pisode 171: Marketing role in ABM: what marketing must own and execute with Andrei & Vladimir

In this episode of Full-Funnel Live, Vlad and Andrei provide the definitive blueprint for marketing's responsibilities in a high-performing ABM program. They move beyond theory to give you a concrete list of what you should own, the processes you must drive, and the metrics that prove your impact.

Tune in to learn:

• What marketing owns
• What are the playbooks and process marketing must run together with sales
• What are marketing responsibilities and KPIs

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/

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
This is the Full Funnel B t B Marketing podcast.
Want to you buy Full Funnel Dot Let's Starve?

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hello everyone, we are back with our regular full final life.
We're slowly moving to the end of this fall season
and next week probably will have the last one. And
what we have heard from you guys, that was a
constant question we as a marketing team, as marketers, what

(00:38):
actually we are supposed to do in account based marketing. Unfortunately,
we have seen a lot of misconception in this let's say,
in this area. Why because again, if we learned about
account based marketing from the PDFs, from the blog posts

(01:01):
of the technology vendors right.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
All this.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
I'm not going to say that the content was bad,
but this content often created a perception that marketing role
is to manage the technology and obviously run ads, programmatic
ads through the platform, because this is the only way
how you can do the one too many ABM right

(01:27):
orchestrate this let's say programs and then track the signals
and share the sales. And to be honest, completely it
has It's like it has its place in account based marketing,
but it's just the tiny part of ABM. And if
marketing is only doing. Let's say, if only run on

(01:50):
these playbooks, then you can very quickly lose the trust
and the attention from sales and you move to whatever,
to the standard silent motion. So what we are going
to share today with what is what marketing actually owns
in a BM. What activities marketing should run and then

(02:16):
what market and what let's say, what processes, what activities
marketing should cock create together with sales. I would love
to emphasize on this co create. It means that not
marketing created and then given the sales, or not sales
created and given to marketing, but the teams are sitting
down together and creating this. Let's say these assets together.

(02:38):
Before I will start, let us know, guys in the
chat where you all join from. We are broadcasting from
sunny and warm Spain. Let us know in the chat
where you guys join us from. And while you're type
and I think we can move to that part what
marketing owns an a BM.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
Alright, fello, everybody, it's warm compared to the other places.
But if you are ten years in Spain like myself,
I'm getting the chills when I'm outside, to be honest.
So let's dive into the roles that we usually recommend
teams to have in ABM. All of these roles are

(03:22):
very essential and the first four roles here on the
diagram for those who are watching us, are owned by marketing.
The first very important role is the ABM lead, So
that is the person who owns the program, who is
in charge of owning the process, coordinating everybody, orchestrating the

(03:45):
ABM program campaigns. And it's very simple. If you don't
have anybody who is in charge of a process, that
process is not going to run. And this is actually
something that we see in a lot of is being missed.
And then of course, even if you run one campaign,

(04:06):
if you have done maybe a pilot or experiments, if
you don't have that person and later on we always
recommend to form a sort of center of excellent especial
excellence excuse me, especially when you have regional teams, nothing
will happen. So this is kind of the central role.
Usually it's best if you can stab this with a

(04:28):
more let's say media or senior profile with experience in
enterprise marketing. Although I have to be honest, one of
the best APM leads we had at the very beginning
when we started was a young twenty two year old
woman who was just out of school and didn't know

(04:51):
that some things shouldn't be done by marketing. And that's
what made her so good because she was just doing
whatever we advised her to do, and she did an
ex one job. But usually you want to have somebody
who is able to talk to sales internally, who already
has that relationship, who is able to also who understands

(05:12):
the customers, who understands the product, et cetera. We also
have success with people who are like product manager role
because they are usually the strategic product marketing. I mean,
that's that's what I meant actually with product management product
marketing who have really good strategic few have good in

(05:34):
that knowledge of the customer of the product. Usually are
kind of a senior role as well, and they are
in charge of the process of orchestration. They're in charge
of the let's say the i c P together with
sales basically stecting the sales, the insights from the sales

(05:55):
and using that for a con qualification prioritization. In charge
of the content strategy together with content person and together
with the SME subject matter expert. So this is essential.
The second one really really important. Again, something that is
not very easy to feel honestly is content marketer. And

(06:16):
you would think, you know, every team has somebody who
is in charge of content. Unfortunately, what we see in
a lot of companies that you don't really have a
dedicated a role for ABM. And what I mean by
that is large organization may have this as a function
a content marketing team, but that's usually a siloed function

(06:38):
with their own KPIs, with their own agenda. They're in
charge of creating a lot of content that you know,
for the website, you know, whether that's the blog or
you know, the product marketing material as well, based on
the input from product marketing white papers, maybe even emails

(06:59):
and email marketing, et cetera. And they simply don't have
enough time to commit. And it's also a very different
way of working in a BM because it requires close
more closely working with sales. It requires a change in
the mindset from and in the way of working from
doing it like you have a big calendar of content

(07:20):
to being much more lean and looking weekly at the
target accounts that are evolving their needs in engagement and
then adapting also the content strategy or the content actual
content to the needs of sales and the accounts. That's
a really important role. That's kind of a key role also.

(07:42):
And then the two other roles that are kind of supportive,
and we usually say at the beginning these roles can
be taken either by the a BM need or you know,
an agency. In the case of design, is the design
itself to support the content, especially because we always like

(08:06):
to focus on content that is helping sales engage target accounts,
which is usually social content, which is usually events or
webinars where you know it's designed heavy, right, If you
want to have good content, you also need to support
it with cold design. Different companies fill this role differently.

(08:29):
Like I said, it can be an agency, can be
an internal designer. And then demand gen is to help
with usually with the paid part, which is you know,
distributing content, whether it be a thought leadership ad, promoting
the events, the webinars, running account based marketing advertisment as well. Again,

(08:53):
in some things this might be taken by the ABM
lead or they will be working with the demand gen
team somebody from the demandsion team on that. But I
think the main two roles are the ABM in the
content market there and you need also to fill these
two as a function not necessarily a different person and
very important, really really key. We talk about the role

(09:18):
of marketing but ABM as we know and everybody is
saying that, but in reality it is not easy to
pull off. It doesn't work without sales, so ABM will
not work with actual hands on sales engagement. And maybe
just to prevent from me continuing to talk and do

(09:38):
a monologue, what it adds Andre to maybe share his
view on the role of sales in ADM.

Speaker 2 (09:45):
I want dive in too much detail because in the
beginning of this season we had two sessions. One was
Eric Leglar about account based sales playbox and one with
your Bleat about the role of account based sales REPS.
So I will drop a link for everybody to We

(10:08):
also documented it in a nice way so you can
go through a breakdown of what is the role of sales.
I will just highlight two critical roles and the main
areas of responsibilities. What they should own. This role is
a business development. I would say this is the the
must have role a person who is going to run

(10:30):
account research according to your standards. Of course, the person
who is going to do the buying committee engagement, the
person who is in charge of constant engagement with the
buying committee members and social sealing, and the person who
is going to do the multistreading right. Well, account why
I said it's a core role because honestly, you can't

(10:52):
expect to do that. Account executives will be doing this.
We have seen this multiple times and it's else so
account executives are focused on closing the deals and they
they don't have that villainess to do let's say the
field job. Even if you wan't run expansion playbooks, right,

(11:12):
you still need to have business development aps to do
these activities. While as can obviously help when you have
engaged accounts of what we call active focus accounts with
a high likelihood to be converted into sales opportunities. This
is why you need to involve account executives. They could
work on business cases. They also can help with program

(11:33):
planning when you start orchestrated your program. They I think
it's very beneficial to bring ease, and that's a call
for a b M leads right to plan with them
the account qualification and selection create area, the area plan
and the account based content strategy, right, that narrative that

(11:55):
would be that would be essential. So they could quite
often they could act as your subject matter experts, or
they could work alongside SMEs and provide you essential insights.

Speaker 1 (12:08):
Right.

Speaker 2 (12:09):
And so to dive into details and to specific tactics
and actions of contoy sales reps, you can read the
guide right. So from that perspective, marketing owns the content creation,
the strategy, the orchestration, the reports, the promotion, et cetera,
while sales owns the active engagement with the with the

(12:30):
buying committee members. So what we want to do next
is we want to highlight the core areas with the examples, right,
what exactly marketing should own and work on. Let's do
it one just by picking one by one of these examples.

Speaker 1 (12:49):
The first area we mentioned already contents, and I mentioned
already that the role of content and the type of
content changes and the way that it changes from let's
say the standard content marketing to account based content strategy
is that you want to create content that is relevant

(13:14):
for accounts that we are targeting across their buying journey.
So we personalize the content for the target accounts for
the roles within those accounts and for the journey stage
and what you can see on the graph here for
those who are looking, we have two access One are

(13:37):
kind of the level of intent no intent, medium high.
The other one is the goals that we have in
the program. So typically for no intent, our goal is
to create awareness, and there we are looking to create
content that is let's say one too many. Usually one
too many or one too few, depends on how it

(13:59):
is fine. And I think when people look at the
programs that we start, they would probably call that one
to few. We call it one to many whenever we are,
for example, addressing it air content a complete cluster of accounts.
So by cluster accounts, what we mean is group of
accounts that share a common challenge or use case. These

(14:22):
are types of content that we want to create. Here
are the content. The challenge is the status quo. Because
our biggest competitor, usually especially an enterprise, isn't the direct
competitor that we are fighting for, let's say with an
innovative solution against another one, that it is the status quo?

(14:46):
Why change white change now? Why implement something now? There
are always other high priorities. So content that helps us
challenge the status quo that actually educates the buyers about
jobs to be done. That's also why we like to
align our content with specific shared challenges and use cases.

(15:08):
That really helps create relevant content for a group of accounts.
So as the kind of the first level of personalization.
Obviously also things like industry news, trends, best practices. So
this is all related to the product. It has not

(15:33):
so much about the product, but the product solves a
specific challenge. It's used by the buyers in the context
of specific function. Let's say I'm selling a product that
helps with the process of recruiting new candidates. Well, okay,
then I might be talking about the challenges around recruiting

(15:53):
candidate experience, collaborating with other hiring managers within the organization,
so things that are on top of mind of my
target buyer one to few. This is really when our
goal becomes to actually become a part of the consideration

(16:14):
step set. Excuse me, right, So to become one of
the brands that we to be considered where we go
for more kind of demanding content, key studies that prove
how the solution works in the context that is similar
to our buyers, sharing step by step processes our solutions

(16:38):
in other ways to solve the problem that our product
solves as well. And then one on one type of
content could be business cases that we might work together
with the account executive on active focus accounts could be
account specific solutions. We love using what we call account

(17:01):
love letters. These are basically linked in written for specific
account and then also when we have as we usually
have a buying committee in the target accounts, we will
also write specific content to address specific challenges or questions

(17:26):
objections of the specific stakeholder and align it with their
goals and gpis. So I mentioned practically we are talking
about content that is supposed to be used by sales
to help them drive those deals. And I want to
share a very practical example of how we might create
content for one cluster. So here is an example here

(17:53):
where we have back in September, ran a campaign which
was focused on a cluster of accounts that were basically
we discovered that there was a new challenge that was
coming up. Everybody was talking about being under pressure to

(18:15):
deliver new results, that there was additional pressure to deploy
a I without really like do more with less kind
of pressure. So we decided to basically address cmos who
are struggling with this challenge. And what you can see
here is we have taken this big topic, we broke

(18:39):
it down into We call this cluster decomposition or challenge decomposition.
Take down this big topic, break you down into specific
challenges topics you know, kind of mistakes, status quo, etc.
Then for each of those subtopics we create a piece
of content what you can see in the second can line.

(19:01):
These are usually LinkedIn posts. We like to focus on
social for different reasons. We have addressed this several times,
but basically helps itself engagement, It provides direct feedback and
as you can see in the next step, all of
these pieces now can be used as a narrative within

(19:24):
an event. So each and every LinkedIn post can become
a slide in the in the in the webinar that
that in this case, it was a webinar, an event
that we organize, so we usually actually start with that
narrative linked to a webinar. So we decide upfront in
this case to run a webinar how to survive as

(19:47):
a B B two B CMO and drive enterprise pipeline
in artificial intelligence in an II E era and then
we start breaking this down how we would tell this
during the webinar, and then we create those pieces of
content that we can then re purpose. And then actually

(20:09):
we already also here around a content call creation, which
is another type of content that works really well for
sales engagement. And finally, all of that assets that we
create we can also repurpose, and we did repurpose as
a market research report. So the point here that I
wanted to share the main points that I wanted to share,

(20:30):
it's linked to clusters, the specific cluster of accounts shared challenge.
We look at how we can repurpose that, and we
focus on sales interaction. But as you can see, there's
a lot of repurposing going going on here. So it's
not like that you have to create all of the
content from stretch.

Speaker 2 (20:51):
And I'll just add five cents very quickly here, what
do you say on the slide? Obviously, what we could unshad,
what we couldn't put there is one to one content,
right that's also essential to keep in mind. What you
guys see is the let's say, orchestration of account based
content strategy, but at the same time that would be

(21:13):
engaged accounts, right that need further personalization specific content, et cetera,
right in multiple formats, business cases, et cetera. The key
point is that you create outline and then you can
tweak it to specific ware persona. Then you can tweak
it to specific account based on account research. Right. So
just to make sure that you see the full picture,

(21:37):
it's this one too many and one to few layers.
Also I aligned with one to one right and marketing
should help with this as well. So what is also
interesting here as you can see lots of these activities
that what mentioned webinars, social posts, market research, they create

(21:58):
tones of engagement data right and basically the first party
engagement data what we have absorbed quite often. That's many
companies we are working with. They have really good technology stack,
they track in ten data, they track different signals, etc.
But there is a big problem. First of all, this

(22:20):
information is scattered across multiple systems and platforms. And the
second problem, there is simply no ownership of that stack.
That means that the teams they expect that the sales
reps would be on just as synchronously checking every platform

(22:42):
and tracking the signals or engagement data and knowing what
to do. But what we absorve. In reality, it's I'm
not saying that it's the case for every company, right,
but what we absorve and often sales they treat every
signal as the buying and ten signal, which means, okay,
I'm has happened. We need to send out each email

(23:03):
trying to book a dema and we can't judge them
for this. Obviously, the goal is to they are responsible
to bring the business, but the problem is that they
don't see the whole picture of what's going on in
these accounts. They quite often don't know to whom reach

(23:23):
out to, and that's why quite often if this is
not the engaged accounts that they are currently working on
opportunity creation, they might be just ignoring the signals. So
to avoid this many years ago, we created a streamlined
process and so builders with clients and that works really
well where marketed becomes an owner of all of these

(23:47):
signals engagement and intent and bring them into one place
and then cross share with the ABM team with the
sales reps that are involved in the account based market.
And what does that mean? That means that we're depending
on the let's pick up the ideal scenario, right, the

(24:08):
company uses HubSpot or sales Force, so maybe another sem
Not really, it won't be a big difference. So, first
of all, would you find the standard of a count
research and how it should be saved? Should it be
saved as a count node or the custom fields, et cetera. Right,
the same for engagement data for the signals and what
format do we want to track it, how do we

(24:30):
want to keep it? Next, where do you find together
what are the important signals that we want to track,
because not all signals are relevant. Right, There's also one
thing that I would love to mention, we just caused
this a lot. Blood that signals today is a commodity.
It's not a differentiator. It's not an added value. Why

(24:53):
because everybody has access to tools like Clay for example,
or any other platforms that provide you intent and engagement signals. Right,
So just saying hey, I saw you raised money or
you announce this, that's why I'm reaching out. It's not
moving the needle. It's not helping to get the replies.

(25:14):
What actually helps is when you make sense of all
of the signals and then you start doing the account planning.
Was everything that we know not just one separate signal right,
what's everything that we know about the account? What could
that mean in terms of the viral journey? And what
could be the next meaningful step? How can we together

(25:37):
as marketing and sales work on it. This is essential,
right because quite often we see that the teams they
just keep these signals isolated, each from one from each other. Right,
there is no comprehensive feature, So a comprehensive view of
all the interactions and engagement, and quite often seals are

(25:58):
not aware of marketing interactions with the account, and twice versa,
marketing is not aware of the researcher conversations that has
been happening the sales, and then it all leads to inefficiency.
So that's why from this perspective, we believe that tracking
the signals, engagement, inten data created unified system to collect

(26:19):
all of this information to create in some way, if
you will, three hundred and sixty degree view of all
customer engagement. Right, and then planning together the sales. The
next actions is the marketing responsibility of sales won't be
doing this. Maybe in different organizations that could be the case,
but we have never seen, let's say, as successful ownership

(26:43):
by sales. So that, but on the contrary, when marketing
owns this, this usually works well and then from this
point both teams can work together on the father playbooks
and activation.

Speaker 1 (26:58):
All Right, we already mentioned webinars is kind of a
key piece of content, and we mentioned that we like
to when we run campaign or a program for one
cluster of accounts that we want to like to start
with the narrative of that webinar as kind of a

(27:18):
core narrative, build a content around it. Next to using
that event or a webinar as let's say, the key
narrative or the driver let's say of that narrative. It
actually makes it just so much easier also for people
when you're talking to let's say a subject matter expert
to think about what are the messages, what are the

(27:41):
things that we need to say to our target accounts
about this challenge, about this use case, etc. When you
make them think in terms of key, imagine that you're
speaking at an event or now we are working on
the narrative for the webinar the event, it's much easier
for them to create it. Now, that's one part of it.
The second part of it is also like as an

(28:02):
ABM lead it's really helpful to have an event to
align everybody and to have a specific milestone. It's a
very practical thing and it really helps because kind of
everything builds towards that bigger milestone. So we are warming
up accounts with our content, with our sales engagement, and

(28:24):
kind of everything is leading up to that event. And
what when we speak about events, when we speak about webinars,
we speak about account based webinars. We speak about account
based events. So it's very important for the marketing team
to realize that this is not just you know, running

(28:45):
yet another webinar. This has to be aligned with the
top challenges of our target account cluster. In terms of
the topic. We want to have a speaker that is
actually an expert and knowledgeable about it. The webinar needs
not to be about the product. It needs to be
about It needs to be educational, not masking to be educational,

(29:10):
and you a product pitch that is asking to be educational,
and very very important is that to really get results
out of that, we definitely need to think about how
can we work with sales to engage those people who
are signing up for the webinar beforehand? How are we

(29:33):
going to engage them during the event, how are we
going to engage them after the event? Right, So thinking
about this defining what are the insights that we can collect,
for example, during the webinar using webinar polls, using the
webinar sign up form. When sales is connecting to people

(29:55):
who register for the webinar, they can also reach out
to them and ask them a question, what are you learn?
What is the top challenge that you would like us
to discuss during the webinar and then also the follow up.
So there is actually a lot of moving parts. Uh,
there is a lot of coordination that needs to be done.

(30:18):
And this is actually what marketing needs to own. Usually
it is marketing who owns the events, but usually this
is not how they run them. Usually it's like, okay,
we have this event, we plan it, we invite people,
we promote it a little bit, you know, maybe we
run some pay promotion, we send it to the email.

(30:38):
Then when it's done, we send the follow up email.
Maybe we pass the list of leads to sales who
And I've seen this taking I'm not saying this because
I'm trying to be mean, but it's just a reality.
Maybe sales follow follow follow up with them a monthly

(31:01):
never untime. It's not really high on their priorities. So
if everything is synchronized from the beginning, if you have
sat down with sales and defined that webinar so it's
actually relevant to the target accounts. If they have been
there from the beginning engaging them and you have planned
exactly what they need to do and how to follow up,
it's much easier. And then at the end of the webinar,

(31:24):
very important is to take all the attendees upfront, everybody
who registered, see who of those are actually belonging to
target accounts. Having this data just to begin with is
a lot of organizations don't even have. Then looking through
those accounts and seeing like which of those accounts we

(31:45):
actually have, you know, which of those accounts are engaged,
Which of those accounts that we have some insight about.
Maybe some of these people have shared the question during
the webinar, Maybe some of them have left a comment
when they were signing up Intact Activit sales. Maybe there
were multiple engagements. So this is what Andrew was actually explaining.

(32:05):
Collecting all of the insights into one place about that
account allows it to know where that account is potentially
in the in the buying process. In our case we
use like three lists. We spoke about it many times
uh and then organizing the follow up. So depending on

(32:28):
where they are, are they are account or not, did
they attend or not, did they ask a questions or not,
you can have specific follow ups. We also advise to
advise to define upfront a bridge activity, which is basically
something that is a natural next step after the webinar,
let's say a strategy session with our SME or with

(32:52):
the account executive, a kind of an audit let's say
technology audit or an audit of the process, some sort
of added value adding advice that we can give to
the people that is related to the topic of the webinar,
which is a natural bridge between you know, I've been

(33:14):
engaged in a webinar because I wanted to learn. Now
I want to dive deeper and maybe and in some
cases and a lot of cases, actually this progresses into
a discovery conversation and sometimes also into a sales qualified opportunity.
So as you can see, there are a lot of
moving parts in the webinar. You want to align it

(33:35):
with the topic. You want to align that with the
content that you're creating, and that sales is sharing the
other via the social profile, so that everything is basically
aligned and naturally going from you engagement in content, to
the webinar to the post rabin and engagement. There are
multiple touch points. So if you're talking about what is

(33:56):
the marketing role is basically making sure that it's properly
that you implement as many of those touch points as possible,
because that's how you're going to get better results. So
that is another one.

Speaker 2 (34:11):
Yeah, I just wanted to quickly bring this while we
are still touching the content and webinar in some sense
still the part of the content, right, can you give
examples of the one to one content and the format
Even the webinar that Loot mentioned that could be one
to one webinar in some environments, I mean some clients,
we were doing fully personalized webinars just for a specific account.

(34:36):
That could be a format and delivery of that content, right,
Or it could be the workshops or proof of concept creation,
free consultations. What mentioned has preache activity, it's also a
format of one to one content. But besides of this,
let's say if you think about the typical formats, it
could be the business cases right or project mammals for

(34:57):
specific wire personas. It could be techt content that has
addressed on specific questions of the specific buyer, right migration,
security certificates, comparison data, whatever products, snapshots, proprietary data, could
be multiple formats right content HLPs. These are the digital

(35:17):
rooms of personalized lended pages with the content that is
based on the account research relevant to specific bid committee members.
And one of the formats that what mentioned the account
love letters. This is something that probably you guys might
be interested in. I dropped the link in the chat

(35:38):
just to give you an example, right the love letter
that I wrote a company called ag Gie Cup from friends,
which at some point was our strategic account. So you
can just see an example that's also a format of
this fully personalized one to one content. I see a

(36:00):
lot of questions, but again the fun will cover them.
Let's make sure that we finished Everson on time.

Speaker 1 (36:06):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (36:06):
We we have a couple of things that we want
to shore with you guys, and the next one I
will very briefly cover because as well, we have an
in depth guide on measuring a BM. I will drop
a link right now measuring a BM. So we have
the ABM reports and KPIs. You can read it again

(36:31):
on our substract. What I want to mention here is
that obviously if we do anything the sales again, we
can't expect them tracking the activities right or tracking the
ultimate reports they would be. They would be definitely having
own reports and reporting on UH discovery, calls, on pipeline

(36:52):
coverage on pipeline created, on revenue right. But we all
know that ABM is a long term strategy and we
can't really if we are running ABM right now, we
are running the pilot program, we can't always report on revenue.
But that also doesn't mean that our program is not

(37:15):
performing right. So what we need to have in place
is the set of leading and leg and indicators that
represent the program efficiency right, making sure that there is
a constant progress. These indicators would be definitely dependent on

(37:37):
the types of the playbox that you are running, but
in natural the leading indicators are the activities that are
under our control right, pieces of content created, accounts, research
by a committee, engaged invited to the webinar, for example,
and the leg and indicators would be maybe account engagement,

(37:58):
account penetration, account replies, discovery, calls as well the part
of legging indicators. And then we have the revenue metrics, right,
so revenue metrics or the sales opportunity created revenue. Also,
if you're r on an expansion, you can customize it.
That could be the expansion revenue, et cetera. And what

(38:19):
we believe one very helpful metric to track is the
account velocity. We have our own framework for this that
we cover in full Final Academy. And this assumption that
if you guys, because you asked a lot of questions
about the playbooks, the examples of the content, the documentation,

(38:40):
we have all of this in our ABM course. So
if you're the interested, you can check it and drop
the link in the chat. But I will briefly explain
this metric account velocity. How fast we are moving accounts
that fit our ICP create here from being called from
being completely unaware of us to the awareness stage and

(39:01):
them to the opportunity stage. Right, So this criteria you need,
of course define the sales. But at the end of
the day, what would be helpful if you'll create a
simple dashboard. You can use Google sheets, you can create
this in HubSpot. You can use tools like hockey Stack
for example, in the substack article that I share it

(39:24):
with you, there is a copy of hockey Stack report.
I share it with them our reports and Google sheets,
and they created the let's say digital dashboard in their product,
so something that you can track as well. The point
is that it should be easy, easily understandable by everybody
in your team. Leading indicators, legging indicators, revenue metrics, and

(39:52):
the account velocity. These are the most meanionful metrics and
digitails you can read in the post. I want to
be sure that because we need to finish in twenty minutes,
as we promised that we're not going to keep this
podcast more than one hour based on your feedback, So
I would love to give a chance to what to

(40:14):
present this important area because I believe this is what
is often missed engagement with the ecosystem.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
Yeah, I think this is not typically what you would assume.
A marketing role is to participate in outreach and engagement, right,
And it's not a marketing role to engage the target
buyers and book the sales calls. That's not what we mean.
But when you look at today's buyer journey, we know

(40:44):
from the research that buyers actually are much more likely
to trust somebody's recommendation if that's a person that's their peer,
or somebody from the industry, somebody from the network, somebody
they know already and trust. So the sole ecosystem around

(41:05):
target accounts which includes brands and people and maybe niche
communities and industries that our buyers belong to or follow.
So in other words, people they already people in brands
and communities they already trust. If your brand is part
of those conversations, you're much more likely to be on

(41:27):
the radar. They are going to trust those recommendations, en dorment,
those messages much more than they will trust vendor marketing.
And so what is the role of marketing here. It's
a little bit of a more complex diagram, but what
you see basically is you see the buying committee, where

(41:47):
you see the kind of the corol of the buying committee,
and then some people who kind of could be the
influencer in the buying process or even marketer like people
who could help you connect to target target buyers. So
marketing role here other than you know, helping sales with

(42:08):
content and engagement, et cetera, is limited to, for example,
what a marketer could do is they could connect to
marketers in target accounts even though they might not be
the part of the buying committee. Why and how because
let's say, well, let me put it like this. So

(42:31):
we have a client and spoke to the experienced sales
director from that from the company, and he said, look,
it's impossible for a junior SDR to engage our senior buyers,
which are I T directors, et cetera. So what we do,

(42:52):
he said, which is very difficult for the SDR. We
have our executives, which in their case are the CMO
and the CEO sometimes connect with those executives. They shared
thought leadership on LinkedIn. They have their podcast where they
speak to executives as well, so this is somewhere. This

(43:13):
is kind of peer to peer interaction between on the
executive level. And as you can see already here marketing,
the CMO takes an active role in creating the total
leadership and connecting to the executive team of the target accounts.
But as an ABM marketer you can facilitate that. It's
very logical that you connect to another marketer there whose

(43:35):
role is to promote the company. So let's say there
was a podcast interview, you can connect to them, you
can co promote it. Maybe if this is a you've
done a customer webinars, you can connect to the marketing
team from the customers to co promote it. You can
also be connecting to people like some industry influencers, to

(44:00):
niche media owners, to partners and their marketing teams. So
there're actually a lot of people and brands and their
marketing teams that marketing can connect to and help actually
create this engage basically the ecosystem and create this you know,

(44:22):
halo effect of you know, your brand being mentioned by
those trusted influencers in the space, and by influencers I
don't mean like Instagram and YouTube fitness influencers, I mean
like voices in the industry that your buyers are actually
listening to. So this is something that we've been discussing
a lot like that. We see also in some of

(44:47):
the teams, their marketers are kind of more hands on,
want to want to sit down and actually help with engagement,
but don't want to be posting about industry stuff on
their profile, don't want to be connected target buyers. That's
not necessary, but there's definitely a role in engagement. Also
for the marketers sore if you want to maybe take

(45:13):
the remaining stuff wrap it up so we get to
some of the questions.

Speaker 2 (45:18):
Yeah, absolutely, I would just address one of the popular
questions that I see. So we always share the recording. Uh,
there should be an email called the recording of the
full Final Life. But just in case, guys, if you'll
miss that email for whatever is, and you're always welcome

(45:39):
to reach out either to me or to blat on
LinkedIn and we'll share that recording museum. So we'll never
keep it private. So don't worry. Back to the topic
that what mentioned right, just a simple playbook if you'll
look at it right. Remember we mentioned this last step

(46:01):
program that we were running right about how to survive
as B two b CMO in AI era Out of
Curiosity type plus in the chat if you have attended
that webinar or signed up and watched the recording and
minus if you didn't. I'm just curious to see how
many of you have seen this. So as a part

(46:22):
of this program what Blood mentioned, we have we were
doing this content collaboration and practical example. Uh, maybe some
of you know Castle and Booth she was working for
Pavilion as VP of Marketing the Popular Community and part

(46:43):
of that research obviously we were doing with the piece
of marketing, but she is well known sort leader in
our space. She's the p of marketing of popular Community
where we know our target audience is right, So from
that perspective, instead of Jazz, let's say a flood was
engaging with the piece of marketing only right, Uh, we

(47:06):
couldn't get that additional reach. So in that sense, if
you'll think I'm acting as marketer, I was reaching out
to castlein and others at leaders in our space and
suggested them to participate to be a part of this research.
And then we had this engagement with Castle and she
was also another podcast speaking of our assignment in the past,

(47:29):
so some relationship was already in place, so I asked
you and then we had a couple of pieces of
content that for example, in our case at CIS. But
let's say if you have sales team, right, you could
create this piece of content for sales and then you
can see Blood customized a bit and created this piece

(47:51):
of how B to B leaders deploy AI to scale
revenue and you see the red quadrant, right, We featured
Castle and there alongside John Ealder and a lot of
other leaders. A nice piece of content that helps to
boost that awareness because some of these people they are
also cross sharing this from their profiles. They engage and

(48:12):
that's just simply the engagement boosts that post to their network, right,
and this is what is helping us to create the environment.
Another tactic, like what we were doing, we were reaching
out and what you can it's with other clients, right
as marketers, we were reaching out to market and counterparts

(48:33):
and asking like, hey, for example, feature it your cito
and so you guys might enjoy whatever. If you want,
we can do the cop promotion or if you would
be willing, here's the quote for example, you can publish
on your linked in page, et cetera. So the entire
point here is that we don't wait, right and don't
just give sales that playbook to engage with the accounts,

(48:57):
but also we help to create that awareness and that
norturance through different ecosystems. And apparently I see not so
many people attended that weabinar. It's interesting because we had
eleven hundred sign ups, as assumed that everybody who is
listening to the podcast that's also been there, So if
you would be interested, we can share with you the recording. Again,

(49:21):
just pink me on LinkedIn and I will share the
recording and the deck. So coming back to this, right,
the entire point is that marketing should take an active
participation and what we have observed sales loved. I have
never heard a bad feedback from any sales rep saying hey,
I hate when you guys are helping me to create

(49:43):
when create awareness or help me to get inside these accounts. Right,
so sales always appreciated. And one more we have two
basically two areas to cover, so let's do it quickly.
Another one is that the documentation.

Speaker 1 (50:03):
Yeah, I think when it comes to documentation and operationalization
of the process, especially after a brand and the pilot,
if you are the abm ME, then you're owning the process.
What you want to do is you want to run
the analysis of the pilot if you've just finished the pilot,

(50:27):
review of the processes that worked, and document everything. And
you want to document it not in a way of
just you know, these are the steps that we took
and things that we did, but also using the examples
of the exactly like okay, how did we do the
account research. Can you show me the example, why did
you select this account, how did we reach out to them,
how did we find the buyers, what exactly sales did,

(50:50):
what kind of contented views? So the more you can
include the exact examples, it's going to be helpful to
later onboard new people to make sure that this processes
go from you know, we did it once to becoming
a repeatable, operationalized process. But also if you want to
deploy AI to scale your processes, exactly this documentation can

(51:11):
be turned into a kind of a prompt, and exactly
these examples can be used as what we like to
call quality benchmarks, where you can show the AI but
also people who come after what good looks like. Right,
So the best way to train AI is to show
the example of output that is high quality output. So

(51:36):
and the process and the process, like I said, like
the documented process becomes the prompt. Right, So it's like
not only that you want to document this and primarily
for the team, but also if you want to scale
that later with AI. Now you're not like doing it
in a let's say, in a way expecting AI to

(52:02):
magically act as a buyer to create outdre scripts and
things or content, but are actually based on a proven process,
based on the data that you have collected, based on
the examples of what could like, what the good result
looks like, and basically what I wanted to say here.
The main point here is nobody will do this if

(52:24):
this is not owned. So this needs to be owned
by the ABM need and needs to be part of
the responsibility. Otherwise it's not going to happen. You're need
to miss out on actually being able to prorationionalize and
if you're not operationalizing this, you cannot scale it. The
exact same remark that we made about AI is the

(52:44):
same way. If you want to onboard new team members
and these are the ways you will scale this. You
will be working with more people, you will be automating
or augmenting some processes AI and other technologies, etc. The
templates that we use that can be helpful. I think

(53:05):
that we have documented a lot of times our clients
basically already. We purpose some of our documentation because we
have done it so many times, so we always like
to share this with our community. We also included in
our academy where we share examples of what good looks

(53:26):
like where we share the detail documentation of the processes, templates,
et cetera, all accessible. We had the full funnel academy
and the comments where we share this.

Speaker 2 (53:41):
And I think we can just very quickly wrap up
the last area, which is the most obvious and probably
everybody is doing this, right, ran and ads the target accounts,
not only let's say the direct ads, but also SUT
leadership ads promoted the account based content that you have created. Right,

(54:02):
it's kind of the st leadership ads or ads generally
they become your distribution accelerator. Right, you just guarantee that
it will appear in the US fee of the target accounts,
just building that least together with sales creating that content,
boosting it to the target accounts, promoting the same webinar

(54:23):
to the predefined buyer persona and target accounts. This is
also the area that should be owned by marketing. So
this one the seven core areas that marketing owns. The
last one that we want to very quickly present and
then we'll answer your questions guys, is the processes that
marketing should work on together with sales. Literally will you

(54:46):
find these six pillars right of account based playbook? We
call it the six A framework just because A repeats
so often in it. The first one is account selection, right,
that's all about A is all about accounts. Account selection
the clear, tangible, measurable account qualification criteria that anybody in

(55:08):
your team can apply and qualify the account. It should
be done. It should It shouldn't be created by sales,
and it shouldn't be just created by marketing and silence.
You need to meet together and create this criteria. And
this is the only way to avoid let's say, discussions
about the lead quality that marketing leads are bad, right,

(55:30):
because then when you have this criteria in place, you
simply won't be delivering bad leads. And b you avoid
the gods feeling qualification. You know when somebody in the
room says, oh, I know this is the perfect account.
Why I just have that feeling?

Speaker 1 (55:46):
I know?

Speaker 2 (55:47):
Right, So we need to avoid this. We need to
have something that anybody in your team can use and
easily qualify the accounts. Next, account segmentation, how we prioritize
the accounts. This is and that we have covered multiple
times right with sub segment all accounts, by the likelihood
have created an opportunity completely called accounts seat and cluster

(56:09):
ICP was the goal to create print awareness. Then the
future pipelines accounts that hit our engagement threshold. This is
where we start involving sales and the goal is to
run account research and validata needs and actually focus accounts.
These are the accounts that sit and now one to
one playbooks right, where we work together with sales and
created opportunities. Account research. We have mentioned this already a

(56:33):
couple of times. Rates the definition of good. How should
we be doing that research? What information should we collect,
How we are going to use this information? Where and
how should we store this information? Next? Three most important
parts of the executional playbooks. How we are going to
create awareness among our target buyers? Right? Spoiler, it's not

(56:58):
by running more ads and certain more emails. Right? What
will actually help us to engage these buyers? What will
attract the attention? Then? Account development? How can we do
the smoothest thread and how can we keep this constant
nurturing and conversations with our target accounts? Going on to
validate their needs to understand whether they are in the

(57:19):
buyer journey? And lastly, account activation. Right, what we are
going to do as the team to create sales opportunities,
what can help us what type of one to one
content right? What types of one to one activities will
help us to book the discovery call or accelerate the
deal if it's already in the pipeline. So these playbooks

(57:39):
should never be created just by one of the teams
and should never be created in the silace. We have
seen multiple times when marketing with the best contention create
the playbooks come to sales, print super detailed deck on
boarding them on what sales should be doing. But you

(57:59):
got all know the sad story, right, No sales rep
ever asked marketing to design for them the engagement playbox.
So this is where we need to flip the funnel
and instead of telling them what they are supposed to do,
because this is the ABM best practice, we need to
co create with them by start by basically answering these questions, right,

(58:22):
how can we create that awareness? How can we do
this engagement? And it would be very helpful if you'll
bring subject matter expert, somebody who used to be as
your target barer persona who can provide an immediate feedback
right on every activity that you are going to run. So,
with that being said, we can answer a couple of

(58:44):
questions that we have in the Q and A section
while what picks up the first one? Let us know, guys,
what's the seconds that helpful? Did you loan something? You
just give us a shot feedback.

Speaker 1 (58:58):
So let me and address this interesting question from Daniel.
How do you go about creating and segmenting your one
to one versus one to few versus one too many targets?
And we just recently posted about it, So let me
just oh, excuse me, I'm just looking out how I

(59:21):
can share quickly my screens? Me? Can I not have
to stop sharing so I can share my skin? Okay?
Let me just do that. Okay, so I'll paste also
the link to this post. But basically, can you see

(59:42):
my screen?

Speaker 2 (59:43):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (59:44):
Yes, okay, I think maybe even better like this? No?
Oh yes, yeah, much better. So basically we split accounts
into three lists. All of these accounts belong to the
same account cluster. That's why the first list is cluster ICP.
These are accounts that belong to a specific cluster, but

(01:00:07):
that don't know us. We don't know them, they don't
know us, they're not aware a future pipeline. That means
accounts that are vendor aware, so they're aware of our brand,
but we are not really sure if they have the
product need, if they have any let's say priority challenges
that our product can solve. And then finally active focus

(01:00:30):
their accounts that we know them, they know us, so
there's some level of relationship that are aware of us.
There's multiple engagements usually and we have insight that tells us, hey,
you know what they have the product need, they have
a need that we can actually help solve. And the
way that we do this and the way we're out

(01:00:51):
it is explaining this post that I will post here.
But essentially, obviously we check whether they are fitting our
ICP and belong to a club faster, then we checked
the under awareness where without going to a lot of details,
the signals that we use explaining the post, but I

(01:01:13):
think Andrew also mentioned it several times. This is stuff
that you decided together with sales. Example was like more
than two visits to the high intent page, you know,
joining the webinar with you know, one or two buyers,
things like that explain in the post. And then if yes,

(01:01:35):
do they have a product need, did we get some
inside some signals that they actually have a product need.
Maybe that's something we found out in back and forth
conversations with them. Maybe they shared that, you know, during
the webinar, in a poll or something like that. We
have that information usually coming from the buyer, and that's

(01:01:58):
how we then split them up and then also be
aligned both the activities and the content with this stage,
so we make it practical. I will drop the link
in the comment, so Andre, if you won't pick up
a next question, I can. I can take it. I

(01:02:21):
see that Andre has left the building, so I'll need
to address the other questional problem. If people are still staying,
I want to drop the link to this post and
give you the Let me just very quickly copy that

(01:02:43):
link here. Well, let's answer the next one from Slava.
What's your single source of truth to track the tent
engagement signal, CRM spreadsheet or another system? So, I mean,

(01:03:04):
I'll say it depends, but basically it depends because simply
because if in your organization, sometimes marketing doesn't even have
access to the CRM system, if you can pull everything
in your CRM, that's ideal because whenever the account will

(01:03:26):
you know, hopefully ever create an opportunity with that account,
and that account will be assigned to an account executive.
Account executives use the CRM. Salespeople use the CRM. So
if you can have all this information about that account
within the CRM, that's the best. What does it mean
in the CRM you have? I know teams that have

(01:03:47):
built like complete AI enable signal engines that pull everything
in and push it to the CRM. Kind of the
most advanced version of this to teams that have defined
custom fields in their CRM to a note important information.

(01:04:08):
To teams that create notes, like salespeople normally put the notes.
They create a special note called account insight or account
scorecard or something like that, put it in there. I
know other teams that use spreadsheet like Slava mentioned, it
could be as well a spreadsheet as maybe during the

(01:04:31):
pilot you might start with the spreadsheet. It's not a
bad idea. It actually can help you see what is
the information that it's actually relevant, What is the information
that you can collect, What is the information that is
being actually used before changing the CRM and before maybe
implementing a more complicated process around it. Whatever you use,

(01:04:56):
I think the key point is that one you agree
with else together where this information will be stored b
you have defined roles. Who needs to check what engagement
data like each week? You know, let's say SDR should
share the engagement based on the conversations they had the

(01:05:20):
Let's say somebody from revops might bring you some data
from the marketing automation system. Let's say if you had
events or webinars from the webinar event registration system, whatever
you're using, et cetera, et cetera. So whatever, you need
to have the sources of information, but you also need

(01:05:44):
to have people or technology if you have it, that
will actually regularly take that information and put in the
right place. And even when you have and I've seen
like very advanced systems completely automated, if there is no
person responsible to make sense of this data. If this
person is not bringing those insights to the team regularly,

(01:06:07):
those insights are frequently not used. So the best practice
we like to implement is keep them all in one place,
but also during the weekly pipeline review meetings, bring the
most relevant insights about the accounts to those meetings. Hopefully
that answers that question. Let me see another one another

(01:06:36):
question here that is yeah, that interesting one from ADELA.
What if sales are already doing all the activities listed
on their own. And I believe that Adela asked this
question while I was talking about the webinar, and you

(01:06:57):
know what I mean, if this is really the case,
this is awesome, right. I have yet to see when
this is done in a way that we were talking
about it, you know, in a systematic way before after
the webinar, where you know, you know, sharing the content,

(01:07:18):
the right content from your profile, engaging with the target accounts,
connecting with them, sharing this content, inviting into the events,
pre connecting before the events, following up one on one
after the events, et cetera. I mean, sales is already
doing everything, and you're working with them, and you're both
synchronized on the target accounts, and you're using the right content,

(01:07:40):
you have the right content strategy. You're already doing it.
So well done and congratulations, and you're probably seeing the
results from that activity. But a lot of teams are
not yet in that position. So we also had a
complete session about two weeks ago, I believe because it's

(01:08:02):
about ABM audit, because a lot of teams say, you know, oh,
we are already doing ABM or we are doing this
type of activity, But there is a difference between let's say,
the ways that we see are highly effective and bring
a lot of results and other ways that may be
you know, halfway there, et cetera. So we went deep

(01:08:25):
and broke down I think six different categories of activities,
and one of them is also sales engagement, one of
the most important ones. So where we cover like, what
do we actually mean when we sales sales engagement? What
high effectiveness, high quality sales engagement should look like. So
that could be an interesting resource. Was there another one?

(01:08:49):
I think this might have been answered by Jamie? How
long are your sprints? We usually go for parts of
a quarter and we run each and every ABM project
with weekly sprints. And by sprints, I mean every week
we meet together and we make a micro week plan

(01:09:12):
for the next week. We look at what are the
new accounts that are being engaged. So we don't treat
our list as a static list. We treat them as
dynamic lists. So you know, maybe because accounts they don't
sit still things that are happening in the market, Things
are happening in those target accounts there are responding or

(01:09:32):
not responding to our outreach, responding or not responding to
the content that we're sharing, to the marketing activities that
we are running, and we basically look at that. That's
why I said, like every week we should bring all
the relevant engagement data about our target accounts. We should
give you these three lists that I just shared, you know,
the cluster ICP, Future Pipeline and Active Focus. Are some

(01:09:54):
accounts moving from list to the other list. Maybe we
you know, haad and account in an Active Focus list,
we believed, you know, there was engagement, there was reason
to believe that there are in the buying process right now.
We try to engage them in multiple ways. After multiple weeks,
we may decide to deprioritize them, there is no response,

(01:10:15):
We maybe you know, park them back into the cluster
ICEP of Future pipelineist and try to engage them let's
say a month later or the next quarter or something
like that. So it's basically that ongoing process where you
basically adjust both the lists you plan together, what are

(01:10:37):
the next activities, how you're going to engage those accounts.
What is the content you need to be produced? So
sprints you can look at them that way, can be
the short weekly sprints. But if you want to roll
out the first time in ABM. We usually do it
over a period of a quarter, you know, with some
preparation et cetera, together with sales. Maybe a shortest toes,

(01:11:00):
but usually we try to get it in a quarter.
Andre you're back, you want to take another question?

Speaker 2 (01:11:08):
Which one we didn't cover?

Speaker 1 (01:11:10):
I think there was this one, but a market is
answered to me. The one was answered all the others
I think I covered already.

Speaker 2 (01:11:22):
Good, well, thank you for covering this well. I took
a few minutes off, so again, thank you so much
guys for a fantastic engagement and for fantastic questions that
this always helps us to. Let's say, Taylor the narrative
and prepare the relevant examples for you. Next week, probably

(01:11:45):
will host the last episode for this specific season before
we'll take the Christmas pouse, so stay tuned. Will announced
the next topic next Monday. By the time would be
the same Wednesday, mind such am Eastern time, Austria Central
European time. Vicially, have fantastic week and see you next week.

(01:12:07):
Take care everyone, Cheers by