GTM Live

We talk a lot about tactical execution on State of Demand Gen. But there’s another side of your marketing strategy that is just as important—your brand story. Your brand’s story is the backbone of your marketing strategy. It’s what creates deep loyalty to your brand over competitors. In this episode, we welcome back Dave Gerhardt to talk about the importance of building a story around your brand.

There has never been a better time to be a top-tier marketer. Demand is high and supply is low. But how do you become one of the top 1%? In this episode, Chris goes through his top 6 pieces of advice for marketers that are trying to become the best. These are all tips that he implemented himself and attributes to his own success and the success of Refine Labs.

Creating content in-house gives you a massive advantage in the market. Yet, content creation is still one of the most outsourced items for in-house marketing teams. When you outsource your content creation (and organic distribution) you lose key advantages. The first is that you don't give your in-house subject matter experts the ability to speak your company's unique value prop or opinions. The second is you aren't in the weeds on social media every day hearing what the market is saying about your industry, so you're always one step behind and end up being reactive, instead of leading the industry. In this episode, Chris talks about why it's so important to bring content creation in-house, and what parts you can outsource without losing value.

Modern demand gen practices have not yet been adopted by many companies in the EMEA region. In this episode of State of Demand Gen, Chris talks with Adam Holmgren on what companies across the pond need to do to get started using modern demand gen and how it can positively impact their business.

Pipeline velocity isn't just about pipeline creation. Pipeline velocity uses 3 historical metrics (win rate, ACV, and sales cycle length) to forecast forward. Most companies only look at pipeline creation. They don't look at sales cycle length. They don't look at win rates or conversation rates. And they don't look at ACVs. The beauty of pipeline velocity is that in order to drive growth, you can play with any one of the metrics that are used to calculate it. In this episode, Chris dives deep into why Pipeline Velocity is the most important marketing metric you should be tracking and how you can break it down to see what areas of your business are really driving meaningful growth.

B2B SaaS companies have been running the same lead generation marketing strategy for over a decade now—create a gated piece of content, collect low intent leads, and have your sales team follow up. This practice may have been necessary 10 years ago, but with the advancement in how buyers consume content and increasingly tight privacy laws, smart marketing teams are challenging the status quo and transitioning to more modern practices. In this episode, Chris dives into how Refine Labs has been able to grow so fast with zero outbound, how to transition if you're already stuck in a model that is built for outbound, and why it's so important.

The goal of B2B paid social ads should be to communicate a single idea to your audience, not to move them from "who is this company" to demo.  Companies waste millions of dollars every year by spending their budget on ads that fail to produce meaningful results because they don't tell the right story. In this episode, Chris gets super tactical on how to run effective campaigns that play to your greater strategy of telling your brand story, including:How to craft your messagingTips for setting up your ad campaignsAnd why you might want to make changes to your current campaigns

Capturing demand works hand in hand with generating demand, but it’s something that companies often overlook. When you’ve created enough demand that a customer is ready to buy, that buying process needs the best experience possible if you want them to move to closed-won. In this episode, Chris goes back to basics and talks about what to do after you've generated enough demand to move a prospect into your pipeline.

In this episode, we pulled together some of the greatest hits of our talks on The Attribution Mirage. We start with an early episode of Demand Gen Live where we began experimenting with required open text fields comparing where customers said they found us and what software was telling us. After the explanation of the initial experiment and results, we skip forward several months where we share 20 real-life examples comparing software vs self-reported attribution. Finally, we end the episode by sharing some of the best practices when implementing self-reported attribution to get the best results, without biasing the data.

Most B2B companies know how to do sales. Most of them do not, however, know how to run a modern marketing strategy designed for creating demand, capturing demand, and funnel optimization. Companies are still running the same go-to-market strategy they were running in 2011 by pumping up MQLs and other vanity metrics that require more sales headcount with less results. In this episode, Chris talks through the strategy Refine Labs uses to help companies fix their go-to-market plan, starting with marketing.