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- [00:01]
A
Hey, y'. All. Welcome back. It's been a really fun and also very busy February for us at Pesetto. Amber and I just got home from Florida. We were actually at the above the Fold conference in Fort Lauderdale. It's a new conference where we made some incredible new connections with folks in the industry. And we took so much in, more than I ever expected around AI and just how the industry is using it and how we can incorporate it into our own SaaS product as we innovate on it here at Posetto. Plus, we actually met each other for the first time face to face, which think surprises a lot of people. But we got a chance to record an episode from the back deck at the Airbnb that we were staying at in the sunshine, and that was just so much fun. But for today's guest in this show, we have Matthew Chanella from Refine Labs. He and I actually go back quite a few years because he was my account manager when my previous company hired Refine Labs. And what I really respect about Matthew is that he is so brilliant at his craft as a demand gen expert. But what makes him even so amazing is just his ability to cut through all of the BS in this space in such a relatable and knowledgeable way and just give it to you straight. And I love that. So we start off just catching up and then we get right into it. And I hope you love this episode as much as I enjoyed having the conversation with Matthew. You're listening to GTM Live, a podcast by Passetto.
- [01:29]
B
Hey, what's up? How you doing?
- [01:31]
A
Hello. Good. How are you doing? You got here.
- [01:34]
B
Yeah.
- [01:35]
A
What's going on? I feel like. Well, we haven't chatted in like years now.
- [01:38]
B
Yeah, we haven't chatted since I was your dimension director. Yeah.
- [01:41]
A
Yeah. So remind me, like, you guys living in different places?
- [01:46]
B
Yeah, My wife's getting a green card, so she's employer sponsored by the company out there. And she works in biotech, so she's got to be on site. So the company has a. A site in Sacramento and so that's where she lives.
- [01:59]
A
Oh, got it.
- [02:00]
B
But yeah, otherwise, like, it's good. But I go out like every other week.
- [02:04]
A
So where's home for you again? I don't remember.
- [02:07]
B
Washington, D.C. area.
- [02:08]
A
Okay, got it.
- [02:09]
B
It's across the country. You're not in Canada, are you?
- [02:12]
A
I'm in Canada, yeah. I'm in Toronto.
- [02:15]
B
I thought you were in Austin.
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A
Well, that's because Chris is in Austin, so I feel like most people think we're all in Austin.
- [02:23]
B
I guess when you record, you're recording in Toronto.
- [02:25]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I'm not like I'm outside Toronto, more like the suburbs kind of thing.
- [02:31]
B
But, yeah, like Mississauga or wherever.
- [02:34]
A
I'm in Water down, which is like. Yeah, it's even more west. I'm surprised you even know what Mississauga is.
- [02:42]
B
Oh, yeah. When I was in. When I worked in manufacturing, our rep was based in Mississauga, who's in the Toronto area, so.
- [02:51]
A
Got it. Yeah. And I feel like you had a few refined labbers at one point.
- [02:56]
B
Still do. We got. Malin is still in. Melyn and Mo actually are both still in Toronto or Toronto area. So we got a couple refiners who are still Toronto area. Yeah.
- [03:05]
A
Nice. Well, what's been going on in your world? I saw. Well, you've been at Refine labs for like four years now. And when I was just looking at
- [03:13]
B
LinkedIn, four years next month. Yeah.
- [03:15]
A
So, like when we worked together and you were assigned to my account, you must have been pretty new.
- [03:21]
B
Yeah, I think it was about a year in, at that point. Year and a half, something like that. Yeah. And like, I was. Yeah, I was quite a journey on at that. Has it really been that long? Like two and a half years, I guess.
- [03:34]
A
Like that.
- [03:35]
B
Wow. Yeah, that's been a long time. Yeah. So, yeah, I've been. I've had, you know, I've always kind of had like the weird misfit toys of refinement clients. I feel like including you guys who had a really. Which is a really difficult targeting. I feel bad now because, like, there is new tooling that's come out that I think would have made your program a lot more. A lot more viable than I know. We had like a lot of CRM tech debt as well as well, which I remember for sure very vividly from that account. But like, yeah, using tools like Primer, like, I have had tremendous amount of success targeting audiences who are really not on LinkedIn, on Meta, using Primer. It's actually been kind of amazing to watch that play out for me. Cool.
- [04:20]
A
Okay.
- [04:21]
B
I feel like if I had Dentia three years ago, I would have recommended this instead, and it probably would have done much better. But.
- [04:27]
A
Well, I want to shout out one thing. Okay. So when I came in as a client, I think I was in a place that a lot of people are in, which is like, okay, you get a lot of pressure from your leadership to go drive demand. Right. And at that point I was pretty green in, like, how to do that I sort of had in the back of my mind, okay, are these expectations for what leadership really wants gonna work? And so, like, I was pushing that on you guys. I don't know if you remember that, but I was like, we gotta do it this because our leadership thinks we should do it this way. And at the time, I commend you because you're like, listen, I don't think that's smart. We'll do it. But just telling you we would never do it this way. And I was like, let's just try it.
- [05:07]
B
I remember having that conversation. One thing I also realized, and you've talked to Ashley as well at who just left a line. But like, her and I talk all the time about how sometimes you get in the role as a marketing leader and like, you get constraints put on how you want to do your job for sure. And it drives your behaviors for better and for worse. So when you have constraints, you're really not able to do your program the way you want to until you can, like meet the bar within the constraint. Right. And that's kind of a difficult position to be in, especially for a new VP or a new head of marketing who's been successful doing it a certain way and needs to figure out for themselves whether that way will work in this new situation that they're in and then be able to kind of organically adjust to that reality instead of throwing, throwing them into this scenario where it's, you need to do it this way even if you've never done it before. And like, what. And what got you this job is not going to be what makes you successful in this one.
- [06:10]
A
Yeah.
- [06:10]
B
And that's just, that's kind of just the life of being a marketer. But I always find that interesting. Like, I know with Align, for instance, like aligned is a last touch attribution, pog, led, and everything needs to have a very direct through line. Right. Well, that drives a lot of different behavior in how you do advertising. Right. You're doing an influence or campaign. Every thought leader post you're going to run, it's going to have a call to action. You need to have really, really, really great conversion tracking, which, from what I know has been one of their challenges, which is why, like, those direct through lines just don't appear as much as they do. And also, like, it takes away things that I think, like, will happen to a lot of companies when ultimately what you want to be as a marketer is effective.
- [06:53]
A
I think at the job. Yeah.
- [06:54]
B
And there's all kinds of ways for that to happen. And there's actually all kinds of ways for that to be measured. And sometimes you just get boxed into whether you sourced it or not right at the end of the day. Which is so ironic because in B2B in general, but B2B tech especially, like, there is not one sale that happens without sales really being involved and working that very actively.
- [07:18]
A
So, like, oh, I have been preaching this for like, that's why I just had a call. You saw that email. Because you're like, I want to talk about this. So maybe this is a good segue into that. Because I literally had a call with a client this week and we just had our regular sync or whatever and she's like, okay, can I ask you something? Like, I'm feeling pretty frustrated because this is our tracking right now. We're actually helping them fix it. But she was like, right now we have the deal source field and like, sales is constantly overriding it to say that something is sales source.
- [07:46]
B
And they always will because if they make one email and they answer, if they connect on one BDR call, that's just going to be what happens, right?
- [07:53]
A
Yeah, but you can't have a deal without a rep. So that is why I always say measure the two things in parallel, but just like separate them. Like, that needs to happen. But I'm curious to know what you were thinking when you read that, because you did say when we were chatting about what we're going to talk about, you're like, I want to talk about this because I have some opinions. So I would love to hear from you.
- [08:13]
B
Yeah, so I mean, I was just thinking about it. And also this goes into like, just having to measure marketing on the idea of ROI or roas or those kinds of metrics. It's a fallacy anyway, because if sales touches every single deal that happens and has to work it all the way through to closed one, like, does marketing ever have a conversation with the prospect after they booked that first call? Most likely not. At best, you're running pipeline acceleration with active deals. And even then, I think a lot of people make that measurement really fuzzy. That's actually one of the perfect scenarios to do split testing on. And it's like, we'll test half of our deals from this cohort and the other half we will not advertise to. And then what is the difference after all of those CoH closed one between the ones we advertised and the ones we didn't? What's that? Incremental lift. And so this gets back to the heart of what I feel like B2B at least people who are really tuned into B2B are finally getting into the idea of incrementality, even though I think still the math for them is really fuzzy in that regard. Yeah, but going back to your own email, what I found really interesting about that was, you know, most people measure marketing just from a marketing cost to revenue made. But like, there's a lot of other things that go into that. There's the cost of sales, there's cost of goods sold, there's your contribution margin, there's brand spend, there's performance spend. Those both manifest over different timelines at different time horizons. And nobody really wants to talk about that or even like really critically think about, well, how would we measure marketing if we just admitted all these things were actually part of the process of creating financial impact for the business? Yeah, I think that drives, if you're honest with yourself, it really removes a lot of attribution from the discussion and it forces you to look at expense versus cost versus outcomes. And I think that's where it probably is going to end up coming to a head a little bit more over time. I think for early stage companies it makes less sense because I think there's just more direct through lines you're normally running, more performance marketing, there's more prospecting, there's less emphasis on brand. But as you get bigger and you kind of need that more to differentiate yourself because you're really just trying to survive when you're smaller. Brands really fuzzy to measure. And so there's just ways you have to measure it where you completely take the idea of source or attribution out of the equation. But then you still have to say, well, what was the financial impact of it?
- [10:40]
A
100%. And just to go back to what you were saying earlier, which is like, how do we measure brand or marketing impact once the deal has already been created? I think that that was the biggest problem when you were working on our account back at like when I was a Refine Labs customer is because that was like that industry. Well one, we were selling a public sector, which is like hard enough as it is. Our sales cycles were like years long for one. Yeah, wasn't really a lead gen motion. These are like.
- [11:09]
B
No, it's never a Legion motion. Right. It's an RFP motion or it's things like that. Right. And so. Yeah, and this goes back to time horizons.
- [11:17]
A
Exactly. But I think a lot of companies right now that are trying to move into like a pure enterprise motion and then they still optimize for lead gen. And it's just like you're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. And that's what we were doing. We were trying to build a lead gen motion. And that's what I was saying, like, help me build a Legion motion. I need my leads. I need these campaigns to produce leads. And at the time you were saying if you're running a brand awareness play, that's just not gonna work.
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B
Right.
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A
Like what you're wanting to do for your business, it's doesn't fit together. And so it took me a while to learn that, but I see it all the time now with our customers. Yeah.
- [11:53]
B
And then with, with lead gen plays even as well. You know, this still happens, especially on enterprise sales and things like that, where they still run state of this ebook, right? Or yeah, things like that. And when you want to run lead gen, especially where you're trying to get people into a sales process in the next quarter or over the course of the next sales cycle, you need better offers. And I think a lot of companies just aren't very honest with the fact that offers basically amount in some way, shape or form to managed service and people want to sell pure SaaS. Right. So when you're putting an offer in place, you normally are having to create like a stripped down version of what you do or take your IP or business intelligence and then provide it back to them in a way that they can do something comparative. This goes back to like, and you can find this out if you're willing to do enough upmarket research to actually talk to your buyers, talk to your market, go do like postmortem with customers and then just figure out like what helps you the most in your evaluation process. Because we, you know, we've, we've done this with companies and like one of the things that is really apparent is how much the demo request as an offer is terrible.
- [12:58]
A
Oh yeah.
- [12:58]
B
And it really, really is. I mean, they need to basically have already decided on you to actually take that step. So hitting them with retarget ads that do that or all these other things or even testing cold targeting in a controlled scenario doesn't work. You need to figure out what actually helps them evaluate a solution and then craft an offer that is going to be compelling. And you do that by talking or surveying or actually getting upstream with your customer and talking or your prospective customer and talking to them. And the more removed they are from like, you know, the marketing and sales sphere, the more you have to do that work. Because if they work in cybersecurity or finance or ops, you know, they're the way. I mean, marketers will. Marketers have no idea how they evaluate that. And for that matter, sales really doesn't either unless they're actually doing real product work. So, you know, there's just that whole. I think that whole missing piece of Legion is also just pretty half baked from a lot of companies.
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A
So do you think that that's a channel execution problem or is like, from what I'm hearing, like that's more of a strategy and how you're going to market and what your offer even is like you can run the channels all day long.
- [14:04]
B
Yeah, I think market is a strategy problem more than a channel problem. I think of ads a lot through like angles offers channel creative. And so that's how I would like kind of think about it overall. So I mean, ang gets the positioning and messaging offer, gets into the offer itself. Channels like, okay, do those two things work for this channel? And then the creative is. Does the creative hook them in? Right. So I just kind of start up top and then go down to the bottom and that's normally kind of where I would go. Because the ad platforms themselves create constraints too. I mean, if you want to do direct response on LinkedIn now, just like in Meta, you have to use lead gen forms. You have to, you have to. I mean, these, again, they're. There's. You're incentivized to do these things if you have constraints to create those kinds of results or you have to have like a very frictionless landing page offer. So if you notice these PLG companies like, and we've talked about a lot, but Ramp's another great example. Ramp runs a lot of direct response. Right. And I also think Ramp has one of the great brand presences out there on LinkedIn and in general right now for SaaS, but almost every kind of conversion path for them for direct response is a single line form of enrichment behind it. So again, there's creating offers that reduce friction and then understanding we're gonna advertise that this is how the platform works. So this is how the experience has to work to match it. Otherwise we're never gonna find success on it.
- [15:17]
A
Oh my gosh. It's striking a chord for me because when I like look back to my own experience in house trying to do this thing with the objectives that were set upon me, I realize in retrospect just like how dumb my thinking was around that thinking, okay, this is what we gotta go do now. When I'M hearing you talk about it and when I'm seeing now like through lived experience of our customers and your customers or whatever, rarely I think the things that we are doing are really the things that we should be doing based on everything that you're telling me. You see it in the data.
- [15:48]
B
Yeah, I mean and they're also just, you don't even need like a lot of data. You can just look at this and then just use common sense. Right. It's just like I can see 90% of my impressions on my LinkedIn ads are mobile and I have no way to control for that. There's no desktop only setting on LinkedIn ads like there is for Reddit or there is for Meta. So any ad I run anywhere is going to be for on mobile, on LinkedIn going to be on people's phones. So I basically need my almost my entire advertising strategy to consider the fact that it's not on desktop. Now I spend most of my time on LinkedIn on desktop because I'm a marketer but almost no one else does that.
- [16:20]
A
So yeah, for sure.
- [16:22]
B
Again just thinking about how these app platforms work kind of drive those constraints. But yeah, I mean just going back as we talked performance marketing, but like obviously I think on brand where it's even fuzzier, I just think that like no, you wouldn't even want to look at brand like that because I think brand is much more of a compounding interest play over time. So you almost need to find a way to amortize your brand spend in a way that'll make sense to your financial leader and explain to him how it's supposed to impact not just marketing. But like I think going back, I think I mentioned this, but I'll say it again, brand should make every part of the business easier to do in terms of generating revenue. So it should make sales outreach easier. It should make partner channels work better. It should make prospecting more effective. It should make your performance marketing better as well. It should touch and affect positively all the business. And the way you would do that is you would look at that expenditure across your output and your contribution margin. So if you really want to look at brand spend in a way that makes financial sense and doesn't constrain it, going back to the idea of constraints doesn't constrain it to lead gen or performance marketing, you look at it against contribution margin and you would strip out source and attribution from the discussion a hundred percent.
- [17:37]
A
And that's what I'm seeing like the best highest performing teams do now is stop looking at results as individual sources or functions or anything like that.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So when I think back to, like, our experience working together, what ended up happening was like, okay, we're running an enterprise motion. We want to generate leads which we know wasn't going to work, and three months in we pull the plug. Our leadership was like, kill that partnership. We're not getting the results fast enough. We can't afford to wait. And so what I think when you're mentioning brand, and that was the thing that Refine Labs was encouraging us to do, is run a brand motion, like that is the play that you need to be running right now. And when I now look back at our clients and we actually measure that engagement period before a lead ever becomes a viable sales opportunity, sometimes depending on like the type of business or motion or whatever. But sometimes that's like years. Like, I just talked to a company last week whose engagement stage or awareness stage was like a thousand days. And so what's your take on that? How do we get C suite and, you know, the board to understand that the results are not immediate?
- [18:46]
B
Yeah, I mean, I, again, I think it goes back to sales cycle. And I think largely what people should probably come to grips to is sales cycle doesn't usually change all that much. Unless you, Unless something happens either in the market or with your own product, that accelerates that. Or if you do something absolutely way out of left field with brand or something like that, or you, or you go to. Or you're hating the word go to market, because I know go to market, it comes with so many other things than just like, you know, your ability to orchestrate prospects and stuff like that. But like, or you go to market motion does something outrageous. But I think largely one thing you should be doing is just benchmarking your brand expenditure overall and just looking at how it's affecting your revenue. But like, to your point, a thousand days, I mean, it's a compounding thing. And like, people will buy on their timeline. You can create as much urgency or FOMO or whatever it is you want. And like, God knows I've had plenty of that, especially watching places like LinkedIn lose their mind with AI right now. And I'm like, God, am I that behind on it? But I'm still not going to be moved until I am actually ready to move on it. Because any other person who has budget and authority, I have competing priorities, I have things I have to do first. And like, maybe this doesn't just quite fit my timeline right now, but I do certainly still appreciate kind of being reminded that you exist and kind of staying top of mind for when I come in market. I mean this goes all the way back to wanting to be at the top of the consideration set. Right. And so it takes time for that to happen, but it also takes the buyer wanting to move on that. You know, it's something that you the only thing you can really help yourself. And I think a lot of people look at marketing as deterministic and it's actually more so probabilistic. Like you do all these things, right. To increase the probability that you get into that consideration set. You don't do it to determine that you get in that consideration set because you still have to do other things well and you have to execute well also. So that's still going to happen on their own time. And I don't think there's as much you can do to effectuate that as I think you people would like to believe. I think you're doing more than anything trying to create the probability that you're going to have someone come in and want to get into a sales process with you. And that's going to manifest itself by the way in a lot of different ways. They could going back to like how brand lists and everything else. If you're doing brand really well, maybe it's timing, right? Maybe that email, that cold outreach email hits them at the right time and they're like, oh yeah, I've been watching that company. Now I'm finally ready. And this goes back to the whole ridiculous idea of source and attribution. And always think a little bit about if, like if companies just stripped the idea of source and attribution kind of away from their business operating system and just kind of operated under the kind of one revenue umbrella, how would their behaviors change and how would people be in incentivized to work differently 100%.
- [21:25]
A
So my perception is that marketing leaders already understand that for the most part maybe you see it differently. So I'm curious to understand your perspective. But from my perspective I think it's like that is accepted by marketing but not yet accepted by ELT or senior level leadership. That just doesn't understand marketing the way marketers do. What's your stance on that? Are you seeing that too or something different?
- [21:49]
B
I think marketers, it's less that they understand it and more that they feel it. Because if they understood it, they could articulate it and they could prove it. Yeah, because I think there's one thing to feel it and say it and Know it in your gut. And it's like that sixth sense that you have, right, where you're like, I know this isn't working and I know why, but I can't get anyone to believe me. And then it's being able to understand it and articulate and show it right? That comes into like, just. You have to be able to make a cogent argument financially for why you need to do more brand. And normally you would do that by saying, hey, let's actually look at this against our expenditure and our revenue. And like again, going back to like understanding sales cycle and how does brand memory decay work? And you need to create a model that finance can buy into. And then I've actually worked on this, so I have a document or an Excel sheet that kind of works through this with like an arrayed formula and brand decay over like a geometric period. And like, it gets mathy, but the output is actually pretty simple. It's like, here's our expenditures, here's our cost centers, here's our revenue, here's the periods we're looking up against. Here's actually the marketing roi. And if marketing is doing, and a brand's doing its job, that marketing ROI should period over period get better. And if it's not, then you can without a shadow of a doubt say, this is not working.
- [23:08]
A
Okay, I love that and I could not align with that more. But what would you say then to like CFO or your FPA person who comes at you and says, but you're measuring this on all revenue. And like marketing didn't source all the revenue. So show me your ROI on what marketing source, which I know is ass backwards and you know that too. But what would the argument be that we would give said person?
- [23:31]
B
I mean, look, this goes back to like, you have to play those games. So like, you know, you'll always have a marketing source where you're gonna run direct response do lead sc. You can't just do that all day. And like, get that. It also goes back to how are you targeting? Are you doing more segmentation, targeting, positioning, motion against your CRM, or do you have very defined target account list? So you can do things even within periods like that to kind of prove whether it works or not. And that goes back to testing. You can do split testing with the target account list. You'd be shocked how many company, how many companies are just not willing to even do that. So I mean, there's other, there's other ways that you can use it with experimentation or with incrementality to show it. But like going back to how you're told or how you're mandated to be measured, you're gonna have to play those games. And that goes back to the whole point of like coming up with offers that are gonna get people into the sales process. So go back to the upstream research. Like it's really not that complicated. We just make it really complicated for ourselves because like there's really just brand and performance and you have to do both. And you have to do both pretty well. And the kind of behaviors that you have to do to make both effective are different. Right?
- [24:42]
A
Yeah.
- [24:43]
B
Like performance is going to have much more tight alignment with sales. It's a lot more about offers. And those offers can be anything from like high intent offers to middle intent offers to events and things like that. Anything to show tangible through line impact. You're always going to have to to a certain extent do that in B2B marketing because it's the only way to justify your existence quarter to quarter for better or worse. And then like to do the longer term things again, you have to go back and show that modeling exercise out. And you should, if you can model it out for yourself, you can show historically how that worked before and then how your efforts are impacting it after the fact. And recognizing that that will take periods of time. If your sales cycle is 180 days, realistically it could take truly a year and a half.
- [25:29]
A
Yeah.
- [25:29]
B
And you have to look at those things and understand that like you're going to be under different time horizons for different motions to have to show impact and those are going to drive your behaviors. But you have to balance both.
- [25:40]
A
Yeah.
- [25:40]
B
To recognize like honestly it's just for the good of the business. At the end of the day I
- [25:45]
A
think like just a lot of companies are really looking for a silver bullet and like.
- [25:49]
B
Yeah, there is none.
- [25:50]
A
Sorry, there is no silver bullet. No sorry. Yeah, 100%. And also I would love to know what you're seeing with your like customer base. But I feel like largely speaking a lot of demand gen and like marketing leaders have very little visibility after opportunity creation. They don't know their win rates, they don't know their sales cycle link, they don't know their acv. They don't know any of this stuff. And usually when we run a like an audit or diagnostic or whatever, we're like look at your win rates here. They are so, so low. Like you don't need to go get more pipeline. You don't need to run. You need to help sales lift the overall win rate, the leverage and yield from doing that is far more significant than like just dumping in more pipeline into like a shitty machine.
- [26:36]
B
Why do you think the win rate's so low though?
- [26:38]
A
Quality of pipeline, I think or what is being passed in sales.
- [26:42]
B
What drives quality of pipeline?
- [26:44]
A
People who are actually have an intent to buy.
- [26:47]
B
Yeah. And also people who know about you and know what you do. Right. And are confident you can solve that solution for them. Very rarely with performance marketing are you going to actually solve that. And again it goes back to offers because if you can do a performance marketing, it's because you have an offer that's good enough that can prove it. Not a state of this report. So this goes a little bit back to just like strategy and approach. But I agree, I mean we're unfortunate in I have one client who you know, does not have great, great win rates. I think they have a heavy field sales motion and not enough in house sales support. And I think that's a large reason why. But they are growing for sure. And then I have another one where we've risen the win rate, we've risen the marketing source revenue. We run a target account list, we do account penetration. I mean and we, we've seen a lot of nice interplay between what we do on LinkedIn and what we see in branded search. And those things are, are very easy things to tell if you were to simply look at people who come in via branded search and then people who you're getting, who you're exposing to with ads. I think what is challenging for a lot of marketers right now is you don't get a lot of time really to kind of put it all together. And you're also not very well resourced. And like those early decisions you make really make or break you overall. Like the agencies you work with, the bets you make, the amount of, of market research that you do. Pipeline quality problem is definitely an issue. It's. It astounds me that companies and market leaders don't know their win rates through their sources because you're never going to get budget to do the things that are difficult to measure. If you're not very good measuring the things that you should, you should be measuring well. And I get it, it's performative and it's a bit of a game to like go through all the different, like here's the marketing source, here's the channels or the conversion paths or pipeline sources, however you want to articulate it and here's how each of them do. But that's how you get yourself a seat at the table. First off is you show you know your numbers and you know how to move them and then you get the opportunity to do a little bit more of the creative and honestly probably more impactful stuff writ large. So I'm a little surprised to hear marketing leaders not know their numbers that well. I mean I could tell you, I could tell you all clients unit economics cold for marketing right now. Like they're doing about 650 cost per MQL, about 900 cost per SQL. We're doing about 1200 cost per op. I mean just all, all the way through the line. I mean if, if you don't know those numbers just off the top of your head, I mean you're gonna have a hard time getting credibility with your CEO or your CFO 100%.
- [29:12]
A
Do you think that though that you guys have been like a lever in allowing that to happen? Like, was that the case though when like said leader came and started with you all or is that something.
- [29:23]
B
Yeah, part of it is that that's why they come. They don't have that visibility. They don't really know how to measure it. They do what a lot of companies do, which is look at marketing as this one big department. But don't look at it through pipeline source. Right. People who come in through demo versus come in through MQL scoring versus come in through or signals or anything like that, or come in through mid intent or low intent offers. It all gets grouped together. So even just being able to segment out by your pipeline source to understand what works and what doesn't and what you need to drive to actually get it because those pipeline sources actually matter. I mean intent still matters. I know that we're almost in this post intent world where it's about signal orchestration. I still think that really matters, especially for marketing because they're going to come in through your website.
- [30:07]
A
Yeah. Not all sources are created equal. Like are you still seeing a lot of companies like want to optimize for MQLs or. I think they're dead. I, I think the industry is catching on, but I don't know if we're. I don't think that's a status quo yet. I still think we're a ways out from that.
- [30:24]
B
Yeah. I still think it's how you define it, but I think anchoring on sales qualified lead is probably the best way to go. I would say if you really want to just get into like 3 numbers or 4 numbers, it's sales qual lead sales qualified, op in pipeline revenue at the end of the day. And like, those are the three to really anchor on because you're right. I mean, you know, you'll get a bunch of leads in even on the MQL side, even on the high intent side. And sometimes that conversion rate is just not great. And you can see, I mean, you'll get bots, spam, things like that. You can't help for that. Right. So just anchoring on that SAL number, sales accepted, sales qualified, however you want to define it. To me, that's like, it's just identifying the North Star and being able to model it. Right. Overall, yeah. I don't think the MQL is dead. I think it's largely how teams define it. And I think if you had a high bar for what defined an mql, nobody would complain about the definition.
- [31:12]
A
Yeah, but does anybody really have that? You know what I mean?
- [31:15]
B
No. That's why they hire agencies.
- [31:18]
A
Yeah. I mean, oh man, it's so hard. Like, honestly, I think any, any company that comes through Passetto at least is still optimizing.
- [31:26]
B
That's why they hire agencies. Honestly, they, they hire, they hire agencies to give them cover for those kinds of rpg, for those kinds of discussions, like, for better or worse, like, the agency kind of has to hold the line on that and then it's their ass on the line when it doesn't work out that way. That's the same for not just like what you and I do, but for all the solopreneurs out there that you and I both know, same thing. Their job is to be the voice of reason. I've had more reps, I've done this at two or three dozen companies. I know your definition is off, and I know this is why you can't figure out what's working and what's not. Right. You gotta remember a lot of the people that we work with or a lot of people who work with consultants, agencies, solopreneurs, you know, these, most of these people have been in house their whole career. They've had four or five jobs, maybe some of the early jobs, they had no visibility into this. So they're really only in their second or third job, kind of really, really getting exposure to this kind of pressure, visibility and mandate. And so they just want someone who has seen it more than them, who can help guide them and navigate them through or at least help them figure it out.
- [32:26]
A
Yeah. And just like, what is the framework or what's the playbook that is working for all of these other Companies when they don't have visibility into that. Right.
- [32:33]
B
And then also just how is it evolving? Like part of your job and my job and anyone's job. It works with a lot of clients and it's really part of any marketing leader's job and any go to market leader's job. But I think especially for us, and this is why people bring people in for what you and I do. But like, you know, just what's next, what's current, you know, what are people doing that we're not doing, that we should be, and then like helping them do that. Well, and that in and of itself can be difficult because when you work with larger companies or companies that have pretty entrenched ways of doing things, can be difficult to turn that around, even to the point of talking through offers and things like that. And like, you know, what is a good offer and how do we test that? So I think that's also like another reason why, why we exist overall. But I really just kind of think about it through. Our job is to like create a business impact for that company in a way that is financially defensible. And that's really all it comes down to at the end of the day.
- [33:25]
A
Yeah, for sure. So like, you guys have worked with so many clients and I'm very curious to know if every success is different client to client or if you're seeing like things in the industry right now that every company should invest in. How are you thinking about that?
- [33:39]
B
I think every company is definitely different in that it's difficult. I mean there's definitely commonalities. I think companies that invest in every company I'm, I've worked with, that makes my job a lot easier. And especially for performance marketing, I think even more than anything. But I think even if you want to see like the vanity metrics be good. I think every company does that I've worked with has great product marketing. To me, that's the most common thread of like having a strong demand motion is your product marketing is strong. There's this great customer feedback loop. There's this great buyer feedback loop. You know your positioning, you know your messaging. You have a brand identity and you allow that to be utilized in different ways. But I think the biggest common denominator is product marketing.
- [34:26]
A
Very cool.
- [34:27]
B
Great product marketing equals great demand. It just does.
- [34:30]
A
Do you think sometimes that's overlooked or
- [34:32]
B
like percent why though?
- [34:34]
A
Why do companies overlook that?
- [34:36]
B
Because I think a lot of the product positioning and messaging sort of work first off, it doesn't really fall on marketing. So Marketing is just on the hook for the growth result. Right. And so look at it and go, well damn, this isn't working. And you know, you think, well, we changed the creative or changed this, but really what you need to do is just understand the positioning better. And so I think it doesn't happen because a lot of the positioning and messaging is either shaped by sales call feedback, but your customers are not your buyers necessarily, or they're not your future buyers. So you need to understand people who don't know you, don't know who you are. But deal with those constraints. What are they on the hook for? What do they use to evaluate those things change over time. I think also like the CEO who's normally very technical in nature, typically likes to drive the positioning and the strategy because they know they'll take small samples of feedback to kind of create what that narrative is or sometimes for better. Sometimes they're very savvy at it and sometimes they are not.
- [35:30]
A
Yeah.
- [35:30]
B
And then sometimes I think when you start to really expand your service offerings or you have a bunch of different business units and then don't staff up to keep up with all the different sort of precise EPS and segments that you support, you lose in your positioning and your messaging because message, because positioning is company wide and messaging is business unit specific. Right. And also you can even get further down into seg, into segmentation, even beyond that. Those things tend to get very watered down and diluted as you add horizontally to your business. So that's why I think a lot of companies struggle with it is they grow, they kind of lose their, they kind of, they kind of lose that edge when it comes to that and then it ends up cascading down to the rest of the business.
- [36:13]
A
Yeah, definitely. Would you say that clients in your guys portfolio right now, like what, what would tip, like what would be a typical acv or is it all over the place?
- [36:22]
B
It can be all over the place. I would say our typical ACV right now is running in the 30 to 60 thousand dollars range a year. We definitely have some that are a little larger than that. We also have some that are a lot smaller too as well. I mean, and that actually again that drives a little bit, drives a little bit of how you approach it. Right. You have low acv, high velocity, you're just running a little bit of a different program I think. And also you can prove brand, I think a lot of, a lot faster there.
- [36:49]
A
Right.
- [36:50]
B
But yeah, typically like we're playing in that. I mean we say it's 25k and above. We're actually playing a little bit more on that 30 to 60 and we've actually gone fairly upmarket recently. Like we're tending to work with more six figure or sorry, nine figure brands right now. So.
- [37:05]
A
Okay, so I guess my question was, I think to what you're saying is that like product marketing is often overlooked and would you say and even like SMB mid market, that Persona specific messaging and understanding your different industries and building a whole strategy for product marketing around that is still critical because that's definitely my perception. My perception is that most companies want to move up market but their messaging is, it's like umbrella level and their tracking and their CRM is like super vague. So it's like who do you, how do you know even who you're marketing to? I think it's just a huge gaping hole in like a lot of company strategies and then they wonder why they can't be effective.
- [37:46]
B
Yeah. And it's just going back to understanding like how do they buy? What helps them evaluate buy. What are those buying triggers? Who do they consider? What is their perception of them? What's their perception of you? If they have perception of you, like you can. First off, I think a lot of companies try to do this themselves and they would probably better off bringing someone outside of their org to do it because we always tend to look at our own situation with very rose colored glasses or also very myopic classes as well. I think in my case I'm very myopic about these things. But you bring someone in who's like can kind of objectively kind of find that out for you and give that feedback and like it is gold man. It is so useful to know that and help drive kind of what you're going to do from a, from a growth standpoint it can shape your outreach cadences, it helps your, your brand messaging and helps shape your offers. So I just think it's like it's so basic even before you develop like a new product. Right. You're just going and doing market research with buyers and get an idea of the market requirements before you even start building product requirements. Like that stuff is just the foundational part of marketing that like you know, made it a 4P profession at 1 point in time, you know.
- [38:58]
A
Yeah, it's just so wild. Cause I feel like from our vantage point get a lot of companies that want to generate more pipeline, don't really know how, they don't know what's working. And so immediately when you audit everything and you want to see marketing influence and the touch points that happen along the journey and what's working, what's not. Like, I feel like a lot of people are really quick to short circuit to like, oh, this channel or that channel or this motion or that motion, and totally overlook this, like, giant elephant in the room, which is, man, your positioning, your messaging and how you're targeting
- [39:30]
B
the number one, this platform, it doesn't really hold. And I mean, I think that's why you see guys like the fletchpmm team just like have. Have the body of work that they do just because, you know, it's usually a lot. There's a lot that goes into it. You have to ask yourself really hard questions as a company to kind of get to that point. And then I think it's. Even then it's very difficult because you have loud voices in the room who like, really feel strongly about it, but your market doesn't feel the same way. And that's kind of like, I respect it because, like, that's how a lot of founders got there, by pushing an idea and a story that they had to. That they got others to buy into and that you can get your way to 5, 6, 7 million doing that. We know, with the right product that works and stuff. But at some point, if you want to go and scale, you just need a more refined position that's more differentiated. And it can't just be a vibe story, you know, it's got to be something rooted in market research and just
- [40:27]
A
like, compelling, especially in the age of AI Right now. I'm so quick, you know, I see so many, like, SaaS brands out in the market and I'm like, this positioning is just so meh. Yeah, it's just noise, you know, And I feel like there's such a skill that comes into doing that well, in a way that's actually going to be like scroll stopping.
- [40:45]
B
Yeah. And I also think, like, AI is just, it is just such this. It's. It is such a disruptor. And I think, like, just people are trying to wrap their heads around it. And I know we're all on LinkedIn and we follow it a lot, but God, go touch some grass and talk to someone who doesn't work in tech and ask them about AI. And it is still a very, very foreign concept to them. So, like, we're living in this small little fiefdom where everyone is an AI expert or is trying to build to create more AI fluency. And if you go touch some grass and talk to other people, even people your own age. It's really not the case nearly as much as you would think. And I feel bad because I think that's going to be very disruptive to them. And I think. I think almost every profession will be disrupted by it. But the messaging and the positioning around it right now, I think it's hard because people are even relatively smart people are still trying to really wrap their head around it and see what's possible. And it's almost like the rules of the game change every single week. Like you saw openclaw, like this past week, and like people started to build around, build a bunch of stuff around it, and then other people will say, well, there's a bunch of security flaws in it, and you're just trying to figure out, like, what's real and what's not. It's hard to navigate in that because even legacy tech had more guardrails than AI has. And AI almost has almost no rules to it. You can apply it almost anywhere and it's difficult for it to. I almost feel like it's at the detriment of the technology right now that it's. It's so much like that because no one really is seeing a use case that's consistent enough for them to buy into because just the growth hack of it just changes every week. And it's just like, well, I'm definitely not doing anything now. I need to see how this plays out 100%.
- [42:21]
A
I love what you said about, like, going to touch some grass because I actually feel like now with this, like, like massive proliferation of AI. Not that it's not important, but I think the companies that are going to accelerate their marketing are going to have to be the ones that go back to, like, first principles, in person interactions, connecting with people on, like, a human level. There's just so much freaking noise with AI. And I don't know, I feel like people are becoming obsessed with that wave, which I get. But at the same time overlooking the first principles of what marketing is supposed to be in the first place.
- [43:01]
B
Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, everyone's almost looking at it as a shortcut, I feel like. And you know, we talk a lot about first principles in, in our industry with, and rarely ever actually exercise them, which is one of the ultimate ironies that kind of happens with us. But, like, it's really disruptive. It goes back to like, yes, fundamentals are ultimately going to win, but the speed by which you can apply those fundamentals and the rigor by which you can actually get to that point. Is still hugely important. Like, you're not going to be able to apply something like AI effectively without having a foundational IP that you really believe in. I'm perfectly comfortable being like a second wave adopter of AI. Like, I certainly using it, I am applying it. I'm, you know, testing things like clock, cowork and things like that. You know, I think that those things are, you know, you have to have those skills doing working clay and all those stuff. But like, some of the really, really kind of. I think I call it like frontier AI right now. Like, I'm perfectly comfortable to just watch that play out a little bit from the sideline before I start planning a flag on that myself because, like, I'm finding it a little difficult to navigate. And I'm not seeing a lot of companies who are becoming AI first or like really adopting AI really showing the business impact of it. I think, like Kyle Coleman from ClickUp kind of showed. Showed a graph for ClickUp. That's really the first graph I've ever seen from a company where he showed. They showed their results over the last and it still probably took them longer. They probably started implementing it last year and it still took till October for it to really take a little bit. I haven't seen a lot of companies actually post our growth results and AI is really driving that for me. It's a lot of we're piloting, we're trying to figure out what works, we're breaking our systems down. But I think for a lot of companies, that disruption is coming at a human cost. I think a lot of people are trying to wrangle themselves around it.
- [44:46]
A
It.
- [44:46]
B
I'm not sure if it's moving the needle so much for people right now. I have no doubt that it will. I'm almost sure that it will. But, like, right now, I'm not positive that that's happening at the rate that people may be claiming are right now.
- [44:59]
A
For sure. The one thing that I'm seeing like AI that companies want to adopt AI for the most is like automating outbound, automating your SDR activity, automating all of this stuff.
- [45:10]
B
Got it? Yeah, 100%. That is the use case right now. I mean, you watch everyone and they're scraping LinkedIn profiles or like, you know, running personalized outreach via clay against all these other channels. It's literally that. And again, this goes back to like, what are you doing outbound for? Are you doing outbound to, like, actually try to build a relationship with people? I personally, when I feel or can tell if something is very much coming at me from AI and there's not a lot of thought or care taken into it. Man, I'm so turned off by that brand pretty much immediately. So like, you know, it almost goes back to like most of what we're seeing in marketing too. I'm seeing this, there's this huge return of lead gen and direct response at the moment, which I find to be kind of fascinating to see play out. But it still goes back to like just the intention behind it and like what are you doing it for? Are you trying to collect an email address to go run them into like a really boring nurture sequence or like hand them off as a call sheet for sales? Or are you doing that to try to like actually further relationship understand they have their own timeline and kind of provide value. It still comes back to like, you have to be value driven as a business and like people want to use AI to scale outbound to burn their TAM every 30 years. Yeah, 100%, yeah, super volume driven. I mean I'm interested in what some of these people are doing, but like I'm following it but like, you know, there's one person I've watched who today sent 8 million emails for a client over the last 30 days and I know exactly who that client is and I'm like, person doesn't have 8 million people to email.
- [46:40]
A
Yeah, oh man, yeah, for sure. I, I really understand and like appreciate that. Definitely. Yeah. There's one person that I've been closely watching and they're using AI and they're being really, really strategic about it. They're not just putting in this new system and trying to scale it overnight. They're just trying to make their outbound way more intentional and smart and actually take the lift off humans doing the work. And it's not for them, it's not about doing more. It's how can we make that engine smarter? Because outbound from my purview is really hard to get right. And it can be really expensive, especially too if you've got like a 50% SDR team or something like that. So why slap on AI on an already like suboptimal system is my perspective.
- [47:27]
B
Right. And that's the other thing. Oh my God. You just kind of said something that I just thought of is like people putting AI in, into systems that already don't work well or already are kind of slapped together just makes that output so much worse. You're almost better off as a small team figuring out your motion and then putting AI over it. The reason why I think larger companies are having so much trouble is they're having to deal with all the tech debt that they've never dealt with in their life to actually make AI functional for them. And that's a bear of an effort. So all the companies who just ignored data hygiene APIs that talked well to each other, better orchestration, those companies are struggling to get AI to work for them. This goes back. We have mutual contacts who have talked about addressing your technical debt for years just because it's good practice and it gives you good visibility and it helps tell the truth about what's going on in your business. Right. Well, they didn't do that. AI came, they're feeling forced to adopt it and it's just making a bad system worse. So it's just noise on noise on noise. Yeah, I feel bad because when there's a lot of people who have talked about that for a long time, but I feel like the people who are making AI work well for them have pretty clean data systems working for them.
- [48:49]
A
Yeah. Do you see that or would you say that's a rarity? Would you say it's an exception to actually have like, do you see a lot of customers coming into Refine Labs
- [48:56]
B
with like actual good hiking on their data? No, no, no, no. This is why you exist, right? No, no. But no, I can count like on this many fingers how many clients I've had that had really nice data. You still have to get it explained to you a little bit because I've had ones where they had a lot of custom objects. But it did work actually quite well once you understood it. And I was like, okay, this actually makes a lot of sense. And there's good data flowing in. The UTMs work correctly. You have all of these sources. I personally like don't see it very often and sometimes that ends up being a lot of your job at the output is like, hey, let's fix your data so I can actually show you what's working and what's not working. Right. So that becomes a little bit of the first question also, like that data just limits your ability to do things you really want to do as a marketer. So we go back to the things that we were talking about, like if you want to run incrementality, if you want to do geo holdout tests, if you want to do split testing, things like that. Can't really do that without good data, otherwise you're going to have a horrific time proving it one way or the other.
- [50:01]
A
You know, 100% I could not agree more. And honestly that was the bane of my existence, having lived that world. Data initially wasn't a priority for me, but I was very quick to realize that my credibility is all comes back to like my narrative and like what I can report on and it's a fricking headache trying to stitch together bad data. So.
- [50:25]
B
Yeah, and it really shouldn't be that either.
- [50:28]
A
Yeah, I know, I know. Well, maybe there's a world where that is not the case anymore, but we'll see. Are you still working with clients? I know you got a promotion. Congrats, VP of Innovation. What is that like, are you still like hands on with clients?
- [50:43]
B
I have two clients still. Yeah. For the time being. I would describe my role as like the intersection between service delivery, AI and data. So I'm working I think a little bit more on aggregating our data, a little bit more to drive insights for the company. So we're working on like getting a little more into BI and data warehousing. So that's definitely something that I'm taking a more of a role into. There's quite a bit of an enablement component to it as well. So like we're always looking at our philosophy and like making adjustments to it and being kind of understanding where the times are and kind of seeing where our POV fits into that right now. So I do a lot of work on that. I'm basically the AI driver, AI adoption driver for our company. So I've done a lot of AI testing, unstructured data to figure out how good it is and how good it isn't. It's okay. You have to do quite a few prompts and you have to do a lot of testing. Like you gotta really be willing to manually look through your data and understand your control before you test the AI across all the different models and figure out what works. So it's certainly a busy job. I'm enjoying it so far. I do still love the client work. It's really hard to let go of it. I have to be honest, like one thing about being in the role that I've really had to come to grips with and I, I kind of still am, is all the work I did in my life to get this job is not the work I'm going to really be doing anymore. So I have to come to grips with that. I'm like literally very much entering a new chapter in my career. I'm still kind of coming to grips with that a little bit and embracing that and having to find my Footing on it. And there's a scary part to that and there's a fun part to it. And most weeks are good. And some weeks the imposter syndrome really kind of sets in.
- [52:29]
A
Oh, yeah, totally relatable. But that is where the growth happens.
- [52:33]
B
Yeah.
- [52:33]
A
Being in a place where you might not totally be comfortable or where things feel new, like 100%. I get that. I used to be an in house marketer. Now I'm running Passetto as an agency.
- [52:44]
B
Yeah. Now you're a CEO.
- [52:45]
A
I mean, totally different world, you know what I mean? And like, I don't know, it's just crazy sometimes when you reflect on that. But I think that's all like, super cool. I love watching you guys from the sidelines and seeing what you're all doing.
- [52:57]
B
Appreciate it. Cool.
- [52:58]
A
Well, it was so good to catch up. I would love to do it again soon. I love hearing about the inner workings of what's going on at Refine Labs.
- [53:05]
B
Yeah, definitely. Actually some pretty exciting things at Refine. We have some things happening that will, I'm sure be announcing over coming months and quarters, but we're definitely kind of in a growth phase. We're kind of in a. We're kind of past our little reset that we, we did over the course of last year. And we're definitely charting our own path and our own future right now with Megan at the helm. It's pretty, pretty exciting.
- [53:25]
A
Well, I am super pumped to keep on watching and seeing what you guys are doing. Anything that, like, we didn't cover that you would have hoped to or.
- [53:34]
B
No, no, that was it. I have such conflicting feelings about AI. Like, I'm so interested in it, but at the same time, I'm so repulsed by what I see people do with it on LinkedIn right now. And I'm just like, ugh, this should really help humanity. Every shiny new toy that gets kind of launched into the manosphere ends up becoming like, reduced to the lowest common denominator of output.
- [53:59]
A
I'm so careful to really watch how I contribute to the conversation around AI because for one, while we're like a software company, we're building software and so it needs to be AI native. And that's super important to us. AI makes anything to do with data analysis for us so much easier. But on the other hand, I feel almost a little ignorant to it because I feel almost like a little bit behind or almost not an early adopter of it.
- [54:27]
B
Yeah, I would say, I would say the same. And I think the other thing is just the options are so broad right now. It's like, think about how fast people have moved off of ChatGPT. Yeah, that's crazy. ChatGPT, was it okay.
- [54:41]
A
I still use chat. ChatGPT all the time.
- [54:43]
B
Yeah. Not even two years ago and every market on LinkedIn, I was like, fuck ChatGPT, I only use Claude now. And I'm like, dude, my head is spinning. Like, how can you just like break down the entire operating system from ChatGPT and just migrate it over to cloud like no one's business. It's just like, I know. And the other thing is like, this really only works if you're a solopreneur and you offer a very narrow solution set or if you work in house at a company. But if you do what you do, or I do, which is you are a consultant or an agency that works with a very diverse set of clients who have existing infrastructure that you need to work around. In some ways it's so much harder to design like this kind of prepackaged sort of AI solution set that's just going to fit into it that you kind of make yourself. And so that is another thing that I think I'm struggling with is like, I'm trying to do it to the greatest extent possible, but I also know that the limitations of it based on the situations that we walk into are going to be severe. And the other thing is, like, you work with larger companies like the Cyber Security, the SoC2, like all the, all the, all the secure, all the compliance and security means. It's just, they're like, they're like, yeah, we're not doing that.
- [55:54]
A
Yeah. The number of MSAs we sign with our clients literally have clauses in there that say, you cannot use LLMs to any such extent in this engagement. Like not even AI transcripts from calls and things like that. So I think that there's still, at least for like our clients, probably yours too, a certain level of like, apprehension, especially when you're handling data.
- [56:17]
B
Yeah, I mean, all that data's gotta be hashed, it's gotta be anonymized, you know, can't have any email addresses in it. We've pretty much migrated to Gemini by and large because we want to stay self contained within our Google workspace. And that kind of keeps everything self contained. There's also just more, more fluency across the LLM to that. I didn't even notice. I got NotebookLM with our Gemini and I'm like, oh, I can. I should be playing around with NotebookLM and seeing what I can do. It's actually really interesting to build to build stuff with that. So like, you know, Stephanie, who's our content person is doing stuff with that as well. I built a lot of stuff in ChatGPT. I'm really interested in kind of creating our onboarding motion and just kind of making that like very much AI enabled but like there's time bandwidth constraints with that. But the other thing is I'm not totally sure where I want to build it. Do I want to build it in Gemini? I want to try to build it in a chat sheet in Claude. I feel like Claude's going to be the product that's going to be considered best in class, even if it's not the most well known. I'm already seeing that scenario play out a little bit where everyone knows.
- [57:20]
A
Are you guys using Lovable at all for anything?
- [57:21]
B
Oh, for dev stuff? Yeah, no, I haven't really gotten into the cursor lovable replit that sort of arena yet and I know people who have and swear by it. Yeah, I haven't quite gotten there. Are you guys doing it much?
- [57:32]
A
No, but I'm very intrigued to use it. We have basically like in our process we have a free workshop that we do with folks and it's really around like no data, no nothing like that but it's very subjective and just understanding like a company's tech debt debt and their level of maturity in terms of like data and, and what they can report on and things like that that it's very much manual right now but I would love to move that into maybe something that can be like self served by our customers and done in lovable and using some level of AI. Yeah. To just help with like service delivery. So I've seen that like. Yeah, so you mentioned Fletch. We, we hired Fletch and I'm so excited we're going to work with them in, in March.
- [58:14]
B
Oh, did you? Oh good for you. Yeah, I, I, I kind of hope Evan does too.
- [58:18]
A
Yeah.
- [58:18]
B
I just love their work so much.
- [58:19]
A
Yeah, I'm super excited because we really struggle with like explaining to people what we do in a way that is equally understood.
- [58:26]
B
I have trouble thinking about what you guys do, honestly. Like I always think of you guys as like a CS2 competitor almost. But I know you're really not and you would never say you are probably.
- [58:36]
A
Yeah, well CS2 is a managed service company and we're not.
- [58:40]
B
I know, I know but they're doing a lot of stuff with, with Claude. I know. Chris, is it Chris? Not not. It's Chrissy and Charlie, Christy and Charlie. I knew they voted to see. I almost think of you guys as like a pseudo competitor to them and maybe you are, but they're definitely more managed service than.
- [58:57]
A
Yeah, I guess in some ways we're, we're trying to actually we're trying to solve in some ways what they are solving with a product versus going to like rebuild infrastructure. Because like that is the thing most the thing that we're solving is the fact that like nobody can really understand how pipeline gets created end to end and like what's impacting that and blah blah blah. And so like what we do is hook into the CRM and pull it into our system and have a bunch of reporting and then we do audits and things like that. But at the end of the day most companies still have like a shitload of data gaps that they need to go fix. Right. And that's where like a managed service comes in to help you fix it. And we do have that. So in some ways we do compete with them. Although I wouldn't really consider us a competitor because I think the market is. There's such a need in the market for this right now. But we're also trying to find a way that like where RevOps or fixing your data isn't the blocker either. And so that's what our product is going to aim to solve hopefully.
- [59:52]
B
I'm excited for that for you guys. Is it just you and Trevor still?
- [59:55]
A
No. We acquired a Rev Ops agency, Ops Nectar. So that's. Amber is right now the three of us and as you know Chris is not involved in the day to day anymore but it's been really, really fun. We've doubled our revenue in the last three months. Months.
- [60:11]
B
Wow, look at that. Nice.
- [60:12]
A
Yeah, it's been a freaking wild ride like since Chris left last Feb. It's just been like so crazy in all the best ways but like also like very challenging in many ways too.
- [60:24]
B
How are you enjoying selling? Because you probably have to do all the selling at the company, right?
- [60:27]
A
I am, I'm less involved in like the day to day client stuff which is good. But like I do all of the selling.
- [60:34]
B
Is that mostly Amber? Amber and Trevor?
- [60:36]
A
Yeah, yeah. They do service delivery for the most part. I really like selling. It's just it was a process to like we used so when Chris was in the business we were doing a lot of like custom proposals. We didn't really have like our foot footing on pricing and so selling that way was really hard and time consuming because we didn't have like a lot of conviction around what we were selling. We were sort of like at the mercy of our customers. But we have like totally standardized what we do. The price is the price, the offer is the offer, the process is the process. Either you're qualified and you want it or you don't. And so that has made the whole process so much easier. And like selling is, is really fun now because it becomes just so much
- [61:14]
B
easier when people come to you. Like first off is, do you have CROs coming to you more CMOs, CFOs, what are they thinking they're going to solve for you?
- [61:23]
A
Mostly CMOs. I know the world that Chris was building when he started this was like a CFO CEO and I feel like he was, he pulled in that audience a little bit more. But definitely since I've taken over, it's been more so CMOs, female CMOs and some Rev Ops too. Like some VPs of Rev Ops and things like that. Not a lot of CROs. Yeah, that's definitely it. It's always the measurement thing. It's always like I have no idea what we're doing and how that's actually connecting to outcomes. I just know I measured on like Deal source and I hate it. And, and I think it's under reporting my true impact.
- [61:59]
B
Of course it is. A lot of what marketing does that actually helps them doesn't show up in your CRM or if it did, it would show up more in like you'd almost have to do it more through experimentation. And that's a lot of CMOs just don't think through an experimentation mindset a lot. It's like we're going to do this and we're going to see this output and that really kind of puts you in this really binary place where it either works or it doesn't. It gets you the growth target or it. And you don't have a lot of nuance really to explain it other than what you do, which is help explain what's going on in the CRM to actually help explain what's working. So if you had that technical debt, it's going to have a difficult time kind of doing that for sure.
- [62:43]
A
Yeah. So that's our niche. It's been like CMOs who want to completely optimize a strategy and want a better way with data to tell that story, you know what I mean? And I still think a lot of people come to us us thinking we're an execution partner. Oh, you guys are doing what Refine Labs is doing it's like, no, that's not at all what we're doing.
- [63:01]
B
Yeah, so. So you go in and like is it mostly Salesforce companies you work with
- [63:05]
A
or HubSpot and Salesforce? Mostly, yeah.
- [63:08]
B
Do you guys plug into it or is it a lot of exports and then it goes into your system?
- [63:12]
A
We originally did a lot of data exports just cause it was easier with the sales process and with like security review and all. But like as of three months ago, like we plug in directly. That's it. We won't even. And we won't even entertain.
- [63:25]
B
How do you plug in directly? Did you guys build. Build an API?
- [63:29]
A
Yeah, Trevor built basically like a. So we have a product and it has like a connector, native connectors to HubSpot, Salesforce. I think we've got a few other platforms that we support like Marketo and Dream Data and Hockey Stack and other things like that.
- [63:44]
B
Oh man, I can't stand multi touch attribution. Don't get me started.
- [63:50]
A
Oh, that's okay. We should talk about that on another thing because I too, I can tell
- [63:54]
B
you right now my problem with it. I mean it's easy actually. My problem with it is that it only measures a digital touch point. It can see. Right. There's just, I mean everyone just assumes it sees everything. It doesn't. Yeah, I always find it very ironic how much it always credits LinkedIn. And my theory about that is that it's best able to discern touch points on LinkedIn as opposed to other channels. So like, like I would assume my prediction or my belief about those products is a. Do not do a great job of telling, of looking at, at other channels, at looking at meta, looking at YouTube, at looking at things like that. CTV for instance, I think would be another one. I just don't know how, I just don't know how it works. I would need to have that explained to me. I mean there's a lot of ways to kind of look at multitouch but like it only tracks what it can tell. It ultimately just looks at touchpoint. It doesn't actually prove anything or like what was impactful. It's just what's the difference between using that and then using fiddler for 130 bucks a month to show influence pipeline. Like if the only thing you want to do is just show LinkedIn works, why do you need to spend six figures on that tool? I don't know.
- [65:01]
A
There's a lot. I mean I've always said attribution is the enemy for so many reasons because I think People are asking the wrong question of it. Yeah, I think attribution has a place in the measurement ecosystem. I don't think it has the place that people use it for which is like trying to diagnose performance issues using attribution. I've gone down that path. I've made that mistake. If attribution worked, I don't think we would necessarily have a business because all of our customers have it and like they still can't figure out what the real problem is.
- [65:33]
B
If attribution worked, no one would fight about it. Like let's just be be honest about it.
- [65:38]
A
Yeah.
- [65:38]
B
This goes back to incentives. Like all the ad platforms you advertise on are really not incentivized to you attribution. They're incentivized to keep you on their ad platform. So like they don't want you to click through. They literally would prefer if none of that happened. Only company that really cares about that stuff is really Google search and it's only really that product. So like the entire debate about attribution is like it has made a generation of marketing leaders bad at their job and it's also driven them up a wall and instrument some of the branch they added to tech because people again this goes back to like looking at marketing as deterministic. They look at attribution as very deterministic whether you want to use for such last such self reported and it's not, it's just a data point 100%.
- [66:22]
A
So do you have. I know Megan has talked about like things like my telescope to monitor like brand lift.
- [66:28]
B
We have my telescope. It's actually super interesting. I. I actually like.
- [66:31]
A
Is it?
- [66:31]
B
Yeah. I love, I love looking at that shared search data. Yeah, it's kind of cool.
- [66:35]
A
Okay. Anything. So obviously there's a whole lot of like you know, dark social and just offline stuff or even online stuff that just can't be tracked well in attribution like what other. Are there other tools or are there other things that like you all.
- [66:52]
B
And this goes back to what I'm pushing the team of more on is like we have to get more into incrementality testing and like designing experiments that show lift and are conclusive about that.
- [67:01]
A
Yeah.
- [67:02]
B
And so to me like that's exactly what I'm getting the team more into doing is like what's a good ad experiment design to prove this or that? What are things we can test and prove out? How can we test around it? What are the inputs to get there? So like it goes back to me to doing testing like that in order to show impact. So it's getting out of tools and getting out of CRMs, and it's just kind of keeping a log. We're like building a Monday board out for it. It for ourselves, where we can kind of track by client and then ladder up across our entire book so we can show more of those kinds of tests and then we can kind of go back to catalog it. I've actually been talking with, like, Pranav from Paramark. I really like his content and I like the work that he does. I think we're going to have him on. I'm going to have him on a podcast on a roundtable next month to kind of talk through this, because even he was walking me through how to do incrementality testing and he was telling me things even I wasn't thinking about.
- [67:55]
A
Hey, thanks so much for chatting with me. I know your daughter's at home sick. That's not easy. I've been there many times, so hope she bounces back soon. And yeah, let's keep in touch. But thanks for coming on. And I'm very, very excited for people to listen to this, so thanks.
- [68:10]
B
Yeah, yeah, me too. Me too. That went. That went in a lot of different directions, I have to say.
- [68:20]
A
It.