May 19, 2025 • 55 mins
In this episode of FullFunnel Live, we dive deep into a real-world Account-Based Marketing (ABM) case study with our client, BenchPrep. Discover their proven playbook for targeting professional associations—what worked, what didn’t, and the key lessons learned.
🔹 What You’ll Learn:
✅ Live pilot program results – See the real impact of ABM
✅ Key playbooks executed – Tactics that drove success (and what flopped)
✅ Top mistakes B2B teams make when launching ABM (and how to avoid them)
✅ How to get sales & leadership buy-in for ABM success
🎯 Walk away with actionable strategies, real examples, and a blueprint for aligning sales & marketing to generate AND capture demand together.
📌 Want more ABM insights? Subscribe & hit the bell (🔔) for weekly B2B growth strategies!
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
Vladimir on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladimirblagojevic/
Andrei on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azinkevich/
🔹 What You’ll Learn:
✅ Live pilot program results – See the real impact of ABM
✅ Key playbooks executed – Tactics that drove success (and what flopped)
✅ Top mistakes B2B teams make when launching ABM (and how to avoid them)
✅ How to get sales & leadership buy-in for ABM success
🎯 Walk away with actionable strategies, real examples, and a blueprint for aligning sales & marketing to generate AND capture demand together.
📌 Want more ABM insights? Subscribe & hit the bell (🔔) for weekly B2B growth strategies!
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
Vladimir on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladimirblagojevic/
Andrei on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azinkevich/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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 starve.
Speaker 3 (00:13):
Hello everyone, We're back with the final season of Full
Final Life before the Summer Pose and this would be
the season of Live ABMK Status with SABM practitioners. We
have invited our clients who are in the trenches and
who can share with you what's actually how actually practical
(00:37):
ABM looks like. So today we have Prian and Megan
from marketing team bench Prep, and I believe that this
episode would be super interesting just because of the fact,
not because they create marketers, not only, but just because
of the audience they're selling to the associations a rare
(00:59):
case for everybody, not the audience that is hanging out
actively on social media, not the audience that is super
responsive to sales outreach. So today we're going to discuss
a couple of things. What you can expect us of
all from ABM, especially from the pilot programs right the
(01:20):
key and what you might consider us kind of working
playbooks and the things that definitely don't work. So something
that any internal team can incorporate. The main mistakes B
to B teams make when trying to launch an ABM
program and lastly most popular questions how to get in
(01:44):
from sales from either back across on this again with
my DA co founder what broadcasting from funny and hot Spain.
Let us know guys in the chat u all join
on us from from the chat here account you guys
(02:05):
all time. I'm from and follow you guys have type them.
I would love to ask you Ron bench Prep and
uh targe absolutely.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
Thanks for having us. So yeah, my name is Brianna
and the head of marketing here at bench Prep. I've
been with bench Prep for about seven years now and
I'm tuning in from finally sunny Chicago in the United States.
And bench Prep is a B to B SaaS organization
in the education space. We offer a learning management system
(02:40):
designed to help professional membership associations or credentialing bodies deliver
engaging and impactful learning programs. So whether that be exam
preparation for learners looking to obtain some sort of you know,
professional certification or maybe a license, or continuing education programs
(03:00):
to continuously support those learners. That's our primary product is
our LMS. And while we aren't really focused on any
particular industry. We have seen great success in healthcare, finance,
and technology. You can imagine that certifications and licenses in
those industries specifically require a lot of preparation and a
(03:21):
lot of CE to maintain those, so we see great
success there. And I'll pass it over to Megan to
introduce herself as well.
Speaker 5 (03:29):
Hello, everyone, and thank you for having us on.
Speaker 6 (03:31):
We're so excited to talk more about our ABM challenge and.
Speaker 5 (03:35):
Strategies and how we've our successes that have come along.
So I'm Megan Barney and I am been on the
bench Prep team for about fifteen months and I am
also based in Chicago where we are also headquartered as well.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
So nice to meet you finally face to face. Rihanna
and we had the chance to meet during our summit,
which was a great session, and I'm really looking forward
diving more into the program, which we didn't get it
so much chance to break down and just to kick
things off. I'm wondering, like, what made you shift towards ADM,
(04:11):
What was happening that made that a priority adventurerep.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
Yeah, so I think like many people out there, or
at least but based on what I see on LinkedIn,
quite frequently is that we have seen a significant slowdown
with our outbound motion. And Andre mentioned this, but again,
working in the space that we work in, sales cycles
are very long and so that contributes to some challenges
(04:38):
as well. But we just haven't really seen the type
of engagement that we maybe used to see with our
outbound motion and have been also struggling to get larger
deals in our pipeline. So the marketing team contributes about
eighty percent of our pipeline, which I know is pretty high,
but a lot of those deals because their inbound tend
(04:58):
to be on the smaller side. Our larger deals have
always historically come from that outbound motion referrals, whether that
be customer or you know, CEO or whoever it might be.
But we've seen just a little bit of slow down
there and so that's where ABM came into play. I
had been following Full Funnel and Andrew for a long
time and had seen some other organizations see success with ABM.
(05:22):
We had also run like some mini hell call the
mini ABM campaigns, not at all to the degree of
which this campaign was run, but we did see a
lot of engagement. What the more personalized our touch points were,
so it was a strategy that I knew we had
to invest in and prioritize. Who didn't know if it
would work or not to solve these problems, But that's
(05:44):
kind of those were kind of the catalysts for us
looking into ABM making it do you don't know if
you have anything to add there, I.
Speaker 6 (05:51):
Think just kind of being content support.
Speaker 5 (05:54):
I know Brianna was a huge advocate for ABM, and
I had previously had a little bit of experience in ABM,
and I will say I was kind of kind of
an awe shock when I came in and really understood
the ABM approach that bulth On I was talking about
and how successful it was. And I think the shift
was really exciting, but also a challenge for a whole
team with lots of learning curves, which I know we're
(06:15):
going to get into too.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
I think the main question that everybody has is was
the transition successful? And just maybe to set up the expectations,
would you mind to share the quantitative and qualitative outcomes
of implementing ABM, because it's not we can always talk
(06:40):
about pipeline, avenue etcetap. But aside from this at least
from my subjective point of view, ABM helps to improve
lots of go to market operations, right, So I would
love to ask you about how successful was the transition
and what the qualitative and quantitative outcomes the teams can
(07:03):
expect based on your experience.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
Yeah, I think I think the transition was successful. I
think we again had a lot of key learnings and
just knew a new muscle to flex in this regard.
But I think overall it was successful from a qualitative
or sorry quantitative perspective. I think we ended up having
about sixty accounts in the campaign. I know that kind
(07:27):
of dwindled or fluctuated at times, but about sixty accounts.
And our goal was to move accounts from being you know,
vendor unaware to vendor aware or having a need, and
so we would tag different accounts accordingly, and I think
we successfully moved about forty percent of our accounts from
being totally vendor unaware to vendor aware, meaning they had
(07:48):
some sort of engagement with us, maybe they mqled or
something like that. And then about twelve percent of accounts
moved from that stage to what we called active focus,
which was where there was an expressed expressed intent or
some sort of expressed buying need. So for that perspective,
I think we were successful. And we have also seen
(08:09):
three opportunities. And although the campaign has kind of loown down,
we're still seeing inbound demo requests from ABM accounts and
so it kind of, you know, it is a long play,
so something for folks to keep in mind. You're not
going to see necessarily results right away, but we're still
seeing results from you know, the three month long campaign
that we ran, which is great. And then from a
(08:33):
quality cative perspective, I think we've gotten a lot sharper
on our content and personalization. I think through this approach
we learned that a personalization is more than just using
you know, somebody's company name or their industry or you know,
some sort of personalized token. It's really you know, being
(08:54):
intentional about the accounts that you're working and understanding everything
there is to know about them, and then doing a
one to one approach, which I think and for us,
was the most successful approach in the past. Again, we've
kind of done like one a few or one to many,
which I guess you could argue is maybe demand generation.
At that point but we've seen the most successful the
(09:17):
one to one approach, and I.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Think it goes also to say, it goes to kind
of your credit as a team, because you know, we.
Speaker 7 (09:27):
Are only in consulting partner.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
We work with a lot of different teams, and really
where you know where you make it or break it
is with the execution, and you guys did amazing. I'm
sorry I think I interrupted you, Megan, because I actually
wanted to ask you a follow up to something you
said previously, But please, do you want to share something else?
Speaker 5 (09:47):
I just yeah, I would love to add kind of
one quantitative thing that happened. So we focused a lot
on content collaborations. Our sales rep was adamantly trying to
get feedback and advice from our target contacts at target accounts,
and just kind of one result we had was in February,
we had just a conversation, we asked for feedback, and
(10:08):
three short months later we had them request a demo.
So we weren't asking much of them. We were asking
we were almost flattering them in a way. We wanted
their expertise and to use that, and just three short
months later a demo came in. So I think that's
great to say kind of not only did we increase
brand awareness and visibility with that relevant content, but also
we saw a quantitative result too.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, I think like one of the biggest insights that
people have when starting ABM and with content is how
much that content is actually geared towards these sales interactions,
how much it's actually meant to support sales as they
are creating engagement.
Speaker 7 (10:47):
Opportunities, et cetera.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Just don't need to reflect on something that you said
that we didn't really you mentioned something like, Okay, I
had previous experience with ABM, and then I was surprised
when it came here.
Speaker 7 (11:00):
Megan, I believe you said something like that.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
And so before we jump into the exact kind of
program and how you ran it and diving into those
details from your perspective seeing different kinds of implementations of
ABM maybe in the past, and now, how do you
feel about, like, what are the main differences that maybe
(11:22):
make one program succeed like this one versus maybe some
other flavors of ABM that you have seen elsewhere.
Speaker 5 (11:32):
Well, how long is this podcast because we can go
on all day. The one thing that really stood out
to me just in my past, as I did it
for a short, short lived time, was not getting sales
buy in. So I was doing a lot of direct
mails and creative approaches, but it was really marketing led
without that sales support. So I would meet with sales
to kind of get with what target accounts we wanted
(11:54):
to do, but then they kind of stood back and
it was very siloed. So with this kind of with
fun both on a we got the realization where you
need sales buy and early and you need them all
on board and everyone invested. So that was a big
change and I think that really helped with the success
of this.
Speaker 6 (12:11):
And of course it was sales lead marketing supported.
Speaker 5 (12:15):
Brianna has says said this in the past, it's account
based marketing, but where does sales fallow in that name
of account based marketing?
Speaker 6 (12:21):
And I think that's really stuck with me.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
I think what we can cover next is the playbooks
of the orchestration of ABM program. I don't need to
dive into too much detail, but I think what would
be good also to share how the program is orchestrated.
We mentioned already a couple of things, and I would
love you guys to elaborate a little bit on it. Right,
(12:47):
you mentioned sales, early sales buy in. I would add
that what is also important is to show early winds
to sales, even like tiny small wins right when they
see could account engagement accountry plies. It's something that helps
to kind of facilitate that buy in. Aside from this, obviously,
(13:09):
what becomes kind of evident here is that that should
be cross functional collaboration right between teams. So what I
would love to ask you next if you can share
the program orchestration and the key activities and who was involved.
That would be very interesting.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
Yeah. So from who was involved, we had myself as
kind of the lead of the program, and then Megan
being a mission critical player helping to create contact and
content and working with the SDR on outreach and you
know all of that. So Megan was a huge help.
(13:51):
And then we also had our SDR and an AE.
It was primarily led by the SDR, so they were
the ones, you know, reaching out for content collaborations and
we would kind of share content on her profile and
then we would repurpose it, even looping in our CEO
and our VP of sales to post content as well.
(14:12):
So it was a team of maybe like four or
five people. And then yeah, I think from some of
the key activities that we ran, there were a few
that stood out in my mind making. I'm sure you
have some thoughts here too, but I think the first
the first thing that we had to prioritize was building
(14:34):
our networks because we recognized that this was largely LinkedIn
led and we had not prioritized LinkedIn in the past,
so we didn't have a network. So even if we
would have just started posting content like, there was no
one there to receive that content. So we had to
start there building networks on LinkedIn, and then from there
(14:55):
it was you know, posting on LinkedIn, thought leadership type
of intent, seeing who was engaging, and then week over
week you would kind of change your tactics based on
what you had seen from the previous week. So you know,
someone from one of your accounts had engaged with a post,
maybe you would reach out in a one to one
message with a personalized content hub, or maybe you saw
(15:16):
someone register for a webinar and you reach out ahead
of time asking them for anything they might want us
to cover in the webinar and things like that. So
it was like these one to one touch points where
making kind of talked about like we were seeking out
their expertise, which kind of fueled our content as well,
which was nice. But it was really all about building
(15:37):
relationships and we weren't Yeah, we weren't just asking for
meetings right away with people that we had never talked
to before, which sad to say, was something we've definitely
done in the past. But it was really just about
building the relationship. And then again the thought there as
being like, once there is a need, we would be
top of mind because of all of these wonderful positive
(15:59):
touch points that we had created with them throughout the
course of the program. So I think that was the
one thing that really stood out, was that kind of
relationship building.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
If you don't mind, I just want to want to
reflect on one thing. I remember that a funny anecdote
that happened during the execution when Jalen is there was
reaching out people for content collaborations, and then one of
the Target Bank committee members replied, what do you want.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
And then that was I want to book a.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Media But yeah, that was a lot of fun. But
I think also Jalen is not here unfortunately today but
I think what she would add as well that I
would love to emphasize on it that that was a
mindset shift for sales, right, that it wasn't like pitch
(16:52):
slap and I, hey, thanks a lot for accepting Actually,
would you mind to have fifteen minutes demo call with me?
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Right?
Speaker 3 (17:00):
So, I think that was a huge difference for sales
as well, that they understood that this is the especially
for the accounts that have no idea who who is
bench prep right, what this product does to create anotherness,
to create an interest and basically motivate and these people
(17:22):
to have that discovery. So this was one of the
things Megan, would you add, Yeah.
Speaker 5 (17:29):
There's quite a few activities that I think were key
to the access to add on. We did do a
webinar and ABM webinar focus super hyper relevant to our
target audience. And with the pre and post engagement that
our SDR had with on LinkedIn, We're reaching out, I
thought it was really interesting that we decided to create
content hubs and these were really great. So anyone who
(17:52):
had engaged with us, whether they'd be attended a webinar
or content collabs, we would create a content hub for
them personalized to target account with personalized messaging and videos
and resources that were relevant and helpful for them. And
the really great part is we got to share that.
We got to see what resources they wanted to, which
ones they clicked on, how much of the recording they had,
(18:14):
And that was a very good key activity to kind
of share where their interest was, if there was interest,
and share kind of a personal story with them. I
would say that was one key activity. And then I
think another one kind of kind of internally was our
weekly meetings. So having that weekly meetings with Andrea from
Full Funnel and Rihanna and me and our sales, it
(18:36):
was a perfect opportunity for us to kind of talk
about our wins, celebrate them, also encourage us because we're
seeing the more we do, the more action we're taking,
the better results. So we're seeing those wins, we're getting
more excited. We're talking about the content for the week,
the plan for the week, and I thought that our
meeting was crucial to keeping everyone aligned, on board, excited,
(18:56):
kind of passionate about what's to come. So I would
say that was a keiectivity and would definitely recommend it
going forward.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
I'm reflecting on how this is actually different to the
way that we usually do marketing, the way that we
actually create content and get feedback aust on the marketing activities, right.
I mean, it's so dynamic, is what I'm hearing from you.
For example, you're creating content instead of let's say the
(19:25):
old way where you maybe do some keyword research and
create content for the SEO, and then you have to
wait to see whether it ranks, and then you have
to wait and see whether it converts into leads, and
then you have to wait and see those leads convert
into opportunities and whether those are actually, like Rhanna mentioned
at the beginning, the kind of opportunities we want, not
(19:46):
just like low revenue potential, where now you're sharing content
directly via social you're getting that feedback right away. You're
meeting with sales weekly, you're getting feedback from them seeing
them use the content. The content helps that you mentioned
as well, you're seeing which content is actually being used,
et cetera, et cetera. Just funny to kind of that
(20:08):
stood out for me how different that is than the
let's say, the usual way of us in marketing teams
seeing actually the impact of what we do now, I
wanted to ask a quick question because I think like
a lot of people that might be listening to this
later are joining us live right now realize okay, like
(20:31):
maybe they want to do that. They saw that, you know,
like you said, it's so important to involve sales. You
were there from content, Rihanna was there from you know,
managing the project and the program. Can you maybe reflect
on the actual time investment that it took from different
team members? What do you feel like is not necessarily
(20:54):
a minimum, but what people should be counting on to
be able to pull the off. And I think you
did a fantastic job. So I just wonder, like how
much time did you spend maybe on average per week
or any other ways you want to express it.
Speaker 4 (21:10):
Yeah, so we definitely have experienced some capacity constraints coming
into this year. So it's interesting because we did notice,
like Megan mentioned, the weeks where we were able to
invest more time, we would see more results, we would
see more engagement, and so like in hindsight, I feel
(21:31):
like we definitely have learned that and we'll take that
into our next program. So I would say, if I
we reflect back, like there were some weeks where you know,
we had other priorities and we weren't able to lean
into this program quite as much. But again then we
wouldn't see the same results. So if I look back,
I feel like one hour a day is a good
amount of time to spend on ABM each week. So
(21:55):
from our perspective, we were creating content. We're looking at
which accounts have maybe shift did from one list to
the next list, where you know, looking at pipeline. But
I think for us it was the content creation part
that really took a lot of time because again you're
not just writing some generic piece of content for a
broad side of accounts. You're very one to one and
(22:16):
so that you know, I don't want to take away
like that did take some time. And the more personalized
and one to one you can be, the better results
you'll see. So you do need to take the time.
So from my perspective, I would like I would say
an hour a day is a good amount of time
to invest. But again there's going to be weeks where
you just can't do that unfortunately, and you'll have to
(22:36):
kind of talk about that in your weekly meetings to
let people know, hey, I might be low on capacity
this next week. And kind of prioritize accordingly. I'm definitely
curious to hear Megan's thoughts because she was also in
the trenches on the content front.
Speaker 6 (22:51):
Absolutely, I wish there was more time in a day.
Speaker 5 (22:53):
I think for this, I think blocking time on the
calendar was something I learned like later into the camp
because at first, I guess I came in not knowing
how much time and commitment was needed.
Speaker 6 (23:03):
So that was kind of like almost.
Speaker 5 (23:05):
A mistake I had, or just like a false reality.
But then when you see how much time you needed
for execution, I would say, yeah, four to five hours
a week, that's kind of what I'm going I don't
think like I think an hour day would be kind
of nice to have, But if you can do like
a time black Friday afternoon, that's always great time it's
(23:26):
a little quieter. I think the more effort, once again,
you put in, the more you're going to get out
of it. So I'm actually going to consider that kind
of moving forward. How much time am I spending? And
also there might be weeks where you can kind of
create more content to prepare for those weeks when you
have external events or can't do an hour a day
I'd just.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Like to take a quick, quick moment to reflect on
what you have shared. I mean, the results day is shared,
and then the actual time investment it's actually quite low.
I mean compared to the time that story to the
return that you were getting, knowing that it was a
new learning experience, a new program, a lot of things
(24:07):
you had to do for the first time. You have
to set up a lot of things, and yet you
managed to achieve those results.
Speaker 7 (24:13):
So we hear a lot.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Of times this way of doing EBM, or this way
of doing marketing and sales collaboration where there's a lot
of one on one where there's a lot of manual
engagement that's not scalable, that's unscalable.
Speaker 7 (24:26):
But I wonder.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
If you look at the time invested versus the result,
are there any other activities that you see actually how
scalable or how the return that you're getting on those hours.
I feel like this this should be kind of a
nail in the coffin of that that this is not scalable,
just given this brilliant example.
Speaker 7 (24:51):
That you shared. So I just wanted to thank you
for appreciating that.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
But if I don't mind, I just wanted to add
a few say and also get your take on it.
Brian and Megan, what you mentioned is actually the execution time, right,
so you have and what is create? I feel this
is the approach that literally every team should take this
weekly plan and and review meetings, and then you do
(25:19):
the planning for the next week considering all the new
insights you have collected about the target accounts. You prioritize
the content plan, You prioritize the next steps and touch
points on how marketing can support sales, write and account
development playbooks for sales the same. It's again ABM and sales.
(25:41):
It's not the replacement of the prospective, right, it's it's
it's just a you. And maybe I could be a
little bit biased here, but I would say it's a
little bit better way to do the prospected right in
a value added way. But again the bare minimum would
be one hour for the execution being said, what is
(26:01):
essential and I feel, I mean, we did this program together.
Quite often the teams that for example, especially without robust
ABM background or without prayer experience of running ABM successfully, right,
I feel they that that they often underestimate the amount
of time and the loan and curve to understand how
(26:24):
ABM works, right, because a natural tons of companies think
about ABM in one too many way, right, So like, okay,
let's build this list of accounts based on our kind
of generic broad ICP definition and then let's because these
are accounts, right, and we have approved these accounts with sales,
(26:46):
doesn't matter if there is any product need evidence, do
they know us? And it's now a marketing problem, right,
the accounts were selected, So what marketing is supposed to
do is just run some ads and sales. I suppose
to do the outreach, which in nutshell again, maybe you
can call it a con based marketing because steal the
(27:07):
areouts right, But from my point, it's no different from
the standard lead generation. It's just the new rap en
of it. So, if let's say was the client side,
what would you say should be the time that the
team that doesn't have let's say experience of trying and
improve an ABM programs, what is the time that they
(27:30):
should allocate to understand how it works and to plan
it and orchestrated properly.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
It's a good question because you're right, there was definitely
time taken in the learning curve from just the fact
that we hadn't run a program like this, and so
it definitely does take time. And once you have kind
of you know, gone through a program throughout so many
months and you've kind of learned what works what doesn't,
and it does, I feel like, get a little easier.
(27:58):
But the initial time, yeah, it did take us some time.
Even as we prepare for our next campaign, which we're
launching later this week. I mean, something that I think
Megan and I both talked about as a key learning
from the first campaign is depending on the accounts or
maybe the use case that you are going to focus on.
I mean, for the ones that we're choosing for our
(28:19):
next campaign, we actually don't have a lot of existing
content content. It's a new use case for us. So
the time that we're taking up front before we actually
launch is actually more than the time that we took
for our pilot campaign with full funnel, which was catered
toward towards an audience, towards our core audience. With our
core use case that we have all of our content
previously was dedicated towards. So from that perspective, it didn't
(28:43):
take as much lift on the front end to get
things ready to go for launch. But it did take
time from a learning perspective, just to understand the new
tactics that Andre was showing us, or the amount it
took just to even choose the accounts. It's not just
you know, through a few filters on a Salesforce report
and there's your account, so like you've got to do
(29:04):
some deep understanding of engagement and MQL and do your
contacts even work there. I know we had some like
database clean up that needed to happen in some accounts
we didn't have any viable contacts for so all of
that takes time upfront, and again as you go through it,
you'll kind of learn the best approaches and once you've
done it once, you'll get a lot better at it.
(29:26):
But I think something to also consider is depending on
who you're targeting in your campaign, like do you have
existing content or do you maybe want to take some
time before launch to build that repertoire up a little
bit so that way you're not spending so much of
your time while the campaign is live doing all of
that as you go. So I think there's a couple
of different considerations in regards to like preparing for the
(29:49):
campaign and then again the time that it takes just
to kind of learn how to do some things that
like you've never done before.
Speaker 6 (29:56):
I think.
Speaker 5 (30:00):
One thing in the beginning that really helped, and it
was a bigger time commitment, was workshops we had with
full funnel and sales and marketing all on board, talking
through kind of what is it from the ground up
doing live content sorry content brainstorms, working to do account
research live, to all do it together to really understand
(30:20):
the time that it takes to do it and the
thoroughness that is required researching, target counts, writing content live.
Speaker 6 (30:29):
I think all of that we did together in the beginning.
Speaker 5 (30:31):
It was more time and everyone was on board, but
it kind of showed the commitment and it helped us
learn what's important and the key activities.
Speaker 6 (30:39):
That we need to do to be successful. So those
are really helpful.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Love it, thank you.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
I think this is the biggest problem even for teams,
I mean, like zooming out from our collaboration. Lots of
teams that consider ABM, they have kind of some false
perception of what it is, right and especially in many
teams sales just saying that it's fully owned marketing activity
and they need just to show up for the discoveries.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Right, that's all this wish.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
Enterprise accounts, which in reality is absolutely not true. I
think the biggest mistake that lots of teams are making
is actually not mapping out the program together and then
executing each part of this program together to see realistically
how much time it takes and based on it, set
(31:31):
up the proper expectations. Right, Because how that looks like
as we spoke, Hey, let's do ab I'm fine, give
us your list of accounts. Okay, so hundreds of accounts,
maybe like five buying committee members per account actually seems
to be a lot. I don't have time, So let's
let me just ASKT to pretend as my target buyer
(31:53):
persona tons of different bots, right, fans pose the sales
sales look at the scrap and say, hey, I will
never go in to post this, right, so I will
better do my leg standard outreach.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
And that's it.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
This is a natural how the ABM looks like for
the majority of companies, unfortunately. So I think this was
really important and thank you for highlight on this.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
And I know.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Something that I wanted to reflect on. You said that
you need to take the time to prepare their content.
You need to take the time to prepare. And I
think it's also important when it comes to collaborating with sales,
right we know that. I don't want to say that
sales is impatient. I think they are right. They have
right to be impatient. Their commissions depend on their results.
(32:45):
I mean, it's just a different type of work than
we have to do in marketing. But it is a fact.
I mean, it is a fact that we have to
live with. We have to respect that reality. And I
think what we noticed a lot of time when teams
are prepared, like you were, okay in this case, you
already had some content we could start. I think the
(33:06):
biggest difference is once you start with sales doing these activities,
actually having the content and anything that you need to have,
having the accounts, having the content, having the playbooks ready.
Speaker 7 (33:20):
So once they.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
Start engaging, they're actually going to see some traction as
soon as possible, and that's going to help create that
momentum that you really need to get sales along because
at the end, what they will trust, they will trust results.
They will trust you know, when they are able to
(33:41):
book more calls, close more deals, that's then they are
going to trust marketing. That's just a way of life.
But given your kind of hindsight, I wonder, like, if
you have to do it again, or you have to
do it and a different company, how would you go
(34:03):
about getting the buying from leadership and sales.
Speaker 4 (34:07):
Yeah, that's a good question, and I know something that
a lot of folks struggle with. I think for us,
I mean again, we were already seeing the lag and pipeline.
We were already seeing the lag in large deals, so
like we knew that there was a problem that needed
to be solved, and so that I think kind of
opened the door to okay, so what are some possible solutions?
(34:31):
And through that kind of conversation, it was where I
planted the ABM seed and we would talk about it,
but there was I think still a lot of like
education to do. Megan touched on this earlier. I don't
think the name ABM necessarily helps, but there was definitely
a misconception around like what that means. And even candidly
with our like previous little mini ABM campaigns, they were
(34:54):
all marketing led, so like they had kind of understood
ABM to be this thing, but those were just you know,
trying us trying to get something off the ground, and
they weren't successful and we know exactly why. So I
think there was some education that needed to happen in
terms of what is ABM, you know, sharing case studies
(35:15):
or talking with other peers who have been successful in
ABM and sharing those results. But I think for us,
because the problem was so clear and we knew we
needed to solve it, I think there was definitely more
openness around trying the strategy, and so it did take
some time up front to get everyone on board with
(35:35):
exactly what what what what it would look like. And
so I think if you can identify the specific problem
that you're trying to solve with this strategy, I think
that will go a long way. If you can start
with data, so showing any sort of like quantitative metrics
or you know, low conversion rates or you know you
(35:57):
were getting a lot of unqualified leads or whatever it
might be to kind of make your business case stronger
is a really good place to start. And then obviously, yeah,
if you can showcase any kind of success stories towards
more tangible I think that was also really helpful.
Speaker 6 (36:14):
Perhaps sharing this podcast with leadership, we too.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
I'm just wondering, if again, if you together reflect on
the pilot program, what would you tell the teams that
consider to deploy a b m uh what what what
do you tell? What would you kind of what mistakes
(36:44):
you would aware them off they should avoid? So what
are kind of the typical things that you now was
hindsight now.
Speaker 4 (36:55):
Megan looks eager to share some mistakes at hurt start.
Speaker 5 (37:00):
The first thing that comes to my mind is not
committing enough time and energy into executing it, to creating
the content, to making your plan and sticking with the plan.
Speaker 6 (37:09):
I think we were guilty of this.
Speaker 5 (37:10):
We would make a plan for the next week, and
because of other bandwidth issues and kind of limits to timing,
we never we didn't always achieve that goal for the
next week. So I think something like a lesson learned
would be blocking off the calendar, making sure that this
is a priority, perhaps saying no to other things or
deprioritizing other things that you are managing. So committing the
(37:33):
time and energy and making sure everyone is one hundred
percent bought into it.
Speaker 4 (37:38):
Yeah, And I think another thing that comes to mind
goes back to the the personalization aspect of it. I
mean it does go a long way. So I mean
you can cut corners to Magen's point if you are
tied on time, like there are ways to cut corners,
and not to say that we never did that, but
like that's not going to show you the results that
you hope to see. So from a personalization standpoint, I
(38:02):
think that was really impactful for us. So our Sdr
Jalen would you know, take the time to do in
depth account research when a contact would engage with us,
she would do research about that contact. And then we
were all working together around like how, like what's our
strategy we see this engagement, like what are we going
to do about it? We want to reach out for
a content collaboration, or we saw this person attended our webinar,
(38:25):
create that content hub, or we want to ask them
for a quote that we're going to share on LinkedIn,
which a lot of people really enjoyed. People were very
excited when we would reach out asking for them to
share thoughts about you know, a question and we're going
to post it on LinkedIn, And I don't know, it
was like a form of flattery, I think. But I
think that personalized content and those one to one touch
(38:48):
points really went a long way and making people feel
like they can trust you and that you have good
intentions and it's not just yeah, what do you want
another sales outreach, you want another meeting or whatever it is.
But I think then seeing that like that's really not
what we're reaching out for. We really are trying to
build network and help you solve a challenge. I think
(39:09):
was a really important part of our strategy as well.
So again making the mistake of not cutting corners and
taking the time to personalize and do one to one
instead of one too many is I think going to
show you the best results.
Speaker 3 (39:25):
And I think there were a couple of other cool
things that could be especially relevant for the smaller teams,
like in your CaCO CEO was following up with the
active focus accounts and not just pitching them, hey, you
attended the webinar, have a discovery call with us, right,
but suggesting consultations, suggesting audits of that existing processes kind
(39:48):
of just to be helpful to give them an idea
of like what could be improved in that jobs to
be done right, which is a natural transition to the discoverer, right,
because you discuss you and you can show some best
practices on how these things could be improved, because what
we often see is that the buyers, they quite often
(40:11):
can't connect.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
The dots between your solution and the problem.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
Right. It's always like in you know, when we have
the discovery calls, companies come and say, hey, but you
actually had an experience of selling to this type of audience. Yeah,
maybe we don't have that experience, but it doesn't change
the fact that we have experience of selling to the
global ICPR right of companies was long sales cycles and
(40:37):
it doesn't really matter, but everybody wants to see this.
So from that perspective, it helps a lot. From the
personalization point of view, right, connect the dots for the
prospect and different buying committee members, like in your case,
you have a completely different roles technical buyer right, economical buyer,
engagement buyer, that the person who is in charge of
(40:58):
this professional education, they have completely different KPIs right, And
what's important for one person might be completely irrelevant to
another band committee member. Right, And it always helps to
connect the dots because if you don't, if you don't
do this, they say, Okay, that's a nice product, but
it's just yet another right, and then they think about
(41:20):
your category, yet another LMS, yet another vendor or whatever. Right,
but when they say, wow, that makes perfect sense to me.
These guys did the homework. The perception I feel that
ABM changes is that they truly understand my needs and
my business. This is the perfect partner I want to
(41:40):
talk to.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
And the same comes to perception of the sales teams.
Speaker 3 (41:48):
Right. They don't think, oh, this is Galant, just one
more sales rep who wants to take my brain right
for the fifty so they think about, wow, this person
is so knowledgeable.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
This person helps me.
Speaker 3 (42:01):
Right, this person comes up with, like Megan mentioned, personalized
content helps and maybe, of course, while when we're not
yet in the sales process, we don't know all the
confidential information, right, but still based on that desk research
and prior engagement, we can come up, like you said,
with the resources that are helpful. Right, even in our case.
(42:22):
I remember how maybe you Briana said this once, even
just like we have an understanding of how ABM team
might look like, but seeing just visually right, the structure
of the team, the responsibilities changes the understanding, right, And
this is kind of the universal resource that we're happy
to share with everybody, right, But people say, Okay, that's helpful,
(42:42):
that's helpful, that's helpful, and that creats that impression that
this vendor cares about me. Right. So I think there's
a few things that's important to consider as well. One question,
if you don't mind, you both mentioned this the plan
and face right, and that like Megan, you said, for example,
(43:03):
that sometimes you need to say no to other things.
At the end of our pilot, we did to gether
planning of how the qtube program might look like. And
I think what is important here is to coordinate the activities, right,
making sure that ABM and your other marketing activities.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
Demand gen A not going in silence, right.
Speaker 3 (43:24):
Okay, this is a bunch of things that we have scheduled,
and somewhere on the left side of this plan is
a BM right, So I think this is this is
also another mistake teams are making, so they plan it
in silence and they don't incorporate it into existing marketing plan, right,
because then you can always combine these things. I would
(43:44):
love because of we did that relatively close to today.
What's what's your experience, how would you reflect on it,
and how would you what's what would be your recommendations
on inte creating a BM in to exist in market
and planning.
Speaker 4 (44:04):
That's a good question. Yeah, that was something that we
definitely didn't do coming into our pilot campaign and something
that we need to keep in mind moving forward. Yeah,
we've got a lot of activities on our demand generation
side of things. Maybe in particular, has a ton of
webinars that she plans during the year, which is a
huge contributor to our pipeline. So it's an important channel
(44:28):
to have. But I think a recognition that we had
during this program was that we were spreading ourselves too thin,
so we weren't giving ourselves appropriate time to promote, and
especially on the ABM front, where it does take more
time because you're doing one to one outreach and those
types of activities. We didn't give ourselves enough time leading
(44:48):
up to the event, and then by the time we
would get there, we were already on to the next event.
And so I think that was definitely something that we
need to realize moving forward, is planning BM activities in
coordination with our demand generation side of things. And so
one change that we'll make for our Q two campaign
(45:10):
is making sure that we have plenty of time leading
up to the webinar to dedicate to our ABM webinar specifically.
And Andrea liked the suggestion you made, which was, you
may have other things going on, but we're labeling this
ABM webinars like our strategic priority. We will have maybe
another webinar that we're doing, but we're not going to
(45:30):
do the one to one outreach, and so that's kind
of the approach that we're taking, and it'll be interesting
to see the results for each one of these webinars.
And to Lad's point earlier, just like the time that
we take isn't really that significant when you see the
results that we've seen, So I think that'll be really
interesting to see this next month. But that's kind of
(45:52):
where we're what we're doing. So we'll you know, execute
our ABM campaign with our ABM webinar, and then we'll
try to slow down a little bit on the demand
gen side so that we can give appropriate dedication and
prioritization to ABM. But Megan, I know you're again kind
of leading that, so any thoughts you might have or
are helpful, I think for us, it's.
Speaker 6 (46:15):
Planning ahead too.
Speaker 5 (46:16):
We've really taken the time to learn, take the lessons
learned from the pilot and think what does content look
like for this next campaign, giving us enough time to
kind of think through the resources we need and planning ahead.
So yeah, we do a lot of webinars on the
demand gen side, but we're going to start doing some
hyper relevant ABM one. So I think kind of having
that nice balance planning ahead is really going to help
(46:38):
us and has been. So we're excited to see the
results as we put more focus a little less on
the demand gen.
Speaker 7 (46:45):
And more on a b M the next So we'll
have to plan another follow up podcast. I think.
Speaker 6 (46:54):
See your next letter.
Speaker 3 (46:58):
To catch up off to some and see and say
the progress. Maybe just to sum it up, I would
love to ask the last question. Maybe a lot you'll
come up with something else, but my last question would be,
(47:19):
if you are going to do it from scratch again,
what would be the first sink, like, let's say, the
most important thing that you'll you'll do.
Speaker 4 (47:30):
Oh that's a good question. Well, yeah, that I asked.
The two things that come to mind are again that
account selection and just being really meticulous and particular about
the accounts that we're choosing to target and then the content.
And I think something that I want to say about content,
which I don't think we've really touched on yet, is
(47:53):
the repurposing of content, which was really helpful. And so
I think for us, even though again as I mentioned,
for our upcoming campaign, we kind of need to build
our content repertoire, don't let that like slow you down
from launching, because you can repurpose your content. So for example,
we just mentioned Megan does a ton of amazing webinars
(48:14):
throughout the year, So we'll take you know, webinar content
and repurpose that in two blogs or you know, infographics
or whatever it might be, and then we can repurpose
that as our LinkedIn posts for our ABM campaign. And
then even aside from that, we'll have our SDR posts,
you know, on LinkedIn, and then we'll have maybe our
(48:34):
VP of sales or our CEO who really has enjoyed
being part of this program as well, but we'll have
him post the exact same post that the SDR posted
and maybe just wait, you know, two or three weeks
and then they'll post that same thing. So you don't
always have to be coming up with content from scratch.
I highly encourage you to use what you already have
(48:56):
and that is where you know tool like a chat
GPT or AI can help you come up with those ideas.
I wouldn't though, and Andre we talked about this in
our campaign as well, I wouldn't rely solely on chat
cipt to create your content. It's very easy and obvious
to tell which content is created by chat gipt. You've
all probably seen all of the conversation about the end
(49:18):
dashes that are happening right now. But you can take
that as a tool to use. But then you need
to do your tweaking and personalize it and turn it
into your own human voice as well. But just wanted
to offer that from a content perspective because I know
it can be quite daunting. So encourage everyone to look
at your current content, how can you repurpose it, and
(49:40):
then again utilizing other folks on your team to spread
that message as well.
Speaker 1 (49:46):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (49:47):
I say one question comment from Rob if you could
do a total strip back version of abiam, what would
that look like? Micro business respond marketing lead and one.
Speaker 4 (50:00):
Yeah, that's a great question. So again, I feel like
it's all about building that network and those relationships, and
then content is kind of the fuel of the engine.
So I mean, I will say that we also didn't
have a lot of channels to work with. I mean,
we had a team before, but we weren't running you know,
paid ads. We didn't do any direct mail sends in
(50:22):
this particular campaign, both of which we could have considered.
But again, we're also you know, running lean from a
bandwidth perspective, so we prioritized LinkedIn as our primary channel
for execution with like email follow ups, and so I
think for you know, a small team, one marketing lead
and one salesperson, that's also where those weekly meetings become
(50:45):
incredibly important, so that you can align on what your
capacity looks like for the next week. But again I
think on the sales side, they can be you know,
creating those connections on LinkedIn and building those relationships, and
then on the market side, creating that content for them
to post, and then every week in your meeting, looking
to see who engaged with your posts this week? Was
(51:07):
it anybody from one of our target accounts? If it is, okay,
what activity should we do for that account this next week?
So I think just making sure you maintain close communication
and just really leaning into the social selling side of things.
I think you will see great results because that's honestly
where we've seen our results come from as well with
(51:27):
primarily LinkedIn.
Speaker 5 (51:29):
Yeah, we have such a We were a small team too.
We did have a few more people than with two
marketing and almost two sales. But I think it was
really helpful to just constantly be communicating expectations, kind of
saying we're going to set an hour today, We're going
to work on this, and just kind of having that
kind of clear expectations and clear goals and communicating if
(51:50):
things kind of have to shift.
Speaker 1 (51:52):
I think you mentioned it several times, things like okay,
you can repurpose content that you probably have to do
within your marketing role, make sure that that's the content
that anyhow, what you're planning to do, maybe like the
webinars that you're doing, Megan or Rob. I don't know
what kind of activities you're busy with, but first can
we align that with our strategic Well, first have a
(52:14):
strategic focus, right, Like you said, how do we select
our accounts is so super important. Again, if you have
low resources, where you put those resources all starts with
which accounts we are targeting, right, then aligning the planned
activities with the needs of those accounts with then also
(52:38):
that collaboration between sales and markel.
Speaker 7 (52:40):
If you're doing a webinar, hey why not Like you.
Speaker 1 (52:42):
Were mentioning that you leveraged a lot of these marketing
activities as sales touch points. So that's another way if
you're not working in silos. If this content is to
begin with relevant for and the marketing activity is relevant
for those target accounts that sales is f then you
also get opportunities to then kind of like kill towards
(53:05):
with one stone, getting that additional engagement multiple touch points
without always just knocking on the door and saying, hey,
are you ready to buy now? Are you ready to
buy now?
Speaker 7 (53:15):
And things like that.
Speaker 1 (53:17):
So I think like a lot of the tips that
you shared today and a lot of the ways in
which you handle the program should help smaller teams get
more out of more bang out of their marketing back
whatever I'm struggling, I think this is all going to
(53:40):
be very helpful. So thank you so much for sharing
that and great results. We really have to do a
follow up after the summer.
Speaker 3 (53:50):
Yeah, absolutely, thank you so much for time and sharing
your experience and being for the transparent and fan about
what it takes to run a successful ABM program and
what challenges and hurdles the team can face, because I
feel that, indeed the sad reality is that lots of
teams they simply don't understand the motion, don't understand how
(54:15):
to run it properly, the commitment and the cross functional
collaboration it requires, and then the program fails. And on contrary,
even with lean team, without having like big resources, you
can drive fantastic results right and especially if you have
high cevy product you have long sale cycles that could
(54:37):
be your central motion that also should be maybe not easily,
but again that should be integrated into your marketing mix
right and be a part of your marketing strategy.
Speaker 2 (54:50):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (54:51):
It last fantastic conversation and looking forward to other chats.
Speaker 4 (54:57):
Yeah, thank you so much for all of your support
and help throughout the pilot program. We really enjoyed working
with you and are excited to see continued results. So
I appreciate you all having us here.
Speaker 7 (55:08):
Thank you, thank you, thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (55:12):
Thanks having about us for the timing. See you in
the next week. Cheers, take care, Hi,
This is the Full Funnel bt B Marketing podcast, brought
to you by full Funnel dot io.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Let's starve.
Speaker 3 (00:13):
Hello everyone, We're back with the final season of Full
Final Life before the Summer Pose and this would be
the season of Live ABMK Status with SABM practitioners. We
have invited our clients who are in the trenches and
who can share with you what's actually how actually practical
(00:37):
ABM looks like. So today we have Prian and Megan
from marketing team bench Prep, and I believe that this
episode would be super interesting just because of the fact,
not because they create marketers, not only, but just because
of the audience they're selling to the associations a rare
(00:59):
case for everybody, not the audience that is hanging out
actively on social media, not the audience that is super
responsive to sales outreach. So today we're going to discuss
a couple of things. What you can expect us of
all from ABM, especially from the pilot programs right the
(01:20):
key and what you might consider us kind of working
playbooks and the things that definitely don't work. So something
that any internal team can incorporate. The main mistakes B
to B teams make when trying to launch an ABM
program and lastly most popular questions how to get in
(01:44):
from sales from either back across on this again with
my DA co founder what broadcasting from funny and hot Spain.
Let us know guys in the chat u all join
on us from from the chat here account you guys
(02:05):
all time. I'm from and follow you guys have type them.
I would love to ask you Ron bench Prep and
uh targe absolutely.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
Thanks for having us. So yeah, my name is Brianna
and the head of marketing here at bench Prep. I've
been with bench Prep for about seven years now and
I'm tuning in from finally sunny Chicago in the United States.
And bench Prep is a B to B SaaS organization
in the education space. We offer a learning management system
(02:40):
designed to help professional membership associations or credentialing bodies deliver
engaging and impactful learning programs. So whether that be exam
preparation for learners looking to obtain some sort of you know,
professional certification or maybe a license, or continuing education programs
(03:00):
to continuously support those learners. That's our primary product is
our LMS. And while we aren't really focused on any
particular industry. We have seen great success in healthcare, finance,
and technology. You can imagine that certifications and licenses in
those industries specifically require a lot of preparation and a
(03:21):
lot of CE to maintain those, so we see great
success there. And I'll pass it over to Megan to
introduce herself as well.
Speaker 5 (03:29):
Hello, everyone, and thank you for having us on.
Speaker 6 (03:31):
We're so excited to talk more about our ABM challenge and.
Speaker 5 (03:35):
Strategies and how we've our successes that have come along.
So I'm Megan Barney and I am been on the
bench Prep team for about fifteen months and I am
also based in Chicago where we are also headquartered as well.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
So nice to meet you finally face to face. Rihanna
and we had the chance to meet during our summit,
which was a great session, and I'm really looking forward
diving more into the program, which we didn't get it
so much chance to break down and just to kick
things off. I'm wondering, like, what made you shift towards ADM,
(04:11):
What was happening that made that a priority adventurerep.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
Yeah, so I think like many people out there, or
at least but based on what I see on LinkedIn,
quite frequently is that we have seen a significant slowdown
with our outbound motion. And Andre mentioned this, but again,
working in the space that we work in, sales cycles
are very long and so that contributes to some challenges
(04:38):
as well. But we just haven't really seen the type
of engagement that we maybe used to see with our
outbound motion and have been also struggling to get larger
deals in our pipeline. So the marketing team contributes about
eighty percent of our pipeline, which I know is pretty high,
but a lot of those deals because their inbound tend
(04:58):
to be on the smaller side. Our larger deals have
always historically come from that outbound motion referrals, whether that
be customer or you know, CEO or whoever it might be.
But we've seen just a little bit of slow down
there and so that's where ABM came into play. I
had been following Full Funnel and Andrew for a long
time and had seen some other organizations see success with ABM.
(05:22):
We had also run like some mini hell call the
mini ABM campaigns, not at all to the degree of
which this campaign was run, but we did see a
lot of engagement. What the more personalized our touch points were,
so it was a strategy that I knew we had
to invest in and prioritize. Who didn't know if it
would work or not to solve these problems, But that's
(05:44):
kind of those were kind of the catalysts for us
looking into ABM making it do you don't know if
you have anything to add there, I.
Speaker 6 (05:51):
Think just kind of being content support.
Speaker 5 (05:54):
I know Brianna was a huge advocate for ABM, and
I had previously had a little bit of experience in ABM,
and I will say I was kind of kind of
an awe shock when I came in and really understood
the ABM approach that bulth On I was talking about
and how successful it was. And I think the shift
was really exciting, but also a challenge for a whole
team with lots of learning curves, which I know we're
(06:15):
going to get into too.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
I think the main question that everybody has is was
the transition successful? And just maybe to set up the expectations,
would you mind to share the quantitative and qualitative outcomes
of implementing ABM, because it's not we can always talk
(06:40):
about pipeline, avenue etcetap. But aside from this at least
from my subjective point of view, ABM helps to improve
lots of go to market operations, right, So I would
love to ask you about how successful was the transition
and what the qualitative and quantitative outcomes the teams can
(07:03):
expect based on your experience.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
Yeah, I think I think the transition was successful. I
think we again had a lot of key learnings and
just knew a new muscle to flex in this regard.
But I think overall it was successful from a qualitative
or sorry quantitative perspective. I think we ended up having
about sixty accounts in the campaign. I know that kind
(07:27):
of dwindled or fluctuated at times, but about sixty accounts.
And our goal was to move accounts from being you know,
vendor unaware to vendor aware or having a need, and
so we would tag different accounts accordingly, and I think
we successfully moved about forty percent of our accounts from
being totally vendor unaware to vendor aware, meaning they had
(07:48):
some sort of engagement with us, maybe they mqled or
something like that. And then about twelve percent of accounts
moved from that stage to what we called active focus,
which was where there was an expressed expressed intent or
some sort of expressed buying need. So for that perspective,
I think we were successful. And we have also seen
(08:09):
three opportunities. And although the campaign has kind of loown down,
we're still seeing inbound demo requests from ABM accounts and
so it kind of, you know, it is a long play,
so something for folks to keep in mind. You're not
going to see necessarily results right away, but we're still
seeing results from you know, the three month long campaign
that we ran, which is great. And then from a
(08:33):
quality cative perspective, I think we've gotten a lot sharper
on our content and personalization. I think through this approach
we learned that a personalization is more than just using
you know, somebody's company name or their industry or you know,
some sort of personalized token. It's really you know, being
(08:54):
intentional about the accounts that you're working and understanding everything
there is to know about them, and then doing a
one to one approach, which I think and for us,
was the most successful approach in the past. Again, we've
kind of done like one a few or one to many,
which I guess you could argue is maybe demand generation.
At that point but we've seen the most successful the
(09:17):
one to one approach, and I.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Think it goes also to say, it goes to kind
of your credit as a team, because you know, we.
Speaker 7 (09:27):
Are only in consulting partner.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
We work with a lot of different teams, and really
where you know where you make it or break it
is with the execution, and you guys did amazing. I'm
sorry I think I interrupted you, Megan, because I actually
wanted to ask you a follow up to something you
said previously, But please, do you want to share something else?
Speaker 5 (09:47):
I just yeah, I would love to add kind of
one quantitative thing that happened. So we focused a lot
on content collaborations. Our sales rep was adamantly trying to
get feedback and advice from our target contacts at target accounts,
and just kind of one result we had was in February,
we had just a conversation, we asked for feedback, and
(10:08):
three short months later we had them request a demo.
So we weren't asking much of them. We were asking
we were almost flattering them in a way. We wanted
their expertise and to use that, and just three short
months later a demo came in. So I think that's
great to say kind of not only did we increase
brand awareness and visibility with that relevant content, but also
we saw a quantitative result too.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, I think like one of the biggest insights that
people have when starting ABM and with content is how
much that content is actually geared towards these sales interactions,
how much it's actually meant to support sales as they
are creating engagement.
Speaker 7 (10:47):
Opportunities, et cetera.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Just don't need to reflect on something that you said
that we didn't really you mentioned something like, Okay, I
had previous experience with ABM, and then I was surprised
when it came here.
Speaker 7 (11:00):
Megan, I believe you said something like that.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
And so before we jump into the exact kind of
program and how you ran it and diving into those
details from your perspective seeing different kinds of implementations of
ABM maybe in the past, and now, how do you
feel about, like, what are the main differences that maybe
(11:22):
make one program succeed like this one versus maybe some
other flavors of ABM that you have seen elsewhere.
Speaker 5 (11:32):
Well, how long is this podcast because we can go
on all day. The one thing that really stood out
to me just in my past, as I did it
for a short, short lived time, was not getting sales
buy in. So I was doing a lot of direct
mails and creative approaches, but it was really marketing led
without that sales support. So I would meet with sales
to kind of get with what target accounts we wanted
(11:54):
to do, but then they kind of stood back and
it was very siloed. So with this kind of with
fun both on a we got the realization where you
need sales buy and early and you need them all
on board and everyone invested. So that was a big
change and I think that really helped with the success
of this.
Speaker 6 (12:11):
And of course it was sales lead marketing supported.
Speaker 5 (12:15):
Brianna has says said this in the past, it's account
based marketing, but where does sales fallow in that name
of account based marketing?
Speaker 6 (12:21):
And I think that's really stuck with me.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
I think what we can cover next is the playbooks
of the orchestration of ABM program. I don't need to
dive into too much detail, but I think what would
be good also to share how the program is orchestrated.
We mentioned already a couple of things, and I would
love you guys to elaborate a little bit on it. Right,
(12:47):
you mentioned sales, early sales buy in. I would add
that what is also important is to show early winds
to sales, even like tiny small wins right when they
see could account engagement accountry plies. It's something that helps
to kind of facilitate that buy in. Aside from this, obviously,
(13:09):
what becomes kind of evident here is that that should
be cross functional collaboration right between teams. So what I
would love to ask you next if you can share
the program orchestration and the key activities and who was involved.
That would be very interesting.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
Yeah. So from who was involved, we had myself as
kind of the lead of the program, and then Megan
being a mission critical player helping to create contact and
content and working with the SDR on outreach and you
know all of that. So Megan was a huge help.
(13:51):
And then we also had our SDR and an AE.
It was primarily led by the SDR, so they were
the ones, you know, reaching out for content collaborations and
we would kind of share content on her profile and
then we would repurpose it, even looping in our CEO
and our VP of sales to post content as well.
(14:12):
So it was a team of maybe like four or
five people. And then yeah, I think from some of
the key activities that we ran, there were a few
that stood out in my mind making. I'm sure you
have some thoughts here too, but I think the first
the first thing that we had to prioritize was building
(14:34):
our networks because we recognized that this was largely LinkedIn
led and we had not prioritized LinkedIn in the past,
so we didn't have a network. So even if we
would have just started posting content like, there was no
one there to receive that content. So we had to
start there building networks on LinkedIn, and then from there
(14:55):
it was you know, posting on LinkedIn, thought leadership type
of intent, seeing who was engaging, and then week over
week you would kind of change your tactics based on
what you had seen from the previous week. So you know,
someone from one of your accounts had engaged with a post,
maybe you would reach out in a one to one
message with a personalized content hub, or maybe you saw
(15:16):
someone register for a webinar and you reach out ahead
of time asking them for anything they might want us
to cover in the webinar and things like that. So
it was like these one to one touch points where
making kind of talked about like we were seeking out
their expertise, which kind of fueled our content as well,
which was nice. But it was really all about building
(15:37):
relationships and we weren't Yeah, we weren't just asking for
meetings right away with people that we had never talked
to before, which sad to say, was something we've definitely
done in the past. But it was really just about
building the relationship. And then again the thought there as
being like, once there is a need, we would be
top of mind because of all of these wonderful positive
(15:59):
touch points that we had created with them throughout the
course of the program. So I think that was the
one thing that really stood out, was that kind of
relationship building.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
If you don't mind, I just want to want to
reflect on one thing. I remember that a funny anecdote
that happened during the execution when Jalen is there was
reaching out people for content collaborations, and then one of
the Target Bank committee members replied, what do you want.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
And then that was I want to book a.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Media But yeah, that was a lot of fun. But
I think also Jalen is not here unfortunately today but
I think what she would add as well that I
would love to emphasize on it that that was a
mindset shift for sales, right, that it wasn't like pitch
(16:52):
slap and I, hey, thanks a lot for accepting Actually,
would you mind to have fifteen minutes demo call with me?
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Right?
Speaker 3 (17:00):
So, I think that was a huge difference for sales
as well, that they understood that this is the especially
for the accounts that have no idea who who is
bench prep right, what this product does to create anotherness,
to create an interest and basically motivate and these people
(17:22):
to have that discovery. So this was one of the
things Megan, would you add, Yeah.
Speaker 5 (17:29):
There's quite a few activities that I think were key
to the access to add on. We did do a
webinar and ABM webinar focus super hyper relevant to our
target audience. And with the pre and post engagement that
our SDR had with on LinkedIn, We're reaching out, I
thought it was really interesting that we decided to create
content hubs and these were really great. So anyone who
(17:52):
had engaged with us, whether they'd be attended a webinar
or content collabs, we would create a content hub for
them personalized to target account with personalized messaging and videos
and resources that were relevant and helpful for them. And
the really great part is we got to share that.
We got to see what resources they wanted to, which
ones they clicked on, how much of the recording they had,
(18:14):
And that was a very good key activity to kind
of share where their interest was, if there was interest,
and share kind of a personal story with them. I
would say that was one key activity. And then I
think another one kind of kind of internally was our
weekly meetings. So having that weekly meetings with Andrea from
Full Funnel and Rihanna and me and our sales, it
(18:36):
was a perfect opportunity for us to kind of talk
about our wins, celebrate them, also encourage us because we're
seeing the more we do, the more action we're taking,
the better results. So we're seeing those wins, we're getting
more excited. We're talking about the content for the week,
the plan for the week, and I thought that our
meeting was crucial to keeping everyone aligned, on board, excited,
(18:56):
kind of passionate about what's to come. So I would
say that was a keiectivity and would definitely recommend it
going forward.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
I'm reflecting on how this is actually different to the
way that we usually do marketing, the way that we
actually create content and get feedback aust on the marketing activities, right.
I mean, it's so dynamic, is what I'm hearing from you.
For example, you're creating content instead of let's say the
(19:25):
old way where you maybe do some keyword research and
create content for the SEO, and then you have to
wait to see whether it ranks, and then you have
to wait and see whether it converts into leads, and
then you have to wait and see those leads convert
into opportunities and whether those are actually, like Rhanna mentioned
at the beginning, the kind of opportunities we want, not
(19:46):
just like low revenue potential, where now you're sharing content
directly via social you're getting that feedback right away. You're
meeting with sales weekly, you're getting feedback from them seeing
them use the content. The content helps that you mentioned
as well, you're seeing which content is actually being used,
et cetera, et cetera. Just funny to kind of that
(20:08):
stood out for me how different that is than the
let's say, the usual way of us in marketing teams
seeing actually the impact of what we do now, I
wanted to ask a quick question because I think like
a lot of people that might be listening to this
later are joining us live right now realize okay, like
(20:31):
maybe they want to do that. They saw that, you know,
like you said, it's so important to involve sales. You
were there from content, Rihanna was there from you know,
managing the project and the program. Can you maybe reflect
on the actual time investment that it took from different
team members? What do you feel like is not necessarily
(20:54):
a minimum, but what people should be counting on to
be able to pull the off. And I think you
did a fantastic job. So I just wonder, like how
much time did you spend maybe on average per week
or any other ways you want to express it.
Speaker 4 (21:10):
Yeah, so we definitely have experienced some capacity constraints coming
into this year. So it's interesting because we did notice,
like Megan mentioned, the weeks where we were able to
invest more time, we would see more results, we would
see more engagement, and so like in hindsight, I feel
(21:31):
like we definitely have learned that and we'll take that
into our next program. So I would say, if I
we reflect back, like there were some weeks where you know,
we had other priorities and we weren't able to lean
into this program quite as much. But again then we
wouldn't see the same results. So if I look back,
I feel like one hour a day is a good
amount of time to spend on ABM each week. So
(21:55):
from our perspective, we were creating content. We're looking at
which accounts have maybe shift did from one list to
the next list, where you know, looking at pipeline. But
I think for us it was the content creation part
that really took a lot of time because again you're
not just writing some generic piece of content for a
broad side of accounts. You're very one to one and
(22:16):
so that you know, I don't want to take away
like that did take some time. And the more personalized
and one to one you can be, the better results
you'll see. So you do need to take the time.
So from my perspective, I would like I would say
an hour a day is a good amount of time
to invest. But again there's going to be weeks where
you just can't do that unfortunately, and you'll have to
(22:36):
kind of talk about that in your weekly meetings to
let people know, hey, I might be low on capacity
this next week. And kind of prioritize accordingly. I'm definitely
curious to hear Megan's thoughts because she was also in
the trenches on the content front.
Speaker 6 (22:51):
Absolutely, I wish there was more time in a day.
Speaker 5 (22:53):
I think for this, I think blocking time on the
calendar was something I learned like later into the camp
because at first, I guess I came in not knowing
how much time and commitment was needed.
Speaker 6 (23:03):
So that was kind of like almost.
Speaker 5 (23:05):
A mistake I had, or just like a false reality.
But then when you see how much time you needed
for execution, I would say, yeah, four to five hours
a week, that's kind of what I'm going I don't
think like I think an hour day would be kind
of nice to have, But if you can do like
a time black Friday afternoon, that's always great time it's
(23:26):
a little quieter. I think the more effort, once again,
you put in, the more you're going to get out
of it. So I'm actually going to consider that kind
of moving forward. How much time am I spending? And
also there might be weeks where you can kind of
create more content to prepare for those weeks when you
have external events or can't do an hour a day
I'd just.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Like to take a quick, quick moment to reflect on
what you have shared. I mean, the results day is shared,
and then the actual time investment it's actually quite low.
I mean compared to the time that story to the
return that you were getting, knowing that it was a
new learning experience, a new program, a lot of things
(24:07):
you had to do for the first time. You have
to set up a lot of things, and yet you
managed to achieve those results.
Speaker 7 (24:13):
So we hear a lot.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Of times this way of doing EBM, or this way
of doing marketing and sales collaboration where there's a lot
of one on one where there's a lot of manual
engagement that's not scalable, that's unscalable.
Speaker 7 (24:26):
But I wonder.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
If you look at the time invested versus the result,
are there any other activities that you see actually how
scalable or how the return that you're getting on those hours.
I feel like this this should be kind of a
nail in the coffin of that that this is not scalable,
just given this brilliant example.
Speaker 7 (24:51):
That you shared. So I just wanted to thank you
for appreciating that.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
But if I don't mind, I just wanted to add
a few say and also get your take on it.
Brian and Megan, what you mentioned is actually the execution time, right,
so you have and what is create? I feel this
is the approach that literally every team should take this
weekly plan and and review meetings, and then you do
(25:19):
the planning for the next week considering all the new
insights you have collected about the target accounts. You prioritize
the content plan, You prioritize the next steps and touch
points on how marketing can support sales, write and account
development playbooks for sales the same. It's again ABM and sales.
(25:41):
It's not the replacement of the prospective, right, it's it's
it's just a you. And maybe I could be a
little bit biased here, but I would say it's a
little bit better way to do the prospected right in
a value added way. But again the bare minimum would
be one hour for the execution being said, what is
(26:01):
essential and I feel, I mean, we did this program together.
Quite often the teams that for example, especially without robust
ABM background or without prayer experience of running ABM successfully, right,
I feel they that that they often underestimate the amount
of time and the loan and curve to understand how
(26:24):
ABM works, right, because a natural tons of companies think
about ABM in one too many way, right, So like, okay,
let's build this list of accounts based on our kind
of generic broad ICP definition and then let's because these
are accounts, right, and we have approved these accounts with sales,
(26:46):
doesn't matter if there is any product need evidence, do
they know us? And it's now a marketing problem, right,
the accounts were selected, So what marketing is supposed to
do is just run some ads and sales. I suppose
to do the outreach, which in nutshell again, maybe you
can call it a con based marketing because steal the
(27:07):
areouts right, But from my point, it's no different from
the standard lead generation. It's just the new rap en
of it. So, if let's say was the client side,
what would you say should be the time that the
team that doesn't have let's say experience of trying and
improve an ABM programs, what is the time that they
(27:30):
should allocate to understand how it works and to plan
it and orchestrated properly.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
It's a good question because you're right, there was definitely
time taken in the learning curve from just the fact
that we hadn't run a program like this, and so
it definitely does take time. And once you have kind
of you know, gone through a program throughout so many
months and you've kind of learned what works what doesn't,
and it does, I feel like, get a little easier.
(27:58):
But the initial time, yeah, it did take us some time.
Even as we prepare for our next campaign, which we're
launching later this week. I mean, something that I think
Megan and I both talked about as a key learning
from the first campaign is depending on the accounts or
maybe the use case that you are going to focus on.
I mean, for the ones that we're choosing for our
(28:19):
next campaign, we actually don't have a lot of existing
content content. It's a new use case for us. So
the time that we're taking up front before we actually
launch is actually more than the time that we took
for our pilot campaign with full funnel, which was catered
toward towards an audience, towards our core audience. With our
core use case that we have all of our content
previously was dedicated towards. So from that perspective, it didn't
(28:43):
take as much lift on the front end to get
things ready to go for launch. But it did take
time from a learning perspective, just to understand the new
tactics that Andre was showing us, or the amount it
took just to even choose the accounts. It's not just
you know, through a few filters on a Salesforce report
and there's your account, so like you've got to do
(29:04):
some deep understanding of engagement and MQL and do your
contacts even work there. I know we had some like
database clean up that needed to happen in some accounts
we didn't have any viable contacts for so all of
that takes time upfront, and again as you go through it,
you'll kind of learn the best approaches and once you've
done it once, you'll get a lot better at it.
(29:26):
But I think something to also consider is depending on
who you're targeting in your campaign, like do you have
existing content or do you maybe want to take some
time before launch to build that repertoire up a little
bit so that way you're not spending so much of
your time while the campaign is live doing all of
that as you go. So I think there's a couple
of different considerations in regards to like preparing for the
(29:49):
campaign and then again the time that it takes just
to kind of learn how to do some things that
like you've never done before.
Speaker 6 (29:56):
I think.
Speaker 5 (30:00):
One thing in the beginning that really helped, and it
was a bigger time commitment, was workshops we had with
full funnel and sales and marketing all on board, talking
through kind of what is it from the ground up
doing live content sorry content brainstorms, working to do account
research live, to all do it together to really understand
(30:20):
the time that it takes to do it and the
thoroughness that is required researching, target counts, writing content live.
Speaker 6 (30:29):
I think all of that we did together in the beginning.
Speaker 5 (30:31):
It was more time and everyone was on board, but
it kind of showed the commitment and it helped us
learn what's important and the key activities.
Speaker 6 (30:39):
That we need to do to be successful. So those
are really helpful.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Love it, thank you.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
I think this is the biggest problem even for teams,
I mean, like zooming out from our collaboration. Lots of
teams that consider ABM, they have kind of some false
perception of what it is, right and especially in many
teams sales just saying that it's fully owned marketing activity
and they need just to show up for the discoveries.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Right, that's all this wish.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
Enterprise accounts, which in reality is absolutely not true. I
think the biggest mistake that lots of teams are making
is actually not mapping out the program together and then
executing each part of this program together to see realistically
how much time it takes and based on it, set
(31:31):
up the proper expectations. Right, Because how that looks like
as we spoke, Hey, let's do ab I'm fine, give
us your list of accounts. Okay, so hundreds of accounts,
maybe like five buying committee members per account actually seems
to be a lot. I don't have time, So let's
let me just ASKT to pretend as my target buyer
(31:53):
persona tons of different bots, right, fans pose the sales
sales look at the scrap and say, hey, I will
never go in to post this, right, so I will
better do my leg standard outreach.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
And that's it.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
This is a natural how the ABM looks like for
the majority of companies, unfortunately. So I think this was
really important and thank you for highlight on this.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
And I know.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Something that I wanted to reflect on. You said that
you need to take the time to prepare their content.
You need to take the time to prepare. And I
think it's also important when it comes to collaborating with sales,
right we know that. I don't want to say that
sales is impatient. I think they are right. They have
right to be impatient. Their commissions depend on their results.
(32:45):
I mean, it's just a different type of work than
we have to do in marketing. But it is a fact.
I mean, it is a fact that we have to
live with. We have to respect that reality. And I
think what we noticed a lot of time when teams
are prepared, like you were, okay in this case, you
already had some content we could start. I think the
(33:06):
biggest difference is once you start with sales doing these activities,
actually having the content and anything that you need to have,
having the accounts, having the content, having the playbooks ready.
Speaker 7 (33:20):
So once they.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
Start engaging, they're actually going to see some traction as
soon as possible, and that's going to help create that
momentum that you really need to get sales along because
at the end, what they will trust, they will trust results.
They will trust you know, when they are able to
(33:41):
book more calls, close more deals, that's then they are
going to trust marketing. That's just a way of life.
But given your kind of hindsight, I wonder, like, if
you have to do it again, or you have to
do it and a different company, how would you go
(34:03):
about getting the buying from leadership and sales.
Speaker 4 (34:07):
Yeah, that's a good question, and I know something that
a lot of folks struggle with. I think for us,
I mean again, we were already seeing the lag and pipeline.
We were already seeing the lag in large deals, so
like we knew that there was a problem that needed
to be solved, and so that I think kind of
opened the door to okay, so what are some possible solutions?
(34:31):
And through that kind of conversation, it was where I
planted the ABM seed and we would talk about it,
but there was I think still a lot of like
education to do. Megan touched on this earlier. I don't
think the name ABM necessarily helps, but there was definitely
a misconception around like what that means. And even candidly
with our like previous little mini ABM campaigns, they were
(34:54):
all marketing led, so like they had kind of understood
ABM to be this thing, but those were just you know,
trying us trying to get something off the ground, and
they weren't successful and we know exactly why. So I
think there was some education that needed to happen in
terms of what is ABM, you know, sharing case studies
(35:15):
or talking with other peers who have been successful in
ABM and sharing those results. But I think for us,
because the problem was so clear and we knew we
needed to solve it, I think there was definitely more
openness around trying the strategy, and so it did take
some time up front to get everyone on board with
(35:35):
exactly what what what what it would look like. And
so I think if you can identify the specific problem
that you're trying to solve with this strategy, I think
that will go a long way. If you can start
with data, so showing any sort of like quantitative metrics
or you know, low conversion rates or you know you
(35:57):
were getting a lot of unqualified leads or whatever it
might be to kind of make your business case stronger
is a really good place to start. And then obviously, yeah,
if you can showcase any kind of success stories towards
more tangible I think that was also really helpful.
Speaker 6 (36:14):
Perhaps sharing this podcast with leadership, we too.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
I'm just wondering, if again, if you together reflect on
the pilot program, what would you tell the teams that
consider to deploy a b m uh what what what
do you tell? What would you kind of what mistakes
(36:44):
you would aware them off they should avoid? So what
are kind of the typical things that you now was
hindsight now.
Speaker 4 (36:55):
Megan looks eager to share some mistakes at hurt start.
Speaker 5 (37:00):
The first thing that comes to my mind is not
committing enough time and energy into executing it, to creating
the content, to making your plan and sticking with the plan.
Speaker 6 (37:09):
I think we were guilty of this.
Speaker 5 (37:10):
We would make a plan for the next week, and
because of other bandwidth issues and kind of limits to timing,
we never we didn't always achieve that goal for the
next week. So I think something like a lesson learned
would be blocking off the calendar, making sure that this
is a priority, perhaps saying no to other things or
deprioritizing other things that you are managing. So committing the
(37:33):
time and energy and making sure everyone is one hundred
percent bought into it.
Speaker 4 (37:38):
Yeah, And I think another thing that comes to mind
goes back to the the personalization aspect of it. I
mean it does go a long way. So I mean
you can cut corners to Magen's point if you are
tied on time, like there are ways to cut corners,
and not to say that we never did that, but
like that's not going to show you the results that
you hope to see. So from a personalization standpoint, I
(38:02):
think that was really impactful for us. So our Sdr
Jalen would you know, take the time to do in
depth account research when a contact would engage with us,
she would do research about that contact. And then we
were all working together around like how, like what's our
strategy we see this engagement, like what are we going
to do about it? We want to reach out for
a content collaboration, or we saw this person attended our webinar,
(38:25):
create that content hub, or we want to ask them
for a quote that we're going to share on LinkedIn,
which a lot of people really enjoyed. People were very
excited when we would reach out asking for them to
share thoughts about you know, a question and we're going
to post it on LinkedIn, And I don't know, it
was like a form of flattery, I think. But I
think that personalized content and those one to one touch
(38:48):
points really went a long way and making people feel
like they can trust you and that you have good
intentions and it's not just yeah, what do you want
another sales outreach, you want another meeting or whatever it is.
But I think then seeing that like that's really not
what we're reaching out for. We really are trying to
build network and help you solve a challenge. I think
(39:09):
was a really important part of our strategy as well.
So again making the mistake of not cutting corners and
taking the time to personalize and do one to one
instead of one too many is I think going to
show you the best results.
Speaker 3 (39:25):
And I think there were a couple of other cool
things that could be especially relevant for the smaller teams,
like in your CaCO CEO was following up with the
active focus accounts and not just pitching them, hey, you
attended the webinar, have a discovery call with us, right,
but suggesting consultations, suggesting audits of that existing processes kind
(39:48):
of just to be helpful to give them an idea
of like what could be improved in that jobs to
be done right, which is a natural transition to the discoverer, right,
because you discuss you and you can show some best
practices on how these things could be improved, because what
we often see is that the buyers, they quite often
(40:11):
can't connect.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
The dots between your solution and the problem.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
Right. It's always like in you know, when we have
the discovery calls, companies come and say, hey, but you
actually had an experience of selling to this type of audience. Yeah,
maybe we don't have that experience, but it doesn't change
the fact that we have experience of selling to the
global ICPR right of companies was long sales cycles and
(40:37):
it doesn't really matter, but everybody wants to see this.
So from that perspective, it helps a lot. From the
personalization point of view, right, connect the dots for the
prospect and different buying committee members, like in your case,
you have a completely different roles technical buyer right, economical buyer,
engagement buyer, that the person who is in charge of
(40:58):
this professional education, they have completely different KPIs right, And
what's important for one person might be completely irrelevant to
another band committee member. Right, And it always helps to
connect the dots because if you don't, if you don't
do this, they say, Okay, that's a nice product, but
it's just yet another right, and then they think about
(41:20):
your category, yet another LMS, yet another vendor or whatever. Right,
but when they say, wow, that makes perfect sense to me.
These guys did the homework. The perception I feel that
ABM changes is that they truly understand my needs and
my business. This is the perfect partner I want to
(41:40):
talk to.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
And the same comes to perception of the sales teams.
Speaker 3 (41:48):
Right. They don't think, oh, this is Galant, just one
more sales rep who wants to take my brain right
for the fifty so they think about, wow, this person
is so knowledgeable.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
This person helps me.
Speaker 3 (42:01):
Right, this person comes up with, like Megan mentioned, personalized
content helps and maybe, of course, while when we're not
yet in the sales process, we don't know all the
confidential information, right, but still based on that desk research
and prior engagement, we can come up, like you said,
with the resources that are helpful. Right, even in our case.
(42:22):
I remember how maybe you Briana said this once, even
just like we have an understanding of how ABM team
might look like, but seeing just visually right, the structure
of the team, the responsibilities changes the understanding, right, And
this is kind of the universal resource that we're happy
to share with everybody, right, But people say, Okay, that's helpful,
(42:42):
that's helpful, that's helpful, and that creats that impression that
this vendor cares about me. Right. So I think there's
a few things that's important to consider as well. One question,
if you don't mind, you both mentioned this the plan
and face right, and that like Megan, you said, for example,
(43:03):
that sometimes you need to say no to other things.
At the end of our pilot, we did to gether
planning of how the qtube program might look like. And
I think what is important here is to coordinate the activities, right,
making sure that ABM and your other marketing activities.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
Demand gen A not going in silence, right.
Speaker 3 (43:24):
Okay, this is a bunch of things that we have scheduled,
and somewhere on the left side of this plan is
a BM right, So I think this is this is
also another mistake teams are making, so they plan it
in silence and they don't incorporate it into existing marketing plan, right,
because then you can always combine these things. I would
(43:44):
love because of we did that relatively close to today.
What's what's your experience, how would you reflect on it,
and how would you what's what would be your recommendations
on inte creating a BM in to exist in market
and planning.
Speaker 4 (44:04):
That's a good question. Yeah, that was something that we
definitely didn't do coming into our pilot campaign and something
that we need to keep in mind moving forward. Yeah,
we've got a lot of activities on our demand generation
side of things. Maybe in particular, has a ton of
webinars that she plans during the year, which is a
huge contributor to our pipeline. So it's an important channel
(44:28):
to have. But I think a recognition that we had
during this program was that we were spreading ourselves too thin,
so we weren't giving ourselves appropriate time to promote, and
especially on the ABM front, where it does take more
time because you're doing one to one outreach and those
types of activities. We didn't give ourselves enough time leading
(44:48):
up to the event, and then by the time we
would get there, we were already on to the next event.
And so I think that was definitely something that we
need to realize moving forward, is planning BM activities in
coordination with our demand generation side of things. And so
one change that we'll make for our Q two campaign
(45:10):
is making sure that we have plenty of time leading
up to the webinar to dedicate to our ABM webinar specifically.
And Andrea liked the suggestion you made, which was, you
may have other things going on, but we're labeling this
ABM webinars like our strategic priority. We will have maybe
another webinar that we're doing, but we're not going to
(45:30):
do the one to one outreach, and so that's kind
of the approach that we're taking, and it'll be interesting
to see the results for each one of these webinars.
And to Lad's point earlier, just like the time that
we take isn't really that significant when you see the
results that we've seen, So I think that'll be really
interesting to see this next month. But that's kind of
(45:52):
where we're what we're doing. So we'll you know, execute
our ABM campaign with our ABM webinar, and then we'll
try to slow down a little bit on the demand
gen side so that we can give appropriate dedication and
prioritization to ABM. But Megan, I know you're again kind
of leading that, so any thoughts you might have or
are helpful, I think for us, it's.
Speaker 6 (46:15):
Planning ahead too.
Speaker 5 (46:16):
We've really taken the time to learn, take the lessons
learned from the pilot and think what does content look
like for this next campaign, giving us enough time to
kind of think through the resources we need and planning ahead.
So yeah, we do a lot of webinars on the
demand gen side, but we're going to start doing some
hyper relevant ABM one. So I think kind of having
that nice balance planning ahead is really going to help
(46:38):
us and has been. So we're excited to see the
results as we put more focus a little less on
the demand gen.
Speaker 7 (46:45):
And more on a b M the next So we'll
have to plan another follow up podcast. I think.
Speaker 6 (46:54):
See your next letter.
Speaker 3 (46:58):
To catch up off to some and see and say
the progress. Maybe just to sum it up, I would
love to ask the last question. Maybe a lot you'll
come up with something else, but my last question would be,
(47:19):
if you are going to do it from scratch again,
what would be the first sink, like, let's say, the
most important thing that you'll you'll do.
Speaker 4 (47:30):
Oh that's a good question. Well, yeah, that I asked.
The two things that come to mind are again that
account selection and just being really meticulous and particular about
the accounts that we're choosing to target and then the content.
And I think something that I want to say about content,
which I don't think we've really touched on yet, is
(47:53):
the repurposing of content, which was really helpful. And so
I think for us, even though again as I mentioned,
for our upcoming campaign, we kind of need to build
our content repertoire, don't let that like slow you down
from launching, because you can repurpose your content. So for example,
we just mentioned Megan does a ton of amazing webinars
(48:14):
throughout the year, So we'll take you know, webinar content
and repurpose that in two blogs or you know, infographics
or whatever it might be, and then we can repurpose
that as our LinkedIn posts for our ABM campaign. And
then even aside from that, we'll have our SDR posts,
you know, on LinkedIn, and then we'll have maybe our
(48:34):
VP of sales or our CEO who really has enjoyed
being part of this program as well, but we'll have
him post the exact same post that the SDR posted
and maybe just wait, you know, two or three weeks
and then they'll post that same thing. So you don't
always have to be coming up with content from scratch.
I highly encourage you to use what you already have
(48:56):
and that is where you know tool like a chat
GPT or AI can help you come up with those ideas.
I wouldn't though, and Andre we talked about this in
our campaign as well, I wouldn't rely solely on chat
cipt to create your content. It's very easy and obvious
to tell which content is created by chat gipt. You've
all probably seen all of the conversation about the end
(49:18):
dashes that are happening right now. But you can take
that as a tool to use. But then you need
to do your tweaking and personalize it and turn it
into your own human voice as well. But just wanted
to offer that from a content perspective because I know
it can be quite daunting. So encourage everyone to look
at your current content, how can you repurpose it, and
(49:40):
then again utilizing other folks on your team to spread
that message as well.
Speaker 1 (49:46):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (49:47):
I say one question comment from Rob if you could
do a total strip back version of abiam, what would
that look like? Micro business respond marketing lead and one.
Speaker 4 (50:00):
Yeah, that's a great question. So again, I feel like
it's all about building that network and those relationships, and
then content is kind of the fuel of the engine.
So I mean, I will say that we also didn't
have a lot of channels to work with. I mean,
we had a team before, but we weren't running you know,
paid ads. We didn't do any direct mail sends in
(50:22):
this particular campaign, both of which we could have considered.
But again, we're also you know, running lean from a
bandwidth perspective, so we prioritized LinkedIn as our primary channel
for execution with like email follow ups, and so I
think for you know, a small team, one marketing lead
and one salesperson, that's also where those weekly meetings become
(50:45):
incredibly important, so that you can align on what your
capacity looks like for the next week. But again I
think on the sales side, they can be you know,
creating those connections on LinkedIn and building those relationships, and
then on the market side, creating that content for them
to post, and then every week in your meeting, looking
to see who engaged with your posts this week? Was
(51:07):
it anybody from one of our target accounts? If it is, okay,
what activity should we do for that account this next week?
So I think just making sure you maintain close communication
and just really leaning into the social selling side of things.
I think you will see great results because that's honestly
where we've seen our results come from as well with
(51:27):
primarily LinkedIn.
Speaker 5 (51:29):
Yeah, we have such a We were a small team too.
We did have a few more people than with two
marketing and almost two sales. But I think it was
really helpful to just constantly be communicating expectations, kind of
saying we're going to set an hour today, We're going
to work on this, and just kind of having that
kind of clear expectations and clear goals and communicating if
(51:50):
things kind of have to shift.
Speaker 1 (51:52):
I think you mentioned it several times, things like okay,
you can repurpose content that you probably have to do
within your marketing role, make sure that that's the content
that anyhow, what you're planning to do, maybe like the
webinars that you're doing, Megan or Rob. I don't know
what kind of activities you're busy with, but first can
we align that with our strategic Well, first have a
(52:14):
strategic focus, right, Like you said, how do we select
our accounts is so super important. Again, if you have
low resources, where you put those resources all starts with
which accounts we are targeting, right, then aligning the planned
activities with the needs of those accounts with then also
(52:38):
that collaboration between sales and markel.
Speaker 7 (52:40):
If you're doing a webinar, hey why not Like you.
Speaker 1 (52:42):
Were mentioning that you leveraged a lot of these marketing
activities as sales touch points. So that's another way if
you're not working in silos. If this content is to
begin with relevant for and the marketing activity is relevant
for those target accounts that sales is f then you
also get opportunities to then kind of like kill towards
(53:05):
with one stone, getting that additional engagement multiple touch points
without always just knocking on the door and saying, hey,
are you ready to buy now? Are you ready to
buy now?
Speaker 7 (53:15):
And things like that.
Speaker 1 (53:17):
So I think like a lot of the tips that
you shared today and a lot of the ways in
which you handle the program should help smaller teams get
more out of more bang out of their marketing back
whatever I'm struggling, I think this is all going to
(53:40):
be very helpful. So thank you so much for sharing
that and great results. We really have to do a
follow up after the summer.
Speaker 3 (53:50):
Yeah, absolutely, thank you so much for time and sharing
your experience and being for the transparent and fan about
what it takes to run a successful ABM program and
what challenges and hurdles the team can face, because I
feel that, indeed the sad reality is that lots of
teams they simply don't understand the motion, don't understand how
(54:15):
to run it properly, the commitment and the cross functional
collaboration it requires, and then the program fails. And on contrary,
even with lean team, without having like big resources, you
can drive fantastic results right and especially if you have
high cevy product you have long sale cycles that could
(54:37):
be your central motion that also should be maybe not easily,
but again that should be integrated into your marketing mix
right and be a part of your marketing strategy.
Speaker 2 (54:50):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (54:51):
It last fantastic conversation and looking forward to other chats.
Speaker 4 (54:57):
Yeah, thank you so much for all of your support
and help throughout the pilot program. We really enjoyed working
with you and are excited to see continued results. So
I appreciate you all having us here.
Speaker 7 (55:08):
Thank you, thank you, thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (55:12):
Thanks having about us for the timing. See you in
the next week. Cheers, take care, Hi,
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