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- [00:01]
Carolyn
If you've been listening to this show for a while, you'll know that in my opinion, paid media is incredibly hard to get right for just so many reasons. You need a balanced strategy. You need the right blend of campaign types. You can't underinvest in brand, that's a really big one. And you can't ignore the opportunity to use ads for expansion revenue, not just new local acquisition. Then there's also the measurement side of it, which is where a lot of companies really falter. What looks good on a dashboard doesn't always show up in pipeline and revenue. So this episode I think is a must listen to show. I sat down with Megan Bowen, she's the CEO of Refine Labs, and we unpacked. Why so many B2B companies are pouring their budget into paid media, but still missing revenue targets. There's just so much to unpack. So if you're investing in paid media or you're thinking about it, this episode is packed with so many tactical insights from somebody, in my opinion, who knows this topic better than almost anybody. Let's get into it. You're listening to GTM Live, a podcast by Passetto. Welcome everybody. I hope you enjoy the show. And if you have questions, please use the chat capability. We'll be tracking that, answering questions as they come in, hoping to get all of your questions answered during this episode. So just to kick it off, and before we get into introductions, one thing that we've seen you all know that Passetto has been operating now for about a year and a half. A lot of the go to market teams that we work with, that we consult with, they invest really heavily in paid digital advertising. But we see the same theme over and over and over again, which tells us that there is some level of dysfunctionality when it comes to paid media. And we see this all the time. MQLs are climbing, or maybe they're not. Pipeline is down, new logo. Revenue is down, growth is declining, budgets are getting cut because revenue is not showing up. And we see despite this, that often teams are investing more. Let's just put more money in paid digital channels. Let's just spend more on programs. Let's just drive up and inflate MQL volume, pass that over to sales and hopefully close more deals. But today we're sort of unpacking or hoping to unpack what's broken when it comes to paid digital advertising. We have yet to really work with a lot of companies that have mastered paid ads. In fact, a lot of times we refer them to refine Labs saying bring in an expert to help you solve this problem. It's really difficult to solve it on your own. And so Megan Bowen has been beating this drum now for several years as the CEO of Refine Labs. If y' all don't know who Refine Labs is highly suggest that you give Megan a follow check this company out. But we're going to go deep into why we think the go to market machine is breaking. When companies over rely on performance marketing optimize for the wrong KPIs under invest in the things that actually that we know drive long term growth. And yeah, most teams think that they're paid media strategy is working but in reality it's probably not. There's a lot of things that are really broken within sort of the way that teams are operating right now. And ultimately what Megan and the team at Refine Labs does is it really comes down to a strategic balance between investing in brand executing demand the right way and focusing on customer expansion too, which I think is a really big opportunity that not a lot of companies are seeing. So before we go any further, Megan, thank you again for joining. Really excited to have you here. I'm sure the whole audience is too just given the volume of people that actually registered. And so I wanted you to take a moment moment introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about your philosophy when it comes to paid digital advertising and what Refine Labs does.
- [03:54]
Megan Bowen
Yeah, thanks Carolyn. Thanks Trevor. I appreciate you guys having me on the show. Similar to some of the trends that you were just calling out that you've seen at Passetto, with all of the companies that you've worked with and go to market engines that you've analyzed, we see a lot of the same things. One thing I do want to call out is what I really do notice a pretty distinct difference depending upon company stage and maturity and where they are relative to paid advertising specifically. But I would also just say just their marketing strategy overall and how outdated or modern it is. So Refine Labs was founded in 2019. So we've been operating for over five years. We've worked with over 300 B2B SaaS companies over that period of time. And a lot has changed. Also a lot has changed from 2019 to 2025 today. So what I've noticed is a really distinct pattern. When I look at any established B2B SaaS company that I would say is typically anywhere from 8 to 10 years old at least they're typically at 50 million ARR, all the way up to a billion ARR. Those companies are more likely than not sort of stuck in a 2015 digital marketing world. They have already achieved pretty significant success. They have already deployed these programs and these investments they've literally been running for 10 years. And because these companies have so much momentum, basically are just continuing the status quo, like that's really what we're seeing. And because they're sort of relatively successful overall in terms of total revenue, there isn't a level of scrutiny against their go to market programs. Now you talk about companies that have just started up over the last five years. I would say more and more we're seeing newer, younger companies already coming to the table with a different mindset in terms of how marketing should be measured and executed. And many of the things that I'll talk about today, I'm seeing companies that have started over the last few years already thinking that way and adopting that way. So the biggest challenge I see is in these bigger legacy companies. And what's alarming is I think a lot of them don't perceive that anything is necessarily wrong because of their relative success. So it's almost this like silent killer because they might just be chugging along, growing well enough, but not actually noticing that if they look at their trailing two to three years, they're actually seeing a decline in their rate of growth both in pipeline production and in revenue. They're not looking at things through the right lens to properly scrutinize things. And some of the other sort of aspects of these types of companies because they're so established, they're very large. Change is very difficult to implement at these programs. People are incentivized almost to maintain the status quo versus bring new ideas to the table. So there's a whole bunch of factors and have a lot of empathy for the go to market operators in these companies because often they, they do see that something needs to change and something isn't working. But it's this whole big machine, this bureaucratic machine that has to really, starting at the top, have to have a total reset on leadership, alignment, mindset and measurement. And that has to cascade down into how budgets are allocated and how investments are made. And so I think it's important in the context of this conversation to just kind of call out that I'm really seeing almost like two segments of companies, predominantly legacy, successful and new. And I think they both have very different challenges. But in terms of what we're going to talk about today, these bigger companies are the ones where I'm seeing they have an issue. We know what the issue is. There's a clear plan to address it. If they don't start making the change now, this is going to catch up to them if it hasn't already. So soon enough.
- [07:57]
Carolyn
Right. I really like that thinking in like the old way or versus the new way or just looking at like these two different buckets. Because I would say at Pasetta we see something really similar and a lot of the times we're brought in by a CRO or a CEO because they notice our spend is increasing. But like new logo pipeline is going down, new logo revenue is going down. But yet like our mq, like whatever is happening in marketing appears to be working. Like their MQL trend is increasing over time. SQLs are increasing over time. So like what's the problem here? There's obviously a disconnect and I wanted to share actually an example, sort of like a quick, a quick little case study for everybody on the call here that kind of illustrates that. So y' all can see my screen hopefully. But this is one particular client that we worked with. Now mind you, this is a couple of quarters back, but we were brought in I believe by the CMO at the time actually. And the first thing that we had isolated that was not news to anybody is like new logo revenue was going down. You could see that on the top chart. So and then also pipeline created every quarter also going down. Aside from this random 29, 29, 2 million spike, ultimately the trend was declining. They wanted to figure out why. And you know, we dove into it and we had realized in marketing the way you are all measured on your performance is not necessarily correlating to the top line like business measurements, right. They're measured on MQLs generated, they're measured on SQLs generated. And so this really became sort of like a much larger issue. It's because way the company was measured, right? And so we can see that, right? The MQL trend looks pretty good overall. I mean it's a little bit fluctuation. But then SQL is also increasing. Where this breaks down, when we look at their program spent, we can see that they were total. Well one, they were like totally over investing on paid digital channels overall immediately were like, you know, your cost of acquiring pipeline and cost of acquiring new logos is really high. Like way outside of what we would consider a healthy range. That's problem number one. But problem number two is when we actually looked at their composition of how they're spending their paid media budget totally over rotating on capture ads. And you can see the composition by channel here, LinkedIn is primarily like lead gen ads, paid search obviously primarily lead gen with the small exception of like these YouTube video ads that they were running. And so right away we sort of like dug into that and they had said, well we put our money in these like lead gen ads because that's how we collect names and you know, pass them over to sales. And right away we sort of gone, went down this path of how do we help them fix this? Because just the way that they're sort of optimizing for performance from our vantage point was like just not broke. It was broken, it was not working. Obviously fundamentally what they are doing here was what we would consider outdated. But this sort of like falls into this camp of like they were a high performing like very mature company and just optimizing for the wrong things and optimizing for the wrong metrics. What do you think about that? How do you, how do you see that sort of transpiring?
- [11:02]
Megan Bowen
Absolutely. And like the, the thing that I always like to, to call out is at one point those metrics were good metrics to track because of the dynamics of how buyers would engage digitally and make decisions. So back in 2010 and 2015 when all of these strategies started becoming more widely adopted by these companies, the reason all these people are doing it today is because at one point it did work. And it worked because of how buyers engaged with the Internet to learn about new information. There was a point in time where people would gladly give up their contact information for really interesting content and they, they didn't have any negative associations with that. There was a time where the most important thing to do was to get a name, an email and a phone number in the hands of a seller to close a deal. And then that was really, really effective. What happened was the world change. The Internet matured, social media became more widely adopted. Tactics that were really successful were so widely adopted and overused and misused that buyers began to develop distrust. People started to learn about new products and services in very different ways. The Internet commoditized information. I don't have to talk to a person to learn something. I can just go to Google search or go to social media and see what people are up to. What has happened is the conditions with which buying and selling happens and how buyers consume information has changed. But the go to market strategies and tactics did not catch up to this change. And so I don't fault these companies because it's like it totally worked for a long period of time, but it just totally doesn't anymore. And the underlying Reason is this change in buying behavior that we've observed. We're basically on the brink of a totally new evolution of this right now with AI, right? So predominantly, I mean even now, like most people still use Google search as like the primary search engine, but you're starting to see more people use ChatGPT or other LLMs, right, for various searches and products. So we're literally on another cycle right now where everything is going to change again. And what these companies need to be thinking about is, oh man, if I am stuck executing a 2015 playbook, I first need to evolve my strategy to what is working today and then I need to prepare for this next shift that is about to happen over the next five years. I'm not even fully sure exactly how AI will impact how people learn about new products and services and make decisions, but you better believe it's going to have an impact and it's going to change buying behavior. And so that's really the crux of it. And so the main thing that we do when we begin to engage with a company that's in this exact situation is we have to prepare essentially a data backed business case that proves what we're saying in the context of their business data. So we like to run what we call a split the funnel analysis. And this is stuff that I know you guys talk about a lot as well in terms of evaluating actual qualified pipeline and revenue from MQLs from various programs, being able to show definitively which programs work, which ones don't, being able to educate them on the difference between demand capture channel like search and a demand creation or brand awareness channel like paid social, that they serve different purposes and your strategies need to be tailored to how buyers are engaging on those channels that you need to think about budget allocation in the same way, only a small percentage of your market is actively looking for you on search and everybody else is not. And you want to be able to reach your entire market digitally and through other strategies and tactics, of course. And so part of it is what I've learned is you have to go through this sort of assessment of reality. Look at your trailing 12 to 24 months of data clearly analyze what is working, what is not working. This needs to be presented in a clear and compelling way to basically shift the mindset of the leadership of the organization to be willing to think about things differently. Your strategy then has to shift, your measurement has to shift. It's less about volume of MQLs and it's more about quality of MQLs that convert to qualified pipeline and paying customers. And so you just need to take them along that journey. And what we've realized at Refine Labs is being that change agent and being able to help a company navigate that change management or like digital transformation process. That's really what you're doing. And it's business cases, it's leadership alignment, it's aligning on measures of success, it's presenting a strategy and how you will slowly phase into that strategy without disrupting the organization, showing them that they can still hit their near term goals and their long term goals by phasing in a different approach to paid and other strategies that they're implementing as well. So you really have to take that approach. And I think what I'm telling all of our customers right now is like, look, we got to get you from 2015 to 2025 in the next three to four quarters because everything is about to change again and you need to be prepared and build the muscle of constantly evaluating and evolving and adapting your go to market strategy. So this first phase we're going to improve efficiency and effectiveness. We're going to align your strategies to how your buyers buy and consume information and buy. And we're about to build a muscle of how you need to be constantly scrutinizing your go to market programs. Because let me tell you, things are just going to start to change even more rapidly over the next five years. And you need to have a way and a system to regularly audit, analyze and adjust and optimize on an ongoing basis. Like that is the skill set for these companies in order to survive what this change that we're about to go through over the next, I was saying decade, but it's going to be faster than that. It's going to be like three to five years.
- [17:24]
Carolyn
I would agree with you. I think a lot of the customers that we see are like very similar and that they're stuck in this playbook from 10 years ago. And sometimes I think it really takes like an outside, neutral, objective, third party partner like Refine Labs or like Passetto to show them the data that they might not otherwise be equipped to look at. To say like this is, well, not necessarily always like this is how bad the scenario is. But like look at it from this perspective, we're showing you it from a different angle than you're used to seeing. Here are all of the ways in which those metrics that you're looking at like aren't doing you any favors. I think MQL volume is one. Trevor and I talk about this all the time. But like we still see it to this day go to market teams measured on their like last touch attribution, like the department that sourced the deal. And we often say like, we don't recommend totally just like abandoning that. If you, that's what companies are used to. It's like keep that but then layer in, you know, new ways of thinking as well. And eventually I think what we'll see is companies start to like sunset some of those old ways of measuring department performance. So from that perspective, that's the Passetto point of view from Refine Labs. What is the most impactful way that you're helping companies sort of like see the today vision and not be stuck still in 2015?
- [18:42]
Megan Bowen
Yeah, that split, the funnel analysis that I referred to is the primary entry point to show them with their own data. Some of these conclusions that you've gone over a couple of times how there are certain dynamics in terms of volume of MQLs that doesn't translate to pipeline or revenue, that being too myopically focused on whatever you can track is preventing you from doing the right things that are ultimately going to drive business results. And then I think the most important part of this is what I've found is often a lot of individuals within these organizations actually already know this. They just are not equipped to understand what to do to fix it. And so part of it is showing them that there's sort of an issue and an opportunity for them to improve their go to market efficiency and effectiveness, but then also showing them exactly what they need to do to fix it. And so I think that's where we like to come in in terms of we are both a strategic and sort of an execution partner of like, we can help you identify the biggest risks and opportunities and then we can actually help you do the work to make the changes that are needed. And what I typically find, you kind of touched on this earlier, Carolyn, is sometimes you need an external partner to get the right buy in from everyone at the organization and the right external partner that has credibility in terms of a track record. I can confidently tell a new CMO that we might be working with. Like we have done this 300 times over the last five years and I can tell you pretty much the impact that we're going to drive. I can tell you how long it's going to take. I can tell you the downstream impacts of these changes and we can prepare for them. And we're going to do A, B and C. We will do this heavy lifting. I need your team to Do X, Y and Z. You guys need to contribute and participate and collaborate and that within six to nine months we're going to start to see a 30 to 50% increase in qualified pipeline and then we're off to the races. And once we start to put those wins on the board, that's going to be the confidence lever that your leadership team is looking for. That this was the right decision and that they're willing then to continue to invest, invest in that strategy, to continue on that growth. And so I think what's interesting is a lot of people feel this and know this but then don't take action because they're not sure what to do. And so that's the other real missing piece is having a clear perspective on this is what we can do. And we know that this will work because we've done this a lot before with companies just like yourself.
- [21:31]
Carolyn
I do have a question that I wanted to ask next but before that you had mentioned something about like this is how long this sort of change takes. I think in a lot of situations like companies don't have that kind of time, they need results tomorrow. I've certainly been in that position. A lot of the companies that we work with are in that position. They don't have six months, they don't have two quarters, three quarters to wait for the impact. How do you help companies see through that?
- [21:58]
Megan Bowen
Yeah, so I totally get it. There's this short term pressure to hit goals and growth targets that have been set. So number one, usually there is within a demand capture and sort of demand conversion lens there's usually some pretty immediate changes that can make that will have an impact within 90 days. And so you do have to demonstrate, for lack of a better phrase, like a quick win. Right. You do have to be able to show that I am actually going to make changes that you will see positive ROI from within 60 to 90 days. And so the most common ones that we typically see are a full audit of their search accounts. Google is typical channel, sometimes Bing but but basically people are typically overspending on that channel, wasting budget, not properly tracking conversions to train Google on what a quality conversion looks like. And we can typically identify what needs to change and make those changes within 30 days and see pretty immediate impact on Google search alone by day 90. And so the way that you communicate the roadmap is we're going to tackle this in phases. We're going to start with the low hanging fruit and the things that we know are going to make an impact within this quarter and the beginning of next quarter so that we can continue to get the right validation that we can communicate to your leadership team. And at the same time, we're also going to begin making changes now that are going to drive compounding gains in months six, eight and nine. And I think again, when you get that resistance or pushback, referring back to that split the funnel analysis, like if you just keep doing what you're doing, you're just going to continue to see a decline in both pipeline and growth. So like that really isn't an option anymore and you have to change and evolve. Like you have to do something differently if you want to get different results. And so that's typically how we, we attack that. Now keep in mind these companies, they have product market fit their 100 million in revenue, 500 million in revenue, they have a lot of inbound coming in. When you talk about they're spending hundred thousand dollars a month, $500,000 a month, $1,000,000 a month on paid advertising. When you're in that position, you can and you should be driving some improvement to results within the first one to two quarters. You have a lot of money, you have a lot of programs deployed, there's a lot of optimization opportunity. The difficult part is how you're communicating that and setting the right expectations of what changes and what improvement they're going to see from which programs over time. The things that take longer is for example, sunsetting lead gen programs on paid social and replacing them with brand awareness programs. And what I found is there are other things that you can track that are critical leading indicators that can continue to demonstrate confidence in the approach. So for example, hey, give me your target account list of your top 3,000 accounts that you want to acquire. Let's advertise to those accounts on LinkedIn or with a new approach, let's track what percentage of those accounts that we're reaching and that are engaging with our campaigns over time. And that is one metric before conversion or opportunity that we can demonstrate that what we're doing is achieving one of our objectives of making sure that our company and product and proposition is top of mind for our target audience that we're trying to reach. So there's a lot that you can do to bring the team along with you. I don't really think it. You can't really just say, oh, you have to wait nine months and sorry, you just have to wait. That doesn't really fly. Like I've been an executive, that wouldn't fly with me. Right. So you have to do the work and you have to be able to map out. Well, actually, yeah, we're going to see these improvements between months three and six. We're going to see these improvements between month six and nine. We'll then see this improvement from months nine through 12. After doing this with over 300 companies, what we have found is by six to eight months, we drive a 30 to 50% increase in qualified pipeline almost every single time. So I have confidence that if we work with the right type of company, with the right set of circumstances, that we can drive that outcome. And our track record proves it.
- [26:27]
Carolyn
I think a lot of that too is like appetite to go through that process as well, which I think is really important in that alignment. Right. Because not every, not every executive is going to, I guess, understand philosophically the change that you're all trying to impact as well, which I think is really important. Absolutely.
- [26:46]
Megan Bowen
And then that's why you need to do that business case exercise, which typically is the entry point to get that. If you have executives that no matter what data you show them, no matter what case you make, and they just are not interested, it's not going to work. Because they will point out various reasons why they're not seeing what they want to see. I feel for these people because they basically just revert back to the status quo as a means of protecting their job. At a basic level. That's what's happening. I empathize with that. People need their livelihood, but they're just not willing to take the risk to do the right thing. And they think if they just keep doing what they're doing that they'll be safe and protected.
- [27:28]
Carolyn
I can appreciate that for sure. Hey, everybody. This isn't something we talk about much on the podcast because it's a thought leadership podcast by design. But with the customer wins that we've had lately, I really wanted to share a little bit more about Passetto and how we've evolved and what we've been building behind the scenes. So over the last year, we've really been heads down refining both our product and our advisory model. And the goal really is to, at the end of the day, give B2B companies a real way to, to transform how they operate across the entire go to market. And honestly, and I say this genuinely, I wish I had this when I was in house as a VP of marketing, I remember the scramble before every board meeting. My team's work would come to a halt. So I could piece together reports, stress over whether the numbers were right, and burn entire weeks chasing answers instead of Actually making strategic decisions. And I know I'm not alone. I see this in every customer that we work with. And it's not just a marketing issue. It's a full blown go to market issue. Nobody has true ownership of the data. Everyone was telling their own version of the story. It creates misalignment, confusion, finger pointing, and no one really knows what's actually driving results. Which I think is the biggest thing that matters the most. That's exactly what we solve. So we connect your CRM revenue and financial data into what we call the executive go to market command center. And this is a clear, reliable source of truth that shows you what's effective, what's not, what's quietly driving growth or what's hurting the business. And it's not a marketing source or sales source. This, it's the full picture. In fact, we do everything we can to actually get away from that antiquated way of measuring go to market. We help our customers stop burning budget, uncover overlooked signals and make informed decisions. And it's been so rewarding to see the impact, especially with the teams who treat this as a continuous process. And I'll tell you quickly about one client. They are a $100 million ARR company. They went from averaging about $5 million in pipeline per quarter when we started working with them and now they're doing about 9 million in pipeline per quarter. After incremental gains quarter over quarter. They didn't guess that's the biggest thing. They knew what was working because they could finally see it. This is something I'm genuinely really excited about. I want to continue supporting customers in this vein and seeing these sort of transformational results. If this resonates. This sounds familiar. Feel free to send me a message on LinkedIn. Visit passetto.com and most importantly, I hope you're enjoying this show. If you are, I would be very grateful for a review or you sharing this show with a colleague that you think would find it valuable. Thanks y' all. Appreciate you talk soon. One thing that you that I hear like your entire team talk about a lot is just like this balance between this model of brand demand and expand. I would really like to talk about that mostly from our perspective. We see companies really like over rotate on demand and then ignoring the brand component, which I think is really important and then the expand piece as well. In fact, a lot of the companies in our portfolio have issues around retention and marketing is just not tapped into that at all. It's like sits on the other side of the bow tie. Like we're only going to carry about the left side of the bow tie. Acquiring new logos, generating pipeline. How does yeah, walk us through, I guess this model and particularly I really want to unpack the expand piece as well.
- [31:00]
Megan Bowen
Yeah, absolutely. Not a lot of people know this, but my background is actually customer success. That's where I spent sort of the bulk of my career. And so I'm excited to talk about customers and like the lever of growth that customers can provide because I think it is largely ignored and is a huge opportunity for companies. So when you think about brand demand expand and I'm not trying to claim this is like a new model that Refine Labs has made. This is just basic go to market fundamentals and principles in my opinion. I see the exact same thing. People overly focus on demand because there's this pressure of I just need to acquire customers. What do I need to do to get customers in the door to build pipeline? Now let's break down each one Brand is pretty self explanatory, but it's basically what are you doing to drive awareness and salience and recognition and relevance with your target market for the problem you solve, your solution and your company. You want your target audience to understand the problem you solve, how you solve it and the solution you bring to the market. And you want to be the first name that they think of when they're considering how they're going to solve that particular problem. In my mind, that's basically the goal of most brand programs. And performance marketing is not what creates brand awareness or affinity. Right. These are other programs. You have to think, number one, you have to have like a unique point of view. You have to have something interesting and important to say. It has to be relevant to the target audience that wants to buy from you. You need to find ways to communicate with your audience, whether that's through organic, social or thought leadership programs. Now that we're in this post Covid era, I think events are so underutilized and need to be a primary component of every company's brand strategy overall. Obviously there's a digital component like yes, we can run brand campaigns to your target audience through digital channels and put money behind it to guarantee distribution to your target account list and your your audience. So a digital component is part of brand and that should be part of the mix. But it's only one component. There's lots of other things you should be doing to execute a strong brand strategy. Demand is probably what people are most familiar with with what especially what we talk about a lot at Refine Labs and That's really your demand capture, demand creation, demand conversion programs. And that's building basically turning intent into pipeline and revenue. And obviously digital advertising is a big part of that. But everything from your kind of inbound digital buying experience, how you think about bringing people from social channels into your digital properties, whether it's your website or landing Pages, your podcast, YouTube, whatever, it happens to be the experience that you're providing so that they can easily learn and get the information that they need. And what are you doing to create that brand affinity so that they remember you when they need? The thing that you sell and that you offer and then expand is, you know, often relegated to sort of like account management or customer success or sales. Like, oh, it's their job to retain customers or upsell or cross sell or renew or expand. And a lot of the companies that we're working with that are again, 100 million to a billion in ARR mean they have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of customers that they're working with. And then they have an entire suite of products and services that they have available to them. And then you find out that a typical customer only actually uses one out of the six products that they offer. And there's. It opens up an entire new possibility for digital marketing to support that motion. How are we leveraging those channels for product adoption, for cross sell and upsell opportunities for education on the different offerings and products, or use cases to promote stickiness and retention? And it's not to say that the digital strategy is the only thing that you should do. Of course not. You need to have a coordinated effort like an ABM program with your account management or customer success team in sales. But from a digital marketing perspective, there's a lot of opportunity there. How are we building an engine for case studies and use cases and pushing that out that will also help new customer acquisition? How are we thinking about customer events that again, might also help new customer acquisition as well. And so I think you mentioned it earlier, like getting out of the habit of attributing deals by department. Like, the goal with brand demand expand is you should be thinking about how you're building brand, how you're converting demand and how you're expanding your customers through the lens of the company, not the lens of the team. And then what are all of the strategies that you can do across marketing and sales and customer success to kind of achieve those goals? And there's a role for marketing in all of them, in my opinion, sales too, customer success as well. Like, it's all one Go to market team. And so the intent behind the model is it's trying to break down some of those department level silos and to think about it more holistically from the lens of the customer. And then what is the role that marketing plays, what is the role that sales plays, what is the role that customer success plays? And how can we coordinate our efforts to have the maximum impact of results and not over invest or underinvest across these three core areas?
- [36:36]
Carolyn
Yeah, I think coordination and alignment is everything and oftentimes like I think it just, it's too common now that these teams just work in these silos. And I think a lot of it really comes down to the way that companies are measured. Right. Marketing historically has been measured for top of funnel performance. Right. Like how often do we see marketing teams measured for the impact on cross sell, upsell, expansion, renew? We just don't. And that's one thing that we're really striving to sort of change fundamentally at Passetto and looking at all of the various signals that happen throughout the entire revenue factory, not just like over here, creating awareness in the engagement stage, I think that's really, really important. So we talked about this, you alluded to this earlier, which is that brand is notoriously hard to measure. And I think that that's why a lot of teams sort of stay away from it because we can't track it back necessarily to an impact. So what's your sort of take or stance on that, Megan? How does that look in like a modern go to market strategy?
- [37:37]
Megan Bowen
Yeah, so one of the things that we like to anchor on in terms of business objective measurement with our clients is basically looking at the holistic inbound funnel. So we believe, and we kind of present to our customers that if you have an appropriate strategy that bal both brand and demand programs that you're going to see basically an overall lift to your qualified inbound funnel. Increase in number of website conversions, increase in the percentage of those that become qualified opportunities, increase in the percentage of those that become paying customers. So it's important to not sort of set the expectation and get that buy in that you're never going to be able to measure everything in marketing perfectly. But if we're executing the strategy correctly, you're going to see that ongoing lift overall. However, it's also valuable to identify other ways to measure brands specifically so that you're arming your maybe the CMO, for example, with a well rounded data set that they feel confident presenting to their C team or their board to get the requisite buy in that they need. So one of the things that we've been doing this year as we continue to lean more into brand, specifically at Refine Labs, is anchoring on two additional ways to measure overall brand effectiveness. So the first is this concept of share of search. So there's some cool tools out there. Liam Moroney at Storybook Marketing talks a lot about this and he uses a great tool called My Telescope that we're integrating into our service delivery right now at Refine Labs. And you're actually able to get a baseline of any company's share of search, which is a primary indicator of how healthy their brand is based on what people are actually searching for in Google. And so is really interesting to, number one, do a look back of that over a 12 month or a four year horizon and see how that changed and evolved and kind of map back different milestones within your marketing strategy to see if you can potentially understand some cause and effect dynamics there. But then once you measure the baseline and then you begin to invest more in brand, you want to measure this on an ongoing basis and you should be seeing your share of search improve over time, which would indicate your brand awareness campaigns are effective and more of your target audience is actively searching for your brand specifically in search. So that's a new measurement that we're introducing that has been pretty effective as a proxy for how is your brand awareness improving in your target market. Another thing that we've been experimenting with is leveraging Winter's new brand surveys. So this is a really quantitative and qualitative measure, but basically the way that Winter has their software set up is they're effectively able to reach your target ICP with a very specific survey that is intended to be deployed every six months or a different frequency of your choosing to effectively get another data input on brand recognition with your target audience specifically. And so that's another great way to have a essentially an ongoing program that allows you to measure this over time. The most crucial thing for brand measurement is one snapshot in a point in time is not helpful. You need to create a mechanism where you can monitor improvement over time. So monitoring share of search over time, monitoring the results of a brand survey that's deployed at some regular interval, that's how you're going to develop a baseline and actually measure improvement over time and be able to provide defendable data to your C team and your board on how you're improving across those parameters.
- [41:46]
Carolyn
I really, really, really like that approach. They're like just the fact that there is these other Measurements that we can look to as a proxy to how we're improving. We certainly have the same perspective in terms of what we're doing. For one, we always look at, we look back at last six or eight quarters and sort of look at trends over time, which I think a lot of marketers or tacticians like they're so stuck in the day to day that I think sometimes they forget to zoom out and just look at the overall trends for one. But another thing that we often look at would be go to market efficiency. People have heard us banging this drum now for a little bit. And the ability to look at efficiency in pipeline creation, efficiency in closing new logos. And now we have the ability to go even deeper in pipeline creation and look at efficiency with generating basically engagement or awareness and efficiency in the process of like prospecting to a prospect, which I think is really great. And it's not so much like an actual dollars in dollars out, but more of like a ratio that gives you sort of like a baseline to understand over time are you becoming more efficient or less efficient, meaning is it costing you more to produce pipeline or are you getting more of a return based on what dollars you're putting into it? And so I think that there's a lot of new ways that companies can get a sense of how, what their performance is in terms of all of their different tactics and channels that they're executing in the market without just looking at what we're historically accustomed to looking to MQL, SQLs, Last Touch Attribution and just even just pipeline lift. Right. There's all of these other, I guess, new modern ways of measuring things which I really like. I was not aware of the share of search capability. I really like that. I think that that's like a really great actionable thing that people listening in today can take away. They're spending, you know, dollars on paid search, which a lot of companies are. So. Yeah, I like that a lot.
- [43:45]
Megan Bowen
Yeah. And it's even, it's less about paid search specifically and more about how many people are actively searching for your brand. Right. And how does that change over time? So it doesn't, it's not necessarily a measure of paid search effectiveness or efficiency. It's more of a measure of how many people already know about your brand before they get to Google and are looking for it because they're already aware that you exist. And so that's really the measure there. Everyone should check out my telescope. We just actually trained our whole agency on this brand new tool and this measurement approach and we're in the process of integrating it across our entire customer base. Right now we're running some tests with Winter, as I said, to sort of leverage this new survey capability that they've launched and getting more use cases under our belt of the best ways to utilize that and the best sort of takeaways. And so as this is becoming in my mind now that we're past the sort of like the 29, 2020-2022 is this like grab bag of like you can just spend a shit ton of money on paid and you can grow pretty quickly and we're just not in that era anymore. People have to think about more sustainable, profitable growth where really leaning into some of these alternate measuring strategies and approaches to help round out the approach. GTM efficiency is awesome and people should absolutely look at that. And I think we're really big on efficiency and ROI as well. But I always like to make sure to remind people that you can also over optimize for efficiency at the expense of effectiveness. So just like anything, that balance is so crucial and we look at cost per everything and efficiency across the board because driving an ROI at the end of the day is what's required for a go to market engine to be effective and efficient. But again, just like with any attribution model, don't get so myopically focused on only one efficiency metric that you neglect doing things that are effective but may not be as easily measured in that efficiency ratio. So you have to kind of do both, right? You have to both matter.
- [45:51]
Carolyn
Agree with that. Yeah, I really like the stance that you have of like this myopic focus. I think we see that a lot. I want to talk about legacy demand strategies. Like things are obviously evolving a lot when it comes to building really great demand strategies. Right. Tell us what no longer is effective when it comes to creating and capturing demand. What seems to be working really well that you've seen with some of your clients?
- [46:17]
Megan Bowen
Yeah, great question. We touched on this a little bit throughout. So I'll kind of summarize and focus I think on what's really working right now as the main focus. I think that'll be most valuable for listeners. I kind of mentioned earlier how a lot of the tactics that kind of became really popular in 2015, whether it's low intent searches or gated content that were effective at that time, those, those really aren't anymore. So let's kind of break down paid search, paid social and then how you should be thinking about conversion. And I'll share a little bit about what we see as really working best today. So from a search perspective, our search strategy is very focused on either branded search campaigns, high intent keywords campaigns. And I think the thing I'm most surprised about with most people spending a ton of money on search is they do not set up conversion tracking. Paid search is arguably the easiest thing to track. It's, I mean, maybe easy is wrong, the most straightforward. It's not the black box that paid social is of, like, is it working? Is it not working? Like, if you have conversion tracking set up and you have proper measurement in place, you can know pretty clearly if search is working or not working and you can turn off non performing or underperforming campaigns, you can continue to invest more in campaigns that are performing well for you. So typically this is just a result of lack of knowledge or lack of priority on getting this set up properly. And when you do the low intent keyword campaigns, your competitor campaigns, the ones that never actually convert anything into an opportunity, become glaringly obvious and then you can turn those off. Right? So that's the big thing on search for social. People still lean into running social campaigns that are easy to track, which typically means, you know, I call it lead gen or direct response, where they can say they filled out this form on LinkedIn, I got this name and email. Right. And that's a symptom of a broader issue of them feeling that they just have to execute on what is easy to measure, not what is most effective. What we find is most impactful in social is that it should be awareness, your cre, the quality of your creative matters a lot. Your CTA should be learn more and you should be bringing people back to one of your digital properties, your website, a landing page, your podcast, YouTube, whatever, your content library. And then that kind of brings me to the conversion element, which is so maybe people are executing search and social well and then you go to their website and it's garbage. And like you don't even understand what the company does. It's hard to find information. You have to click like 5 times to fill out a form and then someone doesn't even contact you right away. There's always tons of improvement on your actual, what we call the inbound buying experience or your digital journey. Right. And so you need to remove friction. You need to make it easy for people to get information, you need to make it easy for people to get on the phone with a salesperson. Usually there's so much low hanging fruit around those kind of conversion elements as well. So those are the most Important things to be thinking about today of what you can do today to make your digital dollars work better for you.
- [49:31]
Carolyn
I love that. And do you like, do you have a recommendation for the type of the composition or makeup of ads on paid social meaning like an allocation towards thought leadership or product marketing or social proof, things like that?
- [49:46]
Megan Bowen
Yeah, you really should be doing all of it right. You should have, you know, top of funnel brand awareness campaigns. You should have campaigns that are talking about the problem you solve, your solution, your brand. If you are deploying retargeting campaigns to a warm audience that should be more focused on very specific product features or use cases or testimonials or case studies. So you really should be thoughtful of deploying multiple types of campaigns that are going to reach different segments of your audience depending upon how cold and warm they are and that that those need to be refreshed over time on an ongoing and regular basis. And the reality is today is the quality of your creative is what will stop the scroll and get someone to take a look at it. And so not being afraid to be bold or risky or funny or sort of scroll stopping in your creative is, is really important, especially now when things are really, really noisy. Thought leadership on LinkedIn is great. You have someone posting relevant content to your audience, they perform well organically boost that. On LinkedIn we even had success with things like conversation ads which are essentially look like a LinkedIn DM, right. But it's sort of an automated message that's going out. If those are, you know, if you have a strategic account list, you have a really compelling offer. Those have been really effective for us as well. All the different media types too. Whether it's a document ad or a video, you know, you should be leveraging different formats to engage your audience in different ways. So you need to really be doing all of that. Most people are typically deploying like a set of static ads to a retargeting audience is probably like the most common thing I see on LinkedIn. And LinkedIn is expensive. You have a target account list. You don't have to use the broad targeting like there are ways to be really efficient on that platform even though it is expensive, but it's arguably the most effective B2B paid social channel out there today.
- [51:45]
Carolyn
Right now I can think of some of the clients that you work with who have really like nicely diversified campaigns running right now. But why do you think it is that some companies like totally over index on thought leadership and you know, neglect product ads and things like that? Do you see Like a cause for that.
- [52:03]
Megan Bowen
I think it's just having a lack of strategy and I think also bandwidth for execution. So one of the reasons that when we work with a company, for example, they already have a creative team, you know, they have folks that are overseeing digital. But it's a lot of work to, especially if you have a large audience to develop the volume of assets that you want to be able to achieve all of those different objectives that we just went over. So it's typically a strategy issue, an execution issue or a bandwidth issue. Which is why we find when we kind of come in as like a fractional demand or creative team, we're able to own this component and say you don't have like we'll own creative for your paid social programs and your in house creative team can do everything else. Because the needs of a creative team are far beyond just ads. Right. We know how to create ads that convert, so let us leverage our expertise there. So those are the typical things that I see and it's just not prioritized relative to other things. And therefore those dollars are just not driving the return that you want to see because of that.
- [53:14]
Carolyn
Yeah, I think there's something to be said too. Even if you are creating a diversified and balanced set of campaigns on paid social, for example, I think there's so much to be said as well going into like the messaging and the theme and the creative, like all of those things matter. It's not just putting together some copy and putting it on your brand template and putting it out into the market to perform. I don't think it's that simple. We have just a few more minutes left. I want to talk about some success stories that you've had at Refine Labs. Like tell us about one or two customers that have had really good success with, with the strategies that you've built for them.
- [53:49]
Megan Bowen
Yeah, absolutely. I mean we have a bunch of success stories on our website. I'll mention a couple companies that people are probably familiar with. Vena Solutions was one of our early customers that we worked with for almost four years. They were awesome because they were an early adopter of our philosophy back in late 20, early 2020. And because of that they were able to see insane growth both from sort of qualified inbound and pipeline. Huge surge in pipeline velocity, massive improvements in terms of a reduction in customer acquisition cost and really are still executing sort of the philosophy, although they now have their internal team running all of the programs and they've been doing a fantastic job. Clary is another great company, awesome product Great leadership. We were able to boost their Win rates by 64%, cut their acquisition costs by 67%. And they have a great product. They have an excellent strategic narrative. They were working on a strategic narrative with Christopher Lockhead at the time. So we were able to bring that to life in their advertising on top of all the other things that they were doing to promote that narrative in the market. And so I think both of these companies, it's not only running our philosophy and strategy, but it's also making sure that they have an awesome product, clarity on their ideal customer profile, a really compelling strategic narrative, leadership aligned in what marketing should be. You have executives at both of those companies that are actively engaging on social through their own personal profiles as well. So the reason that we were so successful is because of all of those ingredients combined. If you're running our strategy but you don't have some of these other foundational elements in place, it's not going to work as well. Right. So, like, we like to take credit for our part in it, but these are two really awesome companies with great products and really strong teams and ultimately that's why they were successful and we were a partner that was able to like meaningfully accelerate that success.
- [55:59]
Carolyn
Love that. Those are great stories. Thanks for sharing them. We got a question in the Q and A and so I want to make sure that we can answer this quickly in the last few minutes that we have. And I think this is a great question, by the way, not specific to this particular industry, but this person says, I'm selling to the financial community that seems to be really quiet on LinkedIn in terms of posting due to some compliance issues. Can you still assume they are lurking on LinkedIn even though they're not actively posting and publishing content?
- [56:26]
Megan Bowen
Yes. So that audience is absolutely like of the financial audience. Vena is a great example because they sell into that same space. So, yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of people that are on LinkedIn that are not actively posting or engaging, but that does not mean that they are not on the platform.
- [56:43]
Carolyn
Yeah, I've heard that actually a few times. Not again, not specific just to finance, but even in like the government space and things like that. Right. Thank you. Thank you for that. Any. If there's any outstanding questions. Trevor, I know you didn't chime in here quickly, but I think. Go ahead. If you, if you have any final questions for Megan. I've just enjoyed sitting here and listening, honestly. So, Megan, thank you very much. You covered a lot of ground there. Lots of years of insight there all condensed into an hour, a nice clean hour. So thank you for your time and all your great thoughts on this stuff.
- [57:17]
Megan Bowen
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, Trevor and Carolyn. It was awesome to be here. We will do it again sometime.
- [57:23]
Carolyn
Thank you, Megan. And where can people find you if they want to learn more about you or, you know, Refine Labs?
- [57:27]
Megan Bowen
Yeah, you can go to refinelabs.com and you can actually, we just launched a great new feature where you can ask our chatbot at the bottom of the site any of your questions about demand gen and we'll give you free access to some Vault resources, up to 10 questions. So if you you're interested in our philosophy or interested in getting some new tips, we've recently republished all of our playbooks for 2025. Feel free to go there. It's a free resource that people can check out and get some value out of. And you can find me on LinkedIn as well.
- [57:58]
Carolyn
Super cool. Yes, The Vault too. I am personally a member of the Vault and I. You guys are always pushing out new resources on that. So a great resource to any demand gen marketing revenue leader. All right, cool. Thanks y' all for showing up. Appreciate the live audience here today. Thank you, Megan, and see you all soon. See you later.
- [58:16]
Megan Bowen
Take care.