We all see a new face, so Judy Sheriff is stepping in for Megan Bowen who had a last-minute scheduling conflict. Judy's a rock star, she works closely with CRS Scott and myself on the client side and it's been here many years, so excited to get her perspective in this conversation as well, but that is not Megan. Thank you Evan. Sorry everybody, you have to deal with me today, not Megan.
I'll try to fill her shoes. Cool. So today we're going to dive into all things ABM specific. One thing that we talked a lot about internally is just how subjective the acronym really is and how everybody comes up with a new definition.
We have conversations with clients who kind of define it one way. We have other clients who just think it's paid media only and I think it's just, it's good to have this conversation and dialogue to recognize that it's not, there's no clear one definition or one way to define ABM. It's like how your organization can utilize it and what tools and tactics it needs in order to scale and I think that that's the biggest blocker for us is when we have conversations with clients in perspective, prospects, it's like, we need to run ABM and we dig a little bit deeper and it's like, what does that mean to you and they just want to run a targeted account list or they want ads in front of a certain prospect, but there's no really thought beyond that. I think the goal of this conversation really is to frame it up around four key pillars is understanding across our group of people and just a lot of anybody listening if you're a perspective too, but what does ABM mean to us?
How would you get started? Some of the tips and tricks that we utilize, what makes it hard, what are some of the blockers and the bullshit that just frustrating to deal with and then measurement? That's a key component for a lot of this. It's kind of the path that we're going to take on, but yeah, I think we can just probably jump into it.
We'll probably wrap up the last 15 minutes or so with any questions that you might have, but throughout this we want to keep it super conversational, so bring those live, come on to chat, turn out your camera, whatever you want to do and get started. Cool. Judy, I might kick it off with you since you are the mega replacement at the moment, but I forgot to put myself here as a sitting duck. No, but I would love to just kind of across the group.
What's your perspective on what ABM means to you? How do you define it or how you define it over your career? Yeah, I was actually just talking with one of our directors here about this this week around the fact that I feel like I have any acronym in marketing. ABM has really been pervasive for a decade and we're still talking to companies where it's like we want to do this for the first time or it's a new initiative for us.
It's our big focus for 2025. And I feel like in 2015 I was sitting on demand-based demos talking about personalizing our website. So kudos to whoever has driven this ABM acronym because I think it's had such longevity. But even before it became a thing with marketing, it's not a revolutionary concept really.
I think before we had the tech, sales was still going after target account lists and having a coordinated effort on the sales front, we had technology that allows us to get really specific with who we're marketing to. But I think in my mind when I see true successful ABM across our client base, it's the coordinated effort between marketing and sales to really surround their ideal ICP potential customers with the marketing messages to put the company top of mind and then a coordinated sales follow up to those same accounts. I think it's also beyond just the digital touch point of marketing and thinking about how your ideal target account list is flowing into your event strategy, direct mail, any marketing touch point where you can go after a specific audience, how is your target account list audience fitting into that? I think that technology plays such a big part in that.
Sarah, I'd be curious to answer any of your closest clients like what your perspective is on how you think about ABM. Yeah, I mean, I think Judy, like you're totally right. Like I remember before I was at Refine Labs, I was at another company and before that I was at another company and both of those companies before we were talking about what we were talking about with account-based marketing. And really what the conversation was was who are we targeting?
It's a targeting strategy at the highest level. And so I think with any targeting strategy, you're going to need alignment with your sales team because they are ultimately the folks that are going to be driving people through your sales funnel and buying funnel and hoping that they purchase whatever you're selling. And so with account-based marketing, it's really this notion of being a little bit more strategic into not just the people that you want to target, but the accounts that you want to target. And with some of our technology evolution over the last decade, we've seen a lot more information around accounts and it gives us a little bit more of a strategy around who we should be targeting and what's right for our business.
And so I think that it makes for a sense to me that this is a continual conversation just as targeting in general from a marketing perspective is a continual conversation. And so I think with account-based marketing, it's really more about trying to figure out who your list is first and foremost and what tools you need to implement to gain that list or get a sense of what that list is. And then of course, like I agree with what Judy said, is having this alignment between your team and then of course your sales team and maybe even your operations team and maybe even some other teams like your partner team around who this target audience is. It's an ICP exercise more so than it is.
Let's figure out which specific accounts we need. The first step is really understand your ICP and that's alignment across most of the business units in your organization. Yeah, I'll kind of continue on that, Red, because I think my biggest issue is that I'm actually with ABM or at least the current state, I was actually just literally the M in the acronym, right, is like marketing. And it kind of puts the onus on marketing to figure this out.
But I think when ABM works and in my experience, the only way to make it work is when it is at minimum a joint effort between marketing and sales. And so I sometimes like to think of it as account-based messaging or account-based motion, right? It doesn't matter. Like if it's a sales motion or marketing motion, we're sorry, I should say who's doing it.
Like it needs to be both. It needs to be a combination of like one-on-one personalized outreach. And then we do have new tools that we can use on the marketing front to improve targeting. But if we're not changing the message and we're not tailoring that to this audience or this ICP, then I don't know, is it really ABM or is it just an account-based ad strategy, which is not new at all?
So I think really dialing in the message, who we want to go after the audience. And I think measurement is also kind of a big element of ABM that I think is different than some of the other always on or evergreen campaigns that we might run. Yeah, and I feel like we generally overcomplicate what ABM is. And I think it's kind of in theory because it's absorbed so many different definitions over the course of the years and the different tools.
There's a lot of clients where I personally don't think they're necessarily set up for ABM or need an ABM motion to, right? I think sales cycle, ACV play a big factor in that. When you think of large scale tier one accounts have a large buying committee, you need those multiple touch points and those different ways to engage with that audience. And sometimes like if you are just running more of an executed targeted account list on the paid media front, that is a sound strategy.
Just recognize that like as we think of the definition of ABM that's cross functional organizational alignment and influence on a target account list. So don't we agree with you there that marketing owning it through and through becomes like I think a bit of a cop out for organizations like marketing failed versus no, we failed to come together and like actually understand what it is. And there's so many different, I guess, parts to it too, right? One to one, depending on how you tier and I think like let's get into a little bit of from your guys perspective, like how do you even get started?
So let's say you do other right tools and maybe not even the tools but the mindset, the alignment there. What would you recommend or what are some areas that you're like? This is typically the best case forward. Yeah, I think there's a lot that can be done before you actually invest in the tech component of ABM.
I see a lot of companies that we work with that have are paying for six cents or paying for demand based or a specific tool that's barely being used or maybe it's just generating a couple of audiences and it's the full functionality is untapped. I think you can get a lot of the foundations in terms of alignment with sales, like who is that list? CR mentioned it's an ICP exercise. So I think there's sort of just like the foundation of your business that needs to be in place.
You have to really understand who your customer is and have the product market fit to make it be successful. I think things like aligning on your list, your target companies, figuring out what components you want to bring into ABM. Is it going to be digital events? Is it a SDR outbound?
Is it those things lining up before you spend money on an external tool will make that tool more valuable? Let's get into a little bit like tactically, like you're saying create your ICP list or you don't have a bunch of tech to like create that. What are different ways you think about it or like what the tools you might have in an organization to use to get started? I mean, sorry, no, you came off me too.
So feel free to be here. Yeah, I mean, this is also like a really good question because we always talk about these ABM software and they're like really expensive, like to get to man base and like, but this is how you get your list and it's beautiful and has intense signals. You definitely don't need that type of tool to implement an ABM strategy within your organization. I think it's a really good place to start with just what you have in your CRM or your customer database.
So if you want to go and look at the folks that are essentially close, like they are your customers and coming up with an ICP list based off of your customer attributes. And then that is something you can kind of compare with the other accounts that are in your CRM. So you might not have a lot available there, but it's at least something to start and then you can use a tool like LinkedIn to import a list and then potentially have a look at like, you know, option with LinkedIn to get more accounts. So there are ways you can do it that you don't have to pay someone to get you a list.
But there also, if you do have budget for this or also options to not have to sign on with a demand base or, you know, a sixth sense to get all of the extra bells and whistles that those type, those that, you know, software will give you. You can, you know, buy a list from someone using zoom info or something like that that you can be pretty prescriptive of what your demographics are, of course, like ICP fit and things like that that you can use into your CRM and then of course any of your paid platforms that you want to target. But I think that the main point here is that you really don't have to pay a bunch of money to start with ABM and it's really about trying to understand at least the list of the accounts that you currently have in your CRM and which of those will fit your ICP, which of those are customers, which, you know, of course, you don't want to target those for any business, but those are a good boilerplate to understand your ICP and then which are not customers, but that your ICP and that's what you want to go after initially in your targeting strategy. Yeah, I'll add to that too.
On the building out your list piece, I think, and everybody's mentioned you don't need tools. I would say it's actually detrimental to get the tools first because if you don't have a plan, you don't have a strategy and we don't know who we're talking to or like what types of messages do you want to share with them or how, then the tool drives a strategy for you rather than you get to go and shop for a tool that actually supports the strategy that you've come up with. And then list wise, it is a really good opportunity for audience wise to figure out like who is our core ICP and like what segment of that can we afford to go after for ADM. So it might not be your whole ICP, it might just be like tier one accounts and a good exercise that I've seen in the past that some clients and also some companies that I've worked for directly is instead of just pulling that list of top customers and reverse engineering it and figuring out, okay, what's similar across them, they actually build out what do we think is like the demographics or the demographics of our top tier customers.
And so you build out like a grading system beforehand and then run that against your top tier customers and see like where we write. Do we have the proper understanding of like what the makeup of our top customers is and then you kind of keep refining that until what you think actually matches the reality of like who your customers are. So ultimately you end up I think in the same place as if you would just sort of a first engineer based off top customers, but it's a really good thought exercise to get the company aligned on like what do we think matters in our top accounts. But yeah, starting with the audience, in my experience always has to be the first place, right?
Because then your next exercises are going to be, okay, where are they? What channels are they on? Because it may not be the same with pressure for ICP. You may find we make the most money and accounts in this vertical or of this size and really figuring out like, okay, what segment of our ICP can we afford to run ABM?
Just going back to Evan's comment on ACV. You know, if they're not big enough deals and ABM's maybe not the right strategy, just depending on again, your sales cycle is and how you build out that marketing plan and the cost structure. Yeah. And I feel like just I love that like forcing function of a thought exercise, right?
And just kind of understanding to our buying committee is I think some of the easiest unlocks to get started is typically people like running an ABM strategy that we've signed on, but it's just a large account list that they're pushing ads to, right? Let's just say thousands of accounts and they'll just fit their ICP. But I think what you really need to understand is like, how does segment take that a step further? So I always think of it in like, how do I segment that by tier one, two, three and potentially four?
It's like, look at that LTV and that or that revenue band of your top customers. Like who, what is their niche industry or fit that have been there? Like, and then what are those accounts that encompass that? Perhaps it's only 20.
That's like your tier one where you can have really targeted one to one place. You can think about events and then like what's tier two? You know, can you verticalize this, right? Is there some industries within this larger bucket of accounts potentially 30 to 50 accounts that it's like we see a lot of thin tech or a lot of healthcare and then we can create more targeted components there.
Then I think this is where like a tier three in my mind, everybody did find it differently, but it's like this demand gen at scale, right? So it's just really targeted ads across this account list. And I think if you have intentions behind like how to tier or segment your audience, that's like the first step because a lot of times it'll be overwhelmed with like, okay, all these accounts are so different. How do I even engage with them?
But like your point to like tiering is the right exercise using your CRM though and the data within there can tell you a time. If you're unable to identify some of the simple data, I think that the different discussion, right? Like you should be able to get some general guidance on like industry, employee size, revenue vans, I think that would be like a foundational component, but that's like the getting started point and then what the hell do they want, right? Those accounts.
I was just going to add that I would argue if you can't track the basic data, you shouldn't be doing it yet. You should be able to do a win loss analysis on your closed one deals and understand those facts before you even approach a VM. That's true. So we assume the list is built or you know, you're kind of finding the tools.
Okay, I go in there segment, I'm starting to create various plays based off of that or strategies based off of that like how am I going to engage is going to be one to one personalized event, is it going to be like industry specific webinars. I think where I always get stuck and still to this day is like measurement on the ABM front. And I think we can probably spend a little bit of time here like the different tools and only kind of get a little bit more tactical like with what you have assuming it's a bit of a limited tech stack, what resources would you use or do you look out with some of the clients that you work with like on how to measure the success of ABM? You know, Scott and Sierra and I all have marketing ops backgrounds.
This is probably our favorite part of ABM is just figuring out like, is it working or not? I might answer will be sort of tech agnostic right now and just like at the most sort of tactical basic level, it's important within your CRM to create a field that's going to flag or indicate when an account is a target account. It says maybe it's a Boolean checkbox, maybe you have a drop down list that's tier one, tier two, tier three, if you're going to be reporting kind of on your tier separately, but having a specific location on that object in Salesforce or have spot whatever CRM you're using. So that at the very preliminary level, you can build a report that says, is there any pipeline or opportunities being created from this set of accounts?
Is that increasing as we put more effort into outreaching these accounts or marketing to these accounts? Or are we not seeing any movement? Like this could be done without any other external tech. There are obviously integrations that provide a lot more visibility into what type of engagement the accounts are having with your marketing efforts.
I think that's like the phase two, but phase one is just be able to notice which accounts are target accounts and are you seeing any traction with those accounts because of your efforts? There's a lot to say on this. I'm going to let Sarah and Scott add in more context. Yeah, I'll start with like the business metrics and like setting yourself up for success there.
I think that part gets skipped a lot. So I would say like the beauty of creating a really narrow ICP for ABM, right? As you can look at the makeup of those customers that you have that fall into that top tier customers going off of what you and Sarah were saying. Maybe you don't run to everybody, right?
Maybe you have a set of customers that are good customers, but also like move through your sales cycle really quickly. You might have some huge customers, but maybe when you do win loss analysis, you go, oh, that type of customer, we actually don't win very often. So right, you're really focusing down on this list and then you can look at, okay, how much money do we make off those accounts over what period of time? So you can start to then, I keep saying reverse engineer, I'll come up with a better term later.
You're like, okay, how much can we afford to spend on trying to get more accounts like this? So like what is our target customer acquisition cost? And then obviously the biggest variable in that is going to be when do we need to make the money back? And I think that is a business decision and one that will bring like more departments into this conversation.
You know, if you're willing to wait five, 10 years to get the money back, like, you know, your target cap could be very, very high. That's probably not the scenario for most companies. It might be we need it back in a month, six months a year, right? But then you're also having that conversation around for these types of accounts and how long they stick with you and charin rate, all those things may factor into like what we're willing to spend to get those accounts.
So I think that's the core business metric. And then, you know, you have obviously all of the engagement metrics and account penetration metrics and things like that on top of that where you really, I think just trying to report on are we hitting the audience we want? Are they engaging with do they care about what we have to say and how much and like who in that account is engaging, right? So are we getting people in different roles across the organization and not just trying to go super pinpoint to, you know, one specific role that's usually the person who requests the demo, right?
We want to hit the people around them. So your metrics have to change to account for that because not everybody you're going after in these accounts, do you expect to come and convert on the website? And there's a good chance that your funnel metrics right now are built on that behavior concerning its different for AVM. Yeah, I'm really echo both of those.
And I think something we've danced around a little bit in this conversation so far is this notion of intense signals. And then, you know, I know we've talked about like moving folks through the funnel, like accounts through the funnel, but we really haven't, you know, outlined, okay, this is what your top of funnel buying stage to look like, middle funnel buying stage to look like, you know, and then kind of right before they get into your into your funnel, like the decision phase with that to look like or bottom of the funnel. And I think this is very different for each business, which is why I stay away from giving you a prescriptive. Here's what you should do in terms of your funnel.
But I think having an idea, kind of like what Scott and Judy have said around who are the accounts that you want to target. That's obviously said one one if you've talked about and then who's engaging is really important. And so you can understand engagement in various different ways. You can of course use an AVM software.
You can use LinkedIn's great for, you know, comparing accounts with who's engaging. If you reach out to your LinkedIn reps, they will tell you give you a list of who is engaging and who you've also served impressions to your accounts. And then of course, like our people, you know, if you, if you, I dare say scoring model, but if you are using a scoring model, you can, you know, heaven's like, I hate scoring. If you are using a scoring model, you can kind of engineer it to really serve your AVM reporting well in the sense that if folks are opening an email, that's, you know, that's part of the score.
That's an engagement metric. If folks are viewing an ad on LinkedIn, which is you're not going to get much in terms of meta or, you know, X or Reddit, but LinkedIn's really great for understanding, you know, who exactly is seeing your ads. And so kind of evaluating those different engagement metrics and then you can really like provide a score for these accounts or people in your, in your TRM. And then based off of that, you can understand which of the accounts are know about your brand the most and then which of the accounts don't know about your brand the most.
And so then from there, if you see that, you know, that subset of accounts that you're typically winning doesn't know about your brand and the subset of accounts that doesn't win as much knows about your brand, then you, we have to switch strategies a little bit. And so I think looking at that in that way is also really helpful. And then I also want to make sure we answer Danny's question. I don't know if this is kind of in line with potentially reporting and measurement or at least just alignment internally.
So Evan, I'm happy to answer or whatever process you want to do in here. Yeah, no, let's pull it up. Let's jump into it. I think it's all relevant because I think a big part of this whole conversation is like how people define AVM really ties back to like the reporting, the measurement, what success looks like.
So I think we can talk about this for a good portion. Yeah, cool. And I think, you know, I'll just read Danny's question here. It's about how would you ensure all the team, especially sales teams recording all the engagement and the tools for ABM approach and how to avoid double communication from different teams internally to the targeted prospects.
So I think this is, I'm glad you brought this up, Danny. It's definitely part of the internal conversation and discussion you need to be having with your stakeholders. Mostly we talk about sales stakeholders, but if there are other stakeholders in the business, make sure everyone is involved in these types of conversations. Typically the sales and marketing engagements should be different.
So sales is going to be like if they have their target list and each sales rep has their list of specific accounts, they're going to use different tactics to go after this target account list, then the marketing team is going to use. Marketing team will be more of like, I hate using spray and pray, but it is more of this like we're going after all these accounts and a more widely used fashion or a sales is going to go pick and choose which accounts you want to go after, maybe they do a gift incentive, maybe they use LinkedIn email, maybe they use just direct, like more of that direct outbound type of contact, whereas marketing is going to be a little bit more strategic. We're going to go after them with ads or invite them to an event or ask them to join a webinar. Whatever tactics you want to use internally, but it's really important to lay out all of that and you know, spread sheet or some sort of document that's like sales, you guys use this, marketing use this, and it's totally fine to double communicate with these accounts as long as it's in a different fashion.
So we want to use many different tactics to talk to these accounts, but the tactics will vary or department. Well, add a specific use case at a prior company that I was at. We had a sales outreach tool, we were using Groove, so like an automated email sequencing tool. There was an integration between that tool and Salesforce, it auto logged outreach specifically to the tagged accounts and we were able to pull task reports and Salesforce that looked at by target account, when was their last outreach from sales and when was the date of their most recently engaged marketing campaign to be able to get sort of a scale perspective on which accounts have been followed up with most recently from sales, which ones need more hands on attention and try to determine a total number of outreaches that are happening within an account prior to joining the list versus ideally closing them as a close one customer.
So depending on your sales ops structure and what tools you have, there's some ways to automate or provide some more visibility into what sales is doing from an outreach perspective as well. There's more questions. Yeah, I know this one's like I was just reading through this that I had and I think it's pretty relevant to an area that it'd be a mess sometimes. I don't know if you'd want to come on and just ask your question and see if we can kind of just talk through it or I'm happy to read it.
I have some more. It really opens up more questions for me when I read through this situation. I think immediately my thought is like, how did you determine which accounts were going to be on this list? And I guess are they the right fit accounts if they're showing no buying intent down the road or is there something else you know from your conversations with sales or your buying processes that are product gap?
Is there a competitor that is frequently coming into the mix? It's without knowing a little bit more about the business. It's hard to understand where that gap might be. But to have them be engaged across emails and ads and webinars and then not ever want to buy makes me feel like maybe there's either a mess in the type of company that you're going after or your solution isn't meeting their needs.
Yeah, the other thing that I would add is like obviously the time frame is going to be specific to your business and also this ICP that you're going after right or that you've modeled after for ADM. So I would say that like in general, you need at least two sales cycles to make like much of an impact right like anybody who's buying right now is going to have been heavily influenced before. You can get some intent lists or like try to capture them as a really low in the funnel but you're swimming upstream a little bit because they probably have a brand preference already. So you might have a chance of getting in there.
But really it's going to take a while to drive like awareness and educate your audience on why you're the better solution. So that's going to just take a while. The other thing I would say is, and this is why I think lead scoring gets a bad rap because I also don't like it in the way that's usually used. But engagement does not equal intent.
I think that's like a common misconception in our marketing models. And a lot of people may just want to learn from you and you have great content but they're not in market or the person that is engaging with you is not the person who can decide to like move into a buying motion. So I think oftentimes we're thinking about like how can we move people into that buying motion but I think in a business it's got to come from some other problem that they're trying to solve or initiative that they have as an organization and you can't really make that happen. You can't create the catalyzing of that.
I think what you can do is you can make people problem aware. So if you have a different take on a category or a problem, you can kind of plant that in their head because maybe they were never considering solutions, right? Nobody's considering a solution to a problem they don't know that they have. But just because you made them aware that they have this problem or this opportunity that you can solve doesn't mean that the second they understand that they're going to then go try to buy it.
That can take a while. So then how do you know like I guess when to stop going after them? I think you have to build that into your ADM strategy and like what is the timeline? Maybe you come up with a big list and you split it and you say we're just going to run our ADM motion to half of this list and then you know you do that for like let's say you have a three month sales cycle so you do that for six to nine months and then you move on to a different list.
The same way that sales would handle their prospecting, right? Because they're going to have some way to like segment this larger audience in prioritizing go after them. So I think you can link up with sales on that too so you're hitting the same accounts at the same time. Yeah, there should be like a nurture fallback, right?
So we kind of engage for a period of time, you cohort the set of accounts that you're going after for let's say three months and maybe one month's like hyper-personalized focus like more of a tier one approach if these are larger enterprise accounts. I think one thing to consideration is like what are your competitors that they potentially are there are the current solution? What are their contracts typically that contract length? A lot of times they can engage three to six months before they're even eligible to start kicking the conversation to move forward.
So having that conversation trying to get the insight of typically we sign a 12-month deal, there are signals that you can kind of look forward to see. Sometimes you'll see case studies or things from that company that speaks about like a new customer they designed and you kind of do some customer research there. But having a default nurture stream that just kind of keeps like an evergreen pulse on these accounts whether it's email to that buying committee in the short term is good. And then if you see new engagement signals, let's say you ran that for three months, you kind of pulled back because you didn't see a lot of traction, you see some more signals based on whatever you're tracking whether that's new contacts coming in, raise in their hand.
That's where you can like re-engage or have another system that kind of activates them as like a demand gen, tactics and more of an ad awareness play building that messaging and strategy again. And that's got to look like Danny has a follow up there for you. Oh, sorry, let me take a look. Okay, I'll read real quick.
One thing we're also struggling with the marketing side is how we can measure marketing success in real time if we're not using engagement as many businesses have a long sales cycle. How do we type the pipeline of marketing activities in real time? That's a good question. I don't know that you can in real time.
I think that this is where aligning on the metrics as an organization is important and like what do we think that those metrics mean? Right, before you start, so again, is engagement a sign of intent? I don't think so. Obviously some engagement is better than no engagement.
So in some ways there you're reporting on like the effectiveness of your marketing spend. I think when you report on things like accounts reached engagement, audience penetration, you're saying we're using our marketing dollars wisely, like we are talking to who we want to talk to and they care about what we have to say. Like I think those are the engagement metrics are the whether or not they care. So I do think those are important.
I'll call metrics. I don't know that leading indicators is necessarily the right terminology, but I do think it's important to report on that. And if the organization is not aligned on the fact that those things have value, then maybe you're not ready to do APA. Again, I think if the expectation is like we're going to turn on marketing and then everybody who sees it is just going to want to buy all of a sudden and they're going to show up in the pipeline like nobody buys anything that way, you know, certainly not expensive, considered purchases.
None of us operate that way. So like why would we expect our customers to operate that way? I don't know. If that answers your question, I think I just kind of doubled down on the things you asked what there were alternatives to, but I really do think those metrics are important to show the organization and get aligned on.
We can go into some more. All right, great. I think there was a question around who in the Oregon needs to help facilitate better collaboration between marketing and sales when it comes to ABM. I'm just that.
You got buried in the middle. It's a good question. I mean, I think there's your marketing leaders, your sales leaders, and I think depending on how your team is structured, marketing ops leaders, sales ops leaders, that's probably to facilitate the collaboration between those teams. But then like one level up, I think you need to have your executives bought into the fact that you're planning to execute an ABM strategy and have that alignment that this is a co-effort from both teams be driven home at your all hands, be part of your quarterly strategic initiatives, reinforce at a company level that this is something we're all invested in and we're all measuring the joint impact through more revenue coming from these target accounts at the end of the day.
I'm sure in larger orgs, there's more sub teams that come into play. You know, if you're running it across marketing, you have your digital leads, but if you're flowing things down to event or field, there's that take on it as well. And so anybody touching ABM needs to have the mindset that it needs to be a two way comm street with sales and the follow up on the other side needs to be cohesive with what we're doing from a marketing firm. Yeah, I agree.
And I think what I was seeing worked really well with some of our clients is it's like kind of this top down approach. So the leadership, you know, the executive level leadership or high level leadership by your organization, depending on how big your organization is needs. It needs to be, they need to be bottom from the start. And then they also need to very much like implement their strategy within their teams.
And so what I've seen work really well is that the CMO is body and the CEO is body and then maybe like the executive level sales leaders body or CRO, whatever, you know, executive C suite that you have in your company. And then it's a very coordinated effort between kind of the top person like your CEO or president and then your leader, marketing leader of sales. And then they kind of talk about it all the time. And it's like, we're talking about it during reporting meetings.
We're talking about it every week. And then your team is focused on account based marketing. And so that we talk about the list. We talk about which of the lists are becoming hand raisers or MQLs or hand-tapped needs, which are the lists are becoming pipeline.
And then you're really focusing a lot of your reporting on it because that's what the executive level cares about. And so that's kind of the coordinated effort and the discussion that needs to be happening pretty much every single day in order for an effective account based marketing strategy to work for your business. And then something I think too that we haven't really mentioned yet is, you know, to really validate and gut check the, I guess, the efficacy of your list. So what I've seen work well with companies is of course you're going to get inbounds from folks that are not on your list that's going to happen.
And so it's really important to compare the folks that are not on your list with the folks that are on your list and how they're moving down the funnel. And ideally you want to see massive objects and conversion rates from the folks that are on your list because they're more an ICP fit for your business and for your product compared to the people that are not on your list. If you're not seeing that, then there's something wrong with the account based list that you're going after. So really make sure that that is part of your measurement strategy as also that's what leadership and stakeholders are going to want to know is this list actually the right list.
Because if it's not, then you're wasting money getting to this list or wasting money on your strategy, and you might as well just use native targeting because that seems to be working better for you in that moment. One thing that Sierra you're mentioning was the reporting. And that's like the piece that I think about when I think about who needs to be bought in and who needs to help facilitate. So like as high up in your org as that report goes, they need to be bought in.
In some earlier stage companies startups, et cetera, that is probably includes the board. So if the CRO and CMO agree on, here's our ABM approach and here's what we're going to measure, but then the board says, yeah, bigger cost per MQLs going up, then that's going to override what you want to do from ABM standpoint. Because generally in ABM strategy, you're going to hit more personas in the account. So you want to go after, but we know that not all those personas are potential champions.
You might also do some pipeline marketing. So they're already in and off, which is usually when we turn off marketing. So we're not spending dollars to drive behaviors already happened, but in an ABM motion, you might actually increase your spend or increase the personas you talk to once they're in that opportunity level. So you're creating awareness within an account that you believe you're going to have, you know, start to have conversations with the buying committee and there's other people that are involved in that process.
So yeah, I would say anybody that's looking at the numbers needs to be bought in on like what those numbers are going to be, what the goals are. And so yeah, it definitely is, I think, top down in that regard, at least from a buy and standpoint, the strategy can come bottoms up, but the buy in and the commitment to doing it has to come from the top. Yeah. And I think the reporting piece of it is very, I want to say subjective, but it depends on the, like who in the team is reporting out which insights.
So if you're direct, like boots on the ground, marketing manager, demand-gen manager, you're likely doing more of the account penetration or audience penetration that we're getting there right. So you're reporting those metrics, but then if you're thinking about like an account, this perspective, like understanding what percentage of those accounts have had some sort of marketing engagement interaction, it's all defined by how you define those intent signals or those engagement signals. I think that part is that like you don't have a perfect ABM dashboard, there might be directional ones, but I think it's just what signals you quantify as being successful. So as a time on site, as a site visits, it's a certain job title is like all of that is relevant to build like the ideal space.
But what I see it typically coming in like leadership conversations, we're able to interact with or have our brand logo in front of this audience or 50 to 60% of this audience for the last 60 days, like that is success on our part because we know that we're driving that brand awareness or like that more demand-gen push for create demand. Yeah. So I think that's a big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big thing. And then just to piggyback on that, it's also, you know, if you look at when folks are becoming, like getting into your funnel, like I would say through like a hand raised type of motion, contact sales demo request, whatever it is on your website, when they enter that funnel and they fill out that form at that moment, can you go and look at the engagement that that account has had?
Is it a lot of engagement? Is it not a lot of engagement? Where is that person or I guess account at when they come in, come in, come in, come through a high intent form? And then that will also inform your strategy.
Typically what we see is like the folks that are more engaged, they at least have a little bit more knowledge about your account. You've been running NavyM, you know, of course, like Scott said, I think two sales cycles is good, at least when you start your NavyM strategy to when you can actually appropriately start to measure it. But it's really important to understand the engagement when folks are coming in and then that will kind of guide how you want to market to those folks or not market to those folks depending on what you see. Talk to the engagement piece and I just want to re-add that you can track this without necessarily having a specific ABM tool.
I hacked together this with Marchetto and essentially saying if anyone who has an email domain at any of these target accounts that we're at engages with any of these variety of marketing efforts, change, we had a status field in Salesforce called ABM status that would be not engaged, marketing engaged, sales engaged to be able to report on that over time. And we automated the sales engaged piece too if they replied back to an email coming through the email sequencing piece. But there's a lot of deep insights you can get from some of the tools around what they specifically did and how you can track percentage of contacts that you have at the account that have engaged with marketing or sales in some capacity and get that as your baseline before you invest in tech. Yeah, that makes me think back to the lead scoring comments too where I think there are some good opportunities to change how you think about account scoring.
Anything so often, right, account scoring just becomes the sum of the lead scores from the leads of that account which is a little lazy, right? This is another opportunity to get aligned as an organization. What do we think are the signals that somebody might be ready to move into an account, sorry, or might be ready to move into that buying motion. So, you know, does one person at an account with 10 engagements, is that the same value as one account with 10 people with a single engagement?
Like, I don't know, I don't have a strong opinion on that. I think it's unique to your business. But there's probably some, right, waiting, not just on like what they engage with but how many people over what time period. So you can get kind of a better picture.
And again, it's still really just an engagement score. But sometimes that's the best that we have to work with. And then again, you can still show that we are driving awareness among this account. And that could include all sorts of things.
I think if you have, maybe you have a PLG like freemium model in addition to like an enterprise sales model, well, how many people from the accounts you're targeting have signed up for the free account, right? That would be a huge indicator that they're curious, even though maybe they haven't submitted a requested demo form yet. So I think each other think about all of those pieces and how they play together. And again, like what do we think this means based on how people engage and then kind of wait it accordingly.
Yeah, there's no like perfect playbook. There's guidance from playbooks like informing ways to think about it tactically. And tactically, excuse me. So got a few more minutes here.
I just kind of want to close out with, you know, where do you often see, I just love this because I feel like we get a rapid fire of answers. But when does typically when you see like ABM strategies, maybe not fail, I hate that word fail because right? You're just like learning and iterating. But when you see them like not successful or the initiatives kind of fall short of what the expectations are, I've heard a few things right?
There's not enough time found to like actually understand that momentum. So people turn it on for a couple months and they're like, Oh, we're not seeing that movement or that signal. Well, if you depending on that tier, right, you can have a lot longer. So just kind of curious, you guys perspective of what you've seen opportunities for maybe to think of it before it happens with other accounts.
Yeah, I think it's, I really think it's just like, you know, what we've talked about in the beginning is this really need alignment. You really need alignment with other stakeholders in the business. You can't just like run ABM in a marketing silo and I love what Scott said about the M and ABM is like so misleading. It really should be like a account based motion or a camera.
What else you said Scott, but I loved that kind of reframe. And so that's first and foremost. And then of course you need to like the list is a really important piece. So if you have alignment and then you get your list and the list is not within your ICP fit or there's a lot more accounts that maybe should go on the list that aren't.
That is something that is going to not going to set you up for success. And so really ensure again, really ensure alignment and then really ensure the appropriate list. And that list is going to take time that it takes a lot of time to figure out your list. It takes a lot of time to socialize that internally to figure out that the right ICP fit for you and those are the right accounts.
And so in ABM motion, it's doesn't, you know, just turn it on overnight. It's something that takes time and discussion and strategic planning. You need a super tight team too. Even though you want cross-functional alignment, like you also want to have your core stakeholders that are your champion in that.
So you don't have a ton of delays and like it's kind of the subject in this around creative, right? Everybody has an opinion. So you want to make sure like the strategy is there. But if there's lack of sales marketing alignment, a lack of a dedicated resource to drive the strategy forward and the initiative forward or not clarity on how to measure it.
I feel like those are often like the three pillars that we talked through most of this conversation that really can not set you up for success. And I would just add, I think I touched on this in the very beginning, but if you don't have just core foundational aspects of your business lined up, ABM won't solve those problems. That's not going to fix product gaps or misalignment with your audience or unclear messaging or a clear deficit from a competitive standpoint. So I think sometimes people throw ABM at their go-to-market motion as hoping this will fix what is really addressed more of a root cause business fundamentals.
Yeah. And I would go back to I think just some of the things that we've talked about, brew out. But if you try to launch this and then figure out what to measure after, like it's going to fail because you don't have alignment on what the metrics mean, what do we care about, what are the kind of guardrails. I would say another one that I see often, and it's not necessarily a fail, but I think it's just to be understood how it's different is when you're only running intent based ABM.
Like, that's a tactic. Like in my opinion, it's not a full ABM strategy rate. It's strictly reactive. You're saying these people are already in market, we think, right?
That's at least how you're valuing that those intent signals, regardless of like, if they actually mean that. But, you know, I think a real ABM strategy is proactive and not just strictly reactive, right? And then you're measuring against like, okay, are we getting engagement with these accounts? And then what does that turn into in when against a baseline of people that you're not running that playbook against?
And then the last one is I think we've all harped on this a bit, but it's like tools first for letting the tools drive the strategy. I have a good tagline from a former boss. I can't take credit for this one, but it's software doesn't create a process. It just pours cement around one.
I think you could swap out process for strategy there, but like if you go with the tool first, now that's what you're doing, right? You buy the tool first, it costs a lot, you know, it's maybe a 30, $30, $50, $50,000 a year tool. Like, you're going to be forced to use that even if you find out later, it was not the right one. So strategy first.
Perfect close. Appreciate everyone. If there's any last minute questions, feel free to drop them in, but this is always a good conversation. I feel like it's just a reminder that all of us have to kind of reformat how we think about ABM and just make sure that we understand it across the organization.
So we'll be doing another event next month. Unsure on the topic right now, we're about ready to release six to seven new playbooks. So it'll probably be around one of those, but thanks all again. Appreciate it.
Judy Scott and Sierra for joining. Thank you. Thank you.