Mike Boyle:

You talk about this a lot and you’ve kind of touched on it already here, but how can B2B companies effectively target their ideal customers?

Chris Walker:

Yeah. So when it comes to an overall demand engine, I break this into three core places. So you’re going to have one level of demand capture. Demand capture could include retargeting people from your website, getting intent data about what accounts are on your website and then prioritizing outbound against them, getting intent data based on who’s on G2 and then prioritizing outbound against them. Just buying the core keywords and categories for G2 or Google Search that your customers would search when they’re looking to buy you. You have an element of demand capture. That’s basically the B2B strategy today. That’s the sole primary B2B strategy today, outbound based on intent data or MQL scores, retargeting and transactional SEM, SEO affiliates.

There’s actually two other layers to this. You have what I call a dark social thought leadership strategy, which would include live events, a podcast, organic social media content in the form of video or text or things like that that could actually create website content and YouTube content as well. So you have that, which is basically what we’re doing right now, what I do on the Revenue Vitals podcast and through LinkedIn.

And then you need to have an integrated campaign strategy to create demand inside of your target accounts. And that’s what we help a lot of B2B companies with specifically because we just have a process dialed in about how exactly to do this. You have to be able to identify who your top accounts are. Are you going to go after your strategies, your enterprise segment, your commercial, your SMB, all of them, all of them and segmented campaigns? So what’s the actual target accounts that you’re going after, step one.

And then how am I going to make tons of different variations of messaging, positioning, customer and social proof, thought leadership content, video animations? How am I going to make a lot of different creative campaigns across digital channels that go after these accounts that actively progress them through buying cycles? Get them on your website, get them engaged, get them consuming content, get them trying to do an ROI calculator if that’s a play that you make. And using the targeting capabilities and the overall activity of B2B buyers on a platform like LinkedIn and using that to get in front of all your target accounts superfast for relatively less expensive than any other B2B marketing tactics that’s used today, like content syndication, outbound sales, buying, building trade show booths and other things like that.

Mike Boyle:

I’m really looking forward to the answer to this question because I hear you talk about this all the time. How do you measure the success of B2B marketing campaigns?

Chris Walker:

Depends what the goal of the campaign is. In a high-intent search, you sell FP&A software and there’s a buyer in Google Search that’s searching FP&A software and you’re going to buy that keyword, you should be measuring it on dollars of pipeline created versus dollars of ad dollars spent. You should have a ratio of pipeline dollars per ad dollar. And then eventually, if you go at it long enough, you should be able to get to a close one revenue over at ad spend dollar and just get ROAS. So for demand capture type of stuff, you should be measuring ROAS and cost of acquisition.

And then when you think about demand creation, this is where a lot of B2B companies get stuck. And I’m sure B2C companies get stuck on it too because everybody’s looking for the attachment to revenue. And the core thing about demand creation, especially inside of dark social channels today, is that the measurement is very difficult to accomplish with the current measurement methodologies and technologies that are used in companies.

And so the overall effectiveness of a campaign, if you run a big campaign and you’re a leading sales tech company like Clari or Gong, you may not feel the impact of that campaign on the first day or within the first week. And so it’s actually very difficult to correlate this overall. So I never recommend that companies try and measure the success of a campaign. I instead say that you should make a bunch of campaigns and then measure the success of the channels.

And so it’s not about… Because maybe we run a campaign for Clari, we use 6sense and do some programmatic, it’s over at LinkedIn, we use another tool and we target across Facebook and Instagram. They might bring that and build it, bring it over to the web and out of home and part of their trade show or field event strategy. And then you got a big campaign. And so how are you going to be able to measure the effectiveness of all those things? I think it’s going to be really hard.

And so what I’d recommend instead is put a bunch of campaigns out on LinkedIn and different things and then see what your customers say is working. And when you get the information directly from your customers, it’s just super easy and it’s super clear what to keep doing and what to stop doing.

Mike Boyle:

You’ve touched on this a little bit, social media here, so let’s just stay here for a second. Let’s talk about B2B companies using social media, how to effectively promote their products and services these days, and maybe some of the best practices. I know you yourself for Refine Labs are on LinkedIn. Are you finding success in other channels? Are you using TikTok?

Chris Walker:

First, let me talk through what we’re doing and then let’s talk through B2B companies broadly. The order in which we built this overall system, and so the idea is that you build one channel, it’s working, you keep running it, then you go and build another channel, you get it to work, and you start getting compounding gains by having multiple channels being effective and running at the same time.

So we started with LinkedIn four years ago. I still continue to do LinkedIn. So it’s not like, “Oh, we did LinkedIn for two years, now let’s move on to a podcast.” It just builds. So LinkedIn, then live events that we do every week, then the podcast, then TikTok, then YouTube Shorts, and all of a sudden you have five heavy channels that are distributing content that all gets created through live events and podcasts and probably drive somewhere between 90 and 97% of our overall revenue.

And so the issue in B2B companies is that number one, their company page is a throwaway most of the time. Nobody gives a [inaudible [00:15:28] if you’re going to post about Happy Earth Day as your company or a picture of your offsite. If you want to use it as a recruiting tool and to do that, great, but it’s not going to drive business results that way, not at least on the net new revenue side.

Another thing is that what it basically comes down to is executives don’t believe in it. That’s really the discussion that needs to be had here, that executives don’t believe in it. And even if there’s people, I know a CEO of a thousand-person company that challenged the leaders on his team about whether or not LinkedIn was an effective channel. And then they got a bunch of data that showed how much revenue was being driven through that. And now that CEO posts on LinkedIn four times a week, hosts a podcast, and does all the strategies.

He went from somebody that didn’t believe in it six or nine months ago to his pot committed, fully executing it. And they’re crushing it. The company’s crushing it. Fundamental foundational shift in the overall company’s thinking and strategy at the executive level. And that’s the magic that can happen. But most companies are that CEO nine months ago, and most companies aren’t looking for the aha of why they should be moving on social despite how obvious the opportunity is.

Mike Boyle:

Misconceptions with B2B marketing, Chris. How can companies overcome them? That it’s hard to do, getting the right people, being in the right places, I mean they make up lots of excuses.

Chris Walker:

Yeah, I mean, let’s be honest, B2B marketing is hard. Sales is hard. Building products is hard. Running a great finance team is hard. Everything in B2B is hard, including marketing. And then the difference about whether or not you execute well on those I find is typically driven by how well and how much the executives in the company believe in it.

I’ve gone into so many different companies, have conversations with a CMO or a CRO or a CEO and at the beginning of the calls they tell me, “I don’t think that we have the right people on the team.” And I tell them, “After doing this with so many companies, what I usually find is that the people on the team are high quality and can get the job done, and they’re not being put in a position to succeed by the executive team and the marketing leadership. And when you put them in a position to succeed, they thrive. And maybe you got a couple people that aren’t going to make it, but you definitely don’t need to clean house on your 15-person marketing team right now. And the people have the talent to execute. They need to be put in a position to succeed by the executive team, the company, and the board.”

Mike Boyle:

You’ve talked about the depth of people that you have on your team in terms of B2B marketers. Can you talk a little bit about skills that B2B marketers need to be focusing on and developing? And perhaps there’s somebody who’s young listening, starting out in this career, some advice that you might have for them to build a successful career in B2B marketing.

Chris Walker:

I can give blanket advice here, but I’m going to go a little bit deeper. It really depends on what your goal is. If you want to be a senior marketing manager, make $120K, and take care of your family and have all the weekends, you’re going to have a different plan than the person that wants to be the CEO of a $100 million run rate company.

But some blanket things that I think would make marketers far more effective at any level and get increasingly important as your level goes up, business acumen and financial basics. You have to be able to read a P&L. You have to understand how to calculate the cost of acquisition. You need to understand key metrics that your finance team is looking at every day, every month, every quarter. Getting primary market research directly from customers in qualitative and quantitative formats. Every marketer should be doing this, not just the product marketing team. So all marketers should be engaging with customers, understanding them, coming up with perspectives on overall strategy and tactics. I’d be hard-pressed not to say that if you are a marketer today and you don’t create content for yourself or your business, then you’re really missing out. The number one driver of business results today is content that gets put in social networks.

So if you don’t understand the two parts of that, the actual content creation, getting customer insights that then lead you to what is the type of content that we should create to address objections, to shift the narrative, to help educate people, what is that? And then you have all of the downstream stuff, which is content distribution. And sometimes companies split this between two people. So the people getting the insights, the people creating the content, and the people distributing the content are three separate teams. And sometimes the data doesn’t get passed around. And the reason that I get such great insights is because I come up with the insights, I make the content myself, and I publish the content myself, which then leads me to 50 or 100 comments, DMs, and other things like that that then bring me back the insights.

And so understanding all three parts of that loop, insights, content strategy and content creation, and then content distribution mainly on social platforms I would be remiss not to mention that. I think those are three strong areas.

And then I think if you’re a marketer today, and I don’t want to get overly tech on this one, I think you need to understand how to build reports inside your CRM and look at data in the right way to make informed decisions. If you have to ask your marketing ops manager to build a report for you in Salesforce, then you have some challenges. You should be able to do that stuff yourself. You should be able to slice it, create reports, build dashboards, look at different data, know what you’re looking at to drive the right conclusions and strategy.

And then I think something that’s on the fringe, I think a lot of marketers should be experimenting with AI. I think the benefits of AI in the short-term are going to be operational. So taking a six-step manual process that partially is done by humans and automating the whole thing to 80% I think will be one key thing. And so marketers that used to be able to create three blogs a month now could probably create 60, 100, more than that just through operational efficiency. And there might be some wins to gain there in the short-term.

So those are the things I think marketers could be focused on. And obviously, I didn’t cover everything holistically, but those are a couple of key points.

Mike Boyle:

Chris, before I cut you loose, there’s two things that I wanted to cover with you, after all this is the Salesforce Simplified podcast. You folks there at Refine Labs, you have your own Salesforce app. Talk a little bit about that.

Chris Walker:

Yeah, so what happened was we would go, we worked with over 200 B2B companies, most of them use Salesforce or HubSpot, many of them Salesforce. And we would go into those companies and we would do the same manual “marketing ops”, rev ops work for every single customer. We would do the same exact work, build the same dashboards, the same reports, map the same data, same automations, all that different stuff.

And so we basically found a pattern and said, “Hey, if we created automation around this, then we would be able to do this for a customer in one day instead of six weeks.” And so what the Salesforce app is amongst other features, it basically automates the use of a custom object to do full-funnel marketing, ROI tracking. It could actually be sales tracking as well. So you could do basically full rev ops.

And basically what it comes down to is the best practice inside of every B2B company should be using a custom object to do full-funnel tracking. Lead date stamps and lead stamps are not enough anymore. You should be using a custom object. And so if you believe in that theory that you should be using a custom object to get all the visibility, then you have to decide am I going to pay my marketing ops team or a marketing ops agency 50 to 150 grand to build this, or could I install automation software that gets me 80, 90% of the way there and then I can configure the rest of the way myself and save $100,000 in six to eight weeks of time?

And so that’s the overall proposition here that basically if you believe in the idea of using a custom object in Salesforce, we’ve automated 80, 90% of it and you can self-configure the rest based on your business needs. So that’s the Salesforce app.

Mike Boyle:

And there’s more information about that on your website as well, refinelabs.com. And when you go there, there’s also a really cool resource that B2B marketers should check out too. It’s called The Vault. What would people find inside The Vault?

Chris Walker:

The insight on The Vault is that about two or three years ago, and it’s part of what I mentioned earlier, is that it’s not that B2B marketers aren’t talented enough to get the job done. I’ve found often that it was either being restricted by executives in the metrics or just simply not having the right information about what to do. And so what we did at Refine Labs is created a product and membership product that B2B marketers or marketing teams can buy that basically has validated information, playbooks, templates, step-by-step guides of all the things that we’ve done with B2B customers for the past four years.

So we’ve done it with more than 200 companies. We’ve had a lot of reps. We have a lot of opportunity to optimize in a far different view than a marketer has at one individual company in terms of repeatability and scale. And so we’ve taken all that information, packaged it into a asynchronous learning system with videos, templates, and documents that gets complimented with live learning classes, some classes that I teach, group coaching and other sort of live learning sessions in addition to a network of B2B marketers that includes a social network component of it, as well as job boards and other professional development things. So that’s The Vault overall with the goal of basically creating the next wave of CMOs.

Mike Boyle:

And I highly recommend it to everyone. Chris, this has really been a pleasure to have you on the Salesforce Simplified podcast. There is a part two. I have a whole other bunch of questions for you. We’ll do that down the road. I hope you will come back.

Chris Walker:

Mike, thanks for having me. Really appreciate you having me on the show. Great chat.

Mike Boyle:

Thank you, sir. And if you’d like to learn a little bit more about Chris and Refine Labs, I’m going to be placing some helpful links inside this episode’s show notes. I’m Mike Boyle from Ad Victoriam Solutions. Thanks for joining us for the latest edition of the Salesforce Simplified podcast. Our next episode is just around the corner.

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