Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The State of B2B SaaS Marketing with Chris Walker
69 Plays3 years ago
Chris Walker’s on fire.
He’s a high-profile B2B marketing thought leader.
His LinkedIn posts generate huge engagement.
His agency, Refine Labs, is red-hot.
But here’s the interesting thing:
Not that long ago, Chris wasn’t the belle of the B2B ball.
Many of his ideas about B2B marketing were dismissed.
Hard to believe, right?
On the Marketing Spark podcast, Chris said:
“For the first five to seven years of my career, everyone thought my marketing ideas were not smart, and they didn’t want me to do the things that I was doing like podcasts.
They were heavily scrutinized at all the companies that I worked for.”
Chris’ frustration and appetite to do the marketing he wanted led to the creation of Refine Labs.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction of Guest: Chris Walker
00:00:03
Speaker
Hi, it's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. If you're active on LinkedIn or a B2B marketer, Chris Walker likely needs no introduction. Chris has emerged as one of the leading voices in the B2B marketing world. His insight into how data, brand, and content can drive marketing success has attracted a huge audience and made his agency, Refine Labs, a red-pot business. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Chris.
00:00:29
Speaker
Mark, I am pumped to be on here and I appreciate the intro. Looking forward to diving in today.
Impact of 2020 on B2B Marketing Strategies
00:00:35
Speaker
It's an obvious statement, but the BDB landscape dramatically changed in 2020. Was there anything in particular that surprised you, good or bad?
00:00:45
Speaker
The thing that it didn't surprise me, but I think it's important to note, is that companies hadn't spent the time to figure out other things to do than physical events. I think the number one thing, it was when I started to recognize this for the company that I worked for as an employee in 2017 and started moving into digital and seeing how much better it was working than our physical event strategy.
00:01:15
Speaker
that I started talking about it. I thought that people would start to pick up on it, try and build those different skills and muscles and different things. And I think a lot of companies got caught there and had to spend some time really trying to figure out how to do it, which might have caused some challenges in terms of business growth.
00:01:31
Speaker
It's an interesting statement because it seems fairly obvious. A lot of B2B companies spent 60, 70% of their marketing budgets going to conferences, attending conferences, sponsoring, buying awards, all that thing. Do you think that a lot of companies and marketers got caught by surprise when they realized they were so dependent on conferences to drive leads and to nurture prospects?
00:01:54
Speaker
I imagine that they were surprised but I think when people look back in two or three years, they'll recognize it as a good thing if you isolate it to the company strategy because I think a lot of companies would have gone a long time not figuring those things out and eventually one of their competitors would have done it and perhaps put them out of business.
00:02:18
Speaker
We'll get into conferences later. One of the things I wanted to ask you about is at the beginning of 2020, March, April, a lot of B2B companies thought the world was coming to an end. Business was going to go down the drain. The economy was going to go into a state of inertia. And a lot of them reacted very, I would say, violently by laying off marketing staff, cutting back on sales and marketing activities, which is to be expected, is
00:02:43
Speaker
But then they realized that the world wasn't coming to an end and that business was going to be actually pretty good if not really good for a lot of companies. How do you think marketers reacted to this sudden realization that things could actually be good and they actually had to do some marketing to accelerate the business, not just keep it alive?
00:03:06
Speaker
Yeah, so I think a lot of people reacted that way. I'd be lying if I said that we didn't, as our company, react that way as well. And we were able to get through that time quite smoothly. And so I expect a lot of other people, especially in cloud, were able to do a similar thing.
00:03:25
Speaker
Variable marketing expenses are the first thing to get cut when something is up to get when you need to make budget cuts. And so I'm not necessarily surprised that that is what happened. But it's really interesting hindsight 2020 when you look back that that was actually the place where you wanted to go harder.
00:03:43
Speaker
And what we saw, because we continued to run media for several, more than a dozen B2B SaaS companies during that time. And because everyone else had moved down, the prices of the ads were ridiculous, 25% of what they would normally be for a two month period of time. And so we capitalized on that component, not that buyers were specifically in buy mode necessarily, but driving awareness and product consideration and different things like that through that media at a very low cost, I think was a good move.
Marketing Reset: New Approaches Post-2020
00:04:14
Speaker
As we head into the second half of 2020, it's interesting because when we started this conversation, you're in Boston where things seem to be going back to normal. I'm up here north of the border in Toronto where we're still locked down and things seem like we're sort of in a holding pattern. But overall, it feels like we're poised for a marketing reset. But the rules of engagement aren't entirely clear yet.
00:04:38
Speaker
I'm curious about whether you think companies will continue to embrace and explore new or different marketing approaches or whether they'll snap back to the old normal however you want to find normal so the idea is all the things they've learned last year all the things they did differently will all that be tossed aside and they'll just go back to what feels comfortable.
00:05:01
Speaker
I think we'll see something like a bell curve on this one. I think that you'll see companies that regress, that go back to spending 60% or 70% on events, maybe because they weren't successful during this period of time on digital or content, because you don't just snap your fingers and magically get good at producing content that people like, understanding your customers deeply, distributing on the internet, building an audience, understanding how to run media against it. You don't just figure those things out
00:05:32
Speaker
immediately. And so I imagine that a lot of companies haven't truly been able to figure that out. I think that a lot of companies have probably ripped and replaced the intent of what a physical event is about and then just done that digitally, bought booths at virtual trade shows, run as many webinars as possible to get leads, like those types of things. And I think that there will be other companies that have learned a lot of different things during this time period and continue to progress forward. I think if I had to decide as an executive which bucket I would want to be, I would
00:06:00
Speaker
The real bucket I would have want to been in is that I knew exactly what I needed to know before this happened so that I truly capitalized on this situation relative to competitors. But if I'm not in that bucket, then we need to be taking these learnings and continuing to progress forward.
From Lead Generation to Demand Creation
00:06:15
Speaker
I think this could look back on it as a dramatic shift in how B2B companies do marketing. I've been talking about it for a long time. B2B companies tend to run heavy lead gen models so that their sales team can do sales to people that don't want to buy.
00:06:28
Speaker
and i think that marketing should be a lot more focused on creating demand in the market so that outbound works more effectively we hear that from plenty of our customers after twelve months of executing that hey are outbound. Opportunities have gone up by four x and we didn't really change that much you know what i mean so there's some element that is people more people know about you and then you're also driving more inbound demand or when buyers moving to buy in cycles they're gonna come to you first so i think that's.
00:06:55
Speaker
what a majority of companies, if not all, should be transitioning to over this time in this period of 12, 14 months or whatever we've been in this for, I think should have been the catalyst for this change.
00:07:09
Speaker
It's interesting that you mentioned virtual conferences, because in some respects it felt like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. They really wanted to do conferences because it's what they know, so a lot of companies... And the conferences needed to make money. Right. Which conferences don't have their events, they go out of business. I know we're going a different path here, but it's interesting that you mentioned that because when I look at conferences, typical B2B conferences, a lot of the speakers are sponsors who paid to get on stage.
00:07:39
Speaker
Uh, you know, the programming in general is probably anybody in the audience could probably get on stage and speak because we're all pretty smart people. We all have insight. And I think the real opportunity for conferences is becoming connection catalyst. Like I think one of the reasons why LinkedIn has been, been such a powerful platform over the last year is it's made it so easy to connect at scale or relative scale.
00:08:02
Speaker
and allowed people to, giving people permission to introduce themselves to people through connections. So the reason we're connected is through your content, me engaging with you and connecting. And I just honestly think that conferences need to focus on connections more than content, because that's where the real value is in those spontaneous and interactions. Sure. Let's talk about this instead from an opportunity from a company standpoint.
00:08:29
Speaker
And so from a company standpoint, you should be trying to create a content strategy that's better than the conference that happens all year round, not just in three days that for only the people that are able to travel there. And so I've taken that mindset since 2017, when I started to see that all the buyers were going there and I would pay attention to who was speaking and whether or not they were credible and what people thought about their presentations and different things like that. And then I would bring them on our own channels, right?
00:08:57
Speaker
with the intention of producing a media entity that produces content that our buyers want to listen to more than the conference.
00:09:07
Speaker
I think that's a great North Star for companies. It's a massive opportunity. I don't know why that given we're in 2021 and we see the middleman getting squeezed out in every other industry like taxicabs and with Amazon and a lot of different real estate. There's a ton of places like that, but we still want to go through a conference to engage with our buyer when we can do it on our own.
00:09:31
Speaker
And so I'm just really challenging people to think about that component, like the benefit of a conference, like you mentioned, is that a lot of people are physically there.
00:09:40
Speaker
And so when I think about that, I think about the idea of being able to create content with the six best experts in the world because they're all there and that's the only time that they're together once a year. I think about the idea of being able to do a ton of market research that most companies would never create a budget for somebody to go out and go to 20 different customers and do that research on their own.
00:10:02
Speaker
We used to do product research. We would buy a suite and have people come up and give feedback on our future products that we're developing, pricing strategies, pricing tolerances, different things like that. And then another opportunity for marketers is to actually go follow your target buyer around, depending on what the conference is, and see which sessions they go to, who they listen to, what they think about it.
00:10:27
Speaker
and then try and compare what you think about it. And so I think that there's a lot else outside of the booth that is the most value in a conference. And I would, from a sales standpoint, I would scrap the booth and I would set up your meetings in advance and do it over dinner at a coffee shop at an event or different things like that and redeploy that cash elsewhere.
00:10:47
Speaker
So it's an entirely new mindset or a new approach to conferences rather than sort of the same standard. I'm going to sponsor, I'm going to attend. And the conference isn't going away because you didn't buy a booth there, right? A bunch of other companies are going to waste their money on it. And so, but you can be the smart one that spends the definition, not necessarily the definition, but the goal of marketing is to create the most impact
00:11:12
Speaker
for the least amount of dollars. And so one of the ways that you can do that is you can scrutinize big expenses. And we just mentioned 60 to 70%. I've literally done this for five years, going to companies, seeing their trade show expense, matching it against actual sales data and calculating the ROI, showing that to executives, presenting them with a different idea that's going to work better, that's already been proven in a pilot, and then start moving money somewhere else.
00:11:37
Speaker
Speaking of moving money, I wanted to ask you about the structure of B2B marketing teams,
In-House vs. Outsourced Marketing
00:11:43
Speaker
given that a lot of tactical execution has been outsourced to consultants, agencies, freelancers, and contractors.
00:11:51
Speaker
Do you think that B2B companies will staff up again or do you think Lean and Mean is the way to go and that marketing teams will be more strategic? They'll have some key tactical assets in house, but a lot of those activities can be done more efficiently if they're done by a third party. Agree or disagree?
00:12:11
Speaker
It's interesting because I'm not seeing the same trend. So maybe we're looking at two different segments of the market. I think that companies are trying to take more in-house. If I was the CMO or the CEO of a 500 person SaaS company, my objective long term would be to do almost everything in-house.
00:12:32
Speaker
And I would insert external partners and consultants for innovation and frameworks and different things like that, that my team can move on and implement. Now, when we think about the thing that can't be outsourced, I've mentioned this a couple of times, I really want to hammer it home. The thing that you cannot outsource is the customer intimacy, deep understanding of your customer. And so if you prioritize that, I actually don't see companies prioritize that enough. I interact with hundreds a month.
00:13:01
Speaker
It's like that is the number one thing that you are not able to outsource. They're outsourcing all these different things, SEO, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you got to spend the time really understanding your customers because it drives your strategy. I believe that you could theoretically outsource everything else except for that. Not that I would recommend it, but I think the component of the company should really focus on.
00:13:22
Speaker
But what's interesting when you read a lot of LinkedIn posts, and this may be marketers talking to marketers, is the idea of knowing your customers. And there's post after post about customer insight and really understanding their needs and interests.
Understanding Customers: A Common Failure?
00:13:35
Speaker
And to me, that's marketing 101. Like you should be intimate with your customers, as you say, but are marketers not doing that? Are they simply sort of operating theoretically or making educated guesses when in fact they should be sitting beside sales and on sales calls and on sales meetings and things like that?
00:13:51
Speaker
I think there's a difference between what someone perceives as understanding a customer versus what it actually is. And so the first step in that process is clearly defining who your customer is. I don't see a lot of companies do that well either.
00:14:04
Speaker
And so clearly defining who your customer is forces you to make choices around who that is and look deeper than just company size and job title. And so that would be step one. And then once you've truly identified that target, then you can actually narrow in and you start getting the psychographics and things that do not play across that whole span of people.
00:14:23
Speaker
And so that's what I think people should really be focused on at this point. Community and content can help you attract those people easily. And so that's sort of an interesting framework to play by. You have written a lot about the, I don't know if it's the obsession or fascination with quantifying marketing performance, and you've emphasized that marketing success can happen in ways that can't be measured. So what's the healthy balance between quantitative and qualitative assessment when it comes to marketing?
00:14:52
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, let's clarify a couple of things. I 100% believe that you should be able to quantify the impact of marketing inside of your company. I just think the way that it's done right now is not smart. And so the way that I think that it should be done is the idea of how many people are coming to your website asking to buy and then buy and how is that growing and how much expense is facilitated in order to get people to do that.
00:15:19
Speaker
relative to the revenue that gets returned. The reason that you focus on that point is because you win them at the highest rate. They have the shortest sales cycles. They have the lowest customer acquisition costs. It's going to help your sales team because they're getting deals that they don't need to go and hunt for.
00:15:33
Speaker
And so over time, you want more of your overall revenue contribution coming through that flow for the reason that I just laid out. And so that's why I want marketers to focus there. And if you focus there, then you can think about how do I get all of it? One, if you focus on a singular funnel through your website, it breaks you free from needing lead gen channel attribution on every channel, which incentivizes marketers to not use the ones that are most effective today. And so that would be the initial part of the framework. Now, the things that are difficult to quantify
00:16:02
Speaker
are that we produced a piece of content. Somebody liked it. They shared it with their friend, Susie. Susie liked it. And then nine months later, Susie's boss, Jane, comes and buys something. Never gonna, you know, it would still get caught at the, we're measuring marketing the way that they come in to buy. So like,
00:16:24
Speaker
If you change your measurement model, you would still attribute that in the right way in my view, but you're not going to know that clear path. And I think the thing that's suboptimal or just frankly not smart is that companies think that they can measure that and they can't. And so they give credit to things that don't necessarily make the most impact.
Reimagining Marketing Metrics
00:16:43
Speaker
Another thing that you'd not be able to measure is one that I mentioned before, which is the idea that
00:16:47
Speaker
because you've executed marketing really well that your sales output actually works a lot better. But that's incredibly difficult to quantify because there's too many variables changing and there's no real tracking around that. And so that's another thing that I would consider difficult to measure.
00:17:02
Speaker
the increasing outbound effectiveness, the long term position of your brand that gives you a competitive advantage. Those are all things that are upside. I'm saying if you just measured the marketing impact against website sourced revenue relative to spend, that that makes sense on its own. And then you're getting all these things that are difficult to measure as extras. Right. And so I think people should should move to for the reasons that I laid out mainly because executives cannot get off the fact of the Google AdWords 2012 mindset that
00:17:32
Speaker
you need to say somebody went here they click their ad they converted and they bought something like it's just a linear model in this case and you know for some transactional sales or product like sure but for enterprise sales you're gonna spend a lot of money and you're gonna waste a lot of your sales team's time.
00:17:49
Speaker
And I guess the follow up question to that would be for marketers who buy into your approach to quantitative performance is how do you convince your CEO that this is the way to go? Because a lot of CEOs, as you mentioned, it's cause and effect. If I do this, this should happen. But when that doesn't happen, then marketing bears the brunt of that. By showing them the differences between the performance of those different marketing funnels.
00:18:14
Speaker
And it becomes very obvious. I go in and do this. I've probably done this with 25 companies in the past 12 months. All of their lead gen models went at 0.1% with long sales cycles and they spend all of their advertising dollars on them. And then you have all these people that are coming through your website that are buying that have not engaged with those ads that are winning at 7% that have the shortest sales cycles out of all of the different sources of revenue that contribute 80% or more of marketing's revenue on that system alone.
00:18:44
Speaker
And so it would be much easier to start trying to build on that, a much more productive, efficient engine versus continuing to throw money at something that's terribly inefficient and actually has human resources downstream, SDRs or AEs, that need to follow up with them, which is a huge hidden cost and an incredibly expensive asset. And as you start to scale, if you're trying to grow revenue,
00:19:06
Speaker
and you're working off of that really inefficient system, you're going to need more head count than you actually need. You're going to need to spend way more advertising dollars than you actually need. And over time, the system will break. There are plenty of companies that are at 60 million ARR that don't have great net revenue retention, that have too many sales and marketing people and have capped out their digital advertising spend to a point where there's dramatic diminishing returns. And who wants to get to 60 million in revenue and be in that situation?
00:19:34
Speaker
Having consumed a lot of your LinkedIn content and listened to your podcast, State of Demand Gen, you have thoughts on a wide variety of topics. So for fun, let's do a rapid fire segment on some of the different marketing activities. And I'll mention these channels and you can fire off what you think. We talked a little bit about this before, but conferences, will they come back? How will they come back? What are your thoughts on that? Companies are over invested.
00:20:01
Speaker
Okay. And is this rapid fire for me too? Cause I'll just give you like a quick answer. I'll go further. You tell me. You can go a little further on that. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I, I think that they're going to come from the conferences standpoint, the industry conferences have no incentive to innovate zero. They can, every year they continue to raise their prices and companies still continue to pay it. And so they're, they have no incentive to do anything more than the exact same thing they keep doing.
00:20:27
Speaker
And the only way that you incentivize them to do more is companies start challenging that model. And companies are not going to challenge that model at enough scale anytime soon for anyone to change. And so what I'm recommending is for one smart company to do something different as a point of challenging that drives dramatically more impact while still siphoning off all of the real value of a trade show, which is not the booth. And I think companies should try it. Facebook advertising. Still very impactful, but was dramatically more impactful in 2018.
00:20:57
Speaker
LinkedIn advertising. Overpriced but catching up in terms of overall engagement. Second thing I'll add, not enough reach.
00:21:10
Speaker
And so while you see very large audiences when they build the data inside of LinkedIn, because everyone's profile matches your, your things, go look at how many people actually get delivered your ads. And it's not a lot. And so if you are in a, you know, I would, I would say any type of velocity sale less than 120 days sales cycle, you're going to really struggle to hit scale on LinkedIn, which is why we supplement with Facebook and Instagram and other channels. A lot of companies only run LinkedIn and display. And I think it's a huge mistake. Uh, field marketing.
00:21:39
Speaker
could use some updates to the activities that they do to drive the most impact. ABM. Misunderstood. And from a strategy standpoint, it makes perfect sense. At an execution level, companies really, really suck at it. Something close to the heart, podcasting. Incredibly underrated.
00:22:03
Speaker
for the potential impact and incredibly under-resourced by most companies that do it in terms of who's the actual host of the podcast, how much time they're investing, and different things like that. And companies just fail to see the dramatic impact that it can have if they executed it well. 800-pound girl in the room, content marketing. Too stuck in SEO 2011. Okay. Email marketing.
00:22:32
Speaker
Effective but overrated by a lot of companies because of the fact that they can measure it public relations Requires a facelift on how it's done. I think a lot of companies still run the PR play from to you know 2002 where they put a press release in the wire and hope somebody picks it up and in the future the I have mentioned this several times I'm gonna go into depth in it here the actual model is to build a
00:22:56
Speaker
owned PR channels that demonstrate expertise and command attention, which then opens up earned opportunities rather than hiring a PR firm paying them 25 grand to send cold emails to try and get you on some show. We've been doing that exact strategy. I can talk you through exactly what happens. We have been executing our own channels, maybe LinkedIn and podcast.
00:23:19
Speaker
I was initially asked for free consulting calls and then to go on other people's podcast which continues to grow and now and then an article was written about my company and Forbes and now we're getting asked to speak at conferences that the other people that vendors will pay twenty thousand dollars for someone at their company speak we get invited to do it for free and companies are asking us to do keynotes for their team. Which is content marketing.
00:23:48
Speaker
business development ABM. All in one. I think there's a huge opportunity in leveraging third party channels that have credibility. You could argue that an influencer is a form of PR or PR is an influencer. You could argue both of those things back and forth. I think that companies should really think about how they're executing there because it could be really impactful.
00:24:17
Speaker
Word of mouth. The thing that drives the most buying decisions in B2B today and nobody in B2B actually recognizes it. And finally, positioning. I would say that it's something that's important that I think companies spend a lot of time on that
00:24:37
Speaker
they have a good positioning. And then when it actually gets moved into quote unquote production or where somebody would actually read it, all of the teeth in it gets cut out because of bureaucracy.
00:24:49
Speaker
Great, great, awesome. Thank you for participating in that little bit. Yeah, that was fun. I could do that for hours. Finally, there's a lot of talk about the value of personal branding on LinkedIn. Or LinkedIn, there's a lot of talk about personal branding. And personally, I think a lot of people overthink it. I think it comes down to being a good person, doing the right things, delivering value, all the things that just make you a good person, both professionally and personally.
00:25:18
Speaker
As someone with a large personal brand, what's been your approach to personal branding? Do you think about personal branding? No, I think about producing content that people like, which allows them to consider my company when they have a problem that we can solve. I don't consider it personal brand. I consider it content marketing with effective distribution that drives a narrative for your company into the market in an effective way that people like.
00:25:43
Speaker
And so everyone, personal brand is not a new thing just because people have put a tag on it, right? Like in 1980, there were people in Boston that were significantly more well-known than other people in Boston. And those people had a reputation about being good at something. Maybe they were a good lawyer, maybe they were a good, you know, CPA or whatever. And they got more business because more people knew about them and recommended them.
00:26:10
Speaker
It's the same thing that's going on here. I do believe that a lot of people overthink it. I think it's about providing value. I think it's about talking about the things that you know that can help people. I think it's about building a community, listening to what people are saying as a feedback loop, generally being helpful.
00:26:30
Speaker
Final question, one final question. What's it like to be regarded as a marketing thought leader? That's a bit of an awkward question, but I think I got to ask it. How do you handle the demands on your time to do podcasts, speaking at events, and all those things that you do at Refined Labs? Is it a tough balancing act these days? I think that it's
00:26:54
Speaker
interesting and I'm grateful that people would refer to me as that. It's interesting though because throughout the first five to seven years of my career, everyone thought that all of my marketing ideas were not smart.
00:27:09
Speaker
And they didn't want me to do the things that I'm doing, like producing a podcast and different things like that. They got scrutinized heavily in the companies that I worked for. And so it's just, and the interesting thing is that all of the things that I do right now and all the things that I say, I might be able to say them more clearly, but I knew them all and I was saying them to the companies that I work for and trying to do those things in 2017.
00:27:31
Speaker
Right. And so it was, it's, it's nice now. And the reason that I was able to do that is that I took the leap to start a company because I couldn't find a company to work for that would actually let me do marketing the way that I wanted. And so I wanted to create an environment where I could be innovating and testing and doing a lot of cool stuff for a lot of sophisticated companies, which is what we're doing right now. On my time side, this is not a matter of, do you have enough time as an executive? The, the, there's two components. It's one, are you committed to it?
00:28:01
Speaker
We're committed to it is driving our narrative is driving our business at three hundred four hundred percent year-over-year growth multiple years in a row massive brand outcomes big vc private equity relationships that would have that other people spend a bunch of time cold called in sending direct mail and never get a meeting these big firms are coming to us because of the work that we're doing so totally committed to to the impact of it the second part
00:28:25
Speaker
is building the infrastructure of a great team that can execute on things so that i can prioritize this and so we have a incredibly talented and capable team many people that are better at a lot of things in marketing than i am and so i'm happy to put those people in a position where they can be really successful and have a lot of fun doing it and so that's the way that we we work on it but no it's not i don't consider it demanding i consider it my aside from our people and then our customer success my number one job.
00:28:55
Speaker
I guess I would be remiss if I didn't ask you to tell me what Refine Labs does. For most people know you, they may not be aware of what you actually do behind the scenes or in front of the scenes, depending on how you look at it. So maybe a quick snapshot on the Refine Labs story.
Refine Labs' Demand Marketing Strategy
00:29:11
Speaker
Yeah, so I believe in the future that companies will start to try to move to what I call category-winning demand marketing.
00:29:18
Speaker
which includes three components. It includes a brand component that would include events, organic social, community, earned PR, influencer relationships,
00:29:33
Speaker
content, things like that. The second component would be demand, a one-to-many or one-to-few based on company firmographic targeting through a paid distribution model across the internet that informs buyers, drives a ton of different content through guaranteed delivery using paid media.
00:29:53
Speaker
And then the third pillar would be an ABM pillar, which is one to one for significant deals. I'm thinking 250 or $500,000 deals or above only that you're targeting less than 20 accounts and each single account is getting specific campaigns. So if you're creating a piece, if you're doing a campaign for an account,
00:30:13
Speaker
then you're going to send them a podcast episode that you did where you broke down their strategy or provided something like that. I see almost no company execute that way because it's sales driven ABM, not marketing content driven ABM. And so I believe that companies will try and get to that outcome.
00:30:32
Speaker
And so that's what we believe. And so if companies believe in that, our job at Refine Labs is to help companies get there as quickly as possible. First by fixing demand because it creates the most short-term impact possible in a one-to-many model that allows you to create results and build confidence internally on what to do. Next would be the brand component. So advising on how do you build a podcast? How do you get organic social going? If you were going to do events in a different way than your sales events or conferences that you do right now, what would you do?
00:31:02
Speaker
If we were going to do influencer marketing, what would we do? We know how to do those things. And then the last thing would be ABM actually taking a lot of the operational infrastructure and content created from demand and brand and then rolling that into a one-to-one model in ABM would be the third pillar. I think that companies and then you're constantly switching out the different tactics and activities inside of those three buckets.
00:31:26
Speaker
that are generated based on targeting, whether it's paid or organic, and your overall intent and where you're playing. And so you could change out tactics over time, but I think that companies should be playing in all three of those spaces. I think that a lot of companies listening, if they look deeply, would realize that they're not.
00:31:44
Speaker
I asked this of every guest, and I'm not sure if you need to tell people where to find you, but if people want to find out more about you and refine labs, where do they go?
Conclusion: Contact Information for Chris Walker
00:31:52
Speaker
Yeah. People love the State of Demand Gen podcast. It's available on Apple, Spotify, and all the other places where I think crossing over 15,000 subscribers.
00:32:01
Speaker
narrowly on B2B demand marketing. I guess we talk about brand and ABM as well, category-winning demand marketing we cover on that show. So that's a great place to find us if you're looking for a lot of depth. And then if you're looking for more micro stuff, then you can follow Chris Walker on LinkedIn. I published daily there as well.
00:32:19
Speaker
Well, Chris, thanks for all the great insight and thanks everybody for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you'd like to learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor and coach, send an email to mark at marketingspark.co. I'll talk to you next time.