30. A CFO’s Guide To Measuring Marketing ROI – and it isn’t by MQLs! with Chris Walker

30. A CFO’s Guide to Measuring Marketing ROI – and it isn’t by MQLs! with Chris Walker – Refine Labs

Hannah Munro: 0:48 

So, hello everybody and welcome to this episode of CFO 4.0. Today we're taking a slight off-track conversation and we're going to talk about marketing. And I hear you asking why we're talking about marketing on a CFO podcast. Well, obviously you as CFOs are going to be discussing with your marketing team how they're measuring, doing investments in marketing. And so, I think it's really important for us to actually talk about, you know, how do we measure marketing and, you know, what are some of the So, with me today, I have one of the thought leaders in the marketing world at the moment, Mr. Chris Walker. So, Chris is founder of the Demand Gen podcast and also founder of Refine Labs. So, welcome, Chris. It's awesome to have you on the show. 

Chris Walker: 1:35 

Hannah, I am excited to be on the show. I'm excited to talk about these topics. It's something that I feel passionate about for the people that are listening for a little bit of context. I'm a marketer, but first and foremost, I'm a business person right and so, I understand finance I've run several businesses I understand how it works I spend a lot of time in PNLs like and so, just giving a I just want to give a little bit of context for that because I don't believe that all marketers have that skill or look at it through that lens 

Hannah Munro: 2:06 

and I think that's a really good point so, just for context for our listeners talk a little bit about your background chris how did you end up doing what you do now. 

Chris Walker: 2:13 

Yeah, so, I studied engineering in university, and then I worked at a large British holdings company called Hama and rotated around their subsidiaries. It's about 60 technology and engineering companies that I rotated around and did things like product management, engineering. process optimization. We were manufacturing millions of units of a hardware product. And so, saving some time on the manufacturing line or changing a part out and reducing cost of goods could increase margin by like 10% gross margin for the entire company. And so, I spent a lot of time in those types of roles, which now I look at like a revenue generating system, just like I would look at a manufacturing system, which gives me a very systematic methodological full from beginning to end process, which a lot of marketers, a lot of salespeople, and a lot of CFOs don't look at it in the full process. And so, that's part of the background. At the same period of time, I started several e-commerce companies from my bedroom, importing goods, private labelling them, branding them, and then selling them online. And the thing that I learned there that's interesting for people is that when you're building your own company and you have no brand and no customers, the number one thing is you find out very quickly whether or not the marketing works or not. And if you're going to move into advertising, you're going to find out very quickly whether or not the advertising works because you're spending your own money. And so, I knew that the product that I was selling was $60. And I knew that my landed cost was $24. And I knew that I had $36 to acquire that customer in order to make a profit. And so, a lot of sales-led B2B marketers don't look at that because they are... They've been trained to measure on cost per lead, not cost per acquired customer, right? And so, I took that learning and then I moved into venture funding companies for the past four years of my career before I started my business. And I took all of those foundational learnings, and I started to implement marketing in a different way. I started to look at the process individually. entirely I started to look at pipeline and revenue outcomes relative to the costs that were being spent on marketing I looked at the sales cycle length and the win rates and how much more productive our sales team was when you did marketing well I looked at how low our customer acquisition cost how much better our growth rate was how we could change marketing investments and dramatically change the trajectory growth trajectory of the company and then after that company iPod I started my business because I realized how unique my model that I built at that company was and now we do it for 25 sales-led enterprise SaaS companies throughout the world actually north America amia apac middle east and so, um that's where we are right now we run demand marketing we help marketers quantify their impact in a better way we help them make better decisions on where to invest money we help them cut out programs that are complete waste of money unproductive for the sales team that's what we do 

Hannah Munro: 5:06 

Awesome. So, what do you think are some of the shifts in marketing that have changed? Because if we look back sort of five, 10 years, the traditional model is that the cost per MQL lead. So, what are the shifts that are changing that? So, what are some of the changes that you're seeing? 

Chris Walker: 5:24 

The major shift that CFOs need to understand is that over the past 10 years, what's happened is that buyers have way more control over their process because of the access to information and the communication layer between peers that didn't exist 10 years ago. And so, buyers have far more control over the process. And so, 10 years ago, let's go back to 2011, sales owned a majority of the customer journey in 100K ACV deal. And marketing's job was to get a contact, an email address, a phone number, because there was no other way to get it because Zoom info wasn't at scale. And so, they needed to collect a phone number in order for the sales team to have somebody to call. That's where we were. And so, that's what marketing job was, and it made sense, and it worked to measure marketing on cost per lead because that was the only way to access the information. Now here we are in 2021. You can go into Zoom Info at any point and get all that data. You can go into LinkedIn at any point and message a CFO or a CTO or a CIO or whoever you're selling to directly. You can send them mail, like all these different sales actions that you can do on your own without marketing sourcing the contact information for you. But a lot of marketing teams still are measured on how many contacts can we source so, our sales team can try to do sales to people that don't want to buy right now. And so, when you flip that and you think, okay, now like buyers want to do most of their journey on their own. We need to market to people until they're ready to buy. And then they come to us and say, hey, I'd like to talk to your sales rep about buying stuff. Marketing needs to own more of the journey, get someone all the way to the end. And then sales can handle the transaction in an incredibly efficient, incredibly productive, incredibly cost-effective way relative to what's happening right now. And I think that's where the market has moved. And that's where buyers have moved. That's where the market has moved. And a lot of companies have not adopted to this. adjusted to this reality. 

Hannah Munro: 7:18 

So, I think what you're saying there is actually the role of marketing has changed from being that sort of information gathering. 

Chris Walker: 7:24 

Contact acquisition to full stack customer journey. I need to get someone educated, on board with our narrative, ready to implement, and then get that into sales. It's a completely different revenue generation model and way of thinking. 

Hannah Munro: 7:42 

So, if we look at that shift then, so, what does that mean in terms of measurement? So, if you're not measuring on the number of contacts, what should be the focus in terms of measurement? 

Chris Walker: 7:53 

Yeah. So, let's just back up a little bit. So, for anyone that is measuring cost per contact, I would encourage you because I've done this at 30 companies in the past 12 months. I would encourage you because you're going to have the data on your contact and where they came from and how much you spent. And you can look at what was the percentage of those contacts that became a customer over the past 12 months? How much did it? And then you can calculate how much it cost you to get a customer. You can quantify how much sales team's time was wasted spending time on leads that did not become a customer, which is in incredible hidden cost, hidden costs there for the CFOs. I know that. Um, and so, you can quantify all those things. I go in there and do that for companies, a hundred million dollar ARR executives drop their draw, drop their job when they see some of this data where they're spending, you know, $150,000 to get a $25,000 customer because the marketing, because they, it's a facade measuring on cost per lead. The cost per lead looks great. They're getting leads for 20 bucks, but none of those leads become a customer. And so, um, that’s why the model is starting to break down. It's starting to break down because the easiest way to collect cheap leads is to collect cheap leads that have zero buying intent and buying intent is a huge factor as to whether or not your sales team is going to be able to close that deal and whether or not they want to talk to your sales rep and whether or not your sales rep wants to talk to them. And so, the new method of measurement that I use right now is one, we need to better define what a lead is. And so, the way that I define a lead is a person, an ICP qualified, firmographically qualified buyer that comes to our website on their own and says, hey, I would love to talk to your sales rep about buying your product. That's it. And so, you cut out all of the eBook downloads. You cut out all of the content syndication garbage that wastes so, much people's time. And you stop doing those things. And you focus on how I get more people to say, I want to talk to your sales rep about buying this. And then after you change the metric, you can completely change your marketing approach. And so, for the CFOs out there and for the executives out there, you need to change your mind set about what marketing is. We just talked about that. Then you need to change your metrics. Then you need to change your actual marketing execution. The marketing execution can't change until you change the other two things. And so, the way that we measure marketing is how many of those people came in. How much pipeline did that create? Relative to the amount of money that we spent to create that pipeline. And then how many customers came out of that relative to the amount of money that we spent to get those customers. What were the sales cycle lengths? What was the win rate? What was the average deal size? And how does that compare to other methods that we're doing to generate revenue like outbound sales? And you can make a direct comparison. And I do make this direct comparison, and outbound sales is dramatically more expensive than if you do this well, 50%. less expensive to do it this way and acquire customers for way cheaper. And I've been doing it for companies for a very long time. And so, that's how I think companies should move to measure marketing, which is a lower volume. When you have a lower volume of higher quality leads, perhaps you don't need as many salespeople because those salespeople are arguably less productive because they're following up with garbage leads. The salespeople that you do have are going to be incredibly talented, hopefully be very educated on your buyer, hopefully be hitting quota. You need less of them. They can do more strategic outbound to higher value accounts when they're not wasting their time following up with a 20K ACV deal that doesn't want to buy that downloaded an e-book. And so, you can see how this completely shifts the model. high efficiency leads scale through marketing, scale that up. You need less SDRs, perhaps less salespeople. Those salespeople can be more productive. They can spend more time going outbound to higher value accounts for you. And that's how I think the companies will start to change. And then there's a, there's, you can use the excess dollars that gets saved there, depending on the stage of your company. That could be millions, perhaps tens of millions of dollars that could be saved throughout that process that you could then perhaps invest in future, faster growth, more brand building for marketing, whatever. But you could also invest it in customer success. You could also invest it in product. You could also invest it in operational things to make your business work better. But companies spend so, much money on customer acquisition that they need to make compromises on customer success, product, all these other things that are incredibly important to grow a business long term. And so, yeah, that's how I think companies should change. 

Hannah Munro: 12:27 

And I think there's some really interesting points. So, for a point of clarity for our listeners, so, what do we mean by outbound versus inbound? What's the definition that we're working to here? 

Chris Walker: 12:40 

So, I think about it from the buyer's perspective. And so, if we're doing marketing, or you could even be doing outbound sales for this reason. So, if we're doing marketing and a buyer comes to our website and says, hey, I want to talk to your sales rep, that's inbound. The buyer came into us. 

Hannah Munro: 12:56 

Mm-hmm. 

Chris Walker: 12:56 

If you're doing outbound sales, we're going to call that person when they weren't expecting it, and we're going to try and get them into a meeting. So, we went outbound to that person. So, that's the difference. And if you can split your mind on where the buyer is, you'll see in your data that the win rates, the sales cycle lengths, all these different things are different based on how the buyer gets to you. And so, there's clear patterns in your data. I know this to be true because I've done it at enough companies. There's clear patterns in your data based on how the buyer gets to you to start the opportunity. 

Hannah Munro: 13:32 

And I think that's a really good point. So, to our listeners, if you're looking to evaluate sort of the ROI of your marketing, the first thing you need to understand is, you know, is kind of getting that split from a cost perspective between those inbound and those outbound. 

Chris Walker: 13:45 

It just gives you a baseline, right? Like, I think a lot of executives in general have unrealistic expectations for what marketing can do to their business and so, by evaluating by quantifying what's happening on the sales outbound sales side that every company does you can have a baseline to understand if marketing did as good as our outbound channel if we invested the same amount of money that we're doing in sales to do outbound sales in marketing, then this is how many customers we should expect to get. This is how much pipeline we should expect to get. And then marketing's job is to be the most efficient, cost-efficient way to grow a company and therefore should have lower cost per qualified opportunity, lower customer acquisition costs. That's the goal. 

Hannah Munro: 14:24 

Awesome. And I think one of the shout-outs, and again, just following up some of your points, Chris, is for people to understand what their organization means by lead, by... opportunity by deal because that can vary quite a lot across organizations as well. 

Chris Walker: 14:41 

And then people look at things so, transactionally that they don't understand other things. If you do marketing well for two years, your outbound sales works better because people know you, because people like you, because people know what you do. You know what I mean? And so, there's no measurement mechanism to that. You're not going to be able to attribute that because brand is a feeling, right? There's not going to be some attribution software that's going to say, oh, because we've done marketing well for two years, now our outbound sales is working better. You're just going to give credit to the sales side. I work with CMOs that work with us for several years and struggle with that when their outbound SQOs go up by 400% because they built brand and the outbound sales channel works better. 

Hannah Munro: 15:25 

And I think that's a really good point. So, again, remembering that our CFOs, what do we mean by brand and by brand marketing? What sort of activities would fall under that umbrella in your opinion? 

Chris Walker: 15:37 

CFOs know the understanding of what an investment means. I think a lot of CFOs would get what that means. I think the challenge in a lot of specifically venture-funded B2B companies is that their investments require short-term ROI. And so, when it requires short-term ROI, it becomes transactional, short-term, and stuck in this attribution model that favours MarTech vendors that have platforms that can measure that stuff, as opposed to the things that work the best and are difficult to measure. And so, I'll give you an example. We started our company two years ago. We made an investment in a podcast 12 months ago. in the first three months our podcast didn't do much for us last month we drove a million dollars in net new business through a podcast with no sales team and that number is going to continue to grow for people that's an investment and so, what CFOs need to understand is if you do brand well and we're going to break down brand later if you do brand well it will up outpace sales dramatically over the long term. And I think a lot of CFOs don't see that because they've grown up in a time for the majority of their career where the way that you grow a business is scaling sales headcount as opposed to scaling sales team efficiency through marketing. And that's what I think is the path in the future. 

Hannah Munro: 17:00 

And I think that's a really interesting shift in understanding also how buyers buy. Because buyers, you talked a lot about buyer intent and selling and marketing differently. So, talk to us a little bit about the process that buyers go through and how people buy now in the current age. 

Chris Walker: 17:21 

So, I'm not going to go through this elementary buyer journey component, but essentially... I think that there's several ways that people research, discover and purchase products that are dramatically different than what was happening 10 years ago. And so, 10 years ago, the way that people discovered products, just think about this in 2011, the internet wasn't at maturity. There was very few social platforms. B2B buyers did not communicate with other B2B people on social platforms. There was no Slack communities like Revenue Collective or all the other communities that are popping up that facilitate word of mouth between very smart, connected people. And so, in 2011, the ways that people discovered products were that they would go to a conference and they would peruse the trade show floor and look for a new innovation because there was no other way to discover it. Or they would go to Google, and they would try and find it. And 10 years later, the way that people discover and buy things is that they consume content from a company that makes them aware of problems or a new and a better way to do things. Or they hear about it from somebody that they trust. Very few Google searches lead to non-branded generic searches lead to purchases anymore. I need people to really think about that. Brand is the most important thing. And so, you want someone in brand, the easiest way to say it, somebody wants to buy something, they can go to Google, and they can search financial analysis software, or they can search your brand. And my objective is for more people to search my brand rather than fighting over people that are brand agnostic that are looking across four or five vendors and most likely you're going to lose in those. And so, that's how I think about it. 

Hannah Munro: 19:14 

And that's a really important point though, isn't it? And it's hard to measure those activities that are driving brands and what's actually doing it. So, yeah, where do you go with it? 

Chris Walker: 19:25 

So, executives, this is not just CFOs anymore. This is CMOs, this is CEOs, this is head of salespeople. Everyone has been trained by marketing technology vendors to measure certain things that those marketing technologies can measure because it incentivizes the use of the marketing technology. People really need to think about that statement. The metrics that companies use have been decided by MarTech vendors that have a vested interest in you measuring those things so, that you use their product. Instead of looking at all of those things, I tend to look at the things that actually drive business. To be honest, some of the things in that platform probably do, but a majority of them don't. A majority of them are leading vanity metrics that make you feel like you're doing something, that go into some spreadsheet to make an ROI calculation that's never true, that never actually plays out practically. That's where we are. And so, instead of arguing about which different thing happened, I think people like, attribution software pushes companies to do specific marketing tactics that are transactional so, that you can measure them. And so, the things that we do here are very challenging to measure. But like I said at the beginning, when we look at our marketing results, the way that we measure it is how many people came to our website and asked to buy something. And is that number growing? And is the pipeline associated number growing, aka the conversion rates are staying the same? And is the revenue number growing, aka are the conversion rates staying the same throughout the full cycle? And how much is it costing us to do that over time? That's the way that I look at it. And then it's a smart marketer's job, an architect is what I call it, a marketing architect, to put together all the different systems that bring people in. And so, when companies look at attribution, they focus on capturing demand. I'm going to split this up to two people. Capturing demand is when a buyer is solution aware, product aware, and is ready to buy. And where do those people go to look for things? They look in Google. They look in Captera, G2, or they go to your website. that's where companies focus and they focus on the small percentage of the market that is actively buying right now and our what I prefer is to go out and create demand aka talk to the 99.9 of the market that's not in a buying cycle right now build brand educate them on the problems that that they have that they may not be aware of make them aware that there are solutions to that problem in a way that's not salesy, that's educational, that's objective. So, that when they do move into a buying cycle, which oddly enough happens faster because when they're aware of problems, they see them more inside of their own business. And when they see the problem inside of their business, they think of your brand, not how do I solve this and make a top of funnel search in Google. And you don't need to win in Google because you've won way before that. But that part of the process is hard to measure. And so, when you look at it like an entire funnel, the things that we do right now that are most effective, none of them get measured, right? Attribution software measures them all wrong. I know because I'm running the whole system. 90% of our revenue gets attributed to organic search. We do zero SEO. have spent zero time on SEO and 90% of revenue gets attributed to organic search. And people need to think about that because they see in the attribution data, oh, all of our revenue is coming through organic search, not understanding that buyers pass through Google to get to your website when they're ready to buy. And the other touch points that happened, AKA somebody told them to buy your product, AKA they saw some of your content in LinkedIn, AKA they saw one of your ads on Instagram, And then they go to Google and they search and you give all the credit to organic search and you stop doing all the other things and you invest all your money in SEO and people don't do that anymore. And so, that's a, that's one very easy common way where attribution data goes wrong at the executive level. Um, so, the things that we do that work the best, a podcast, there is, when this thing goes live on our podcast, there will be zero data of the people that listened to it and how it moved them forward. There would be zero tracking to that. But I know, because I do every sales call here, that when people show up on the Zoom, within the first five minutes, they say, I am a huge fan of your podcast. I would love to talk about this. And that's my data. I don't need visible data. I don't need a hundred-thousand-dollar attribution software to tell me that it's working. We do LinkedIn organic. We've built a majority of the early growth of our company was built on LinkedIn organic posting every day. Companies don't do it because they can't measure it because they need to see some UTM data to click through an organic post, to get to their website, to ask for a demo. When I know that CMOs watch hundreds of my videos before they convert and they don't like them, they don't comment. They just watch them. And there's no tracking around that ever. Um, we run heavy paid social ads for companies that are not lead gen that are teaching people things that are showing them problems, illuminating problems. They didn't know they had showing them other customers that have had success in what that looked like. And we use paid social to distribute that content, not to collect leads. And when we do that, it's difficult to track as well. But when we spend, when we go from spending 5,000 a month on Facebook ads to $50,000 a month, and the pipeline grows by nine X pretty clear, what's driving that outcome. And we can, we do have metrics in place to measure it, but not at the contact level and attribution software. And so, we're not just out here spending money. Like we do have methods to track it. It's just a non-traditional way of tracking it that companies will not accept because of how Martech vendors have positioned their products. And so, I'd really challenge people to think about that because all the things that I just said, zero marketers are incentivized to do anything that I just said inside of your company. And we're growing at a massive rate because we're doing these things and we're not doing all the stuff that every other company does because they can measure it. So, I just wish some people would take this information and think about marketing differently because it's the most simple... Simple is not the right word. It's the... It's the thing that you can change most easily. You're not going to be able to make your product the best in class overnight. You're not going to be able to get your 100-person sales team to be dramatically better over the next three months. But you can change your marketing and make a dramatic impact. It's the thing that you can change the most quickly, the most agile, and make an impact today. And so, that's what I look at. 

Hannah Munro: 26:32 

And I think if I just take you back to a comment you made, which I thought is a really good piece, is there's two types of measurement almost, isn't there? There's measuring the building and the demand building piece, and there's measuring the amount you're spending on capturing demand. And do you have any thoughts on... If you had $100,000 a year, how you would split that in terms of that revenue cost? How much would you spend on capturing demand versus how much would you spend on creating it? 

Chris Walker: 27:04 

Yeah, so, first off, the way that I think about the measurement is looking at it in two separate ways. It's not necessarily created demand and capture demand. It's looking at it at the business level. AKA what's happening in Salesforce that marketing is sourcing for pipeline and revenue, and high intent leads versus what's happening at the channel level. And companies try and measure this all in the same thing, which then requires them to do the wrong behaviours inside of certain channels. And so, I knew that my LinkedIn content was working because when I only had a thousand followers, because seven CMOs at companies that I wanted to sell to commented on my post. And now, probably 700 or more CMOs do this, look at, see the content and do the same thing. And it makes dramatically more impact, but I knew it at the beginning and a CFO, or an executive would look at that and say, oh, you got 12 likes on your LinkedIn post. This is a waste of time. Do something else. Where are the leads? Because they think about things in too short term and they don't understand those types of things. Like I had multiple conversations with CMOs inside of the comments on LinkedIn in a more effective way than your outbound team calls, tries to cold call CMOs. It's a different way to do business development. And so, if I had a hundred thousand dollars, maybe we could make it more realistic. We can call it a million dollars. And so, um, if I, if I had a million dollars, the process is to the, the process of capturing demand is not that expensive. And so, there's a lot of things like conversion optimization, lead handoff optimization, making sure that when somebody converts, they get to the person that's educated, that can guide them through the process, not an SDR that doesn't know what they're talking about and needs to book a meeting and do BANT qualification. That person came through, they're an executive title at a perfect size company, and they asked for a demo of your product, and you're going to pass that to an SDR to do BANT? 

Unknown: 28:59 

Yeah. 

Chris Walker: 28:59 

That should go directly to an account executive. You need to fix your process around that. Your conversion rates will get way better. Your buyers will be happier. It will work better. You just need to separate those leads from the junk that you need SDRs to sort through. That process is capturing demand. Then I would spend what I needed to on Google search that justifies the spend. Venture-funded companies, one of the places where they waste the most money in marketing is they overspend on Google search. to the tune of three, four, five X more than they need to spend. We've gone into companies that spend $200,000 a month on Google search ads and reduce that to $20,000. And we had $180,000 to go out and create demand with better revenue outcomes at 20 K than 200 K because they waste a lot of money because the Google platform is built to help you waste money. And they build metrics inside of the platform to make you feel good about wasting money. It's just the truth. It's the, it's really the truth. And so, whatever that number is, I think that's probably going to be to the tune for a regular SaaS company to the tune of $25,000 a month. So, now that's $300,000. You have $700,000 more. With the $700,000, I would hire one person that's a subject matter expert that has done the job of my buyer. Maybe that person's in your company and you don't need to hire them. A lot of companies have that person inside of their company. You sell to CFOs; you got a CFO. If you sell to CFOs, perhaps the CFO should be the face of your podcast because they are an expert, and they can actually provide value to your customers instead of an SDR or a marketing manager. And it's no knock on an SDR or a marketing manager. They just haven't done the job of a CFO before. Therefore, they're not positioned to provide value to that person. And so, I would have that person. Let's just pretend that they're in-house already because most have it. So, there's no expense to that. I would build around them the way to build a community, a virtual event series with a live Q&A that happens weekly that gets into a podcast and fuels LinkedIn. The resources around that is somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000 a year. Let's call it $200,000 a year. We have $500,000 more. With the last $500,000, depending on the buyer and different things like that, I would create... pictures and videos and different things like that. And I would run targeted ads at the job titles to the people at the job titles at the companies that I want to sell to. And I would run them on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram, potentially YouTube. And I would spend 50% of that money 250k on the pictures and videos and things like that. And I would spend the other 250k on the media. And that's what I would do, which is Incredibly different than what anyone would do with a million dollars. 

Hannah Munro: 31:45 

Yeah. It'd be really interesting if, you know, CFOs listening to this, if you looked at what your company's spending on at the moment and where that sits, I think it'd be fascinating to understand like how different that is. And you may... So, in terms of the... the attribution piece, because that's what a lot of conversations are about, isn't it? You know, how much are we spending on Facebook and what is Facebook driving? You know, talk to us about some of the challenges with that approach generally, because, you know, you said like, want to spend, you know, half a, you know, half a million on basically brand, wasn't it? So, sharing videos and content. It's 

Chris Walker: 32:27 

more than that. It was probably 80%, whatever the Google search was it. And then the rest of it was on brand, 70% on brand. Um, and all I think about is just, so, just for CFOs and everyone, like when I think about brand, it's very different than how you might think about it. It is not the colours of your website. It's, it's brand marketing, communicating with your customers in a way that creates affinity to your company, which leads them to consider you when they're ready to buy something that's brand for when they want to talk about you. And people think that you can only get word of mouth referrals from people that are your customer. People refer us business all the time and they just like our content. They've never worked with us, right? And so, that's something else to consider. But when you get into attribution, companies have been trained because of the way that Google was set up at the beginning. It was the first digital advertising channel. And in Google, it's an intent-based capture demand channel. I'm going in there and I'm looking to buy HR software. And I say, HR software to make my onboarding go faster. And then I hit enter. And then if you have that tool, you can put your ad there and I want it and then I click on it and buy. And that's what happens in Google. And if you think about how you use LinkedIn or how you use Instagram or how you listen to a podcast, that is not what you do. You do not have intent to buy something when you're on there. And so, when there's not intent, you need a different marketing approach, and you need different marketing metrics in order to support it. And you need a different mindset about what you're trying to do because people don't have intent, and you don't need to convert them there. And so, people take this Google mindset and move it into LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, wherever else they can do it. And they collect leads that have no buying intent, and they churn through them with SDRs and get very little revenue out because they can measure it. because attribution forces marketers to do that in LinkedIn because they need, when they spend a hundred thousand dollars, they need to report back to the CFO on how many leads they got and how much those leads cost as opposed to how much the customer that you acquired cost and how much, how much, what the win rate was between the lead and the customer. which if you do that will be 0.1%. Any CFO can go and check their Salesforce data. You do that tactic eBook download on LinkedIn ads to an SDR. You will win those at 0.1% or less, which means that if you're paying $50 per lead, it's going to cost you $50,000 in advertising costs to get that customer. And that doesn't include your marketing headcount or your sales headcount or your sales commissions. And so, that's something that that's something to think about. Um, the lead, metric creates those situations where that stuff can happen, and people don't see it. 

Hannah Munro: 35:48 

And I guess that lead metric is being created at the top level, isn't it? 

Chris Walker: 35:52 

The lead metric gets created by LinkedIn because it incentivizes you to spend more money on LinkedIn because you have leads for $40 and that's a... decided industry benchmark that that's a good cost per lead. And we go and work with companies. And we, over a year-long period of time, reduce the number of leads they get by more than 90% by better defining what a lead is and changing marketing around that. So, their leads go down by 90%. And their qualified pipeline goes up by more than 100%. 

Hannah Munro: 36:30 

Wow. 

Chris Walker: 36:31 

And so, with less leads, with no additional budget, just changing what marketing's doing, get 90% less leads, get more qualified pipeline by a dramatic amount, sometimes 300. We've had one company that's 300% increase in qualified pipeline over a year with no additional budget. And then you have all this time where your SDRs were calling 35,000 junk leads that they can do something else with. Yeah. And so, ... It's just like the lead metric doesn't matter. And when we do that, when we shift and we reduce the leads by 90%, because the win rates are so, much higher, the conversion rates are so, much higher, you can pay a lot more for a lead. I'm pumped for a $50,000 a year software tool to pay somewhere between $500 and $1,000 per lead because I know that we're going to win them at 7% to 10% as opposed to win them at 0.1% where I need the cheapest lead possible. And so, there's just like so, many things that have been ingrained in executives. Cost per lead. We need a bunch of leads. This is how we're going to measure it. And what I've done over the past five years is challenge all of those assumptions. Found a better way to do marketing that I feel like is just objective. It objectively works better than what's happening right now. And I hope some people take the information and use it. 

Hannah Munro: 37:50 

I think that's a really good shout. And when you think about it, measuring activity... is not necessarily a measure of success, isn't it? Because that's what we do when we're measuring cost per lead. We're measuring the activity that we're doing in marketing rather than the outcome. And so, by that, exactly what you said, that shift over to actually measuring the pipeline, the qualified pipeline that's come in that has buying intent that is fully bank qualified and is actually closing, it just makes so, much more sense. 

Chris Walker: 38:18 

Yeah. Let's talk about the lead handoff that every company does for predictable revenue where there's a person that comes in that's qualified firmographically that asks to talk to your sales rep about buying something, and it takes them at least one, perhaps two calls to even get to that person. Let's talk about that. The way that I look at this is that in 2016, I was doing this, and the company wanted to send the leads that I was generating to Yeah. Yeah. Don't do that because there's a perceived efficiency around a lower-cost employee Bant qualifying someone before they give it to a rep like it's 2007. If an executive comes to your website, if you're selling to CFOs at companies that are 200 employees or above, and a CFO at a company that's 500 employees in an industry that you know that you have an advantage to win comes in and asks for a demo, you don't need Bant. Those people are qualified. You don't need an SDR to check that. That person has authority. The rep can figure out timeline on the call. They clearly have a need because they asked for a demo. They have the budget because executives know how to... Anyone smart knows how to find budget. I've been a marketing manager and found millions of dollars of budget by making a business case. I just think that that process is not buyer centric. It's also not... business centric because I've measured that the difference between those two processes and you win more deals when you give high intent leads directly to reps. 

Hannah Munro: 40:23 

So, I think there's a couple of things to point out just to, to sort of sum up there. So, what we're saying that is obviously the first point is, are you generating good, good quality leads that you're, you're actually want. 

Chris Walker: 40:36 

So, companies that generate a high volume of low intent, bad leads can't do this. Because they need a low-cost employee to sort through 100 leads to get one to give to their rep. And if you focus on high intent leads, those leads are going to convert to an opportunity somewhere between 20 and 70%. You do not need someone to search for a needle. You don't need a low-cost employee to search through a needle in a haystack when the conversion rates are that good. 

Hannah Munro: 41:05 

Yeah. 

Chris Walker: 41:05 

Change your mindset. 

Hannah Munro: 41:07 

Yeah. So, firstly, change of mindset, stop measuring activity, shift to measuring good quality leads. And then I think the second point that we were getting into there is all about optimizing that conversion and making sure the right people are speaking to the customer. And I think if anyone has ever, and I've certainly been on the other side of that conversation and been put forward to an SDR that doesn't actually know the business, doesn't know what they're talking about. That can be really, 

Chris Walker: 41:32 

really challenging. It's challenging as a buyer. And I should have said this at the beginning, but I need people to understand for CFOs and marketers that for both of you, I see both sides. There are some companies where the way that they set up their revenue strategy puts a CMO in a position that they will fail. And there's other companies where the CMO doesn't know what they're doing and needs to get fired. That's the situation. And the problem with a lot of companies is that nobody else in the organization understands marketing enough to judge which side of the fence that they're on. And that's a real challenge for people because marketing is changing so, much and so, quickly that you might actually not know whether what you're doing is good or not. And you actually don't know what a good Salesforce instance of marketing doing well looks like. I'll tell you very quickly, if a company is doing marketing well, everyone in the organization knows because they can feel it. There's momentum. There's word of mouth in the market. People are talking about you. People are buying stuff faster. You can feel it. And so, if you can't feel that you need to try and go in and assess. In a lot of cases, I recommend using a consultant because they're objective and they've seen a lot of different companies, and they can tell you objectively whether or not you're doing a good job or not. And you need to go in and assess. Are we setting up our CMO to fail or do we need a new CMO? Because they're running a playbook from 2011 that doesn't work anymore. 

Hannah Munro: 43:05 

And I, just to take you further on that point around, how do you know you're doing well? So, we talked about, you know, obviously investments in brand versus capturing demand, but how do you, is there any way apart from internally and a feeling, um, is there a way that a CFO could step back and say, is this piece working? What sort of science could they look for to know that brand is working? 

Chris Walker: 43:30 

So, some of the things that I've been doing recently that I think marketers would want to do for executives is that we've been doing our podcast for 13 or 14 months. And after about 60 to 90 days, I started to get messages from people. And I started to get messages from people that said, hey, I've listened to your podcast. I tried this. It worked way better than I was doing before. Thank you. And then I screenshot that message from a CMO. And then I send that to the executive team through Slack or whatever. And then that happens 20 times a week now. And that's how I know it's working. And then all I have to do is look at the pipeline, inbound pipeline growth that's happened over the 12 months. And it pretty much directly maps to our audience growth on our podcast. It's not that complicated. And so, you need to think about a different way to look at it that relies on common sense, not the way that software has been built to measure stuff. It's just literally common sense. People are talking about you. People are sharing it. I know that 200 to 2,000 CMOs see my LinkedIn posts, and I do it every day. I can't measure it like your email nurture, but I'm positive it works better. 

Hannah Munro: 44:53 

Definitely. I'm pretty sure most CFOs listening to this will be in, I wish our CMO got those kind of stats. 

Chris Walker: 45:00 

Yeah. And so, like people in general, marketing is focused on specific metrics like impressions or leads or different things like that. And I'm focused way more on the impact of, the consumption of the information, the impact of what someone watched a five minute video and how it changed their perception, how it changed how they feel about you, how they went out and did something and were more successful and how they feel about you after that. And companies are stuck in this transactional game that is company centric, not buyer centric, that puts them in positions where they have to do things that are in their best interest, not the best interest of their customer. And it's not complicated. Do things that are in the best interest of your customer at all levels, and you win more. 

Hannah Munro: 45:49 

100%. And I loved your comment there about stop focusing on impressions and the leads and shifting more onto impact. And impact, I guess, is the hardest bit to measure though, isn't it? Because in some ways, it's intangible. Somebody might have taken something away but not have reached out. So, I guess, you know, from podcasts, you said that you've got messages. So, are there any other ways that CFOs can get a hold on like the impact of what their CMO is doing? 

Chris Walker: 46:22 

So, on the organic LinkedIn side, which is a brand marketing tactic, as long as you're not posting stuff saying, hey, come get a demo, which is definitely not going to work. And so, if you're providing information that helps people, that drives your company's narrative into the market in a way that people want, in a way that people respond well to, then you can go in and look at who's responding to it. Like I went in when I had... 20 people that like my post. And I do now when a thousand people like my post, I go in there and I assess because you can go in there and you can see someone's picture. You can see their name and you can see their headline, which normally includes their job title and their company. And so, I browse through and I'm like, okay, CMO, CMO, CMOs, marketing managers, CROs, you know, consultants, blah, blah, blah. I get a qualitative set. Like you can't pull that data out and do some analysis on it because it violates a ton of privacy policies, but you can do it manually and then I look at that and I'm like, you know, 30% of the people that liked my post were CMOs at types of companies that I want to sell to. And 150,000 people saw the impression of this video and 19,000 people watched it. And how much would I need to pay in order to get 19,000 people to actually consume a five-minute video? A lot of money. And I get it for free every day. And so, and then I look into the comments, and I see what people are saying. And I see a VP of marketing at a $50 million ARR SAS company. That's a perfect company that we could help say, I've been really struggling with this and then tag their CRO, their CEO, and the marketing manager. Can't, can't measure that unless you're in there looking at it, but it's way that, that comment is way more valuable than almost anything else that you could do. And so, those are the ways that I, that I know it's working. It's not the way that people are accustomed to do it. People that stare at dashboards and spreadsheets all day would never see that stuff, would never care to look. And that's the way that brand gets built. 

Hannah Munro: 48:32 

So, if we sort of take a step back then. So, what questions should a CFO be asking their CMO? Because you made a comment earlier. You said you’re setting your CMO up to fail. with the way that you're measuring or you need to replace your CMO, basically. So, if you look across those two, what questions should you be asking to figure out which one is the scenarios? So, do you sit in? How do you figure out whether your CMO can do it, but it's just not been set up in the right way and doesn't have the right backing versus somebody that perhaps isn't quite right for the job? 

Chris Walker: 49:14 

If you have the right CMO and you've put them in a position where they are set up to fail, then they will tell you or they will leave. That's it. If I was in that role and a company told me that I need to get 10,000 MQLs every month or I'm going to get fired, I would leave that day. And any CMO that knows what they're doing would do the same thing. because there's plenty of companies that would rather have that talent and they can let the talent do stuff that's effective. And so, if you have your metrics that say you need 10,000 leads and the CMO doesn't say something to you, then you might know that you have the wrong CMO. It's that easy. And so, if that's the situation, if that's the situation, then if I was a CFO and that's the metric, I would challenge the CMO to figure out what is our cost per qualified opportunity by channel. I know that if you need 10,000 leads, everything is measured. I know that for sure at the channel level. And then you can go and say, what is our cost per qualified opportunity per channel? And then they can go and look at that. And then you're going to be able to see how bad it is. And then you can ask for the customer acquisition cost. And then you can say, based on this data, what things would you stop doing? And then it's your job as a CFO to let them stop doing it and go and do something better. And so, but when it comes down to it, if a, if a CFO is not pushing batch on metrics that don't make sense anymore, then you, it's an easy signal that you got the wrong CMO. 

Hannah Munro: 50:44 

So, what questions should you be asking? Say you're recruiting for a CMO at the moment and you're part of the executive team that's inputting into that decision. What questions should you be asking a new CMO or new revenue officer around? 

Chris Walker: 50:57 

that? This is a really challenging thing for people that don't understand marketing deeply to do because they don't know how to judge it. When I interview someone, it's not the first question that that I ask that gives me the answer, it's when I ask five layers below the first question. And the problem is that I can't prescribe how to ask the four following questions because you need to know what you're talking about in order to get to question five that gives you the answer about whether the person actually understands what they're talking about. And I spend time inside of Salesforce, inside of ad platforms, inside of content with people to evaluate how they think about things. which makes it very challenging for somebody that doesn't understand how people should think about things today to judge whether or not someone is doing it the right way. And so, what companies will lean into for the reason that they don't understand, they don't understand those things. So, they can't evaluate at that level. They're going to lean on resume and they're going to lean on recommendations. And in some cases, that's going to work for you, right? Like in some cases you get a recommendation from somebody that says, hey, this CMO is great. They're going to come in and there's a pretty high probability that they're going to be great. Other companies that are smaller might say, hey, this person worked at Salesforce seven years ago. They must be good. Let's hire them. And then they're going to come in and run the Salesforce Predictable Revenue MQL model and destroy your company, right? So, those are some of the trade-offs. But the take-home is that if you don't understand deeply how to judge whether someone's good at marketing, then you need to find someone that is or you need to get good enough to understand it yourself so, that you can judge someone so, you can hire the right person. 

Unknown: 52:37 

Yeah. 

Hannah Munro: 52:38 

Understood. So, if we think about on the flip side, what support should a good CFO give to a CMO to enable success? What should that relationship in an ideal world and what should that look like in your personal opinion? 

Chris Walker: 52:56 

So, I've done this at several different levels inside of a company. And the reason that I was able to build really strong relationships with the CFO and the CEO is because I think about things like them. That's a take home from marketers, right? I think about things as if, when I was a marketing manager, I thought about what I would do if I was the CEO. I thought about what I would do if I was the CFO. And when I assess the business data and I assess the customer acquisition cost between our field sales team and our inbound channel, and we were getting customers for somewhere between eight and 10 times less through inbound as in the buyer comes inbound, not SEO, the buyer comes inbound, versus our field sales channel, which was eight to 10 times more expensive, and I surfaced that information, and then I surfaced the cost differences and the level of budget differences. Hey, we're over here spending $29 million on our field sales team every year, if you include all the expenses, and we spend $2.6 million in marketing, and we're getting customers for eight to 10 times less with this 2.6. What do you think about moving this 2.6 to 5.8? and taking a couple of little hits on the sales side because we might be able to get a lot more customers while making all of our sales team productive if we change this strategy, and this is clearly working. And so, a CMO or any marketer, in my view, anything from a marketing manager up should be able to do that. That's what I believe. and put together a business case of we're spending $100,000 on Facebook right now. We're getting $12 of qualified pipeline for every dollar we spend on Facebook ads. I want to take this from $100,000 a year to $1.2 million a year. And I'm going to monitor the success of it based on the cost, the number of pipeline dollars per advertising dollar. And if we get to a point where that number degrades, I'm not going to spend anymore because I spend money responsibly. And so, that's what the marketers need to do. For a CFO, that's what a CMO should come to you and say when they ask for more money. Not everybody's busy. I need more people. You should have a business case based on business-level results that clear a path to make your company grow more efficiently, grow faster, grow better, whatever that is. On the CFO side... you need to if your CMO is not in a place where they understand that stuff where they can't read a p l where they can't calculate customer acquisition costs one you don't want to question whether or not you have the right CMO but you should help them understand those things and show them that they need to report on that type of data in order to give you the insights that allow you to make good decisions and so, right now I feel like whoever is doing it inside of a company, maybe it's the CMO, maybe it's a different executive, like when we talk about attribution, are taking a very transactional, short-term view look, which then puts pressure on marketing to do the wrong things. And you should be very cautious of doing that. I talked to a CMO the other day, and we've been working together for maybe a year and a half. And since we started working together, we've... grew their qualified pipeline year over year by 350%, which is to the tune of like $12 million in qualified pipeline additional with no added expense, which led to the company sourcing through marketing about 47% of net new revenue. And they're getting questions from their CFO about ROI. And they're getting asked to do things about influenced revenue to prove the ROI when you just source 50% of the net new revenue for the company. And I know that you're spending way less than the sales team. And so, the influence thing is a facade. I really do not like this. And it's driven through executives that don't truly understand marketing and make marketing trying to just attach activities, play a game of attribution to prove things that they're doing anyway. And it drives people to do things that they can measure that are lower funnel that make the least impact in order to pretend that their stuff is working better so, that they can defend their budget. And this whole circus act could just be gone away by just acknowledging that it's not an important metric and you can focus on doing things that work. 

Hannah Munro: 57:45 

So, for clarity on that one, just because I think that's actually, we're an hour in and I think that's an incredibly important point is that rather than trying to attach a measure to how to a particular Facebook post or a particular way of promoting something and trying to call it an influence in revenue. I think what you're saying there is it stop focusing on that and focus on what is the outcome. So, if your overall pipeline is going up and more is being driven and you're spending the same amount of money, they're doing something right. 

Chris Walker: 58:18 

Precisely. And I don't know how many times I can hammer home this point, but Influenced revenue incentivizes marketers to do things that they can track, not things that work the best. And so, when you force people to do influenced revenue, you are going to facilitate people to send emails to people that already have deals. To say that they opened my email when they were in stage three and therefore, we influenced that revenue and that deal would have closed anyway. They're going to focus on the Google ads where companies waste hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. I go in there every time and companies that spend a lot of money on Google ads are wasting so, much money and their marketers are incentivized to do it because of the attribution model inside of that company. Content syndication. I watch companies that spend $500,000 collecting $50 leads through third-party content syndication and just push a bunch of garbage into their data system that their SDRs can call and nobody becomes a customer. And they do it because they get $50 leads on autopilot. And so, these are all of the things that if you look about the problems with the measurement... And the measurement creates the behaviours that I just talked about, which are people succumbing to the measurement as opposed to thinking critically about how am I going to educate buyers? How am I going to make our business grow faster? How am I going to make sure that our sales team and our team are getting along because we're helping them hit their goals? Like a lot of the marketing, I don't want to get into this, part, but a lot of the marketing and sales alignment issues start at the top level, at the CFO, CEO level of how they set the metrics, which force marketers to do things that, by design, create misalignment. 

Hannah Munro: 1:00:12 

I think that's the shelter, isn't it, for CFOs? For an If you want to empower marketing, it's about focusing on what is the end goal that you're looking for that marketing team to achieve? And how do you measure it in a way that gives them the ability to do things that might not be naturally attributable, but easily attributable? 

Chris Walker: 1:00:32 

I'll give you a really easy example. When we go into companies, we start at sales qualified opportunities, but as quickly as possible based on their sales cycle length lag, I'm going to close one deals. And that's how I want to get measured. Close one marketing source deals that come through a website and ask to talk to a sales rep. That's what I want to be measured on because I can get 500K in close one deals, and I don't need 10 million leads to do it. And so, when you focus on the outcome, you allow your marketers to work backwards based on the things that actually work rather than starting on a leading metric and hoping that it trickles through. I know that I can get 10 close one deals on somewhere between 100 and 150 leads. And most marketers need to get 10,000 leads in order to get 10 deals. And they don't actually end up getting the 10 deals. And so, like, yeah, I really encourage people to focus, to think about their measurement in a much more simplistic way and to incentivize marketers to later funnel, which gives a lot of flexibility on what you can do that tend to be more effective and more customer-centric. 

Hannah Munro: 1:01:44 

There's a couple of challenges with that, though, isn't there? Because there's a challenge of, is it the leads that you're generating, or is it the way that you're running the sales cycle, which is outside sometimes of marketer's control? It's not true. It's not how it works. 

Chris Walker: 1:01:58 

I don't believe that's how it works. A lot of marketers will say that. A lot of people will say that. But when you look... Everyone's data will show this. You go in and look and you say, okay, the people that submitted a demo request that were qualified, how long were the sales cycle lengths and what percentage did we win? Versus when we could call people and they were qualified and they got to a meeting, what percentage of those meetings do we win? How long were the sales cycles? They are dramatically different. And so, it's just something to think about. And I've done this enough. Like, I have generated enough inbound leads to know that the surrogate for intent of the buyer in the firmographic qualification and how much they want to buy something when you engage with them is the number one factor to whether or not they close. I've sent leads to reps that are on their first week that close $100,000 deals in 14 days. Because the buyer was ready to buy. It didn't matter. All the sales rep's job was to shepherd the process. When you have people that are already convinced that they want to buy, sales is very easy. I don't even consider it sales. And so, I don't believe that to be true that like, oh, we're running our sales cycle better, so, everything's looking better. You have historical data. And before you started doing this stuff, you were closing either one, two, or zero deals per month. And then on your 90-day sales cycle, four quarters later, you're closing seven, 10, 15 deals a month. And when that happens, it's very clear. It's not complicated what's happening. You're doing more marketing, more people want to buy, and they're coming to you to buy. And so, ... 

Hannah Munro: 1:03:46 

And what's the time like? Because sometimes marketing can take a while. So, your podcast didn't overnight just start generating leads and ops, or it might have done, but it took a while for you to start to see the impact. How long would you give, obviously based on sales cycle, how long would you give your CMO to start seeing that impact? before you sort of said, actually, this isn't working? 

Chris Walker: 1:04:10 

What people don't understand is that if you're in there, like I knew that LinkedIn was going to work when I got seven likes on my post. It was very clear that it was going to work. I knew that our podcast was going to work within the first month because people sent me messages saying they liked it. People showed up. I could see the listener data. It was very clear. Like I don't need to attach it to revenue in the first month to know that something's going to work. But you need to be in the details enough. You need to be seeing how people are engaging. You need to see those things as a qualitative leading metric that will predict the future of what you're going to see qualitatively in your business data. People look for the business data. Business data is actually a lagging metric. I don't care if you're measuring leads. It's still a lagging metric. The leading metric is the qualitative insights that you go out and you talk to people and what you learn or what you observe or how much you listen. And so, I knew that those things were going to work because people told me it was very, it was very obvious. It's just not inside of Salesforce for people and people, a lot of people. And so, people just don't know how to, to be fair, like a lot of people don't use the channels the way that I use them and therefore they would never see the things that I see. And so, in terms of how long to take things are going to work, I recommend that people run a pretty methodical process in how to build this from the ground up. If you were running 10,000 MQLs a month and getting two customers every month and it's costing you a ton of money and you wanted to change, what I would recommend is fix your paid strategy first. If you literally just stop generating all these garbage leads with no buying intent and passing them to your SDRs and you change your paid strategy if you're spending $20,000, $50,000, $100,000 a month, you could hit your goals right there. Very confident, as long as your goals are reasonable, that if you just change that, you will hit your goals. And if you were hitting your goals, then it would create the space where you could go out and do the podcast and it wouldn't be scrutinized in month one. It wouldn't be scrutinized in month three because your paid strategy is delivering the results that you need. And so, that's the... That's the recommendation that I ask for people because if you need to get 10 customers a month and you're a CMO and you're getting two customers a month and you tell your executive team that you're going to go start a podcast and it might not generate any quote-unquote leads or any type of impact for six months, then you're probably going to get fired during those six months. Yeah. Yeah. The way that I consider it, I call it clearing space as a marketing leader. You got to hit your goals first, which then clears the space for things that might take a little longer in order to see results. Clearing the space meaning hitting your goals. 

Hannah Munro: 1:06:52 

Awesome. So, I'm very aware that we've been chatting for... what, about an hour now. I think it's one of the longest podcasts we've done and probably, you know, an incredibly interesting one as well. So, for our listeners, so, CFOs, what's the thought that you want to leave them with? What is the message that you want to send out to those CFOs and those finance leaders out there about measuring marketing? What's the key takeaways you want them to take from today's session? 

Chris Walker: 1:07:21 

I hope that... Some of the things that I said have encouraged you to at least go explore a different way to think about marketing that is not getting contacts so, your sales team can do sales. And thinking about marketing as a function that will drive the growth of your business potentially faster than your 40-person sales team. I know that because it can happen. And so, if you think about it in a different way as an investment that will build your business dramatically faster than scaling sales headcount, if you do it appropriately and well, then it changes the thought process about what you're going to do. And so, I would really encourage, I don't see a lot of companies that think about marketing that way. I think about it that way because I've done it at a bunch of companies and I know that it works that way when it's executed properly. And so, that’s what I want people to take away is that we're in a period of time where a majority of the experience that a buyer experiences with you is not one-to-one through a sales rep. It is the things that they see on the internet, the things that they hear from other people, the content that they might have an opportunity to consume if you put it in the right places and people want it. And that is what drives how people feel about you. That's what drives how people perceive what you're doing, perceive whether or not you're valuable, perceive whether or not you're different relative to the competitive set, whether they perceive whether or not your product is better. It doesn't actually matter whether or not your product is actually better. It's whether or not the buyer perceives it to be better. And marketing can do that because software products are not that different today. And so, those are some of the things that I think about. That's how I see marketing. 

Hannah Munro: 1:09:24 

And I think that's a brilliant note. So, if our listeners want to learn more about yourself, Chris, and about the team at Refined Labs, what's the best way for them to get hold of you, find you, listen to some of your thoughts as well? 

Chris Walker: 1:09:37 

Yeah, CFOs. So, I'll give you two options here. If you want to go deep... We have the State of Demand Gen podcast available on Apple and Spotify. 60-to-90-minute episodes that go deep into marketing tactics, measurement, attribution, forward thinking things. There's a lot of stuff in there, but they're long episodes. We publish three times a week. People love that stuff. You might not want to invest that amount of time to learn marketing. We also, on my LinkedIn, at Chris Walker, I publish weekly. four to six videos a week that are more bite-sized, somewhere between two and eight minutes, where you can learn a lot about marketing without as much depth. And so, those are two options about things that you could do to learn a little bit more about the way that I think. 

Hannah Munro: 1:10:23 

Brilliant. And for those listening, we'll pop all of the links to both the podcast and Chris's LinkedIn profile in the show notes. And thank you again, Chris. This has been a fascinating podcast. And I'm sure our audience are going to go back and have a look at their sales force and maybe take a different look at how they are measuring the success of their CMO and their marketing team. 

Chris Walker: 1:10:45 

This was a blast. Thank you. Hope you enjoyed it.