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i want to try and communicate the importance of what's going on in b2b marketing right now we're going through a major shift a major shift complete disruption of the distribution of content and the communication that companies have the ability to make with their customers and more importantly the communication channels that have opened up between peers in b2b which allows the the communication and information transfer in a way that was completely different than what was happening 10 years ago we're gonna go through that in a lot more detail and so to get it started the the dark funnel and what it means for you is that b2b buyers are researching discovering and evaluating products in places that companies can't track that's the long and short of it examples of that are podcast third party events community word of mouth between peers organic cert or organic social and other pr channels the reason that companies aren't able to track them is because all these things are happening in a third party where they don't have cookies or different things in marketing automation that they're accustomed to with that they built a tech in order to track right and so the third-party channels like linkedin has no incentive to pass me the data of all the people that watched my video has no incentive to pass me the data of all the people that liked the video or any of those different things a podcast channel apple doesn't pass us almost any data specifically about whether or not people are watching the or listening to the podcast and so because companies can't track these channels in the way that they're accustomed to tracking things with their traditional like marketing automation platforms they actually don't even use them or or if they do use them they don't take them seriously in a way where it's like these can be major business drivers and i want to bring people back to the channels of podcasts third party events community word of mouth organic social pr how people are making buying decisions how people are understanding products i would argue that those channels and the companies that execute on those channels well are the ones that are winning right now if you if you just like think about the products that the brands that you like and where you actually discover them you're not you don't love brands because they're winning paid search you don't love brands because they ran a linkedin gated ebook and then they cold called you a bunch of times when they did that the brands that you like are distributing content that you like in these places it's super fascinating to think about and the the shift the main shift that's happening is built on communication the evolution of the through the internet of the communication channels that allow b2b buyers to communicate with all of these different people and i'm going to just really hone this in because i i started my career in 2012 which is nine years ago and so at least my professional career and so i'm gonna break down what it was like in 2012. in 2012 b2b buyers would see peers once or twice a year at industry conferences and have very little communication with them otherwise they couldn't get information on the internet or through peers in the way that they can today and so the places where they went to get information were at industry conference presentations through analyst firms like gartner or if they couldn't find it they would go to google search and look for it that's what people did in 2012 and because that information was not abundant and because that information was not in places where people could access it easily they needed a sales rep to deliver them that information to help them complete a purchasing process those are the things that b2b buyers did nine years later when we get to today b2b buyers are hyper-connected daily on the internet through social channels and third-party communities all over the place if you think about yourself as a b2b professional from today compared to just five years ago how much more interaction you have with other peers that do your job and how much more content you consume on these places that's just completely different people get information through word of mouth of trusted peers organic social podcasts events and they have the ability to get all of the information that they want whether it's through on someone's website on a social platform through a peer or anything they have the ability to get all the information they need to basically make a decision about whether or not they want to buy something before they ever talk to sales anyone that's a b2b buyer i think would that would resonate with them i personally pre like when i ask for a demo as long as i can see the pricing i've i pretty much have decided that i'm already going to buy that product i think a lot of people would would agree with that statement and so the next thing about communication that's really important is that when you compare it to 2011 and 2021 that if you have a really great experience with a brand and you really like a brand your ability to tell other people is way different way way different i can go i personally can go on and i can talk about a brand and a podcast and i know that i can drive revenue for them that month if i wanted to i know that i could post about how we use a tool and each person regardless of their audience size or different things has the ability to do the same thing and they do it subconsciously because they're they like the products that they use and they want to tell other people because they've had a great experience about it and so that's just like setting the table for the amount of of communication disruption inside of b2b which is now creating go-to-market disruption right and so traditionally when companies would have marketing which was basically built to get contact information so that sales could try to do sales to people that don't want to buy right now it's what marketing used to be that's what marketing is for a lot of companies still today to what marketing actually is where you can get someone to the place where they are bought into buying your product all the way through i call it like i call it moving people through a buying process at scale in the way that they want on their own with no sales touch that's what marketing is right now when companies come inbound to us it's not like they're comparing three or four agencies against us they're either going to work with us or they're going to try and do it themselves and i think a lot of companies should strive to have a product that's differentiated enough to have a narrative that's communicated actively enough in the market and to do strong product marketing and demand gen to a level where the people that are coming inbound to them and asking to request a demo are basically done and if you adjust your marketing mix to do that then you see dramatically shorter sales cycles i've been seeing 50 to 67 percent shorter sales cycles in the businesses that i've worked for since 2017 when you operate this way companies that used to have a 210-day sales cycle going with outbound field sales in 2017 we started running this model and we had 60-day sales cycle for the same deal sizes and the scalability of that if you keep operating on it is way different than scaling sales and so now i want to get a little bit more tactical inside of the channels you see the way that we operate at refined labs the the things that we do at refund labs the reason that we do it the way that we do is to model what companies should be doing i was a it was a really interesting sort of like light switch for me in 2019 i remember the the exact situation i was giving advice to to a company that i was a consultant for and i was recommending that they start they would start a podcast and then i looked at myself and i said we don't have a podcast and from then on i started to exec basically all of the advice that we give we execute ourselves and so the the podcast at the cadence that we're doing right now which is three times a week is something i think everyone should be doing i talked to a company yesterday they wanted to do it once a month i told them if you're gonna do a podcast once a month you might as well not do it it's just not it's just not enough frequency it'd be like i wanna get in shape i'm gonna go to the gym once a month and so when you have these opportunities in these channels i'm it's it's very clear that when executed properly these are the best things that a company could do and so when you have these opportunities and you know you have to believe that there are the best things that you can do and you have to be able to communicate that to the executive team and then you need to move hard that's why our company is growing so fast because it's not like we're doing a podcast once a month while we continue to do all the other dumb [ __ ] that companies continue to do that have been doing it for the past 10 years we don't do any of those things which allows us to stay super focused on the three or four things that are the major levers that that can grow a business right now and it's a really interesting recommendation for people if you think about it because by the time that companies realize that broadly right by the time it's commonplace just like a company has a blog that a company would have a podcast which is probably going to be somewhere in the next two to five years that a lot of the value and a lot of and a lot of the a lot of the um volume and of the results that happened happened way before that if you look at the people that started early blogs like they were early to something if you look at our the thing that we did on linkedin really early in 2019 when people weren't doing it and the amount that we were able to grow over the past two years and then keep building on top of it it's a it's a skill as a marketer because when you're doing those things well like when i started on linkedin and i'll go through this when i started on linkedin it was very easy because i had the mindset to be bought into the idea that linkedin is working i have to produce content i have to have a different mindset about what i'm trying to do which i'm trying to help people so that they pay attention so that they consume the content so they understand more about the way that we see the world so that they have a potential or a consideration to working with us or just doing it themselves to be honest there's way more people out there that take our take the information that we provide and just use it themselves and have success which is amazing the reason being is that when they have success they tell a ton of other people which leads me back to like the word of mouth component which i want to go into a lot word of mouth between peers is by far the thing that drives the most b2b sales out there and gets almost no credit in attribution i was talking with a martech vendor a couple of weeks ago they actually did a survey i would i would encourage anyone that's listening to this podcast or anyone that's live on this event to do this to go through and and look at all the closed one deals that came through your website and and call each of those individual primary contacts on the opportunity and ask them how they heard about you and this company that actually did that had 50 percent or more that people said i heard about you from this podcast i heard about you from this person in revenue collective i heard about you well several of them said they heard about it from refined labs right and so and how do you actually get that word of mouth action to happen is super interesting right there are there's at least a dozen people that i know of that recommend customers to us that have you know series d sas companies coming inbound to work with us and the people that made the recommendation have never worked with us and don't know anything about what we do or they probably know about what we do but the reason that they're telling people is because the content is so on point and so it gets back to the original part of the statement which is the way that you move the needle on on word of mouth is create content that commands attention and the only way that you can start to create content that commands attention is to start to respect what the dark funnel actually is i have a deep respect for it i don't companies that are that are married to their attribution model will always struggle with this because you can't track it you can't attribute it and it immediately when executives go to audit and spend in activities they're gonna cut these things they're gonna cut the podcast that's the first thing when i was an employee at a different company the first thing that got cut was the podcast after four episodes because we didn't have enough leads right and that's just because people see the act see the attribution and don't see how it directly impacts revenue and we need to change the mindset of both the marketers and the executive team about what we're trying to do on during that process when we get to trying to communicate trying to really communicate this to executives i think a really interesting starting point that i've been recommending a lot recently for marketers is that you need to have a way to be hitting your goals first before you try anything in the dark funnel that's what we do for customers people come inbound to us and they're like we want to we want to work on a podcast but we're two two million dollars in pipelines short for this quarter and we got two weeks left and i say there's no sense in starting a podcast right now it's gonna be the first thing that scrutinizing gets cut you need to be getting to your goals first so it's two things are the goals achievable or are there other things that you could be doing to hit those goals that have more direct attribution and more direct tie to revenue which is why we start at demand and even the way that we execute demand i would i would argue that the way that we execute demand is pretty deeply in the dark funnel