An Insider's Take on Account-Based Marketing

Transcript lightly edited for spelling and punctuation. The conversation is unabridged.

Mark Evans: Welcome to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers insight from marketers and entrepreneurs in small doses. Now by small doses, I'm talking about 15 minutes or less. On today's podcast, I'm talking with Nadia Milani, the Marketing Director with Terigo Networks. Nadia is a Fearless 50 Marketer with a focus on creating digital brand experiences and accelerating marketing technology. Nadia is going to offer insight into account-based marketing. Welcome to the podcast, Nadia.

Nadia Milani: Hi, Mark. I'm so happy to be here. So thanks for having me.

Mark Evans: Yeah. This is amazing. I'm really excited about talking about ABM and getting your insight on how to make it work. Can you provide a quick overview of account-based marketing? What is it? And what are the benefits of companies embracing it?

Nadia Milani: I want to just preface this by saying this is ABM from the trenches, so I have not written a book. I haven't written multiple books about ABM. I've read a lot of them, but this is still me experiencing it from a first-person perspective with an organization. ABM is account-based marketing, and really what that means is targeting your marketing based on accounts. Traditionally, it was demand gen, all about lead quantity, and it's shifting that from quantity of leads to actual account-based marketing. So delivering highly personalized experiences to accounts for the really, the goal of acquiring them and possibly expanding on current existing accounts that you have within the organization.

Mark Evans: There appears to be growing interest in ABM. Maybe it's my perception. Do you think that's true? And if so, why is that happening?

Nadia Milani: I think that with marketing, there's always, the buzzwords. Right? So we think about even, like, 10 years ago, it's all about lead gen. It kind of morphed into demand gen, and then now we hear a lot about ABM. I think there's something to that. I think that there is definitely some more buzz around it. But really when you think about the philosophy around it, so account-based marketing, it's been around forever even if you did marketing 25 years ago. Just, you know, strategic planning campaigns around accounts isn't new, but what makes it really relevant right now is when account-based marketing needs technology. We think about all the different technologies that are available. It really allows you to scale your acquisition efforts in a very, very tailored personalized way. So because of that, the scalability around that, because of technology, it's actually a really good strategy for B2B companies to use today.

Mark Evans: What type of companies should use ABM? Is it limited to B2B companies?

Nadia Milani: Total debatable. I'd love to, like, be on a panel perhaps one day to talk about B2C versus B2B. My experience has been B2B, and for me, it works. And I think that what makes it work for B2B is that if you're in a company where, you know, you've been doing demand gen, lead gen for a very long time, and what that usually means is, like, you've hit your lead number for the month and marketing is like, 'Yay!' This is awesome. And then you hand over those leads to sales, and sales typically says these leads are crap. And what happens is there's just this alignment between sales and marketing. So marketing, you know, we're doing this thing on the side with all these great quantity of leads, then sales just saying, these aren't good, and I'm not going to focus on these. So all your efforts are wasted. There's really no revenue or return on them. What account-based marketing does and it allows you to do is if you're not finding success with your demand gen efforts and your lead gen efforts, then it's really a good tactic to get alignment across the board and bring revenue and showing ROI within the organization where everyone can rally around the strategy and work together on accomplishing those goals.

Mark Evans: If you buy into the concept of ABM, how do you get started? If you've never done it before, you're doing some kind of digital marketing, but you think that ABM can help you, give us sort of the first steps that you should consider.

Nadia Milani: So I think there's, I mean, a couple of, I think, that there's a lot of thought around this, thought leadership around this. I think it's really important to just do some research around it, like, is ABM? And I think it's really important to get buy-in first and foremost. Like, you need to talk to your executive team, so your C-suite, and get them on board. Explain to them what it is and the why around it. Because if you're not going to get them to buy into it, it's never going to work. It's super important to do that. And then when you get buy-in, you need to understand, like, how are you going to measure this across your organization? Because the CEO and the CFO are not going to care about, you know, traffic numbers, not going to care about CTR and emails, not going to care about open rates, they're going to care about revenue. So how is this going to drive revenue and ROI within the organization? Once you have that buy-in, you understand how the measurement is going to work, what are we going to measure as an organization together, then you're going to get sales and marketing alignments. You're going to talk to your sales team, and you're going to say, look. This is what we're thinking. And this is what it could do for our team if we work together. So it's really important to have a sales organization that's going to work with you to develop orchestrated account plays that you can work together on to really drive the incremental revenue that your organization any organization needs today. That alignment is super important. Can't stress that enough because if you don't have that, you're not going to get too far. And then once you have that, you test it. So I know everyone, you know, hates the word testing, but test it out. Test out the strategy. So get a really a play that you guys can work on together that has a high propensity to win. That way, you get the momentum, you show the early wins, and then from there, can expand from there. And then lastly, once you kind of, you know, have this organizationally implemented, then it's about scale, then it's looking at the technologies and how can we scale these programs to make them bigger and better.

Mark Evans: So if ABM is your delivering mechanism, who are the supporting actors, or what are the supporting actors? And by that, I mean, you know, what kind of marketing collateral do you need in terms of blog posts or videos or sales sheets? Like, how are you going to actually put meat on the bone when it comes to ABM?

Nadia Milani: You know, really good question. I think that every single account is different. So when you look at your account, right, you want to have multiple touch points. I know if you talked to me about a year ago, there were live events were huge. So that has changed, obviously. So it's really about, like, what are the digital touch points that are going to matter to this existing customers or this prospect or account? It's going to be a myriad of things. You're going to have blog posts, you're going to have video, you're going to have email, you know, DMs work really, really well. And then not only that, like, you're going to have another thing about account-based marketing is you're going to be developing your ideal customer profile. So who's our ideal customer? So let's just say it's mid, you know, the verticals, categories, defining all of that, all the firmographic data, like, how big this customer is. And then in that ideal customer profile, there's going to be buyers. So there's going to be your CMO, your COO, or prospectively, of a company. So what works for them? Email might work, DM might work. So like a personalized book perhaps with a really personalized message on your particular vertical. So that would work for a CEO. But what works for a manager level? So maybe it's, you know, an exclusive invitation to a digital experience that you're creating that they may want to participate in. So you have to really think about it cohesively. What's marketing going to be doing? And then when does sales follow-ups? Do they follow-up after the DM and then they call? So it's really about multiple touch points, personalizing it to that customer, and who are the different buyers in that customer at that company, and personalizing it for those buyers. There's multiple things to think about, when orchestrating these types of campaigns, and it's very customized for each customer. So one thing may work for one person, it may not work for another person or company.

Mark Evans: So we talked about the theoretical, sort of the concept of ABM, and I promised people that I would provide or make sure that guests provide some real-world insight into the successes or failures that they've had with different marketing campaigns or technology. You know, going back into what you've done with ABM, talk about your successes or talk about your failures. What did you do that really resonated, that really delivered results, and achieved your objectives?

Nadia Milani: I've been in very much integrated into the onset of ABM. So I'm now kind of in the second time where I'm implementing an ABM program. So now we're getting a little bit more of a mature program. But so not specifying exactly which company I've worked at, but I'll give you two examples. So one example is that we tried to activate ABM, and I think we did a really great job at sales alignment and getting buy-in and getting everybody rallied around this concept of ABM. But what we didn't do really well is simplifying it. So we made the orchestrated marketing sales campaign really complicated. So it was probably too hard of a customer to go to because we couldn't figure out, like, how many buyers there were, who they were exactly. I think that we try to make it too complex. It's really important to pick something that you can win on the early onset because if you can't win on that campaign, you can't show success, it's going to be hard to move it forward within especially within big organizations. That was kind of a failure for the first one that I was involved in is that we made it too complex and we weren't able to show the revenue wins that we wanted to. A second example that I had was we were able to really get so this is more of a win is that we were able to get senior leadership on board. We were able to get the sales and marketing team alignment. And where we really, I think did a good job is we were able to connect with each individual sales rep and we had kind of we worked with all of them. We picked the ones that we could win on. So we said, okay, out of these 20 reps, we think that five of these campaigns are going to deliver, but we launched with the one that we knew could win. We launched with that, we showed the revenue successes around that, and the way we did that is we measured our success by meetings booked. So how many meetings we could book with a prospective customers. Then by booking the meetings, then we were able to track, okay, how many actually closed? Once we showed that, hey, Marketing not only delivers leads, they can actually get you meetings booked, which then delivered an amazing close rates. By showing that early win, we were able to build the momentum and get everybody rallied around this idea and really push that forward. That was all around getting everyone kind of psyched up about it. So those are kind of two examples, real-world examples of around how you're getting alignment and how you can make it win, but how you can also make it fail.

Mark Evans: There's so much talk about MQLs and SQLs and all the different KPIs. But at the end of the day, when you think about it, ABM is really about meetings. You can do whatever you want, but if you can get those meetings, you can actually have conversations with people, like real conversations, that's got to be the key success factor.

Nadia Milani: It is. So for ABM, I think that there's, I mean, every organization may have a few different types of metrics around ABM, but, you know, I think that most rally around the meetings booked because it's quantifiable. It's something that you can talk to the CFO about and the CEO and say, okay. This is what we're measuring this as against. And then if we could show that you could deliver, you know, 10, 20, 100 meetings on the campaigns that we're putting out, that's something that everyone can get excited about and measure. Meetings booked is a very much important KPI around ABM.

Mark Evans: Well, Nadia, for your insight about account-based marketing, and thank you for joining today on Marketing Spark. It's great to get your insight. Good luck as you move forward with Terigo.

Mark Evans: Thanks for listening to this edition of Marketing Spark. Don't forget to subscribe via iTunes or the app that you use to listen to podcasts. Leave us a review. I'd love to know what you think of the show. For show notes, visit markevans.ca/podcast. If you have feedback, suggestions for guests, or looking for help with B2B marketing, connect with me on LinkedIn or send an email to mark@markevans.ca. See you next time.