GTM After Hours
This is a safe space for the best GoToMarket execs, IC’s, and middle-managers in B2B SaaS. We've all failed and succeeded, so, of course we'll talk about both - and spill the tea on how we coped along the way. Join us for some real talk about how to survive, succeed, and thrive in GTM!
GTM After Hours
Beyond the ABM Platform: Unlocking the True Power of ABX with Greg Acquavella
In this episode, Mark Bliss and Greg Acquavella discuss the key components of a successful Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaign. They emphasize the importance of understanding the value of a sales rep's time and providing them with valuable information. They also highlight the need for clear leadership buy-in and a solid understanding of the target audience. Other key components include analyzing CRM data, establishing feedback loops, and having a field marketing budget. They also discuss the role of ABM platforms and share their biggest failures in implementing ABM.
Hi, and welcome to Go To Market After Hours. This is a safe space for marketers, for AEs, CSMs, and everyone else that's stuck in this B2B SaaS growth hamster wheel. So grab a comfy blanket, grab your emotional support animal, and your go -to beverage of choice. And join me for another exciting Go To Market conversation. All right, so today I'm really thrilled because we get to drill down onto one of my absolute favorite subjects, which is ABM or ABX or whatever acronym you want to call it nowadays. I've got a phenomenal leader in that realm, a growth leader across multiple companies who's been implementing ABM since well before it was a trending buzzword that every C -suite mentions. And so I've got Greg Aquavella here. And so Greg, I'm going to pass it over to you to kind of introduce yourself and give our listeners who don't know who you are, a little bit of background of why they should listen to the rest of the podcast. Yeah, so I think this is going to be a lot of fun. So first off, Mark, thanks for having me on. I've been leading, you know, growth marketing teams for quite some time now and have a deep passion for all things, you know, ABX. I mean, like you said, any acronym that you call it. And, you know, I've been doing a lot of different things, whether they're growth strategies on the marketing side, a little bit on the sales side. And I get a really cool picture because I talk to... our sellers constantly and so I get one of the most holistic pictures in the business which really helps me and my team align our efforts to really what's needed but also really allows for some really creative pursuits that we're doing so it's a lot of fun. Well, let's start there. Yeah. Tell me about a really creative campaign that you did. Yeah, so one of the things, when I came onto my current company that I'm at, Devo, one of the things that they brought me on to do is to build out really a global ABM program. And even before I came on, one of the things that I asked is I was like, all right, well, why are you doing this and what's the foundation behind, or what's the reasoning behind a lot of this? And... In any kind of like ABM or ABX go to market motion, right, you need a few things. You need high sales volume, or high, I'm sorry, not sales volume, high, you know, basis, we'll cut this out. Yeah, we'll cut that. You need a high average deal size, you need a significant amount of people in the buying committee, and typically you see deal cycles longer than most. And this, fit that port, just fit it to like the T. And so I thought I could really come in and build out something now at a global level that was a lot of fun. And so when I came on, one of the things that we were looking at is different ways to kind of slice and dice, you know, the data that we had. So, you know, you can look at persona level data, you can look at industry level data, you can look at, you know, account sizes and try things, try to see what matches. But one of the things that we found, is when you're in an industry like anything in the cyber industry, a lot of times when you're looking at a company, you look at company A, they do it one way, and you look at company B, and they do it totally different. But on face value, if you look at the companies on paper, they're identical. So I mean, if you take Verizon and AT &T, for example, I'm making this up, I'm not sure what they have underneath their hood. But... AT &T could be doing something totally in-house, while Verizon could be outsourcing their entire ingest model with how they're going about their cybersecurity posture. Those are going to be wildly different sales cycles, and you might not even want to compete in one. And so one of the most interesting things that I've done here is try to figure out a way to analyze when the right company emerges to go after that right company. And... Being able to peek under the hood and figuring out, all right, is this the right company to even go after is a skill that is really critical, especially in our industry. And especially when you're talking about ABN or ABX, when you're going to waste, not waste, but you're going to spend a ton of dollars, you don't want to waste it on a company that all of a sudden, when you're, you know, six months into it, you realize, you know what, they have a different ingest model than what we typically thought. And it doesn't necessarily work. And so one of the things that we did here that I thought was a pretty creative way to look at it is we tried to take all of those insights that we got from our sellers. And so we were looking at, we were talking to our sellers every day. We were saying, all right, what industry has the highest hit rate when it comes to when you peek under the hood? Is it a really good company to go after? And it turned out to be Finserv. And so what we did is the industry trends that we were looking at, we were like, all right, let's slice and dice this by Finserv. We tried that out at you know globally because if you look across all of our target you know regions whether it's North America, EMEA or Asia Pacific, everybody has you know a FinServ whether it's a bank whether you know they have some kind of infrastructure already built out and it's a very easy you know sell because you're dealing with PII, you're dealing with a lot of sensitive information and so it could scale right. And so that was one of the first kind of global campaigns that we ran and we launched and we saw some significant success in that area. So that was kind of like our proof of value, a proof of concept when it comes to doing like a pure pipeline ABM play. But again, like you said, I mean, you said earlier, when we were talking earlier before this, ABM is so much more than just the right? You got to bring in sales, you got to bring in experiences, you got to bring in customer success, you got to bring all these things. And so... that was kind of an intro into all right is this something that is viable and can we actually scale this out into whether it's an industry or whether it's a persona or whether it's something else is this something that's you know viable that we could really scale and grow and it turned out we could. So my favorite, I think, thing that you said is that it really comes down to data and knowing your target personas. I think a lot of people miss that. And I actually prefer ABM as the acronym because I feel like reinventing it to ABX or ABE, account base everything, like all of it is just, you're pivoting from the central messaging, which to me, ABM is just marketing. You know, it is old school marketing. It's... how well do you know your ICP? And then how well can you take that knowledge and market to them directly? And it's a universal effort. It's collaboration between marketing and sales, which you don't have in a traditional inbound model. And I also think it's complimentary. So even in something with a lower average deal size overall, that company might want to have. some enterprise pipeline coming in, especially in the current economic climate. And so you can run ABM motion for the 10 to 20 % of your revenue stream, and then the other 80 % keep your traditional inbound play. But, you know, go after those enterprise accounts that are going to be longer, they are going to be higher average deal sizes. But that you know, that even works if you got like a $10 ,000 ACV. Right? Yeah, 100%. I've actually have also seen it kind of going the other way where sometimes when you're looking at account based marketing and you're saying, all right, you know, it's a pipeline play that we're, you know, we're not going to focus on the customer side of the house just yet, right? In terms of this, where we're at in the motion and we typically are running, you know, let's say 12 to, you know, 14 month cycles. You know, maybe we don't want to. put all of our eggs in that basket and we want to actually look at some deal sizes that are smaller but are going to close quicker. And so I've seen it also go on the flip side where it's, all right, you know what, let's actually push some money towards the shorter sales side of our business, which it would be more of the mid -market. And I've seen that actually happen too because we just need to get pipelined in the door. And so what can you do in the near term? that can significantly impact the bottom line. And so again, it all goes back to your audience and what is your key objective that you're trying to solve at any company at any given time, and that's where you dedicate a lot of the resources to. And a lot of people, I think, get wrong this idea that it's just top of funnel. Like, ABM is just simply for new customer acquisition at the top of the funnel. Everything else is your traditional sales funnel. And I don't think that that's true. For me, ABM, some of the best campaigns I've ever run are things like Wake the Dead campaigns or mid funnel or even like white space campaigns. I mean, you can reduce churn and tack on additional sales to your existing customers just through some really strong ABM plays and that you're working with the CS team on outbound messaging versus sales. Like, I don't know. Have you run into that a lot where you got a CEO or somebody that just frankly thinks about ABM only in terms of that top of funnel box and you have to then educate them on the entire expansive. value of an ABM program. Yeah, absolutely. And I think what you kind of nailed it. I mean, a lot of people when they come into this, they think, all right, we're going to run all of these ABM motions and it's going to generate all of this pipeline. But they don't take a step back and look at the full picture and say, all right, what can be done right now? And sure, that's part of it. But if you're dealing with large enterprise B2B sales, it's so much less expensive to cross sell. than it is to bring on a new customer. I mean, you're talking about onboarding, you're talking about, you know, potential data migration. And if you could just cross sell a current customer, that's such an easier sales cycle. It's probably significantly shorter. And it's just a land and expand type play that is so underutilized, I think, in our space. And so when it comes to kind of educating around what can be done in terms of... you know, ABM or what signals you're looking at online, right? If you have any kind of platforms that you're using that you can, you know, look at what your current install basis, you know, what content they're consuming, what they could be interested in, what intent signals they're firing. That's just really good ammo for your CS team to, you know, go after and, you know, tailor a narrative around this account to say, hey, you know, you're looking at X product. you know, online, did you realize that our product can accomplish the same thing by doing X, Y, and Z? And so it's, it's emotion that I think is greatly overlooked. And to be honest, you know, in the early days, you know, when I was coming up, you know, in doing like all the, all of these ABM efforts, that was something that, you know, wasn't top of mind for me, because a lot of it from the top was like, listen, we need pipeline right now with net new customers. And... It wasn't getting to the core of what was actually needed, which is just pipeline in general. And it doesn't matter where it comes from, whether it's a current customer or net new. And it's a lot easier to go cross sell or upsell somebody than it is to bring on somebody new. So yeah. So you brought up intent data and this is an area that we've seen significant changes in just the past two years alone. Honestly, when you and I both started this ABM thing way back in the day, the intent data was bullshit. I remember Terminus's initial like surging accounts. It was so terrible. And you know, Now the intent data is so incredibly strong where we're honestly able to see that somebody is in market because they're checking on G2 crowd different competitors or something. The algorithms that companies like SixSense and Demandbase and Terminus have and the data that they're buying up on the backend is so much better. So I think it's an extension of ABM. It's like, how do you use that intent data? And so what if... What have you seen? Like, is it as good as I'm saying it is for you? And then how are you leveraging that data for all of your different ABM -related campaigns? So intent data, the way that I try to think about it, and you can get into the nitty gritty intent data when you're talking about bit streams and how things actually come in and keeping it at like a thousand foot view, I think about it in two different ways. There's first party intent and third party intent. So first party intent would be anything that a prospect. does directly with you. So it could be filling out a form, it could be visiting your website, it could be doing something that they specifically did. And then third party intent could be anything that they're consuming across the web that, you know, then like a demand base or somebody like that aggregates and then pulls it into your system and says, you know, this account could be surging around this topic because, you know, so many people are doing whatever and they could be a potential fit. And So the way that I, that's kind of how I think about each different set of intent data. And so the way that I leverage it constantly, and this is with every single seller that I've worked with, is I always have a discussion with them upfront, like on day one, right, around how they can actually leverage intent data. Because when you're a frontline seller, you can leverage it through multiple different ways. Whenever you're going into, like your first demo with a customer, right? If you just take a look, or if you're not even a demo, but if you're going into a demo, if you're going out to, I don't know, a baseball game, if you're doing some really cool event, going to a bar with somebody, you know, if you just take a look at some of the intent data that is firing on that account, the chances are, if you have your targeting set up right, somebody that you're gonna meet with or speak with to is going to... really resonate with some of the topics that are firing. And so the way that I position it as is if it's a demo, if it's going out to get drinks, or if you're going to a baseball game, you can tailor that narrative as a seller to really position yourself and then potentially set traps for other competitors in the space. If you're seeing competitive intent firing, you're going to be able to stand out so much quicker than if you, you know, didn't have some of those tools in your arsenal, so to speak. And so from a selling standpoint, it's tremendous because you can really take what you're seeing, craft a narrative around it, make sure you're hitting on those key topics that the customer wants to hit on. Don't say like I see your company's firing on X signal, right? But you can just work it into the narrative. And then if you see other companies that they might be looking at, you could then say, have you ever compared us versus... company acts and like look about you know time it takes to run a query or something like that whatever you know the whatever you're selling and you can change that narrative in that way on the seller side and then the other really good use case is on the CS side right is when you get into deeper into the funnel and you're looking at churn and you're looking at risk you can say all right we have a solid customer based on everything we're seeing in our instance, they look like they're scoring, let's say, green on health, but for some reason, all of this intent data is firing against every single competitor that we have. There's a big problem there in that account that you should really address as a CS team. So then it's a matter of just making sure that you're getting that information back to the folks that managed that account and have them have an honest discussion with, you know, who is your point person to say, listen, there's a lot, just reassure them, right? And run your typical CS play to say, what needs to be done to make sure that we stay really top of mind for you? And so I think there's like really two key use cases there that are like kind of like my go -to when it comes to intent data. I don't know, am I missing one? Do you have any others that come to top of mind for you? Honestly, I'm incredibly in awe of everything coming out of Bambora, with partners with all the tools that were mentioned. I love two things about Intent Data beyond what you've just talked about. Number one, I absolutely love it as you factor it into lead scoring. If you can even leverage the predictive lead score that something like Sixth Sense puts out, I see a lot of benefit from that because it breaks it into three sections. You have what you were talking about, what is their first interactions on your site, what are they actually doing within your playground. And then you have the second section of what are they doing out in the market, what are their people searching, how are they interacting, what topics are surging. And then the third area, which is I think something that we often overlook, is how does it compare with your ICP that's actually closed business in your CRM? Because a lot of companies, particularly earlier stage startups, they have an idea of what their ICP is, but it may not actually match what opportunities are moving through the funnel. Like there might be a segment of the market that is starting to surge and that type of predictive analysis. goes a long way into helping you identify similar companies before you then take three months to write up new personas. And so I love using using that type of lead scoring as you know, factors in intent data. It's just so much better than the the shit that you and I were building like five, 10 years ago with we have much more lead scores. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's just this. It's so it's such bullshit because you're like, you know, now you're gating everything right at that time because you had to because it was the only way that you're going to know is this lead hot or not and how do I score it? And then you create a bunch of MQLs that the sales team doesn't give a shit about. Whereas, you know, just kind of trusting the model, I think, makes a lot of sense. And so I would say that's a big thing for intent data is how it affects your lead scoring and then the trust that your sales team can have. into that lead score because they can actually see all the components that make it up. And then the other side of the equation, I love that you touched on making events better. You know, you've got an upcoming event and how do you run run an ABM play against, you know, surging accounts that are likely attendees of that event? That is my favorite play and honestly do it post event to, you know, see who's surging. look geographically where they're at and then run a road show. You know, if you've got, you know, if you've got five accounts that are surging in the, you know, San Francisco Bay area, like run a, run a road show six weeks after the big event. So that way you get more FaceTime with people who are excited. 100%. And the other piece, and I'll go back to that in a second, but I want to make sure I don't forget, is you touched on the lead scoring and bringing that into the equation too. The other piece that intent data can be really critical on is, let's say you're building out your audience, and let's say you know your ICP and you're building out your audience and you're trying to get a little more targeted. The way that you can really make sure that you're putting your ad dollars in front of the right people, is by just layering on an intent filter in say an ABM platform and you add that intent filter that they have to be firing at a certain rate over a certain period of time and then that will take your, I guarantee it'll take a list of a thousand down to 200 and then all of a sudden you layer on our do they know about us, have they visited or came to our site in the past 60 days and that takes the 200 down to like 50. And then you're like, all right, from an ad side, I have 50 solid targets here. And then that's when I like to run the geo filters and say, all right, where are these people located? Where are the companies located? Can you actually triangulate and then say, you know what, based on what I'm looking at, we're not only going to hit them with ad dollars, but we're going to do bookend events at RSA. Or we're going to do bookend events at a road show. You know what I mean? And so there's so many different ways to leverage it. And it's really just about like, if you can think about it, you can probably do it. That's the really cool thing with intent data. Well, and if you're tying that into your lead scoring, you're also able to factor that into how do you measure your content against your ICP? You know, like which which assets are they consuming? And, you know, you can actually stack rank every asset that you have, every every every single blog webinar, white paper, everything against what percentage. of surging accounts in your ICP are, you know, consuming it. And that is fabulous. Nine out of 10 departments aren't doing that. And mostly because they're not investing in ABM and intent data as much as they probably should be. But the second that you do that, you learn so much about what content actually resonates and it goes well beyond the traffic to it or the downloads. Yeah. Now you're seeing here's actual in market companies that are likely to buy that are in our ICP that all love this one blog. It might have the lowest traffic of that month, but all the traffic's the right traffic. It's just phenomenal when you align some of those data points together, like what you can see. Yeah, it is wild, especially when you brought up personas a little bit too. Then you can say, all right, layer on persona level data with intent level data. It can help your content team in a way that allows you to then produce content aligned to the right people at the right time. Then you can make sure that they're consuming your content at the right time because they're in market. You can do a lot. Yeah. So one of the partnerships that has to be rock solid to have any type of success with ABM is the relationship with the sales team. How do you foster that? And it goes way beyond like you having drinks at a bar after SCO. You know, like how do you, how do you do that on a daily basis where you're going to stay connected and embedded with the sales team? Well, having drinks at SCO is a really good one. So don't, don't, don't, what I would say is, I mean, that's, don't underestimate the power of that too. That's really good for building relationships. But, you know, in all, in all seriousness, when you're, you know, in the day to day, one of the things that, you know, me and my team, that I always make sure that we do is we consistently set up one -on -ones with every single rep that we are talking to. And I think it's that, that one -on -one. conversations that happen, that's where you're going to learn and build their trust the most, right? And because when you show a consistent effort into what they're doing and they see that you are really invested in helping them close deals, you not only become this member of the marketing team or this random growth marketing team, you become somebody that is going to be there to help me get this deal over the line, or you're going to become this valued partner. that can help me break into a account where I don't know how to break into, right? And so having that communication, that feedback loop is so critical to not only build trust, but also to build some really good, like competitive intel or some data sharing. And then you can start to get into like some really good feedback loops with some of these reps. And one of the things that I found is I run this like, called an account intelligence engine. And so I take all of this intelligence that we gather, whether it's intent data, whether it's people hitting our website, whether it's if we just closed one deal where there's a similar account in this patch that a seller just ran a similar motion, why don't we do something like that? Having all of this data consolidated into one package for them and sent out on a weekly or bi -weekly basis, depending on how much data you have, really can... then show them what you guys can do as a team. Because it, for honestly, for us, it has allowed me to say, listen, I'm giving you all this data. We're gonna walk through it, you know, every single week and see how we can get better. But they start to, when you have really like data centric sellers that really like this kind of stuff, it really just positions them as like people that can go out, use it, win it, and they know how to like, craft a narrative around it and that's where once you get one person to kind of like tip the domino, every other seller is going to be like, what is that person doing? How do I replicate it? Like, tell me what you're doing. And then that's when this whole thing really starts to take off. And so I think the biggest key there is just communication. And I've talked to a lot of companies and so many, so many companies, they just don't have that consistent communication. I mean, two hours ago I was on the phone for 30 minutes, 45 minutes with one of our sellers. We were talking about how to break into an account in California and it's a matter of you know establishing that trust to say Like listen like Greg. I don't know. I don't know what to do here I'm struggling like can you what should I do and when you get to that moment? It's if you've hit something really good The other really great thing that has happened in in my career is I've leveraged demand base for a few years now and I have reps that are really, really proficient in that tool. And one of the reps has has come to me in the like in the past three months. It was like, Greg, have you ever considered to do X, Y and Z in this demand? Have you ever considered to run this report or try to pull this data? And I was like, no, holy shit, I should have known how to do that. Like, that's a that's a great idea. And so as soon as your reps are starting to then try and like they're starting to bring you ideas and insights into like how they can better leverage. some of the data that you're providing through a lens that they want to see it. That's when you really hit gold and that's the key. I love it. Yeah, I think two magical questions that you can consistently ask of your your friends and sales. What is shitty in your world? And what are you celebrating? Because whatever, whatever those two things are that that that that's going to give you all that you need to know. And, and I it's funny, because in this era of remote work, it's much harder to be able to build those relationships, because it's a completely set of new skills. You know, you're you're no longer going to see them at the water cooler or the company happy hour every week. And that makes it more difficult. So, I mean, you you have to take that initiative. You have to put that, you know, 15 minute block onto their calendar and you have to create a safe enough space where they're actually going to tell you what's shitty in their world and not worry about that, you know, hurting them politically at the company or anything. So. Yeah, it's a completely new set of skills and you need to exercise, I think, a bit of confidence. You know, not being super in your head about like, well, I know they're really busy, so I probably shouldn't put a half hour on their calendar and just doing it. Because the one thing that every sales rep is incredible at is making sure that they get value from their time. So they are not going to stay on the phone with you for 30 minutes unless it adds value in some way. And yeah, one of the things that has helped me, because early in my career, I had kind of that mindset where I always had great relationships with the BDRs because they're dialing, they're really grinding and trying to get ahead in their career. One of the things that, years ago, I was like, all right, I need to get in front of our RSMs or our AEs more. And the easiest way, I think, to do that and to facilitate that, if you're... trying to figure out how do I start those conversations is to come up with a data package that you think they would like and then come to them and say, is this helpful or not? And if it's not, what would be helpful? And then you have a precept, you know, piece of data or, you know, sets of data that is going to help them close deals. And if you're presenting them with a way to solve a problem, they're going to spend 30, 45 minutes with you to figure it out. figure out what that problem is, how to accomplish solving it, and things like that. So, yeah, you can try to help set yourself up for that success by getting the right data in order ahead of time. But yeah, I think those two questions, what sucks right now and what's going great is gonna tell you everything you need to know. All right, so I want to play a little bit of a game with you. It's going to be very similar to a fantasy draft, but we are drafting the components of a successful first ABM campaign. So company's never done it before, and they want to start. But the caveat is, if you pick it, I can't. And if I pick it, you can't. And it's going to go back and forth like a fantasy football draft. And we're going to come up with each of us going to come up with three components that that company is going to leverage to have a successful ABM campaign, their very first one. So I'll give you I'll give you number one pick in the draft. So what is what is the most important thing that that company is going to need to kickstart their brand new ABM program? Let me ask you this first. Did they understand why they want to do it? I would assume that you shouldn't assume. so first and foremost, I would say, and this might be a two for one, but making sure that they understand that it's A, the right time for them, and the fact that leadership agrees that this is the way forward. So it's basically leadership buy -in, but what comes with that is everything that they understand is like, the justification as to like why they're doing this. Because you never want to do something by just acting on it because they heard a buzzword. It's like, no, we looked at the data. It's right for us. Leadership is bought in. Let's figure out some metrics. Let's try to hit them. And we have leadership now bought in. Okay, I dig that. I'm going to take a spin off of yours and I'm going to say my number one draft pick is going to be the customer data. I want to know what's actually moved through the pipeline. I want to know who has bought, what were their roles, who was all involved in the buying committee. I want all of that pipeline data. I want to take every bit of information I can. out of the CRM and review that in a brainstorm before we ever get going. Because if you don't got the list right, you're fucked anyway. You want to hear a cool story off that real quick? So every six months or so, my team and I do what we call a look back analysis around all of the close one deals and who was influential in those deals. And it's funny that you just said that because we got through this maybe two weeks ago and we did a larger aggregate pool of the year and a half, past year and a half close one deals. And typically what we've done is we've always focused on either the CISO level or the analyst practitioner level. And granted, now, if you're using your pick, right, you're hoping that that hygiene is clean, so that's assumption number one. But if you're thinking, if you're looking at all of the contact roles associated with an opportunity, that'll tell you so much that you need to know about every single campaign. And so one of the things that we found when we did this is, On the opportunities that were closed one, there were obviously more contact roles than others just because we closed one. And what we found is when you started to dig through some of the gong calls or some of the calls that were associated with those is the people that had the most influence were not the CISOs. They weren't the analysts. They were the people that were managing the socks. They were the senior architects. They were the people that had the ear of the CISO. but then also knew how to distill information and communicate with the analysts. They kind of knew how to go up and they knew how to go down. And those personas popped out the most. And what we found is we need more content for that specific group. And so that was one of the most enlightening kind of things that we did. Anyway, it's funny that you mentioned that because I literally just finished going through an analysis like that. But all right, my pick number two. love that because you always, you always find something in that. And so I'm sorry, I took that pick from you. So you don't, you don't get it now. you know, your startup company that's, you know, doing their first ABM program, it's just going to have to do it without that analysis. But, you know, I love that story because to me, anytime that you do it and, and I get it like all, all the data in the CRM, it's always going to be messy, particularly a company that's never done ABM before. The idea that they're going to have sophistication in their data and their CRM, like it's not. But if you take the time and you go into each of those accounts and you dig into who's active on LinkedIn in those accounts, you start to see who was in any of the email chains, who was invited to the demo. Yeah. know, it just makes your life so, so much easier when you get going. So yeah, I just, I love that y 'all did that. But you had some extra time. What is your second pick? What are you going with? Second thing would be having solid feedback loops from sales and marketing. Or basically solid feedback loops all around. So it would be feedback loops from sales, feedback loops from CS, just strong communication all around. I think that's key because you might learn you're running an ABM program and you're like, this isn't the right ICP. The easiest way to figure that out is Sales is not winning deals, they're gonna come and tell you. And if they're, so you're gonna get to the bottom of the answer so much quicker if you got those feedback loops set up already. I dig it. I'm going with content for my number two. I got to have something that, you know, I've already done the work. We've done the look back analysis. We we've identified who's involved. Now I'm going to go build that content. Yeah, anything that's going to resonate. So now I've taken that away from you. So your your third pick is going to be a tough one. my god, okay. Yeah, you really took everything away, didn't It's not my first fantasy draft, man. I'm going for Amara St. Brown. That's what's happening here. the third one I would do is I would say having a clear, and it's a little different than some of the CRM data, but it's having a clear direction of potentially what you're, where. where your biggest influencers are in your accounts. So understanding is if you're going after a security account, is it the CISO, is it the CIO, is it the SOC manager? Understanding that you have a clear target persona and target audience to go after with your message. So basically having a solid understanding of your audience and knowing who to go after. Okay, I dig that. Hmm, what? You know what? I'm gonna go a healthy regional field marketing budget. That's what I'm gonna go with for my third. You know, starting a program with a small budget set aside to be able to run a few tiny in -person events. Like it could just be five grand at Topgolf, but you know. coming up with a few of those targeted events that you can pitch to for the 10 % of the accounts that are actively surging. I would probably go with that because if this team, like this hypothetical startup, assuming that they've got decent enough data that they can identify the accounts that they want to go after and the personas, they have content that they can leverage. digitally as well as through their email marketing, which I didn't touch. So, you know, feel free. The fact of the matter is, is if we can get these people face to face in person, particularly if you're selling to the enterprise, it's going to be hugely beneficial. So I'm going to go with a regional budget for a few, you know, events that they could do locally. So you know what's crazy? Let's say if we ended like right here, the last thing that we said was budget, right? And then something that we didn't even say was a like a ABM platform. And I think one of the most underrated or under, one of the most misunderstood concepts when it comes to any kind of... program that you're running is that you need a platform and you need a significant amount of budget. You don't. And we kind of through the draft that we just did, we just kind of proved that out right there. And it's amazing what you can do to prove out and do a small POC with a very limited amount of budget with no platform, just to see if it's something that you can really make work. And I think what we just did right there is it shows kind of you and I have been in this for a while. we kind of know what you need and what you don't and it's kind of funny that we both kind of landed there. and it's interesting because, you know, you, you, you come into an organization and they'll tell you, we tried ABM and it didn't work. And nine times out of 10, somebody bought a tool like six cents terminus demand base. They ran some digital ads and they didn't do any of that data persona work. They didn't have the feedback loop in place. They weren't as tactical with their content or. their events, they weren't doing any of the things that we talked about, and that's always why it fails. I don't think that there's an organization that wouldn't benefit from ABM, if done right, because good ABM, like we talked about earlier, it's just good marketing. Know the people who are most likely to buy. Know who's actually in market. Know who's going to be a part of those deals. Understand what do they actually like to consume content wise, what type of event can you get them to like all of these things? It's it's just good marketing. So yeah, I love that neither of us picked that. I mean, no, no disrespect to the platforms. I truly love the platforms. They make. Yeah. They make they make our job easier. But if you don't if you don't know. all of that data and you don't know your approach and you don't know how you're going to run the campaigns. What you're also going to do is buy a cheap version of that product. Like, like Sixth Sense is notorious for this. I love Sixth Sense. No hate to them. But they are notorious for selling like a starter package, which does not have a lot of the heavy lifting, intense type of data into it. It's just basically going to let you run ads to your target accounts, which you can do anyway. So, you know, a lot of people will buy that and it is a lot of money. Like, don't get me wrong, even their starter pack is expensive, but it is much better to spend more money and get a full platform that fits everything that you have thought out in detail. Then. going with something cheap, checking a box and saying, we have ABM, so you can put up a slide in the board meeting. And then three quarters later, your ABM program has quote unquote failed. And now everybody's jaded about ABM, especially the sales team. Yeah, I totally agree. And it's interesting all these different platforms that are out there. They kind of take a little bit different approach. I mean, if you look at the, I mean, if you just look at like the MQ, like the top platforms that are almost top right or demand -based and Sixth Sense, I'm a big demand -based user. We use it all the time. And the way that those two... platforms approach just ABM in general is wildly different. I mean, demand base from what I've seen and from what I've used from a content perspective, you know, is much more focused around those relationships that you have with sales and those, you know, how you can progress and progress a deal and things like that. And whereas Sixth Sense is much more on the on the ad programmatic side of the house. And so. I mean, both are good approaches, but it's interesting that the two leaders in that area are wildly different in how they're approaching, you know, ABM. Okay, I want to end with failure because I don't think we as GoToMarket leaders talk about it enough. And so, you know, I just want us to share our biggest failures in creating these ABM programs. And, yeah, I'm happy to go first. I mean, outside of the obvious of like I have bit into the trap of implementing without as much detail or thought put in, especially implementing at a place that doesn't have product marketing, you know, smaller startups, and you're trying to build all of that stuff together. I've definitely run into some problems, but a funny one for the audience. I implemented this campaign that was centered around sending cookies to different sock teams and leaders. And. it was interesting because, you know, the whole premise was if this, you know, the cookie had a, a flash drive, within it, like, like not within the cookie, but with the package. And so the messaging was like, if this can get to you, anything can get behind, behind your, your, your, your network. And so, you know, it was, it was an interesting, you know, campaign. There was really strong messaging around it. You know, there are, our, our corporate marketing team had, had. really, really great ideas around it. But what happened, it wasn't packed sufficiently in a way. And so every, every cookie that got delivered was like beat up and crumbled. So, so incredibly humility. We're getting like, like, like CISOs taking pictures of this like broken up cookie that they received and sending it over to us. And it's like, Yeah, yeah, should have should have had that that thought that yeah, cookies, cookies do do break and you know that that we like, okay, well, we got a good concept here. So but we need to change it. And so, you know, from that from that failure, and it was incredibly embarrassing. We then worked with local bakeries to them. And it would be a bakery like they would recognize and it cost us more money. So I had to reduce probably. 50 % of the contact list, but we went with some local bakeries who then brought it in, you know, to the reception desk physically. And so that way, you know, we knew that nothing was getting busted up. And I have friends who've done similar things with like, like buying lunch and sandwiches and things. And I think it's more successful now as people are going more hybrid approach and stuff that there's. likely going to be somebody from your buying committee at that office. And so, yeah, that type of an approach was fun. But yeah, we sent a bunch of broken cookies all over the security world and incredibly embarrassing. What's a failure that you could talk about? Let's see, I don't have a funny one like broken cookies, but that's great. At least there though, you could spin that off into something funny. Once you found out the cookies were broken, you could then at least target them with an email or a mailer saying, you could do a fun spin off on that. We did that. That's the way the cookie crumbles. was just going to say, you can get to that narrative somehow. I was trying to get to that in my head. I was like, how could you get there real quick? One thing that I think, one of the biggest failures probably earlier on in my career, basically it was dictated by the leadership, and this isn't at my current company, I'm going way back. We wanted to do ABM and they wanted to do it by a certain time period because they had a board meeting coming up. And one of the people that was on the board was in marketing 20 years ago. You've got to love those board members. And heard about ABM, wanted to do it, and was wondering why we weren't doing it at the time. And at the time, what we were doing was just smart, really just demand generation tactics against basically our audience. And what we... did is we spun up an ABM campaign because we were on a very tight timeline and we did not set clear goals and expectations of what this program could have delivered. And by doing so, we kind of set ourselves up to fail no matter what metrics came out of it because we didn't have the right, basically numbers in place, we didn't have the right buy -in, we didn't have all of these things. in place prior to launching a full-fledged ABM campaign from soup to nuts. It was rushed. It was rushed for the wrong reasons. And it was just something that, it was just a massive failure. And then we had to walk it back to say, all right, here's why it failed. This is what we need in order to get something like this done correctly. And it ended up being okay, but... It was a really quick lesson around, you know, all right, you know, in order to launch something like this, you need a clear definition of what you're measuring. You need to, you need to make sure that whatever metrics you're delivering to whoever, they need to understand what is the basis of those metrics. Because sometimes you're introducing a whole new set of, you know, metrics that they've never seen before. And so that was a really quick, I would say, quick thing I learned in like a... course of a month of what not to do when it comes to measuring ABM and so all because of a board meeting too which is always great. Well, it's it's that, you know, I guess it goes back to the point of like, ABM isn't just a buzzword. You know, we talked about it's not a buzzword. It's not a technology. You know, it is a marketing strategy and you need to tackle it as such. And so coming up with this, hey, well, we need to do ABM because, you know, I hear about ABM. I listen to a podcast and ABM, everybody's doing it. So why aren't we spin this up in the next three months? and you're missing out on the strategic element of what ABM actually is. And if you don't do that work, you don't have an ABM program. You might have technology. You might have a line item in your budget that says it's for ABM, but you don't actually have an ABM program. You have a buzzword that you're just kind of executing on. You got a $150 ,000 buzzword. That's exactly what you got. 150? That seems cheap in today's age. you're right, probably like half a mil. man. Well, this was an absolute blast. Enjoyed nerding out over ABM with you. I will let you have the final word to the audience. What advice would you give to people who are struggling with their programs right now? Let's see, people that are struggling. Well, first off, my team would have won, by the way, in the fantasy ABM draft. But let's see, people that are struggling to implement a program. The first thing I would do, what I would recommend is, there would be two main things, is I would say, assuming you have buy -in and assuming like this is the right thing for you to do at the right time, is to set up metrics that are achievable in a given timeframe. So if you're measuring things like, MQAs, like if you're measuring marketing qualified accounts, right? Making sure that everybody is on the same page around that because when you come back in six months and you say, all right, listen, we moved seven accounts to 30 accounts to MQAs, people need to understand what that is. So I'd make sure that that's really known. And then the second thing that I would say, if you're struggling to kind of like start or jumpstart a program is... talk to your sellers and say, hey, where do you need the most help? Like, what accounts, what industries are you, where are you winning and where are you losing? And then see if they have any reasons for why. And that might really get the creative juices flowing around, you know, maybe you can slice the personas this way, or maybe you can look at the data a little bit differently. I would say those two things would be, you know, where I would start to kind of like jumpstart any kind of mechanism. Love it. Well, thank you again for your time. Thank you to everybody who listened, especially the people who got to the end right here. And yeah, join me next time for another great GoToMarket conversation.