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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.

Winning in dark social requires a well-executed content strategy. Part of executing a content strategy successfully means that it's scalable. But scaling content efficiently is something that most companies fail to do. That's where stacking growth comes into play. It's at the foundation of dark social because it's what allows you to distribute your content across multiple platforms with minimal additional effort. In this episode, Chris outlines how we win on dark social by stacking growth internally and how we do the same with clients.

Events in 2022 play a totally different role than they did even a few years ago. Gone are the days of having to spend huge chunks of your marketing budget to build trade show booths that generate little return and sponsoring overpriced industry events. Your audience is digital and your event strategy needs to be aligned closely with your digital goals. In this episode, Chris talks about how you can use in-person micro-events to create amazing experiences, all while fueling your larger digital growth.

The term demand gen gets thrown around a lot. A lot of companies claim to be running demand gen programs, but when you take a deeper look it’s still a traditional lead gen program. In this episode, Chris does a deep dive on what is demand gen, what is lead gen, how do they differ, and how the strategy has to change to run a true demand gen model. 

Should SDRs report to marketing or sales? This is an age-old debate. But it's asking the wrong question. It doesn't matter which team the SDR reports to if they're doing the same, low-efficiency role. The real question is what is the future job function of the SDR and does that new functionality align with marketing or sales? In this episode, Chris talks about how he believes the role will evolve over the next several years to be more efficient and produce better results.