Megan Bowen on this episode
Megan Bowen, CEO of Refine Labs, is a leading expert in B2B SaaS marketing measurement and attribution. She leads a top marketing agency focused on scale-ups and has spent years helping companies move beyond vanity metrics to real revenue impact.
Megan champions hybrid attribution as the framework for measuring marketing's true impact on revenue, combining software-based tracking with self-reported data to capture the full buying journey. The core insight is that software attribution (direct traffic, organic search, paid ads) misses the "dark social" channels—LinkedIn, podcasts, events, word-of-mouth—where most demand creation actually happens.
Most B2B SaaS companies remain trapped in MQL-focused measurement despite knowing it's flawed. Megan identifies the real blockers: comfort with the status quo and fear of short-term perception damage from changing evaluation methods. The episode unpacks how to operationalize hybrid attribution via HubSpot dashboards, establish proper baseline metrics, implement deal stage time-stamping, and qualify inbound leads effectively. Megan also details how to segment website conversions, when to field leads directly versus use SDRs, and how qualitative feedback from sales reps validates marketing impact beyond any dashboard metric.
What we cover in this episode
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0:00
Megan's Path to CEO How Megan joined Refine Labs as co-builder in 2020 and transitioned to formal CEO role in January 2024.
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6:47
Hybrid Attribution Framework Combining software-based attribution (direct, organic, paid search) with self-reported data to reveal dark social and demand creation sources.
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14:30
The MQL Target Problem Why B2B companies acknowledge MQL flaws in theory but resist change in practice; status quo comfort and reputational risk block adoption.
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22:45
Pipeline Sources Over Lead Source Moving from broad inbound/outbound categories to granular program-level attribution like podcast, events, LinkedIn, and outbound motions.
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29:03
Qualitative Sales Feedback How sales reps validate multi-touch buyer journeys and confirm that prospects arrive pre-educated, shortening sales cycles.
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31:31
Baseline Measurement Setup Establishing web conversions, conversion-to-opportunity rate, and closed-won metrics as critical starting points before optimization.
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38:59
Response Speed and Lead Qualification Fastest follow-up wins; Megan shares her $15K ad budget qualification threshold and automated disqualification workflow in HubSpot.
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44:39
The Vault Product Launch Refine Labs' upcoming content product offering self-serve access to their attribution and demand creation strategies.
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48:50
Closing Takeaways Recap of hybrid attribution, the shift away from MQLs, and how to prove marketing ROI through revenue-based measurement.
The lines worth sharing
Hybrid attribution is looking at both software and self-reported data points together so you can have the most holistic picture.
Megan Bowen · 6:47
Software attribution is really good at measuring demand capture, like paid search. Self-reported attribution gives insights into demand creation programs.
Megan Bowen · 14:20
It's basically people feeling comfortable doing what's always been done and people being afraid to make a change.
Megan Bowen · 17:49
When you get to that level of granular tracking, it will shine a light if something is broken so you can look into it further.
Megan Bowen · 38:30
Common questions from this episode
What is hybrid marketing attribution?
Hybrid attribution combines software-based attribution (direct traffic, organic search, paid ads) with self-reported data (how prospects say they heard about you). This reveals dark social sources like LinkedIn, podcasts, and word-of-mouth that software alone misses, giving a complete view of demand creation and capture.
Why is self-reported attribution important for B2B marketing?
Self-reported attribution answers why a prospect visited your site directly or searched your brand name. Software attribution can't explain this. Adding a free-text 'How did you hear about us' field on your primary conversion form captures the demand creation channels driving awareness and education before purchase intent.
What's the difference between demand creation and demand capture?
Demand capture targets prospects already searching for a solution (Google, G2, Capterra). Demand creation builds awareness and affinity before purchase intent through content, LinkedIn, podcasts, events. Demand creation takes longer but creates educated, faster-closing deals.
Why do B2B companies still use MQL targets despite knowing the flaws?
Most acknowledge MQL targets are ineffective in theory but resist change in practice due to comfort with status quo and fear of short-term performance perception damage. CMOs worry that shifting measurement approaches could hurt their reputation, even though it's the right move.
How do you set up pipeline source tracking instead of lead source?
Move from broad inbound/outbound categories to specific programs: podcast, events, LinkedIn, Google search, SDR outreach, etc. Track which exact program drove each opportunity, then measure performance by program rather than by team, revealing true ROI and where to allocate budget.
What are the first baseline metrics to measure marketing effectiveness?
Start with monthly web conversions (form fills), the percentage converting to qualified opportunity, and closed-won rates. These baselines show your current state and allow you to track improvement in inbound volume, opportunity quality, and revenue generation over time.
SEO meta description
Megan Bowen, CEO at Refine Labs, explains hybrid attribution: combining software-based tracking with self-reported data to measure marketing's true impact on B2B SaaS revenue and pipeline.
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Megan Bowen
Refine Labs
hybrid attribution
self-reported attribution
marketing measurement framework
B2B SaaS marketing
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demand capture
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Read the full transcript · 52 KB · Megan Bowen
EDDIE REYNOLDSWelcome to RevOps Corner, where we talk about how B2B SaaS companies scale through revenue operations by interviewing amazing guests and sharing what we see in the trenches every day here at Union Square Consulting.
EDDIE REYNOLDSToday we have a great show diving into best practices on measuring and optimizing the effectiveness of marketing. I interviewed Megan Bowen, the CEO at Refine Labs, one of the top marketing agencies for B2B SaaS scale-ups. We dove into hybrid marketing attribution, blending the attribution we can see in our software with the self-reported attribution provided by prospects themselves, and how to measure the effectiveness of marketing all the way through to revenue and break it down by each channel within marketing that contributes to that revenue. Megan shares some of the most common mistakes B2B SaaS companies make in marketing and how to fix them. You don't want to miss this episode.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, hey there, Megan. Thanks for joining me today. Hey, Eddie.
SPEAKER_04Good to be here. Thanks for having me.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI'm super excited to get into this with you. But before I do, I just want to say congrats again on the new CEO role.
SPEAKER_05Thank you. That's very kind of you. I appreciate it.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAlthough I can't remember how new is it. You've been in the role for a little while now, right?
MEGAN BOWENI think it was effective like mid-January is the formal effective date. So it's been almost three months.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAwesome. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that transition before we get into the weeds on marketing. Yeah, absolutely.
MEGAN BOWENYou know, I teamed up with Chris, the founder of Refine Labs, back in the summer of 2020.
MEGAN BOWENSo he had started doing some solo consulting under the Refine Labs name in 2019. And then as he got into 2020, he started getting a few extra clients. So he hired a couple people to help support like the growing client base. And him and I got acquainted in 2019, just because we were both active on LinkedIn. So we were engaging with each other's content. He reached out. We recorded a couple podcasts together. He actually came down to New York in February 2020.
MEGAN BOWENAnd we recorded like an in-person interview, which was really fun.
MEGAN BOWENAnd I was at a different company at the time, although the pandemic impacted that company. So I was sort of stepped away from that. And in the sort of June or July of 2020, Chris reached out and said, hey, it really feels like this Refine Labs company is going to become like a real agency, not just like me doing some solo consulting with a couple of, you know, people helping me out. Do you want to come help me build the company? And so obviously I said yes. And we started building the agency together. And so, you know, really over the last like three and a half years, we, you know, built the company to what it is today together. And I would say that actually the start of 2023, so over a year ago, him and I had started discussing kind of this new idea that he has for his new company, Poceto. And we were really trying to kind of think through, like, is this really part of Refine Labs? And should this all be one company? Or is this really like a separate and distinct business? So we had actually, we had started planning this almost a year before the public announcement. And he wanted a little more time to validate, you know, his new business idea. And he continued to give me more and more responsibility for the management of the day-to-day, along with the, you know, setting of the strategy, et cetera. So honestly, most of 2023, internally anyway, I was really stepping into that role and, you know, incrementally taking on more and more of those CEO-like responsibilities. So when we finally made the public announcement in January, we had done so much work internally for the transition. So it didn't feel like that much of a big change for me in January necessarily. But I think that was actually a good way. It was a smart way for us to do it because we knew it would be successful. We took our time. It was very methodical. And so far, 2024 is turning out to be an awesome year where we're going to exceed our Q1 revenue plan. And it's looking like we're going to potentially be able to keep that momentum going and potentially have an even better year than what we were expecting. So it feels good to kind of start off, kind of start off from a place of strength at the beginning of the year.
SPEAKER_01It's very cool. Yeah. And I met Chris myself, like probably around a similar period of time in the same way, just
EDDIE REYNOLDSon LinkedIn. I think he was like still working at home and I think it was just him. I think I might've even referred you guys, one of your first clients, which I think was probably not a good fit with your current ICP.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd then I saw you guys grow together. And I think as Chris's LinkedIn took off, I kind of felt increasingly less, less anxious to start filling up his LinkedIn DMs. And I started chatting with you and other people on your team to try to figure out our own demand, Jen. And you were incredibly helpful. And it's just been, it's been a long journey of watching you help to grow this company. And it's, it's really cool to see you taking the helm, which I feel like you've had, you know, a critical role in that from the very beginning as well, from what I've seen.
SPEAKER_18Yeah. So I think the fact that really we built it together and we have a lot of, you know, a lot
MEGAN BOWENof experience working together. He knows how I work, I know how he works. And so, um, I feel like all of those ingredients made the transition pretty successful, um, and pretty seamless from, especially internally, right? Probably felt like more of a big deal externally than it was internally. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Well, congrats again.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThank you. And so the reason that we're here today, the reason that you guys have been able to accomplish
EDDIE REYNOLDSwhat you've accomplished is because at the end of the day, companies need visibility into their business to effectively scale their revenue. Um, we're coming off of this growth at all costs phase that I think that you guys and my team have all, all been talking a lot about. We need to see what's really driving revenue. And you guys talk a lot about MQLs and SALs and SQOs and are these relevant? Are they not? We really should be looking at what is actually driving revenue and not just looking at what our tech stack can tell us. We need more visibility than that. We need consistent and accurate data collection. Um, because inaccurate, incomplete data means that we're making up conclusions and we're going on gut feel and that's driving bad results. And so what leaned me into wanting to do this podcast with you today is to talk about your, your concept of self-reported attribution, how you guys actually operationalize that some of the do's and don'ts, and just talk through that together from demand generation all the way through to revenue. So that's what I want to cover. And I'm anxious to jump in here and ask you some pointed questions.
SPEAKER_05Let's do it. Let's do it.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo let's start with the easiest one. What is full cycle self-reported attribution?
MEGAN BOWENYes. And, um, I want to answer that question, but I'm going to, um, I'm going to kind of zoom out a little bit and we actually like to use, uh, I feel like it's a common misconception
MEGAN BOWENthat people think people associate self-reported attribution with refined labs and sometimes come to the conclusion that that's the only data signal that we look at, which isn't fully accurate. So I actually like to use the phrase hybrid attribution because what we do in practice is we look at the data that software-based attribution will provide. Um, but of course we champion and we make sure that all of our clients implement what we call self-reported attribution as well. And so hybrid attribution is looking at both of those, uh, data points together so that you can have the most holistic picture and make the best decision about what programs are actually driving people to come to your website and raise their hand and say that they want to talk to the sales team. Software attribution is pretty straightforward and it will typically provide a set of, you know, basic responses. You're going to see direct traffic. They went straight to your website, right? Organic search. They went to your website, but pass through Google to get there. Um, then you might see attribution related to paid search campaigns. Traditional software attribution will pick that up and it's very, you know, clear to attribute any inbounds to any paid search campaigns that you have running. And then additionally, if you have UTM tracking for different, you know, paid social campaigns or other campaigns that you have running very often, you'll pick up some of those UTMs and you might see some additional campaign level specific attribution showing up in, in HubSpot, Marketo, whatever your marketing automation platform is. So all of that is valuable, right? That's important information to know. The interesting thing though, is let's, let's unpack direct traffic and organic search. So, okay, cool. You know, this person went straight to your website and the software attribution tool is telling you direct traffic, but how did they know to go to your website?
SPEAKER_05How did they know your website URL? That's the question that software, software based attribution isn't giving you that level
MEGAN BOWENof insight into how or why they knew about your website. So when you implement self-reported attribution, which is very simple, add, how did you hear about us to your primary conversion form on your website, make it an open text, free form required field. So people have to type in their response. And the most interesting insights that we get is comparing when software attribution says direct traffic or organic search, actually seeing what the customer self-reported. And in almost every scenario, they will self-report what we would term as sort of a dark social source. So maybe they say a social media network, LinkedIn, Meta, Reddit. Maybe they mention like a word of mouth referral. My friend, my colleague, someone in the Pavilion Slack channel referred me to you all. And that is actually then answering the question of how did they even know to go to your website directly? Or how did they know to search your brand name in Google to get to your site in that way? So hybrid attribution takes all the data from the software and all of the self-reported data points that your customers are telling you of why they remember how they heard about you. And it paints a much fuller picture.
MEGAN BOWENAnother rule of thumb to consider is software attribution is really good at measuring
MEGAN BOWENcampaign effectiveness for demand capture, like paid search. That's reliable. And you can use that and trust that data. How did you hear about us? Self-reported attribution. That's really intended to give you more insights into if your demand creation programs are effective and driving results. I'm sure you might have some follow-up, but I'll pause there. That's sort of a breakdown.
SPEAKER_20I have a lot of follow-up, but it's really good.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI'll add, for whatever it's worth, since I first understood this concept from you guys, I implemented it immediately. We have that free text field on our website. People fill it out. Our demand generation is all LinkedIn, newsletter, podcast, maybe some speaking events. And then when we look at our attribution in Google Analytics, everything is all direct traffic,
EDDIE REYNOLDSGoogle search. There's some referral from LinkedIn. And then it matches up. Every single lead that comes in, how did you hear about us? It was LinkedIn. A hundred percent of the time, it was LinkedIn. Now that our newsletter and our podcast has more reach, we see a little bit more of a mix. But it's always one of those things. And it's been really interesting for me to experiment with that and see the data firsthand. And I know it's accurate because I built our website up until six months ago when we actually paid somebody that knew what they were doing and had all the codes in the back end. It was just a Squarespace website that I built myself. We're not doing any SEO. Like, I don't think we even show up in the rankings when you Google anything related to our company.
SPEAKER_14I'm not even sure if we show up number one if you Google the name of our company. And so it's like, there's no way that these people are just coming through organic search, like searching
EDDIE REYNOLDSfor rev ops and they pop onto our websites. They're coming from these dark social channels.
SPEAKER_30Absolutely. Well, yeah, I think you just reinforced the point that I was making that you're seeing
MEGAN BOWENsimilar data trends that I just broke down.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. So let's see, where do I go from here? Because there's so many questions I have. I guess I'll start by just asking, could you tell me a little bit more about how you combine the software-based attribution with this How Did You Hear About Us form when you're looking
EDDIE REYNOLDSat a particular account or campaign or overall and the data conflicts, like what data wins? How do you decide at the end of the day, what's driving your rep?
MEGAN BOWENYeah, absolutely. So we like to, most of our customers will use HubSpot for their marketing automation platform.
MEGAN BOWENLove HubSpot, really easy to use. So for example, and if you have Marketo, all of this applies as well, right? But for the purposes of this example, I'll anchor on HubSpot. We'll actually build out what we call a hybrid attribution dashboard within HubSpot. So it's pretty straightforward to visualize all of the attribution data that HubSpot is naturally going to collect. And then when you implement that, how did you hear about us on your primary conversion form, you need to make a few updates to HubSpot in order to process and visualize that data effectively. So obviously you're capturing all of the form fields, but because it's a free response text field, you know, there's a million different ways to say LinkedIn. They might say just LinkedIn. They might say your LinkedIn post, you know, Eddie's LinkedIn profile, whatever it happens to be. So what we try to do on our side is have a sort of a workflow that just streamlines and categorizes all of the responses into the typical categories that we see, right? So we like to have categories for each, you know, social channel, LinkedIn, Meta, Reddit, you know, whatever irrelevant to the company based on the channels that we're executing. We typically will also have something like podcast or event, and then we'll typically have some a category like word of mouth, where we'll group any responses of a friend, a colleague, a referral, a Slack community, et cetera. So it can be helpful to just take a little bit of time and it's pretty straightforward to do in HubSpot to just categorize these raw submissions and then visualize those categories. And we basically just build this dashboard. So these are side by side. So you'll see for a particular time period, all of the inbound leads volume by software based attribution category, right? Which is typically going to be direct traffic, organic search, paid search, and then maybe So I'm just seeing the total number of leads for each of those, those channels. Correct. In, and then side by side, you're going to see what software attribution says, and then you're going to see what self-reported attribution says, and you're going to see where there are similarities, but most importantly, you're going to see where there are some key differences. And the trick, I mentioned this before, but I'll reinforce it. I think it's worth reinforcing any demand capture program like Google search software attribution is reliable. That data is good. And that's a great data point to use if you're evaluating effectiveness of paid search. But when you're thinking about demand creation tactics that are typically difficult to measure, that's where you want to rely on self-reported attribution to get insight into which of those programs are actually driving in bounds for you.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd just for our audience to clarify, you're talking about the difference between demand
EDDIE REYNOLDScreation and demand capture. We're talking about the difference between somebody that has already decided they have a problem for which they want to search for a solution versus people that haven't, right?
MEGAN BOWENCorrect. Yeah. Or another way to think about it is people that are actively in market to buy or to solve the
MEGAN BOWENproblem that you solve. They're on Google search or Bing. Maybe they're on G2 or Capterra and they're trying to evaluate options and read peer reviews about what their peers might think of the various options that are under their consideration versus those that maybe aren't necessarily in market but then become aware of you because you're showing up in their social media feed, right? And then over time, they develop an affinity to you. And then when they realize that maybe they could use your services, you're top of mind because of all of the education and awareness building that has been happening up until that point.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd so what I think I'm understanding you're saying is that people that already have demand that are going and searching for a solution are more likely to click on like a Google ad or
EDDIE REYNOLDSsomething like that. Whereas the people where you're creating demand over a long period of time, they're following you on LinkedIn, listening to your podcast, et cetera, they're more likely to go direct to your website, search for your company name, et cetera, and have that attribution software misrepresent what caused them to come to you.
MEGAN BOWENYeah. If you are executing an effective demand creation program, then that is what happens. What I see today, though, is a lot of B2B companies are so focused on the demand capture. Because of the pressure to drive short-term results, that many aren't even executing against the motions so that we can have that experience that you just described. That doesn't just happen unless you invest in those types of demand creation programs, which are more medium to long-term plays. Yeah. Sorry. That brings us to a whole other topic, which is this MQL target.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYou guys talk a lot about it, right? I was at a dinner with a number of go-to-market leaders with Pavilion a month ago or so, and
EDDIE REYNOLDSone of the CMOs there was complaining about this, about how she's held accountable for an MQL target and doesn't want to be. It's a real problem. Have you guys seen improvement over the last couple of years that you guys have been screaming from the rooftops about this? Or do you feel like you still see a lot of marketing departments that are held accountable primarily for an MQL?
SPEAKER_30I've really only seen incremental improvement. And it's actually pretty surprising to me when...
MEGAN BOWENI mean, I talked about seven to 10 CMOs and heads of marketing per week. I'm still running all of the RefineLab sales processes. So I have multiple conversations a day with different marketers at B2B SaaS companies. Everyone acknowledges how much B2B buying behavior has changed. And everybody can get on board in theory with a lot of the concepts that we're talking about now. But there's a huge disconnect from them nodding their head and agreeing to what they're actually doing from an execution standpoint. And I think that it primarily stems from a couple things. I think that what they're doing is technically socially acceptable. So even if it's not effective, they're checking the boxes and doing the work. And I think for someone to put their reputation on the line to make this shift for a company is scary, right? Like if a CMO or a head of marketing is going to campaign to make this shift, it is the right shift to make, but it might result in short-term perception that things are not performing because of the time that it takes to see some of the results. And so I think it's basically people feeling comfortable doing what's always been done and people being afraid to make a change and what that could mean for their own personal situation. That's my hypothesis of why more companies are not adopting something that they'll totally nod their head with and agree with in theory. But then when it comes down to it, don't actually change anything.
SPEAKER_47Yeah, it's kind of like that old adage, nobody ever gets fired for buying Microsoft.
MEGAN BOWENYes.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSame idea.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt's like nobody's getting fired for just doing the thing that's the status quo, but it's
EDDIE REYNOLDSproblematic. I mean, I see this in our own marketing engine. We recently hired a marketing manager and the first thing that I did was to say, hey, like all your goals and comp are going to be tied to revenue. And in fact, like her comp plan is broken up on inbound revenue and total revenue because every single deal we close is going to be influenced by marketing. So whether it comes in as a lead or whether this is somebody I've been working for three years, our marketing content is going to influence that person. And so I've built the comp plans and the goals around that. And we're running into this interesting problem where since she's come on board, since we redesigned the website, we've dramatically increased the number of high intent leads, meaning people going to our website and clicking a button, requesting a meeting or booking it out right through Calendly, which is great. But now these leads aren't closing. And since I'm still the one actually selling, managing both sales and marketing, we can't just blame the salesperson because that's me. And I'm sitting there talking to these folks and a lot of them are not ICP. They're not buyer persona. They're way too early in the process. They need nurturing. And I look at this and I'm thinking, well, how would I handle this? If I was the marketing person being held accountable for an MQL, I would look at it and say, job done. Sales responsibility to close these, but that's not how we have things structured. And so now we have to have this concerted team effort to decide what do we do to solve this problem? We're now generating all these leads. We've got to convert them. We've got to think hard about how to fix that problem. And to me, nobody would be doing that if we're being held accountable and compensated on an MQL target.
SPEAKER_25Yeah, I agree with everything you said.
MEGAN BOWENI think that's, and I see that a lot as well. And I will say, I think a lot of CEOs and CFOs don't fully, I think don't fully understand like the nuances of marketing. And so it's, and, and it's not a, it's not a me, uh, blaming them. It's just because of their, the lanes that they're in and their areas of focus. Um, it's not something that they're thinking about. And in their mind, it's like, well, just generate the more leads we generate, the more sales will close. Right. Most of them still hold onto that mindset.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I mean, I can say personally over the last three years, it's been a really steep learning curve for me to wrap my head around marketing. And I can understand why maybe some other CEOs, especially like myself that may have grown
EDDIE REYNOLDSup in sales might just say, Hey, like I'm going to hire somebody for that and let's give them an MQ all target and let's have, let's have sales close them. But, uh, getting back to sort of our topic at hand, I'd be really curious. So with your framework, how do you look at multi-channel attribution? Um, especially if you're creating demand and you have a number of different channels, let's use podcasts as an example, since we both have one, we've got LinkedIn, uh, newsletters, events. I can imagine that many customers are going to be hit by a lot of these different things. How do you guys look at that?
MEGAN BOWENYeah. And so I think, um, one of the, um, one of the measure, I guess, uh, pillars of our measurement framework is what we would call pipeline sources.
MEGAN BOWENSo the typical measurement setup that I see most B2B companies will have when they're, you know, measuring either pipeline source or lead source, they're going to use fairly big categories. We'll typically see things like outbound, which is sales, right? Inbound, which is marketing. And then, you know, a partner is another common one. If there's some type of partner program or referral program.
MEGAN BOWENAnd, you know, that I think as a result of the past and how leaders and business leaders
MEGAN BOWENhave thought about investment allocation and measuring the return on that investment, right? Okay. I'm going to build a sales team. I want to track how many opportunities the sales team closes to see if my investment in the sales team is bringing a return on the sales that they're making. Right. And then for marketing, okay, I'm going to invest in this marketing budget. I want to track all of the leads that come in inbound because of marketing. And again, I want to compare the ROI of what I'm getting. And it's logical, right? I get that. It makes sense. Many companies have that set up. However, with this shift in buying behavior and with the measurement of marketing becoming more complex, it doesn't really give you the full picture of whether which marketing programs or which sales programs are actually driving pipeline and revenue and which ones are not. So pipeline sources blows up that categorization. Instead of thinking about it as inbound, outbound, and partner, let's actually think about it relative to the specific program. So just like you were saying, podcast, events, LinkedIn, Google search, right? Even from an outbound perspective, you know, SDR outreach, AE, maybe outbound after an event that, you know, that they met someone in, right? Actually getting a lot more granular of what are the particular campaigns and programs that we're deploying that we believe will drive that inbound? And how can we re-architect our marketing automation platform and our CRM to begin collecting data in that way so that over time, we can actually, instead of is sales performing or is marketing performing, it should actually be looked at, is the podcast performing? Is our event strategy performing? Is this outbound motion performing? Is that outbound motion performing? Then it becomes much more insightful and gives you a lot more data to help know which programs you should cut or reduce funding or increase funding if they're working and how you should prioritize things. So that's the basic premise of moving into a pipeline source model that's actually mapped back to how the buyer came to you versus which team, you know, gets credit for the opportunity.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So then as you're looking at the amount of revenue generated from the podcast, for example, how do you determine whether or not the podcast gets credit versus LinkedIn versus something else where that prospect or company, and we haven't even gotten into companies that have multiple people interacting with your brand. How do you determine who gets, what gets credit?
MEGAN BOWENYeah, it's a great question. So the disclaimer here is none of this is perfect data, right? We're getting as much data signals as possible. It's difficult to measure marketing's impact today. It really is. We will use the responses from self-reported attribution to measure demand creation programs such as podcasts or events, right? And it is not atypical for a particular contact to have many things that they interacted with that ultimately led them to come inbound or make a purchasing decision, right? And so in a more, probably in a more sophisticated implementation of this, you could actually have multiple pipeline sources listed. You could be mapping back both the software attribution data point and the self-reported attribution data point to the same contact. So you can get pretty sophisticated and try to capture as much of those touch points as possible because the reality is there are many, many touch points, right? You're just trying to get as many signals to know which touch points are really resonating with customers and which ones are correlated to opportunity creation and closed one opportunities.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat makes a lot of sense and it's very clear to me that this is not an exact science. I mean, if you think about it from the scientific method perspective, like you have to have
EDDIE REYNOLDSa test group and a control group or whatever the proper terminology is and like we just never have that. You have a bunch of different people interacting with a bunch of different marketing channels
EDDIE REYNOLDSin a bunch of different ways, many of which are not measurable. So I like your approach. What I'm hearing is basically you're saying if somebody goes to the website and fills out the
EDDIE REYNOLDSform and says that they came to you because of the podcast, even though they also saw you on LinkedIn, even though they also attended one of your events, even though they also saw one of your ads, then there's a halfway decent chance that the podcast is what influenced
EDDIE REYNOLDSthem most.
MEGAN BOWENAnd that's what they remembered, right? So I think, again, it's important to look at this data as it is imperfect, but it's giving
MEGAN BOWENyou important signals to know. And I believe very, very much so that it's the combination of all of those tactics that ultimately get to the outcome that you want. And I think if all of those tactics are executed effectively, you're going to see self-reported attribution data points to support all of them, right?
EDDIE REYNOLDSMakes sense. So one thing I'm curious about is, have you guys ever had salespeople asking folks how they heard about you as well?
MEGAN BOWENDefinitely. So one of the things we love to do when we start working with a customer, especially when we start to see inbounds come in as a result of our programs, is get even more qualitative feedback from the sales reps that are talking to them. And there's a couple of things we want to ask. So we'll get some additional data points. This is definitely a little bit more anecdotal or ad hoc in having conversations about validating lead quality when we're working with a customer to help make this change. But what we typically hear are the sales reps will report beyond whatever the customer put in self-reported attribution. They'll basically report back the point you were just making. Oh, they've actually been following our CEO on LinkedIn for a year. They came to our event last quarter and they really loved this podcast episode, right? But podcast was what they put. So it validates the theory that we're talking about, that it's really multiple touch points that actually drive that buyer to raise their hand. The other thing that we'll find out, which is very interesting, is whether or not they are appropriately educated. Did our campaigns actually deliver the messages that we wanted and were those received and internalized by them? So another great piece of feedback that we look for is, wow, I was doing my discovery call
MEGAN BOWENand qualifying this prospect, but they already knew so much about our product.
MEGAN BOWENThey already had come to me so informed about what our product could do and we were able to move through the sales process so much faster, right? So there's another really interesting kind of qualitative point there around the level of awareness and education that this buyer now has coming into the sales cycle, which is very different than if you're trying to convince someone that didn't know you existed to take a meeting with you and what that education process looks like. So some interesting insights that we typically see.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, that's something I can identify with personally. One of the last deals we closed came in off of a podcast listener and it's just like this guy had spent hours listening to our podcast. And so at the point in time where we finally spoke for the first time, it's a different conversation than what you have via Cold Outbound, obviously.
SPEAKER_05In a good way, right? In a very good way. I mean, we closed the deal. We have a very happy customer, so I can't complain.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo talk me through a little bit about your recommended measurement framework. How do we start measuring this? We talked offline before we started recording on what are some of the baselines you need in order to start measuring this effectively?
MEGAN BOWENYeah. So I think the way I like to think about goal setting and setting expectations for anyone when
MEGAN BOWENyou're going to be making this change is it's really important to understand what your historical baseline is for your inbound demand. So there are a couple of key metrics that, and in fact, even in my sales process at Refine Labs, I actually try to get this level of detail in the sales process so I can help manage expectations before we even bring on a customer about what they can expect in terms of a lift in results. So one of the things that I want to anchor on immediately is how many web conversions are you getting per month off your primary conversion point on your website, right? How many people are filling out your request to demo, your contact sales form? All of our efforts will result in more high-quality traffic to your website and more web conversions as the first starting point to build pipeline and more revenue, right? So knowing the baseline of what the current inbound volume is per month and what that's been for the trailing 12 months is so important because that can be zero, that can be five, that can be 50, right? And that's a very different story of how we can begin to implement change and improvement there. Then we want to know, out of all the inbounds that have come in, what percentage of those converted to a qualified opportunity. We want to know what that conversion rate is because our hypothesis is if we implement our strategy, we'll increase the number and quality of web conversions and we should expect an increase in how many of those convert to a qualified opportunity. And then, of course, we want to know how many of those qualified opportunities actually move to closed one, right? Actually become a customer. So those are like, I would say, the most important initial metrics. And those are the ones that we want to move for our customers. We want to get them more hand raisers, more opportunities, and more revenue. So getting that baseline is important. Some people don't have it because they have poor data collection. Many people will have a version of it, but maybe not have the data perfect. That's okay. No one has perfect CRM data. But that baseline is really critical. And from there, we can begin to map out how to think about increasing all of those metrics across the board, which ultimately results in more pipeline revenue for the company.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, that makes a lot of sense. Some of the problems that we've run into internally in doing this ourselves, as well as with our customers, I'll start internally, is you just look at the website conversion rate. So I'm looking at how many people visit our website and how many people convert into, we don't do demos because we don't sell software, but they book a sales call. So before I even get there, when I think conversion rate, I'm wondering, are companies out there
EDDIE REYNOLDSlooking at that in terms of how many people download their white paper, which I think you and I agree is obviously far less meaningful. So it sounds like you're starting with a baseline of saying, we're really looking at the conversion rate for people that want to talk to sales.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_18We call them hand raisers or inbound web conversions. Yeah.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And so one of the issues that we had is our website just got hit with a job search with Indeed, so it spiked all of our data. No big deal.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe could clean that up, but it's an example of bad data. One month we have like 10X the traffic and it's not the traffic we want. So we have to go in and clean that out when we're looking at that data to give you that baseline, right? And then I think the biggest issue that we see with a lot of our clients is now we're getting into Salesforce and into the sales CRM and many organizations, especially less mature organizations, have sales reps that call every meeting and everybody with a pulse qualified sales opportunity. So we have to go in and say, well, what is the definition of a qualified sales opportunity? What is your sales process? What gets into pipeline? What moves from stage one to stage two, et cetera? Are you guys seeing that as well? Do you guys work with clients or encourage them to work on this so that you can get more visibility into like the real pipeline and the real conversion rate to revenue?
MEGAN BOWENYeah, definitely. I think in an ideal setup, we even recommend something that we call deal stage time stamping.
MEGAN BOWENSo basically, at every core touch point, like, okay, inbound came in, meeting held, qualified opportunity created, and many companies will have pipeline stages, right? Like, oh, maybe stage three is beyond qualify than before closed one. It's really interesting, and I would say probably the most sophisticated implementation is if you have date and time stamping set up, which is just basically building a set of workflows, automated workflows that happen on your contact and your opportunity records, that you can actually start to measure conversion percentages across each of those steps, as well as length of time, and how those will ideally improve over the course of a longer time period, if you're doing your job correctly from a demand creation perspective. Theoretically, you know, a shorter sales cycle is a typical outcome our customers will see, because again, that customer is coming in so educated and ready to buy in a very different way than a cold outbound prospect would respond. So you can get, and then you can start to see, okay, if you look at all those conversion rates, is there a particular point where there's, like, a fall off? And that could be a signal that something's going wrong, right? You know, we've had instances where we saw a huge spike in inbound demos, but we didn't see them convert to opportunities. And we're like, what's going on? We have all these leads coming, but they're not converting into opportunities. And then we dig in, and we realize that, you know, the sales team is taking three to four days to follow up with a form submission. And we're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, of course, we're seeing this drop off because there isn't a tight follow-up process. Let's dig into that and let's correct that so that we can get back on track, right? That's just one example. But when you get to that level of granular tracking, it will shine a light if something is broken so that you can look into it further and then figure out what you need to fix. Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there.
SPEAKER_01And those are some great points.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo we've been doing that for a long time. I'm a big believer in it. And I think one reason, just from a pure sales perspective, is that typically when you see a stage or an entire sales cycle that is significantly longer than what is normal, it's usually what
EDDIE REYNOLDSyou see with deals that are not going to close. And from a sales perspective, you oftentimes have salespeople that are chasing deals that will never close and they're losing valuable selling time. That can translate into many other things, such as not having time to prospect. It can also translate in not having time to follow up with new leads, causing the problem that you just shared, that it's taking three, four days to follow up on a lead. And there's tons of studies out there that show that even waiting 30 minutes versus five minutes, let alone 24 hours or three days, can drop lead conversion drastically exponentially. And so I'm assuming you're going to agree with me, but when we're looking at marketing, one of the first things that we want to fix is how quickly do you respond to inbound leads?
MEGAN BOWENYes. And who is responding to them? It doesn't, it shouldn't be a junior SDR. It should be your best sales rep, right? I totally agree with that.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, I would say your best sales rep that can handle that lead flow, which then segues me
EDDIE REYNOLDSinto my next question of what are those leads? So our whole conversation is all talked about these high intent leads, people asking for a meeting with sales, but there's a lot of questions I have around that, right? So do we, man, where do I start? Cause I don't want to ask you a six part question. Um, let's start with this. Okay. So let's say that the only leads we're going to pass to sales are people that have requested a meeting with sales. Do you guys see in your client base times where that is too much for an AE to handle?
EDDIE REYNOLDSLike it has to go to an SDR because it's just too much volume.
SPEAKER_30Um, I would say that sure.
MEGAN BOWENYes. I've seen that. That is like the best problem to have though. Too many inbounds. And what we, um, what we try to do, for example, like if the volume is too much for one individual, great. Let's bring in another, you know, high performing AE to back it up. I think the key is, um, you want to, you, and you said this, so I'll just reinforce a point that you made. You want to follow up as quickly as possible and, or let the customer actually book the meeting in the form fill process on the website. And you want someone who is educated and equipped to get that deal to qualified opportunity stage as quickly as possible. If you have so much volume, you need more than one person, get another person in the mix to do it. Right? Like that's the easy, that's the easiest solution in my book because it's a great point
EDDIE REYNOLDSif it's converting and it's, what's so funny, anything go to market. It's like, well, if the ROI is there, if you're making money, just hire more people. And if you're not, that's a different problem.
EDDIE REYNOLDSRight. And that leads me into my next question. Are you filtering these leads in some way? Cause I'm personally experiencing the challenge of we're getting a lot of these leads, uh, for us that aren't, you know, the types of people and companies that we work with right now. Um, and since I'm the one fielding all of these is our senior salesperson, so to speak,
EDDIE REYNOLDSalso CEO, uh, I feel the pain there. Um, how do you guys handle that?
MEGAN BOWENYeah. So actually I have a solution that I use at refine labs. Cause I also take all the sales calls. Um, I, I started to, um, make notes every time I had conversations with a particular prospect
MEGAN BOWENon and realize, you know, on that first call, this isn't a good fit. This isn't going to work. And there, there was one common trend that came up every time, which was how much they were currently spending on paid advertising. So I was able over, and this took time to uncover and realize, but I was able to understand, okay, if they spend less than $15,000 per month on paid advertising, it almost never will work. So I have, now I asked this question on the refine labs form when you're booking a call and you can also book a call right on my calendar. If you go to the website and if it's below that 15,000 threshold, I have automation set up in HubSpot where they're going to get an automated email from me that says, Hey, thank you for your interest in refine labs. I noticed that you said your ad budget was less than this. I wanted to be respectfully transparent. This is our pricing. This, these are the quality, like, these are kind of like the qualifiers of the typical companies that we work. We typically work with B2B SaaS companies that are over 10 million in revenue, have an ACV of $20,000 per year or higher, and are already spending $20,000 or more per month on paid advertising. So I'm not sure we're the right fit. Now, and I put at the end, Hey, if I've misread the situation and you can afford our pricing and you want to spend more, by all means, let me know and we'll get on a call. But that's been awesome because I have this all automated now and they get that email and then I pretty much get a response every time. And the response is either, Oh, thank you so much for the information. You're right. We could never afford you. I'll reach back out when we're a little bit further along. Or I get, Hey, you misread the situation. We're not spending that now, but I want to, and we can totally afford your retainer. So yes, can we have a meeting? Great. Let's do it. Here's my calendar. Right? So it's obviously going to, the qualification criteria is going to depend on your business. You can't take that particular data point that I just shared for ours. But that's been super effective. And that has allowed me to have the majority of the calls that get booked be qualified. And for me to have this other process whereby, uh, I'm sort of disqualifying them, but in a way that keeps the door open in case it is still a qualified prospect that I should speak with.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI love that detail. Um, but to summarize it, what you're saying is you have a qualification criteria, even if somebody is requesting a meeting. Uh, and I love the way that you, you handle that when you take this to a company that's much
EDDIE REYNOLDSlarger than yours and mine, um, with a huge sales team, when would, when would you want those leads to go to an AE or an SDR? When, if ever, would you want white paper downloads or folks with a certain lead score to go to an SDR or an AE?
MEGAN BOWENYeah. Great question. So generally we're, we don't really believe in lead scoring or, or having a salesperson follow
MEGAN BOWENup on a white paper download, like when's the last time you downloaded content and wanted to, you know, immediately have a product demo. If you wanted a product demo, you would sign up for the product demo. So we, we typically avoid, we recommend avoiding that type of outreach. Um, now if you're a B2B SaaS company and you have a large sales team and it's not like a situation like you and me, where you're like the business owner who's also selling and needs to be really, uh, you know, smart about how they're spending their time. Um, I would say give all of these people, like anyone that wants to come in, like get, get them to a salesperson or, or an SDR. For me, um, it's interesting. We'll see how those roles kind of evolve over time. For me, it's less about the title and it's more about, is this person equipped to have a real conversation on the first call? I see so many people where the SDR is like a qualifier. So the first meeting is like a qualification call to then set up the real meeting. And that's frustrating to a buyer. So it's less, you know, there are SDRs that are super knowledgeable about the product. So it's less about the title and it's more about the content of that first call should
MEGAN BOWENbe giving the buyer the information that they need to move through the sales process.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I absolutely align with that. I think the only challenge I have there is if we're saying, okay, great. So we've got this amazing inbound program and people requesting meetings with sales, but we want to, we want to make calls.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe feel, or we have proof that we can pick up the phone and call people or email them or LinkedIn DM them or whatever. And we can generate meaningful pipeline and revenue. What's the best way to do that? So now we're like talking about outbound. And for me, I'm increasingly thinking about this. Why are we separating this? Especially with the framework that you just laid out, we can put these people aside, these folks that have requested a meeting. And I did a podcast a while back with Channing Ferrer who ran sales ops at HubSpot. And he said, like, as you imagine, HubSpot gets a lot of inbound leads, a lot of MQLs, lots of lead scores, and they broke things down into a couple of buckets or one more bucket. Really. They had the folks here, you and I've been talking about these hand raisers. They had the folks with the lead score, and they found that those folks were largely not worth calling. Those were not converting. And then they had folks in the middle that had hit their pricing page three times. And they did find that that bucket of leads did convert, and it was worth their SDRs. I assume SDRs. I don't remember if it was SDRs or AEs, calling those folks and trying to get a meeting with them. And so I think it's kind of interesting. Are you guys looking at your inbound lead flow, slicing it into custom buckets for each company? Like, it's kind of a long-winded question, but how do you look at a concept like that?
MEGAN BOWENYeah. And so I would say when we're working with a customer, our primary flow that we're trying
MEGAN BOWENto influence is primary conversions on the website. So in many cases, actually, too, we're recommending to clients, like, let's kill this, you know, gated content campaign on LinkedIn. And instead of putting money behind that, let's actually put money behind a demand creation campaign on LinkedIn. So our belief is that you should be allocating budget to drive the best customer buying experience that exists. Now, big company like HubSpot, Salesforce, you have these massive companies where other motions can still be effective and you have a huge volume and, you know, big teams, then yes, I think you could be more sophisticated than that. Typically, we're working with companies that have not reached that scale, that want to get to that scale, but aren't there yet. And we believe the fastest path is by catering to the way that B2B buying happens today, which is not the white paper download, is not the lead scoring.
SPEAKER_25It's just a different approach.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, I can tell you that I buy into the concept because I've invested all my time and money trying to replicate this go-to-market motion. And it's worked quite well for us. It's part of the reason we're here on this podcast. But I haven't even gotten through half my questions and I'm looking at the clock right now and we're almost at time. We'll need to do a part two. I'm up to it. But before we do run out of time, Megan, how can people hear about you? And is there anything specific that you want them to check out?
MEGAN BOWENYeah, so you can check us out at refinelabs.com. The only social media platform I am on is LinkedIn, but you can find me on LinkedIn.
MEGAN BOWENI try to post pretty regularly, obviously about marketing, but I'm really big on continuing my own personal and professional development. And I'm really fascinated by things like leadership development. So also a lot of my content is around those types of themes as well, which I think are just interesting and applicable to anyone really. And yeah, I would say we have some exciting updates coming soon about our content product, The Vault. So I'll put that little teaser out and we'll be making some big announcements in April with some cool enhancements and some cool things we're doing with that to give opportunity for more B2B marketers and B2B companies to get access to all the cool information we have.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThe Vault's really cool. I'll plug it as well. For companies like me, for people like me that can't afford your services or aren't at the
EDDIE REYNOLDSscale that we probably could leverage your services either, it's really cool that you have access to this knowledge base that is, as I understand it, much more affordable. Yes.
MEGAN BOWENIt's basically for people that can't or don't want to hire us. You can get access to everything you need to know to implement our strategy on your own at your company. So that's the goal of it. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Megan.
SPEAKER_85Thanks, Eddie. Great conversation. Thank you.
