongoing basis to see how things are working. It's a really interesting gap and I'm actually quite surprised that no one has come up with an idea like this before.

I would say for the first time, new marketing leader. It's rare if you've had a couple wins at other companies and have done this in other ways before, maybe you have a philosophy on how you like to run marketing that you subscribe to. But I think this is would be a smart playbook for. If I'm listening to this, I don't really have a framework. I'm not really driving predictable revenue through marketing. I would go try this.

Yeah. And we're going to be producing tons of DOC publishing documentation so people can adopt this at their own company.

Smart. Okay, I have one follow up question and then we'll hang up. And I have this echo from Riverside which is driving me nuts.

This is real life, people.

Yeah, this is real life. Imagine hearing my own voice twice for everybody. You talk about driving revenue through the website and basically marketing gets credit. And that's not the right word. But from everything that comes through the website. I'm not always sure that I've understood how to think about that. Like, do you give marketing credit for everything that happens through the website?

No. But the amount of qualified buyers that are coming to your website saying hey, I want to buy now is the best proxy surrogate for the effectiveness of of how much demand you're creating in the market broadly. I think that marketing's core job is to create demand for their product and category. And then you have multiple places where you capture the demand. One of them is through your website, another one might be through outbound, another one might be through events, another one might be through low intent MQL model type of stuff. And then you have basically most companies are somewhere between two and five core sources of pipeline where they capture demand from.

So you're not assuming that the website.

Is the only place my company operates where like our goal is to get someone to come to the website or reach out on LinkedIn or some other action where the buyer is coming and saying, hey, I'd like to talk to you about working with your company. We're also starting to work and having some pretty good success with sale. What I'm calling sales led events where we send salespeople to events and we don't build a booth and they are there to network and we seen positive ROI on the events. We've done that so far and maybe companies should do that. Instead of spending 100 grand in the booth and having 20 people there, why don't you just send two reps and have them go and do work and close some deals. It's not debatable that when people come to your website and say hey, I want to buy now. Highest win rates, shortest sales cycles overall, best sales velocity and best sales productivity. So why wouldn't you want to get more people to do that. And then the challenge that companies have is they don't know how to. They think that people just show up at their website and want to buy and that they have no control over that. And there's a finite amount of people. And that is totally not true. It just requires you to actually execute marketing, not sales.

Yeah. So it's not just about understanding that the website is the revenue driver. Of course it's a revenue driver. It's 2022. Your website is the store for your B2B SaaS business. But it's understanding, like, which channels, like, how are people getting there? Like, knowing that deals convert the website is not good enough. It's knowing how did they get there and how can they get more people to come and do that? All right, we're going to end because I'm having a miserable time on Riverside.

It's been challenging. Well, let's do Zoom next time. Let's do Zoom.

Let's do Zoom next time. We're back to Zoom every six months. Every six months I change back. Maybe I'll try Google Meet and that's it. All right, I'll see you in a couple weeks.

All right, man.

We'll make this nice. This is great. People are going to love it.

Catch you later.

All right, see you later. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode.

Of the Exit 5 podcast.

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