Demand Generation Essentials from Refine Labs

Oct. 22

Chris Walker of Refine Labs frequently shares insights on why revenue teams need to evolve from traditional marketing models to full funnel attribution, and why leveraging dark social is a competitive advantage for marketers.

Below is a breakdown of some of Refine Labs’ core concepts, as discussed on the Revenue Vitals podcast (episode 73 – Demand Generation Essentials | B2B Insiders):

The Problem with The Funnel

Traditionally, B2B marketing has been built on idea that marketing generates leads, pushes people through a funnel, and passes those leads off to Sales.

The problem with this approach is that there is a natural flow of people buying in the market, and companies try to artificially inject things into the process to make people go through the funnel faster. This leads to low close rates on MQLs, frustration from Sales on lead quality, and friction in the buyer journey.

A different way to think about net-new acquisition is that buyers are either in-market or not. Many buyers will go in-market and back. They will come back in, look at your website, talk to their colleagues, and then go backwards, not respond to your cold email, and so forth. They can alternate between showing intent to not showing intent across the buying group.

You want to have tactics for people who are in-market to buy (showing intent), and have tactics for all the companies that aren’t.

The 3 Phases of Demand

There are 3 distinct demand phases that have corresponding tactics and activities: (1) demand creation, (2) demand capture, and (3) demand conversion. Break down your budget, measurement, and analysis across these phases accordingly:

1. Demand Creation

a. Podcast

b. Paid social

c. Organic social

d. Community evangelism

e. Third party events

2. Demand Capture

a. SDRs, some marketing activities

b. SEO/SEM

c. Review sites

d. Affiliates

e. Website CRO

3. Demand Conversion

a. AEs, Solutions consultants, sales engineers

Most companies only look at (2) Demand Capture and (3) Demand Conversion, so the measurements (and therefore budgets) skew towards them and create a divide within the revenue team.

Even though marketers know there is value in doing the things in the Demand Creation category, and leaders want their marketing team doing things to create demand, the metrics incentivize them to capture demand.

Thinking about this instead as one well-resourced system leads to better outcomes. Roughly 1% to 2% of your target market is in-market looking for a solution at any given time. That’s where you should deploy SDRs/BDRs, use performance media for retargeting, run google ads, SEO, Capterra, etc.

Your audience will shrink over time if you are only trying to capture and convert that small group. So, you need to have a budget and an engine to educate and drive the other 98% who should be your TAM to want to have consideration of your product.

The Demand Creation phase should have an always-on engine for education and awareness that involves:

getting people onto your site
having them understand customers that are working with you
how the product works, what category it fits in
how you see the world and where it’s going
what challenges your product solves
what key metrics it moves

If you’re not doing these things at the demand creation phase, you’re going to be battling over that 1-2% forever. You’re hoping that someone else makes the market bigger (e.g., getting featured by Gartner, stealing market share from a bigger competitor, or hoping that word of mouth or product virality is going to make the market bigger).

Self-reported Attribution

Self-reported attribution (i.e., Asking “how did you hear about us?”) is a free and easy to implement way to get key insights directly from customers at exactly the time that they convert. Like any attribution system, it isn’t perfect, but it is an additional data point that covers a lot of things on demand capture.

When looking at your attribution reports, most of your traffic should be coming from earned demand (demand that you create for the market) rather than organic demand (things that happen outside your control). Things like word of mouth are harder to pinpoint and control.

Chris mentions that 99% of Refine Lab’s self-reported responses are different from their Last Touch (as reported by their attribution system). In this case one method isn’t right or wrong. They tell you two different things. The buyer is telling you how they heard about you, or indicating the most impactful channel.

Responses like: “I’ve been listening to your podcast for 2 years” or “I’ve been following your CEO’s content on LinkedIn” are completely different from seeing “organic search” show up from last touch attribution.

You get a different insight. Yes, they passed through a google search to get to your website and convert, but the only reason they were on google in the first place is because of your LinkedIn content or podcast. Those are two separate things. You have to create the demand and then capture the demand.

Skipping self-reported attribution can lead to a myopic view towards demand capture. It’s easy enough for most companies to add and try for 30 days rather than just saying no to it.

Leadership conversations

The MQL model was built at a time when marketing wasn’t measuring the whole lifecycle. Full funnel tracking makes you realize that a lot of leads that Sales receive are not a good fit. Companies that don’t do full funnel tracking aren’t able to tell whether investments like ad spend on google actually helps drive pipeline.

Because we now have the ability to track all the way to the end, we should be able to scrutinize everything and ask “is this working?”

That’s the conversation you have to have as a marketer with your executive team (knowing that if you do it, there’s a possibility you get fired).

That critical conversation goes something like this:

Why we’re doing full funnel tracking
What the situation was before
Now that we do full tracking, here are the results
The results aren’t poor because we suck at running media etc.; it’s because buyers don’t buy this way
Here’s what our sales team says about the leads we’re sending
Here’s how much we spent, and heres’ how much pipeline we create
= the traditional funnel approach is a waste of money
Instead, how do we drive the highest sales productivity, sales velocity, and lowest CAC using sales, marketing, customer success, and all the resources within the GTM team?”

If you have this conversation as a marketer and do get fired, it’s a good thing, because you don’t want to keep working at that kind of place. The number one thing that holds people back is working at companies with marketing executives that don’t get it. Most don’t.

Many people in marketing departments are risk averse, hedging on their careers, playing politics, and not taking action with strong conviction to move the profession forward. Trying things and being ok with them not working is what leads to learning. And the learning is what gives you competitive advantage.

3 things for demand gen marketers to focus on:

1. Understand customers better than anyone else in the company

Use qualitative and quantitative research, and regularly talk to customers

2. Be able to gather data across the revenue engine, extract key insights, and tell stories around those insights to guide your company’s decisions.

It’s not just about building the Salesforce report. It’s the analysis of the report, identifying why these things are important, communicating what’s happening and what we should do about it to the executive team in a compelling way, and then taking action.

3. Become educated and skilled in producing dark social content through paid and organic channels

You don’t have to be the host of the show or go on podcasts or speak at events. But you need to know how to produce the show, strategize on the topics, orchestrate the distribution, and how to measure it.