Marketing Strategy Talk w/ Chris Walker, CEO @ Refine Labs

Ian May 11, 2021

Hello all you marketers out there, my name is Ian from Marketing Strategy.com and you’re listening to another Marketing Strategy Talk. Recently I had the pleasure to interview Chris Walker of Refine Labs out of Boston. And Chris is setting the B2B Marketing world on fire right now. If you haven’t heard of him yet, I highly recommend you go check his content out on Linkedin.

And what makes Chris unique right now is the way he thinks about what many would consider traditional B2B marketing strategies. His takes are different, creative, clever but maybe most importantly, honest—and you’ll see what I mean in our conversation.

In this Marketing strategy Talk we’ll cover things like why most ebook-based marketing strategies will fail, why tradeshows are a waste of money, why marketers need to report on business metrics instead of MQLs, tips on how to grow an audience on LinkedIn, why brand is important “now more than ever” and so much more.

So strap in and get your pen and paper out, you won’t want to miss a single nugget in this one. Don’t forget to check us out on LinkedIn and Facebook, of course, visit us at marketingstrategy.com where you’ll find the most effective strategies for rapid growth for marketers, by marketers. So without further adieu let’s dive into the talk. Till next time.

Ian Luck
Founder
Marketing Strategy

Transcript

Ian

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Ian

Chris, thank you so much for joining me in a marketing strategy talk.
Chris

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Chris

Yeah, really happy to be here, Ian.
Ian

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Ian

Of course. So, before we get started I want to address the elephant in the room, if that’s all right with you.
Chris

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Chris

Let’s do it.
Ian

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Ian

All right. For all you marketers out there pulling this tape 100 years from now for historical record, I think Chris and I just want to let you all know that getting a quarantine haircut was damn near impossible so please forgive myself personally for this atrocious haircut and anybody listening on the podcast who can’t see it, consider yourselves lucky, but if you’re watching the video, you’re shit out of luck. So, be gentle on us.
Chris

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I actually haven’t gotten a haircut in two months and I’m just holding out hoping that they open soon, because if it goes on much longer I’m going to have to do it myself.
Ian

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I’m almost at that point, and I know my wife is, so I think there’s whispers of New Hampshire … I’m based out of Massachusetts. So is Chris. There’s whispers of New Hampshire opening up their hair cutteries
Chris

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They’re open. I understand however that you need proof of residence in order to do it.
Ian

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Ian

No way.
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I swear to God. Because, I was going to go and do it the first day they opened and you need a New Hampshire ID or some other proof of residency.
Ian

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Ian

What a world we live in, man. Good Lord. So before we kicked it off, we were just talking about Portsmouth. I worked there for about four years, and I think you have a connection up there. I’m curious to see what your favorite restaurant or lunch joint is before we get into the nitty-gritty of marketing here.
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Yeah, I lived in Portsmouth for about 18 months. Loved the little town there. And, then I outgrew it and wanted something bigger so I moved down to Boston. There are so many good restaurants there. A couple that come to mind, Row 34, which is also a location in Boston. However, I like the Portsmouth, New Hampshire location better. And on top of that, I know the person who owns Surf-
Ian

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Yeah, Surf’s great.
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Surf is good and then Jumpin Jay’s, but as you can see, it’s pretty much all seafood when I go to Portsmouth.
Ian

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Ian

Can’t go wrong there. I think Portsmouth in general, the fish there and obviously the lobster rolls are top-notch. All right, so I’m really excited about this one.

I think you are, dare I say, one of the leading voices in B2B marketing right now. I know it’s probably weird to hear, but I do want to call out a couple things in this interview. First off, do you consider yourself a contrarian and do you think that’s important in B2B marketing right now?
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I don’t consider myself a contrarian. I might have controversial point of view’s based on the people that read the content. However, I tell the truth and now that I’ve left … So, I’ve worked in companies for the first five or seven years of my career and I recognize now that because I don’t work in them I can just tell the truth. And, I know that the people inside of the companies can’t because they might be reprimanded or fired for calling out all the dumb stuff that happens in there, so I become the voice that hopefully pushes people to challenge some of the behaviors in companies that I think are outdated, ineffective, seller-centric and so, that’s how I see it.
Ian

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I think that’s really interesting because that was the first impression I had of you. I don’t know what the first piece I came across of yours was, but I do remember just literally stopping what I was doing and just starting to read almost everything on your profile, and it was like you’re inside of my head saying all the things that I felt in my gut and you were saying them. Everybody who doesn’t know Chris, go look him up on LinkedIn and he has a pretty serious following for this exact reason, I think. It’s because you are saying things that aren’t in line with what everybody else is doing, and it’s honestly a fresh take, I think, but it is very much in line with what I would also consider the truth right now. I think it’s what we need-
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It’s rooted in experience and data. I worked in the company. I ran the paid social eBook downloads and passed them to reps and looked at the metrics, and now I audit three to seven companies a month and I see the exact same thing. Nothing has changed except the performance is actually getting worse. I mean, I just look at it objectively about two things. One, is it working or is it not based on data? And the second thing is is this seller-centric or is it buyer-centric? Those are the two ways that I look at things, and over time, I’ve realized and learned and preached that being buyer-centric also means better business results.
Ian

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Yeah, no joke. I think that’s also one thing that really grabbed me, too, is buyer centricity. I work at a company that is all about customer-centricity, and I don’t think we were necessarily being super buyer-centric at the moment. After I specifically started looking at the content, I think it was a very easy call to just align those two methodologies together and create this cohesive … I hate to use it because it’s overused, but the human-centric company. Make it easy for people to engage with you, buy from you, interact with you, give feedback to you. I think that’s where the market and just business, in general, is going. It’s making things focused on your end-users and their desired outcomes.
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Yeah, and one point on that, and this might be tough for some people to hear, but I just see it a lot is that no company is going to tell themselves that they are not buyer-centric. Every company tells themselves that they’re buyer-centric. Very few actually live it.
Ian

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Ian

Yeah, and I think one of the tactics, too, that you really called out which I loved, and it’s basically letting people consume content. Your approach to paid distribution is very different than most.
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Different than everyone.
Ian

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Ian

Yeah, right. Let me just break it down for those of you that aren’t aware of it, and correct me if I go out of line here, Chris, but essentially your hypothesis, or maybe it’s past that at this point, is-
Chris

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Passed it, yeah.
Ian

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Ian

Don’t make people give you something. If you’re running a paid ad, don’t ask them to fill out a form. Don’t ask them to do XYZ. What you do is you want them to consume the content. You have one purpose for this piece of content that you’re kicking out and it’s for them to understand it or read it. Can you expand on that a little bit? Why do you think that’s the right move, and your successes doing that?
Chris

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Yeah. In essence, the way that I figured this out was when I was running the eBook campaign paid social. This was in 2015 or 2016, so we ran highly target paid social ads to download an eBook. We got 500 conversions in a week, and sent out the automatic reply email with the link to the eBook, and I looked at the click-through rate on that email, and less than 10% clicked through the email. If you look at the engagement metrics on the content, very few people actually got through it. So, what I learned is that we were creating a lot of friction for someone to actually get the content, which was the whole point of the execution.
Chris

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But, the side note is that a lot of companies have to do it that way too because of how they’re scored. Luckily for me, while I built this demand gen function, I was able to elevate the metrics that I reported into the company and I reported at the business level. I reported on pipeline, sales cycle length and win rate, and marketing source revenue, so the amount of MQL’s or demo requests never hit the CEO’s desks. So, for those reasons I had the flexibility to make the choices that I thought were best for the organization from a revenue perspective and a lot of people don’t have that flexibility so they’re driven to get 1000 eBooks downloads regardless of whether or not anyone actually reads it.
Ian

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Ian

Wow. Let’s explore that a little bit. In theory, I 100% agree with you. For those companies out there … Not in theory. I agree with you, but for those companies out there that are already being measured on MQL’s, they have their entire funnel built around these conversion metrics. How do you make that transition from basically measuring on MQL’s to measuring on essentially pipeline?
Chris

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I mean, this question is so multifaceted. There’s the one, which is the organizational change component, and then the other one is actually at the tactical level. On the organizational change component, luckily now I work with CMO’s that believe in this process, so they’re able to manage the organizational change around it. At a tactical level, the first thing that we do is what I would call a blended transition. So, we’re not just shutting off the faucet because we know that they have X amount of inbound SDR’s that are waiting for the 30,000 MQL’s to come through this year so they can call them and they don’t go anywhere.
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So with blended transition, first thing we do, optimize the ads. We optimize the ads and take them over, usually the CPA goes down, so we recoup all that money. We also slow down the amount of budget that’s being allocated to that while we start moving it to other things. The other things being basically at its purest form, right short form content and guaranteed delivery of that content targeted paid social or other mediums. Email can work. Organic social can work, but for a lot of companies, we just use targeted paid because it super accelerates the process.
Chris

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And then what happens is we stop measuring on MQL’s and we start measuring on inbound sales conversions. Inbound sales conversions, we get demo requests and inbound phone calls with the sales line, and chat requests for a demo, a “contact us” submission, a “Get a quote”. Any of those types of conversion when a buyer is starting their own buying process. That’s called being buyer-centric is waiting for them to be ready. And when you do that, you have to start changing around the amount of metrics because you’re actually going to have less of those. The difference is that those are the people that actually buy things. So, we work through that and over time what happens is as the funnel plays out and they get to see the data, they recognize that the only people that are buying things are the people that go through that channel anyway.
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So, as they’re able to see that, that they get more sales from 10 demo requests than 1000 eBook downloads, yet the amount of money they’re spending to get the 1000 eBook downloads is significantly higher than the 10 demo requests, then they recognize what’s going on. Another key nuance here is we send no paid traffic to a demo page because if you send paid traffic to a demo page, the people that convert are also going to be low quality. So, we send paid traffic to the blog or anything that helps them consume content, and then when they come back, they come back through organic search or direct traffic as last-touch attribution, and that is a signal that they took the action, read the value prop, converted 50 ICP, and you see the conversion funnel metrics play itself out over there with much higher conversions to sales opportunities and all the way through to close one revenue.
Ian

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Ian

That’s so powerful. What you just said, just covering how that works, I think is a revelation for a lot of companies. Do you think inbound is to blame for this inbound-centric, eBook-centric marketing strategy that literally just drives inefficiencies? Because that’s literally every company I’ve worked at that has had an inbound centric, inbound marketing demand gen strategy that were always inefficient as hell.
Chris

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I think that HubSpot is responsible for marketers not evolving from SEO. However, the eBook download things is the responsibility of analysts that drive the demand gen waterfall framework, which is built on driving a bunch of leads and then having SDR’s do tele-prospecting to triage them before they get to sales. So, analysts drive this behavior. That’s probably the number one. I believe in that framework from when the account executive touches it forward, but before that, I think it’s trash. And, all of the tech vendors that need that attribution level to support the purchase of their product. So, those are the two reasons why it’s happening at that level.
Chris

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HubSpot, I put in a different camp which is why are marketers still thinking that content marketing’s only SEO? There is way better ways to do content marketing today than a decade ago, but you’re still doing the playbook that was built a decade ago. So if I pinpoint one thing, it is that for why I still see companies, or there’s HubSpot agencies … Just to be transparent, we’re a HubSpot agency and we are not like any of the other ones. We just prefer their tool because it’s way less expensive and way better to use than Marketo.
Ian

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Ian

I agree.
Chris

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So, a lot of the HubSpot agencies run the HubSpot play so companies go over and hire an inbound agency and they write surface-level content stuff with keywords and they hope someone stumbles upon it, and they celebrate their metrics, “We’ve got seven organic PDF downloads this month,” and that is just not the way to get it done anymore.
Ian

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I think that’s what’s actually so compelling about Demand Gen Live, the podcast that you run with Gaetano … available on iTunes and anywhere other podcasts are sold … is that you are pretty much in the paid content distribution camp, and Gaetano is a hardcore SEO specialist. I think the dichotomy between your viewpoint and his viewpoint is super interesting to see how you guys tackle different issues as they come up. Because the format, for all of you that don’t know, they just take live questions on the spot, and while both of your viewpoints are very sound, I think it’s interesting to see that you can just slice it different ways.
Ian

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There’s always two different ways, three different ways you can achieve an outcome. I think you would argue that the paid distribution is a quicker way to do it than for example letting an SEO strategy develop. But, Gaetano would argue that it’s maybe a better longer term strategy. So, there’s benefits to both.
Chris

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We’re both highly skilled practitioners and I super respect his approach, and we both understand our strengths and our experience. Do I want to start going over to SEO? No, I’d prefer to continue to run paid. The reason being is that we run paid social to get the results going for clients, but the real place where we’re going to end up is organic thought leadership content pushed out on organic social podcast, YouTube, email, which lowers customer acquisition costs over time. They just need to see the fast results in order to get to the point where I think they should be anyway.
Ian

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There you go.
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Should every company be hosting a live Q&A with two subject matter experts at their company and a guest every week with 50 plus people from their audience online asking live questions? Yes. Should they be ripping that and putting it on a podcast? Definitely. Should they be taking the video and putting it on YouTube organic and optimizing that for search traffic? Definitely. Should they be sending out the recording in an email? Yes. Should they be chopping it up and putting it on LinkedIn on their company channel, packaging it up for the person that was a guest on the podcast so that they can post it on LinkedIn and posting it through the personal profiles of the subject matter experts at their company? Yes. Are any companies doing that? Very few. That’s going to be a killer clip for LinkedIn.
Ian

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I know. No, that was very … Let’s just stop. Great talking to you. I think there’s so much to unpack there but honestly the one thing that gets me is these companies on LinkedIn, I am as guilty as the next. I’m VP of Marketing at a tech company and I’ve been doing LinkedIn company profiles wrong. And I think I’ve already put a playbook in place over the last couple of weeks just consuming all the content to change that up and try to be more human about it and treat it as a personal profile. I don’t know if it’s going to work, but to be honest we don’t have much to lose. We have 12,000 followers on LinkedIn on our company profile, which is not too bad. It’s not as big as some other companies, but for our size, it’s pretty good.
Ian

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But, we get almost no engagement on it because it’s robotic. It was corporate, so we’re going to switch it up.
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The core metric that we need to look at on LinkedIn is not followers. There are people with 100,000 followers that post and get two likes because one, their content isn’t good and they had a bot invite people before LinkedIn stopped allowing it, so that is not a metric that matters. If you look at people on Instagram that bought hundreds of thousands of followers and get no engagement, that’s why. So, the metrics we need to start looking at quality of engagement. Who’s liking the post? Is it a bunch of people? Is it a bunch of bots from … How do I say this? Is it a bunch of bots from people in Asia? Or, is it CMO’s and CRO’s at companies that you’re trying to sell to, or influencers of people at companies you’re trying to sell to? And, who’s commenting? Is it those people and what are they saying? Who are they tagging? What’s going on in there?
Chris

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Those are the indicators that matter. I would much rather have 10 likes from exact ideal customer profiles from every post than 1000 likes on a generic post that means nothing from a bunch of people that would never buy from me. I know that there’s arguments for both, but the way that I use the platform is to go deep, not wide. So, the post about compounding interest that gets 40,000 likes is not what I’m going for.
Ian

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Right. I think you’ve done LinkedIn better than most I’ve seen out there, so I agree. You go deep. You’re focused. So, you don’t comment on every random thing.
Chris

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I just say in my lane.
Ian

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Yeah, and you basically really hone in on providing a ton of value. You don’t mention product. You don’t mention your agency. You just focus on providing useful information that could serve your target audience, and I think that, If anybody could take anything away from this whole LinkedIn thing right now, is provide value.
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It’s really hard. I figured this out in 2016 and I’ve never looked back, and I have empathy for people that haven’t figured this out yet is that when you post and when you create content, there must be absolutely no thought of how it creates a sale opportunity for you. And, I know that that is super hard and when people hear it, they’re like, “What is this guy talking about?” And, they push back because they don’t understand it, but when you get it, you’ll understand.
Ian

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Yeah, right. I think that’s especially a tough one for business owners, CEO’s, salespeople. They’re like, “Push the product. Push the product. We’ve got to get our product out there.”
Chris

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20% discount, can’t wait to post this. Let’s run ads on it.
Ian

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Ian

Nobody cares. Nobody cares.
Chris

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No
Ian

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All right, LinkedIn. Let’s stay here for a little bit. I’m going to make you look like a wizard. Are you ready?
Chris

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I’ve been ready. Born ready.
Ian

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So, this is a post from January 2020. January, pre-COVID, nothing was really going on and you say, “Here are nine things you’ll wish your marketing team did in 2020.” And, the number one thing was cut trade show booth expenses by at least 50%.
Chris

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That’s really funny. I had never connected the dots on that. I’m curious if the other things in the post are real, but-
Ian

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I can go through them. I’ve got all nine.
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But, I just commented on someone’s post maybe 10 minutes before we started this podcast and it said, “Wouldn’t it be great if people proactively changed and innovated instead of being forced to?” If you really think about that, the post was about people that have moved to a remote sales environment and are getting better results. It’s like, “Because, you don’t need to be in an office to be productive.” So, I just feel like this time, as unfortunate as it is and I really do mean that, it’s forcing change that should have happened years ago.
Ian

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Yeah, I think the image that comes to mind is this guy, Marketoonist, or something like that. I forgot what it is, but he does these marketing cartoons, and it’s a bunch of executives in a boardroom talking about digital transformation. There’s this big wreaking ball coming in from the side that says, “COVID-19”. Digital transformation is just getting absolutely thrusted upon these companies, whether they have a choice or not. So, I thought that was really interesting. Literally cut trade show expenses by at least 50% and that was in January 2020. Good on you for calling that one.
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It’s a gift. People are really sad that they can’t go to events because they don’t know a better thing to do, but they better figure it out because it’s a gift that they got 50% of their budget back to use somewhere else.
Ian

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And, you have a really interesting approach in trade shows as well I’d like to bring … And, I’m sure you’ve talked about it 1000 times, but I think it’s so interesting its worth mentioning one more time. Hit me.
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Every time I break it down, I add a new layer to it. I continue to figure out a better way to explain it. So, if you break a trade show into its core sales goals, there are a couple buckets. The first one is net new acquisition for people who have never heard of you. The next bucket is move existing pipeline forward. Active deals that you are currently working, have meetings with them. There is current customers, so have meetings with current customers. And then, the last one would be thought leaders or other people from networking perspective. If you look at where all of the results happen, it’s in the last three buckets that I talked about and you do not need a booth to accomplish any of those things. You can have dinner with people in active pipeline. You can have drinks with current customers. You can do all of these different things outside of a booth.
Chris

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The only reason you would have a booth is to get new customers that have never heard of you, and if you measure the results of a trade show just on that, you would realize that the booth is a complete waste of money. The problem is that people put all of the stuff together and say, “Yeah, we moved that one active deal from stage four to close one and we got $100,000 and we only spent $60k on the booth.” It’s like, “Yeah, but you didn’t need the booth to do that.” I would love to see companies ditch the booth, move that money into facilitating the things that are important about the trade show. Save a lot of the additional money, use it to create content at the event. I would love to see a company have either a station or a walking camera creating content and interviews with thought leaders and have all these things going on.
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And, the value of that is the amplification of the content after the event. If you did it well, you could record 20 interviews or 20 sessions and then you could put them … And, you’d have a month to three months of content depending on how fast you want to chop it up and put it out. So, that’s one.
Chris

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If you didn’t spend, there’s companies that are spending well over $2 million dollars a year on trade show booths, so maybe you just do it for the first couple shows and you take the $1.7 million that’s being wasted and you take it, and what I’ve been doing … A long time ago I realized that if I start to experiment … As people start to see the things that I’m doing and they see what the final product looks like, then they’re more open to it. So, what I’ve been doing before COVID happened, I was hosting micro-events in a much different style. I did one in Miami with Josh Braun. I did one in LA with Justin Welsh, and we’ll have a couple other ones coming up whenever we can get over this. We invite somewhere between 20 and 50 people, and we host in a fireside chat, so Justin Welsh and I are talking about how to scale a company, how he scaled a company from zero to $50 million in revenue.
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We open it up for live Q&A where the audience gets a lot of value, and we get to leverage the audience to create better content because it’s what they care about, and then we measure the success of the event based on the results of the amplified content, not on how many people we converted at the event. Nobody’s coming to your event to be sold to, so if you just, again, go back to being buyer-centric, provide value to those people, and then get the value that you need somewhere else. We take the content, we have a 90 minute quality video. We put that up on YouTube. The audio gets ripped for a podcast. It gets chopped up on LinkedIn. I package the videos and clip them and I give them to Justin, who has 30,000 followers and they’re great videos and it’s good quality content for Justin. And Justin publishes them, which brings awareness to my company to his followers. That whole executive is $8000 or $10,000.
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So, why are you not doing that in 50 different cities in perpetuity forever and you’ll have a ridiculous content stream all for less than the cost of what you’re wasting on trade show booths today? But, the reason people don’t do it is because it’s hard, because they want to measure the success of their event on number of leads and sales, not on things that actually matter. So, that is the long winded, my view on what’s happening in trade shows today and what you should be doing instead.
Ian

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Ian

So, let me build on that because I’m in 100% agreement with you on that, and we’ve done something at my company similar, which is run our own conference. Like you said, those little micro-events, we did something for 200 people. We called it Monetize! Amsterdam, which is this sub-brand we have, but it was basically a thought leadership style summit where we didn’t pitch a product. We had our best customers tell their stories about how they’re improving their experience program. We had analysts from Forrester. We had Salesforce, Microsoft, all those guys up on stage just providing value. There was not any product pitch weaved in there. It was literally just provide value, provide value, provide value.
Ian

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Ian

We did that in Boston, in Amsterdam, Sydney, Australia, Silicon Valley. Two things that jump out, right? When you’re not really actively selling, like you said, provide value, these companies come to you. So, we closed some serious logos like Eventbrite, Anheuser Busch, Heineken from that type of thing. And, those larger companies tend to really gravitate towards that type of stuff, which is interesting. That’s another thing we found.
Ian

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Ian

But, the second piece is if you get your clients up on stage, these are clients that were really hesitant to do a case study with us before, but if you get them up on stage and talk about it and you film it, it’s literally like you said, it’s content that you can literally chop up, reuse-
Chris

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Chris

Probably more authentic, too.
Ian

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Ian

Way more authentic, man. And, it’s so much better than a crappy little PDF that’s three pages rambling on about your own company and how great you are. It’s literally right from the customer. We don’t control their message. We just tweak it for presentability so it’s easier to understand or better received by the audience, but you nailed it, man. It’s authentic. You get the case study. They feel great about it. They spread it around their company. It’s one of the biggest game-changers for our company was avoiding literally trade shows and just saying, “All right, we’re just going to do our own thing.”
Chris

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Chris

And, most companies are spending somewhere between 30 and 70% of their variable marketing budget on trade shows, which restricts them from trying anything else because they don’t have enough money to try it.
Ian

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Ian

Right
Chris

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Chris

One thing that I would ask you is when you did them in different cities, was it the same speakers at each one?
Ian

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Ian

No. So, we hustled pretty hard. It was a lot of effort.
Chris

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Chris

I love it.
Ian

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Ian

So, we did different speakers, different customers-
Chris

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Chris

Because, the content amplification afterwards, if you have the same piece of content, you can’t use it over and over.
Ian

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Ian

Exactly
Chris

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Chris

There are some companies in the US that do a roadshow and do 15 stops and present the same piece of content at every single location, and you could have 15x the amount of content if you had different speakers and different topics at each city, which is what I would prefer to do.
Ian

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Ian

Yeah, that’s the right way to do it. I think different topics, different speakers, exactly what you said. If you’re going to do it, and you’re going to spend the money to do it, you might as well get something out of it outside of just the attendance. You’ve got to get that content.
Chris

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Chris

Talk to me about the big logos. Now, I’m going to start interviewing you. So, talk to me about the big logos. Were those on your ABM target account list? Or, did they just happen? How did that go?
Ian

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Ian

Yeah, good question. I think you’ll agree with me on this because I think I’ve heard you say this, but we had a show lined up and we promoted for a good four or five months, and then what we did is we made it mandatory for every single sales opportunity to go to the show. Every rep had to get those accounts at that show. It was a pipeline accelerator. So, what actually ended up happening is these companies would come inbound … I could go on a rant about this, but we had a couple different marketing assets that drove a ton of organic traffic for us from large companies. 90% of the Fortune 500. I wouldn’t say we’re huge, but in that aspect we were punching above our weight class there. So, we got a lot of engagement from these larger companies.
Ian

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Ian

So, we would have good conversations with them but what we found is that they would sometimes just go with a different company that … One of our biggest competitors is a $5 billion dollar company that got bought out by SAP. So, my biggest lever is brand. I got to fight on brand and I got to win on brand, and I think you said that as well, but I agree. You’ve got to at least be at the same level as them, if not striving to be above them on brand.
Chris

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Chris

I love … Sorry to interject, but I love being the $20 million dollar company that’s competing with the $5 billion dollar company.
Ian

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Ian

So do I.
Chris

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Chris

Because they are wasting money everywhere. Your product is better and you just need to communicate it. It really is that simple.
Ian

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Ian

Exactly. And, you can be a little bit more risky in some things, too. These larger companies, they have a very set message. It has to run through 10 lawyers, and you can basically just blow by them if you want to, which is really cool.
Chris

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Chris

Exactly. I agree.
Ian

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Ian

So anyways, we got them in our pipeline through organic various channels, and then we would mandate that sales gets them to the conference. It’s a pipeline accelerator. They see the message delivered on the stage. They see the customers. They see the analysts. It’s compelling as hell, man, and I can’t quantify this for anybody that’s listening to this. It’s something that you have to experience for yourself. If you’re running your own conference and you’re delivering a message that supports your value prop but it’s not salesy, good things tend to happen.
Chris

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Chris

It’s just the core difference between closing Eventbrite through an event that provides value versus having five SDR’s cold call them for six months and show them banner ads, and send them some gift for $500 in the mail hoping that they’ll have a meeting with you. And, it’s just a completely different approach and I think we could go in this, because over time, I find continuously is that if you just pick 100 accounts that you wish you could be at and you go hard at them, that’s one way to do it. But, you could also just put out great information and let the 100 that actually want to go from you come and find you. And, I just prefer that route. I just think it’s more effective, so I do think that there’s a multi-prong … You can have an outbound motion going in that. I almost like the idea of having the outbound motion happening in a subset of accounts, and in the accounts that you’re going to go after afterwards, right now you’re actively interviewing the CMO at that company for your podcast.
Chris

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Chris

And then, a sales motion might start in six months, if at all, because what I think I’ll find is that if you do the podcast with someone and you have 100 accounts, two of them when they need something, you’ll be top of mind in a completely different way. So yeah, I have some feelings with how ABM’s practice today. I think that it’s more account-based outbound sales-
Ian

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Ian

Of course it is.
Chris

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… than marketing. And that message is driven purely by the vendors that sell the tool, so I just look at it in a different way.
Ian

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Ian

I’m with you, man. I think the other thing that really jumps out at me, too, is fine, have a target list. That’s totally fine. That works. That part of it does work, but where you win is when you, like you said, provide value or you stand out. The thing is marketing is a battle for attention. You got to get the attention of the other account, and you’re not going to do that if you’re doing the same playbook 40, 50 other … That’s probably in the low end … probably hundreds of other companies are doing. You got to do something that’s unique like, “Hey, come to this event that we have. Maybe even speak.” Whatever it is, you have to have a different way to slice it or you’re going to blend in.
Ian

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Ian

And, it goes back to what I know for you, which is a core belief, is brands. Brand, brand, brand. You got to stand out. People need to recognize your brand so when that conversation does happen, you’re the first person they talk to.
Chris

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I’ve tried to really figure out how to message this because when a lot of people hear brand, they hear fluff, colors, logo. And actually how you drive brand, and the best way that I’ve found to drive it is by providing value with no expectation in return. So, never have a call to action. Nobody that attends my webinar when I provide value for an hour, I don’t have an SDR that’s going to put them in a cadence afterwards. I have people that have come to a webinar nine weeks in a row. I don’t think they would have been here week two if my SDR called them after week one, but I think companies are really shortsighted in some of those things.
Chris

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Chris

And then, just wanted to transition. So, is there anything else on the list that you found interesting? The nine things?
Ian

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Ian

Oh, yes. Okay, so a couple things. Stop gating your content in videos. Not super shocking, right? But, I would tend to agree, even though hey, I’m going to fully admit to you I’m selective, so I give away videos. I give away case studies. I’m still too nervous to give out my eBooks without a form. I’m not there yet. I know it’s the right thing to do in my head-
Chris

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Chris

The easiest way to stop is to not make eBooks. It’s so funny because there’s so many comments that are relevant, but I commented when I was walking my dog earlier today and the question was about eBooks and the comment that I responded with was, “I stopped making eBooks in 2016 and since then my results have gotten way better.” Because, you stop getting so married to having a 10 page PDF that is tough to read and you start focusing on high frequency, high volume, high value items. I think that the reason the eBook prevents people from doing things is because you can’t produce it in volume, and right now, the way people consume content in a social environment, you need to figure out … If you’re going to take the eBook and you’re going to find a way to break that down so you have 10 social posts every couple days, maybe.
Chris

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Chris

But, I don’t think that many people try and do both because they have the eBook gated, so they don’t want to give it away organic, which is just weird.
Ian

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Ian

So, I might differ with you on this.
Chris

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Chris

Yeah, let’s hear it.
Ian

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Our approach and I’m going to give you some backstory. We have a report. It’s not an eBook, it’s a report. It’s an industry level report that we run. The last one we ran was about a year and a half ago. We’re in the process of doing one right now. We focus on the keystone piece of content, and this thing generated 30,000 downloads organic for us. We didn’t have to rely on PPC for the first three years at this company. That might be shortsighted by me, but we were ramping so we had to conserve cash, all that stuff.
Ian

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Ian

I think you can focus on keystone high-quality pieces of content, get a good amount of leads in and then as long as you’re not letting what you said suffer, so if you’re not producing because again, it goes back to the awareness and the attention. If you’re not out there every day, twice a day, it’s going to be tough for companies to remember you, but that’s why I’m struggling with that, man. You could probably challenge me on it, but that’s where I am at. I know that if I don’t do it, I’m giving up 30,000 emails.
Chris

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Chris

Yeah. I was going to say, do you think those people are leads or contacts?
Ian

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Ian

We don’t talk about … Yeah, I say contacts, but it’s basically we don’t really talk about leads at my company. Everything’s a contact. But no, I think they’re super low quality, so that’s the other issue. Industry report is even more so low quality than maybe a focused eBook.
Chris

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Chris

If it’s happening organic, I actually am okay with it as long as there’s not a sales motion behind it. I think that is maybe the core difference. The two things that I see not working for companies is one, using paid to drive downloads of content and immediately put them in a sales
Ian

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Ian

Yeah, that’s insane. That’s insane.
Chris

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Chris

The second one is using paid to drive download to the content, putting them in a nurture sequence with eight emails and if they don’t come through that, which nobody does, then put them in a sale case. So for both of those, the pain for that execution with the expectation that somebody that downloads a book is all of a sudden going to buy your $100k ACB SAS tool, I think, just comes back to being seller-centric.
Ian

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Ian

It’s delusional is what it is. You can say it. I think lead scoring plays a big role. If you have 30,000 downloads coming in, you need to be able to sort through and sift through which ones are consideration level contacts. Are they doing things that look like somebody that is interested in buying?
Chris

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Chris

Why wouldn’t you just wait for them to give you the signal that they are buying, that they want to talk to you?
Ian

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Ian

How would they send that signal?
Chris

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Chris

By reaching out to you?
Ian

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Ian

That’s what I’m saying. So, if they reach out to us, if they request a demo, or book a meeting, that’s when we pass it off to sales.
Chris

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Chris

Precisely.
Ian

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Ian

We shave off I think it’s 75% of our leads, we don’t ever pass to sales.
Chris

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Chris

Yeah, I did the same thing when I was doing this in 2016. Unless you made a sales conversion, you never moved from HubSpot into Salesforce and an opportunity because you’re just wasting your sales team’s time.
Ian

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Ian

100%, and losing their trust, which I’ve heard you say, too. I’m right there with you.
Chris

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Chris

That’s a big intangible. I’m really glad you recognized that.
Ian

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Ian

It is. And that’s how the whole, “Marketing delivers crap.” “Well, you’re not following up on the leads.” That is a killer.
Chris

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Chris

I’ve really figured this one out and why that’s happening, so just really quickly, the misalignment starts at the culture level but it presents itself much lower. So, it starts at the culture level, and at the culture level, everything is driven on sales metrics, not on brand metrics. They’re driven on sales metrics, which therefore leads to marketers needing to do whatever to support the sales team and misguided decisions drive a volume metric because that’s what they think that they need. So then, marketers do all the wrong things to hit the volume metric, which then drives a bunch of trash to sales and then sales says, “Marketing is delivering garbage,” and that’s where the misalignment happens. So, people think it’s at the metrics level or the tech stack level, or all this different stuff. It is not. It comes back to culture and it persists in metrics.
Ian

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Ian

Culture is one of those things, too. You said it’s intangible. If you’re not hyper-aware of those things, they can literally just eat a company alive from the inside out.
Chris

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Chris

And, it pretty much starts and stops with the CEO. It really does.
Ian

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Ian

Interesting. So, back to your list. I’ve got one other one for you. I think we covered a good amount of them actually, so I got one other one for you I want to bring up. Create a video strategy and build a video team in-house. This goes back to your marketing department should run as a media company, or it shouldn’t. Where do you stand on that and why did you say that point?
Chris

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Chris

I think that your marketing department should run as a media company, for sure. With that, a lot of thought leadership content that is produced to grab attention and create value, not to drive sales conversions, which ultimately leads to better sales conversions. I think that point is very clear, so when we run paid Facebook, “This study came out that said that blah, blah, blah is happening. This new feature was released. We just had a new integration with this company, and by the way, we targeted you and we know that you use that product.” In paid social, we distribute content that feels like news because people are in a news feed and it feels current. It makes them feel like they’re learning something. It can be read very quickly. They get the message and then they move on.
Chris

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Chris

So yes, I have lived that for five plus years, and I believe that is the best approach. Why should build a video house in-team, or why you should build a video team in-house is because if you do not, you will not be able to cost effectively create a volume of content that’s needed to be successful. If you have a video team in-house, most likely you’d be able to create a video every day and I believe that if you’re not putting out a video every day, you’re leaving a lot of room and upside on the table. And the second thing is, I believe that you need it as a core competency. Companies call me and they’re like, “Hey, can you write our content for us?” And, I’m like, “If I was in your seat, Mrs. CMO, then I would want me to tell you that you need to learn how to create content in-house because you can not outsource content creation unless it’s for SEO.”
Chris

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Chris

People can stuff keywords in blogs and get it to rank, but you can not have a piece of content cut through the noise and resonate with your buyer by outsourcing it to someone that doesn’t know what they’re talking about. So, I believe that companies … This is not in my best vested interest to say but I believe most companies should try and build everything in-house from a marketing perspective because if you do it well, it’s a competitive advantage that most big companies do not recognize right now.
Ian

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Ian

I want to cover this because this is also something I very strongly agree with you on. I’m reminded of one of your podcasts, actually, Demand Gen Live, available wherever podcasts are sold … there was this guy, I forgot his name and I’m sorry, chimed in and was like, “Hey, so all this stuff you’re talking about, is there a book out there that you can recommend that would help me learn how to do XYZ?” And your response, and the way you’re kicking this advice out there is, “I can’t help you. You need to learn how to do it yourself. The reason why I’m able to talk about these topics is because I’ve had companies, side hustles, that I learned how to do this, and that’s the only path forward. It’s hard work.”
Ian

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Ian

And, I think that rocks a lot of people. There’s no, “Wait, I can’t hire this out?” You need to do the work yourself, and I’m 100% with you on that. I mean, hell, this is a side hustle for me. I have a day job and I’m doing these interviews because I want to learn and grow.
Chris

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Chris

Love it.
Ian

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Ian

But, that’s so important and I think that’s also for the young marketers out there is super, super underrated because a lot of them get in that trap of, “Let’s just hire a contractor. I don’t have expertise here. Let’s just hire it out.” Again, sorry if that’s going against what you do because you are an agency-
Chris

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Chris

No, no. I literally just said it.
Ian

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Ian

But, I do want to just really harp on that because it’s so important and-
Chris

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So, I got here by building … I was a one-person demand gen arm in a $30 million dollar company. I created the content. I managed creative. I ran all the media. I did community management. I built the marketing automation system. I ran all the automation. I did all of the sales ops. I did all of the marketing ops. That’s how I learned everything is I did it, so I took pieces … At one point, I was outsourcing the AdWords, and guess what? The agency wasn’t very good on it, and luckily I knew it well enough to know that. A lot of people, because they haven’t done that at a level where they really understand it, they outsource to vendors that aren’t good at what they do, or they hire people that aren’t good at what they do, but they don’t know that because they don’t know how to do it themselves.
Chris

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Chris

I think we’ll see a new wave of marketing leaders emerge that are deep practitioners that actually could go in and tweak and add and go in and analyze it, and will be the face of the company’s podcast if it makes sense. If you’re selling to robotic engineers, maybe the CMO isn’t the right face, but in a lot of cases, I would like to see leaders produce at that level, get actually in it. I do think that over time we will see that transition. I like the idea of having a team that is more flat from an organizational standpoint. So yeah, those are a couple of my thoughts there.
Ian

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Ian

Cool. And, I agree. I think hopefully as these things progress, I know there’s this T-shape marketer out there, which is for all of you that don’t know what that is, it’s basically a bunch of broad experience at the very top of the T, the horizontal part, and then one very specific, deep expertise in the vertical. For example, paid distribution. I think it’s a little bit more complex than that. Hopefully, the new marketers coming up will have maybe … I almost envision an upside-down W or an M that goes all the way to the bottom where it’s the expertise in two to three areas.
Ian

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Ian

But, wishful thinking. I don’t know if we’re there yet, but it’s good. I think that if anybody can do it, this new generation of marketers can. So, I’m hopefully. All right, little bit of time left. I’ve got a couple questions that I want to just blast through. You said that you certainly believed that we were in a golden era of B2B marketing, and I want you to unpack that on why because I also agree.
Chris

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Chris

Especially in B2B marketing, and the reason that I know this is because it’s already played out in B2C. The companies that have built $5 billion dollar companies on the back of pure Facebook ads from 2008 to 2015, the same thing will happen with B2B companies. It’s already happening. So, it’s not like I’m predicting anything. I’m just looking at what’s already happened and extrapolating it to B2B environment. Buyers are changing, outbound sales executions need to change. They’re becoming more effective and less … They’re adapting to the current buying situation. And frankly, marketing in most B2B companies is grossly underrated for how important it is because a lot of companies are sales led.
Chris

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Chris

Smart companies are recognizing that they should be product-led, which also means product and brand led because if you just have a product, you need to be able to get people there. So, smart companies are recognizing that. If you look at the difference between really strong marketing talent and the average marketer, the gap is huge. It’s really if you are a really good marketer, it’s very easy to stand out because a lot of people have not evolved in their ability to execute. For those reasons, I believe that the best demand gen marketers, they’re leading teams that are driving businesses forward at a huge level, will be paid more than the best performing sales rep. I do believe that that will happen over time. I don’t know when, but companies that recognize how much more important that function is from a retention standpoint, and a business gross standpoint and a customer acquisitions cost standpoint, and how rare to find those skillsets together are, I think companies will start to pay more for it.
Chris

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Chris

So, that’s why I think it’s the golden era. I think the people that work really hard and understand the crafts will be really successful.
Ian

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Ian

Do you want to drop the mic or shall I? I’ll do it. We’ll have to edit that out. Sorry for anybody listening. All right, so the last thing I want to cover, it would be a tragedy if I didn’t, you have access to a good amount of SaaS companies under your clients list that if you could pinpoint one thing that almost every SaaS company is doing wrong, what would you consider that to be? That you work with personally?
Chris

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Content Marketing Demand Generation Social Media

Chris

I think that none of this is new. I think all of my clients overspend on trade show booths. I think that is probably the easiest one to pick out. I would say that a majority, not just companies that I work with but companies that I audit and consult with on a one-time basis or things like that, a big mistake that most companies are making are passing their inbound sales conversions to SDR’s and not directly to account executives. That’s a huge mistake. As a buyer, I go through processes all the time and I never make it to an AE because the SDR fucks it up.
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Chris

I just came in and I clicked the “Request a Demo” button and I filled out a form, and I invited three of my teammates to see a demo, and you’re going to have a 30 minute qualification call where I don’t see a demo with an SDR. Then, they’re going to follow up with me with seven emails and I’m not going to answer them. I already went and found your competitor and bought their product. So, that is a huge problem with companies everywhere is if you look at the data from the time from demo request submission to demo to demo sat, how long is that taking? Because, people are not waiting 18 days between when they ask for the submission and they get the demo. They’re going to go and find it somewhere else.
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Chris

So, I think that is something that companies refuse to do. They refuse to do it because I think that they drive a lot of low quality inbounds or they don’t take the time to sort the inbounds based on the intent of the conversion.
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Ian

The other thing that drives me nuts about that is when I run into a really cool product that’s uber transactional and I have to request a demo, and get an SDR and it’s like, “I’m ready to buy.”
Chris

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Chris

$99 a month product.
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Ian

Give me the fricken credit card portal and let me sign up. That happened literally two days ago with me. I was going to get a really cool, slick payment portal for one of the websites I’m building. And, all I wanted to do was get it up and running in the next 20 minutes. I had to sign up through an SDR. It was a disaster.
Chris

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Chris

It’s really tough.
Ian

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Ian

So, I lit up their live chat. But anyways, so we’re almost on time here, so let me get through a couple more things.
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Chris

I’m ready.
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Ian

I like to do this word association exercise. Sit back in your psychologist leather chair and let’s do some word association. All right, I’m going to kick out a couple different words and give me a thought on where this is at. Two to three words. Facebook ads.
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Chris

Very effective, very under-priced.
Ian

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Ian

Content syndication.
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Chris

Terrible use of money.
Ian

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Ian

Podcasts.
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Chris

Incredible opportunity if you know how to create good content that brings value.
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Ian

Video
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Chris

Awesome if you’re good at it.
Ian

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Ian

Trade shows.
Chris

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Chris

High value interactions but that you don’t need the booth for.
Ian

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Ian

Outbound sales.
Chris

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Chris

Needs to change.
Ian

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Ian

YouTube.
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Chris

Incredible place to act as a repository for videos and then search optimize them.
Ian

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Ian

Tik Tok.
Chris

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Chris

Haven’t spent any time there.
Ian

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Ian

LinkedIn.
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Chris

The best opportunity for most people right now.
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Ian

Refine Labs.
Chris

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Chris

Changing the way companies do demand generation.
Ian

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Ian

Donald Trump. I’m just kidding. Don’t answer that.
Chris

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Chris

I wouldn’t have anyway.
Ian

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Ian

I know. I always like to end on the final piece. What are some of your favorite marketing books? It doesn’t have to apply directly to what you’re doing, but what are the ones that you’ve enjoyed most over the years?
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Chris

It’s not really even a marketing book, but I found Icarus Deception by Seth Godin very inspirational. I think that it really helped propel me to not be upset when I post a piece of content and three people like it and one person says, “This is dumb”, because looked what happened now. So, I read that book one of the first days I started my company over 14 months ago, and I found it very inspirational.
Chris

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Chris

I really like Tom Goodwin’s book called Digital Darwinism, which basically explains in a lot of detail with really good examples why companies don’t innovate, so I found that one super impactful where I basically have just taken why they don’t innovate on product or business model and basically looked at it as why they don’t innovate and go to market model or marketing strategy or anything like that. They place artificial constraints as to why they can’t change.
Chris

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Chris

Those are the two main books that I’m attached to and that I really enjoy, and then I spend a lot of time on YouTube-
Ian

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Ian

Same
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Chris

… and learning that. Basically, once you have a core base of knowledge and you’re doing, you don’t need to go back and reference other people. You’re learning by doing. I like to use this model where learning is 10% reading or learning, 20% seeing an expert do it and 70% doing it yourself. But most people spend 100% of their time reading about it and watching someone else do it, and never do it themselves, which is why they’re never ahead. The reason that I don’t believe in eBooks is because I spent a lot of time running eBooks and deemed that they were less effective, but I think the problem where most people get to is they don’t know what to recommend instead.
Chris

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Chris

I was able to just find things that I determined worked better on a revenue standpoint. I built this whole company on just execution and learning.
Ian

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Ian

Just one final thing. Have you watched The Last Dance yet on ESPN?
Chris

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Chris

I have not.
Ian

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Ian

I’m not a huge sports guy to be completely up front but it’s a show about Michael Jordan, kind of like a behind the scenes. The one thing that I really just gravitated towards was the fact that he will pick one of the smallest things to get extreme motivation out of. Like this guy said this, or that guy said that. I was curious to see if you relate to that, because it seems like I’ve also done this as well so I feel okay saying it to you, but it seems like you worked for some companies that don’t quite get what you’re trying to do and you see the light, and it’s frustrating so you at some point just said, “Fuck it, I’m going to start my own thing.” Is that about accurate?
Chris

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Chris

I would say that I’m very grateful for the companies that I worked at-
Chris

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Chris

Of course.
Chris

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Chris

… and eventually, I outran the company, which means that I wanted to keep innovating faster than what they were able to do. I just know myself where if I’m in a place where I’m not able to go and try new things and innovate and experiment and move my vision forward, then I’m going to get really frustrated and I’m not going to be a good employee to the company. So, I had to move on when those places happened, so I started my company mainly because now I only get to work with companies that are aligned with my vision and I get to experiment and I get to evolve by experimenting on my own content and I just get so much out of it.
Chris

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Chris

I am very motivated by being underestimated, so it was probably about … I probably had two customers back in May or June of last year and I was commenting on a post and the person that commented back said, “Yeah whatever, but you can’t scale.” And, where we are and we’ll continue to go but the company is going to grow 20x probably from that time to the end of this year. That was motivating. When I was posting content on LinkedIn, I had some people that I hadn’t heard of for eight years when I got three likes text me and say that what I was doing was dumb. I’m like, “Fuck you.” You know what I mean? Let’s talk about what’s happening right now. I had someone when I was on a podcast earlier this week where someone in a very condescending way was like, “How did you even get on here?” The last episode I did with Neil Patel, and I was like, “Whatever, man.”
Chris

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Chris

All those things are motivation. I’m not offended by them. It’s fuel. Now I go back and I’m like, “Okay, well in 12 months I want you to be like, ‘Wow, I interviewed that person 12 months ago and I really underestimated them.'” That’s what I’m after.
Ian

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Ian

I picked up on that, too. There was this part in that show, back to it, that Michael Jordan came back to the NBA and he had a #45 and people basically said, “45 isn’t 23.” They completely underestimated him and he just … He lost a playoff game so they went home, and literally the next day he was in the gym working out, doing his thing, honing his craft. I sense that from you. I’m also the same way. If somebody tells me I can’t do anything, I lose my mind and I just focus on completely destroying that to the point where I prove them wrong. I think there’s an intangible there that is important because I think that also breeds hard work. It breeds determination, motivation. All of these things that are super important for entrepreneurs. So, I just wanted to end on that note and hopefully this podcast, this interview, gave people the framework to adjust some of their tactics and get motivation to change and better themselves and their companies with honestly better B2B marketing, which is what this is all about.
Chris

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Chris

Nothing else to add. That was perfect. Perfect way to end.
Ian

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Ian

Cool
Chris

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Chris

Great conversation. Hope everyone got value. Thanks for having me.
Ian

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Ian

Chris Walker, thanks again. Where can people find you? Let’s shout out some plugs here.
Chris

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Chris

LinkedIn is the best place. Chris Walker on LinkedIn. I post content there every day. If you’re trying to learn more, you’ll get content in that stream, and if you want to start … I like the idea of looking at what I’m doing and then trying to just emulate it for what you want to do. You can go and see LinkedIn and then see the stream on the podcast and then what’s going on on YouTube, and maybe it’s just the boost you need to start trying some of those things for yourself.
Ian

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Ian

Yeah, well said. Chris Walker, thank you so much. Thank you for keeping all the B2B marketers out there on their toes, and it’s been a pleasure talking to you today.
Chris

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Chris

Awesome. Pleasure.

About the Participants

Chris

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Chris Walker

CEO, Refine Labs

Chris is CEO of Refine Labs who is on a journey to help companies optimize their revenue model. Refine Labs has spent the last four years perfecting the process at rapidly growing early- and growth-stage companies. The final product, our Revenue Engine Optimization formula, is a unique combination of Revenue Operations, Growth Marketing, and Buyer Enablement, which has been proven to accelerate business growth and new customer acquisition with a focus on pipeline velocity.
Ian

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Ian Luck

Founder, Marketing Strategy

Ian has marketed for some of the world’s best-known brands like Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Ryder, Force Factor, and CIT Bank. His content has been downloaded 50,000+ times and viewed by over 90% of the Fortune 500. His marketing has been featured in Forbes, Inc. Magazine, Adweek, Business Insider, Seeking Alpha, Tech Crunch, Y Combinator, and Lifehacker. With over 10 startups under his belt, Ian’s been described as a serial entrepreneur— a badge he wears with pride. Ian’s a published author and musician and when he’s not obsessively testing the next marketing idea, he can be found hanging out with family and friends north of Boston.

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Marketing Strategy Talk w/ Chris Walker, CEO @ Refine Labs

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