Show notes
Chris Walker’s on fire.
He’s a high-profile B2B marketing thought leader.
His LinkedIn posts generate huge engagement.
His agency, Refine Labs, is red-hot.
But here’s the interesting thing:
Not that long ago, Chris wasn’t the belle of the B2B ball.
Many of his ideas about B2B marketing were dismissed.
Hard to believe, right?
On the Marketing Spark podcast, Chris said:
“For the first five to seven years of my career, everyone thought my marketing ideas were not smart, and they didn’t want me to do the things that I was doing like podcasts.
They were heavily scrutinized at all the companies that I worked for.”
Chris’ frustration and appetite to do the marketing he wanted led to the creation of Refine Labs.
From the conversation
What 2020 exposed about dependence on physical events
Chris says the 2020 shift did not surprise him. His view is that companies had not spent time finding alternatives to physical events. He first noticed this in 2017, when he was an employee and saw digital working much better than his company's event strategy. He expected others to build those skills sooner, and he thinks many companies got caught short and had to scramble, which may have hurt their growth.
Mark pointed out that many B2B companies put around 70% of their marketing budgets into conferences, sponsorships and awards. Chris thinks that in two or three years companies will see the disruption as a good thing. Without it, a competitor might eventually have figured out digital first and put them out of business.
In March and April 2020, variable marketing spend was the first thing cut. Chris admits his own company did the same. Refine Labs kept running media for more than a dozen B2B SaaS companies, and because everyone else pulled back, ad prices fell to about 25% of normal for two months. The team used that window to build awareness and product consideration at very low cost.
Why companies should build content that beats the conference
Looking ahead to 2021, Chris expects a bell curve. Some companies will slide back to 60% or 70% of spend on events, partly because they did not succeed with digital or content. Chris notes that nobody becomes good at content, audience building and paid media overnight. Others, he says, have copied the old event model online with virtual booths and as many lead-gen webinars as possible. A third group has learned from the year and will keep moving forward.
Chris argues that marketing should focus more on creating demand so outbound works better. Customers have told him that after twelve months of this approach, outbound opportunities went up 4x without much else changing.
On conferences, Chris has taken the same approach since 2017. He watched which speakers were credible, then brought them onto his own channels, aiming to build a media entity that buyers prefer to the conference.
"from a company standpoint, you should be trying to create a content strategy that's better than the conference, that happens all year round, not just in three days for only the people that are able to travel there."
Customer understanding and what to keep in-house
Chris sees companies bringing more work in-house, not less. If he ran a 500-person SaaS company, he would aim to do almost everything internally and use outside partners for innovation and frameworks his team can then implement.
The one thing he says cannot be outsourced is deep understanding of the customer. He talks to hundreds of companies a month and does not see enough of them prioritizing it. Mark asked whether marketers are really that far from customers. Chris says there is a gap between what people think understanding means and what it takes.
The first step is to define the customer clearly, which forces choices beyond company size and job title. After that, marketers can get into psychographics. Chris adds that community and content help attract those people.
"I think there's a difference between what someone perceives as understanding a customer versus what it actually is."
Measuring marketing through website-sourced revenue
Chris wants marketing to be quantified, but he thinks current methods are flawed. His preferred measure is how many people come to the website asking to buy, how that number is growing, and what it costs relative to the revenue returned. Those buyers win at the highest rate, have the shortest sales cycles and the lowest acquisition costs. Focusing on one funnel also frees marketers from needing lead-gen attribution on every channel.
Some effects stay hard to track. Chris gave the example of a content piece shared with a friend, Susie, whose boss, Jane, buys nine months later. The purchase would still show up through the website, but the path would not be visible. Better outbound results and long-term brand position are also hard to measure. He treats them as extras on top of website-sourced revenue.
To persuade a CEO, Chris shows the difference between funnels. He has done this with about 25 companies in the past twelve months. Their lead-gen models win at 0.1% with long sales cycles, yet absorb all the ad spend. Website buyers who never engaged with those ads win at 7% and contribute 80% or more of marketing's revenue. The lead-gen route also carries a hidden cost in the SDRs and AEs who follow up.
"I 100% believe that you should be able to quantify the impact of marketing inside of your company. I just think the way that it's done right now is not smart."
Rapid-fire views on marketing channels
On conferences, Chris says industry events have no incentive to innovate, since prices rise every year and companies keep paying. He recommends one smart company try something different while keeping the real value of a trade show, which is not the booth. Facebook advertising is still impactful but was more so in 2018. LinkedIn advertising is overpriced and does not deliver enough reach. For sales cycles under 120 days, he says it is hard to reach scale there, so his team adds Facebook and Instagram.
He calls ABM sensible as a strategy but poorly executed, and says podcasting is underrated and under-resourced. Content is too stuck in SEO 2011. Email is effective but overrated because it is easy to measure. Positioning often loses its teeth to bureaucracy.
For PR, Chris says the model is to build owned channels that show expertise. His own LinkedIn and podcast led to free consulting requests, podcast invitations, a Forbes article, and unpaid conference speaking slots. He calls word of mouth the thing that drives the most buying decisions in B2B, and says nobody in B2B recognizes it.
Personal brand, early career and the Refine Labs model
Chris does not think in terms of personal branding. He treats it as content marketing with effective distribution. He points to Boston professionals in 1980 who got more business because people knew them and recommended them. He believes many people overthink it and that it comes down to providing value and being helpful.
He also described why he started Refine Labs. He had trouble finding an employer who would let him do marketing his way.
Chris describes Refine Labs as built around what he calls category-winning demand marketing. It has three parts: brand, demand and one-to-one ABM for deals of $250,000 or $500,000 and above. The agency starts with demand because it creates short-term results and internal confidence, then moves to brand and ABM. Listeners can find his State of Demand Gen podcast, which he says has passed 15,000 subscribers, and his daily posts on LinkedIn.
"everyone thought that all of my marketing ideas were not smart, and they didn't want me to do the things that I'm doing like producing a podcast and different things like that."