[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, welcome. In this podcast we talk B2B marketing and what it takes to know your customer innovate and profit. We're glad you made it. This Is the campaign by 97th floor.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Hello everyone. Happy Friday. I'm Paxton Gray and this is The Campaign, a B2B marketing podcast about better knowing your audience, innovating beyond best practice, and converting visitors into customers. The Campaign is a Weekly conversation with B2B marketer marketing leaders designed to fit as much value as possible in 30 minutes. You can catch the campaign live on Fridays at 2 Eastern and you can find past episodes on YouTube, iTunes and Spotify.
[email protected] today we've got a really great topic hitting on ABM. Between the cost of tools, the time and resources needed to create tailored content, the investment in marketing ops, and the challenge of aligning with sales reps, ABM can be seen as a high risk, high reward strategy for many orgs. At Nice and Floor, we'll either help clients with their ABM strategies or we will plug in to different elements of their ABM strategy. So we've seen this work firsthand and we've seen a lot of the challenges that org can face when executing an ABM strategy. And that's all before you even get to measurement. Many companies find proving the ROI of ABM campaigns to be somewhat complex. However, if ABM is done properly or ABM can be one of the most effective ways to guide high value accounts down the funnel.
But there's a lot you know. ABM is one of those things that is easier said than done often and on paper it's quite simple, but in practice it can become much more complex. So can B2B Orgs win with ABM? How can you set it up to deliver maximum value? And how can companies measure the ultimate impact of their ABM strategy? We're going to get into all of that today and more with our guest Madeline Oliver. Madeline is a dynamic Senior Operations Manager specializing in account based marketing strategy and implementation. With a tenure of 11 months at Cloudflare and over 11 years working in marketing technology, 8 years working at Marketing Technology, she is instrumental in scaling operations by developing developing a marketing operations roadmap aligned with company and team goals. Her expertise includes designing, managing and implementing the demand based ABX platform, collaborating with global ABM teams to establish a center of excellence for ABM and driving sales and marketing enablement to enhance demand based adoption. She's also passionate about leading teams, mentoring others in martech and ABM and public speaking. Beyond her professional achievements Madeline is a toddler mom, toddler girl mom, an exhibiting gallery artist and a two time published children's book illustrator. She's based in Central Texas, close to Austin. Madeline, welcome to the show.
[00:03:00] Speaker C: Yeah, thank you for having me. Excited to be here.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: Yeah, we're so excited to have you and to learn from your experience with abm. And what I want to do is kick it off by asking the question ABM and demand gen. You had posted a while ago, you said quote another challenge with ABM I see often is companies that think they are doing abm, but really it's demand gen and not abm. Marketers have a hard time distinguishing that line in the sand when it comes to one to many abm. So tell us difference between ABM and Demand gen from your perspective.
[00:03:37] Speaker C: Yeah, I think the biggest difference is that, and I see this with the application side of things too is that ABM is like single handedly account centric. Like it focuses on the journey of the account whereas demand gen is, you know, leads, contacts, like all of those people touch points that we would expect that get associated of course with the account. But their journey is like the typical what we see the lead scoring journey becoming an MQL and all of that. And so know that that kind of strategy and approach is different when, when you're going as compared to when you're going after an account holistically. Right. And you're looking at the overall account.
Yeah. So that's kind of like my North Star definition because it keeps it really easy for, for marketers to then like think of the tactile approach of like okay, you know, demand gen. I'm going to focus on my leads and my contacts and then you, you know, ABM marketers can focus on the account overall.
[00:04:47] Speaker B: Right. So with abm, you know, there's a lot of places that can go wrong starting at the very beginning, which is in the account selection process. You know, you, it's not as you say, it's not truly ABM unless you're thinking about individual accounts and their journey through that funnel. So it all kind of begins with selecting the right accounts. Where do you see organizations often go wrong when building out their list and selecting the right accounts?
[00:05:14] Speaker C: Yeah, I think the most common place is when they don't align with sales.
And I do think that marketing can come up with the like target account list first. But what they should do is then validate it with sales and make sure that they're aligned. A lot of times companies don't have that alignment and don't validate it with sales. And so then it kind of like misses the mark when you think of like how an MQA would then get passed over to, you know, a BDR for follow up and qualification and pipeline fit. So and then just being on the same page from, from like an org perspective of like these are our one to one, these are one to few and these are one to many.
[00:05:56] Speaker B: I, I've seen orgs with target account lists of 50 and I've seen orgs with target account lists of thousands. Do you have a good metric or rubric for how big a target account list should be for an organization?
[00:06:09] Speaker C: Yeah, if you're following like a tiered account scoring framework, you'll usually have like three tiers and your tier one is usually like your one to one. Your tier two is that one to few which is usually like in the thousand like ballpark range of accounts. And then like with tier three I would usually expect anywhere between like 3,000 to 5,000 accounts for one to many.
And you know, one of the ways that you can help define like the number of accounts for those different tiers is using your ICP is using like your data to help come up with those lists. Intent, engagement, all of that. So like that's kind of what I think of. But of course every company is different and they, they, you know, implement their own different framework. But that is kind of like what I've typically seen.
[00:07:12] Speaker B: I like that framework of one to one, one to few and one to many.
And I want to dive deeper into the one to one and that process and one to many seems to me like a lot of that is kind of the traditional marketing practices. Tell me about the one to few. How does, how does an organization treat that one to few segment and how does that differ from the one to one or the one to many?
[00:07:39] Speaker C: Yeah, so and I'm kind of thinking I'm pulling from my current experience of where I work at Cloudflare right now. Like one to one is the very like high touch enterprise clients that really require like this very custom like journey, custom fit, custom outreach, like a lot of custom content.
And that's where also a lot of one to one like ABM marketing like struggles because usually there isn't content resources at the company to deliver that fast turnaround, very dynamic, very fluid content for the one to one target accounts just because those are like usually enterprise companies. And, and like I said, it's very high touch, it's very custom for one to few. Usually I see like you have a variety of like always on for your one to few and then you have like a lot of vertical breakdown for one to few. So that allows you to get a little bit deeper with your segmentation of your one to few target account list. You can then seg meant by different verticals, different behavioral signals that lean towards your solutions or your products that would express that intent to buy. And then one of many.
That's where it gets a little bit more tricky. Tricky of where that line in the sand is with overlapping with demand gen. But I think, I think what we will see is we will see that to be more common and then it will just be on the marketer to kind of maintain that line in the sand and say hey, these are going to are always on campaigns for one to many and then this is where we can get a little bit more specialized for like let's say like a vertical banking or finance for all of our target accounts at the one to many level.
[00:09:31] Speaker B: That makes sense and it's easy. Yeah, I can see how those lines could get blurry to the realm of like standard homepage, perhaps some like wider net ad campaigns that would clearly be more demand gen. And then yeah, as you say pages and things like that could be more on the ABM side. That makes sense. So I think it's a really great framework.
So moving on from account selection. Well actually before we move on. So you're saying marketing builds those account lists and they go and validate it with the sales team, assuming sales team, you know, they go through that and they're like yeah, these are exactly the kind of target accounts that we're getting now we get into data collection and data governance. I saw this study by validity.
They say that 44% of the people surveyed say that they have lost 10% of revenue which is attributed to their CRM decay. So this data, it's not enough to just like put this big effort into building out ABM and gathering this data, but you have to maintain that data ongoing for it to be valuable. And if you don't, it can end up costing you a lot more than just inconvenience and resources. But like it really detracts from this effort of abm. So how do you view that data governance and what kind of tools and frameworks do you have around maintaining that and building that out?
[00:11:11] Speaker C: Yeah, it's interesting because like data hygiene and data cleanliness has always been like an issue in the marketing ops world. So it's like nothing new to us when we look at a client's CRM. Or anything like that. But specifically in abm it has a huge impact on the target account list because you're working with a smaller pool and you're working specifically with accounts.
It's really important to make sure that that data is clean, it's reliable, it's dedupe, it's standardized. Especially with like you know, Salesforce, there can be parent accounts, there could be child accounts. And so you know, you really want to make sure that those, that the data is clean so that your lists are clean because that impacts like what kind of campaigns you, you enter them in. You don't want like an account being over touched too many times and too many emails or too many ads because you know just how they entered into your target account list in the first place based off of the data was, you know, not done correctly.
I would also recommend for a best practice and like the overall like framework is making sure you have clear suppression criteria. Again not really new when it comes to like marketing ops. These are things that we think of all the time. So definitely work with your ABM operations person at your company if you have that. But make sure you're also plugging in the gaps on data collection. So when we think of like industry data, firmographics, technographics, usually those are coming into your CRM from like third party systems. So make sure that when they're appending the data to the fields that you desire to pull that from, it's doing so correctly. I've seen for example sometimes like a government account could be marked as like the wrong industry and then all of a sudd because of how you built your list with your criteria that that government account got onto the wrong list because the industry value was incorrect. So like you can see how just like that tiny example can have a huge impact on your account list or account selection. So make sure you're protecting your data. Make sure it has like regular hygiene practices implemented at your company to clean it, de dupe it. Make sure the hierarchy in your salesforce makes sense to your ABM platforms. That's communicating to make sure your, your target account list go through like a review like on a quarterly or annual basis so that someone is like looking at it and saying okay, we want to add these new accounts or we want to remove these accounts based off of like what we've seen with different trends and intent signals and opportunities.
So that's a little bit on that.
[00:14:13] Speaker B: I think it was just yesterday that it came out that Apollo and Seamless were both hit by LinkedIn and both of Those help with like data enrichment. And people believe that LinkedIn is setting the stage for their own product that will compete. And so they're kind of clearing the table to make room for that.
And I know that that has application beyond abm, but my main question is like, how have you seen the world and the industry change when it comes to the ability for organizations to gather this data and maintain it? And where do you think that's going? Do you think that it's going to get easier or do you feel like it's going to get harder or do you not see anything down the road that we should be preparing ourselves for?
[00:15:08] Speaker C: Yeah, I think a little bit and I think harder and easier at the same time. I think, you know, it gets more complicated when you're a large company and you have a large like tech stack. That's where it gets harder because now you have multiple systems feeding into each other, talking to each other, have to speak the same language, fields have to be mapped like all the juicy Martech stuff that like we geek out on. And that way it gets harder because now you're also considering AI, you know, when it is sending those, those signals and it is being leveraged in that capacity. But then on the flip side, it can be easier because it can, AI can fill those data gaps. AI can also take a lot of the weight that is currently on the ABM marketer right now when it comes to personal content creation. Take that off and actually, you know, run that itself and it be self serving in that way. And now the marketer can focus on the things that AI can't do, which is more like deciding the strategy according to the business objectives, working well with people, establishing those relationships and building those relationships. So I think can free up the marketer to hone in on their area of like zone of genius and their strengths by doing all the stuff that is like considered more like routine and day to day and robotic, you know, pun intended.
[00:16:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that.
I have said for a while now that what is going to set organizations apart are going to be those that can distinguish between tasks that are best suited for artificial intelligence and those tasks that are best suited for organic intelligence. And the more they can maintain that discipline and allow each to focus on what they're best at, that's what's going to accelerate those organizations faster. And the miscategorization of those things are going to be what makes organizations more or less efficient over time. So I love that you're saying that now you've written about AI and talking about how AI can help with predictive analytics and lead scoring and hyper personalized engagement. And I'm wondering just to get this down to a tactical level, how are you using AI for lead scoring or hyper personalized engagement or just within the field of abm, is there a specific tool that you're using or there's a suite of tools? How do you apply that?
[00:17:48] Speaker C: Yeah, so we do do qualified as AI powered chatbot and we are playing with the prompts, the kind of verticalization of that and you know, just personalizing that more for, for the different industries and, and then also for product fit as well. So we're playing a lot with like AI powered chatbot. We are also we leverage Demandbase as our ABM one stop shop platform and they are launching a lot of new AI capabilities. And so we will be one of those early adopters who you know, are first to the scene to utilize those capabilities within the platform, enable our marketers on it so that they, it becomes more second nature. And then of course our sellers are using like ChatGPT for you know, crafting more personalized outbound messaging content, all that, so that they're saving time because like that is the number one most important thing to a seller is time. How can they maximize their efficiency and save time? And so I think AI is probably going to be maybe more quickly adopted by the sellers because of that, that need and then for, for the marketers it's going to be slowly slower in comparison with these tools as they're actually weaved into the tools or there's dedicated solutions for things like chatbot or multi channel orchestration, that kind of thing.
[00:19:28] Speaker B: Yeah, now we're just gonna have to, the buyers too are probably gonna start using AI at some point to respond to these outreach and then we're just gonna get AIs talking to each other, acting on behalf of everybody.
I wanna, you had mentioned the government account that gets, you know, mislabeled as a different industry. And I'm wondering what do you use as a fail safe or backstop to make sure that you're not, you know, I think there, there's possibility for some harm to be done to accounts if they're miscategorized and then in best case scenario it's just, you know, not effective. Yeah. Do you have some sort of check and balance system or have you found some way for AI to play a role in making sure that things match before they go out and they go live?
[00:20:18] Speaker C: Yeah, I think your latter point were in the midst of discovery for that. So I can't wait to see how that will actually like help be part of like the overall QA process. And in that gatekeeping role your, your former point I would say like the fail safes that you always want implemented as much as you can is leveraging like Salesforce's like automations so you know, and making sure that any outsourced outside data that is feeding into your CRM, you have different automations that are running in that fail safe capacity to override certain values that are being appended to fields according to like what you, you deem is correct. Right. So like that's where one example would be probably overridden by a Salesforce automation that you know, overrides that industry value, stamps it with the correct value because it picks up company name or account name equals you know, a government keyword or something like that.
But then at the same time in addition to that you, you need a little bit of that manual like hand touch from like a human and not a bot or an automation rule. Just like validating and cleaning that list before you import it or sync it into your ABM platform going through. And that really means you have to know your criteria and know what the value should be, know what looks right, what doesn't look right. And we are a little bit more used to like things being manual just because of like our company's evolution.
And as we get more automated I'm hoping we won't have that reliance. But like every company is different, their maturity too I will say. So my suggestions may work if you are at that maturity level but if you're not, then you're just going to have to go more back to the basics which is a little bit more manual. Sometimes.
[00:22:27] Speaker B: Talking about tech, stack and ABM people at different stages, you know, maybe they, they're in the middle and they want to optimize their ABM strategy or they're looking to build one out.
You, you said you're using demand base, is that right?
[00:22:40] Speaker C: Mm.
[00:22:42] Speaker B: What would you recommend to someone building out their abm? Let's say maybe they're, they're mid market and they're looking to build this out for the first time. What tools or stack would you recommend that they look into as they build it for the first time?
[00:23:00] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean we use demand based but like there's a lot of other tools out there. There's six senses.
Follows is one for specifically around like the content, spinning up those quick landing pages that are great for one to one and one to few. You just want to make sure your tracking is like enabled and obviously leveraging your current tech stack marketo Salesforce in the ways that you can in a maximized capacity. Because I know not everyone has like the budget to go out and like get 6 cents or demand based. Sometimes you're just focused on like, okay, we're going to craft our targeted account list in Salesforce or from our CRM, we're going to validate it with sales. And if that's where you are in your maturity level, that is fine too. You know you can still apply like some of the ABM best practices out there, like making sure that you're aligned with sales, making sure that you are getting those, you know, those data signals that you need and making sure that like it's aligned to your icp, you know, all that, all that kind of like basic stuff that you can still do if you don't have the budget to, to purchase like those tools. And there are a lot of different tools out there. And I think with ABM specifically we're going to see more tools arrive to the scene that aren't just like abm, but maybe just like overall account insights driven, spanning both demand gen and abm. So yeah, I think that's, that's kind of like my best recommendation for that.
[00:24:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
So we've got just a little bit of time left, but I really want to make sure that we hit on how companies should be measuring impact of the ABM strategy.
Again, there's another study in 2023 by ITSMA that says that only 52% of companies measure account based marketing ROI. And the businesses that do measure ROI, they often struggle with that because again, it's one of those things that on paper seems quite easy. It's like, these are my accounts, do I convert them or not?
But tell me how you approach that and how you recommend people measure the impact of their ABM strategy.
[00:25:15] Speaker C: Yeah, we are very pipeline and revenue driven. So first off we'll say that.
But we also do look at engagement and some of the other typical like account health engagement metrics for us. I think like the reason why we're so pipeline and revenue driven is because we're trying to showcase what makes the most like impact from like an ABM perspective. And so when you're focusing on like the percentage of your total pipeline and revenue, is it coming from those ABM targeted accounts or not? When you're comparing deal sizes from ABM accounts versus non ABM accounts, the ABM accounts should be the larger deal drivers.
And then when we consider like win rate for target accounts, it's the same thing. Like the win rate should be higher for those ABM accounts when compared to like non abm. And then like pipeline, you know, really look at your sales cycle. For us it's, it's long. And so our goal with Pipeline Velocity is shortening that sales cycle as much as makes the most sense by engaging with the accounts earlier in the process. Right. And so we measure that time it takes for our account to move from that first engagement to a closed deal with what we call demand based journey stages six Sense I think has their own thing.
But that is all to illustrate that ABM's goal is to accelerate high value deals. And so that's why pipeline and revenue attribution for us is the most critical.
[00:26:50] Speaker B: I love that. Now I can see on the speaking of those three tiers, the one to one that's gonna, it's one to one. And so tier three, I can see there being accounts that slip into those materials that weren't necessarily on your target account list, but they have found them and they end up converting. And then the one to few, I could see that also happening in that stage. How do you attribute the effects of the ABM when that wasn't a target account but it did convert from the materials that produced for this smaller group of accounts or does that happen?
[00:27:35] Speaker C: So are you talking about like best tracking for like the, the one to one?
[00:27:40] Speaker B: Yeah, well, well for the one to few and attribution of the success of that, you know, if you have some other accounts slip in that weren't on your list necessarily but they found materials and then ended up converting, do you attribute that to your ABM track or something else?
[00:27:56] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a great question. And I think for right now we don't include that because it wasn't considered an ABM account. But I still think it's important to note because it drove revenue. And we also step back sometimes and we look at overall accounts that have like opportunities and are those opportunities originally driven from you know, platforms like demand based? Can we attribute it all the way back to that first touch point being driven out of like an ABM tool or something like that? So we do, we do look at the overall like multi touch points for, for those type of, you know, accounts and then we compare them and then what we do is later we'll do an adjustment and be like, okay, based off of how that account actually like closed. What were the signals that drove that? And do we need to add that account or accounts like it similar to it to our one to few list. So I think in that regard it's important to note it. Absolutely.
But because it wasn't considered an ABM account on the original target list, I don't think we could say that ABM drove it necessarily so. But that is something that like again, you know, is kind of like driven by the overall strategy too and your attribution model. So if you're a company, I mean, take what I say, always with a grain of salt and apply what works for your company and your attribution model and how, how your strategy is designed and works and, and then leave what what doesn't. Right.
[00:29:37] Speaker B: So I, I love that and I really like your point too about like it's not necessary. I mean at the end of the day there's credit, you know, but really what matters is hey, this thing worked. And maybe we didn't anticipate that it would work for an account like this, but it worked. So what can we learn from that? And should we be adding more accounts like that or can we amplify this thing that worked that we didn't expect and that is more valuable for an organization, in my opinion, than just who got credit, you know?
[00:30:09] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. And that's why those quarterly reviews make such an impact. Because like that's where something like that would be caught and then reflected upon and actually implemented. Like when you're quarterly reviewing your targeted account list, that's when you're deciding like do we need to add accounts, do we need to remove accounts? What worked, what didn't. So make sure that like you are doing that. And I know like our sales team is really good about doing that marketing. We need to get a little bit better about it. We have like a longer time period lapse between like account list reviews.
So if anything, take away from this, like continue to, to look at what is working and what's not working and optimize, refine, tweak. Right.
[00:30:50] Speaker B: So yeah, yeah, get out of the weeds and just take a high level. What could be improved here. That's great.
[00:30:56] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:30:57] Speaker B: Madeline, this has been so helpful. I just want to list out a few takeaways that I, I really like. One, this framework of having tiered accounts where it's separated, you know, there's the one to one, one to few and one to many and each have different efforts and assets around them and obviously they're going to be different sizes.
Having your ABM measurement be pipeline and revenue driven and then specifically the things to measure within that is looking at win rate of these ABM or specific target accounts and looking at the deal size of these targeted accounts are great things to be measuring the effectiveness of the ABM campaign, especially because you have a different set of accounts to measure those against which are the deals that did not go through the ABM campaign.
And that's a very clear way to see how effective this, those ABM efforts are. So really, really great takeaways.
Thank you for coming on. Sharing your knowledge now, how, how can people get in touch with you or how would you like them to engage with you?
[00:32:04] Speaker C: Yeah, on LinkedIn is the best way. Send me, you know, invite request to be added to my network. I accept usually everyone and anyone and like, I just love like talking to people. So reach out to me on LinkedIn and then like, feel free to invite me to anything. I love having these conversations and I definitely want to come back and talk with you more.
All the different things because I think this is how we give back to our community. This is how we like, like spread the knowledge and bridge those knowledge gaps. And especially in companies where things feel really siloed, you reach outside of your company sometimes for that personal career development. And it's things like this that is actually helping a marketer at the end of the day shine or improve their company. So I think, like, the more stuff like this we can, can do, we're just lifting each other up. And considering today's climate, we all need to lift each other up.
[00:33:03] Speaker B: So, yeah, I 100 agree. That is the biggest need that I see over and over again in marketing. Is everybody just kind of sitting in their silos at their different companies and they want to know how am I doing? You know, they're looking for a benchmark is like, am I doing well or am I doing really bad? And they don't have a lot of like, good benchmarks and they just want to talk shop and sometimes they don't have people within their org to talk shop with. And so those connections, I agree, are just like extremely valuable and we really need them and as you said, right now more than ever, we definitely need them. So thank you for participating. We'd love to have you back to dive even deeper into different segments too of abm. And I'm sure you have a lot to share, so we will for sure have you back.
Thank you everybody for listening and tuning in. Tune in. Next week we're going to be taking a deep dive with Matt Murdock from Franklin Covey into building an effective webinar strategy and making some predictions about where the future of webinars lie. So until then, have a great weekend and I will see you next week.
[00:34:06] Speaker A: Thanks for listening. The campaign is produced by 97th Floor, a 20 year old marketing agency that helps companies like McKinsey, Pluralsight and Check Point know their customers, execute innovative campaigns and drive profitable growth. If you have an allocated growth budget and product market fit, we'd love to do research and build a proposal for you. Visit us at 97th Floor.com and if you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe. See you next time.
