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Chris Walker, CEO at demand generation experts, Refine Labs. We hear about the value of testing assumptions, the difference between delivering content and collecting leads, and the power of ignoring the competition. I weigh in with my thoughts on creating strategic narratives, building companies with inbound marketing, being "the best" for your specific customer, developing personal brands and owning a unique point of view.
Hear how successful B2B SaaS companies and agencies compete - and win - in highly saturated categories. No fluff. No filler. Just strategies and tactics from founders, executives, and marketers. Learn about building moats, growing audiences, scaling businesses, and differentiating from the competition. New guests every week. Hosted by Peep Laja, founder at Wynter, Speero, CXL.
Chris Walker on using personal brand and LinkedIn to scale demand gen experts Refine Labs
Chris Walker (00:02):
We know that our marketing model is very different because we ignore assumptions that most people believe to be true.
Peep Laja (00:12):
I'm Peep Laja, I don't do fluff, I don't do filler, I don't do emojis. What I do is study winners in B2B SaaS because I want to know how much is strategy, how much is luck and how do they win?
Peep Laja (00:25):
It's never been easier to start and build a business. Technological barriers of entering have come down. Business building knowledge is widely available. There's more money than ever before. It's insane how many direct and indirect competitors there are to almost everyone. This week meet contrarian, maverick, giant killer, Chris Walker, founder and CEO of demand generation experts, Refine Labs.
Chris Walker (00:47):
We're a demand generation consulting firm/agency, whatever you want to position that as.
Peep Laja (00:53):
How does Refine Labs differentiate? How do they compete? In this episode will learn all about the value of testing assumptions.
Chris Walker (01:00):
The strategy and tactics that we deliver are actually validated to work in this subset of the market.
Peep Laja (01:06):
The difference between delivering content and collecting leads.
Chris Walker (01:10):
Totally focused on building an audience and building brand and the quickest way to not do that well is to start thinking about things transactionally.
Peep Laja (01:17):
And the power of ignoring the competition.
Chris Walker (01:20):
I spend almost no time thinking anybody that I compete with.
Peep Laja (01:24):
Let's get into it.
Chris Walker (01:26):
I started this company about two years ago. We're a firm that helps companies do demand generation. I think the core of what we do is we help companies think differently about how to do it and so companies have been running this whole MQL nurture, outbound cold call type of sequence. We have a different marketing framework that we help companies implement.
Peep Laja (01:47):
When you started the agency, how did you think you're going to win? How did you decide what is the core offering here and how are we going to win with this?
Chris Walker (01:56):
I knew we were going to win because I worked at a lot of B2B companies before I started it. At one particular co company that was 30 million ARR series D I built the demand generation engine that we now help companies implement, which has been further and further refined and watched how much revenue growth happened at that company driven through the marketing.
Chris Walker (02:17):
The company's marketing before I started there was doing sales enablement, build trade shows, help the sales team do field marketing, go to big meeting, help the sales team, try and close, train them.
Chris Walker (02:26):
The website was not good. Inbound revenue was zero. Over the next two years, we had 35% of net new revenue and more of that than pipeline coming through in the company based on building a podcast, interviewing physicians, running Facebook ads to hospitals in 2016, delivering content, not collecting leads, figuring out how to measure that over time. Like just in general, just being customer-centric in terms of the marketing.
Peep Laja (02:51):
I built my company, CXL on inbound marketing back when CXL was a conversion optimization agency now called Speero. I knew that we were in the business of expertise. And in order to show the world that you are the expert on something, you have to show it. Content is the best way to do it.
Peep Laja (03:12):
I blogged like my life depended on it and I made it my goal to create the best content on conversion optimization. Every single blog post I shipped had to be the best ever written on the subject. This was in 2011.
Peep Laja (03:25):
In addition to blogging, I made sure I was visible everywhere my target customers might come across me. I was doing a ton of webinars, being a guest and every podcast that would have me speak at every conference I could.
Peep Laja (03:35):
I was creating and promoting new frameworks for conversion optimization, creating a community online and offline. I studied two annual conferences and by 2016, 5 short years later, I was acknowledged as the most influential name in conversion optimization. All the success was basically achieved with content.
Chris Walker (03:58):
I watched that be successful and then I left that company shortly before they IPOed and then I looked around in the world and saw how other companies were doing marketing and I had tried all of those things before and I knew the difference in the success between these two different models. And so it was very clear to me that we just had a better mouse trap, so to speak, but it requires companies to have a lot of confidence that they can do it.
Chris Walker (04:24):
It's almost like a leap of faith. "Okay. We're going to get rid of all of our thousands of leads, even though none of those leads become customers. What are we going to do then? How do we do it? How are we going to measure it? What do we actually do?" And so we give executives a lot of confidence to move forward in a different model once they acknowledge that the current model was not doing them enough good.
Peep Laja (04:44):
That sounds to me that this is basically kind of like creating a strategic narrative. What is happening in the world and your old vehicle to get to where you want to go is broken and you need a new vehicle.
Peep Laja (04:58):
As companies get bigger, they realize that they need communicate less on features and more on story. Their narrative needs to be connected to a bigger idea, something big happening in the external world. Kind of like the world used to be like this, but it has changed. The winners are adapting to this change and losers are sticking to the old ways and our company will help you succeed in this new reality.
Peep Laja (05:21):
Of course, that's not the actual marketing copy, but you get the point. A fictional example would be selling a course. Let's say we have a course, AI for marketers. Instead of talking about the course contents and who the instructor is, we could sell it by leading with a narrative.
Peep Laja (05:36):
AI and machine learning are unstoppable. It's going to change everything. The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. There is no stopping this train. You can get on it, or you can get left behind. Companies that adopt AI will overtake others and marketers that learn to work with AI will dominate. And here all these examples of companies doing it.
Peep Laja (05:58):
Now, this would make the course way more attractive comparing to the classic way. Like, "Hey, here's a course AI for marketers, seven hours of video. Top lecturers."
Peep Laja (06:09):
Were you very intentional about telling this story as the foundation of your marketing or it just happened by coincidence at the start?
Chris Walker (06:16):
We know that our marketing model is very different because we ignore assumptions that most people believe to be true. And the narrative has come about through practice, through communication, through working with customers and understanding what they think.
Chris Walker (06:29):
We didn't start with me in a room like building this on a little piece of paper and then saying, "This is our narrative." Our narrative actually continues to evolve, but I do believe that this is a core strategic narrative framework. This is what you're doing right now. You believe in MQL, you must have direct attribution on channels in order to do that. When you run paid, it must collect leads. All these assumptions that do not need to be true to doing this instead, which is buyer focused, measuring the full funnel, looking at the entire marketing mix in terms of the overall impact. Those are the things that we believe in.
Peep Laja (07:03):
I like it. How did you start getting the word out in terms of the marketing and telling your story that MQL is broken and et cetera?
Chris Walker (07:12):
Yeah. Because of the success that I had in previous companies with content and distribution, mainly on social platforms, not in search, I started to lean into that. Initially, I actually was leaning into Instagram. And so that was the first channel that we tried and I was moving into LinkedIn as well, mainly into comment. This is like, we got our first two customers through comments that I left on LinkedIn and then those people saw my comments said, "This person now is the CEO of this company, not working as a person at this company. I worked with them before. I'm going to give him a shot."
Chris Walker (07:46):
That's how I got the first couple customers. And then the comments started to get some traction, which gave me confidence to post and then I started posting and I, to be honest, talk a lot about marketing fundamentals.
Chris Walker (07:57):
I believed at the beginning like, oh, a lot of marketers know these things, what I'm saying is super elementary. And what I found is that it's not the case. I believe in the basics a lot, especially on the marketing strategy side, segmentation, like messaging, understanding your customers deeply, how to do qualitative market research. I believe in those things a lot. It allows you to do tactical execution very well.
Chris Walker (08:19):
And then once that started to pick up and I had some attention, then I started to... And we had three or four customers. It was who is the actual ideal customer for this because none of our customers looked the same. We started to look at who is the ideal customer and most people look at like industry or company size or different things like that and I looked more at mindset and organizational sophistication as a couple of different psychographic ways.
Peep Laja (08:45):
How would you assess those things?
Chris Walker (08:46):
Through having conversations with people, by communicating things that I believe in, having them come in, having a conversation with them and then understanding whether or not they believe in the same things that we do and over time, just I find that more and more people believe the things that we do.
Chris Walker (09:00):
But one of the tactical things that I did was I had... I knew that SaaS was the right category for us. We had two of our most successful customers that were there, recurring revenue model, business sales-led. I started to do a video podcast show with SaaS CMOs.
Speaker 4 (09:16):
From Refine Labs, this is the State of Demand Gen.
Chris Walker (09:19):
Hey, everyone, welcome back to the State of Demand Gen Podcast. This is your host, Chris Walker.
Chris Walker (09:25):
I would interview SaaS CMOs on that show and then I got to understand how they thought.
Peep Laja (09:35):
This is great, interviews and podcasts aren't just a way to position yourself as a thought leader or to make contacts. It can be also a means of gathering Intel on your ideal customer.
Chris Walker (09:45):
I was getting to understand what those people are like, what they care about, how they measure their marketing, what they're doing, what's working, what's not working. It gave me a very good sense about what's going on. It allowed me to further identify or further narrow in on the ICP, further narrow in on what the product offering should be.
Peep Laja (10:03):
To win, your company has to be the best at something. There's just no way around it. Being okay is just not cutting it. The customer has too much choice, but you can't be objectively better for everyone. You have to choose. You need to be the best at creating winning customer value for a particular set of customers or you are destined to be overtaken by a competitor who is. Strategy is about choice. Deciding where to play and plotting a pathway to win in that game.
Peep Laja (10:32):
You can't win without being the best. You need to focus your resources on constantly improving your customer value and refining your customer targeting, choose your customers and build the best for them. The best doesn't mean highest quality. It's whatever that group of customers you sell to cares a lot about. The ability to innovate on customer value at high speed must be a core capability of your company and it's impossible to do so if your company's targeting all revenues indiscriminately. If you treat all revenues as equally desirable, you don't have a strategy. That's what separates winners from losers.
Chris Walker (11:09):
From there, continue to lean further into video. Video then evolved because of the just operational constraints that we have as the business screws. I move to podcasts, which then creates the video for me on autopilot and then we can publish that. And now we have both the podcast in LinkedIn, cadence running along with a marketing team here that's posting on the company page and organizing events and other people are posting the company.
Chris Walker (11:32):
And so we've been able to sort of like scale out both tours with channels and in terms of it's not just me anymore communicating stuff. And so that's sort of at the high level, been the progression on our communication strategy.
Peep Laja (11:45):
Awesome. I have multiple follow up questions on this. One is like, I always tell people if you're a consultant, understand that you are in the business of expertise and hence you need to show it. Was showing and demonstrating your expertise a strategic move on your part from the get go?
Chris Walker (12:02):
It was. It really clicked for me in like July of 2019. When my LinkedIn performance started to really pick up, the first thing that I thought is, I need to understand this channel better than anybody else because perhaps the CMO of Salesforce is going to want somebody's advice and I'm going to be the only one that has it. And so I started to take that lens. I'd push the boundaries in LinkedIn. I posted eight times in a day to see what would happen. I move to video, I'd do a lot of creative things to understand how the channel will respond, that a lot of other people would never do.
Chris Walker (12:31):
We model the behavior that we believe our customers should behave with. We show them what best in class looks like, which then attracts them to us if they appreciate the marketing. It also demonstrates expertise clearly. To be direct, there are a lot of marketing agencies out there and a lot of them are very bad at marketing themselves, which doesn't make sense to me.
Chris Walker (12:51):
I understand that the platforms are different too and so when people cross post, I find it very lazy because the same piece of content that I post on LinkedIn would not do as well on Instagram.
Peep Laja (13:03):
I saw Jason Lumpkin post the other day that he's cross-posting his stuff to LinkedIn and Twitter and the Twitter stuff converts four times better to leads for his SaaS stuff. Are you seeing anything like that, LinkedIn compared to Twitter?
Chris Walker (13:21):
I don't think about any one post as something that I'm trying to get someone to convert on so I would never measure that. I'm never in transactional mode. I'm not like, "This post needs to get me three leads." I post a lot of different information. I allow people to be ready to buy. And then when they want to have a conversation, people are smart.
Chris Walker (13:39):
B2B buyers are educated. When they want something, they know where to find us. That's the approach that I take. I just don't measure it at that level because I am totally focused on building an audience and building brand, which has been working incredibly well for us and the quickest way to not do that well is to start thinking about things transactionally.
Peep Laja (13:58):
Brands should double down on building personal brands inside your companies, not just encourage your people to be visible, but be personal brands first. People want to hear from people more than brands and brands benefit from being associated with that person.
Peep Laja (14:13):
If you look at TikTok, all top account are personalities, not cat videos. Tesla does $0 in advertising and Elon has 50 million followers. A 100X more people want to hear from David Gerhardt rather than his previous employer Privy. People want to watch Gordon Ramsey not just a cooking show.
Gordon Ramsey (14:32):
Shall we talk about the duck? What the fuck did you put in that sauce? It's like some fucking SciFi sperm.
Peep Laja (14:39):
Agencies in particular benefit from this as they get hired for their expertise because I want to hire the best expert. Most agencies would get 10X the results by promoting their personal brands inside the company, rather than their company. In a way, it's a lot like pro sports. There's the team brand and the athlete. Pro teams can build the brand of athletes, cash in on merchandising their brand and top athletes can further build the brand of the team. I did it for my personal brand when I was growing my agency and Chris is doing the same now.
Peep Laja (15:14):
You're killing it on LinkedIn obviously. What other insights do you have about the LinkedIn as a platform, especially for agencies? What are you doing that others are not doing and where are you out-executing them?
Chris Walker (15:27):
I believe that we out-execute on one, the intent pillar from a podcast into LinkedIn, and then back to the podcast. Like that flow in terms of how to create content consistently, how to post it a lot, how to get more people into long form content on a podcast through that loop is something that a lot of people can't do.
Chris Walker (15:46):
Next, post frequency. At the beginning, I posted every day from mid 2019 to mid 2020. Now I'm at four to five posts a week. The frequency and the consistency matter on LinkedIn if you're looking to grow. I know a lot of people will say that it doesn't. It definitely does. I don't think a lot of people are committed enough to the channel or to content creation in general, especially someone as the CEO. They wouldn't do the things that I'm willing to do because it's our primary go to market.
Chris Walker (16:13):
We don't have a sales team. It's our primary go to market to get revenue. I'm actively bringing new people into my network, which gives me more people that are "followers" that get exposed to the content and I selectively choose them based on they are active on the platform, they engage with content consistently. They're going to like my type of content. They engage with the content and I get exposed to the second and third degree networks because I still act my network.
Chris Walker (16:39):
Those are three tips that we've been using. Lastly, you've got to have something valuable to say, I believe a lot of people listen to my content is because a lot of people use the information and it helps them. I think a lot of other like consultants would say, "People pay me for this information." I'm not going to give it away. The same thing that our customers that pay $25,000 a month for, I'd say the same thing in my video on LinkedIn.
Peep Laja (17:05):
Well, what's the dream. You've come quite a long way from in two years. What's the dream in five years and beyond?
Chris Walker (17:15):
The dream, long term and who knows what the timeframe is on it is to empower marketers to use a different marketing model. To break free from the serious decisions demand waterfall.
Speaker 6 (17:29):
The serious decisions demand waterfall has been around for over a decade. It's a standard methodology that many of the biggest and best brands in the world have adopted.
Chris Walker (17:37):
Being poorly implemented in companies, that is incredibly transactional, that's incredibly sales focused that doesn't align with how buyers buy. To break that model and give companies an alternative way to do marketing, so build a new demand generation framework, essentially.
Peep Laja (17:53):
It's notoriously hard to differentiate agencies. A strong point of view is one way to do it. Someone having a well-articulated clear point of view is very attractive. When someone cares way more than me about how certain things should be handled, that's hot.
Peep Laja (18:08):
Chris Walker, as a point of view on how demand gen has to get done and what all is wrong with the status quo. Talking about his point of view, feeds him with endless content ideas and helps differentiate Refine Labs. By contrast, people and companies would know particular POV are less interesting and get less attention and share mind, spend time on your point of view. It's a living, breathing piece of work for sure. Maintain it as such.
Chris Walker (18:34):
So one, we would be competing with serious decisions. What serious decisions does is they provide a model framework and then they allow all the MarTech vendors-
Peep Laja (18:42):
That's Adobe, Salesforce, HubSpot and so on.
Chris Walker (18:45):
To tell them what the tactical strategy should be to accomplish that strategy. I believe that a lot of that information is not strong. I believe that it's biased and so trying to give people a connection between this is your strategy and these are the tactics that we're running on a 100 SaaS companies right now that are like you, that actually work. We know that they work because we just ran them on a 100 companies. This is how you do it.
Chris Walker (19:08):
And so being able to distribute that IP to companies I think is very valuable long term and then the last thing is working on a different way to build a framework for people to measure marketing in a different way that's not tied to direct attribution because it drives a lot of the wrong behaviors in marketing. And frankly, a lot of poor strategic decisions because executives think that attribution software gives them the strongest information, which is why a lot of people wouldn't do the things that I'm doing.
Chris Walker (19:37):
You don't see a SaaS company going to market doing a podcast, heavy, organic, social influencer marketing. They won't do those things because they're difficult to measure. And so trying to build an analytics tool that will demonstrate the effectiveness of those programs, which will be a technical challenge, but something that we're interested in working on.
Peep Laja (19:56):
So what I'm hearing is that you're clear on your infinite game. I want to have this kind of a soft change in the world. Marketers realize what's working and what not working. But then you have a more finite game, which is like, okay, taking on serious decision, going after some of their pie, how are you going to win against them? I think they've got deeper pockets than you do.
Chris Walker (20:18):
But they are vulnerable because of a core part of their business model, where I believe that the advice is flawed. There's always parts in a business model where it's very vulnerable and the vulnerability here is that this company has a model that doesn't get updated. They don't do the actual work to know whether or not it's working anymore.
Chris Walker (20:39):
They allow technology vendors to pay them, to tell them what the strategy should be. We will win because the strategy and tactics that we deliver are actually validated to work in this subset of the market and that's the competitive advantage.
Peep Laja (20:55):
And they wouldn't adjust course because the current incentives they have in place are then too strong to evolve.
Chris Walker (21:02):
That's why most companies break or why they become vulnerable is because they grow to a level and then all they do is focus on trying to get their core products more profitable, not rethink about whether or not they need a different product to disrupt themselves.
Chris Walker (21:15):
You could go and look at Boston Consulting or McKinsey at the same time, like consulting groups provided advice. And they're very bad at the tactical execution and agencies provide tactical execution and they let their customers tell them whatever to do and they're very bad at thinking about strategy.
Chris Walker (21:32):
And so a company that can actually do both is a very large opportunity because the strategy and the tactics work together to evolve over time.
Chris Walker (21:41):
The playbook that we were writing six months ago is nowhere close to what we do right now. We consistently update it. And so an SEO agency wouldn't do that. They're just going to keep doing SEO. By not being tied to channels by being invested in customers like CRM, pipeline, revenue, results, unlike other companies, like those are some of the core things that we do that allow us to innovate.
Peep Laja (22:04):
Naming things, gives things power. Have you named your methodology something, have you branded it?
Chris Walker (22:10):
We call it the demand acceleration framework. The idea is you have customers right now that are coming to your website and asking to buy. Those prospects are converting to become a customer somewhere between 2-8%, depending on how good you are at doing that.
Chris Walker (22:24):
Our goal is to accelerate the amount of people that run through that flow. That's what we do. We use a variety of different channels to get people educated, to move through that process and go while maintaining the conversion rates. It's very easy to shove a bunch of people through a demo form and degrade the conversion rates and get no more revenue. By maintaining pipeline conversion rates to revenue is one of the most challenging things while you scale, that's the framework that we have right now.
Peep Laja (22:49):
Let's talk about moats. There are other younger agencies looking at what you're doing, "I might do some of that stuff." And they'll start doing exactly the same things. And some of those people are actually pretty good at executing. Maybe they're not here yet, but a year from now. What kind of moats are you building up and are you thinking about moats?
Chris Walker (23:07):
I spend almost no time thinking about anybody that I compete with. I spend all my time focused on my customer and my customer tells me the gaps in what they are getting right now, whether it's my customer or in discovery calls or in the market. It's very clear if you list, you don't need to spend any time on competitors. If you listen to your customer, because they'll tell you all the things that are missing, that they're not getting right now. And that's where I spend most of my time.
Chris Walker (23:30):
In terms of most, the moat is our brand, the moat is the results from our customers, the moat is what our customers say about when they've been with us for 12 months, how much we've impacted their revenue. That's all that I need and so it's a very, very focused strategy on a moat. Our product continues to evolve because we're close to our customer.
Chris Walker (23:48):
And so the product is also a piece too, but I recognize that the execution is actually a commodity. The way that we think the IP that we have, the way that we move, the way that we look inside of the CRM, those things are difficult to replicate because we move to ask for anyone to catch us and the brand is way too strong for someone to come in from the bottom and catch up to us. That's the way that I think about strategy. In general, I spend very little time thinking about competitors. I spend all my time looking at what customers are doing.
Peep Laja (24:21):
Boom. All right, thanks so much for coming on, Chris.
Chris Walker (24:24):
This is a blast. Thanks.
Peep Laja (24:27):
What were the three key strategic decisions Chris and Refine Labs made in order to grow and succeed. One, they offered different strategic and tactical approach to their competitors.
Chris Walker (24:37):
I looked around in the world and saw how other companies were doing marketing and I knew the difference in the success between these two different models.
Peep Laja (24:45):
Two, they were not transactional. They focused on building relationships and providing valuable content.
Chris Walker (24:51):
The same thing that our customers that pay $25,000 a month for, I'd say the same thing in my video on LinkedIn.
Peep Laja (24:56):
Three, they focused on the unique needs of their specific customer, not on the competition.
Chris Walker (25:02):
You don't need to spend any time on competitors. If you listen to your customer, because they'll tell you all the things are missing, that they're not getting right now.
Peep Laja (25:08):
Bonus idea. If there's no value or substance to what you're offering, then you're dead in the water. All the tactics and strategies in the world won't save you. Like I've said before, you can't put a lipstick on a pig.
Chris Walker (25:19):
You've got to have something valuable to say.
Peep Laja (25:21):
That's how you win. For more tips on how to win. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter.