Are you tired of the same old B2B marketing strategies that just aren’t cutting it? Join us as we dive into the world of innovative marketing with Chris Walker, a true industry disruptor.

Chris Walker, a visionary leader reshaping the B2B landscape, joins us today on the Conquer Local Podcast. As the founder of Refine Labs and Passetto, he’s built a reputation for driving innovation and delivering bottom-line results. With a deep understanding of marketing, sales, and technology, Chris is challenging the status quo and offering fresh perspectives on B2B growth. 

Learn how to build a thriving business, master organic social media, and navigate the shift from growth at all costs to sustainable profitability. From scaling startups to optimizing go-to-market strategies, we cover it all.

Tune in for actionable insights to supercharge your marketing efforts!

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From Growth at All Costs to Sustainable B2B Growth

Introduction

Jeff Tomlin: I’m Jeff Tomlin, and on this episode, we’re pleased to welcome Chris Walker. 

Chris is a B2B marketing leader with a focus on innovation and bottom-line results. Formerly the founder and CEO of demand generation firm Refine Labs, he’s now the executive chairman. He also founded Passetto, is a limited partner at Hatch, and is the host of the B2B Revenue Vitals podcast. 

Chris is passionate about sharing his knowledge and challenging the status quo in B2B marketing. 

Get ready, conquerors, for Chris Walker, coming up next on this week’s episode of the Conquer Local podcast.

Chris Walker Discusses his Company Portfolio.

Jeff Tomlin: Chris Walker, hey, it is a pleasure to have you on the Conquer Local podcast. Thanks for taking time out of your busy day, man, to join us and have a quick chat here. How are you doing?

Chris Walker: Yeah, man, appreciate being on the show. Really excited to be here. Love the setup that you got there and looking forward to the conversation.

Jeff Tomlin: Let’s start from the top. You’ve got a number of different companies and brands that you’ve built. And so number one, why don’t you tell us a little bit about them? And specifically Refine Labs, Passetto, Hatch, you’ve also got an integrated approach when you’re thinking about them, and so tell us a bit about that too.

Chris Walker: Yeah, for sure. And my strategy and thinking on this continues to evolve, but when you think about building a company or a portfolio of companies, you basically have two strategies. You have a branded house or you have house of brands. And when you think about, initially the strategy was branded house. One brand, Refine Lab, it does everything, strategic consulting, demand generation, advertising, marketing operations, sales operations, whatever. And I made the decision to move into a house of brands instead, where you have very specialized companies that help with specific things with key leadership in each individual company. And each individual company has their own sales funnel, their own autonomy, but can also leverage across partnerships to be able to share customers and be able to recommend between customers and share some of those things.

And so the first company I started, called Refine Labs, is a B2B digital demand agency. We help companies with their advertising and content strategies and reporting against their digital spend, typically high-growth B2B software companies. And then my company Passetto is a B2B go-to-market consultancy. We look across marketing, sales, account management, customer success, all the investments that a company would use to drive revenue growth, and we help them improve both pipeline production or growth rate and EBITDA profiles through a combination of benchmarking, standardized metrics, and expert consulting. And then lastly, Hatch. Hatch is a content production agency that does all the social media content and editing for podcasts or YouTube or LinkedIn and helps companies both B2B and B2C basically have a complete social content strategy.

Refine Labs’ Growth Journey and Challenges.

Jeff Tomlin: Number one, congratulations on building your brands. You’re a powerhouse out there now. Refine Labs, you’ve grown it, eight-figure business now. Talk a little bit about the path to growth there. That first $1 million is damn near impossible to get as you’re growing. And then after you reach a little bit of scale, you start to see patterns and you’re able to reproduce things and start getting some momentum. But talk a little bit about what that path looked like for you as you were building that brand.

Chris Walker: Yeah, I think at the beginning in most services business the zero to $1 million often takes as long if not longer than $1 to $10 million. Because you’re really figuring out, who’s our customer, what do we actually offer, what’s a repeatable process? What types of people do we need to hire, how much should we charge? How long does a customer stay? Should we downgrade them after six months? Should we look for expansion? All these different things that you need just reps and time to figure out. I think in a service business, starting out by offering hourly flexible consulting is a strong way rather than projects or some type of retainer, which allows you to basically do whatever the customer needs to help them be successful. And then over time you start to see the patterns around these types, the things that customers value the most that are willing to pay for, hopefully that you can also do on a recurring basis and have a recurring revenue model.

And so at Refine Labs, I started as basically like a consultant. Companies would hire me, I would go in, some companies I would help their content strategy or how they implemented HubSpot or whatever else they were working on. Sometimes their sales email strategy. And then over time, we found this position where if you had … A lot of companies were not spending effectively on digital ads, whether you consider Google Ads, LinkedIn. How they did it, the ROI wasn’t there. And so we had a new process of how we measure the ads, how we do the ads, how you build the creative, how you run them, and that became the repeatable process that we continue to grow with companies, shifting their strategy mainly in B2B from a lead generation strategy to more using most of those advertising channels to get new customers interested in buying rather than trying to get them as a lead.

Focus on Building a Scalable Service Business.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, you talked a little bit about your approach there with hourly. Were the things that you learned outside of that that became immutable laws for you and said, “Hey, you’re scaling any type of business, this is just something you’ve got to do out of the gate as you’re trying to find go-to-market and product market fit”?

Chris Walker: I think that some people might want to be in the business of just basically selling time and doing random consulting, but that’s not very interesting to me. So I think being focused on being able to deliver a repeatable process that delivers a repeatable outcome to a defined type of company or customer is really the thing that you should do before you start scaling. And then once you’re able to achieve that, you know how long it takes, then you can create a predictable pricing model and things like that. So that’s one thing. Another thing I think especially in service businesses is having control and insight and visibility into your margins and the time that’s being spent on each customer and how much they’re paying you. Because as you scale, that becomes very difficult to unwind. Scaling a business at 30% or 40% gross margin gets really ugly with scale. So I think that would be a huge takeaway as well. Aim for a 60%+ margin, know that it’s going to degrade with scale most likely, and make sure you have the controls in place that you can maintain that as you add team members and complexity.

Focus on Margins and Go-To-Market Strategy.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, that’s super good advice. I’ve talked to a number of investors throughout the years and it’s like the margin side of the business is definitely one thing that you’ve just got to have before you scale. And if you don’t have reasonable margins, it just gets really, really tough, doesn’t it?

Chris Walker: It sure does. Yeah. It puts pressure on every other part of the business depending on where your gross margin’s at. So yeah, repeatable process, sound unit economics and financials are probably the two things to really think about before you scale, because they’re really difficult to fix once you’ve started to scale.

Jeff Tomlin: So I think Passetto is your newest brand, focuses on go-to-market strategies. Tell us a little bit about the tech there. And also maybe start out, when you say go-to-market, maybe just put a qualifier on that and define what you mean when you say that. Sometimes I think that we assume people understand exactly what we’re talking about. We were templatizing some assets for go-to-market teams, and someone reminded me the other day, “What exactly do you mean when you’re doing this?” 

Chris Walker: I think go-to-market is all of the investments in people, processes, technology, and programs related to how we maintain and grow revenue. And so if you just look at it as a regular business, customer success, sales, marketing, all the marketing investments, external investments that you bring to consultants, technology and tools that you buy, all those different investments, for many companies, especially the companies that I consult at, they’ll spend 50% of their total revenue on those functions. So if the company does $100 million in revenue, they’ll spend $50 million on sales, marketing, and all the other associated things related to that. And so that’s how you look at the go-to-market investment. And then when you look at the return on that investment, you look at total new revenue added as a percentage of the amount you spend on it, sort of like CAC payback period, but a little bit more objective when you think about it.

Jeff Tomlin: Right.

Chris Walker: And the reality is right now that in the economy, many B2C companies, but very feeling it in B2B in the tech space, is that growth rates have slowed by more than 50%. So a company that used to be growing at 40% now is growing at 15%, and that customer acquisition cost payback periods have more than doubled in the past three years from, they used to spend a dollar and get 80 cents back, and now they’re spending a dollar and getting 50 or 45 cents back. And those economics are very poor. And so these two things are putting a lot of pressure on, it’s forcing companies to think about transformational changes to how they think about sales and marketing, not incremental improvements anymore. And so we’ve identified basically a process that I think helps companies. Number one, we need to get all the executives aligned in the company around the performance of our go-to market. How do we do that? We have a technology that’ll basically ingest all the financial data and all the CRM data and then calculate a bunch of standardized metrics calculated by a third party, validated by a third party, and then have benchmarks around other companies that are like you in a similar revenue range, similar budget range. What are other companies getting across all these standardized metrics compared to you? With the objective of aligning the entire executive team on, what is our performance like? I get that we didn’t hit our plan last quarter, but even though we didn’t hit our plan, we could still be a top 5% performing company related to the benchmarks for everybody else. So getting everybody aligned on how we’re performing, which also sets the context with the metrics around, when we go to analyze our go-to-market strategy and what we’re going to do next, we have the idea of, how’s our growth rate trending? How is our customer retention? How much is it costing us to get a customer? And that allows us to then when we look at the investments that we’re making and we make strategy improvements to have the context around, what are we actually looking for? And we think that that technology basically level sets the conversation, and we add expert consulting that go into the details to think about how we should plan our budget, each individual channel strategy, resource allocation between sales or SDRs versus marketing, other things like that.

The Importance of Benchmarks and CAC Analysis.

Jeff Tomlin: By the way, I can pile onto your initial thoughts there on go-to-market strategies. It’s really easy for a company to get away from actually spelling out their strategy and mapping out all of the different pieces of their go-to-market. And I find if you don’t do that and articulate your strategy, it’s really easy to fall into this place of starting to do random acts of marketing and not doing things in a methodical way. By the way, the other thing I’d layer on is, those benchmarks are really, really helpful. I find when you’re looking at your highs and your lows, typically you’re never as good as you think you are when you’re at your high. And the inverse is true too. When you think one part of your business is super shitty, well, it’s usually not probably as bad as you think it is. So I have always found that having the benchmarks to look at, is super, super valuable to a team.

Chris Walker: Yeah, and I think that the existing benchmarks that exist are calculated by asking someone in a SurveyMonkey what their CAC payback period is, or calculated through having someone fill out some data without actually it being validated or checked. And I think that having accurate benchmarks within a niche market is incredibly valuable when you think about making decisions about how you spend $100 million next year, that the accuracy of the benchmarks that exist today I think should come under a lot of scrutiny.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah. By the way, when it comes to CAC payback, have you seen those start to reverse at all? It’s been a tough couple of years, and by the way, probably one of the most important metrics, it’s a risk metric right now. Well, it is a risk metric, and when the economy’s tough, super important to pay attention to it. Have you seen those starting to come down at all?

Chris Walker: For companies that have done the hard thing and had a large layoff and recorrected their cost structure, growth rates aren’t changing significantly, net new ARR isn’t growing significantly, so the only way to get that thing back in line is to be disciplined around your cost structures. But when you look at the … That’s what one-off private companies are doing. What’s really nice is that there’s 80 publicly traded software companies on the market and they have publicly available financials. And what we’re seeing is that so far, Q2 hasn’t come out yet, but as of Q1, the CAC payback period has continued to rise steadily since around 2022. So we have not seen, at least in the public SaaS companies, we have not seen that come back down.

Dark Social: the Untapped Marketing Channel.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, tough trend. Let’s shift gears a little bit. You’re a big advocate of having a dark social strategy, and I wanted to make sure that we spent a little bit of time on that. Number one, first off, what do you mean when you’re talking about dark social? And number two, why do you feel it’s so important for a company to have a dark social strategy?

Chris Walker: Dark social, through the scale and the maturity of the internet, there’s just a ton of different places where your customer is looking and getting information, whether it’s being served up to them, where they’re going to find it, where they can get recommendations from peers, where they can get new content, where content will be shared with them, where they consume that, where they discover things, that don’t get tracked by different types of digital tracking software that would show up in your attribution data and it wouldn’t create account level intent data that a B2B company might use. And the core of why it’s so important is that this is the number one way that people get information to make buying decisions today. It’s how they discover new products. It’s how they validate decisions that they’re going to make. It’s how they get introduced to a new brand or a new product or a new category of product, and that most B2C companies understand this quite well. B2C companies spend a lot of time creating organic social media content, invest a lot there. They don’t do paid social in, I think, the best way, but they run a lot of paid social, and they’ve figured out that, they do influencer marketing, B2C companies do a lot of that stuff. B2B companies on the other hand, because of how they think about marketing, mixed modelling and marketing attribution, do not invest anywhere near the appropriate amount of time, energy, and resources to this way of marketing and effectively driving sales. And so I think that’s basically the importance of dark social, and it’s the main way that people get information today.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, interesting. Chris-

Chris Walker: And I’ll just break it down with some examples for people. Yeah, just real quick, you have all the social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. You have content platforms like a podcast, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. You have communities, Slack, Discord, you have basic communication channels, text messages, phone calls. You have third-party events, like someone attends an event that you own that then they’re talking about something with a bunch of CMOs or a bunch of VCs. And there’s all these different places where conversations are happening, content’s being shared, content’s being created, isn’t being tracked overall, and is all about peers that trust each other communicating information between one another, which is the most trustworthy source of how people will make decisions today.

The Challenge of Tracking Dark Social Impact.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah. It can be a nightmare trying to track a customer journey or a buyer journey now because there’s so many different touch points.

Chris Walker: Sure.

Jeff Tomlin: You find the most important thing is just to track the attribution and see which channels seem to be getting the bulk of the attention and are hitting at some point in your buyer’s path?

Chris Walker: The problem is that most of those channels and the way that those channels are used are not going to show up in an attribution report. That’s what makes it dark. And so somebody watching, every single day 50,000 people or more will watch a video that I put on LinkedIn, and it’s never going to get tracked in attribution software. It’s never going to show up that way. We’re never going to attribute revenue that way. And that’s just one example of LinkedIn, not alone podcasts, the events, the word of mouth, and all these other places that also aren’t being tracked. So the actual effect of what happens is that companies have their attribution and measurement models that tell them one story about what’s working, organic search, Google paid search, direct response type of advertising, things like that. And then you have what’s actually driving the sales, which is word-of-mouth referrals, influencer marketing, non-direct response paid advertising, and organic content generation that’s driving all of those things. And there’s a big disconnect between what’s actually working for customers versus what companies are measuring and thinking is working. And I think that disparity is getting larger and larger every day.

Optimize Go-To-Market Strategy for Efficiency.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah. So getting back to the technology and the approach, when you think of it from a high level, how do you start pulling these pieces together and figuring out where the black box is?

Chris Walker: When it comes to go-to-market?

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Chris Walker: So in go to market, you can break it way more complicated, but at a high level, in a B2B organization you need to do three things. You need to create pipeline, you need to close net new customers, and then you need to renew and expand those customers. Those are the three core parts of the process. Investments get allocated across those things, even though companies do not look at it this way right now, they look at it as, how much do we spend on marketing? How much do we spend on sales? How much do we spend on SDRs? It gets broken down by the department, not rather against the objective in a full engine. And so we break up the investments and look at the investments in a very different way, and then we compare the performance of those key parts of the process against the results in that part of the process, which very clearly isolate the places where you’re overspending and not getting the appropriate return. You can quickly find the highest priority things to do inside of your go to market. If you spend a lot of money on customer success and a lot of money on sales to close new business and you can’t create pipeline, then all those investments downstream are way less productive because you don’t have the beginning part of the process. And that type of thinking can appear in any part of those three. So then it helps you isolate, “This is the core part of the process that we need to fix.” Then you go even deeper into all the investments that we spend in the process, identify high performers, low performers, and then re-architect the strategy around that.

Jeff Tomlin: Nice.

Chris Walker: So at a very high level, that’s how we look at it. Companies don’t look at it that way right now because they build their strategy around each individual department and then they combine four separate strategies and try and make it into one overarching strategy. And when you think about go to market, go to market is looking at this as one holistic machine, not as four individual department level pieces. And I think that’s the core thing that I’m pushing, because I’m seeing a lot of people that are just trying to rebrand marketing to go to market, and it’s not like that. It’s actually a completely different way of thinking around it. But at a high level, that’s how we use the process to benchmarks, then we break it into those three categories and look at the spend versus the results, and then you identify the problem and you look farther, deeper.

Focus on Organic Social Media and Economic Shifts.

Jeff Tomlin: Nice. I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you, you’ve got a big audience on your podcast, B2B Revenue Vitals. And I wanted to ask you really quickly, one, two trends that you’re seeing that people should make sure that they’re paying attention to right now?

Chris Walker: Trends that people should make sure they’re paying attention to. This trend is, I’m not sure I would call it a trend, but the people that listen to my podcast should definitely be paying attention to it. The number one thing that you need in your marketing engine today is organic social media content. It’s been like that for a very long time. I’ve been executing against that strategy for seven years and five within my own businesses, but it’s still true today. It’s the number one thing that you could do. Companies love to spend millions of dollars a year on Google Ads and millions of dollars a year on social media advertising, but I think we need to prioritize organic social media content first and then leverage advertising after that, leverage advertising as an amplifier to that strategy, not the other way around. I think that people haven’t wrapped their head around how powerful this is yet.

Jeff Tomlin: Find what works and …

Chris Walker: I’m not sure I’d call it a trend.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, find what works and put some money down.

Chris Walker: You use the organic engine to find what works, and then you put money behind it to the people that matter, rather than just making some pictures and putting it in front of people with no validation that it actually works and they want to see it. So that’s one core change. And then how the algorithms are changing in social media is very conducive to organic content. Build organic content, if you build a great piece of content, it’ll get shown to a ton of people that don’t follow you. It’s much more on interest and performance rather than follower based algorithms, which I think has a lot more meritocracy to it.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Chris Walker: And then I think that there’s a lot of interesting opportunities related to AI that I’m starting to explore. An example of what I’m exploring is, I’ve done more than 500 podcast episodes. If you look at the hours of content recorded, it’s probably like 600, 700 hours of content. All of that content has transcriptions around all the things that I’ve said, and then training a niche LLM on all the transcripts of all the things that I’ve said, and then using that to pump out longtail SEO content to write different LinkedIn posts, maybe to build decks for you. So that’s something that I am exploring, but really you need to have the 700 hours of recorded content to ever be able to do that. So that’s something that I have an advantage in terms of the library of recorded content that I have, seeing if I can use that in a certain way. Not necessarily a trend to everybody, but I think it’s interesting to talk through what I’m exploring. And then at a macro level, whether you look at B2C, direct to consumer, you look at B2B, you look at consumer discretionary spending, there’s just pressure everywhere in the economy, which is slowing down businesses overall and changing businesses from, the primary goal is to grow 100% year over year regardless of the cost, known as the growth at all costs era, to now a much more sustainable, being a profitable sustainable business first, and then trying to think about how we grow 40% instead of 25% second. And I think that’s an interesting trend that hasn’t been present in the market for quite some time, that it now is. The funding environment has changed. Our ability to get debt has changed, our ability to get new customers and control, have much accelerated growth rates. All of the dynamics in the market have changed related to owning and growing a business and how your business will be valued by an investor or an acquirer. And I think that’s a really important top level trend to be aware of as well.

Prioritize Organic Social Media for Business Growth.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, gone are the days of growth at all costs and back to an era where it’s a responsible, profitable growth. Hey, it’s been a pleasure having you on the podcast, Chris. You’re a wealth of knowledge. Do you have a last minute takeaway that you want to leave with the audience?

Chris Walker: I’ll just double click on that point. No matter what type of business that you’re in, no matter what type of customer that you sell to, that figuring out how to be good at organic social media content is going to be the number one driver to your growth outside of the quality of your product for the next five years. It’s not, AI is interesting, but really figuring out how to make this type of content, put it in the right places in a modern format, I think is the number one driver to growth. I think that a lot of older executives don’t take social media content seriously, don’t take digital content seriously broadly, spend a ton of money on trade show booths and tons of sales reps and people to cold call and all of these other places where they spend a ton of money, and do not invest anywhere near as much time or resources to create social media content that could have a exponentially greater impact than some of those other investments. And so I’m just pushing people to really think about their business over the next five years and to really think about what are going to be the key things that could be an advantage for my business. And I’m just surprised that more people aren’t taking this more seriously.

Connect with Chris Walker on LinkedIn.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, and to do a world-class job of that, I will pile on, nail your story, people. Nail your story and do a great job of spreading that on social. Chris, it’s an absolute pleasure having you on the Conquer Local podcast. Like I said, you’re a wealth of knowledge and it’s always so awesome to having a really awesome seasoned practitioner on the show and sharing stories. If someone wanted to continue the conversation with you, how do they connect with you?

Chris Walker: Yeah, best way to reach me directly would be to DM me on LinkedIn. My profile, you can find me, ChrisWalker171, or just search Chris Walker. So for direct message, feel free for that. Otherwise, if you like the content, feel free to subscribe to the podcast, the B2B Revenue Vitals podcast, available on any podcast platform.

Jeff Tomlin: Chris Walker, an absolute pleasure. Thanks for being on the podcast with us. Take care of yourself, and I hope you come back sometime soon.

Chris Walker: Thanks so much for having me. Thanks, everyone.

Conclusion

Jeff Tomlin: Wow, super smart dude there. There’s a reason he has over 150,000 followers on LinkedIn. He’s got a really big audience.

One of the takeaways, focus on organic social media content. Chris emphasizes the importance of organic social media content for B2B businesses. He argues that many companies are not leveraging the power of dark social, which is content that’s shared through private channels like email and messaging apps. This content is not tracked by traditional attribution models and can be a major driver of customer acquisition. So businesses should focus on creating high quality content that resonates with their target audience and is shared organically. Nail your story, make it compelling, and make it easily shareable. 

Another takeaway is to shift from growth at all costs to sustainable growth. The economic climate has shifted the focus from rapid growth to sustainable business practices. Companies are reevaluating their go to market strategies and becoming more disciplined about their cost structures. Chris highlighted that it’s critical to be data-driven and obsess about identifying areas for improvement and optimization. And by the way, that goes for all aspects of the business. Sometimes you have to be ruthless when it comes to cost cutting to get to profitability and stay profitable.

If you enjoyed Chris Walker’s episode discussing B2B growth, keep the conversation going and revisit some of our older episodes from the archives. Check out Episode 647: Leverage the Lighthouse Strategy to Attract High-Profile Clients with  Dennis Yu  or Episode  

618: Mastering Partnerships and Go-To-Market Success with Barrett King

Until next time, I’m Jeff Tomlin. Get out there and be awesome.