GTM Live

Positioning is the foundation on which your business is built. But most business leaders don't fully understand what good positioning is, let alone how to execute it successfully. In this episode, Chris talks one-on-one with April Dunford, widely regarded as one of the top minds on the subject matter. April goes through her 5 components of positioning that every organization needs to address i...

What if I were to tell you that the way that you measure attribution is driving terrible business decisions and leading to huge amounts of wasted dollars? If you've been listening to this podcast for any period of time, you know that in order to make good strategic marketing decisions in 2021 and beyond, you need to fundamentally shift the way you think about attribution. Common sense would te...

As much as you wish it was, marketing is not a math equation. It's not even a science. And thinking it is, is an outdated idea that you need to unlearn ASAP. Marketing is an art. And the fact that comes along with that truth is that everything you do can't be measured with hard quantitative data. The real results come when you look deep into the qualitative data that helps you understand y...

Marketers are lying to themselves and their sales teams. They complain when sales can't seem to close their MQLs into won opportunities, but let's face it, the leads don't close because they're anything but qualified. It's the reason sales have such disdain for marketing. Instead of trying to flood sales with as many email addresses as you can, you should be trying to filter th...

The best marketing in the world right now is being done behind closed doors. By people that don't work for the brand. And don't benefit from referring it. I'm talking about communities. And the top-tier marketers are cultivating groups of die-hard fans, not by pitching products, but by offering access to subject matter expertise. But building a community isn't as simple as creating...

Buyers in 2021 and beyond want less involvement from a salesperson when doing product research. When buyers want to do most of the buying before talking to sales, it becomes a marketing-owned journey. And that is precisely why there has never been a better time to be a B2B marketer! In today's episode, Chris talks about what the top 1% of marketers are doing, why they're going to be on the...

Talking to customers is one of the most under-utilized opportunities that marketers take advantage of. The learnings from talking to a single customer will change the way you do content creation. Do it at scale and you'll change the trajectory of your organization. But how do you get started? The easiest way—leverage the teams within your org that already talk to customers (like customer succe...

Unpopular opinion—Marketing's job isn't to give sales a bunch of leads for them to call on. Marketing's job is to sell at scale and pull in high intent buyers to request demos for sales to close. But how do you do that if you're KPIs are all based on generating low-intent leads from gated content downloads? In this episode, Chris talks about the current state of B2B marketing and h...

TikTok. It's no longer a platform to "keep an eye on". It's here to stay and has been the fastest growing social media platform, globally, over the last several years. But is it the right platform for you as a B2B SaaS company? Maybe, maybe not. In this episode, Chris talks about why Refine Labs is diving into TikTok as a brand and encouraging employees to do so as well. 

You have an arsenal of marketing talent inside your organization. The question is, are you encouraging them to build their brand, or are you suppressing them? I'm talking about personal brands on LinkedIn and most companies are doing the latter. If you're worried about employees building a brand for themselves will cause them to leave, then you're not creating a culture that encourages...

Chris joins Daniel Murray to talk about Dark Social, how it was discovered, and how marketing teams need to get off the attribution hamster wheel if they want to succeed in the new world of social media, communities, word of mouth, and everything that isn’t (falsely) measured by your attribution software.

What is the most overlooked part of demand generation? Think about all the metrics you're measuring. All the channels you're covering. All the ad budget you're spending. Think about the number of leads you're collecting.   Now ask yourself this: Do you check to see if anyone is actually consuming your message? If your answer is "No", then how do you know if you're eff...

Dark Social is the difficult to measure areas where companies are creating demand for their category, brand, and product every single day. Brands that everyone knows and loves are built here, not through MQL generation. And let there be no confusion—the highest performing marketing teams in 2021 and beyond are winning by crushing their Dark Social strategy. Once you change how you measure marketin...

In this episode, Chris dives in on how to change your mindset on LinkedIn ads to get better returns. If you want to be successful with LinkedIn ads you need to shift your mindset. It’s time to leave 2011 marketing tactics behind and stop optimizing your paid LinkedIn ad spend for MQLs. Instead, optimize your ads to increase the reach of your organic content. Use ads to help build your organic mach...

“Capturing intent data is the only way to get intent.” - Marketing teams everywhere^ It’s not true and it’s time to accept it. Chris sat down with Jake Dunlap to discuss how the industry relies on intent data that is flawed, solely for the purpose of creating a metric—even if it's sabotaging their success. In this episode, you'll learn about the three levels of intent and how to optimize y...

Marketing teams that start planning for 2022 now are the ones that are going to win in Q1. Teams that wait until December, or even early January, are the ones that are going to be scrambling and end Q1 in the hole. In this expert series of State of Demand Gen, Chris welcomes Dave Gerhardt to discuss their top three tips for developing a Q1 2022 marketing plan now. They dive into seasonality, marke...

Chris Walker and Megan Bowen brought the Demand Gen Live community back last night to discuss a couple agenda items in addition to a live Q&A. On the agenda:    - How product-led growth companies should be thinking about enterprise demand  - The Blended Funnel: why it’s hard to see it’s time to change your strategy. Chris answered follow-up questions in regards to the agenda ite...

This episode consists of a recording from Chris’s speaking slot at the Clozd Win Loss Week event. He shares how to build a marketing strategy, covering everything from win/loss analysis, customer research, and marketing fundamentals.

Chris Walker and Megan Bowen brought the Demand Gen Live community together again last night for an hour-long episode. They covered the history of lead gen & ABM and the leading metric every marketing team should be measuring. They also hosted a live Q&A and answered questions about event strategy, direct mail, marketing without technology, and marketing career paths. Register here for nex...

Chris joined The Marketing Starter podcast as a guest to talk about the dynamic between marketing sales, the making of a B2B brand, paid social and ABM. He got into a ton of marketing fundamentals and broke down what "just checking the box" looks like. Chris shared what happens when marketing takes on sales behaviors and calls them marketing.

This episode consists of a recording from Chris Walker's speaking engagement at the Full-Funnel Summit 2021. The theme for his talk was Measurement & Reporting.

Chris Walker and Megan Bowen hosted last night's Demand Gen Live from Austin, TX where they're gearing up for the Refine Labs offsite. They prepped a couple topics for the episode...The first, backed by actual data, being "The Attribution Mirage - Marketing teams are being led astray and think they’re being 'data-driven'" and the second "How to prepare your executive...

Chris Walker presented a keynote on Dark Social at this year's Traffic & Conversion Summit in San Diego, CA. We've discussed dark social on the podcast before, but as a reminder - dark social consists of the places where B2B buyers are discovering new products. Places where attribution is not available, like communities, organic social, groups, content platforms, meetups and internal comms. Chris...

On last night's Demand Gen Live, Chris Walker signed on from San Diego, CA and covered the following agenda: Why the B2B agency model needs a complete overhaul, The truth about Marketing to the enterprise, and How “data-driven” companies lie to themselves about being data-driven. He also opened the stage to a live Q&A where he answered questions about the things companies decide to continu...

Chris Walker joined the Alphov & Lopez Podcast for a full 90 minutes to chat through attribution, high intent vs. low intent, and overall marketing strategy. Chris was asked what would happen if marketers forgot about leads and demo requests and instead focused solely on qualified pipeline and revenue. He also shared his thoughts on how ABM is nothing new, and how he'd recommend it be implemen...