Refine Labs has had a seismic impact on B2B marketing. Whether you agree with their philosophy or not, it's hard to deny its influence. They've set the agenda, defined the terms of the debate, and challenged many aspects of the status quo. Former CEO Chris Walker catapulted the agency to prominence with his LinkedIn thought leadership. But behind the scenes, there's also been an intricate operational odyssey to scale Refine Labs from scratch to nearly 100 employees. Today's guest, Megan...

Scaling an outbound motion is gruelling and difficult. For sellers, it means hours and hours of research and thousands of dials and emails, all while facing continual rejection. For RevOps, it can actually be almost as bad (albeit, in a different way). You're usually stitching together a monstrous Franken-Stack of data providers and outreach tools, the reporting and attribution are terrible, and the process still requires a ton of manual work. However, with the rise of AI, there's been an...

I think marketing is one of the toughest functions to lead successfully. Your job is part art, part science. You need to hire, coach, and retain talent with a huge range of skillsets that you may even not be master of yourself—from the creative to the analytical to the technical. And then your job is to simultaneously create demand, capture demand, help sales convert that demand, help customer success retain and expand that demand...your job is never done. Today we chat with one of my...

More and more marketers are embracing demand creation as a strategy, at least in principle. But making a fundamental GTM change is HARD. You need to build executive alignment, define new KPIs, identify how to educate your target audience, fine-tune your content engine, and a whole lot more. As VP of Demand Gen at Refine Labs, Sam Kuehnle has been a big part of the movement evangelizing a shift from lead gen to demand gen and has helped many companies make the transition. Now he's leading...

I've worked with a bunch of different sellers. Some were good. Some not so much. But one or two were truly next level. They had consistently better results. They brought in bigger deals. They closed accounts no one else could. And they just seemed to "get it" in a different way. They were switched on—you didn't need to tell them what to do. Whatever challenge you threw at them, they found a way. They seemed built just a little bit differently than other people on the team. I've always been...

SaaS companies spent the past decade optimizing for growth and customer acquisition at all costs. For many, the plan to actually retain and grow those customers has been foggy. Now with many businesses facing the reality of massive churn, it's become incredibly clear that helping customers succeed is just as important as acquiring them in the first place. So we're here today to discuss the third leg of the RevOps stool: customer success ops, and by extension, the discipline of customer...

Prioritization is probably the biggest challenge for ops teams. Say yes to everything—you pretty quickly become a service department. Set your own priorities without input from the business—you can quickly find yourself irrelevant, even out of a job. The best model that I've seen for tackling this problem is what we could call the product management approach to managing MarTech. This is where you effectively treat your stack as an internal product and ops as a product management team...

Every marketing team  wants attribution. But weirdly, it's often not that satisfying when they actually get it. I led many multi-touch attribution projects as a consultant, and we got really good at implementing tools, creating taxonomies, and making sure that data was clean. But I found that when you actually showed these reports to a C-level executive, it was usually kind of underwhelming. The data didn't always pass the common sense test. Today's guest thinks there's a better way...

For most of us in B2B, the marketing automation platform - aka "MAP" - is the anchoring piece of technology in the martech stack. When I was first buying a MAP, there were way more options than today, but generally they all bundled a few core features together — sending emails, segmenting audiences, and creating workflows. But is there a reason why you need to do your lifecycle processing in the same tool that you send emails with? What does a Martech stack look like where these roles are...

Kyle Coleman is one of the most prominent revenue leaders on LinkedIn and a long-time champion of sales development. So there was no one better to chat with about the future of the SDR function, which some claim is facing imminent demise... Spoiler alert: Kyle doesn't share that view. But he DOES think that it needs to change. We look at how sales development will evolve in 2024 and beyond, discuss his SDR to 2-time-CMO journey, and examine how AI will impact sellers and increase...

There comes a time in every marketing ops professional's life when they wonder if the grind of an in-house job is worth it after all. Whether it's politics, overwork, lack of resources, lack of respect, a toxic boss, or one of a million other things...it might make you think, "maybe I'd be happier as a consultant." But is the grass actually greener? What does it take to get started in consulting? Are you better off at an agency or as an independent? How do you find clients? To answer these...

B2B communities are everywhere these days. It's easy to forget that 10 years ago, it wasn't nearly so easy to connect with peers, ask for unfiltered recommendations, celebrate wins, and commiserate about dumpster fires. Mike Rizzo has made community his career - both in developing B2B customer communities and in building the top community of practice for marketing operations. In this episode, we examine how B2B companies can leverage community as part of their GTM strategy, what makes a...

Every B2B company has a funnel tracking process. And quite often, that process is seriously limited or broken. Leads get lost, data is inaccurate, and businesses struggle to produce insights and accurate reporting. I've seen this first hand, and so has this week's guest - Charlie Saunders. We've both spent years as consultants fixing broken funnels. In this episode, we talk about the many reasons funnel tracking goes wrong and dive deep into the architecture of the scalable solution...

Many entrepreneurs dream of creating categories. But few have actually done it - much less built a category worth billions of dollars. Mark Organ is one of those rare few. As founding CEO of Eloqua, he pioneered marketing automation in the early 2000s, paving the way for other players and selling to Oracle for nearly $900 million. Mark and I chat through how he co-founded Eloqua, the pivots and experiments needed to achieve product-market fit, and how category creators may be wired a bit...

Historically, Product-led Growth (PLG) companies have been underserved. Marketing automation platforms, growth playbooks, reporting frameworks, and “best practices” have been largely designed around the needs of their sales-led cousins. But PLG has had a renaissance in the past few years, and all that's changed. PLG now has its own communities, methodologies, frameworks, and tools. Today's guest, Dave Rigotti, has quickly become one of the godfathers of PLG as a thought leader and...

Martech continues to expand and shift at breakneck speed. Hot startups from five years ago have become legacy incumbents. Some platforms consolidate into monolithic suites while other categories break apart into specialized point solutions. AI looms over everything, with potential to disrupt virtually every established paradigm. Who better to guide us through this landscape than Phil Gamache, one of the humans behind the awesome Humans of Martech podcast? Join us for a deep dive into the...

If you're looking to transition from a technical MOPS expert to a leader - or if you're an existing MOPS leader who wants to up their game - Jessica Kao is the person to learn from. She built a career as an expert MOPS consultant before becoming an enterprise marketing ops leader. Listen to this conversation and you'll quickly see: she's ridiculously good at the business side of marketing operations. She knows how to plan, how to communicate, and how to lead. Thanks to Our SponsorMany...

Everyone is talking about how transformative AI is, but the information is still very piecemeal. There are tons of app focused listicles or cool tricks for ChatGPT, but if you're like me, you don't have time to go looking for ways to put apps to work. So I set out to take a comprehensive look at the business of marketing, breaking it down into the fundamental jobs to be done and creating practical guidance for marketers on how they might incorporate AI into their daily work in each area....

I follow the attribution software category pretty closely, and sometime in the last 6-12 months it felt like I started seeing HockeyStack everywhere in my LinkedIn feed. They have multiple team members and executives posting regularly, producing unique and engaging content, and they are building in public, sharing tons of juicy details about their GTM strategy. How did a relatively young startup come to appear so dominant so quickly? I invited HockeyStock's CRO to chat and unpack all the...

Jill Rowley is a legend in SaaS, with early tenures at Salesforce and Eloqua. As one of Eloqua's first salespeople, she helped shape the category of marketing automation and was also an early pioneer of social selling. Today she is helping evangelize a new perspective on partner-led growth, which she calls "nearbound." Jill and I talk about what it was like selling cloud-based software in the early oughts, helping the first customers to use marketing automation, and what it means to go to...

Your GTM message has an incredibly difficult task: to speak to the people who will love your product and take them from a place of disinterest and zero context to a place of understanding and excitement. When done well, it’s pure magic. I think that every GTM and ops professional should be familiar with how to do this, and so I asked my old boss, Mitch Solway, to join me for a masterclass in messaging. Thanks to Our SponsorMany thanks to the sponsor of this episode - Knak. If you don't...

Refine Labs has changed the course of B2B marketing over the past few years. Challenging conventions on attribution and funnel tracking and championing new ways of generating demand, this agency has broken pretty much every mold and driven the conversation and debate. Today we're joined by SVP of Marketing Sidney Waterfall, who produces much of the Refine Labs IP and brings together both deep demand gen and RevOps expertise. In this in-depth discussion we unpack the nitty-gritty of the...

In a world where we have so much tech, it's amazing that revenue planning and forecasting remain relatively primitive in most companies. You could have literally a million dollar tech stack and yet still be creating your business plan with a spreadsheet and forecasting results with a best guess from sales. Today we look at how to go beyond the spreadsheet paradigm with the CEO of Growblocks, a revenue planning and analytics platform. We'll explore whether it's possible to have a truly...

What lies ahead for marketing operations? How can it become more strategic and impactful? Darrell Alfonso has spent the past ten years answering these questions through his work at companies like AWS and Indeed. He's also dedicated himself to moving the discipline of marketing ops forward as an author, teacher, speaker, and thought-leader. In this episode, he shares his vision of how marketing operations can encompass both strategy and technical expertise and describes how MOPS practitioners...