How to Get Your CFO to Fund Brand Without Asking Them to “Just Trust Marketing” | Megan Bowen - CEO, Refine Labs

[singing] Wanna hear you go.

Okay.

So what I'd really love to dive into in this episode is in the talks that you do and also on the Refine Labs website, you've got a lot of frameworks and a lot of, like, mental models, and I love those.

I always think they're a really good way of explaining marketing to leadership or even just framing things so people can understand them more quickly.

And so there's a bunch that I'd like to go through in this episode, but I think I'd love to start with the funnel model because I think this is the one that we're all kind of most familiar with.

Your typical top, middle, bottom of the funnel.

It's one that we talk a lot about a lot as well, and you have something that you call, like, split the funnel analysis, which I think is really interesting that you do when you start working with new clients.

So I say let's start with that, and then we can talk about a few others and fintech and all that.

But, yeah, tell us a bit more about the split the funnel analysis and how you use that in your work.

Yeah, absolutely.

Great place to start.

So if we take a quick step back to just add some context to the split the funnel analysis, we really believe that overall in marketing, there are things that are very easy to measure and there are things that are very hard to measure.

And that over the last several years, and we've been talking about this for a long time, that very often people will index into things that are easy to measure without looking at the full picture in terms of total impact to your inbound pipeline.

And so ultimately, the way we work with our clients, we execute a variety of strategies, again, some which are easy to measure, some which are not, but ultimately we then look at the total inbound funnel, and we look at that growth over time.

What we found in working with clients over the last seven years, that often it can be really challenging for the marketing teams that we work with to get the requisite buy-in from their leadership team, their CEO, their CRO, their board, whome- whomever it may be, in order to make some shifts in terms of how to deploy their marketing investments because they are so entrenched in whether it's last touch attribution or an outdated MQL measurement.

And so the reason that we developed and we use the split the funnel analysis is because it allows us to essentially create a business case to start thinking about reallocating marketing investment overall.

And so what we end up doing is split the funnel is really saying, "Let's look at all of your inbound marketing sourced leads that come in, and let's look at them by pipeline source, and let's actually do a full funnel analysis by source to understand not only top of funnel lead volume, but how that actually flows through to actual opportunities and pipeline created and closed one revenue." And essentially what happens every time we do this analysis is that what we call...

When we say split the funnel, what the split is looking at the difference between low intent and high intent lead sources.

Every single time, the low intent lead sources just convert at a dramatically lower percentage to qualified ops and revenue, where the high intent sources obviously convert at a much higher, higher amount.

And so when we take our customer's data and we do this analysis, and then we present this back to them, it essentially becomes the business case for them to start to make this very important shift.

And instead of optimizing for top of funnel volume, understanding that optimizing for qualified pipeline and revenue is most important.

And as we're telling that story, we're pointing out how there are things that cannot be easily measured.

There are also other measurement approaches we can bring in and begin to add and eventually replace what they're currently measuring today, and start to essentially reset their marketing investment mix and strategy.

So it is a tool and a vehicle to help people make that mindset shift that's really required to be effective today.

And so that's why we've developed it, and it's ...