Metrics that Matter to the Modern B2B Marketer - with Chris Walker, Founder and CEO Refine Labs

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOp Squared and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Chris Walker, founder and CEO of Refine Labs, host of Demand Gen Live, and a top LinkedIn marketing influencer. Today, we will be covering three main topics, the evolution of B2B marketing strategy and tactics, the future of B2B demand generation programs, and third, measuring performance. How have marketing measurements of success changed? Chris, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Chris Walker** (1:12)
Ray, thanks for having me on the show. I think this has been a long time coming. We've been interacting on LinkedIn for several years now. A quick background for me, the people that don't know me, I've been a B2B marketer for my entire career for the past nine years. I spent that first four years in product marketing, product management at profitable large holdings companies, and then spent the next five years of my career at high growth venture funded software companies running and building demand programs. Following that, I saw a big opportunity in the market because I saw basically I had experienced over that eight years as someone that studies what's going on in executives and why people make decisions and why things are being measured and why millions of dollars get allocated to one line item in a budget instead of another. I studied those things for eight years at a bunch of different companies, and I found that the way that I saw the world and the way that I saw customers moving was incredibly different than how people were making decisions in boardrooms. So I started my company to provide customer-centric information, to provide people objective information on how to drive their marketing strategy, to help companies transform their programs away from vanity metric marketing programs to things that actually matter and drive business results. So that's what we're after here. Looking forward to diving into the conversation.

**Ray Rike** (2:24)
Well, let's dig into the catalyst to start Refine Labs, because I've been a follower of yours since your early days of really creating an amazing LinkedIn following. And if I'm not mistaken, you interviewed for 20 B2B marketing jobs before you started Refine Labs. And part of it was that your orientation and philosophy just wasn't aligned with almost every B2B cloud company out there. Can you talk a little bit more about how that was a catalyst for you?

**Chris Walker** (2:53)
Pretty much, yeah. So I spent about two years at a venture-funded company called Vapotherm.
A company that was doing no digital demand before I got there. 100% of outbound field sales came in there, helped them build a digital demand program, ended up driving millions of dollars of revenue for the company, which eventually IPO'd and continues to be successful. And I did that by purely optimizing for pipeline and revenue, and not worrying about leads, not worrying about attribution, not worrying about anything the company only cared. We drive is marketing, driving more revenue relative to how much we're investing in marketing. And so I did a lot of things that most marketers never do, because they have all these fake constraints put up. We need to measure attribution. Where's attribution on our leads? All these things that are made up stories that don't actually need to be true. And so I had I felt like I had a much better strategy than what most companies were doing. I went out and pitched this as a VP of marketing type of role to a lot of software and technology companies. And you're right. The story is that nobody hired me because the way that I saw the world didn't align to the things that they were being told about how to do marketing back then. And I thought that was a gift. And so that allowed me, everything happens for a reason, that allowed me to see, hey, maybe I need to go in my own path. And so what I did is I started as a consultant. I started talking about the things that I believe in in LinkedIn and started to attract a lot of people that saw the world the same way that I did. And so I see that there's a major divide happening right now in B2B marketing. People that do B2B marketing in 2010 window, marketing automation, technology driven land. And there's a new thing that's coming up. People that are executing in dark social, that are putting out content specifically, that are spending a lot of time with customers, that are doing fundamentals well. And there's a divergence happening here. And I think people need to think about which direction they want to go with their career.