RV236 - The Role of Finance Leaders in GTM Success

Summary

Podcast Summary: B2B Revenue Vitals - Episode RV236: The Role of Finance Leaders in GTM Success

Introduction

In Episode RV236 of the B2B Revenue Vitals podcast, hosted by Paul Barnhurst, the focus shifts to the pivotal role that finance leaders play in the success of Go-To-Market (GTM) strategies. Paul engages in an insightful conversation with Chris Walker, CEO of Pesetto and Executive Chairman of Refine Labs, who brings a unique perspective bridging finance and GTM functions. Chris delves into the challenges finance professionals face in understanding and optimizing marketing investments, offering actionable strategies to create a more efficient and aligned revenue engine.

The Current State of GTM and FP&A

Chris Walker opens the discussion by highlighting a common dilemma faced by Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and finance leaders: “How do I understand the impact of my marketing investments? Where should I spend more? Should I spend less?” [00:49]. He asserts that many companies currently approach this problem incorrectly by asking the wrong questions, utilizing inadequate data, and consequently making poor investment decisions.

Challenges in Measuring Marketing Investments

A significant portion of the conversation centers around the inefficiencies in how companies measure and manage their GTM investments. Chris points out that:

• Misalignment Between Departments: There is a fundamental misalignment between Marketing, Sales, and Finance. Marketing leaders often lack financial acumen, while finance teams lack practical GTM experience, leading to ineffective collaboration [03:24].

• Overreliance on Attribution Models: Companies frequently depend on multi-touch attribution models to assign credit to different departments, which Chris criticizes as an oversimplified approach that fails to capture the complexity of GTM investments [07:19].

• Pipeline Creation vs. Departmental Budgeting: Chris argues that funding should be allocated based on pipeline creation rather than departmental budgets. He likens pipeline creation to a revenue factory, advocating for a more nuanced understanding of where investments drive growth and efficiency [10:38].

The Intersection of Marketing and Finance

Chris elaborates on the intersection of marketing and finance by explaining that GTM investments are the largest expense on a company's P&L, often outstripping costs related to product development or R&D [05:35]. He stresses that efficient GTM investments are crucial for:

• Growth and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Combining growth rate with CAC provides a strong indicator of a company's enterprise value multiple, which can significantly impact market valuation [05:35].

• End-to-End Visibility: There's a lack of visibility and data in the stages before an opportunity is created, leading to suboptimal quota coverage and inefficiencies in the sales process [10:38].

Operative Solutions and Strategies

Chris proposes several strategies to rectify the misalignments and inefficiencies:

1. Redefining Investment Measurement:

   • Move away from departmental budgeting to a portfolio-based approach, evaluating investments based on their strategic purpose and ROI rather than departmental expenditure [10:38].

2. Enhanced Collaboration:

   • Encourage finance leaders to take on roles or shadow GTM functions to gain firsthand experience and identify operational inefficiencies [31:25].

3. Data-Driven Decision Making:

   • Utilize comprehensive data integration tools to provide a unified view of GTM investments, facilitating better strategic decisions [06:14].

4. Reimagining Content Marketing:

   • Focus on the ROI of distribution channels rather than individual content pieces. Chris emphasizes that organic content with a strong message and proper distribution yields the highest ROI [43:11].

Chris Walker's Companies: Refine Labs and Pesetto

Chris introduces his ventures, Refine Labs and Pesetto, as solutions to the GTM-Finance misalignment:

• Refine Labs: A demand generation and analytics agency serving SaaS companies with revenues ranging from $10 million to $1 billion. Refine Labs offers services in advertising, content creation, CRM, and data analytics, aiming to provide data-backed insights for scalable growth [23:15].

• Pesetto: Initially launched as a consultancy, Pesetto has evolved into a technology-driven advisory service. It offers top-level GTM analytics by standardizing data across expenses and CRM systems, enabling finance teams to evaluate investment ROI effectively [23:15]. An MVP product is in development, poised to transition Pesetto into a pure product-based solution that allows executives to align GTM strategies seamlessly [26:57].

Content Marketing and Finance

Chris provides a deep dive into optimizing content marketing from a financial perspective:

• Strategic Content Creation: Emphasizes that content should be created based on its strategic purpose rather than its format or distribution channel. The focus should be on what the content aims to achieve, whether it's brand building or lead generation [36:03].

• Distribution Channel ROI: Advocates for evaluating the ROI of entire distribution channels (e.g., LinkedIn, email) instead of individual content pieces. This approach allows for more accurate assessments of where to allocate marketing budgets [41:25].

• Organic vs. Paid Content: Stresses that organic content should first prove its effectiveness before being amplified through paid channels. This ensures that only high-performing content is boosted, optimizing marketing spend [43:11].

Advice for FP&A Professionals

Towards the end of the episode, Chris offers valuable advice for Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) professionals:

1. Curiosity and Cross-Functional Understanding:

   • Encourages finance professionals to engage directly with GTM functions, such as spending a day as an SDR, to gain deeper insights into operational challenges and inefficiencies [31:25].

2. Embracing AI:

   • Highlights the transformative potential of AI in revolutionizing FP&A functions, enabling more accurate and efficient data analysis [57:54].

3. Adopt an Offensive Mindset:

   • Urges FP&A professionals to adopt an offensive stance, proactively seeking out opportunities for growth rather than merely focusing on risk mitigation [58:45].

Personal Insights and Closing Thoughts

Chris shares his passion for entrepreneurial transparency, valuing the lessons learned from both successes and failures. He underscores the importance of sharing experiences to help others avoid common pitfalls in their business journeys [60:27]. Concluding the episode, Chris reiterates the necessity for finance leaders to take ownership of evaluating GTM investments, advocating for a fresh, data-driven approach free from outdated marketing paradigms [56:53].

Notable Quotes

• Chris Walker [00:49]: “Almost every company gets it wrong right now and leads them to the wrong. They ask the wrong questions, they use the wrong data and get led to the wrong answers.”

• Chris Walker [07:19]: “The root of the issue is that nobody's been forced to do it until 2022. And now at this point, it's only been two years. I think we're the farthest ahead in the game that there is.”

• Chris Walker [31:25]: “Be your SDR for a day. What are you going to find? It's a total waste of time. Most of the people you talk to are total garbage.”

• Chris Walker [43:11]: “When you match and you have a message that resonates with your target customer that goes through a medium that fits the distribution channel, it is by far the highest ROI thing that you can do in marketing because the costs are very low and the impact and trust and credibility is incredibly high.”

• Chris Walker [56:15]: “Don't listen. Be curious and understand what those people are doing, but do not listen to what the revenue leaders say about how to do this. You will get led in the wrong direction a hundred percent of the time.”

Conclusion

Episode RV236 of B2B Revenue Vitals offers a compelling exploration of the critical intersection between finance leadership and GTM success. Chris Walker provides a thorough analysis of current inefficiencies and presents innovative strategies to realign marketing investments with financial objectives. His insights into redefining content marketing and leveraging data-driven decision-making serve as valuable guidance for finance professionals aiming to drive their companies toward predictable and scalable revenue growth. This episode is a must-listen for CFOs, FP&A professionals, and GTM leaders seeking to enhance collaboration and optimize their revenue strategies.

Transcript

[Paul Barnhurst]

You're listening to Revenue Vitals with Chris Walker. Hello everyone. Welcome to FPA Tomorrow where we delve into the world of financial planning and analysis, examining its current state and future prospects. I'm your host, Paul Barnhurst, AKA the FPA Guy, and I'll be guiding you through the evolving world and landscape of fpa. Each week we're joined by thought leaders, industry experts and practitioners who share their insights and experiences. This week, I'm thrilled that we have a guest that's an expert in go to market and is going to be able to share some real great insights with us today. So, Chris Walker, welcome to the show.

[Chris Walker]

Paul, awesome to be on the show. I got to say this is the first true finance focused podcast that I've been on and I've been waiting for this day for a long time because I feel like I have a lot to offer to to this audience. I know a bunch of people in the audience right now, especially CFOs and higher level finance people, are wondering, you know, how do I understand the impact of my marketing investments? Where should I spend more? Should I spend less? Where should I spend it on? Do we have too many sales reps? Should we have a SDR team or non SDR team? There's so many different questions around go to market investments and the performance of those investments. And frankly, I believe that almost every company gets it wrong right now and leads them to the wrong. They ask the wrong questions, they use the wrong data and get led to the wrong answers. So looking forward to sharing my perspective.

[Paul Barnhurst]

I'm going to love to dig into that. I thought it was as simple as just hire more salespeople and there's always market.

[Chris Walker]

Good point. Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Barnhurst]

I've seen more than one company do that and I just always shake my head going, maybe a little more strategy here. So just a little bit about Chris, give you a little bit of his background and then we'll jump into go to market here. So Chris is focused on building an ecosystem of complimentary, highly specialized B2B go to market technology and managed services. He's shaping the future of B2B go to market strategies. He's a CEO of Pesetto and the Executive Chairman of Refine Labs. So one question we like to ask all our guests, I'd love to get your take because I know you have a little different perspective than a typical finance person. For you, what does great FP and A look like? If you're in a company or you're looking at FP&A, how do you know, it's great. FP&A. What does that mean or look like to you?

[Chris Walker]

You know, I've been the CEO of a $20 million business for a while, and we had a small finance and FP&A team in the company. And so for me, sitting in the CEO seat, the best part about FPA was and what I'm looking for is how do we figure out how to deploy investment strategically to be able to achieve our business objectives, which is not only growth and having professionals that can do more than just dump ideas or numbers into the Excel model and tell us what comes back, but have a perspective on the actual decisions and the strategy and why we do things and how to prioritize them. And we're spending more, spending less. I think that's what basically everyone, everyone is craving from this, this function. And I work with these people frequently now. I think there's so much talent and so much skill and so much untapped potential that could be added to not only go to market, but the entire company from the FP and A function and the finance department broadly.

[Paul Barnhurst]

No, I appreciate that. Yeah, definitely the CEO. I'm sure you see a lot of it and helping with those investment decisions. So one thing you mentioned, there is a lot of untapped potential. Can you elaborate on that? What do you mean by that? Or what are you seeing that leads you to that conclusion?

[Chris Walker]

So I'll focus on go to market for right now because that's where I understand the best. I see this angle from two sides, right? So half of my customers, the CFO and CEO, bring us in, and the other half of customers come from the CMO or the CRO. And all roads lead to us working with both of them at the same time. But the entry point is different. And when you look, you have Chief revenue officers and CMOs that have a ton of experience in their specific specialty and function and oftentimes lack financial acumen. The ability to do FP and a, the ability to understand a portfolio, investments and how to scrutinize those investments. So they have great go to market and very little finance. And then on the finance side, you have people that really understand finance and really have tons of skills in modeling and looking at investments and being able to build that stuff out, but lack the practical experience of go to market to be able to properly weigh in and say, this model is wrong. We're going to do it this way. And so they rely on whatever the CMO and CRO feed them, usually from a model or what they hear from Gartner or some conference, something like that. So you have two functions that have important independent skills. And all the problems lie at the intersection of these two functions. And what are the problems? Slower growth, higher cost of acquisition, lower enterprise value. Those are the core problems that are facing most B2B with SaaS and tech companies right now. And it's the most painful expensive problem in a B2B company today. And the reason is because go to market investments in a B2B tech company or somewhere between 30 on the low end, a hundred percent of revenue for some companies that burn. And it's by far the biggest expense on the P and L. Way more than product development usually and way more than R and D. And so when it comes to where is the opportunity to be and then go to market for the most part is the also the driver of growth outside of product. So you have growth and CAC and efficiency on getting net new ARR. And you put those two things together and those are a great indicator of what your enterprise value multiple is going to be. And yeah, many people have done that study. You have five year CAC payback versus a two year CAC payback. And you look at public market companies, the difference in the revenue Multiple could be a 10x for a low CAC payback period on revenue and a 3x for a high CAC payback period. So we're talking billions, potentially of dollars, even hundreds of millions for a middle market or lower middle market company that are on the line here.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense, right? I mean if that CAC is really attractive, you're going to get a much bigger multiple because the revenue is worth a lot more. You don't have to spend near as much to get it if you're keeping those customers. I get it. What I'm curious is, right, you mentioned how, hey, you got the great grow to market, you got the finance. What can FP and A do in this discussion to kind of better help go to market with. With the knowledge that many of them don't have that go to market knowledge. Is it. Do they need to. Should FP and A people look to learn more in that area? I mean, how do they challenge? What do you, what do you recommend to make it, you know, to maximize that relationship?

[Chris Walker]

I don't know enough about this. I might be speaking out of turn here, but I know that a chief revenue officer and a Chief Marketing officer are very accustomed to using part of their budget to hire an advisor, consultant, expert to help them. And look from the outside and help them understand things and make better decisions. I think the CFO needs the same thing related to go to market. And they're not getting it from rev Ops. They're not. Rev ops doesn't really understand. They've never been a sales leader before, they've never been a marketing leader before, they've never been a finance leader before. But all of a sudden this TEC admin specialist is responsible for telling all these C level executives what to do. It's just a total mismatch between skills and experience and job role responsibilities or expectations. And so I think that finance like that's what my company does in a lot of cases. Like we advise CFOs around how they're measuring their marketing investments, what their model looks like, what the top level KPI should be across the go to market, whether those things are going up or going down, what that means, how they should think about planning, what the holes in the plan are. And we've just seen it with a lot of companies so that experience can be really helpful to be able to bring in. And many other C level executives will use something like that. I'm not sure whether CFOs do that frequently or not.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Yeah, I mean I think there's times, but yeah, in general I remember I don't think we ever brought in an expert to look at any of the stuff that sells gave us. We sat down and worked with them and we had the conversations and they may have brought someone in. But you know, I can't directly think of finance really bringing somebody in on the sales. But I get what you're saying is being able to have that voice that can really kind of look at it and speak to it beyond just hey, I can look at the numbers, I can run the model, I can do all that. But do I really understand enough to weigh in here?

[Chris Walker]

If you really look at the root of the issue, the framework and the process is the problem. It's the way of thinking that then drives what data do we look at, why do we look at it, what decisions do we make from it? It's actually the that part that's the broken part. And it's very difficult to be able because I, I went to a CMO CRO school event last week just to see what are these people learning about this stuff? And they get taught, oh, what we should do is we should try to divide the credit between marketing and sales and SDRs and partners and we can plan our revenue and we can analyze our revenue and ROI based on that model. And that's what every C level revenue leader is being taught right now. And it is the number one problem of go to market dysfunction. Because those departments each do completely different things. In what I call a revenue factory, you have the people that put the wheels on the car, you have the supply chain, you have the incoming inspection. These people are doing different things in the factory, measuring them all the same way and saying, these people are good at this thing. And these people, these are the only people that made this car. No, everybody helped make the car. So the way that they defied credit based on the department is the root of the problem. It's the perpetuated problem. The reason they do it is because finance only tracks by GL code and what department spent the money. So it's the only way that they can go back and scrutinize the investments about which department spent the money. And we need a much more sophisticated, well thought out way to look at why are we spending this money? What is the purpose of this money? We want to know who spent it, obviously. But that is the least effective way to try to decide whether these investments are effective or not.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Yeah. So let's jump into that. You got to go to market team, you got finance, you're the one who has to measure all this. Ignore the G, throw out, you know, the P and L, whatever traditional method you want. How do you recommend? I mean, obviously a lot of people use attribution. I know you've talked about that. Some use, you know, KPIs. But how do you think that should be measured to make sure you, you know how performance is going and you really hold people accountable.

[Chris Walker]

Yeah. So just to be clear, attribution is the means to get to that number of which department did it.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Yeah.

[Chris Walker]

So the whole thing is based. And then with attribution because he. Oh, marketing did that because they came through our website. And then underneath that you can try to say our Google Ad did it. Right. So that's. Yeah, yeah, the objective. But at the top level, they're trying to divide it by department and then once they divide it by the department, then they see, oh, like marketing misplanned by 7%. And then when that happens, then they look in deeper and. And then they scrutinize the marketing stuff.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Yeah, exactly. Go down and look at the Google and okay, Google brought us this many leads or whatever. Exactly. Yeah. I've done all those analysis before where you're trying to.

[Chris Walker]

Precisely. Yes, exactly. So I have myself as well. And I think over time I've just figured out better ways to do it. So that's all I'm sharing here. Like none of the things that I'm talking down on I haven't done myself. Just to be clear.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Sure.

[Chris Walker]

The way that I like to look at it is first off, the department level structure is the wrong set. And the reason, if you narrow in on the problem, the actual problem is that a company can easily manage and measure from when the opportunity gets created by sales until when it gets closed one, you can build an easy financial model. You can say this is our PRP what the conversion rates need to be. Every finance team can do that. The root of the problem is that everything before the opportunity gets created, you have no visibility, no data, no framework. And what actually happens is that the amount of pipeline that you need to have appropriate quota coverage to manage that process, you don't get enough of it. And that's why your sales team has a lower quota coverage. And the reason is because you don't have visibility in a process to measure that thing in the same granularity as you do from opportunity to close one. That's really the problem. And when you look at the marketing investments or if you look. I like separating it more based on. If you think about it like a revenue factory and setting it up based on the stages of the factory, then we think about it as you have part of the factory which is called pipeline creation. You have, you have another part of the factory which is closing the pipeline.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Yep.

[Chris Walker]

You have another part of the factory which is renewing customers. And then you have the last part of the factory which is expanding accounts. And so there's a four stage simplified process. And then we underlying underneath that we actually break it down into nine stages in our like more complex model. But let's start with the four for now. When you look at creating pipeline, part of creating pipeline doesn't fall into typical marketing budgets, which is called prospecting. And prospecting for 60, 70% of companies is owned by sales, but is really part of the pipeline creation process. And they want to do it because, oh, if we train our BDRs, they'll become our future new reps and we'll have a pipeline of people. That's why they go under sales. But it creates this total misalignment between the pipeline creation engine, between the marketing and then the SDRs falling under sales. And from an investment standpoint, then you have the SDRs trying to go out and get pipeline so they can get credit for it against the marketing stuff so that they can get credit for it. You have this credit fighting between SDRs and marketing that's totally useless and unproductive, productive, and doesn't help you at all as a C level leader to look at the data and make a decision about what to do after that. And so I just think that whole thing needs to get thrown out and I'm providing the solution for it. So anyway, whether you organize with your SDRs under sales or marketing, it's a pipeline creation expense that should go with many of the marketing expenses. But inside of a marketing budget, there are tons of different things that you spend money on and they all have different objectives, time horizons, purposes. Let me just break down a couple of examples for you. And we analyze this at a bunch of companies and we break down every single line item down to like the $30 receipt at a trade show for a couple of drinks. Some money that you spend in marketing will go to your user conference or to customer marketing and it'll be to increase expansion and renewal. Right. So, and then, so we can't measure that or we shouldn't measure that against pipeline creation. Part of it might go to analyst relations and thought leadership and messaging and sales enablement and things like that that actually have benefits across the whole customer life cycle. Being in the top of the Gartner magic quadrant impacts renewal and retention, arguably more than it does new logo acquisition. And so those investments also should not be scrutinized against pipeline creation. Then inside of it then you have advertising and different strategies around advertising. Most of it is lead generation, but some of it could be for brand building, as people will call it. And then you have your event is things and some events are for leads and other events are for brand. And none of those are really defined within the investments or things like that. So you have this. The point I'm trying to make here is that you have all these different investments with all these different purposes. And then what everybody tries to do is say, oh, now we just put one model against this and say, and that model is going to tell us what things are working and what things aren't. Give a great finance example for these people because what is a, what is that pipeline creation investment, that set of investments? It's just like an investment portfolio. And some of your investments are for growth. Like you bought the Nvidia stock. Hopefully you didn't buy it yesterday, two days ago or whatever before it went down. But some of the, some of the investments are for growth and for value and you're going to buy it and you're going to hope the stock goes up and you're going to measure the success of it against whether the stock went up or not and how much you gained. Other investments are going to be for dividends and you're going to buy it and you're going to say did I get my 5% dividend or not or what was that? Some of them are going to be for risk mitigation. You're going to buy it to diversify your portfolio and mitigate risks. Other things are going to be like massive, like a penny stock or like cryptocurrency. And it's going to be like this one little investment, if it pays off, could make the difference in our entire company and value. And if you took all those investments and you said no, I'm just going to measure them against whether we got our dividend or not. That's what you do in, in scrutinizing marketing investments right now. And so what does that do? It pushes all the investments to one category called lead generation and performance marketing. And then all the investments get measured off that. And then you apply your multi touch attribution models and all the different stuff on and then you sort it by department and the whole process is broken. So the first step is acknowledging we have different investments, just like a portfolio. And those investments need to be measured in different ways. And one blanket model is not going to fix, not going be our solution.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Yeah, I mean that makes a lot of sense. I like the portfolio analogy and I get what you're saying. I do marketing with different vendors now as part of my business and often have that conversation. Look, if you spend money on this type of advertising here or on this influencer marketing, it's really brand awareness. It's not primarily lead gen. If you do something here, this is really designed to be lead gen. You're going to end up with those emails and trying to help them understand that, you know, not every marketing dollar is going to go to lead gen depending on what that activity is. And definitely that's something I wasn't near as aware of when I worked in FP&A. You know, I understood the basic ideas and I got it. But I have a much greater appreciation when you're actually having those conversations now with vendors and you're seeing it, you're like, oh yeah, there is a lot more to this than just throw that attribution model on it and away we go. And so I'm curious, obviously you've worked in this for several years. Why do you think for so many people it's broken that we struggle to get the go to market engine going. Obviously you've said, hey, I think we do a lot of the reporting wrong. But what do you think is the root problem? Why do you think this happens? How do we companies step back and get this engine going better? Because it's a common problem everywhere. Yeah, we just didn't sell enough a. Yep.

[Chris Walker]

Let's break it down just for reference. Most of my like experience is in venture private equity funded tech and software companies. Okay. So basically if you go back and until most people started their career, all like, you know, dot com bubble all the way to mid-2022, that whole time no revenue leader was ever asked about unit economics. They were never asked to measure the effectiveness in roi. All it was was get the result, how much money do you need to get that result? And then the CFO and the CEO will figure out how to raise more money in 18 months if that's how much we burned. And so you have a whole generation of C level executives that have never been asked by investors, by executive teams, been taught at schools or anything like that about how do we measure unit economics and deliver an efficient go to market process? Never. And on the finance side, all finance was responsible for was trying to figure out what is our CAC right now. And then it was much easier time pre2022 to go back and raise money every 18 months.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Yep.

[Chris Walker]

And the finance team has never been asked or driven to do the same thing. And then a big thing happened in the middle of 22, if you haven't heard, called SAS winter. When the valuation of tech companies dramatically changed. Salesforce stock bottomed out in December of 2021. And then it took six months to trickle into the private markets. The faucet shut off for venture capital and private equity and companies were forced, okay, we're not going to raise money in 18 months. We need to figure out how to stop burning 10, 20, $100 million a year, whatever the number is based on the scale. And so they have to figure out, okay now how do we get more efficient? And I put that in quotes for the listeners. Okay. And then for the past two years companies have been lowering go to market costs, they've been cutting costs, they've been improving ebitda, they've been getting more profitable, but they have not been getting more efficient in go to market. And go to market efficiency gets measured on the difference between go to market expenses and the total net new ARR that's gained which becomes a ratio. And if you look at the 80 publicly traded south software companies that are tracked on this metric. That number is still going up. It's been going up since the middle of 2022, and it continues to go up today. And if you look at the private markets, it's even worse. It's the same trend, just more dramatic and worse. So cost cutting is not a path to getting more efficient. Because what they're doing is just blanket cuts across. Okay, we'll just cut 20% of sales and we'll stop doing 20% of events. And they're not being smart and methodical around what are the, what are the lowest performing things across the whole thing that we should cut that have the lowest return in our portfolio? And how do we keep doing all the stuff that have the highest return? So the core issue is that nobody's been forced to do this up until the middle of 2022. And the people that are now trying to teach and address this solution are just the people that worked at the companies that happened to be successful seven years ago, and they're just teaching, oh, this is what we did before. HubSpot ipod, it'll work for you now. And they're perpetuating outdated, ineffective knowledge. The investors do the same thing. The investors go back and say, oh, let's just keep doing the same marketing strategy or the same KPIs that we had with that my company, that was the unicorn. And they bring that from 2017 into this 2025 Series A company. And the technology vendors that are deeply integrated into the stack have no vested interest in changing the total quality of their product. It would be way better for them to continue to be more profitable in the world, to stay the same for their business to work. So they're not incentivized to totally reinvent their product and figure out how to bring in finance data and blend all this together and then retrain the entire market on how to do things. The job that I have is fucking hard. Nobody wants it. Sorry, I don't know if we're supposed to swear on this podcast you're all right is super hard, meaning that I take something that everybody needs that nobody wants. And that's what I'm telling people right now. And it's way easier to just find something that people already think that they need and think that they want, just sell them that stuff. And so that's what most people do right now. But the core of it is that nobody's been forced to do it until 2022. And now at this point, it's only been two years. I think we're the farthest ahead in the game that there is. And it's almost like you have to be a brand new startup to do it from a technology or advisory standpoint. Otherwise you'd be cannibalizing your existing business to switch over to this model. And just enough time hasn't played out. And if you are in one company, a sample size of one, let's say you're a CFO or a CRO or a cmo. You do not get the reps and experience across a lot of companies to see the patterns of the things that work and the things that don't work across a lot of companies. So all you do is get the sample of it's if it's working at my company and then you attribute it to the model or the things that you're doing which is unlikely to be the reason why you're successful. So it's a complex situation.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Yeah. No, and I get what you're saying. Definitely the, you know, 2022, 2021, as all sudden money was no longer free, interest rates all went up and the whole market shut down and. Right. I think all we heard is all sudden instead of grow at any cost now you need to balance growth and cost. And especially in SaaS and tech, that was something a lot of people didn't know how to do. So you'd go to those that had done it at least got it public or showed good numbers and implement those models versus hey, somebody's really done all the scientific studies, dug into this and there's this logical playbook that makes sense totally.

[Chris Walker]

And it's difficult to find somebody or a group of people that have deep expertise across both of these things.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Sure.

[Chris Walker]

I've sold $40 million worth of deals. I've run probably some of the best marketing and B2B marketing that drives that $40 million in sales. I've run FP and I've not been the finance director. I've been the CEO of a company that's $20 million inside of the P and L every day. Planning and managing that stuff.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Sure.

[Chris Walker]

It's hard to find somebody that has all that level of experience and then secondarily it intersects between these two functions which makes it very difficult to sell to a company and very difficult for a company to do. And so there's a lot of interesting business reasons why people aren't solving this problem.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Yeah. And so talk a little bit. I mean obviously you're trying to solve this problem. Problem. Talk a little bit about the two companies you have because I know you're trying to say, hey, I really want to fix this go to market problem. So maybe talk a little bit about kind of what you're doing in your companies to help solve this problem. I'd love to kind of know a little bit there.

[Chris Walker]

Yeah, I think some people might find this interesting. Ever since 2017, I have been somebody that says I'm never raising venture capital, especially early stage. Maybe I'll take growth equity and take secondary at some point. But I'm not riding the VC train to be a unicorn because I just worked in those companies and said the culture sucks here. The companies don't hit their targets, the cap tables are underwater. That stuff was happening in 2015, 2017 and so I just didn't do that. So I decided I'm going to build tech companies in a new way. And the way that I decided was number one, I'm going to build a services managed service or professional services business that works with these companies, characterizes the problems, understands the problem, deeply solves the problem, manually generates cash flow and enterprise value and then using that asset to then fund the product, which I just did all the R and D on inside of the service business. And so my first business, Refine Labs was a demand gen agency and analytics agency. And we work with SaaS companies that are between 10 million in revenue and a billion. And we have different services for do you know the different sizes and stages? We do advertising and content creation and the measurement of that advertising and CRM and data analytics. And that company is an eight figure revenue company. We have about 45, 50 employees and my business partner runs that business as of January 2024. So Megan Bowen, my business partner has taken over as CEO of that business so that I could work on my passion which is this other business. And then I started Pesetto. I've been working on the background for several years, but in January 201424 we officially launched it. Being a bootstrapped smart company, the first year of the company was as a consultancy. So we were a consultancy and then we took the data in in spreadsheets and we took Google sheets and we asked for exports and we put them all together and it would take us three months to come up with conclusions. And over time we figured out here's what we need to ask for, here's what tools we integrate with, here's how we process it, here's how the database works and now we have an MVP product and we're positioned as an advisory Service that's enabled by technology and then in the next six to 12 months will be a pure product play where our customers run and use the product on their own. And so that's the product. And what does that product do? It does top level go to market analytics. You can create and standardize data. So it takes your expenses, it standardizes all the expenses into our proprietary taxonomy. It takes your CRM data does the same thing, blends all the data of expenses and revenue by customer and CRM data altogether produces you top level analytics in terms of like your cost of growth, your growth rate, nrr, cost of acquisition. But then the valuable stuff for the finance team is going level a level lower and looking at the investment allocation across the customer life cycle, the ROI of those investments across the customer life cycle, and being able to give the whole executive team one place to look that says this is how we decide what things are working and what things aren't. Where right now marketing's got their own deck for the qbr. Where does that deck come from? Seven different micro tools and reports that don't have expense data, accurate expense data, accurate finance data. It rolls up to marketing, it goes into the QBR deck. None of the data work. Nobody trusts the data is a better way to put it, and they shouldn't. It's poorly. It's made by manager level people that don't have the right acumen or visibility to draw those conclusions or make those decisions. So I figured out a long time ago that executives need a stream of data that they can use to make decisions which should be fast, easy and simple and easy to get alignment on. Across the team. Right now, the bottoms up manual reporting structure or even if you try to do it with AI, garbage in, garbage out. It doesn't matter who's doing it, whether it's humans or not, you're gonna, you're gonna not have the right process to draw the conclusion. So I'm trying to help executives be able to have the data to get aligned and make smart, easy decisions.

[Paul Barnhurst]

So it sounds like obviously you might start consulting. You've got the MVP and you're looking to release a product that really kind of takes all that data and allows the company together to really understand, go to market where they're looking at it in a similar way and they're seeing the data the same and the analysis and the reporting so that you don't run into the conversations. We've all been there. You get in a meeting and everybody has six different numbers for cac.

[Chris Walker]

Yeah, that would Be one of the easiest problems to solve. Sure, yeah.

[Paul Barnhurst]

I like to start easy.

[Chris Walker]

Yeah, same. Yeah. We integrate with CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce and Sage and Suite and Netsuite intact, things like that bring all the data and process it. And really I think part of it is the separation between the data and information that C level executives need to run the business, change strategy, allocate millions of dollars in one direction or the other versus what a manager level needs to be able to optimize their SEO Strategy to get 1% better every month or every quarter. And right now those two things somehow get blended into one set of QBR decks and reports and it's really two different streams. You have a strategic transformational data stream that executives need and most other people in the company shouldn't have access to it. From my perspective, I'm being honest. And then you have a tactical stream that people should use to make incremental, ongoing improvements to the things that they're doing. And the executives don't need to see that stuff.

[Paul Barnhurst]

So I'm curious, you know you talk about the platform is that this tool would kind of have both those, the tactical and the strategic. You're trying to. I'm not separate them or how do I think about.

[Chris Walker]

Step one is just acknowledging that they're two separate things that right now most people blend into one. So that's the first step at the moment because there's a ton of tools at the bottom. They're gonna, you know, your campaigns, your attributes, everyone plays in that little space. Nobody plays on the to build for the C level executive. So we just see the opportunity to build there.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Makes sense.

[Chris Walker]

And so yeah, we're building there. And then the difference is most tools try to go build bottoms up campaigns and attribution and touch points and try to build up to the top. And that process never works. And so we've just come up with this crazy innovative idea to try to build bottom or from tops down. And then as you build down, you just get more granular. But all the data levels back up to the top. And all it starts with is growth rate and cost of growth, those two metrics which cost of growth just for reference is it's like cac, but also includes the expenses and revenue that come from post sale and expansion and then can get broken down between new logo and expansion at the next level.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Yep. And so kind of, you know, stepping back a little bit, we've talked a lot on go to market and let's say, you know, somebody's new in this area you get a lot of, you know, FPA Switch Industries. I remember my first kind of SaaS type company. What would you say to them? Is there somebody going into that situation? Any advice as they're, you know, trying to understand, go to market and just get to know it better. So not necessarily advice on, you know, getting into the deep metrics, but what are some things they can do to start to understand, go to market if they're put in that position and just educate themselves so they can have those more intelligent conversations.

[Chris Walker]

So I'll offer a couple of different ideas and all of these ideas I've done myself, and maybe they were five, seven, ten years ago, but they're still just as valuable today. And this could apply to the people that are listening to this podcast, but really could apply to anyone in the company. So who wants to operate at a more strategic level? So number one, a CMO should do it, an FPA person should do it, a CFO should do it, a CEO should do it. Be your SDR for a day. What are you going to find? It's a total fucking waste of time. Most of the people you talk to are total garbage. They don't want to talk to you. They said, I never filled out that form. And then you can find the patterns. Where are the people that are good that come from? Where do those? And you can play the role. For a couple of days, it took me eight calls to realize that everything in the company, I did this for eight phone calls that connected to realize that all the stuff that was coming from marketing was total garbage because people said, I don't remember filling out that form. I don't want to talk to you. Then you call a couple people that come from certain places and they say, oh yeah, I was really interested in your stuff and you can see the pattern and you can play the role like that alone. I am so surprised that most CMOs have never done that. Most CROs do not do that. And if they did for one day, they would realize all find a lot of the problems that exist in their go to market engine right now. And a finance leader, you want to build credibility when you go to the table to go and have that discussion around the effectiveness. Go do that for a day and then you can speak to your experience around it. I think that's a massive unlock.

[Paul Barnhurst]

I love that one. I found my FPA people were much more effective when I had them sit on the phone for a day. Might have been a call center, might be with the SDR salespeople try to figure out a way to go along on a ride for sales, you know, somewhere in that area so you at least start to get appreciation. A little different than necessarily sit with the SDRs for a day. But that, that idea is just invaluable of go sit in their shoes and see what's going on.

[Chris Walker]

Sure. I don't really, because some people do this of, oh, we want to have empathy for our SDRs because their job is so hard. That is not what we're after here. To see how broken the system is, to listen to what your customers say, to look at the data and find that's what we're really doing for here. Everyone's like, I just sat in a, I did a speaking event the other day and it was a 30 minute presentation of here's what our SDR team does. Their job is so hard. You know, they have to call these people and they're building the pipeline and rah, rah, good for our SDRs. That's not what it's after. It's to look for the problems. Another thing that you could do. I've done this as a marketer and it goes in the same vein. So maybe if you tell me if it's redundant, we can move on. But go and visit your customers and go and visit and pick the ones that are either on the verge of churning based on your data or have already churned recently and go and visit them in person at their place of business. I know a lot of people are remote if you can go in person, especially like if you. Not everyone sells to remote tech. Right. Manufacturing facilities, financial services. There's a lot of people that still go to an office.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Sure.

[Chris Walker]

Go and visit the bottom. A couple in the bottom 5% and then go and visit a couple in the top 5 or 10% and see what the differences are. And then you can weigh in on icp, you can weigh in on why people are leaving, why people are staying, why people love you, what are the things that are working, what are the things that are the same about the people that are good and the same about the people that are bad and have a way more greater perspective on that. I think that's a, also a really big one. If you notice the pattern. It's having finance people start to do the jobs of go to market or at least get exposed to the jobs. And as an outsider, all those people think this is normal. Right. They're in there. This is what we've been, this is what we do in go to market as an Outsider, you can go in and say, what are we doing here? Like, this doesn't even make sense. And so sometimes just a fresh set of eyes can be really valuable in going, going over in that direction. And it does. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to look at them. The problems are very obvious to see and most of it are stem from a misalignment between what the company does and what the customer wants.

[Paul Barnhurst]

And so often is right, misalignment, that's almost always a problem. Somewhere down the line you're not aligned and that's why you have a problem. But I really like how you said do it not from an empathy, obviously good to have empathy, but do it from a what's broken, what's not working, what is working, really analyzing it from. Okay, what can I learn about the process and where it's effective or where it's a waste of time. Like you said, you might be getting leads through your website and those might be pretty good. All the other ones coming from these events might be total waste. And you're going to know that. 10, 15 calls. Oh, the three I did came from, like you said, came from this area. And they actually talked to me. The other 12 told me to buzz off. Like, there's probably something to this. Let's dig in a little further.

[Chris Walker]

Yep. And it's like, yeah, you can, like eventually you might have large scale data that tells you that story, but you can literally figure out in one day just doing that.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Yeah, it's amazing how often talking to people will help you realize a problem quicker than the data will.

[Chris Walker]

Data is always a confirmation of what you, what you experience in real life. Qualitatively should be, yeah, no, it totally makes sense.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Right. If you know business is doing really, really well. When you get to P and L, you should be able to see that. It should be a confirmation of that. If it's not, you're like, okay, either I didn't understand something or the numbers are wrong and you go talk to the accounting person and hope the numbers are wrong. So that makes a lot of sense. So want to talk a little bit? Also, I know you've done a lot of content creation. You talked about your prior business and some of that. How do you see the content side of marketing? How does finance weigh in to make sure it's being used well? And think about some companies say, hey, we should do all content marketing or we should do all events or all SEO or paid. How does a finance person look at that outside of just saying, hey, here's the returns, here's what we think's going to happen and sense. Check it and go. Yeah, this makes sense. Okay. I think a content strategy is right here. Any advice on kind of how to make sure you're having good conversations with marketing versus either just rubber stamping it or saying, hey, I just want a better return because that, you know, we really want to be advisors.

[Chris Walker]

Well, we're going to open a big can of worms here, so we have enough time.

[Paul Barnhurst]

I'm okay with that. I like that word.

[Chris Walker]

Okay, cool. So first off, content marketing is an incredibly broad term that encompasses different distribution channels, mediums, formats. And so like just saying should we or should we not do content marketing is not the right question.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Sure.

[Chris Walker]

And then the second part of it, and I'll get into this a little bit. I also believe that marketing is a terrible categorization of that function and objectives, which include short term and long term, brand building and lead gen, tactical and strategic and vision and story and science. And it's all over the place. And so I'm recommending not necessarily an org structure change, but instead a mindset and thinking change around the subcategories that go into the marketing department. What I'll view now is the pipeline creation team.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Yeah, the four buckets you talked about.

[Chris Walker]

Before, that's actually quite a little bit different there. So just stick with me here.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Okay. All right, I'll stop.

[Chris Walker]

I wouldn't bring us down the same road. Okay, so part of it is what I'll call business strategy. You have product marketing, messaging, positioning, competitive intelligence, sales enablement, analyst relations, pr. You have all this different stuff at the top, which is a lot of art and messaging and has an impact across the entire customer life cycle. So you have that part of it. And then you have demand creation, which is we have these target accounts and we want to get them. We want to shorten the time between them and them being engaged with our company. So we're going to go out and get them. Whether it's through outbound advertising, we're going to get that and shorten the time. Then you have the supply chain which is getting customers, no matter where they came from, a qualified customer that comes and is ready to be prospected by the prospecting team. Ideally high quality signal, high quality account. Doesn't matter whether it came from zoom Info, your website, an event, finance. People should get this. Marketing and sales leaders don't get it because they've been playing the credit game for way too long. Just put them all together. Who cares whether it comes from Zoom Info or your website. We want to have that data so we can make better decisions long term, but it's not for crediting. And then lastly, you have the prospecting engine. Okay, the reason I say that is because content falls across all those different things and has different objectives across the things. It's more about deciding what is the purpose of this content. That not is it a video or a post, did it go on LinkedIn or a podcast? It's not about the channel or distribution or the medium. It's being really critical about what are we trying to do with this thing. Okay, sometimes it has, you know, very like, sometimes it matches the channel and there's some, some consistencies there. But the reason you run a LinkedIn ad, there's a million different reasons that you could run one, the medium and the format and could be different than organic and things like that. So when you think about content, the way that content breaks down is in three different areas. The foundation is the message and the perspective. Like, what are you saying? Is it valuable? The strategy, right? If you say it, even if you have you put it in a beautiful video and you put it on an ad where everybody has to see it, if that sucks, nobody's going to care, right? So that's one place where it can break down. The next place it can break down is in the format, right? Like maybe we take this podcast and we translate it with AI. We make it a blog post that is a trillion miles long. It's the same information in the wrong format and the format is why it breaks. And then the lastly is you have the distribution, right? And then so okay, like now we have this video and maybe if this video was like perfectly cut and clipped and me and you here looking so good, and we put it on LinkedIn, perfectly on organic, and it just hits like that's where it's meant to be. And matching the format with the dynamics of the distribution channel. And so you can see the pyramid of like if you break at the bottom or you break at the second layer, it doesn't matter what you post to the top. And then second and then when you think about that stuff, like you could put it on your website, on LinkedIn, through your email, do a live event like this, whether there's people live or you're post recording all the different social channels, is it paid or organic? When you look at the permutations, there's hundreds or millions. The thing that I think finance people should be able to weigh in on, or at least my perspective on this is that we should not be scrutinizing the ROI of the content. We should be scrutinizing the ROI of the distribution channel. And so instead of saying, did this video have a good ROI on LinkedIn? It's saying, does LinkedIn have a good ROI for our business? And then we happen to put the gas on the car, which is the content in the videos, and then the videos cost money, include that in the cost of running it. And then you have people that post the posts and run the ads, and you have the ad costs. Put it all together and say, does LinkedIn as a whole deliver appropriate ROI? And then if it does, great, let's use the data to figure out how to make it better. Maybe we should do a little bit more paid. Maybe we should scale back a little bit. And if it doesn't, then you have to decide, is this channel viable or not? And if it, if you're far away, maybe it's not, or maybe you suck. And if it's close, then maybe we just need to change a couple of things and make it better. But I think what people get caught up is they say, what was the ROI of that ebook that we made? And reality, they send the ebook out in an email and they do it in LinkedIn ads, and then there's all over the place. And so I liked thinking more about the distribution as like the main mechanism that we're scrutinizing the ROI against, not an individual message or content or campaign.

[Paul Barnhurst]

So really kind of understanding the distribution channel and how the ROI is for that channel. So you're maybe email as a whole, as a channel or TikTok or YouTube or, you know, social media, general versus raid shows. Right. Is that kind of how think of it is really understanding that channel versus the content that you push through that channel?

[Chris Walker]

Yeah. And then just another recognition for people is that generally the creation of the content is like a minimal cost of the overall thing. Right. Like, I can produce this podcast every single week for a year, and it's still going to cost less than your cheapest trade show booth. It's very inexpensive. And so the content creation is not where the costs are. It's in the advertising costs and the distribution and the people that manage those things. That's the real cost, not the content creation part of it. I've encouraging go to market leaders, I've been screaming as loud as I can around it of like, focus on the places where the most money gets spent first and focus on those areas and figure out how to measure them. Properly and that's how you get the biggest gains in terms of insights. And meanwhile they like buy all this technology to measure 5% of their investments they put toward brand. And it's like right here sitting in front of you is 95% of your investments and you can't measure those. Why don't you start there? And I think the same thing goes as finance thinks through the same thing. I think the same principles apply. And when you look at it, the cost to actually create the content is relatively low. And so that would be some of the things obvious. Well, maybe it's not obvious. Having a organic distribution channel where you have the match of I have a great message, I know what mediums to put it in for that channel and then I can put it in that channel and consistently reach my target customer has the highest ROI of anything that you can do in marketing for sure.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Say that again. I just want to make sure everybody hears that.

[Chris Walker]

You say that one more time, 100%. So when you match and you have a message that resonates with your target customer that goes through a medium that fits the distribution channel, that's put on a distribution channel where your target customers and current customers see it frequently and actually consume the message and you have those three things together on an organic distribution channel, it is by far the highest ROI thing that you can do in marketing because the costs are very low and the impact and trust and credibility is incredibly high. And so that's what you're aiming for long term? That's what I aim for every time I go for it. And then after that, when I have those three layers working and people love my content, then I take the content they love and I start running ads against it to the exact people that I want to see it. And so the difference between organic and paid is just simply can I guarantee that the people that I want to see it will see it Organic? No. Paid? Yes. And so organic goes more broad, but it proves that the content works and the medium works and the format and message work. And then once it works, then I move it to paid. Most companies take their organic and paid team and split them apart and there's no synergies around it. And the organic team posts about their company picnic and like celebrating Valentine's day and bullshit like that on their company Organic social media and the paid team runs ebook. Here's our e book. Come download it. Come get a demo. We'll give you a gift card if you have a meeting with our sales team. All this performance marketing and they Spend a million dollars and don't get an appropriate ROI on it. And really it's the blend between the two. But I think you should make or get, you should force organic content to work first and then just use paid to boost the awesome organic content to exactly who you want to see it.

[Paul Barnhurst]

I mean, to me that makes a lot of sense, right, because you're, you're doing it at a much lower cost to confirm it works. Then you're just making sure the right people see it.

[Chris Walker]

Seems logical. Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Barnhurst]

I mean the way you explain it seems very logical. I mean, obviously, you know, as I do marketing often trying to find the right people, I really haven't done any paid for my business yet or very little. But as I'm sitting here and as we're talking, it makes me think of some of more of those paid areas of. Okay, it's condensating. I really should go find more of my tribe, so to speak.

[Chris Walker]

Yeah, and it's, it stems from the siloed outdated thinking that comes from the marketing department which is like, oh, we do organic social media for brands. Like, oh, we, that's why we talk about our company picnic and we like promote the holiday that we're doing and we talk about shit that our customers don't care about and nobody likes and we don't get any engagement on. And then we have the demand or the performance marketing team over here and they're just supposed to get leads and then they just go over and they pound, they pound leads and it's like if you just rethought the whole thing, you would come to the same conclusion that I did. Prove out our customers love this and it's focused on what our business, what they need to hear to, to either buy or renew with our business and then make that be able to work and then just use it on paid. And the reason is because most companies run paid advertising on content that isn't tested. And when you do that, you don't know why. Is the reason this isn't working. Is it because the content sucks? The message wasn't right, it was the wrong format or medium, we didn't target the right people, it was the wrong distribution channel. There's a million variables as to why the advertising doesn't work and you don't know because it's not tested. And when you prove the content works, there's only two variables that can go wrong after that when you move it to paid. We didn't give it to the right people or we didn't run it against the right objective.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Yeah, makes sense. I mean, it goes back to. Right. A lot of marketing we do testing. It's testing it in the right order so you can control those variables because we all know how many variables any experiment can have. It's so hard to experiment in the real world because you're like, get it to fail because of this or that or this or that. So the more you can remove variables, reduce cost, you've reduced risk. I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me.

[Chris Walker]

And then I got one more thing for the finance department because a lot of the particular on this topic and the reason is because most people that I I talk to are like, how much pipeline are we getting from our podcast? Right? Or where, like, how many leads did we get from our podcast? Or replace podcast with whatever, you know, brand organic channel? And that's the same question that gets asked. And I'd like to offer a different perspective from my seat, which is that the reason that I do this is not because of pipeline and leads. It's because it drives my business strategy and I can talk through why and how it impacts it. And pipeline, that new, new customers just become a byproduct of the. The things that I'm getting and doing so especially early stage. But this can work across all stages. You need someone that is a. A expert in your industry that has trust and credibility with your audience and has significant financial interest in the business succeeding. So if you can match those three things, you got the person. If you can't, you got the wrong person. Okay, So I work with customers in my business, and I did when I ran the $20 million agency too. So I'm working with customers. I'm seeing what's working and what's not. I'm seeing what problems they're having, what questions they're asking, what things they're trying that aren't working. I see the patterns and then I take them and I start talking about them on the podcast and I talk about them and bring them up and, you know, share what people are trying, how it's not working. Most of the time I invite a live audience. I just did it an hour ago. So now there's 50 or 100 people that are the right type of person that's going to buy from my company or refer people to my company. I'm sharing the information. Then they come back and say, oh, yeah, but I can't get this to happen in my company because of X. And they bring up objections, they ask deeper questions. They say, I didn't get that. Can you explain it to me differently? And all of a sudden, I'm basically getting incredible market insights every single week about exactly what's going on with my customer. And then I can start to architect the product, the sales message, the marketing strategy based on what I'm hearing from these people. And you can see the whole thing. So that's the reason why I do it. And then it just so happens that 165,000 people like what I'm saying, because I'm actually in the work with my customers fixing the fucking problems. And So I have 165,000 followers on LinkedIn and I get 10 or let's see, how many episodes do I do a year? 150 times 10,000. So 151.5 million 150,000, whatever the math is on that listens to my podcast every single year. And that has driven for my businesses more than $50 million in new revenue. Between that one thing, listen to it. Listen to what customers are saying and doing. Talk about it on a live event. Make the live event a podcast that gets published once, one to three times a week, and then post the videos from the podcast onto LinkedIn. And that's been our main acquisition channel for the past five or six years.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Got it. No, that I appreciate you sharing. I loved how you broke that all down. And it really started with, okay, understand the problem, talk to people about the problem, put it out there in the right channel and watch people start to talk about it and eventually generating, you know, leads and business from that.

[Chris Walker]

And the most surprising thing for me recently is that I found that it has a greater impact on customer success and retention than it does on Pipeline.

[Paul Barnhurst]

The podcast.

[Chris Walker]

The podcast, yes, that my customer. I'm single threaded in a customer, right? So I'm just working with the CMO or I'm just working with the CFO or the CEO, whoever. And they share the podcast with their chief revenue officer or some other C level executive. And then all of a sudden this person now says, oh, this makes a ton of sense. And then they renew with us for another 12 months. So they take a month to month contract and sign it for annual. Or they say, hey, we need your help in the marketing side. I know you're helping finance. Let's double our retainer and work you with you over here. And the only reason I know that is because I sit on the sales calls and the customer says, hey, I was listening to your podcast. I shared it with my chief revenue officer. Now he wants to know it's the only way that you would know is if you sit on the sales call. And so I think that that is also very under, especially for most developed businesses. When you're above definitely by 50 million ARR, you're going to get more growth from your customer base usually than from your new logos or you should. And so at some point that becomes a scaled, highly cost effective way to bring your message and drive your customers to share it. Have more people align with your message to renew more frequently. Rather than having a CSM try to get a meeting and do a qbr. And you should do both. Right? But it's just about where do you get the most return on your time and having one of your smartest, most educated, most credible people talking in a way where there's no constraint on how many people can listen to the information. It just creates more scale than having one salesperson pitch or having one CSM do a meeting. There's more scalability to it for sure.

[Paul Barnhurst]

When you can take a whole room at a time and then distribute it, then push that out to lots of people with that same problem was a lot quicker than one sales guy trying to hold a hundred meetings to get that same distribution or same reach.

[Chris Walker]

Exactly. Yeah. And then let's do one more thing on content because you can break content into two other areas. It's a different dimension and this maybe is more on the distribution side, but there's content where you wait for somebody to come and find it and then there's distribution where you say you need it, I'm going to go out and get it to you. And so most companies have lived in this world of search engine optimization where they just build a blog and then they hope someone searches the term where the blog pops up, right? And a lot of people that search the term that the blog popped up are not qualified to buy from your company. And so yeah, you have five, you know, 5,000 searches and you get traffic from that keyword, but the keyword is free business template. You know what I mean? And like it's like okay, you're, we're selling a hundred K SaaS. The people that are searching for this term and downloading our template are not qualified to buy from us. So you have people where you sit around and wait for people to find you. Best strategy for companies that have a freemium model, product LED growth, low ACV can't afford sales reps, need some high, high volume self service motion typically. And then you have the places where you're gonna go. I know the who the people are, I have this piece of content that they need to see. I'm gonna go out and get them. Great. For higher ACV deals where you can afford advertising, you have enough room of cost of acquisition, you have a well defined account list of a hundred ten thousand somewhere in that range of accounts that you know are the right people to sell to. And instead of waiting for those 10,000 to hopefully like stumble upon you, why don't you just go out and get them? It's actually when your account list is defined, the cost to go out and get them is actually quite affordable relative to every other expense in the go to market.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Yeah.

[Chris Walker]

And so having that distinguishing too which is basically a function of TAM and acv which are generally correlated as well.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Yeah, I love you said there of hey, when you know who you can go out and target, it becomes much, much more efficient. From a cost stand, if I have that list of here's the thousand that are most likely to buy and I know how to target them, then go do it. You got to make sure the content works and that message is there first. Don't just do it without having done the testing as we kind of talked about earlier. But yeah, it makes sense from a cost standpoint. That's a lot of good advice for finance professionals, marketing, everybody just I think the more finance talks to the marketing people, tries to understand these things, the easier it becomes to sit in those meetings and understand what they're doing and to at least weigh in at some level. Obviously we're never going to be the expert or we wouldn't be in finance.

[Chris Walker]

I don't know. I actually, I disagree with that personally.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Hey, go for it. Let me. Why do you disagree? I'd love to debate this a little bit.

[Chris Walker]

Yep. So every single revenue leader, not maybe not every single maybe. I'm exaggerating. Most revenue leaders that I talk to that are saying that admit that they have a problem with this, they want to get. They have three questions they want an answer to. What are my highest performing investments and how can I squeeze more juice out of them? Number two, where should I invest my next dollar to drive the the most growth and efficiency? And number three, what are my lowest performing investments that I should cut or stop? And when you look at those three questions, the thing that connects them all is that it's a measure of return on investment. And frankly, CMOs and CROs don't know how to process finance data and calculate return on investment. They don't have a good process for it. Most of them don't have the acumen for it. I'm not talking down on anyone. It's just the truth. And so I've come to the conclusion that this is, and when, when those questions all revolve around roi, that this is a finance problem that negatively impacts marketing and pipeline creation and then sales needs to live with that problem and deal with it. And so if you, when you look at it that way, I think personally that finance could step up and own this problem. And I think that they are the best equipped in the company to fix it. And I believe that not being weighed down by the ten years of nonsense that marketing leaders and sales leaders have been taught and executed for the past 10 years is a strength, not a weakness. And I think people with fresh eyes would see the flaws and the assumptions that people have that are totally like, just out of this world. Like I walk into it, I'm like, what are we doing here? And I, so I, I, I'm trying to, and yeah, I'm trying to put this empower finance leaders that, yeah, you, maybe you're not going to be the expert in how to run advertising, maybe you're not going to be in president's club selling deals. But when it comes to measuring the return on investment, I think that you could be the people that are the best at it. I think that you could be the function that, that changes this for the company.

[Paul Barnhurst]

And I get that that makes less sense when you explain it that way. And I get what you're saying. Yeah, being that expert on really helping measure the ROI and help ensure we're really doing those things that every CFO wants, knowing where to invest, where not to invest, and how to get better results out of our investment. Right. We all want that. And the better we can help measure things and really understand it so we can have those measurements, the better we can ensure good decisions are being made. Because that's what I think Everybody wants from FP&A. I heard someone say it, you know, finance should help the business make better, faster decisions.

[Chris Walker]

Love that. Yep. Better, faster, more confident decisions.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Yep.

[Chris Walker]

And I'll just give another hint on this pursuit. Don't listen. Be curious and understand what those people are doing, but do not listen to what the revenue leaders say about how to do this. You will get led in the wrong direction a hundred percent of the time. This requires a complete rethinking of the process. I gave you some hints along the way, but as like just thinking, oh, these people are good at marketing and they figured out how to run sales. I Guess they're going to be able to inform me about how to measure the ROI of things. You will be sadly disappointed. You should start with a blank slate. Understand what is happening today as context and then find all the holes in it today. I pointed out many of them for you on this episode.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Yeah, a lot of great advice. I know we're kind of coming up near the end of our time to wrap up, so I want to ask kind of a couple standard questions we asked just to get to know you a little bit better and also a couple around FP and A. So this is one we ask all our guests just to see the different kind of answers we get. I'd love to get your perspective. Not being a finance person. What do you think the number one technical skill that FPA professionals need?

[Chris Walker]

First off, I. I do consider myself a finance professional in many ways and I think that I have a lot of skills.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Well, I didn't mean that.

[Chris Walker]

I know, I know. I'm totally joking with you.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Give me a hard time finding you that way.

[Chris Walker]

I think that there's some combination of curiosity combined. Curiosity can drive. Am I curious about what my. The other teams in the company are doing? Am I curious about what our customers are doing? So I think that's one big one. I think that FPA is going to get totally changed by AI. Like, how do you. How do you figure out how to be a leader in your company?

[Paul Barnhurst]

We're going to go a whole episode without an AI discussion.

[Chris Walker]

There's no way. It's all numbers. It's literally all numbers.

[Paul Barnhurst]

It's gonna be AI then.

[Chris Walker]

Yeah. And it doesn't mean the function's going away. It means you're going to get a trillion times better at doing the most important things because you know how to use it.

[Paul Barnhurst]

I like trillion.

[Chris Walker]

That's good. Yeah. It's undeniable that something's gonna happen there in this function.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Yep.

[Chris Walker]

And I think that I'm not getting the right word here, so I'll say it for lack of a better word, but aggressive. The things that frustrate me as a CEO about the finance leaders that I've interacted with is that it's very risk averse and it's. It's very safe. And I think that obviously we need a balance. I think that FPA plays in a different space than the people that are responsible for risk mitigation in the company. I think SP&A is more equipped, not aggressive, playing offense. Let's call it that. There's some people in finance that need to play defense, FP and A. I want playing offense at my company. I want ideas, I want new routes, the angles that I haven't considered. Those are things that I want.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Got it. I like that. So make sure FP A is offensive. I mean offense, offense. All right. And then what's the soft skill we need? You're gonna say a softer human skill.

[Chris Walker]

I think curiosity is one that I'm working on myself. But I think that curiosity is an important one for people like us. Like I, I consider myself like finance. I think in numbers, I think in logic. Oftentimes I see it of. I've gotten better at this over time, but a lot of times it's black. Like black and white. The numbers 1 or 0. You know what I mean? I think there's a lot of gray in the real world.

[Paul Barnhurst]

I agree. Definitely a lot of gray. And I love the curiosity because it's. You can't be great in almost any job without being curious. Any that requires a lot of thought and strategy. I mean, if it's a process oriented job and all you're doing is the same thing, okay, sure, you could be great. But you know the jobs we're talking about, right. So we'd love to get to know you a little bit more kind of personally. Chris. So tell me a favorite hobby or passion. What's something you love to do when you're not working?

[Chris Walker]

Let's see here. It's weird. I'm struggling to answer the question because my business life and personal life are now like one in the same. I've run businesses. I'm an entrepreneur. I've run businesses for six years. I make my own schedule, I have my own team. If I go on vacation, if I'm posting on social media, it's part personal and parts business. It's this. I don't know, it's just like all.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Blended together and all blends together.

[Chris Walker]

But something that I'm passionate about is sharing the wins and the losses and the lessons of my journey as an entrepreneur in hopes that I wish that I had someone like me telling me all this stuff six years ago. I would have avoided a lot of mistakes, things that were painful. But with pain comes a lot of important lessons. So I don't regret anything. But I, yeah, share a lot of vulnerably recently share a lot of the things that I did, haven't gotten right in my companies and where I messed up and what I learned. And I have a lot of passion for sharing that with people that are where I was five or six years ago in their entrepreneurial journey. I do speaking events, produce content on this is like sort of buttoned up for the C level executive, but I also produce content in other channels that's in different areas and more vulnerable for the, you know, entrepreneur is doing 30k a month or 50k a month and have one employee, you know, so that's been some. Somewhere where I get a lot of energy and a lot of passion. I love to work out and I love to, love to travel.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Cool. Yeah. I know when we started you had mentioned you'd gone travel here recently, so I know you enjoyed traveling. Got one more and then we'll wrap up here. If you could have dinner with anyone in the world to be dead or alive, who you taking to dinner? Who you picking?

[Chris Walker]

A lot of people aren't going to like this answer and like it's not, it's not groundbreaking, but. Well, maybe there's two. I'll just go with the one that came to me. I, I would love to go to dinner with Tom Brady just because I think it would be. I've. I grew up since I was like 8 years old going to those games, seeing him win Super Bowls, I just think it would be cool. Like there's not. Yeah. Nothing more like, oh, he's gonna say something that's gonna change my life. I'm gonna learn. Maybe. I probably would learn something. You know what I mean? But it's more so just because of. Yeah, I was just been a kid watching him win seven or eight. I think it was seven Super Bowls.

[Paul Barnhurst]

So who, who's winning this next Super Bowl? This, the show will come out after, so we'll see if you're predicting.

[Chris Walker]

Great. I'm not a betting man, but I'm not betting against Patrick Mahomes.

[Paul Barnhurst]

I'm with you. I'm not a betting man.

[Chris Walker]

So I got, I got, I got Chiefs for the three Pete. I think when it comes down to it, Patrick Mahomes makes the big throw, makes the big play. Andy Reid, they have a great kicker. Like, I think they just have the things they need to win. They just won the close game by three points in the last game. I think they just have what it takes to win the close game. And that's why Tom Brady won seven Super Bowls.

[Paul Barnhurst]

No, I'm with you. They got a fabulous coach, great quarterback. They know what it takes to win close games. And it's hard to bet against that. I'm not doing it. I like my money. All right, so last question. If our audience wants to learn more about you or potentially get in touch. What's the best way for them to do that? Is it LinkedIn or.

[Chris Walker]

Yeah, probably LinkedIn. If you liked what I said and you're interested in about how my company Passetto can help you, feel free to visit passetto.com, there's a place where you can book a call with me. But yeah, if you're just interested in learning more, you want to send me a question, you just want to tell me the episode was cool or that you hated it, or just give me some feedback, feel free to shoot me a message on LinkedIn. You can find me Chris Walker. The. The URL is Chris Walker171, but you can just search Chris Walker and find me.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Right? Well, perfect. Thank you, Chris. I appreciate you carving out some time. Enjoyed chatting with you today and good luck with your message around. Go to market. I know I learned a lot. I look forward to kind of listening back to it because there are a few things I'm like, gotta listen to that again. I hadn't heard it that way before, so thank you.

[Chris Walker]

Awesome. Yeah, thanks for having me on. I hope I get exposed and invited to more finance podcasts. This is fun. I think the blend between these two is really important. So thank you for being the first one to invite me on.

[Paul Barnhurst]

Well, you're welcome. I'm glad to be first. I, you know, do what I can. Finance podcast for fun for me. What can I say? I'm a nerd. Thank you, Chris.

[Chris Walker]

Thank you. See you later.