#113: ABM | Account-Based Marketing (with Hillary Carpio, Head of ABM at Snowflake)

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All right, Hillary's here. I'm excited to do this. We did a podcast about a first podcast we did about ABM was the most downloaded episode ever. And I just was saying to you, I think this one is going to beat that one. And that's not to knock Brandon, who is our guest on that. But I just, I think you have a great story and I think there's more buzz and chatter about abm. So before we dive into ABM specifically, Hillary, can you give some context to who you are? What's your name? What do you do? Where do you work?

Yeah, of course. In. Challenge accepted. My name's Hillary Carpio. I lead the account based marketing function at Snowflake and my job is to tailor campaigns, programs and processes across the broader marketing organization to support the sales team in penetrating the accounts that are Most important to hitting their revenue goals. So you can think of my team like an integrated marketing function. There's 20 people now in North America supporting the sales reps. Similar to a field marketing organization in how we're structured and how we align into sales. And our job is to help them hit their goals, cross functionally with product marketing, partner marketing, sales development, field marketing, you name it, were in the center helping drive impact and drive revenue.

Awesome. I can feel, I love that you came out of the gate with like, basically what you said to me was, we're going to. Let's beat that, Dave. I'm competitive. Let's. Let's beat that. Which I love. So you're head of ABM at Snowflake. Just to give people context of. Can you just give like size and industry and what does Snowflake do?

Yeah, Snowflake is the data cloud. So we enable multiple workloads for people's data. And we have grown to, I believe we're over 5000 employees now. We're about 1200 when I joined three years ago. So hypergrowth company continuing to lead not only in the data side of the world, but also on the marketing side of the world. We're known for taking risks, making bold statements and really being ahead of the innovation curve in the marketing plays, practices and programs that we run.

Do you have any Frank Slootman stories?

I don't have any Frank Slootman stories other than I'm super grateful for him as a leader and the direction that he's taken the company.

All right. You always gotta ask. That's okay. So in your role as head of abm, can you just give me a sense of like, where does that sit in the broader go to market machine at Snowflake? Who do you report to? What is the kind of overall go to market look like?

Yeah, so I report to the VP of Demand Gen. I always like to say that he's due for a new title because he is responsible for demand generation, ABM field marketing, marketing operations, SDRs and marketing intelligence. So perhaps maybe growth is a term that would cover the scope of what he's doing. But the head of Demand Gen is my colleague that reports into the same same boss.

That's interesting because this topic comes up a lot. What do you think about the relationship between Demand Gen and abm?

So I think that they can coexist and the Demand Gen organization led by Jackie Kyler here at Snowflake. Her and I have a strong relationship where we support the business together side by side. So our Functions are complementary. I think that when you're building an account based marketing function, you have to be very careful. If you're put it under demand generation, you need to make sure the KPIs are different. So if demand generation is being measured on leads or campaign responses, ABM has to be measured on account funnels, not lead funnels. So if you're able to successfully separate those under the same function, great. They can live together, coexist and work complimentary. If you're not able to separate those KPIs. Same thing with field marketing. If you're not able to separate the KPIs with it reporting into a field marketing function, you're setting yourself up for failure. But you're also setting up the person you've brought in for failure if you're asking them to lead account based marketing and report on a lead funnel.

Yeah, it does seem like most of the misalignment comes from or most of the friction comes from being misaligned. And so when you have like an existing demand gen team and then the company's like, hey, we're going to spin up abm and those two teams feel like they're competing for resources and have competing metrics, that's where things start to get kind of messy. Right?

Right. So our job, and not just for demand generation, but for all of the go to market functions. The way I like to say it is ABM needs to be multiplying the impact of those go to market functions. So we should be driving additional campaign responders in the accounts that we're targeting using the programs and campaigns that demand generation already has in place. We should be increasing the attendance rate to the events that field marketing has in place. We should be increasing the efficiency of SDRs in setting meetings and completing meetings in the accounts that we're going after together. So when you look at it across the board, we should be helping.

You mentioned field marketing. That's a separate team from. So you have demand gen and ABM and field marketing. Can you explain the difference between ABM and field marketing? Because I know a lot of people, myself included, would kind of lump those things together. Like field marketing is kind of what you're doing. So I'm just interested to hear the distinction.

Yeah, and I'll preface this with Snowflake is an account based organization. So our sales reps have a set account list that they each own. So we are, we have an account based lens on everything we do. Field marketing and ABM and sales development together are the three legged tool that support sales directly. So ABM and Field Marketing then are the two marketing organizations that directly support sales. So we're hand in hand supporting the same reps, DMS, RVP's, et cetera together. Field Marketing is responsible for event driven marketing. So they're creating regional, local and global in a lot of cases, event individually as well as series that are supporting the full funnel demand in those regions. ABM it goes. And we do digital marketing. We do, we work with the field marketing team. So just an example of how we'd work together. We might take data in a certain region and understand what topics are the accounts in that region interested in what people are most engaged or least engaged and help Field Marketing understand which zip code or which region to hold an event in and what the topic or invitees list should be. They'll develop the entire agenda, work to get the speakers, the location, the catering, all of that kind of stuff. And then ABM will also help promote that event to the accounts that have been listed as top accounts for the rep. So we're a layer that operates with Field Marketing. We don't replace them, we don't do the same job as them, but we're complimentary to their organization.

It's almost like, correct me if this is wrong, but like you might work with, there's probably a digital team of some kind. You might work with them on a particular campaign to achieve a broader goal.

Yep.

Okay. You mentioned that Snowflake is an account based organization and I gotta feel like the 8020 of like why you're able to be successful with this is that the whole company is aligned mind around this motion where I talk to a lot of companies or see a lot of companies where the reason that they don't understand ABM or how to do it is because it fundamentally is misaligned with like the status quo go to market. Can you talk about that?

Yeah. So there's some component of you have to be as an ABM leader, tenacious and innovative in order to make things work, because that's the nature of the industry. But there's also, if you don't have the alignment at the leadership level and at the business level to one go after a certain list of accounts. Which means you have to also be okay with not going after a certain list of accounts. Right. You have to be able to leave those to the side and say these are what we want to focus on. That's really important. But more importantly too is you have to have the budget, you can do grassroots movements, you can run A few plays, you can run some campaigns. But to do a true ABM function, you need budget to do any of those programs just like any other marketing function. And so the budget holder of the organization, and in this case it's my boss, the VP of Demand Gen, as well as his boss, our cmo, have to be bought in to allow you to spend that budget on an account based motion. So in order to spend that budget, they also need to be aligned to sales. Sales has to be willing to do an account based motion as well. So you need that higher level support.

And like the report, I mean we'll get into this more later, but. And the, the reporting, how do you measure what success looks like is much different than like we're working at Slack and we're focused on the freemium, the small business funnel, and we're trying to drive website traffic and it's very much more direct response. And I'm sure you have lots of thought on reporting, but okay, so we talked about you're an account based organization. Do you feel this is a little bit aside of where I want to go on this next part, but do you feel you have to be one or the other? What's your view on ABM as a whole? Because there are companies that they might have like kind of a small business or mid market, they have two funnels. Right. We're seeing more SaaS, companies have this two funnel approach. Can you be successful with ABM in that world?

I think so, yeah. So I think that the key to success in abm and this is where I think most people go wrong is is you have to build a program that suits the needs of your business. So take the ideas for example, from today's podcast. Use them as inspiration, use them as guidance to where you might want to go. But if you try to copy paste like stamp an ABM program from somebody else, that's where you're going to go wrong. So if you can identify a specific challenge in your business, maybe you don't have an account based sales organization, but you have one sales rep who's been designated to your top 10 accounts with the highest revenue. Then you have an account based sales rep and you can support them specifically in what they need for the business. That might be a top of funnel program to just get engagement in those 10 accounts because you've never even had an engagement or at another company. It might be the eight of those 10 or Global 2000 accounts and you're already in them, but there is 80% of the account unpenetrated now you're designing a program for cross sell and expansion and in our case, consumption. And that's going to look different as well. So the key is determine what the problem is you're trying to solve for your specific business and where it makes sense, and then develop a program accordingly.

Pause this podcast, take that last line and just play that over and over and over and over on repeat. Because what Hillary just talked about is true for abm, but it's true for any marketing advice. Whether you see it on LinkedIn, whether you hear it here. You have to go back to first principles and think from a marketing stand. Like, what is my company trying to achieve revenue wise? How are we going to go there? And I think you have to be able to articulate the marketing strategy. What marketing strategy does our business have? Oh, we believe that there's a universe of a thousand people who should buy our product. Then great, then let's figure out how to go after them. When you mash up all these different little things, the marketing team feels busy, everyone's burnt out, everybody's doing stuff, but we're not maximizing impact.

Well, and that's when people say, ABM didn't work. Right? I tried it, it didn't work. Well, what didn't work? What were you trying to achieve? Well, I was trying to get into big accounts. Well, you can't run a three month program and try to get into Global 2000 accounts and say it didn't work. So you have to set a very specific goal. My goal is to get a first meeting in three of the however many Global 2000 accounts and then you can tell yourself if it worked or not.

Oh, I love that because you just broke that down into like an actual actionable metric where like, right. I think it could be easy to say like, hey, we're going to do an ABM campaign and we're going to, we got emails and we got direct mail and we're at this conference. But you don't actually like, know what. We want a meeting at this account. And I think a lot of people, we get obsessed with the technology when like, what if you could, in the simplest form, what if you got a meeting at that account because you emailed them with a strong, with a strong pitch and you have the right product at the right time, that that can also work. I think we get blind, we get blinded to thinking of like these crazy campaigns. But it starts at this, this first principle. Like, how do we get this first meeting? Okay, so let's work off that how do we get this first meeting? You said, okay, we're going to go after these accounts. Let's just take people through like the one on one process. As a company, we've defined that we want to go after this universe of accounts. How do you. High level, how do you define those accounts? What do you use to do it? Who owns that? Let's go through that process first.

Yeah, so first you got to know your tam. And I think depending on the company size and maturity of the people listening, that could vary of like, yeah, of course I know the tam. What are you talking about? And also like, oh, I actually don't know who might buy my product. So first, who's your. Not only your total addressable market, but your total relevant market. Who can buy your product today? And I'll stop there for a second because this is where I see a lot of people make a big mistake, especially on the startup side of the house is they're trying to do an account based marketing approach to sell what their product is going to be in the future.

Right. Or it's to everyone. It's to everyone. Well, we sell to these six Personas, right?

So clarify like, dial down into like who you can sell to today. And if you want to sell the six Personas, eventually, great. But who, who do you really want to focus on? Because you're part of the success of AB is creating clarity for sales marketing and sales development to align on together. Right. A lot of it is just that clarity and alignment will help create success. So what can your product do and who can it serve now? And target them, work on a bigger brand campaign. If you want to start expanding your TAM elsewhere, then you're going to want to find out. There's kind of two paths to abm. There's we're going to go after them whether they're ready or not because they've been decided that they're an account we have to get into. I call these the Roomba vacuum cleaner accounts. The Roomba is going to go. If it hits a closed door, it's going to like turn to the side and go a different direction. If it goes down a hallway, then it's going to find like the next path, go around the room and come back out. So you're just going to keep going after those accounts. That's one path.

Sometimes though, to be fair, it does get stuck under the bench and it's like.

Right.

It's not always perfect, but to that.

Point, how often do you come home and three days later realize the Roomba stuck under the bed because it wasn't your top priority.

So true.

Whereas if it's your top priority, you need to be checking in and like looking for that check engine light. Is it stuck? Why is it stuck? What path did it take to get stuck? And how do we keep it from getting stuck again? And that's where people never go back and make those analyses and changes. They just say, oh, it didn't work, or oh, this person didn't do their job, this thing didn't fall through. You have to diagnose what went wrong to keep it from happening again.

Yeah, I love that. And like five days later, you thought the house was supposed to be cleaned for the party you were having. And it's not exactly.

And then it's, well, ABM didn't work. But then there's the other path too. Right. And this is what I recommend, especially if you're getting started. You want to find quick wins and you can use timing and engagement to do that. So use engagement data, whether it's first party or third party. First party being have they engaged on your website with your campaigns? If you de anonymized a page visit doesn't even have to be a form fill. Or have they engaged third party? That could be intent from a web content perspective. It could be from like the G2 trust radius sides of the world where they're leaving comments or looking at reviews. Those indicate that not only are you interested in them, but they're interested in either you or something that you sell but don't know you're an option. So that's how you're going to narrow down who to go after right now.

Let's pause on that for a minute because I want to explain this for people who might not be as fluent in this as you are. So you mentioned something about de anonymize the visit. You don't even need a form fill. Can you unpack that a little bit? So since you're selling to accounts, you don't need to necessarily have somebody fill out an account because you don't care who filled out the account. You want to know that so and so at this company visited our website. Can you talk about where does that data come from? And then like, what do you do with that?

Yeah. So there's a lot of different tools you can use for website de anonymization. Some are better than others and some rely more on cookies versus other technologies than others. You're going to pay attention to that with the changes in the market. But there's the clear bits of the world. There's roworks, there's six Sense, there's terminus that are like ABM platforms that can help. Bombora has a great tool as well. So it can tell you based off of the visitors to your website, what account do they think it's at? It's not at the people level, it's at the account level. Which when you're doing an account based marketing program is fine. But you can take it a step further. Did they go to your homepage? Did they go to your contact me page? Do they go to the page of a specific product? And when you narrow that down and sit down with a sales rep and say, hey sales rep, you've been trying to go after this account for six months. I can tell you that they've actually visited our page on XYZ Solution. Now let's sit down and I'll create a marketing campaign about that solution. You create touch points about that solution and the SDR has a sequence about that solution. You're now aligning that every touch point that company receives is around the topic that we know or suspect they're interested in. And it's a connected, cohesive experience as opposed to most brand experiences that are like shooting off in every direction and it's all kinds of things.

So you might not be able to say like hey Hillary, but you can kind of take an approach where you're going to have some tiers of contacts. How do you guess who should get that outreach then based on what you know?

Yeah, it's a great point. You need to know your ICP and you need to know your, your buyer. So if they're interested in like I'll just do the snowflake example for us. If it's a data science rated related solution, I need to know which titles level seniority are going to be the influencers, decision makers and who's on the buying committee for data science, which is include data scientists. If I see that it's more of a business solution, then I might go after more business level people. So you need to have a map and you can create that ahead of time. If these are the topics of interest or these are the pages of interest, who are the people that I reach out to with which message got it?

And then you can keep going further based on like once you actually get a response, and I know that now Hillary has responded and she is head of hr, you can then kind of like adjust based on the person that you actually know you're talking to now.

Right. And then you can also. They're likely like oftentimes the first contact's not going to be the exact person, but they'll send you in the right direction. Oh, we don't, we just signed with a competitor on a 12 month contract. Noted. Take a note in your calendar and 12 months follow up. Now you know what tech stack they're using and what the competitive messaging should be. Hey, we actually just changed our budget and announced in our earnings that we're going this direction instead of that direction. Great. Now you have insight and you know, to go after maybe the business person instead of the technical person. So even if the initial person you speak to doesn't get you the, you know, the meeting, you can use it as detective information to get where you want to go.

Nice. And that, that is what's so unique about this model is you're basically not everything is automated. Automated by tech like you. And the sales counterpart or whoever you're working with is like, oh, I read this in the news about this company. Like it's tough to do this automated at scale. You have to have this actual personal level of like understanding the accounts you're trying to sell to.

So my job leading the organization is to make that as easy as possible for my team members. So they're going to be tailoring and creating very, very boutique touch points. But when for example, we identify this is the Persona or the target titles, we've pre drafted messaging for that title in the financial service industry versus that title in the public sector or the healthcare industry. We've predefined what the graphics will look like if they're a senior leader versus if they're an individual contributor because we need them to see themselves in the graphics that they're being shown. So consider it like a library that you can build that when you curate it together, it becomes very boutique. But you don't have to reinvent the wheel and create a fresh new marketing campaign every single time you want to go after an account.

This is so good. I already know it. I already know it. I told you at the beginning you mentioned. So you, you start doing this, you start, you know, you have your account list we talked about in a previous episode, that marketing or well, I guess in your case as head of abm, I bet that do you own the list criteria, do you own that with ops, like who owns the. This is the blessed list of accounts that we're going after.

Yeah. So heads of sales and the sales leaders ultimately own that list. It's their territory. We are there to compliment and support their success. So everything has to be approved by them. And I will tell you, this is one of the traps that we fall into and I'm sure others do as well. It's like, here's the list I suggest. And then two weeks later, well, I don't want that account on that list anymore. Oh, let's go this direction. Right. So it's a lot of it is education and getting the data after a few quick wins to say, we know if we have this list for three months then it will be successful. But if you change accounts every two weeks, we can't expect the same result. And then going to the person who's in charge, whether that's a RVP of sales or regional vice president or whoever it might be, and getting their buy in to say, hey, I need you to hold your team accountable to sticking to this list. But to that point, you have to have their buy in. So this isn't about ABM field marketing or any other marketing org coming and saying here's the list we're going after. Bless it is sitting down and saying, hey, what topic do you want to talk about in your region? Okay, it's healthcare for data. Like data science for healthcare. Great. Let me bring back a list of the accounts that have the highest chance of responding to a campaign. About that. What do you think? And then the SDR is going, here's what I think we should remove, here's what I think we should prioritize. Right. It's a three legged stool that we're working together to all cohesively agree on that list. It's not one team saying, go, run, go after it. It's a team effort.

Even just hearing and how you talk about it, so much of what goes wrong in marketing is because of the relationship with sales. You're basically, the way I'm hearing you describe what you do in marketing, it's like your job is to serve sales. And for some reason we have a tough time swallowing that pill. But it's like it feels like when you're at a company that's performing well, the company has an account based approach. Marketing is seen to serve sales. It almost aligns everything else. I feel like you have a harder time when you're like, we are marketing. We need to prove what we do. Where you're like, hey, I'm partnering with sales. Like I'm gonna get my bonus if we hit the company revenue goal. Not if marketing did X or sales did Y.

And I mean, here's the Question what do you have to prove? If you're generating 110% of your MQL goal and not looking at the sales qualified opportunity rate or the close win rate of those MQLs, you're not proving anything. You're proving that you can go hire a content syndication vendor and get leads to match the number that you're trying to achieve.

That's a hard look at whoever's somebody's on a run or walk or make clean cleaning up around the house right now and they're like oh.

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Which is fine, right? Like it's, it goes back to what are you trying to achieve? If that's your goal you're trying to achieve, great. But if you're, if you've identified that your goal is to accelerate the deal cycle by 2x, then that's not going to do it.

Yeah, I love this approach to marketing. Just even if you're like, it's hard because I'm like, yeah, even if you're not doing at. Org, that should do abm. You should do abm just because it seems like companies that are doing abm, they're the most aligned with sales. They have the least issues. It's like the clearest. I like it because it's like, nope, we care about these a hundred companies and that's what we're trying to do. I do, I do love that from a focus standpoint. Okay, before I get into questions, you mentioned this. You said a three month program is not even enough. So what is enough? How do you think about a program? How on earth do you plan? Because like, if I was going to start an ABM campaign, I'm like, I don't know, like, we need a deck. Let's email them. Like, how do you structure this? How do you know what to do when, how do you plan? If you could share some of that, I would love to hear about it.

Yeah. So I've created multiple tiers within our programs to address different needs to my point of, it depends what you're trying to achieve. The Roomba accounts that I was talking about, where you just have to get into them, regardless of timing, you need to keep pursuing them. That's a year long program. So if those are going in, There'll be about 80 accounts this year for us across our teams, those have to stay in the entire year because we need that amount of of time to continue to knock on different doors and see where we need to go. We have another tier that's a three month program and this is the other RVP nominated. We have another tier that is AE nominated and those ones are on a quarterly basis. Right. We're matching that cadence of a quarter with the rep. That's where that three months comes from. Is it? We need that full quarter to go after it.

Wait, let's pause. Let's pause on this because I want to go into it because people are going to ask, okay, yeah, so this is so good. So in the 80, the 80 accounts, what types of things are you doing for those 80 accounts over the course of the year? Just a couple examples.

Yeah. So those ones are going to get the absolute best treatment. Highest level of personalization. I shouldn't use the term best because it's not better or worse. But they need a different level of support than other accounts. So you might get a custom direct mail program. And I'll use an example of Ash on my team ran this program where we identified we are in this account but we need to actually expand to other departments. But we have really strong champions. So we did a program that was a refer a friend where they got a customized piece of swag. They said if you refer somebody else in your organization that we're not already talking to, you and that person both get this piece of swag. We end up getting introduced to all of these other departments that we hadn't previously been in. That requires coordination with that company's legal team, their marketing team with the champions, with the reps. Right. It's a very, very heavy lift to get something like that off the ground. And so that's only going to happen in one of those must win highly strategic one to one accounts that are a year long.

That's great. This is where you might spend. That's where you're going to go spend before you even do anything because you're like we've already prioritize. What about like dinners, one on one meetings? There must be a lot of smaller meetings or goals to have like, you know, breakfasts, lunches, VIP stuff. Do you, have you done any of that stuff?

Yeah. So we work with our field marketing organization on that and we'll do what we call snow camps which are a full day event dedicated to just that account. And there'll be different agenda items or different sessions throughout the day for different Personas and different departments. Within the account we're targeting. We'll also create custom content. So a one pager or a piece of content directly for the account or business unit that we're going after, you name it, we're doing it one to one digital campaigns, micro sites that have content specific to each department that we're selling to.

The list goes on and do those things like take priority over all other. Like if someone on the team, if you're like, hey, we need to do a customized, you know, microsite for company X. Like does that just jump the priority queue from like for the creative team?

Actually the account based marketers at Snowflake are responsible for the creation of all of the creative assets and the curation of all the digital assets. So we're building them ourselves.

That's great because like that's the only way you'd be able to move fast is like if you have a team of people who can do different things. If it, if it just. You've passed it all down the line. Oh, that's awesome. You're all like, you're like mini, mini cmo. Each, each person is like a mini cmo. That's awesome.

Exactly.

Snow Camps is great. Snow Camps is a great term. And just I think I wanted to break down this level for people because the, the amount of effort that you're putting in to close one of these accounts, you're doing a dedicated one day in person. These people could never buy from us, but we're gonna do this for them and this is what it might take to close them or begin a conversation with them.

Yeah. And typically if we're doing an event like that, you have to have an internal champion at that account in order to run something like that that can help promote the event, get people on board, generate the excitement. Right. You're not gonna go into an account that's never responded to any of your emails and be like, we're inviting you to a full day event and bring everybody, like no one's gonna show up. That's like walking up and asking someone on a date in the middle of a concert that you've never seen before. It's like, doesn't make sense. So there has to be some existing.

So like your tier one is these 80 accounts you're going to do all year. What was the next, was it three months or was there another one between three months?

We define them based off of who nominates them. So that's the RVP level that nominates those accounts. Then we have our DM level. That's a three month one to one. We call it our traditional ABM level where we do best when we're supporting an open opportunity and accelerating that opportunity. But an AE can choose whatever funnel stage account that they want. And that's getting a one to one campaign digitally. They'll get included in a quarterly direct mail program. They'll get sequences aligned with the SDR organization and then we'll curate the demand generation efforts that are already existing in the company. We'll ensure that those are amplified in those accounts as well.

And then what's the last layer? The kind of catch all year long?

Yeah. So then we have our DM level as well, which is a one to many levels program. So that's where we identify a topic as opposed to an account. And we determine for each region they each get their own topic. We create one campaign that is, I like to call it one to one at scale. So we're targeting multiple accounts. But when an account lands on the microsite that we create, we have real time personalization that's putting in content messaging, call to actions specific to that account. So those are kind of our bread and butter with the SDRs. It's our one, two punch. We identify the list and the topic and the content and messaging with the sdr. ABM or AE and field marketer. We launch our campaign within two weeks. The SDR is following up on a cadence and we see about 3x to 4x the meeting rate when we take that approach than when SDRS go after accounts by themselves.

This is so good. You're going to get so many messages after this.

Just letting you know you're welcome to.

And if you don't, I'll eat that. But I promise, I promise you. All right, I want to go to some of these questions because we could talk about anything forever. But I want to, I want to just see your reaction to something. Of these.

Sure.

Some of these can be quicker, quicker answers. Don't feel like you have to go into all these. This one's from Tim. What's the best no tech or low tech ABM approach?

Yeah, I would take something you're already doing. Take a campaign that's your highest performing, so maybe it's a specific asset or a specific play that's working well. And identify a small subset of accounts with a sales rep and pick a sales rep who's interested in working with you. Don't force it upon anybody. And see if you can create a small tweak or tailored approach using that already successful campaign to get into an account that you haven't been able to get into. And that should be with marketing, sales and sales development all working together. So just personalize to make it relevant to the person you're reaching out to.

Love it. This one's from Kayla. What are best practices to get sales buy in to support Long Tail ABM efforts? Oh, this is a softball for you, my friend.

I love this question. You have to align your goals to theirs. So ask them. And this is a question I ask our sales leaders when I talk to them. What are your priorities for this upcoming quarter and what's going to make or break your number for you? You then align. If their priority is solution X or Persona Y, you come back to them with, here's how I think I can support your priority. What do you think? And you help them understand and believe that you are there to help them reach their goals. You're not there to claim credit or attribution for what you're trying to do.

Yeah, I mean, think about everything Hillary said to date on this podcast is like, you're literally showing up being like, hello, how can I help you close more deals?

Exactly.

And so they have to see you in that light. And you also have to be, this is why metrics matter. Like, you have to be measured to that. Because if that's not how you're measured, if you're at this, where a lot of marketing goes wrong here, if the marketing team is not fundamentally aligned to help sales close those deals, then of course there's going to be friction and you're not going to end up supporting. But I can't think of a sales team in the world who wouldn't want help closing deals. It's when they don't believe that marketing is working on the right stuff and they want to. You know what? They're not helping me. This is making things worse. I'm going to take this and I'm going to do it myself. This question, this is a lazy question. It's what is ABM and what isn't?

So I'm going to take a political approach to that question, which there's a lot of ABM police out there that'll tell you. One to many is not abm. It's only one to one. And one to one is only ABM if it's highly tailored and whatever. Like, I don't care. To me, ABM is good marketing. And good marketing is when you are aligning your objectives to the objectives of the company and meeting them. So that's my answer.

Yeah, ABM is a term that was made up by a technology vendor or some point. Like what you said is what you're doing. It's good marketing.

Yeah. I did write a post on LinkedIn that got quite A bit of interaction about what ABM is and what it is not. So if you want to check that out, you can go to my LinkedIn profile and it's sitting there.

And does it echo what you just kind of said?

Pretty much. And I think I go into, it's been a while since I wrote it, but I think I go into like ABM is not a lead based program. Right. ABM is not a magic bullet to solve a problem for the broader organization that if you don't have any support with it, it's not a standalone effort, it needs to be integrated with the other functions, yada yada. You can, you can check it out on, on there.

This question, how do you approach your ICP for ABM campaigns when you don't have any industry narrowing in current clients portfolio and the company's product strategy? I'll take that one. You can't, it has to be a company level strategy thing. You're then you're just like vaporware. Like yeah, yeah, you can't, you literally can't. Hey, we have nothing to sell these people. And to your point earlier, like you need a niche, you need a first market to go after a few. This one's from Mary Ellen. If you were at a seed stage startup with no budget, where would you start and how would you plan for when budget comes available? Before you answer this, I do just want to say these questions are the, are the most frustrating answer because to your point, in the beginning usually you're going to do ABM if you're selling larger deals. And so if you're the CEO or the board or whoever and you're like, hey, we want to close Fortune 500 companies and we're going to give you no budget to do it. That's where as the marketer you're going to be like, see ya. This is, it doesn't work like that. Am I, am I wrong in thinking like that?

No, no. I'd probably look for another job. But I will tell you that I think the draw to ABM is the tailored spear phishing approach to be able to land the customers you want. So if I was in that situation and I work with several startups doing this is you want to start putting in together a campaign infrastructure so you want to identify who are your target Personas, what message will resonate with them, what value do you add to their life? And not just on the technological side, but you need to understand are these people who are sleeping in sleeping bags overnight because whatever workloads they're doing are taking them so long and maybe your business will help them get out in time to get to their kids soccer game. Right. You need to understand how it's going to impact them as a person in their professional life, their ability to get promoted, that kind of thing. Thing. You then can start mapping out what content do I want or need? And hey now with like Chat GPT and I just released a podcast on this as well if anybody wants to dive more into it, you can produce a lot of content on your own and tweak it and adjust it. Obviously don't put it out there just from chatgpt on its own, but use it as a writing buddy to help generate content that aligns to each of those Personas, each of those value messages. Then you can develop your cta, then you can develop your creative. Now when you get budget, you have your whole suite of marketing ready to launch to whatever your ICP is, whether it's an account based marketing approach, whether it's a Persona based approach, like whatever it is. So you can be building that ecosystem ahead of time.

You mentioned Chat GPT. You mentioned your podcast. We're going to get back to both of those things. I got my notes. If you think I've been multitasking, I haven't. This is what I do the whole time.

I love it.

I write notes the whole time. Intent. This question's from Tim. What intent data? Do you believe in it and if so, what's the most effective kind? The ABM platforms keyword intent, Bombora style intent or G2 style intent? That one got a bunch of upvotes.

Yeah. So this is a little bit of controversial topic. I love intent. I could not do my job without it. To be completely frank. And I'm it's right up there with the marketos and salesforces of the world in terms of success. For my organization, we use intent not only to help prioritize accounts, we use it to help craft our messaging. We use it to help understand a sales cycle. You can actually do a look back of what were people searching on or account surging on the 12 months leading up to the purchase that they made with your business. So you can get more insight into what you should be talking about earlier on before they even know that your company is an option. We also are using it to plan product marketing content. So what should we prioritize in timing based off of what people are searching for? So huge fan of intent in terms of what type of intent you need. I think it goes back to what problem Are you trying to solve? To my understanding, the kind of G2S trust radiuses of the world are more bottom of funnel intent that you want to see who you need to be having conversations with to close a deal. That maybe they're looking at other solutions. Sure, you can use them for top of funnel as well. The Bomboras of the world are kind of the OG Intent providers that have an agnostic data co op. Those tend to be my preference because they're not tied to a specific solution. They integrate into any solution you want to use so that you have the flexibility to scale up, scale down, work with whatever ABM providers you'd like to work with. I also have an unpopular opinion about keyword intent where you actually type in the custom keywords. I personally have found that when you have the ability to type in anything and everything, nothing means anything because if you type in enough words, everybody's going to be surging on something, so it's not really separating the sand for you. Whereas if you narrow down on like what are the keywords or the topic clusters that are most relevant to your business, you can better separate and prioritize which accounts to go after with which messages.

Great answer. How do you think this changes in. You mentioned this briefly earlier, cookieless world. Is that coming? What's going to happen to these types of data sources as that happens?

Yeah, I'm not an expert on the cookie transition, but I will tell you that I work closely enough with a lot of these vendors that they've been preparing for it for a long time. They have backup and ancillary ways that they de anonymize web visits, they de anonymize how they consume data. They're all prepared for it. And so I think that it won't be, at least on the intent side. I don't think it'll be as big of an impact as we think it will be.

Yeah, I've heard they've been hiring interns to go to your house and see what you're doing and then they're gonna. The future is gonna be much is gonna go back to humans and spying on you? No. I don't know. I also think, don't you. Don't you kind of like doesn't a part of you, the competitive marketer in you feel like, great, like bring, bring it on. Like it'll. I'll come up with a new. Like, we'll have a new challenge and we'll have to figure out creative ways to solve those problems.

I mean, I will say if you are relying on any single tactic to the point where you think you'll get fired if it goes away, then you should probably reevaluate you your mix.

That's such a good. So true. I'm gonna let that one breathe because that is the life same for anything. Like if you have one strategy, if you have one person on your team, you need to diversify. That's a, that's a great comment. All right, this question was in here and I forgot to ask you this, so let's just briefly talk about it. I'm sure we could talk about it forever. On the whole, how do you measure your ABM efforts? And I'm going to ask you with this kind of caveat, like lens so many activities and I think it's just, it's much easier for most people to measure. AdWords is really easier to measure. Direct response marketing, really easy, easy to measure. When you're doing things over the course of three, six, nine months. How do you, you know you're going to write a blog post here and you're going to do a thing, this thing here, you're going to do one event here. Take us through like just a high level framework for how you, how you measure this stuff.

Yeah, you can't do a direct. This asset led to this lead that led to this meeting that led to this opportunity. There is no direct ROI in that sense. So we're looking at the overall targeting of the account and surrounding of the account and how the impact compares to other accounts with a similar profile that did not get that same treatment. So I'm looking at Lyft of ABM targeted versus ABM engaged which is did we target them or do they actually respond to something we're doing and then compare those to non ABM accounts. The numbers are so significant that that's been the thing that we've really relied on to show the difference. I think you look at like for an example, SDR can go after 100 accounts and get into a completed meeting with 10 of them. Without ABM they can go into 100 accounts and get between 40 and 60 meetings with ABM. When you have those sorts of numbers that can help you really understand the lift. But the overall answer is really pipeline. Right. We're a one team pipeline machine. And so we're all working together. Field marketing, SDRs, demand gen, partner marketing. We're all trying to generate pipeline for the business and the accounts that are must win accounts as well as other accounts as well of course. And so we're more focused on that total outcome than the slicing and dicing or attribution of which activity did what got it.

But for someone to say like ABM is working, you would want to look at like let's look at accounts that we did ABM to verse not and see the lift.

Yeah, it should be pretty clear. If you look at it from that perspective and you have a time bound, you have to know what you're trying to measure so you know specifically what you're looking at and then a time bound length. So in the this quarter, in this fiscal year, in this half, whatever it might be, what was the behavior of accounts with and without account based marketing?

What's your perspective on the blog? Does blogging still have a place in B2B marketing? Does it have a purpose? If you're doing ABM, where do you see content that doesn't have a direct response goal fitting in your strategy today?

The blog is not my expertise, so I don't want to speak to the blog as like a broader marketing tool. I think it's like anything else. If you're trying to mow your lawn with a knife, you're going to struggle. So what are you trying to achieve with your blog? If your blog is a lawnmower, because you're trying to generate thought leadership and drive a specific high level audience to your website and get that traffic up, then great, you now have a lawnmower for your lawn. If you're using a blog to get into a specific C level influencer at a specific account, but you've never actually sent that blog to that C level influencer and you're like just hoping that they land on your website on that blog. Then like you're not really doing anything. So I would say how cool.

Okay, that was great. That was a political way of answering it, but also useful way of answering, which is my interpretation of that is like it's tough to tell any channel without understanding the goal because exactly. If you had a kick ass blog, that position that like pumped out great content that talked about your brand as a thought leader and had interesting research and insights and point of view, well guess what people are going to do? They're going to go read that thing. And so then you probably as the ABM marketer would be like wow, this is great. This accounts that we're interested in are visiting, are reading our content. That would be a positive signal.

I'll tell you what, my first thing comes to mind is a well written blog that's gotten a lot of traction and say it's for a C level decision maker in it. My first thought is, if I have a existing account, 80% of it's unpenetrated. I have a champion in that account. How can I take that blog, have the sales rep help me tailor it and tweak it specific to what that account's needs are, and then have that champion send it them themselves to the C level IT decision maker. Now, you've got an ABM approach of how you're using that blog.

You mentioned it before. I gotta ask. I'm only asking this for the clickbait and for the SEO, but everyone's talking about Chat GPT. Where do you see ChatGPT or other tools like Jasper and such fitting in the ABM stack in the future?

Yeah, I think that the bandwidth of humans is one of the biggest limitations of abm because there's some element that you just can't replicate. And so for some of that, if that's tailoring messaging for a specific account, if you can upload a list of variables and use something like ChatGPT to help you write messaging, I think that could be helpful. I will put a layer of caution on this that anything I say about something like ChatGPT, it's a starting point. It's a generator to get you 80% of the way there. It's not the final product. So you still have to have a savvy, knowledgeable marketer who's gonna look at it and tweak it and alter it and adjust it. But I think it can help you get started. And I've also been using it personally as like a brainstorm Buddy. So even as simple as, like, I was trying to come up with some ad copy and I needed two words that started with T. And so I was using Chat GPT to say, okay, here's the structure of my copy. It's from A to Z in marketing terms, but I need both letters to start, both words to start with the T, and using it to help me identify, like, even small things like that. It's the brainstorm Buddy that you wish you had.

Brainstorm Buddy. Somebody take that an actual marketer with a great. With a great idea. All right, Hillary, this was great. I could talk to you forever about this topic. I hope you get messages from this topic. You mentioned that you have a podcast. Want to plug that real quick? Because I'm sure there's going to be people who would love to hear from you again.

Yeah. So I appreciate that this podcast was similar in that there's very tactical Takeaways. But I started a podcast called Go to Market Speed Dial. Gtm. Speed Dial is how it shows up in Apple and Spotify. And the idea was that I have a lot of conversations with my mentors and other people in the industry asking what I feel are dumb questions because I want to get specific takeaways of how I can action different plays and different ideas and even like leadership advice of hiring, firing, all of the things as a leader. And so I created this podcast not to be highly strategic, but to be very tactical. So I interview folks in the industry. One just came out yesterday, which is how to pitch your ideas internally and execute them. Who do you reach out to? Do you use slack? Do you use email? How do you follow up? At what point do you drop the idea if it's not getting picked up? How do you measure it? How do you manage people who don't report to you? That whole process we lay out in that podcast so you can walk away knowing what to do next. So that's the spirit of it.

Love that. That's a great idea for a podcast too, is people love the tactical stuff. So is it, Is it you? Do you have guests? Do you edit them together? Like, how do you come up with that episode?

Yeah, so it's me interviewing for the most part. So, like the ChatGPT episode, I interviewed my former boss who's a CMO at Kite Works and super passionate about using ChatGPT and product marketing, PR, et cetera. So he gives you tangible ideas of how you can use that. And then I also next week, in two weeks, I'm releasing an Ask Me Anything on ABM where I took in questions from LinkedIn and it's a solo episode where I'll be answering people's questions. So I'm a one man show in terms of producing and planning and editing. So we're kind of developing and going with the flow here as it gets established.

That's all right. That's great. I hope you get some new listeners from this. And also you have the most important ingredient, which is you're a great speaker. You're passionate about what you do, you know what you're doing. And so that to me trumps the high production and whatever else it takes. So, Hillary, I mean, this was great. I learned a bunch from this. Thank you for being here. We'll link to all your stuff. You can go check out Hillary Carpio, LinkedIn. Check out the GTM Speed Dial podcast. I know people will be there, they want to check that out and make sure that you're following. Exit 5 Exit 5 Marketing on Instagram I created a new account where we just post all clips from the podcast so you can just have like a one stop shop to get a little bit of bite of B2B marketing knowledge while you're scrolling through nonsense on on Instagram or whatever, wherever else. So Hillary, thank you for doing this. You rock. I appreciate it. Exit Foreign.

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