The Demand Waterfall with Refine Labs' Sidney Waterfall

00:00:01:09 - 00:00:23:05

Ben Hillman

In the lush heartland, rivers meander through the valleys, gathering momentum as they travel. Each river, brook and Stream has its unique course, converging and divergent, but all with a common goal to reach the ocean. Much like these waterways, the marketplace is rife with currents of demand, each representing a unique need, a desire, a problem, looking for a solution.

00:00:23:09 - 00:00:47:06

Ben Hillman

And while the Earth's terrain affects the river's courses, there are innovative ways like dams, pipes and channels designed to capture and direct these natural flows, ensuring that not a single drop is wasted or left unchecked. In our digital age, especially in the realm of B2B SaaS, these streams of demand have transformed into complex networks representing various stages and interactions.

00:00:47:08 - 00:01:04:02

Ben Hillman

It's here that the metaphor takes form in the concept of the demand waterfall. This system serves as the irrigation blueprint, ensuring every drop of potential interest finds its rightful place. Transforming mere interest into tangible results.

00:01:04:03 - 00:01:29:14

Ben Hillman

Sidney Waterfall. Beyond the serendipity of her name, Sidney stands as a master architect of these waterways. She's mapped the tributaries, gauge the depths and understands how to direct the flows seamlessly. She's the guide you seek when navigating the currents of the world. And yes, she has heard all of the waterfall based ponds. Join us as we set sail with Sidney, exploring the many tributaries of the demand waterfall.

00:01:29:16 - 00:01:53:13

Ben Hillman

Understanding the common challenges faced by businesses and discovering strategies to ensure that every drop of demand is captured and channeled effectively from Paddle. It's Protect the Hustle. When we explore the truth behind the strategy and tactics of bitter business growth to make you an outstanding operator. I'm Ben Hillman. And on today's episode, Sidney Waterfall Speaks with paddles. Andrew DAVIES about the demand waterfall.

00:01:53:15 - 00:02:20:09

Ben Hillman

They talk about tracking macro versus micro data points, the importance of conversion sources, technical versus marketing perspectives, the demand waterfall and effective go to market strategies. After you finish the episode, check out the show notes for a field guide from today's episode. Then, while you're leaving your five star review of the podcast, tell us what resonated most about our guests advice.

00:02:20:11 - 00:02:29:08

Andrew Davies

Sidney Well, it's great to have you on the hustle. Perhaps you can just introduce yourself to our audience a bit about yourself and a bit about your role and where you work.

00:02:29:09 - 00:02:59:08

Sidney Waterfall

Thank you for having me. My name is Sidney Waterfall. I'm SVP of Growth at Refine Labs and Refine Labs is a compass and demand gen marketing firm where we specifically work with B2B companies. We help companies kind of create and deploy demand creation strategies to accelerate their growth engine. That's kind of what we're known for. We really help companies transition from legend to demand gen, but more recently, helping companies transition from siloed departments to integrated revenue teams.

00:02:59:08 - 00:03:18:10

Sidney Waterfall

That's kind of what we do here. And my role is internal marketing, essentially for our brand. I started out on the client side with Irvine Labs and worked with a lot of our clients, manage a lot of our clients, and then switched over. And a lot of my background is in B2B SaaS. I'm a B2B SaaS tech girl.

00:03:18:11 - 00:03:32:18

Andrew Davies

Let's dive right in. So one of the things we're finding that Labs is known for is preaching the gospel around the shift from lead Gen to demand gen. Why don't you just unpack that a little bit for our audience and then we'll go a little bit deeper on that. Before talking about the latest shift, the accompanying for your clients.

00:03:32:21 - 00:03:56:22

Sidney Waterfall

Kind of shifting the mindset of how buyers buy today and understanding how buyers want to buy today. They want to reduce friction. They want to consume. We call it like the dark social era. So the shift in buying really has been accelerated by the Internet and what we call it the dark social era, which is people want you to consume content, read content, get educated about a product, and then buy when they're ready.

00:03:56:23 - 00:04:16:13

Sidney Waterfall

So that's really accelerating the lead gen to demand gen shift. With that, you have to change your marketing strategy to accommodate for that distribute content, distribute information for people to consume, to get them to be high content or what we call declared intent buyers to sign up for your product or sign up to talk to a sales rep.

00:04:16:18 - 00:04:20:03

Sidney Waterfall

So that's really kind of what we mean by the lead gen to demand gen movement.

00:04:20:04 - 00:04:40:10

Andrew Davies

So instead of, you know, getting a whole bunch of people at the top of this imaginary funnel that we all draw in our whiteboards and then pushing through lots of gates to get down to the bottom, it's about making sure that you are, you know, educating people throughout the entire journey. And then as they hand-raised, as they come with high intent, you know, they're going to convert much faster rather than having to go through four or five different gates that you've kind of manufactured in front of them is fair.

00:04:40:11 - 00:04:46:10

Andrew Davies

So why did we get to that situation where we were manufacturing these artificial funnels and pushing people through multiple gates?

00:04:46:10 - 00:05:14:22

Sidney Waterfall

First, I think it comes to before even we have the Internet, but pre mass internet people used to consume and get information from trade shows, from sales reps, and that was how they consumed field sales was a lot bigger. In some industries, it's still pretty big, right? But the acceleration of access to your peers, access to information that's not getting pushed out through a company's website, I think really accelerated this movement and we analyze a ton of companies.

00:05:14:22 - 00:05:44:16

Sidney Waterfall

We found that low content, gated content and lead nurturing that kind of strategy is a very ineffective lead to generate when that's your focus and that's what you're measured on. So that's what you're going to do. If you switch the mindset, switch the measurement to drive for consumption of your content and education of your product and services in dark social, you'll actually drive a much higher declared intent conversions, and those have much higher win rates.

00:05:44:16 - 00:05:45:10

Sidney Waterfall

Obviously, that.

00:05:45:10 - 00:05:57:10

Andrew Davies

Was the shift that you kind of preaching over the last few years. And now we're talking about this this move towards an integrated revenue team. So now updating me on your latest thinking here, the research that's backed it up and how you're walking your clients through this latest shift.

00:05:57:12 - 00:06:21:05

Sidney Waterfall

You're going to run multiple different go to market engines. We call them pipeline sources. We really wanted to help customers transform from siloed departments to more of an integrated revenue team working together to not just work in silos and pass things off, but really think about demand creation as a whole. Sales can create demand, marketing create demand, partner can create demand.

00:06:21:05 - 00:06:43:02

Sidney Waterfall

A lot of things can create demand. Your events, your media, brand, all of these things by looking at it a little bit more holistically and kind of a quote unquote all bound approach. A lot of people are familiar with that term. That's really helping us change the customer's mindset of how to go about this strategy. So quick summary is old way is like kind of the assembly line, right?

00:06:43:03 - 00:07:05:17

Sidney Waterfall

Lead gen starts with internal departments. It's really not focused on the customer new way, kind of this all bound revenue team approach where we're actually starting with how the customer engages and not department focus. So how did we create demand? How are we creating demand with programs that we're running? What programs and strategies do we have in place to capture demand and what are we doing for demand conversion?

00:07:05:18 - 00:07:37:19

Sidney Waterfall

Having all teams operate under those strategies and not just say, you know, marketing, you're supposed to do brand awareness and create demand, and sales is doing everything for capturing conversion. Everything should be working together, which is kind of where we're transitioning to. And the reason a lot of companies are trying to run ABM or ABC's kind of experiences, but they're still siloed in these marketing does this sales, does this and these campaigns run this way where we're kind of taking this approach to combining ABM into pipeline sources for an all bound approach.

00:07:37:19 - 00:07:44:12

Andrew Davies

Why would companies ever design an organization, why, when they're not working together in order to kind of serve the customer needs?

00:07:44:12 - 00:08:05:06

Sidney Waterfall

The intent is that they always want to design stuff to work together. But that's not really the reality in most organizations or there's friction at certain points. I think a lot of it goes back to measurement and how these teams are KPI and gold, right? And how they're incentivized when that's not aligned by cross departments, you're going to run into that friction point.

00:08:05:07 - 00:08:21:23

Sidney Waterfall

I think measurement plays a big part of like how to actually drive the alignment with this, which is why we are recommending kind of to look at how the customer came inbound and how the customer engaged and how the customer did X, Y, and Z, not what department did what to get the customer to do X, Y, or Z.

00:08:21:23 - 00:08:28:18

Andrew Davies

How you effectively comping different departments in a way that gets them to behave in this new all bound method.

00:08:28:22 - 00:08:52:12

Sidney Waterfall

We're still working with different organizations and helping them through from like a marketing perspective. When we are looking at like marketing investments and how to understand if your marketing is working and what's working and what's not, we recommend that we look at all marketing spend through across a standardized pipeline and revenue metric across all of your sources, of all of your pipeline sources.

00:08:52:12 - 00:09:16:01

Sidney Waterfall

So one of the big things that we find is when you don't standardize that pipeline metric, it could lead to something that we're kind of calling pipeline inflation, standardize that and measure all teams across the standardized measurement. So we'll take marketing spend, for example, look at it across all standardized, what we call high intent revenue opportunity, hero pipeline across all of your sources.

00:09:16:01 - 00:09:27:23

Sidney Waterfall

And that's how we can really understand like how is the investments making team KPIs and team measurements is really going to come down to like what programs and responsibilities are they driving towards in what channels.

00:09:28:01 - 00:09:46:03

Andrew Davies

So that makes total sense to me because you have this bad behavior in many, many organizations where marketing leaders go and, you know, buy some cheap leads to inflate their own. I'll never or do a quick content distribution or content syndication play in order to and of quarter. So that makes sense to kind of unify around something that is agreed on aligned more closely with revenue.

00:09:46:03 - 00:10:05:16

Andrew Davies

I'm still interested in how different departments can be motivated to work in the way you described at the top around partners, sales and marketing, all being responsible for creation and all being responsible for, you know, demand capture. Are there any other examples you've got of how you particularly maybe motivate sales teams to be involved in different stages of the funnel and they've been used.

00:10:05:16 - 00:10:28:02

Sidney Waterfall

To the journeys, not linear. And so the more people can understand that like win outbound or, you know, maybe an intent driven outbound and sales reps are out there trying to capture some of that intent, they can also create intent and they can also create demand through stuff that they're doing on LinkedIn or whatever channels that their customers are at or events is a very common one.

00:10:28:04 - 00:10:59:14

Sidney Waterfall

They can create demand and create opportunities in a different way through events, and maybe that buyer comes inbound through a different source. But they mentioned, you know, I heard about you on LinkedIn or I heard about you on this thing over here. It's just really not about fighting for credit. The biggest thing that we've seen that has worked is if you're running a very smooth, like ABM intent driven outbound motion, ideally your reps should be reaching out to those buyers before they even convert on your website.

00:10:59:14 - 00:11:29:01

Sidney Waterfall

And marketing maybe would go, Oh, well, you know, but we did this and like, yeah, but outbound got them first and it's like, it's not about that anymore. It's like, hey, they came in through ABM and triggered outbound, but they also engage through all this stuff and vice versa. So it's more of like that team approach. But that's the biggest signal that we've seen of companies executing this well is that their sales team is actually able to drive more efficient, quote unquote, what we call ABM intent, triggered outbound By doing this well and partnering together.

00:11:29:01 - 00:11:58:09

Andrew Davies

A lot of your work is with organizations in the process of scaling where they're going on one of these shifts. Let's go from a clean slate now and talk to the audience members here who are yet to build or just about to build their go to market structure. So maybe they've got an MVP, they've got a bunch of free users and now want to build, whether it's PLG, whether it was outbound as a go to market on top of this, what is what's your advice based on all you know about fixing these engines when they're at a greater degree of scale that you would put in place from the very beginning?

00:11:58:09 - 00:12:01:07

Andrew Davies

What would be your first hires? How would you be structuring that org?

00:12:01:08 - 00:12:28:04

Sidney Waterfall

My advice is to don't underestimate the reporting and the metrics that you are going to set yourself up for success, like pick the right metrics to measure and figure out how to track, first of all, and then measure those. I've seen a lot of companies get a couple months in or even a year in investing in marketing and sales, and they still can't really report on the things that they want to do.

00:12:28:05 - 00:12:55:17

Sidney Waterfall

That would be just like I'm a marketing kind of ops sales ops lady. So that's just like I have to say that disclaimer. The first thing that I would recommend is to work on your capturing demand strategy. If you don't have your website optimized and capture demand and channels to already capture what's out there, no point in creating demand yet or thinking about awareness strategies to start there.

00:12:55:17 - 00:13:26:00

Sidney Waterfall

And if there is no demand to capture, then great. You know, make sure your website can clearly communicate what you do, the benefits, you know, kind of product marketing basics. That's where I would always start is more with product marketing. Then find an optimize your conversion path for demand conversion, whether that's through your product or not through your product or having multiple conversion points, then I would start investing in like, how are we going to think about creating demand outside of existing things that we're doing?

00:13:26:05 - 00:13:45:06

Sidney Waterfall

And that's really more when it comes to how can we leverage subject matter experts, How can we start creating content and distributing content in a consumable way? That's really what I recommend. I'm actually recently just worked with a super, super small company consulting with them and you know, they've got like ten customers and they're like, What's the ideal conversion path?

00:13:45:07 - 00:14:04:05

Sidney Waterfall

Like, what do we do? And, and like we what? That's the perfect place to start. Let's start with like building your website forward the ideal conversion path into your product and how we want them to engage in your product and how we want them to talk to someone when they're ready or just pay and convert. So that's where I definitely start.

00:14:04:05 - 00:14:07:09

Sidney Waterfall

If you're just getting out of the gates with a couple of customers.

00:14:07:09 - 00:14:28:08

Andrew Davies

One thing that's super interesting about your role evolution and what Rafael Apps are doing is that you've added on the Volt, which I know you're responsible for the go to market on. We see in our data and we see, you know, 33, 34,000 different subscription businesses, financial data, the companies that have multiple different products, they grow much faster than those that don't.

00:14:28:08 - 00:14:45:08

Andrew Davies

And so you've got multiple products. It wasn't a multiple price points. There might be different personas you're selling to. One is kind of maybe a retainer, but it's a it's a consulting product. You know, you're made agency and now you've got this perhaps lower price, more repeatable archive and repository, which has a bunch of other things on it.

00:14:45:08 - 00:14:55:01

Andrew Davies

So why don't you describe for the audience what the Volt is, how it came about, And then let's dig into the different go to market that you're having to adopt in order to take it to market and grow revenue.

00:14:55:02 - 00:15:29:03

Sidney Waterfall

Refined labs, as you just started out as a service company. And the biggest part of our business is what we call the lab. It's our full service consulting and agency. And the vision was always to work with customers, generate insights across not just one or two customers, but a group, a large dataset or large for US dataset. Not quite data like you have, but a decent data set to then inform what other products or services or software could we potentially build to help the market at scale.

00:15:29:03 - 00:15:46:12

Sidney Waterfall

That's always been the intent of the company. When Chris founded it, we actually kind of have two products. I'll tell you, the Volt came to be. So we help a lot of companies with this transitioning their go to market strategy, transitioning from lead to demand. Gen two knows all about an approach and not everyone can afford us, right?

00:15:46:12 - 00:16:13:10

Sidney Waterfall

We are a higher priced item and we are exclusive to for a reason. We thought, okay, well we want to be able to help a lot of different companies in this space in a different way, too much different price point. And so that's kind of how the Volt came to be. And the Volt idea is that we generate non-obvious insights kind of at scale and we learn at scale faster than just, you know, one company learning at a time.

00:16:13:10 - 00:16:31:06

Sidney Waterfall

And so how do we document that, create playbooks, create insights and publish that in a way that is helpful to organizations where they could do their transformation and help their journey around their marketing and demand strategy. That's really how the Volt came about to be. So a pause there.

00:16:31:06 - 00:16:49:22

Andrew Davies

But before we move on, can you just quickly help me understand how much of this was seen as a way to serve customers that you couldn't serve with your higher priced agency offering and how much it's seen as a introductory offer for companies that will then go on and buy your higher priced agency offering? Or is that some other strategy that I'm not seeing it.

00:16:49:23 - 00:17:13:09

Sidney Waterfall

It was originally it's how could we service and get more people to adopt our mindset and our philosophies at scale that we would probably never hire us? We want to be able to. Our mission is kind of to transform how B2B companies do marketing. And with our service arm, that's going to be limited to a very specific segment and a very specific type of customer as well.

00:17:13:09 - 00:17:34:06

Sidney Waterfall

We are a little bit more niche in our targeting and our go to market with our lab, and we wanted to be able to expand that. We want to be able to publish larger data samples and things like that inside the vault and have our vault members also participating in our experiments and some of our research that way as well.

00:17:34:08 - 00:17:35:20

Sidney Waterfall

So that was the original intent. Yeah.

00:17:35:20 - 00:17:40:22

Andrew Davies

Let's dive in then to how this go to market differs from what you've been doing previously of taking refined labs to market.

00:17:40:22 - 00:18:08:12

Sidney Waterfall

Obviously, our CEO, Chris Walker has a huge personal brand, has really built the company on his personal brand. And now that we built a product and we're thinking about the go to market, we're also thinking of how can we get people to understand what this product is, to look at it, to feel it and ultimately convert. Really for us it was we're adding a kind of a product ish led approach to our service business, which is the very interesting thing and we've never done before.

00:18:08:12 - 00:18:36:06

Sidney Waterfall

So we were figuring that out like our ideal customer for our vaults product is definitely still marketing and sales teams, primarily marketing, but we're adding a lot more resources around sales and market leaders and really going after smaller companies that couldn't hire us. Or also on the opposite end, larger teams that already have people that can do the execution work that wouldn't hire us to do execution work at all.

00:18:36:06 - 00:19:02:21

Sidney Waterfall

And we wanted to be a resource for both of those types of customers. So essentially we've designed the product to support people, to take them on a journey which we do in services. We kind of take them through step by step modules and processes and frameworks to accelerate this. We've built that inside of the vault so people can kind of self-serve when we think about going to market with it and who we're trying to market, it's very much our similar ICP.

00:19:02:21 - 00:19:10:03

Sidney Waterfall

I would say it's just a wider of the company. Maturity is going to be wider, The stage of the company is going to be wider as well.

00:19:10:04 - 00:19:24:18

Andrew Davies

Maybe. Can you dig into some of the tactical changes that you've had to go through in order to reach those customers? So yes, you've got, you know, Chris and all of your teams wider audience and followership. Is it just reliant on that knowledge of reaping the inbound, the common thread or anything else that's going on here?

00:19:24:19 - 00:19:48:13

Sidney Waterfall

In the beginning we probably were just reaping the inbound but heavily reliant on our brand. But now we're really trying to focus on engaging people who we believe are fit and getting feedback and then having that fuel our go to market. So originally, for example, we launched the product as teams only and we wanted to accelerate people in the product and to learn more.

00:19:48:13 - 00:20:11:09

Sidney Waterfall

So we opened it up where individuals can actually get access to it and kind of scaling out testing, different pricing and packaging has been kind of the original focus. And now we're really leaning into trying new channels and introducing this product to someone who doesn't know who refine labs is or doesn't isn't a loyal follower who understands our methodology and our point of view of marketing.

00:20:11:09 - 00:20:27:05

Sidney Waterfall

Because if you don't understand that the vault is not going to be valuable to you, you're going to get in there and like, I don't believe what this is or this is framework doesn't fit for me. Our focus now has been to use we're just now starting to experiment with paid media. We've never really run paid media for our brand ever.

00:20:27:05 - 00:20:55:18

Sidney Waterfall

Also different partnerships or co-marketing with other companies that can help us get into people who are already not following us. We already have targeted countless that we're going after to get these people in front and and kind of enrolled in our content streams, enrolled in the vault content path, things like that. So those are kind of the shifts that we've been making and experimenting of how do we communicate the value of the vault, someone that has no idea what we loves.

00:20:55:20 - 00:20:58:01

Andrew Davies

And how's it been going? Like, what are the results you can point to?

00:20:58:01 - 00:21:16:06

Sidney Waterfall

I would say it's going really well. We have a lot of teams, customers and some individuals as well. And then we also one of the things that we did to experiment and grow faster is to we opened up a free version of the product, which anyone can log into. You can kind of get a sampling of what this is and you can see what's in there and you can convert.

00:21:16:06 - 00:21:33:06

Sidney Waterfall

We have over 3500 total users. That's all of our users combined. Our conversion, you know, is not exactly where we like, but for starting out, our conversion is around 5%, which is we obviously want that a little higher but pretty happy with right now if we're we're in the starting phases, you.

00:21:33:06 - 00:21:42:06

Andrew Davies

Know, if we roll forward 12 months, what what are the Volt look like and how does it sell alongside, you know, your labs offering? Does this start to rival it for revenue? Is this become a main focus of the business?

00:21:42:06 - 00:22:04:01

Sidney Waterfall

I think it complements our business. We have are heavily going to be investing in product as well as our service business. So they'll be to updates coming to the vault. Right now it is kind of our content and insights and learning, kind of do it yourself if you want to do Refined Lab says you can do it yourself in the vault in the future.

00:22:04:01 - 00:22:25:06

Sidney Waterfall

We're building and figuring out how we can integrate analytics and data into the vault for companies so that we can provide them much more guidance of what to do, when to do it, what we would recommend, and why they actually, based on their data. So that's kind of where we're going with the vault, is to kind of integrate that into their actual business.

00:22:25:06 - 00:22:32:20

Andrew Davies

And other other products that you're now kind of thinking through internally as some things that go alongside or build out of the vault.

00:22:32:21 - 00:22:56:06

Sidney Waterfall

Yeah, we actually have another product. It's a Salesforce application we built and it's really for standardizing your measurements and just operationalizing your funnel tracking and measurement. That's another huge problem that a lot of our customers have. So it's called Watchtower. You know, it's very, very early stages right now. It's just a Salesforce app that we're continuing to work through and model and test and get feedback with a lot of our customers.

00:22:56:06 - 00:23:00:17

Sidney Waterfall

That's another one of the products that you'll probably see, you know, come together at some point.

00:23:00:17 - 00:23:19:02

Andrew Davies

So I'm going to play back to a couple of thoughts on on that strategy just for you to kind of clarify where I'm getting this wrong. What are the things we're interest in as a learning from home is listening to this podcast is that you've taken what was a really interesting initial anchor product. So in this case it wasn't a product, it was a service where you had what some people would call account gravity.

00:23:19:02 - 00:23:36:18

Andrew Davies

So you had this sense of probably a senior level buyer who, you know, CMO or VP of Marketing or more senior was a small business buying a services. And on top of that now your adding new other products that either precedes that in their purchase because of the maturity, the business of what they can spend or because it's part of their learning about you.

00:23:36:18 - 00:23:55:07

Andrew Davies

And then you have something also that's perhaps goes alongside or after the consulting proposition in terms of the Salesforce app, that then enables you to productize some of the advice you're giving and standard in terms of standardizing people's pipeline. And then, you know, on top of all of that, you've got a wider circle, which is all of the content you're creating, the community, you've got the podcast, etc., etc..

00:23:55:07 - 00:24:13:07

Andrew Davies

So what I see here is a really interesting pitch developing where you've got these concentric circles are bringing people towards the central point to value, the refined labs delivers and everything is faithful to the core philosophy of refining labs, which I think is really interesting. So for me there's like, I don't want to stress test with you all and then just assuming it, I think I think there's a couple of things here.

00:24:13:07 - 00:24:33:20

Andrew Davies

Firstly, you're being quite aggressive on building new propositions that you can monetize around a similar type of customer. We see that correlate with faster growth. Absolutely. Secondly, everything is pretty consistent, not necessarily in his business model or his way of going to market was way of being consumed. But it is very consistent in the philosophy, the differentiated point of view that it's supporting.

00:24:33:20 - 00:24:57:13

Andrew Davies

And then thirdly, they are each of those different propositions can be, you know, purchased or used by a different persona with a different level of ease at a different level of cost. There's something for various people within that buying group of champions. So are those things generally true? Is that something that you went into this process of evolution over refinements, thinking about, or is that something that's kind of come out of the small thinking that you've been going through?

00:24:57:13 - 00:25:21:18

Sidney Waterfall

I think it was an idea or a seed, and I think it's just blossomed into this. Chris definitely had a vision of creating multiple products or multiple service business units within the Refined Labs brand. For sure. The one thing that holds true is it comes back to our mission. We want to change and redefine how B2B companies do marketing and generate revenue.

00:25:21:18 - 00:25:43:13

Sidney Waterfall

There's a bunch of different ways that that can come to fruition, some of which we're testing and experimenting with and building products and services and teams around. But ultimately, at the end of the day, you refine labs brand. We really believe in a certain philosophy and methodology that you would like subscribed to and you also believe in and would want to deploy and follow.

00:25:43:13 - 00:26:07:08

Sidney Waterfall

That's the core of everything that we will do, whether it's a software product, it's a content product, it's a service based product that is the core of what we do. The fun thing that I really enjoy working with the refined labs in here is we're really trying to like elevate revenue and create more of a scientific approach to how we figure these things out and rapidly iterate.

00:26:07:08 - 00:26:19:10

Sidney Waterfall

We don't want to launch a framework and not test it and not change it and update it and constantly move it. And we want to do that with people who believe the same philosophies and foundations that we believe, if that makes sense.

00:26:19:10 - 00:26:37:19

Andrew Davies

I think one of the most powerful methods of differentiation is a differentiated point of view, and if you can establish that and then see that consistently across all of your touchpoints, it really does add, I think, resonance to every interaction. Totally get how while you're doing that, let's pivot completely then. I know you described yourself as a bit of an ops geek and an ops girl.

00:26:37:19 - 00:26:55:12

Andrew Davies

I would love. Just to quickly stop on that point before we finish off. I think for many scaling software businesses, marketing ops, sales ops, revenue ops, whatever you want to call it, is something I find business leaders are embarrassed about. They think that everyone else has got it fixed and they know that it isn't fixed. And I'd love you just to speak into that from a couple of perspectives.

00:26:55:12 - 00:27:11:17

Andrew Davies

Firstly, how you see kind of what good looks like and what bad looks like across your client bases and the clients you work with and how companies as they scale can make sure they invest ahead of those problems, those those moments of chaos in order to not have those crises when they come.

00:27:11:17 - 00:27:46:09

Sidney Waterfall

So let's you and our listeners in on a little secret. Everybody has operational problems. It just depends on how big or small that they are. At almost every instance we look at or every thing that we get access to, there's always room for improvement. However, some are a lot messier than others, and normally that becomes a large issue when growth is happening and things are going well and you're just going, going, going and you don't stop and take the time to put like foundational basic processes in place or update your existing basic processes to maybe a more advanced process.

00:27:46:09 - 00:28:17:14

Sidney Waterfall

You're not alone. The biggest things that we see with our customers and I just see generally in the market is people over indexing on trying to track the micro processes and the micro things and missing the macro data or the macro data points that actually leaders and CEOs and CMO's and CEOs need to understand what's working or what's not and that you can miss that type of stuff in the product, you can miss that type of stuff in your CRM and your website.

00:28:17:14 - 00:28:43:02

Sidney Waterfall

I my advice is to always kind of look at the macro things that you want to track. Is pipeline going up? Is this being able to just track your general conversion sources at the highest level? So many people miss that they're tracking conversion sources, for example, at like the channel or the tactic level, and then they're just in this channel and tactic conundrum and trying to figure out what's working and what's not.

00:28:43:02 - 00:28:57:18

Sidney Waterfall

And they missed the macro level of what is called like a pipeline source or a product source or conversion source. That's my biggest thing that we see missed in the most complex and the most $50,000,100 million businesses.

00:28:57:20 - 00:29:16:14

Andrew Davies

So our audience of go to market leaders and SaaS founders probably bias is a little bit technical as in often it be a technical co-founder that we that we would find or one of these they want to find out about go to market things. So do you find that within your base of fault or is it often kind of someone who's got a marketing job title?

00:29:16:20 - 00:29:41:14

Sidney Waterfall

No, we actually have a decent amount of founders. Founders who are do still doing founder led sales and founder led go to market. I would say they are looking at the best way to kind of scale and create demand and things like that. So that's also what a lot of our vault resources or a lot of our podcast episodes and a lot of people follow a lot of our events and those who would never buy from us, at least not now.

00:29:41:14 - 00:30:11:20

Sidney Waterfall

Like, you know, they read tailored to more mature organizations, right, that have like marketing leaders, marketing teams. They already have product market fit. They have a general sales flow that's kind of already working and then just need to scale. That's really when they would bring on the lab. But that's one of the reasons, if you want to learn about how to create certain things, content strategy, how to do some of this stuff to try yourself, that's kind of where the vault could come in for a lot of our customers.

00:30:11:20 - 00:30:30:07

Andrew Davies

Obviously, clear call to action for anyone listening here that's coming from a non marketing guru. Mark, a little background, good place to find out frameworks, definitions, etc.. Sidney Silly one Given serious decisions and their constant preaching of the demand waterfall, how many jokes a day do you get about your surname and the fact your demand leader with waterfall in your name.

00:30:30:07 - 00:30:58:02

Sidney Waterfall

Quite a bit? I also get that don't go chasing waterfalls of the the TLC song, but I actually have a funny story about that. It's my married name. It's that my maiden name. And so when I changed my name, I was working as a marketing campaign manager. I started writing for our blog at the time and my VP of marketing thought it was a fake name, like a pen name, because I was nervous about my first blog post and I didn't want to put my real name on it.

00:30:58:03 - 00:31:19:00

Sidney Waterfall

And he thought I just made it up because I was in marketing and the serious decisions Waterfall. I legitimately had to show him my new driver's license. He was like not convinced about like my famous, like waterfall story. And I'll never forget that. VP Because he, I mean, he was amazing to work for, but that was just like his personality in a nutshell, fair enough.

00:31:19:00 - 00:31:25:03

Andrew Davies

Well, what do you write the next blog post your slightly embarrassed about you enough to call yourself Sidney Funnel and we'll see what we get to with our on.

00:31:25:06 - 00:31:27:15

Sidney Waterfall

Maybe Dark funnel, who knows?

00:31:27:17 - 00:31:46:15

Andrew Davies

Or also? Well, Sidney, I think we've got through a whole bunch there. Before we add, you know, our audience, you've got visibility and pattern recognition into hundreds of different businesses that are going through scaling challenges. You know, as we go into 2023, everyone's talking about I everyone's talking about the transformation shift, almost all about efficient growth because of the market crash.

00:31:46:15 - 00:31:58:14

Andrew Davies

With all of that context, we don't need to dig into yet again, you know, what are the things that you find yourself advising? Go to market leaders again and again. Everyone on this call should be writing down and making sure they start out with when they start work tomorrow.

00:31:58:19 - 00:32:23:17

Sidney Waterfall

Focus and execute well. And like one did two things before you try to do five things. A lot of times we actually take down the number of channels and tactics and even platforms people are on, and then we pick one or two and we go hard and execute. There and prove it out. Also, it's a lot easier to measure and prove your success when you're doing one or two things.

00:32:23:17 - 00:32:44:02

Sidney Waterfall

It's hard to do one or two things well. It's easier to do a lot of chaos and just like hope, it works. So that's like the ultimate thing that we over and over kind of go back to the basics and then in terms of like AI and stuff, I think that there's a lot of things that you could do very manual tasks.

00:32:44:02 - 00:32:54:21

Sidney Waterfall

How do you automate mindless work? And that's kind of what we've been leaning into internally at Refine Labs. How do we get more efficient with our head count?

00:32:54:23 - 00:33:13:23

Ben Hillman

Shout out to Sidney for being on the show today. We talked about tracking macro versus micro data points, the importance of conversion sources, technical versus marketing perspective, the demand waterfall and effective. Go to market strategies, make sure to get protect the Hustle a five star review and tell us what lesson from today's episode was your favorite. Thanks for listening.

00:33:14:04 - 00:33:21:05

Ben Hillman

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