🧠 Carl Ferreira: Refine Labs, Director of Sales

Market-to-Revenue

Meet Carl Ferreira, Director of Sales at Refine Labs. How community-driven content, a commitment-based sales process, and delivering on promises drives 100% revenue at Chris Walker's Refine Labs. Ask yourself, if you're a sales team or a marketing team, “do I sell in the way that I like to be sold to? Or do I market it in a way that I actually buy technology?”

17 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Read the transcript here.

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

1. Community-driven content. One of the biggest ways that we convert our market into revenue is community-driven content. I think “thought leadership” is the old way to describe that. We found that thought leadership was very “us” centered. It was like, “me, I'm the thought leader.” It didn't have this sense of community. Thinking about content, and distributing it, in a way like, “hey, does this provide value, but also create some kind of a communal experience for our fans, or our followers, whoever it is?” Really significant spike in revenue. Like literally a 100% of Refine Labs revenue comes from our organic presence and our community-driven content.
2. Commitment-based sales process. So we bring people into the funnel and then the sales process that we've architected is really commitment-based. So it gets buyers and it gets sellers, my team, on the same page from a commitment standpoint. You want me to put together an executive briefing for your team? I'm going to need these commitments from you. Right? And that really moves a sales process along, really efficiently. It also weeds out buyers that aren't really committed to investing their time, investing their money, investing resources, committing to just explore new ideas and change. It really drives very high close rates of really, really good-fit customers.
3. Deliver on our promises. This is the last way that we convert our market into revenue. I guess you could say this is like recurring revenue. Making sure that there is no churn, or very minimal churn. But, when we make promises and make commitments in the sales process, we keep those, and our services team keeps those, and we help businesses grow and they continue to give us their money to reinvest it using our strategies and frameworks into their business and their growth.

What are 2 hard problems that you recently overcame?

1. If you notice on LinkedIn, this is my first sales leadership role. I was at HubSpot as a sales rep there as an Account Exec and came here as Director of Sales at Refine Labs. One of the most interesting challenges that I've wrestled with is switching my mind from an individual contributor mindset to a leadership mindset. I want to jump in and close the deal so bad. I want to jump in and take discovery calls, take inbound leads, things like that. And I have to remind myself sometimes, “you were hired to do these certain things. You were hired to be a strategic thinker, to architect new processes, to enable and empower my direct reports to do their best work, to hire on talent that is better than me at certain things so that we can move the business forward.” That mindset shift has been a larger challenge than I thought. You know, I just love selling. So I'm getting out of that mindset has been something that I've been wrestling with and in process of overcoming.
2. Story. When you sell fairly complex, new ideas, it can be overwhelming in a sales process to educate buyers on how you think, how you execute, and how you measure success. So, how do you distill that story and narrative down to something that is compelling and impactful, but still delivers the full meat and value of what the offering is? It's a big problem, if you can't do that well. You lose deals. You can be the best service provider, best tech vendor, best software in the world, but if you can't distill down what you do and what your customer gets out of it really simply, you're going to struggle to grow. So that's something that we're tackling.

What are 2 roadblocks that you are working on now?

1. So like any startup, we're a small team that is growing. I wear a lot of hats. My direct reports, my sales team, they wear a lot of hats. We don't have an enablement team or anything like that, so there's some people doing enablement. We don't have dedicated designers, so we're throwing together our own assets. That's fun, but that's also a roadblock for growth. So the challenge is when everybody's spinning a bunch of plates, knowing when the timing is right to hire somebody that's better than you at spinning that plate, or expanding the team, figuring out that timing of when to do that so that you don't decelerate the business is something that we're working on. It is a work in progress, but a super fun roadblock to tackle.
2. What does outbound look like? I don't know how much you know about Refine Labs, but we're a go-to-market strategy and research firm, and what does outbound look like? We're largely inbounds, like 99.998% inbound, but we do want to start and spark conversations proactively with our dream clients, with our target customers. So what does outbound look like for them? We want to shy away from the cold calling or the cold emailing. Not because we think that's necessarily bad or anything, but because it hasn't been innovated. A lot of the innovation is still happening inside those channels. “Use these subject lines. Use these cold call openers.” and we're really wrestling with what does innovation look like just outside of those channels? Can we discover new ways to proactively begin conversations with our target customers and our dream clients? And that's something that we're really excited to be tackling and working on.

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

1. Extreme ownership. I don't even know if it’s a mental model, but I'm a big fan of Jocko Willink’s work, Extreme Ownership. And I believe that's a mental model. That's a filter, or a high-resolution lens, in which I view my day, my life, my, the way I interact with my family, my work. And the model is essentially extreme ownership. Like everything that happens, happened because of something that I did. I own all of the outcomes in my world. I still use that mindset even when something happens outside of your control, there was something that you maybe contributed that may tip that first domino that resulted in something happening that maybe potentially caused harm to a relationship, or harm to your business, or something like that. So that's the first mental model that I use to do my best work. It’s just “I own everything.” Whether I own it or not in real life, I just take ownership of all of it, and I really empower my team to do the same. And we do some stellar work because of that.
2. A moat model. Again, I'm making up the names of models at this point, but the concept of a moat is that you build a moat around your business, or a moat around your processes. There's a separation that that moat creates. Maybe you think of it as like a ring of fire, maybe I could find a better illustration than a moat. But the point of the mental model is that every process, every tactic that we do, we are asking ourselves, “does this contribute to the depth, or the width, of the moat? Are we different than our competitors? Are we different than the market? Are we helping our customers to be different than their competitors, with everything that we do?” And when you look at, and analyze, your strategies through this lens, i...