By Marketers, For Marketers ep 1: Are You Really Doing ABM?
On the very first episode of By Marketers For Marketers, James Gilbert, Head of Marketing at CRMNext, and Jason Widup, VP of Marketing at Metadata, talk about what it really means to do ABM.
Are we doing Account-Based Marketing?
Often Marketing defines their ABM campaigns w/o Sales, then goes to Sales to sign off on the campaign, which falls flat. Marketing ends up doing air cover ads to support what Sales is already doing in their key accounts, resulting in a disjointed and ineffective GTM approach.
1. Account-Based Marketing is part of an overall GTM strategy
Build Demand Gen and ABM together under GTM–you need both
How CISCO did it:
- Dedicated gatekeeper for each target account
- Understands the biz as well as that account knows itself
- Manages relationship with CS, Product, Mktg, Sales
- Predictive model
- ex- they knew Zoom would have COVID security issues b4 Zoom did)
2. Identify the right accounts with triangulated data
– Start with the data.
– But don’t just take the list from Sales
– Triangulate the Data, to validate it
Marketing, don’t just say: “Sales, PICK the accounts you want to go after.”
Instead, Triangulate with:
a- Sales (Opportunities, Sales Velocity, Industries)
b- Customer (Renewals, Upsells, Churn, Industries)
c- Product (Product Roadmap, Feature-Benefit Use Cases)
d* Marketing Ops
– SEO, Paid Search, Analytics (I’d want this in Marketing Ops, so help make the data actionable)
– That can provide deeper actionable insights, to build an ABM list
– Rather than pushing this data all over to Sales
– Bring them in earlier (Planning and Strategy phase)
– Provide them an entire Powerpoint: All the insights from every system we have in one place
3. Define what your buyer journey really is
- Multi-Touch Attribution
- I get passion about the middle touches
- Those middle touches have more of an impact than 1st and last touch
- Go through the journey with your Sales, Customer and Product teams
- Have really clear pathways of how to distribute the data (hardest part of ABM) so it’s actionable
4. Don’t ignore the mid-funnel
Just as much about getting people to self-select out…
– As to keep people moving through
* Don’t be scared putting out content that self-selects people out
– “Self-selecting content is the easiest way to find the low-hanging fruit.”
-ex- Review sites:
– A friend recommends it
– A BDR reaches out, and you ignore it…
* A BDR is a middle touch
– You may go back and look at customer reviews…
– Later you may go back and look at feature comparisons…
* None of these are first or last touches…
* And they often don’t get tracked because they’re middle touches!
5. Keep it simple
- Product, Customer Success & Sales can triangulate and simplify your messaging and GTM
Difference between Account-Based Marketing and Demand Generation:
- Some of the biggest companies doing ABM really well are NOT focused on a lot of companies
- ABM: Tiered [more customized] efforts [with an Account Owner]
- Demand Gen: Broader targeted efforts
- Execution within the channels are different for ABM vs Demand Gen
- [Some channels may differ as well]
- Each brings different insights
How we did it at CloudCherry:
- Layout content for each phase:
- Top Of Funnel Content: – ex- Educational content on review site
- Middle Of Funnel Content: – ex- Fill-in Template: How to get buy-in from your exec team
- Bottom Of Funnel Content
How do you do it with a small 1 or 2 person company?
- Narrow down your account list to a 5-to-10
- Determine w/ Sales team the best way to get in
- Have a workshop
- Let them know the channels you can pick from
- Let them decide what channels they think will work best
- as the marketer, go with one of their top channel options
