Episode 152: Account-based content marketing: Certn Case Study with Ellen Kaross

In the new episode of Fullfunnel Live we'll share a live, step-by-step case study on mastering account-based content marketing with insights and actionable strategies.
We invited our client, Ellen Kaross, a Global Marketing & Communications Manager at Certn to share:


- How to support account based marketing strategy with content
- How to create account specific content and support sales reps
- How to combine brand content strategy and account based content


RESOURCES:

On-Demand B2B Marketing Courses: https://fullfunnel.io/b2b-marketing-courses/

Full-Funnel Insider - A Marketing Newsletter For B2B Marketers: https://fullfunnel.io/marketing-newsletter/

Join our community for B2B marketers - The Trenches: https://trenches.community/

Upcoming events: https://lu.ma/fullfunnel/events Full-Funnel Marketing Content Hub: https://fullfunnel.io/blog

Ellen Kaross on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ellenkaross/recent-activity/all/

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
This is the Full Funnel bt B Marketing podcast, brought
to you by full Funnel dot Io.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Let's start Welcome to the new aest a lot of
full funnel life. I'm personally super excited about this one
because I missed all the episodes in genuine and it's
good to come finally back. And today we have a
special guest, Allen Carross. She is a global marketing communications

(00:33):
manager at our clients certain and we are going to
talk all things about account based marketing content strategy. Quite
often when it comes to ABM, when writes ABM leads
or somebody from sales talking about account development, engagement, different

(00:53):
ABM playbooks, et cetera, but we rarely speak about content.
And from my perception, an ABM or let's say, account
based content is one of the most undervalued areas despite
the fact that this is one of the most important areas,
right because you use content everywhere your norch target accounts.

(01:14):
You create account awareness with the content. Then you proceed
with account specific content to motivate account even to talk
to you. Right. That happens way before they decide that
they have a buy in need, right, and then you
have one on one fully personalized content when account joins

(01:35):
the sales let's say, or the.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
Buying process, depending on how you treat it.

Speaker 3 (01:39):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
So that being said, we just finished a pilot ABM
program with Certain where Allen had a huge impact on
the content side, and we are going to talk about
all things related to content. Welcome Ellen, Welcome Blood. I

(02:00):
think the best way to kick it off would be
if you'll very quickly introduce yourself, stain your ideal customer
profile and product pref logistic, give context for everybody.

Speaker 3 (02:12):
Sure, Okay, I'm excited to try and certainly jump in
if you think that there's something that I'm missing that
you want to hone in on, given that we worked
so closely together. So I lead marketing and communications here
at Certain. When I first joined, my portfolio primarily consisted

(02:33):
of content marketing and SEO focused content, though it's broadened
over the years to also include client communications and PR,
which are skills that I bring from other roles I've
done in the past. Certain is an online background check company.
We're headquartered in Canada that we have global offices in

(02:55):
the UK and Australia. That alone keep our marketing team busy,
though we also have a very broad product offering. So
we provide services ranging from online criminal record checks, to
identity verification, to employment verification, to social media screening. The

(03:18):
list really goes on and on in terms of our
ideal client, our ideal buyer persona. Given that in North
America in particular, ninety to ninety five percent of employers
require a background check as a precondition of a formal
offer of employment, we primarily work with HR folks, so

(03:43):
those senior manager and director level decision makers on HR teams.
So sometimes that takes the form of a recruiter, someone
in talent acquisition, even people operations. So it really depends
on the company. So, as you mentioned, this was a
pilot program, and in this instance we also honed in

(04:06):
on tech companies in the US given our desire to
grow our awareness among that audience.

Speaker 1 (04:14):
All right, so you're already kind of touching upon that.
Moving from more the kind of SEO content, maybe a
bit of also product marketing content, I'm interested from your
perspective to hear what do you believe are the biggest
differences between let's say, content for the ABM and ACCOUMP

(04:36):
based marketing strategy versus content that you were creating before
in other roles or other companies. Let's say more general
B to B content, what are the main changes in
the content and how do you how do that?

Speaker 3 (04:51):
Okayness? Okay? So I guess something else to highlight that
was special or unique for me as part of this
process is that when I engage with our sales team,
it's often mediated through other colleagues. So working on product
campaigns through direction from our product marketer, engaging with sales

(05:15):
in events, but again mediated through the person on our
marketing team who manages that. So this was a little
bit of a unique experience and that I had a
lot more one to one direct experience working with sales.
Not to say that marketing and sales are totally siloed
within our company, but just for me personally in terms

(05:38):
of those personal relationships. At its heart, ABM is relationship focused, right,
There's a real emphasis on building trust, building rapport, that
one to one, hyper personalized, hyper targeted approach. I referenced
PR before client communications. That's more of your on to

(06:00):
many messaging. Corporate communications is more of that, you know,
ladies and gentlemen, that it's at a higher level. Whereas
in order for an ABM program to be successful for
any sales, really, I think you need to really drill
down and be more specific. I'm fortunate in that our

(06:24):
business is so specialized. Background screening is highly regulated. It's
a very niche service. So as part of any content
marketing I've done in the past, I had to do
quite a bit of research. But this program, in particular
the ABM content, it really demanded a higher level of

(06:47):
rigor a higher level of specificity in order to really
create that sense of credibility. I love it.

Speaker 1 (06:57):
Thanka.

Speaker 2 (06:57):
By the way, quick question to you guys, you're all
tuning in from I saw a couple of people from
South Carolina, Caroline probably call it right, South Africa, Czech Republic, Netherlands.
We're all journeying us from. Let us know in the
chat here as to see what our geography today. Kansas.

(07:19):
Nice to see a lens, so probably the audience from
United States will sale from sett I've got to see
a sale again. So that being said, just even from
the surface definition, it's very the let's say, come based

(07:41):
content strategy is very different from the standard approach, right.
I would love to dive a little bit deeper into
the process of ABM content strategy development. Like you said,
there's one too many content, one to few, one to
one right, And the content creation itself requires a close

(08:01):
and very tight collaboration with ABM lead, with sales and
the subject matter experts, especially in cases let's say if you,
as a content marketer, you don't have enough domain expertise,
so you can't provide you know enough let's approve points
to ever send that you're right. So from that perspective,

(08:22):
I would love to dive deeper and ask, First of all,
maybe it's a simple question, but I would love to
hear your perspective, So, what are the goals of account
based content strategy Or let's say, let's rephrase it into
what specific challenges with solved with ABM content.

Speaker 3 (08:43):
Oh goodness, okay, I think I touched on this briefly before.
But the building rapport, building trust, I think that is
a key hallmark that differentiates ABM content from standard marketing content.
I think you always endeavor to make your customer or

(09:07):
prospective customer feel seen in your content. That's the hallmark
of great marketing, right, That's what we're all striving to do.
That's why we do all of the audience research that
we do, That's why we create the personas and try
to live and breathe those client communities. That's why we
show up at events all of those things. On the

(09:29):
ABM side, I think there's an added level of technical
proficiency really understanding the business process. Folks in sales perhaps
this is more of a part of their day to
day really trying to understand what steps need to be
in place for the buyer to make that buying decision.

(09:52):
So I would say that on my end, that was
a bit of the challenge. So not only just doing
the audience research, which not only engaging sneeze, not only
coming up with those workflows to make sure that the
content was reflective of that intention, but then also understanding
the broader business environment. B to B sales obviously has

(10:15):
a long line cycle. Tech is a little bit different.
The tech audiences that we were targeting that we continue
to target, they have a little bit of a faster
cycle than perhaps some other products and services. But they
also those are very discerning clients. Those are discerning customers.

(10:38):
So again I would say that trying to hone in
on what their process is, what technical information they really
need to create that credibility was a big part of
the challenge, and I think what I really appreciated about
working with your team at Full Funnel is that we
were able to create those kinds of work clothes that

(11:01):
unearthed those nuggets that we could then integrate into the content.

Speaker 1 (11:08):
If you hear that right. The first thing is you're
working with sales, helping them to build trust with target accounts,
with target buyers. I remember when we started the project,
we had to chat with sales, and since the company's
international had presence in a lot of markets, one of
the challenges was building awareness within those specific target accounts

(11:33):
that we have decided to go after this specific segment
of that companies et cetera, et cetera in North America,
in the United States. And then we even like honed
in as you were explaining on very specific company size,
people who are in the company, the type of buyer
within the company, and these were kind of the driving

(11:56):
goals for us, so that on the one hand, we
created awareness, like you said, trust and then also very
specifically trust of in the salespeople as well, because we
used a lot of content that you have produced to
enable some of our salespeople who were sharing some of

(12:17):
the content on LinkedIn. The buyers were being exposed to
that content. It made it so much easier for them
to change the perception of you know, yet another salesp
knocking on the door and trying to get your attention
about committing and sell you something to more of a
trusted advisor or somebody who is actually interested in what's

(12:40):
going on at the buyer's side, Like you said, like
building a trust. So when we have to trieve those
goals you were mentioning audience research, you were mentioning, buyer
persona is what we're using frequently within B to B
content marketing us as in general. And I was just wondering, like,

(13:03):
in addition to buyer personas that sometimes, depending on how
teams think about it, can be kind of generic or
can be maybe a common denominator between the different types
of buyers. I wonder like, how what do you do,

(13:23):
what do you do, what do you use in addition
to mini personas or how does that change within an
account based marketings today?

Speaker 3 (13:30):
Hmmm, that's a great question. Yeah, I again ABM demands
in my opinion, uh, a higher degree of rigor so
to your point, those personas, they may be a useful
starting point when we're thinking of a more generic always

(13:51):
on campaign. Again, not to discredit that work. That takes
a lot of work to interview folks and compile insights
and to build that persona, but when it comes to
a b M and really trying to demonstrate, you know,
a certain level of proficiency and again to build that report,
build that trust, that segmentation work up front. So if

(14:15):
I think of the you know, the way we started,
so the account segmentation, the account research, and then thinking
of that you know, valuable content, that educational content, that
insights and thought leadership content that you know you you

(14:35):
can certainly churn out that content using AI or writing
something generic. But I think in order to really shine,
or to really convince people that you know what you're
talking about, and to really earn the trust of your
sales people, digging deeper, you know, refreshing going back to

(14:56):
your own data, what have you surfaced lately? What are
third party researchers saying, what are those macro trends affecting folks?
And then, based on conversations with Smeeze within your organization,
how are those macro trends influencing buyers these days, what
are the new objections perhaps that have come up, or

(15:19):
what's that unique perspective of that buyer persona. It feels
cheap to keep coming back and saying like rigor more detail,
but there's just a higher level of scrutiny. This program
really held me to account. I really felt like in

(15:40):
order to feel like I was doing a good job,
I really had to dot my eyes and cross my t's. Whereas,
you know, if you're just churning out your social media
post to promote one of your usual product offerings, or
just sending over some key messages to enable your client

(16:04):
success team, it doesn't always require that same degree of
prevetting or research or constant communications with sales. This process
was so iterative, and I'm accustomed to being given my
brief and doing my work and going off and engaging

(16:24):
with folks as necessary, but then it's kind of okay,
that's done, onto the next thing. Whereas there's a continuous
feedback loop in a well functioning ABM program that I
feel as your team really helped us facilitate, and that
is really distinct from some other marketing projects I'd worked on.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
In the past love Thank you so much the Faubel touch.
Let's say the content plan and approach, because I saw
a couple of questions from our community when they signed
up for this event about how to plan the content properly?
What is the right mixed between let's say one to many,
the content that is applied to broader set of accounts

(17:05):
compared to one on one. I would love to ask
you one fallow up question about the count research. You
mentioned that a couple of times, right, And obviously in
our ABM program, we had a sales rep who was
in charge of a count research. We established the process,
We defined together what insights the sales rep should bring

(17:28):
back to you, right, and also explain to you these insights.
And then altogether we created so called account love letter
development right, so writing about specific accounts to raise that
print awareness. While I'm touching this, I saw two questions
from Nicole Dichava and from Sony at Bailey, and both

(17:49):
of them asked, how basically to leverage these account research insights?
Can you give a post example, right? So, how like
as a content marketer can have reached what sales shout
out to me? So if you can just cover your experience.
That would be fantastic, and that collaboration was with sales.

Speaker 3 (18:08):
H Yeah, Actually, I guess it's apropos that we mentioned
account love letters in the month of February. I'm glad
you brought that up. I think how seasonally appropriate. So yeah,
I think that was an interesting tactic, one that we
honestly hadn't employed before. Uh And I think it's a

(18:31):
good example of making a parent some of the things
that you do as a content marketer just as part
of your day to day. So of course I'm looking
at what our target audience is putting out there. Of
course I'm reading their newsletters or downloading their reports, checking
their pres and Media center, and their social media accounts

(18:51):
to see, you know, what announcements they've recently made. Those
are all part of I think a marketer's toolkit. But
when it comes to the account love letter, we used
it as a tactic to showcase, set expertise, and showcase
at Intel in a public forum. So in our case,
we crafted account love letters for our sales lead or

(19:14):
the person participating in the pilot, to put up on
his personal LinkedIn accounts. So using our internal sales tools,
that's how we established who we were going to go after,
so who was engaging with our material, our content visiting
our website. From there, that's how the short list was created,

(19:35):
and it was refreshed frequently. So it may have been
the case that we had a few accounts in mind
at the start of the week, but as things evolved,
we would move up companies in the priority list or
change up the content schedule based on what we were

(19:56):
seeing in our tracking day. And so I think that
input was instrumental, like who are the eyeballs on our website?
Who are the eyeballs? Like who's in the pipeline? Those
inputs helped me in terms of the scheduling. So who

(20:17):
gets who gets their love letter first? Who gets moved
to the top of the queue. I did my usual
marketer research that I would do, But then I think
what made the magic happen was then tapping sales, having
those more again like those continuous feedback loops, but also

(20:38):
shortening it so being in more constant contact with sales. Okay,
you heard this just the other day in this DM
exchange with someone yesterday or this morning. They said this, Okay,
let's add this concept into the love letter so not

(20:59):
only did this process create a better feedback loop for
me or expose me to a new way of receiving feedback,
it almost felt like it was in real time in
some instances because we worked together so closely and so
much more frequently that I was able to adjust things

(21:20):
that I may have taken longer to figure out. It
may have taken me longer to incorporate a certain concept
or idea, or to phrase something differently if I didn't
have the benefit of repurposing LinkedIn content, repurposing LinkedIn comments

(21:42):
rather seeing the actual transcripts of what was going down
in someone's DM or email. So yeah, I feel really
fortunate that we established a workflow associated with that work
product because I think without that different workflow, the product

(22:03):
would maybe be more of a like standard content marketing play,
but we infuse something different.

Speaker 4 (22:11):
So I love the fact that you were collaborating with
sales to the level of in individual accounts, the level
of account prioritization, so you could decide, okay, who gets
the priority in terms of the account of letters as
we call them, time appropriately. But it sounds like to me,

(22:34):
it sounds like there were a lot of changes in
the way that you were planning, and a lot of
changes in the way that you were in your workflow.
So what I think could be very helpful for people's
content marketers if you could just walk us through or
you know, step by step how you were actually organizing
and planning, from how you were deciding what to write about,

(22:57):
which pieces of content to create, and just like the
whole workflow around content planning. I think it might be
helpful because it sounds like it was different than what
you were doing in the past or maybe also in
the president at the same Yeah, you are, of course

(23:18):
wearing different hats else of.

Speaker 3 (23:21):
Course, yeah, the do more with less or wearing multiple
hats is certainly at a startup, there's no way around that, right,
So when I talk about the other process, it's happening
in tandem on other projects. This is a funny question
to me. It's a great question, but it's a funny
question because I am almost a bit nervous to reveal

(23:44):
how my mind works. So as Andre can attest to,
I'm a big proponent of batching content. It's one of
the ways that I can manage my workflow. So when
I actually first set out, when I first started participating
in this program. And when we first started conceiving of

(24:07):
the program and putting things in motion, I dedicated a
few in depth days to do my usual content marketer workflow,
combing through Reddit threads, looking in LinkedIn comments, using the
search bar on LinkedIn as a Google search to surface

(24:31):
what kinds of conversations were happening around particular topics. Again,
all of that the usual marketing intel and I actually
drafted some posts thinking, okay, we're loosely going to talk
about these themes or this is what I know to date.
You know, I know this about our HR persona, this

(24:53):
is what I know about our buyers, this is what
I can intuit about a tech buyer in the US.
And I started to draft content. I batched quite a
bit of it, which was a very worthwhile endeavor. It
was all in service of other work that I was
doing as well. But then when it came down to it,
actually I think success in ABM and this is where,

(25:16):
you know, perhaps we can have a debate about how
worthwhile it is to automate these processes or where AI
could play a role. My perception based on doing this
is that you really do need to carve out that
time for more real time iteration, like it just it

(25:37):
really needs to be a living, breathing thing. And I
don't really believe that a successful ABM program can be
just batched at one time and then delivered in another time.
So I would use Intel. We established a weekly a
weekly check in, a weekly sync with sales and other

(26:01):
participants in marketing to go over here's what we extracted
from sixth sense, here's what we're seeing in on the
sales data side, and we would have real time conversations
about I think we should prioritize this account over this one,
or let's actually hone in on this given X, Y

(26:22):
and Z. You know, we want to talk about candidate experience,
but this particular topic is a little bit sticky right
now on account of, you know, something that's happening inside
of our own company, or given the political climate. Like
we would have real time debates over what we were
seeing in the data and what we were initially inclined

(26:46):
to prioritize. Then we would settle on, Okay, we're going
to hone in on this subset of our list. These
are the five companies, and I would then go away
and do more of that research engaging with Sneeze, bringing
them into the fold again on a more recurring basis

(27:08):
than maybe I would otherwise do. It can be tough
to establish this kind of a workflow because everyone is
quite busy, Everyone is juggling multiple priorities, and even on
the sales side. Sales and marketing have that healthy tension,
of course, but we're more or less always working toward

(27:29):
the same set of targets, same KPIs when it comes
to engaging Sneeze, like in legal and compliance or your
head of product, my requests may not be at the
top of their list, and they're likely not at the
top of their list. Me adding something to the to
do list that can be sometimes a hard sell or
that can be hard to work out. But this program

(27:51):
really required me to refresh my content more in real time,
seek more feedback, created playbooks where we essentially had living
documents of the copy of the proposed posts and scripts,
and they would be edited on an almost daily basis

(28:14):
based on intel that we were receiving from sales, recommendations
from your team as well. So it was a really living,
breathing workflow, which is maybe different from what some folks
in content marketing are taught to do or are comfortable doing.

(28:34):
I love a content calendar. I love seeing my month
at a glance. I love knowing that X, Y, and
Z is going out on this day. And sometimes, admittedly
it would freak me out when I checked LinkedIn and
a different post had been moved to the top of
the queue, and I thought that I'd maybe made a
mistake or the wrong company was named. So we were

(28:55):
constantly swapping things in which ultimately was fun. Ultimately, I
think it's a really important exercise, and it just reminds
you that that's really what effective marketing should be, whether
you're doing it inside of an ABM CAN container or not,
whether it's just a part of regular marketing. It's important

(29:17):
to stay sharp and to really lean into that creative
side of marketing. Leaning on processes to execute and enable stuff.
Process is important, but to also embrace a little bit
more of that messy collaboration that was otherwise maybe missing

(29:40):
just from other parts of my job for different reasons.

Speaker 2 (29:43):
Workload alone, I would love just to summarize what you
have said and maybe idea an idea for everybody who
is listening to us. Right The key difference that I
feel we can absorb in let's say standard content strategy
and content. Right, is that with the standard content strategy

(30:04):
you have the content calendar, you might be looking at
same rush, you know, prioritizing the key words in terms
of search engine optimization. What we need to write about.
And also there's always product bias, right, Okay, I need
to write about my product, I need to write about features,
I need to write about these technical things. The problem though,

(30:25):
that occurs from it, right, is that the or let's say,
this specific challenge our product solves could be just a
tiny part of operations and jobs to be done off
our target buyer persona right, And that's why they kind
of could perceive that specific challenge as a commodity challenge

(30:49):
or like last minute saying, right, But in reality that
specific challenge could impact a lot the big process. So
for example, in your case, they could say, like background
checks or whatever, Right, it's just the last minute thing.
But they don't think about candidates experience. They don't think
why the like hurrent pipeline struggles, why they can't acquire talents, right,

(31:13):
they can't connect the dots and in ABM strategy, right, well,
start we basically flip the process, and instead of like
what keyword is the best and what product features will
be the best to describe in the next blog post,
we start sayking, Okay, what could nrchia my target buyer
persona about these let's say jobs to be done that

(31:35):
they're running on a daily basis, and they are not
aware of the problems they didn't and the road reasons
behind these problems. Right, this is one of the things.
The second one from the sales perspective, we have accounts
that already know us, right, there's some level of relationship
or engagement vendor awareness. So we put another question, what

(31:55):
can help us to motivate or to influence the current
buyer journey stage so that account could consider us, right,
so we can get into the consideration set. What can
motivate this account to start talking to us? Right? So
these things and yeah, in reality that could look messy
for everybody who prefers, you know, like standard content calendar,

(32:19):
et cetera. But like you said, and we always say,
ABM program is not static, it's dynamic program. So you're
doing a lot of things to influence a set of accounts, right,
And definitely all accounts move a different velocity right, you
can't control it. You can, let's say, somehow influence it,
but you're not controlling it. But then if one account

(32:40):
demonstrates more intent or engagement, shouldn't you prioritize that account?
It's over said, it's logical, right, but a lot of
teams ignore that fact. And we touched basically the one
on one content one to one content creation right, and
partially one of few. But I also mentioned this let's
say class approach talking to jobs to be done, and

(33:02):
you did a lot of resource. So I think it's
the very beneficial if you'll also touch the areas. How
do you research the communities to understand that at the
bar persona questions you ask internal smith, right, I think
that would be very beneficial for everybody to understand how
to influence all of these accounts that don't know us. Right. Literally,

(33:25):
there is lack of account of pred awareness inside these accounts,
so we can attract the attention.

Speaker 1 (33:32):
Hmmm.

Speaker 3 (33:33):
I'm glad you brought up the point about it's not
always about you. I think that's helpful to highlight it's
like you're decentering yourself from the marketing process. And I
think as marketers, if you ask the average person. Of
course we're thinking about our audience. Of course that's the

(33:54):
best practice, but it is easy to fall into that
habit of always starting your marketing initiative or campaign or
idea from yourself as the center. So as you said,
what do people need to understand about a background check?
Or what is the right order of running a background check?

(34:15):
How do you create a background check policy? These are
all valid questions to answer, and our clients certainly are
interested in them in other capacities. But through this program,
we zoomed out a lot and had to explore, Okay,
where does the background check really fall within the hiring process? Okay,
it's the literal last step of onboarding. There are so

(34:38):
many other things that our target buyer is interested in.
So all of the work that we did was to
uncover that and to test different hypotheses. We had some
ideas about candidate experience and what was important to our
tech audience, in part because we're a tech company and

(35:02):
we share a lot of you know, those same values
or that company ethos. I looked at a lot of threads.
I looked at a lot of things that folks were
saying job candidates going through the hiring process. What are
their frustrations on Reddit? What are they ranting about background checks?

(35:26):
What's confusing to them? Putting myself in their minds. I've
been on that side of things, I've hired. I get
some of those challenges, But I think what was really
helpful to your point. Andre was also engaging with our
internal smeeth so on the client's success side. We chatted

(35:48):
quite a bit with those folks to uncover, you know,
what are some common sticking points, not generally, but like
specific to this audience. When we're thinking about tech companies,
there are questions of integration, so we be talking about
our integration capabilities differently. I have one perception of why
integration with HR platforms is valuable and helpful, but it

(36:12):
was really through having these conversations with others and learning
about some of the actual limitations, some of the sticking
points that helped me reframe what version of an idea
was more valuable. So there was a lot of testing
and vetting that happened as part of those smeed conversations.

(36:35):
Our head of product he has a completely different perspective
on background checks and specific products and the questions that
people are asking By virtue of the meetings that he's
in in other content that I produce. If I'm writing
an SEO blog post, I'm running things by him to

(36:55):
say is this technically accurate? He's like, Yep, you didn't
say anything incorrect there. Our legal and compliance team will say, Nope,
that is actually correct. But when you open up the
conversation to engage them in a more open ended way,
as we did as part of our early brainstorming, I
think that unearthed more of those insights that speak to

(37:18):
that job speed done stuff. So I think also by
zooming out and by putting aside some of what we
thought and the way the brainstorming sessions were facilitated, the
kinds of people that we engaged again, head of client success,
head of product, different people on our sales team, integration specialist,

(37:39):
things of that nature, I think that made for a
much more fruitful conversation about hiring more generally and again
decentering ourselves.

Speaker 1 (37:53):
I love it, and I always think about a stat
that I read recently. There was a study done by Trust,
Radius and Pavilion about the new B to B buying
process that was done recently last year, and one of
the stats was that I think eighty three percent of
enterprise buyers will shortlist the vendor they discovered before they

(38:16):
started the buying research, which just means that they were
not buying. They were somehow their attention was attracted. But
if they're not buying, if they're not concerned with in
your case, background checks, and you have to grab their attention,
you can't be talking about the nutrotopic that they could
only be interested when they are buying, which goes back to, actually,

(38:39):
we need to take a step back so that we
can catch those thirty percent, which is obviously what we want,
what we wanted to do, and help sales get in
those accounts early enough. Now, it sounds like you did
a lot. You sound it sounds like, next to everything
that you were doing for your other content, you did

(39:01):
a lot of research. You did a lot of meeting
every day, excuse me, every week with the sales team,
you were chatting with the subject matter experts. You're creating
more content than before, etcetera, etcetera. I think probably a
lot of our audiences asking themselves like, okay, but how
much time let's be concrete, how much time should I

(39:25):
actually expect to dedicate to an ABM program, and maybe
you can also break it down if there is a
difference maybe at the start, once it's ramped up, how
would you think about the time requirement for some content.

Speaker 3 (39:41):
Yeah, that's a great question, and perhaps I'll also look
to you to weigh in, just given that you also
help facilitate the setup process. I'll speak to my experience,
but I might have a bit more of a limited
view in terms of like once it was up and running,

(40:03):
I think I only spent about six to ten hours
per week on this program. In particular for some people,
that might seem like an absurd amount of time. I
actually think that is perhaps lower than what I may
have expected from the outset, and that includes meetings. We
did the upfront work to really define roles and responsibilities,

(40:26):
which that is, as you know, often like a key
to success in any program. So we were really clear
on establishing and creating a playbook around every process, so
it was super obvious who had to do what and when.
I think that work upfront that's what then made it

(40:48):
so that I was spending six to ten hours per
week meeting with Speeze, prepping notes for other tactics like
our webinar transcribing our webs are repurposing that content into
new social posts, into design assets. I fortunately had access

(41:10):
to quite a few templates, so it was fairly straightforward
for me to extract quotes or intel or insight from
sales conversations, to repackage those and repurpose them as digital
assets that we then shared through social media and other channels.

(41:30):
So six to ten hours, Maybe someone may want a
budget ten to fifteen if they don't have the benefit
of those processes established in the way that we did upfront.
Of course, there's always a lot more time upfront. I
would say we probably spent about twenty hours doing those
brainstorming sessions, doing those planning sessions, doing that kind of

(41:54):
bench mark analysis. So where are we at now, what
the current state? Getting that buy in from senior leadership,
so doing those presentations, raising awareness within the company of
you know, this is something we're piloting. It might seem
new and unusual, but here's how it actually tracks with

(42:16):
some of our broader business goals. So there's no doubt
a bigger upfront requirement on the content side, I would
say six to ten hours, but there's a requirement from
sales as well. That is probably more than that. And
I can't really speak to how a salesperson's work clow

(42:37):
needs to adjust because I think each person is different.
But I just don't want to lose sight of I'm
one part of the process. And maybe that's the whole
spirit of this conversation, right. The content pieces are really
key enabler, but what really makes a program successful is
the effect of collaboration between marketing and sales. So yeah,

(42:58):
that's my answer for an But maybe you have more insight.

Speaker 2 (43:03):
No, that's awesome. We have a lot of questions from
our community, so I would love us to cover all
of these questions as were always promised to our life happen.
But to wrap up what we have discussed today, I
think everybody is always interested in the results, right, So

(43:26):
how would you describe the key results and the impact
on pinteline or revenue for stain from the pilot program,
considering that everything has been almost I mean, in terms
of ABIM everything was created from scratch. And then we'll
move to the community question.

Speaker 3 (43:47):
Of course. Yeah, so I think it's a pilot program,
so let's first keep that in mind. Though the processes
and workflows, even the ABM specific ones have already in
lews to work that we're doing in Q one, So
we have new initiatives and new programs underway. And just
by virtue of doing this program and forcing deeper integration

(44:12):
or like more in real time feedback conversations between marketing
and sales, we're already set up for success more so
than had we not done this program. So from a
process perspective, I think that's a huge win. As part
of this program, we defined a narrative of candidate experience

(44:32):
for our tech persona. We have a much better sense
of which specific topics within the whole hiring process ecosystem
resonate with people, what parts of background screening are interesting,
and when to bring those in. I also feel like
on the sales side, we have a much better rhythm

(44:54):
or recipe or workflow for follow up. There's always that
standard Hey did you get my email? Just following up
on my email? Hey do you want to book that demo?
Like yes, that is one way of engaging books. But
now we have this whole toolkit that we can use
even outside of the ABM program, asking people to respond

(45:17):
to survey questions, asking them which questions they want to
hear in a webinar and then promising to answer them
in real time, engaging people to see if we can
repurpose their comments from DM conversations or LinkedIn comments into
digital assets, asking people for their opinion on their favorite

(45:41):
HR products that we can include in a roundup. So
I want to highlight the process piece because some people
may think process is a little bit of a snore,
but we work better as a team and have more
creative ways of engaging prospective clients as an outcome of
this program that we can use anytime anywhere. At the

(46:06):
close out of the pilot, we had eighty four target
accounts in the pipeline, which is a lot for one
person to manage. So of course now that tiering, that
figuring out what that next approach is is instrumental if
we don't scale the program, But we are looking at
ways to scale the program and see now how that

(46:29):
can influence how we work in other markets and what
we can do between sales and marketing in the future.
I believe there are three of the target accounts with
sales opportunities in Q one, which again for a B
to B buying cycle, is amazing, and that's also exciting.

(46:51):
Those are three accounts that did not have us on
their radar at the start of this program, So that's
certainly a win in that respect, and I know we
have questions to get to, but I also I'm really
proud to highlight the webinar engagement That tactic worked really
well for us. It's not a hot take to run

(47:13):
a webinar, and some people may even argue that like
webinars are on their way out, but the average view
time was something like people stayed on for an average
of fifty three minutes, Like that's almost unheard of these days.
So to me, that really helped us validate that there

(47:34):
was interest in that topic and that the nature of
the conversation that we had in our case, it was
about a compliant social media screening program and how you
may be inadvertently opening yourself up to risk doing it.
In other ways, there's something there that we are already
planning to apply to other campaigns and other marketing programs,

(47:59):
even outside of this ABM program. So yeah, we had
a record number of webinar signups for a product specific webinar,
and that engagement time was also record for us as well.
So I was exciting to see.

Speaker 2 (48:17):
As people say, the devil is always in detail, right,
It's not the rocket science to run the webinar. It's
just the rocket science to run a proper webinar that
drives the pipeline right. And also just I mean sometimes
people say okay, but that's because you guys post a
lot on LinkedIn and you have prent awareness. But like

(48:37):
our recent webinar was flat about launching pilot ABM program
in October last year, kept us here on the platform
for two hours forty five minutes, despite we finished the
webinar and fifty to fifty five minutes and then it
was like a long view of questions and even despite

(48:57):
this ads that mark to hours five minutes, we had
around one hundred people. One hundred and fifty people stayed
with us life, which was insane, right. And it's question
about how you position it, what you cover on this
webinaror what well you deliver right, and how that helps
your business and how it helps your buyers. So I
think this is this is the most important and your

(49:21):
case is the best the best proof that that is
not relevant to market and space. Oh, basically we'll not
also in e generic or broad market and space.

Speaker 1 (49:31):
Right, it's very narrow niche.

Speaker 2 (49:33):
The same is your case, which is like social media
screen and I mean it's a very specific niche topic.
But just because it resonated a lot, your target bar persona,
your target buyers actually stayed state with you, I think
it's a perfect time to move to the community questions.
So what would be the order of what first game?

Speaker 1 (49:55):
I think I'd like to raise this one because we
have just about it. We have spoken about one type
of content and channel. Let's say that gave the best results.
So I think to wrap this up, it would be
interesting to other than the webinar, How would you answer
this question? What channels did you see best results through

(50:18):
with the ABM content? Mmm.

Speaker 3 (50:21):
So we leaned into perhaps in part just because it
was a pilot, like, we leaned into what was already
working for us or where we had the biggest presence.
So we primarily focused on LinkedIn. So it wasn't anything
really more complex than that. Of course, there were you know,
some email communications, and we had some post webinar follow

(50:42):
up tactics with landing pages and things like that. But
I think it's a testament. It's a testament to the
fact that you can keep it simple and still see results.

Speaker 1 (50:53):
I love it, and just the sort was I wanted
to ask a very related question to rap up because
you're not talking about LinkedIn, and Lenz asked the question
about LinkedIn, So that's why I wanted to highlight this
question before we move on to another topic. So what

(51:14):
Lens was asking, you're creating content for LinkedIn, but I
think it's also important to stress for people who may
be just listening. We're not just talking about content for
LinkedIn that is shared via LinkedIn page or maybe using
ads promoting like that. But actually the majority of content
was shared we are our sales personal profile. Some of

(51:38):
that was also promoted through thought leadership ads. Just to
be a little bit more precise there. Now we have
an interesting question ASO from Lens. Okay, so we do
have the salesperson and their LinkedIn profile and they're using
a content to connect to the target buyers, etc. Etc.
But what about marketing professionals who are leveraging to build

(52:01):
those in relationship before passing that count to sales outreach. Now,
I know that we might have not done a lot
of that during the initial program, but I also happen
to know that as we are now working on the
next steps and scaling this, I know that one of
our team members, Marketer, is actually taking that role on.

(52:23):
So maybe you can give you your answer to this question. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (52:29):
I think, especially in the case of developing something new
or launching a pilot, it's always best to keep it
as simple as possible, and it made sense for us,
giving the nature of our business and how we typically sell,
to start with sales. We really wanted to build up
the profile of the sales team and still want to.

(52:51):
Perhaps there are other businesses where marketing is closer to
your target buyer maybe they are your buyer, So in
that case, of course, that made make sense to start
with marketing. So we started with sales because it was
part of another initiative within our company and it's more
close to how folks buy. But as Lad mentioned, we
are now as part of a broader program branching out

(53:15):
and I think it's important because we saw success doing
this pilot. So when you start to generate those wins,
you can then you get that buy in from other
folks on the team where it's a bit easier to
facilitate those conversations and requests.

Speaker 2 (53:33):
I love it by the way, I saw yeah, yeah, yeah,
I just wanted to say I read I saw a
few comments and people was saying a huge sank Ellen
for fantastic insights, that the episode was helpful, and I
was wondering, let us know, guys, how was this episode

(53:53):
for you? Was it good? Did you learn something?

Speaker 1 (53:56):
You?

Speaker 2 (53:57):
Let us just have as us some feedback in the
that while we are covering other questions.

Speaker 3 (54:05):
Yeah, and I'm happy to dig in, like if people
have any specific questions for me, like the nitty gritty
of what it's really like, I'm happy to answer those
as well.

Speaker 2 (54:16):
Okay, what you wanted to say something? Sorry, I just.

Speaker 1 (54:20):
Yeah, okay.

Speaker 2 (54:22):
So that was another question from David, and he was
wondering if I were targeting enterprises. So the answer is, yes,
all of this enterprises. I bet some of these companies
you use quite I mean, the products of these companies
you guys use quite regularly, especially when booking the trips.

(54:42):
So but let's cover this question. What's the size bracket
you targeted? Was the ABM campaign?

Speaker 3 (54:51):
Yeah, I think like obviously there's that association with it
being enterprise focused, which is true, but we're also dealing
with the reality of an ever changing dynamics. So there
were instances where we decided to skew a bit more
mid market to take advantage of some opportunities that we
were seeing. So going back to how we were opening
the conversation about ABM being more in real time responsive dynamic,

(55:16):
that was a decision that we made based on the
data that we were seeing and shifting business priorities as well.
It was really important for us to showcase certain wins
or showcase certain results. So given that we to kind
of shorten that buying cycle and to we switched up
our strategy to encompass a bit more mid market.

Speaker 1 (55:39):
Yeah, mid market is still a couple of thousand people
in headcount, to give it a little bit more precise example,
So for the folks in Europe, when we talk about
mid market in the US, it's always a bit large
now what we might be used to hear in Europe. Now,
I think we spoke about the time that you spend.

(56:00):
But I think there are a couple of questions that
I see about being in a small team, right, and
there's one interesting question for Nicole. Shouldn't even start ABI
in strategy if you're a team of one marketer, one
sales person wearing ten heads. Already you were in a
little bit of different position. But still we did this

(56:21):
pilot with a relatively small team. So what were your
advice to n called M.

Speaker 3 (56:28):
Well, first of all, I'll say anything that I worked
on as part of the ABM program I've been able
to repurpose in other work, so it wasn't so siloed.
It's actually quite easy to take something hyper specific and
roll it up to more people. Arguably that's the better
way to approach creating marketing content. Right. So on that end,

(56:50):
I think it certainly makes sense if you. I think
it's a matter of setting expectations within the company, within
your team, within management. I think you need that clearance
or that coverage to maybe experiment, to take the time
to come up with a strategy and come up with
the workflows. I was really fortunate that we had that alignment,

(57:12):
that we had that buy in from our executive team,
and when it came down to those conversations about prioritization
or the sales team was stretched, we needed to meet
Q four targets things like that, we were able to
have more productive conversations about adjusting things and changing expectations.
So I think provided that you do your due diligence

(57:34):
and get the requisite buy in, that can be helpful.
But yeah, go for it. I don't think there's any
harm in doing that kind of research and decentering your marketing.
I think it only will benefit you.

Speaker 2 (57:49):
And I just saw some feedback from Jessicassel was the insights,
which are fantastic, guys, thanks a lot for share and
the take away about the sent and yourself from the message,
and they need te created details on the content plan
and so that was fantastic. I would appreciate a lot, guys,
if you can give us five stars on iTunes or Spotify.

(58:13):
I dropped the links in the chat would be very helpful.
I have three last questions to cover, so maybe let's
quickly go through them. What content type do you see
the best performance?

Speaker 3 (58:27):
Again, we were kind of limited in what we did,
so I think the webinar certainly, I already expressed how
I thought that was a win. But there was a
LinkedIn post where we employed tactics at full funnel recommended
of tagging others. We made posts and tagged folks who
were already having conversations with our sales team in LinkedIn dms,

(58:54):
so there was already that kind of built in engagement
and they were proud to comment on those posts. I
would say that was probably one of our most productive tactics.
I really liked that one, and it's certainly something that
I think we yeah should do in the future, because
often you press publish on a LinkedIn post and then

(59:15):
you cross your fingers that that engagement will happen, or
you maybe back channel on Slack and beg your colleagues
to engage with the content which has merit. But if
you can leverage an existing conversation, I mean, I think
that's just great.

Speaker 1 (59:34):
I love that you mentioned that as well as in
addition to the distribution part of it also just opening
up new conversations for your sales folks. They can using
content collaboration asking those questions you get from the source
input basically buyer generated content. What's better than that, right

(59:55):
being able to showcase their insights in your content. But
at the same time, the salesperson is getting that opportunity
to have a conversation and get some inside or insight
potentially into that account. What's important to them? What are
the challenges et cetera. So I think you're absolutely right
to highlight that. Now I have a juicy question from David,

(01:00:18):
and I hope you're gonna give us some juicy insights here.
That was the biggest challenge of conflict between marketing and
sales during the ABM process.

Speaker 3 (01:00:30):
Oh, that's funny. I think there's always healthy tension between
sales and marketing I mentioned beforehand. You know what, Actually,
I think it's I find it more challenging sometimes to
get smeeze on side, or to showcase the value of
what you're doing for Smeeze, to help them find the

(01:00:51):
time to help you. A real practical challenge doing anything.
Launching a new program in Q four is quite ambitious,
especially as that pressure dials up to meet your end targets.
So toward the end, we definitely encountered some challenges with prioritization.

(01:01:14):
Going back to what I said before about buy in,
I think we were able to have more productive conversations
about what we would scale back, who would step in
and do the task this week when the salesperson wasn't available.
I think we were able to have conversations about that
in a more productive way because we'd already set those

(01:01:34):
expectations from the outset and we had executive buy in,
Like it wasn't a surprise to our head of sales
that we were doing this program. But yeah, that prioritization
was definitely a challenge because when that drops off and
there isn't a stop gap or you don't pick it

(01:01:56):
back up, I think you then very quickly can lose
You lose the rhythm, you lose that trust, you lose
that buy in, and then you run the risk of
it being just another campaign that didn't work out. So
it was really critical when that happened. When our salesperson said, hey,
actually I can't do this level of engagement that we planned,

(01:02:19):
or hey this week, I don't have time for this,
we were able to have conversations about how other people
participating in the program on the marketing end could step
in and bridge that gap.

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
Awesome, thank you. We have actually the last question before finishing,
so let's cover this from again coming from lens. Could
you also provide examples of digital assets you extracted from
the insights from your prospects and the responses. I mean, Parchalla,
we have covered this already.

Speaker 1 (01:02:49):
It but.

Speaker 3 (01:02:51):
Yeah, yeah, just to be a bit more explicit. So
when folks who are a part of our target account
list left comments on the LinkedIn post that our salesperson made,
or when they made a comment that was particularly juicy
or insightful inside of a DM conversation the sales are

(01:03:13):
sales rep Sam, he would feed those to us and
we would turn them into quote blocks and integrate those
comments and quotes into content that was coming down the
pipeline so we could further that conversation and showcase both
parties as experts. So that's one example. So I had

(01:03:36):
a template for a quote, and I would just plug
in a quote and a headshot with the person and
their title. And when someone is profiled in that way,
they're often happy to share it and engage with it.
So that's how we built in the engagement piece there.
And then Vlad and Andre have a process that they

(01:03:58):
call a content collaboration. So one example of that of
one that we did in the HR space is that
we pulled internal Smeeze and folks that we were engaging
with as part of our account engagement on what some
of their favorite HR tools are so that we could

(01:04:18):
make the ultimate HR tech stack. And we tagged those accounts,
we tagged those tools. We even sprinkled in some of
our long term partners to kind of bring in other
parts of the business. So that was another digital asset
that we created. We created like an actual little image

(01:04:42):
associated with that LinkedIn post, so that could also be shared.

Speaker 1 (01:04:47):
Awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:04:49):
Thank you so much, guys. Sorry for not covering all
other questions that you have dropping in the chat because
we're read out of time so fast of all, appreciate
fantastic attendance and all of the questions. And Ellen, of course,
thank you so much for not only for helping us
to basically run a SUCCESSFULLYBIA program, but also for joining

(01:05:12):
us live today and covering all of these questions that
we have prepared of our community, also shared in the
chat and in the sign up forums.

Speaker 1 (01:05:24):
Perfect.

Speaker 3 (01:05:24):
Yeah, thanks so much, Thank you for all of your help.
I'm certainly excited to continue our work in twenty twenty
five and to grow and to evolve some of these
workflows and some of these ideas.

Speaker 1 (01:05:35):
So thank you, appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:37):
And for you guys, that was a question. We cast
this live podcast every Wednesday, same time, so stay tuned.
You receive an email on Monday with the next topic
and sign up link. Thank you so much everybody. I
have fantastic question of the week.

Speaker 1 (01:05:56):
Cheers,