Chris Walker, CEO, Refine Labs

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My guest on this episode is Chris Walker. He's founder and CEO of Refine Labs. So, hey everybody, this is the Exit 5 podcast. We're back. My guest today is Chris Walker. He is a founder and CEO of Refine Labs. You might know him from LinkedIn, you might know him from Demand Gen Live. Chris, good to see you.

Dave, awesome to be back on the podcast and great to catch up with you. We got to get another event going too, so I'm going to follow up with you. We got one on self reported attribution coming up. But yeah, let's get into whatever you want to get into.

This is great. I've never been a demand gen guy my whole life, but I have opinions on demand gen on social media and so you make me look smart, which is fantastic. One of the reasons that I've been drawn to you though is I just appreciate how you use your brain and you, you think about problems like in kind of from a first principles perspective as opposed to like here's what an MQL is or here's how B2B marketing works. Where does that come from? Is that like in your DNA somewhere? Because I, I want to push more people to do that. It's like great that you listen to Chris Walker, great that you listen to this podcast, great that you read something, but I just feel like you don't get sucked into all the best practices. That stuff is great, but how do you think for yourself? And we just overcomplicate everything and you seem to have that embedded in you as a person.

I think it's about recognizing what your gifts are and then using them. So people that are listening to this podcast, your gift might not be to go and understand the underlying mechanics and take apart the engine and understand how everything works. For me, I think the easiest way to understand why Myers Briggs is an intj. I spend a lot of time thinking, strategizing. They call it the architect. It's like my thing. But then there's a ton of things that I'm not good at. Put me in a position where I need to go and organize a project and project manage that thing from completion to close. It's something that I'm totally not good at. Right and so it's. I think the key point here is about recognizing your own strengths. And so over time I've done that. And then as I've continued to build out my organization, I've tried to put myself in even more of a position to be focusing on this specific thing.

But like, do you like thinking about things? Like, I think that intj personality. I've known founders that have that. It's a very common CEO and founder pattern.

Visionary.

Yeah. And maybe that's what gives you like, your personality type is the, like, I don't care how everyone else has done it. I need to look at this with my own eyes and go where other people are not going. And I think you've done an awesome job just as a founder. Like, we're going to talk about Demand gen and B2B marketing, but I point to you, to other founders at times because it's not even that you've been like posting on LinkedIn. And I think I hate like, people like kind of misconstrue some of my advice and some of your advice. Sometimes it's like just post every day on LinkedIn. Well, no, that's not it. But I think you have the fundamental ingredient, which is like, whether you're right or wrong. Right. Time will tell. Obviously you're building a business. Like, you have a strong opinion, you have a strong point of view and that gives the company and it gives you a differentiated stance. And like I'm working with a founder, a new company and founders right now and we've just got along like, we've gotten along like wildfire because it's so easy. Because the two founders have an amazing backstory. They have a super strong point of view on the market of what they're building. Then like, I think the marketing stuff becomes easy. That's been such a key piece of.

What you've done, 100%. And to be clear, like, the point of view isn't something that. I think, you know this, Dave. The point of view isn't something that you just like, sit down, you're like, okay, you get in a room. It's like, what's our point of view? Like, it's difficult to manufacture. It almost has to be like, sort of like created over time. When I came into starting my company, I thought that B2B marketing was stuck. I thought that people continue to use outdated frameworks about how to use things. I knew that buyers were changing a lot. So I had all these ingredients and I've been communicating them. But over time, as you get continuous validation from companies that are implementing your advice and being more successful. You get feedback from people that, hey, I understand this, or what you're trying to communicate here. So you're able to iterate on it very quickly, which I think is what social and podcasts has done. I mean, there's done a lot of good things for us, but one of the key things is able to iterate on your point of view.

Also think, I think it matters, like you've been out there from the beginning, so you get that benefit. And so like, I think what's interesting is like, you're the CEO and so you're the one who's like, you started this and you're feeling the qualitative stuff and so you're like, oh no shit, like we should be doing more LinkedIn. And I don't need I, you're the boss and the boss doesn't need a metric to justify why you're doing that. Right. But so often it's not the case. But I think you actually posted something. So we're recording this on, you know, whatever day this will come out. But you posted something today that I, that I loved. And you said, steal this five step process we use to prove out and scale new demand programs. Number one, experimentation and customer insights. Number two, find positive signals. Number three, prove repeatability. Number four, operationalize and scale. Number five, fully integrated. And I love that because I think so many companies that I talk to are marketers. We go right to like, here's a campaign. What's the goal of this campaign? It's like, well, we've never even tried this before. And I think what a lot of people miss is like, before we even do this, let's have a hypothesis about why we're going to do this and then do this. And the thing that really stood out to me was this thing about like find positive signals. For you said, for example, in the early days of LinkedIn, my positive signals were getting DMs from CMOs, being invited as a guest on podcasts, and the fact that most of our sales calls started with I share your LinkedIn content with my team all the time. Like that that doesn't show up. That's not like a direct response approach to marketing. And especially in B2B, where it's long sales cycles, many people involved, you almost have to take this approach, say, I love this framework. Can you, can you kind of give some color to that?

Totally. The framework is rooted in a couple of things. One, it pretty much matches or at least provides A decent level of the exact same thing that you do when you develop a product. You're not out there thinking about how you're going to manufacture 10,000 units when you don't even know what the thing's going to do or you don't have any customer insights. And companies do that, they jump right to stage four. They have Google Ads, they have no proof that it works, they have no idea, and they just pump $200,000 through and just blow money every month. You see that a lot. So this sort of gives you a step back. The second thing is that how are you going to know what are the right things to measure before you start? Right? So most marketing programs that get started are set up to fail from the beginning because you install standard, outdated metrics for how to measure things, which is leads direct attribution, things like that. What this framework allows you to do is it allows you to experiment, get the signals that are indicated. What are the signals that I'm getting? That should be the leading indicators in the future, right? SEO leading indicators might be website traffic, it might be blog reads, it might be clicks, things like that. But maybe it not that, maybe it doesn't work that way in social, maybe it doesn't work that way for a podcast. Maybe we need different leading metrics. And so by following this framework, you can clearly see what are the things that I follow. And now, as I could, when I get floods of DMs because of a post, I'm getting good feedback that that post is working. I'm getting good feedback, the channel is responding well. And then it forces you from there to figure out, I need to demonstrate proof that this is a repeatable channel that's going to drive business outcomes, which marketers don't get challenged to do very much. And so when they don't get challenged to do it very much, they run a lot of programs that don't drive business results. So this basically forces you to figure out, I might need to go and craft a new way to measure it, but I should be able to prove that it's driving results, right? One of the things that we've come up with recently is literally just ask your customer when they convert how they heard about you, and you'll get proof on podcast, social media and things like that, activities and communities, your CEO speaking at a live event, you get all of that interesting data. It just requires you to, if you go through the process and develop how am I going to actually measure the success of this program specifically? And it doesn't Change how you measure and evaluate the effectiveness of marketing at a top level. You can still measure marketing based on how you want to do it, which is probably hopefully like revenue source through your website. Overall pipeline created. Especially if you have the SDR function in marketing like then you own full pipeline creation and growth of that. Blah, blah, blah.

Are more people coming to our site and raising their hand than, than were totally before. The problem is when you slice it so fine and you do like a content piece and then a week later you're like where the demo's at? And it's like, well, think about what the content piece was. It was very top of the funnel type of stuff. I had a couple follow up notes that I wanted. I don't want to lose my train of thought. So you mentioned something in there that I think is important, which is you have to drive to business outcomes. But there's no perfect way to do that. I think like you have to be able to articulate. So come up with your own way of measuring that. I love that you put that in there because there's never going to be some perfect way. And so for you, based on this point in time, if you're trying to get in front of enterprise accounts, right, Come up with your own way that you're going to measure that. Is it going to be, we're going to try to match their IP address to prove that they visit our website. Like you have to come up with some metric of your own. And if you're the marketing leader today or want to be, I think it's as important as like you can get in the spreadsheets and show the hard numbers. And I'm not knocking that, but I would like to see more people be able to like articulate the strategy and talk about, here's why we're going to do this. We think this might work. Here's why, here's how we might measure. Because it is not a perfect science. Yes, we can measure more things in marketing now, but you have to be able to articulate things. And so one example that you made me think of was for the first two years at Drifts, basically we did a content or product launch every single month. We called them marketable moments and they were ways for us to drive momentum for the company on, on its own. We were like, you know what, we're not going to wait for anybody to write about us. We're going to come. Our bet was that if we have something, we're creating this new category. If we have something interesting to say to these people that we're trying to sell to every single month. Our bet is, over time that we will build, they will know like and trust us, and they'll buy from us. We didn't just look at one and say, how did that do? It was the aggregate. And so what happened was, over the course of two years, if you were to go into Google Analytics at the time, you would see every single month there was a spike in direct traffic. And it was right around that marketable moment. And then you. You start to build from there, and then, then people start to expect it. So every month you have something to say. Now, if we had gone in there and said, well, how are we going to measure this piece of content? Well, we want 500 content downloads. That would have been the wrong way to do it. It was based on this hypothesis that, hey, we create our own channels. We're going to create some type of moment each month where we think people should. We're going to give people a reason to come and talk to us. And over time, we're able to view that. Now, because we have done that in the past, I would feel better about implementing that again without saying to the team, like, let's do this. And I need to know how this content offer is going to perform in.

The first 30 days.

I think a really interesting way to go deeper on this is that in the experimentation phase, you just need to go in there with the right intent for your customer and then see what comes back. Right. I think a lot of people come in and say, this is how we're going to measure things before they started, and sort of, sort of flips that. And it says what you mentioned. If we create an update every month, then people are going to enjoy it and things like that. And then over time, you see, oh, direct traffic spikes. This is correlated with what we're doing. This makes sense. But that the metric comes after the experiments, not before you can have hypotheses, but you typically find something that you didn't expect.

And the other amazing thing is, like, it kind of feeds itself. Because what happened was we would then learn what launches were best. And so we could go and figure out the next thing to create or the next thing to build. And we'd be like, holy shit, that launch went gangbusters. People want this. Let's figure out how we do more of this. And it's like marketing is just a continuous game of that. And you have so many channels today beyond having to wait to get these signals, you know, And I think if you're on social media like you are for the company. You can get a good sense of that. You mentioned self reported attribution. Can you give an overview explainer of that, what it means, why you like it, how you'd suggest implementing it and kind of just the rise of it where. Because it's, it's an old school thing that's now that you've been pushing back to bring into B2B marketing. And I would love to just hear your perspective on that.

Yeah, I was a B2B marketer in 2017 doing we had a video podcast. We were doing non direct response account based Facebook and LinkedIn ads. We were doing a lot of dark social, what we call dark social activities now that were ahead of their time and driving significant amounts of buyers that come through our website and say hey I want to buy now. And they were buying fast and they were. And that number was growing. It was contributing a lot of pipeline and revenue for our sales team. And then when you look and you see an attribution HubSpot or whatever attribution system you use is going to tell you basically going to give you last touch for the most part and you get organic search or direct traffic or things that are not very useful. And I'm like we are not doing any SEO. Why is it telling me that SEO is driving all of our revenue?

Right.

We spend $3,000 a month on Google Ads to cover our brand. Like this doesn' make sense. And then I constantly are going out and talking to customers but I think is a huge miss in B2B marketing generally. But I'm out talking to customers and people that have bought recently and they're like I love your podcast. I can't like we, we love watching the videos with Dr. Rada and these people and I keep seeing the content that you're putting out in Facebook. Love that stuff. And it's like so I'm getting these signals over here. But it's way different than what the software is telling me. And at that point I didn't need to. I defended our marketing expenditures against the revenue that came through our website. So I never had got into an attribution convers with leadership there. It just like you gave me 5,000 bucks and we just generated $60,000 in revenue. Like no questions asked here, let's get more money and go. So I was responsible really for like deciding how is that money going to be deployed to drive the result. Which is different in SaaS. Like SaaS companies don't usually look at it the same way. And then I don't know why, But I spent three years of marketing between 2018 and 2021 still measuring marketing and trying to like fit the old way of doing things. We did really creative stuff. We like had people would go from our Facebook ad to the website and we tried to address IP and then like hope that we could get their company and then try and correlate that with pipeline later and do a bunch of dumb shit that basically didn't give us any real insights. It was spending a lot and the way I phrase this is spending a lot of time trying to prove things that shouldn't need to be proven.

I love it. I also think that's just like what attribution is not. It's not like a perfect playbook. And I also think we're talking about B2B. Like I think it's different in a very high volume consumer type of product. Like you're going to think about attribution differently now they still do ask self report attribution. But I think what I have learned from hearing you talk about this is you're supposed to take it as a data point that you ingest and it's not the full story but you're using that. You're like triangulating all these things because it's not like if you go into the Google Analytics on refinelabs.com you're not going to see the same relationship. You're not going to see Everybody's telling me LinkedIn but you're going to see that LinkedIn is the number one refer or whatever. It doesn't match perfectly. But what it gives you a very strong feeling about what you should go do more of. And it's just, it's not this perfectly measurable science. And I like that you're, you're trying to turn up the volume on this.

Story and it's the only data point that you're getting to make strategy decisions that actually comes from your customer. Everything else is inferred based on data that you collect that you pretend that your customer said but you really just collected data. It's first part party versus zero party. So your customer's telling you just to back up for people to get to sense of the mechanics when people are coming through your request a demo form like most often 60 plus percent of your the revenue for your company in a B2B sales led company is going to come through that form or chat bot or you know a contact Us but something like that a high intent conversion where the Buyer's saying, hey, I want to buy your stuff now. Let me get in touch with the sales team. And you just put a field in there and you can use Clearbit or another enrichment tool and you can get rid of all the other fields. You just have work email and then this field. If you really care about conversion rate optimization, although we have done studies and showed that adding this field does not statistically, does not have a statistical significant impact on conversion rates, positive or negative, but you put a field in there, it says, how did you hear about us? We're not doing a drop down. It's a free text field. Just a general market research principle. Get unaided awareness for what the customer heard you from. So you get free text, you make it required. So you get the data from every customer and you don't put helper text or things like that. You don't put how'd you hear about us? Eg, Google friend, colleague. Because you just, you bias the answers. So it's a form of market research. And then the customer submits that field and then you can have the qualitative data and then you could bucket it and create a level of quantitative data. And what this gives you, and what Dave mentioned is that this gives you an extra data point that you don't have right now that comes from your customer to use as an input. And what we found is that all the other inputs surrounding attribution right now talk about how you capture demand, which is why you get Google Search, SEM review sites, lead gen channels, blah blah, blah, and there's no insight and no measurement into what's actually creating the demand. And this is one data point that'll definitely give you a customer. We get Google Search infrequently on our forms. And the people that do say Google search are the worst fit prospects for our business.

Why do you think that is?

Because if you don't know who we are, then you're probably commodity shopping for like a $3,000 firm. That so. And every business is like that, right? It's like if the data was here for the 2000 person cybersecurity company and they collected this data over 90 days, they probably see the same thing. They just don't have the data to see it right now.

Yeah, and those other, those channels that you mentioned, SEM, SEO review sites, that stuff's easy to measure because that's just direct response. It's already measured for you. There's not a lot of guessing. It's the hard stuff, it's the podcast. It's the social media activity I added. So I don't run a B2B SaaS business. Although let's pretend Exit 5 is a small little SaaS business doing great. I'm the CEO of this SaaS business. I don't have any reporting at all because it's just me. I run a company by myself. However, I started asking people when they join, I say, how did you hear about us? 90% of them tell me LinkedIn. Okay, great. So you know what? I'm gonna do more of LinkedIn. And that to me is like, let's try to shorten that. Like if I'm doing marketing at a company, let's try to shorten that as quick as possible and get those feedback loops going, right? It's like, let's try some stuff on LinkedIn. And I'm working with a couple founders right now and they've been really cranking up the volume on what they're doing on LinkedIn. And just like you said, there's not some perfect metric for it. But if you ask both of them, you put them in a room and say like, what should we be doing more of? They're both like, oh my gosh, we need to be doing more of this because people are telling us. And you also have this philosophy which I think is so important in B2B, Chris, like you said, people haven't heard about us. Like you have to.

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Go back to the fundamentals of like, there are multiple stages of this. It's one of the reasons why. And I know you've become, I think you've become friendly with Pep right from winter. Like he took this approach. Like I remember talking in the early days of winter. I'm like, what's your goal right now? He's like, more people need to know about us, period. Okay, is there other things he should be doing? Probably, maybe. But I just love the focus of that. I was like, what is the objective here? We want to do things that get more people to know about us because we think that if more people know about us, they'll come to our website, they will try the free version of our product. Anyway, that's all I got. Tell me about TikTok.

So if you put TikTok in this five stage process, then we're at this point somewhere. We're probably in stage two. Positive signals. To be transparent, I think repeatability would be a real stretch.

Okay, hold on, let me, let me go back. So step one is experimentation, customer insights. At the beginning, you need to do unscalable things to iterate and find what's working for you. Choose two to three high upside channels and activities and start executing them. So you've been doing LinkedIn and your podcast has been going well. Was the hypothesis internally that a lot of people are on TikTok? Let's see if there's something here.

Yeah. So we, we manage this whole pipeline, right? So now if you look at fully integrated podcast, LinkedIn Live events number four might be LinkedIn paid, right? So we're getting good. Like we have programs that are full and then we have, we're always working on what are going to be the next things, right? So if you just, and then over time you're just stacking channels on top of one another that are fully integrated in your business that are driving results. And so if you're a B2B company and your marketing team is high performing, you're driving revenue and getting date, you have data to show podcasts, LinkedIn, other social networks, maybe your community are driving results, then TikTok's the next frontier. I don't know what to say. It's like almost pretty obvious right now. And so the second part of why I'm doing it is that in 2019 I went into LinkedIn and I said I'm going to understand this platform better than anybody else. So that the CMO of Salesforce needs to know about how to use LinkedIn properly. They're going to come to me because I know it better than anybody and I've taken the same type of approach with TikTok. So I go into it, I try and understand the mechanics, I try different things. I don't care when my video gets 200 views, when I get 150,000 on LinkedIn, I don't consider it a waste of time. And so I've been working through this channel and I think there's so many really interesting things about it. The first one is the algorithm is different than any other platform before. It's not based on who you follow, it's based on what the algorithm thinks that you like or what you show based on your behavior, what you like, even if you don't want to admit that you like it. And so it's a very interest based algorithm which allows me to go in there with zero followers and post a video and I might get 20,000 people to see it, which doesn't exist anywhere else on the Internet. And so I love. And the interest based algorithm will go backwards. Instagram's already working on it with Reels other social networks will have to adopt this because it's simply a better way. And so by learning what an interest based algorithm is, you will take that with you in the future.

You got me to do more there and you don't like unintentionally. I've been, I've just been kind of frustrated with LinkedIn lately and.

Welcome to the club.

Yeah, it's a joke. I posted something yesterday or last night and it had like 50 comments very quickly, very high quality freaking Dharmesh from HubSpot comes in the post and comments and like LinkedIn just decides to show it nowhere. Anyway, did you have something? Did you have.

I just am equally as frustrated with how LinkedIn is running that network.

So do you think they've changed? Do you think something has changed since six months or a year ago?

In the past 30 days I've seen a significant decline in my views.

Yeah. No matter the comments, even if engagement.

And comments is strong, my comments are stronger. But my post gets shown about 50 or more percent less than they did 30 days ago.

Yeah. So anyway, so that combined with just like observing other stuff and I, I've been meaning to do more on TikTok for a while. I just haven't prioritized it and I just was lazy. I'm not going to do it myself and so I hired somebody to help me do it. And like one of the first videos that I posted, I have like 900 followers, is not real yet, but one of the first videos I posted has 2089 views already. Go to every B2B SaaS company's YouTube channel and every YouTube video is like 17 views, 24 views, 23 views, 21 views. So I think there's obviously the algorithm, you know, there is something there from a distribution standpoint. What do you say to people who are like, oh, does that mean that Chris Walker is going to be doing TikTok dances?

I'll cover the dance cinema first thing. I made the same comparison in about January on YouTube. I was like, we've been doing YouTube for two years and we have like 2300 subscribers and crazy 400 videos. I'm out of this channel. Right? Like, like if this was in our pipeline, we don't have positive signals like, I'm out of here, right? Put our long form content on there and then let's go. And we've reallocated those resources and focused TikTok and I've done way better signals so far.

Okay, here's an example. This is not, I'm not Like shitting on anybody. I literally just thought of a brand. I went to YouTube, I plugged in Sales Loft on YouTube. Great company. 150 something million plus revenue. 161 views. 751 views. 161 views.

3.2. Nobody. You're shouting and nobody's listening.

It's crazy. And I've been there too. I've been like, oh, we need to be on YouTube. But it's just like you just spread the content on YouTube and like you have, you have a great podcast. Right. But if you just take the podcast and put it on YouTube. So you either have to decide, are we gonna. You can't just take marketing content B2B market and put on YouTube and hope that distribution is gonna be there. But I think that seems like what is possible with TikTok now. You can't just post a straight up. You have to be able to make videos that, that work on TikTok.

So probably that you gotta learn. Yeah, just like any other thing. Just like riding a bike or driving.

And then, and then people say, and then people like, well, that, yeah, that. But Chris, that takes time and that's hard. And I'm like, no, like I posted something about be, don't be a, don't build a marketing team, be a media company. Which is like not a new thought, but it's just something that I think about a lot. And someone was like, well, yeah, but this is hard. And I'm like, okay, that. Isn't that like the point? Like that you're in a business? Like it's not going to be. It's not just like some magic like super growth hack channel. You have to, you have to understand how it works.

And when it comes to the dancing that Instagram started for photographers and now everybody in the world uses it. Facebook started for college people and now everyone in the world uses it. Although some people have sort of like moved on from that platform generally. But you can see how they start typically with a younger demographic and for a specific niche and then they grow when they have scale. There's more than a billion people, there's more than a billion downloads for the TikTok app. It's the number one downloaded app in the app store. Last I checked. People are on there, right?

Yeah.

And it's not just little kids dancing anymore. And you can see that when I do a live event and there is a CEO of an early stage company that are asking questions on my TikTok Live, when people fill out, I mean the forms I talked to somebody at LinkedIn today and they're like, I have never heard of you before. And then I saw your LinkedIn video four months ago and I started following you on LinkedIn. I was like, how the hell if you don't know about me.

But it's amazing.

Like, the signals are there to show that people are there and they like the content. And my video is not gonna get shown to 25,000 people if nobody cares about why your sales cycle is longer than it should be.

Also, I think the reason that I'm putting content there now is like, forget the dances. Like I asked you that question. Cause I believe the same thing. But forget the dances. It's how people today consume information. It's completely changed. Right. And I saw a bunch of stuff going around this week about Google search. You know, TikTok is the new Google search. More people are going to TikTok. But I think of it as like my friends and my family and you know, we're, we're sending each other like the way we communicate now is like my, my wife might send me some recipe and the, the way it used to be YouTube or used to be an article, now it's like, it's a killer. Like, because TikTok has found out, like, how do you make a one minute super catchy? How do you take a concept and convey it in a minute? So that's how I think about TikTok. Forget about the dancing. Like, could you do that 100. But it's like this is how people are consuming that information. And so if you can do that in your industry, there's going to be people there. And 99% of my TikTok is like golf and then it's Chris Walker because not how many other people are there talking about marketing. But I still see you all the time. And there's not a direct response way to quantify that. But I'm constantly getting your thoughts right. Yeah.

And it's about. As a. I'm talking more to the business now. It's about, you need to have some of the programs in operationalize and scale in order to have the experiments have enough time to work.

I actually think the fun is like, forget the channel. To me, the thing that I love about the marketing thing is like, we have a hypothesis. We think people are on this channel. What is our angle gonna be? How are we gonna do this? And so it's like the advice is not just like. Cause you hear Chris Walker or Whoever talking about TikTok going, TikTok, but like, what can you add there. There's actually a great redpoint VC on TikTok. Like they also kind of hired like a comedian, like kind of pseudo corporate bro type. And like they've done an awesome job with that page. But like that's clearly because they said, hey, what do we think is going to work? It's not like we just took a bunch of like, you know, shitty stock footage, B roll VC office videos and chopped it up and made it a tick tock. It's like we're gonna actually figure out how to do this platform right. It's why another example is like Tom Wentworth and, and recorded future. Like instead of having a bunch of junior people write a blog and hope that that works, he went and hired like npr, former NPR journalists and they built out a full media site. I like when people have hypothesis and they go and execute on it like that, 100%.

It's the fun of it.

Yes it is. But we, we spend so much time, you know, even in companies that I work with now, Chris. Like it's. I sometimes I just beat my head and again I'm like, this is why I'm not a CMO any anymore. Because it's like no one's doing fun creative problem solving. This is all internal shit. Like it's all internal stuff because people aren't on the same page or they don't believe in the CEO or they don't have the vision, or they don't have the product. It's all, it's like, it's like 90% internal politics. It's not creative problem solving which puts you guys in a good position to have a business, I guess. What do you think about ad creative? One of my biggest rants is I see a lot of B2B ad creative that looks like B2B ad creative. It looks like an ad just is so branded and so it doesn't stand out. Do you have a philosophy or like from what you've seen from your clients or in your own stuff of like how do you approach like social ad creative or design stuff? Because I, I have a thing that gets me fired up is when I see something that literally looks just like an ad. It's like, do you see the, do you see this feed? Do you see all this stuff happening? Like how is somebody ever going to see your thing and stop and click on it and watch your video or whatever?

Yeah. So if people want, there's, there's a. I think Creative Gallery is what it's called on our website. You can reference that at Some point and see some of the things, the work that we've done. But this is the, the step that companies make. Before you ever think about the creative, you need to think about the objective. And if your objective is to run lead gen, which is 95% of companies, then you're going to think that, okay, just because it's LinkedIn doesn't mean I'm going to just run it like Google. So I'm going to just put blank text and collect email addresses. So most companies don't even think about the creative output because their objectives are not aligned with having good creative. And if you shift that and say, okay, I'm trying to communicate messages to people to create, demand or educate people or things like that, then you start getting the idea of this needs to be native. I'm not optimizing for a click. I want to communicate a message. I'm going to have a short period of time to get their attention or get this across and then you can start to think through it. I've recently seen GONG come through with a lot of like really thumb, I call it thumb, stopping, copy and creative. I think they're doing a really good job as of recently. And we are putting out similar types of work which is heavily focused on how am I going to communicate this message without a click. There's one element of creative, right? So there's one element of like, how am I going to put together this design and copy and campaign and thinking. And then there's a different element of content. And I think that a B2B company should have two streams in a paid engine. You should have some that's trying to market your category and then there should be some that's trying to communicate deep, for lack of a better term, thought leadership about where the market is going that your buyers are going to engage with and then try and get those to blend in a way that people enjoy.

That's a great framework because if you're listening to this, Chris just kind of laid out like, what ingredients are you missing before you can have an effective social media strategy? Do we have something interesting to say? Oh, we don't. Okay, so I would say don't just go and just start posting random stuff. Let's sit down. And this can be an hour conversation with the founder, CEO, like, hey, we don't have a strong point of view, let's start to shape this. But I think the common ingredient you see with brands is like GONG, as an example you mentioned has had a strong point of view and strong, like place in the market since the beginning. And they use social to execute on that. You also said something important about how do you communicate a message without having to click? Because once you get to know a platform like LinkedIn, as we know, hates links. And so. Okay, well, let's think about this. How many. We need to drive more people to our event. So we're gonna go to LinkedIn and we're gonna post a link to the event. And 15 likes one comment versus, like, how could you communicate about the event on LinkedIn but do it in a way where people don't have to click? And how can you try to measure that in. In some other way?

Right, Yeah, I mean, the, the getting over the click because marketers have been trained over this with Google SEM. Like, even social, like clicks have been the thing to optimize and, and count as a way to make it effective because we got someone on our website and just the fact of the matter is like, think about yourself as a consumer on LinkedIn and think about all the content that you see. And then, so try and think about how much content do I see in here and then how many times do I click?

Yeah.

Have you been commenting more on LinkedIn? I feel like I see your comments more like. Or maybe you always have, but I feel like I, I'll be scrolling something and the reason I'm seeing is because.

Chris Walker wrote like, this is ridiculous.

No, no one actually does this. Like, sometimes you post something like that. But tell me about your commenting as a strategy.

The comment strategy is to test points of view that I'm not sure I believe or not. And so I, like, you'll rarely see me put a comment that says nice job or congratulations or I agree. Typically the strategy is like, I'm going to say something that's probably relatively provocative that I think I believe, but I'm not sure. And I'm looking for feedback and I get immediate feedback about whether or not people agree with that point of view. And so that's what I use it for. And then it becomes a feeder to what are the things that I'm going to talk about on the podcast? What are the things that I'm going to post about in the future? So I treat it more like a, like a testing engine. If nobody engages with a comment, they stop showing. It's not like anybody, no, no one really sees it if I, if it's not useful. And I get that feedback almost immediately. So that's how I use comments at the moment.

I was trying to find one that I saw the other day, somebody, somebody.

Posted the BMW heat seats. I think there was that one.

Yeah. Which is. You're like, this is ridiculous. How about give people something like, how about like, make car buying better?

And it's.

I love that I'm joking with Chris, but I think the actual insight is like, you should be doing this. You can't just be committing to social media and just posting, posting, posting. You learn so much in the comments and your comments can be like the quickest source of feedback. And also sometimes if you get a comment on a post like that, engagement does seem to be higher. Like you can get a comment that has 200 likes on it. And for some reason I can't post anything anymore that has 200 likes on it. Can you talk about what you just did recently with Demand Gen Live, why you're not doing it anymore? Where you think the future is going? Just a little bit into your content strategy, I think would be great for people to hear.

Yeah, 100%. We started DemandGen Live in March of 2020. So we had a physical event strategy and then we transitioned it, for obvious reasons, to a virtual strategy in 2020. And I did that event 114 times over the next few years. So almost every week. We did that event for more than two years and it was an amazing event. We had tons of great people there. I got to share my thoughts. My business evolved so much from people when I started to more than 120 now. There was a lot of amazing things that happened during that time. One of the big things about being a entrepreneur and a content creator is that you need to be able to evolve when you're getting pulled to evolve. And so I am going through an evolution right now where I need to grow up from being the Demand Gen marketer to being the CEO to being the business leader and the entrepreneur. And so there's an interesting transition where I still am going to be deeply involved in the content strategy. I'm still going to be deeply talking about Demand Gen and working with CMOs and things like that. But it's a whole another element that I think that I have for the world to offer about how we think about hiring, how we think about culture, how we've thought about fundraising, how we think about product strategy, how we think about setting goals and targets, how we think about whether we comp sales reps based on commissions and OTEs or how we do that, how we think about scaling our sales team whether we use SDRs or not. There are so many elements outside of Demand Gen that fall into a category that I call business. That I think that I have a lot to offer and I think that we've demonstrated it and I think that I have the credibility at this point given the size and scale of my company. And so I'm looking to. And secondarily we have a hundred incredible demand gen marketers here that are doing this stuff every day that often know details at a deeper level than I do now. So I've sort of been able to set the frame. But now we have a new podcast called Stacking Growth that goes in way more depth and way more education about this stuff. So. So you allows me to level. It allows me to level up and communicate things more that are what I'm passionate about today.

So it's a, it's a personal. It's not that it's like it stopped working. It's hey, we did it for two years. Chris is going to go focus on this other content. We have an amazing team now. They're marketing experts. They're going to run this other, this other type of show, right?

Precisely. And it's the live event, right. And I love looking at a pot. This is a good nugget for people. I love looking at a podcast like it's a television channel. And then there's going to be multiple shows in the podcast. Right. So we have the state of Demand Engine podcast which might get rebranded but the state of the Mangea podcast. We have the TikTok live show. We're going to do some deep demand gen level show demand 401 office hours, whatever. We'll do one that's a small business related show. We'll do another one. Sort of like what you and I have been doing and it just gives me more space to explore and be creative.

This is what I wrote down. You can't read this, but I wrote down 143 times. Two years impact. Most companies want to do this for three months and stop. How much do you feel like the fact that you showed up and like you can now look at this in the macro and say we had to do this for two years, we had to do this 143 times. And now I can talk about the impact on pipeline, like how much was the consistency and I guess longevity of this? Did it play a role in the success of this from a business perspective?

Let me put it this way. If you go to the gym and you do ineffective exercises consistently, then you'll still have ineffective workouts and not get to your goals. Right? So step one Is you need to be doing the right activities. And I think about that as the message. So before you think about doing it five times a week, you need to think about, am I doing the right. Am I doing my bicep curl the right way? Am I doing the whatever squats thinking about, am I doing the right activities? Most companies go in and they don't know when they do a podcast, they don't know whether it's the messages problem, whether am I delivering something that people want, are people liking this, are people bailing out? Or is it the channel's problem? Is it the podcast fault? Am I not being distributed in the right way? Are people not finding it? What is the issue? They're not sure. The way that we did it is that for a year I spent time communicating my thoughts on LinkedIn. By the time we started the podcast, I had 15 or 20,000 followers on LinkedIn and a very engaged following, which allowed the pod. When I went into the podcast, I wasn't guessing whether or not the message worked. It had been proven to work. And from there it's just figuring out how do we get the podcast to go. So you can use consistency as a way to learn faster, which I think is one of the big benefits. Like I think that if you look at episode one just compared to episode 50, the volume and speed that we did those with, and if you just compare this episode to that, the first episode, my ability to communicate, my ability to our production quality, there's a lot of things that have been improved through the amount of reps that we've done. And so I think consistency is critical. But just like what you said on LinkedIn, it's not just about posting every day on LinkedIn that can help. It's a necessary part of the formula if you want to win. But you also have to be posting the right stuff.

No, that's good. That's fair pushback, right? You can't just show up. It's not like you were successful. It's not the show that was successful because you did it 143 times.

But I will tell you that probably at least 25% of those episodes, we did them at 7:30pm on Tuesdays, where it's like 5pm and I'm like, fuck.

That'S the last thing in the world.

I don't want to do right now. I do not want to. I do not want to do this. But every time I would show up, I would show up and I would do it and I would be happy that I did it, it's basically like going to the gym.

We're going to wrap in a minute. You're a busy CEO. Give me just a couple thoughts on state of marketing teams. Like what are you seeing from the companies that you work with as far as like strategy and budget and what's happening in the market and everything right now? What's your take?

I mean I think the, the major shift here is in the economic situation which is driving downward, you know, valuations going down for companies. And so they're scrutinizing spend, they're rethinking things in terms of what companies are doing. We're seeing many companies reduce their overall program budgets. We see companies reducing basically marketing expenditures broadly. Some companies are laying off go to market teams. I think these are some of the things that get the news but may not be what's happening as normal or in the masses. I think when it comes to what marketing teams should be looking at right now and I'm not sure whether they're doing this top but it's just my recommendation is that when the economy goes down, the natural demand for most categories declines because belts get tighter and less. Companies are going to buy financial business software or incident response software or chat a chatbot or whatever. You used to have a hundred comp or a thousand companies that would buy this stuff every every month. Now you only have 600. And so you end up fighting with competitors over a small and declining part of the market. Your customer acquisition cost goes up, it gets more expensive, it gets harder to win and you create this never ending spiral. And the way to break out of this is to stop focusing on capturing demand and instead go out and build a reason to create it. And another thing that you should think about as a business leader, not necessarily a marketing leader, is does our product need to change based on how the market has changed? There's been some companies that have been able to adjust their products, spin up something new, whether even if it was not an entirely new product, maybe it's the HubSpot website, greater comp. It's a nice thing to have that's relevant to the current situation that helps their customers be more successful. So you got to sort of when you go through these, you sort of have to evaluate where are we vulnerable. Is it in pride?

Yeah, it's good Advice I think March 2020 at Privy. I was working there CMO and we basically cut like a million dollars or something in the budget. So we were like okay, well what are we going to do? Doesn't mean the Business is over. And so we just, we shifted all that content, we shifted all that focus into launching a podcast and doing a weekly content like, kind of masterclass series. And so I think that's wise advice. It's like, what's happening in the market? Like, maybe people are not buying right now. We kind of are like, well, maybe people are not buying right now. However, they're still thinking about their jobs. They still want to learn, they still want to consume information. So maybe if we, for the next three months, kind of shift and do more focus on content and not so much focus on the hardcore direct response sales stuff and get alignment from leadership around that, hey, everything is going to probably take a hit right now, but we're building a foundation that's going to put us in a better spot hopefully when. When things turn back around. Yeah.

Another thing that should be done at all times, but especially during these times, is as marketers, you got to get closer to your customers. You got to understand what's actually going on for them. That's how you'll learn how you need to adjust. That's how you find if your product's not meeting needs anymore is by getting close to customers and then being able to adjust from there. Otherwise, you're just guessing.

Love it. That's a great note to end on. Chris Walker, always great to chop it up with you. Thanks for doing this. Go and follow Chris on LinkedIn. Check out Refine Labs website, Poke around there. I like to follow them for two reasons. Number one, because I think they have a pulse on a lot of B2B SaaS companies. But I think, number two, I think Chris and the team have innovated in a world where content from a lot of B2B SaaS companies has gotten stale. And so I think if you have a strong founder with a strong point of view and you want to do something around that, Chris and the team are good examples of people to follow. Chris, keep doing what you're doing. You and I will talk soon and we'll do more stuff.

Awesome, man. Yeah. Can't wait to catch up. Yeah, can't wait to catch up. Thanks for having me on the show, Dave. See you later.

See you. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode.

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