😎 Sidney Waterfall: Refine Labs, VP of Demand Generation

Market-to-Revenue

Meet Sidney Waterfall, VP of Demand at Refine Labs. A go-to-market measurement system. Standardizing key metrics for success. Creating demand through content from subject-matter experts. Dark social. Removing friction for buyers. Route high intent leads directly to subject-matter experts or your best people. Funnel analysis. Habits and structure. GSD Time. Asking, “How does this work?”

22 Insights · 7 Questions. Show transcript.

Here’s what Sam Kuehnle said about Sidney:

Sidney Waterfall. She's another VP of Demand here at Refine Labs. The reason that I love working with her is that she's rewriting the playbook for marketing measurement and how to report out on it so that marketers have a seat at the executive table. So, helping marketers just be more informed from operations standpoint, how to report effectively on revenue and how marketing is truly impacting the bottom line.
—Sam Kuehnle, VP of Demand Generation at Refine Labs → Listen

What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?

1) Start with creating demand. It's a pretty broad term, but what we mean by that, and what we do at Refine Labs, creating content from subject-matter experts. Luckily, we have a subject matter expert who is our CEO, but there's a lot of other subject-matter experts throughout the company, in their own niche, in their own interests, that really focus on creating content, just to be consumed, and sharing their expertise rather than creating content with any expectation in return. And then, we, as a company, and as individuals, focus on distributing that content on social platforms and using dark social. So video, text, Slack communities, any ways we can get out that information to be helpful to others. So that's like one big pillar to be creating demand.

2) Dark social. We are leaning into dark social. We have actually put like most of our eggs in that basket, as a company and again, as individuals. So, that means participating and engaging on those channels. So LinkedIn DMs, comments on LinkedIn, other platforms that you can't track. Word of mouth communities, Slack, peer-to-peer, events, community events, Zoom events, things like that is what I mean when I talk about dark social. So leaning into dark social and then not worrying about attribution. So I call it leaning into unattributable marketing efforts, AKA dark social. So, that's basically how the majority of our revenue is driven here at Refine Labs.

3) Removing friction for buyers. We let buyers come to us when they're ready. We remove a lot of unnecessary friction. We let them fill out the form and convert when they're ready. We don't force that conversion. And, when they want to talk to sales, we make that as seamless as possible, and get them right to the right people, and allow them to immediately engage as fast as possible.

What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?

1) A go-to-market measurement system. Sam may be alluded to this in the intro. I'm working on a pretty big project, which is defining a new, go to market measurement system. I’m working with a couple of people here internally and we're really excited to bring it to market. So one of the biggest things that recently overcame with that, a) it was a beast of a project, pretty intimidating, but super exciting to work on, but b) I was really trying to figure out, “What is our structure for documentation, for content and education, around this that we want to launch?” That took a lot of back and forth and thinking things differently. But that was recently something we aligned on, and now are starting to execute on. So it was kind of a big problem to solve for that.

2) Being the coach instead of the player. I recently moved into this VP of Demand role a couple of months ago. I love to be hands-on with my clients and I love to be in the weeds sometimes. So stepping back from being that day-to-day champion with the client and enabling my team, training my team, to be that, and then supporting them when they need help, working with them on strategy, being that coach instead of the player, that has been an internal problem that I've had to really focus on. I feel like I'm in a really good place with that with my team right now.

3) Funnel analysis. The third problem–surprise, surprise–also around metrics and Salesforce funnel analysis here. We do a lot of funnel analysis, go-to-market analysis, of what's going on with our clients. We have a really, really complex setup with data and a lot of different sources. Some of the data's in the data warehouse, some of it's product data, some of it's in Salesforce, some of it's in an Excel spreadsheets. So it became very, very complex to kind of put all of these data sources together, to be able to analyze what's actually going on in their business, and what's working and what's not. So that was a big, big project, and actually kind of fun. I kind of geek out on that kind of stuff personally.

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What are 3 roadblocks that you working on right now?

1) Standardizing key metrics for success. For how we believe that you should be reporting and what you should be reporting on. Weekly versus monthly versus quarterly. And to what audience. So I think that's really key when you're rolling out, or changing, or go to market strategy or the strategy that you're kind of deploying in your business. We are working on standardizing that across all of our clients right now. You normally just have the tendency to report on the same things, weekly, monthly, and quarterly. That doesn't really make sense and it doesn't really make sense for different audiences, so we're trying to define that, and standardize that, across the business right now. So, that's something I'm working on.

2) Enabling and training my team on certain new things that we're doing or certain initiatives that are rolling out. We do things very differently at Refine Labs, and not many people have experience running and doing campaigns and running strategic things how we do. So, it does take some enablement and training. I would say that's kind of always a constant. That’s always on there.

3) Building my personal brand. Again, this is kind of always-on, but specifically, right now, I'm getting comfortable with video. I'm trying to take this to the next step with video instead of staying with text. So, TBD, I started a few things, but trying to make consistent progress on that and not just do one or two things.

What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?

First off. I didn't really know what mental model was, but I Googled it, and I get the concept, but I've just never really heard that term before. Now, I like it, and I'm going to use it all the time.

1) Habits and structure. Or habit stacking. So I recently read, I took the holiday time in January, to read Atomic Habits, kind of refresh on some of that. I hadn't read it before, but I heard really good things. It's a great...