Podcasting is one of our favorite forms of content because it is so versatile. Not only can you publish the long-form audio on all the major podcast platforms, but when you record it with video you can repurpose on YouTube, break it down into smaller LinkedIn video posts, and a whole lot more. Taking full advantage of your podcast is a huge opportunity to generate demand on dark social. In this episode, Chris talks about how we utilize The State of Demand Podcast at Refine Labs to do just that....
Dec 05, 2021•40 min
Dave Gerhardt , Chief Brand Officer at Drift, joined Chris for another Demand Gen Expert Session, this time on the topic of "Marketing and Sales as One Team." Obviously, Marketing and Sales are quite different. But at the end of the day, their end goal should be revenue. By thinking of the two as working together rather than working towards completely separate goals, both teams are better able to drive results for the business. Dave and Chris discussed this in depth as well as where a Chief Reve...
Dec 03, 2021•54 min
Adding "How did you hear about us?" to your demo request form gives huge insights into what channels are working. But, there's a right way and a wrong way. And if you're making these three common mistakes, you could be doing more harm than good. In this episode, Chris goes over the top three mistakes people make and why it's so important to fix them immediately.He also talks about one of the most overlooked ways of increasing your marketing effectiveness—lowering customer acquisition cost (CAC)....
Dec 01, 2021•2 hr 5 min
Marketing is the best tool growth stage companies have, not sales. But how does the founder/CEO play a role in driving marketing performance? The problem with most early-stage B2B SaaS companies is there is a lack of customer understanding leading the product roadmap. For the leadership to positively impact marketing, they need to start by understanding the customer. Segmenting down so much to where your product is so in tune with the customer that you have no competition. In this episode, Chris...
Nov 27, 2021•55 min
When Sydney Sloan walked into Salesloft three years ago they were optimizing for MQLs. Marketing had no efficiency. Salespeople were overwhelmed with low intent leads. Conversions were low. When Sydney took over as CMO, she wasn't interested in the vanity metrics that were being measured up until that point. She wanted to eliminate waste and increase marketing effectiveness at driving pipeline, not MQLs. In this episode, Sydney lays out her playbook on how she took over a struggling marketing te...
Nov 24, 2021•29 min
Marketers love to hate on "vanity" metrics, and rightfully so. But the problem is, they are misdiagnosing vanity metrics and using the real vanity metrics to make strategic decisions. I'm talking about MQLs, eBook downloads, website visits, blog views, etc. These may have been important KPIs back in 2011 when marketing's only goal was to find fit and feed leads to sales. But this isn't 2011. Sales teams can have tools like Zoominfo to find contacts that have fit. Marketing needs to shift their f...
Nov 21, 2021•16 min
You don't need more budget. In fact, less budget would probably help you do a lot more with your marketing dollars. The sad truth is that marketing teams across industries almost universally wasting money. Poor strategy and even worse execution can't be helped by more budget. And most marketing teams are converting at less than .1%. In this episode, Chris talks about how to rethink marketing strategies to eliminate waste and drive results.
Nov 19, 2021•45 min
If you're in sales you're certainly thinking, "Demos?! Really??" And our answer is a resounding, Yes! But there's a small catch. It's time for marketers to rethink what a demo consists of. In the past (and as we record this podcast), a demo is when you go on a website, fill out a form and request to talk to a salesperson to see it in action. But as a marketer, your goal in 2022 and beyond needs to shift from feeding leads to the sales team and executing sales at scale. Sales shouldn't be respons...
Nov 17, 2021•1 hr 17 min
Positioning is the foundation on which your business is built. But most business leaders don't fully understand what good positioning is, let alone how to execute it successfully. In this episode, Chris talks one-on-one with April Dunford, widely regarded as one of the top minds on the subject matter. April goes through her 5 components of positioning that every organization needs to address including competitive alternatives, differentiated capabilities, value, segmentation, and market category...
Nov 14, 2021•36 min
What if I were to tell you that the way that you measure attribution is driving terrible business decisions and leading to huge amounts of wasted dollars? If you've been listening to this podcast for any period of time, you know that in order to make good strategic marketing decisions in 2021 and beyond, you need to fundamentally shift the way you think about attribution. Common sense would tell you that marketing attribution software can't measure word of mouth, community referrals, social medi...
Nov 12, 2021•41 min
As much as you wish it was, marketing is not a math equation. It's not even a science. And thinking it is, is an outdated idea that you need to unlearn ASAP. Marketing is an art. And the fact that comes along with that truth is that everything you do can't be measured with hard quantitative data. The real results come when you look deep into the qualitative data that helps you understand your customers. In this episode, we dive into what you need to do to unlearn the old and how to measure what ...
Nov 10, 2021•1 hr 21 min
Marketers are lying to themselves and their sales teams. They complain when sales can't seem to close their MQLs into won opportunities, but let's face it, the leads don't close because they're anything but qualified. It's the reason sales have such disdain for marketing. Instead of trying to flood sales with as many email addresses as you can, you should be trying to filter them the highest intent leads out there—the 1% that are ready to buy. We're talking about demand generation in dark social...
Nov 07, 2021•29 min•Ep. 210
The best marketing in the world right now is being done behind closed doors. By people that don't work for the brand. And don't benefit from referring it. I'm talking about communities. And the top-tier marketers are cultivating groups of die-hard fans, not by pitching products, but by offering access to subject matter expertise. But building a community isn't as simple as creating a Facebook group or slack channel. So what are the keys to getting a strong community off the ground? Today Chris i...
Nov 05, 2021•55 min
Buyers in 2021 and beyond want less involvement from a salesperson when doing product research. When buyers want to do most of the buying before talking to sales, it becomes a marketing-owned journey. And that is precisely why there has never been a better time to be a B2B marketer! In today's episode, Chris talks about what the top 1% of marketers are doing, why they're going to be on the same pay level as top salespeople, and what you need to do to get there. Register to join us live for the D...
Nov 03, 2021•1 hr 10 min
Talking to customers is one of the most under-utilized opportunities that marketers take advantage of. The learnings from talking to a single customer will change the way you do content creation. Do it at scale and you'll change the trajectory of your organization. But how do you get started? The easiest way—leverage the teams within your org that already talk to customers (like customer success) and piggyback off those meetings. You'll be glad you did! Register to join us live for the Demand Ge...
Oct 31, 2021•41 min
Unpopular opinion—Marketing's job isn't to give sales a bunch of leads for them to call on. Marketing's job is to sell at scale and pull in high intent buyers to request demos for sales to close. But how do you do that if you're KPIs are all based on generating low-intent leads from gated content downloads? In this episode, Chris talks about the current state of B2B marketing and how broken it is. He discusses lead gen status quo, why it always fails, and how to generate real, high intent inboun...
Oct 29, 2021•42 min
TikTok. It's no longer a platform to "keep an eye on". It's here to stay and has been the fastest growing social media platform, globally, over the last several years. But is it the right platform for you as a B2B SaaS company? Maybe, maybe not. In this episode, Chris talks about why Refine Labs is diving into TikTok as a brand and encouraging employees to do so as well.
Oct 27, 2021•53 min
You have an arsenal of marketing talent inside your organization. The question is, are you encouraging them to build their brand, or are you suppressing them? I'm talking about personal brands on LinkedIn and most companies are doing the latter. If you're worried about employees building a brand for themselves will cause them to leave, then you're not creating a culture that encourages them to stay. Having employees create personal brands is one of the best (and fastest) ways you can build autho...
Oct 24, 2021•25 min
Chris joins Daniel Murray to talk about Dark Social, how it was discovered, and how marketing teams need to get off the attribution hamster wheel if they want to succeed in the new world of social media, communities, word of mouth, and everything that isn’t (falsely) measured by your attribution software.
Oct 22, 2021•42 min
What is the most overlooked part of demand generation? Think about all the metrics you're measuring. All the channels you're covering. All the ad budget you're spending. Think about the number of leads you're collecting. Now ask yourself this: Do you check to see if anyone is actually consuming your message? If your answer is "No", then how do you know if you're effectively communicating with your buyers? That my friends is the most overlooked thing in demand gen programs. In today's episode, we...
Oct 20, 2021•1 hr 29 min
Dark Social is the difficult to measure areas where companies are creating demand for their category, brand, and product every single day. Brands that everyone knows and loves are built here, not through MQL generation. And let there be no confusion—the highest performing marketing teams in 2021 and beyond are winning by crushing their Dark Social strategy. Once you change how you measure marketing, what you optimize for, and how you think about attribution it opens up an incredible amount of op...
Oct 16, 2021•51 min
In this episode, Chris dives in on how to change your mindset on LinkedIn ads to get better returns. If you want to be successful with LinkedIn ads you need to shift your mindset. It’s time to leave 2011 marketing tactics behind and stop optimizing your paid LinkedIn ad spend for MQLs. Instead, optimize your ads to increase the reach of your organic content. Use ads to help build your organic machine so you can reach a massive audience and be top of mind when they are ready to buy, instead of wh...
Oct 13, 2021•1 hr 42 min
“Capturing intent data is the only way to get intent.” - Marketing teams everywhere^ It’s not true and it’s time to accept it. Chris sat down with Jake Dunlap to discuss how the industry relies on intent data that is flawed, solely for the purpose of creating a metric—even if it's sabotaging their success. In this episode, you'll learn about the three levels of intent and how to optimize your marketing to create real intent, rather than capturing assumed intent.
Oct 11, 2021•31 min
Marketing teams that start planning for 2022 now are the ones that are going to win in Q1. Teams that wait until December, or even early January, are the ones that are going to be scrambling and end Q1 in the hole. In this expert series of State of Demand Gen, Chris welcomes Dave Gerhardt to discuss their top three tips for developing a Q1 2022 marketing plan now. They dive into seasonality, marketing agility, testing new ideas and channels, and the necessities for a successful Q1.
Oct 08, 2021•55 min
Chris Walker and Megan Bowen brought the Demand Gen Live community back last night to discuss a couple agenda items in addition to a live Q&A. On the agenda: - How product-led growth companies should be thinking about enterprise demand - The Blended Funnel: why it’s hard to see it’s time to change your strategy. Chris answered follow-up questions in regards to the agenda items in addition to questions about how to tell when a channel is not working vs. the person managing the channel is not ...
Oct 06, 2021•1 hr 22 min
This episode consists of a recording from Chris’s speaking slot at the Clozd Win Loss Week event. He shares how to build a marketing strategy, covering everything from win/loss analysis, customer research, and marketing fundamentals.
Oct 03, 2021•47 min
Chris Walker and Megan Bowen brought the Demand Gen Live community together again last night for an hour-long episode. They covered the history of lead gen & ABM and the leading metric every marketing team should be measuring. They also hosted a live Q&A and answered questions about event strategy, direct mail, marketing without technology, and marketing career paths. Register here for next week's Demand Gen Expert Session with Dave Gerhardt, Chief Brand Officer at Drift....
Sep 29, 2021•1 hr 9 min
Chris joined The Marketing Starter podcast as a guest to talk about the dynamic between marketing sales, the making of a B2B brand, paid social and ABM. He got into a ton of marketing fundamentals and broke down what "just checking the box" looks like. Chris shared what happens when marketing takes on sales behaviors and calls them marketing.
Sep 27, 2021•37 min
This episode consists of a recording from Chris Walker's speaking engagement at the Full-Funnel Summit 2021. The theme for his talk was Measurement & Reporting.
Sep 25, 2021•43 min
Chris Walker and Megan Bowen hosted last night's Demand Gen Live from Austin, TX where they're gearing up for the Refine Labs offsite. They prepped a couple topics for the episode...The first, backed by actual data, being "The Attribution Mirage - Marketing teams are being led astray and think they’re being 'data-driven'" and the second "How to prepare your executive monthly/quarterly demand performance reports." They also took questions on content mapping, why only focusing on CPL will be your ...
Sep 24, 2021•50 min
