#49: ABM (Account-Based Marketing) Overview

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Exit. All right, Brandon is here. I'm going to try to turn this around quickly because there's been a lot of, I don't know why it is a lot of comments and discussions around ABM. Somehow it's 2023 and everybody's still talking about ABM and that's okay, it's a good thing. But before, before we hop in, Brandon, can you just give a set some context to your name, quick background on yourself? I think that'd be helpful for people.

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, my name is Brandon Redlinger, currently the VP of marketing at a company called Crosscheck. But what is relevant for this discussion? I was early on in the team at Engageo, built a lot of things from the ground up. There was with Engagio through the acquisition by Demand based. I ran Demand Gen and ABM at Demand Based for a little bit and that's probably the most relevant for this discussion. So I've thought a little bit about ABM and I've seen, I've seen a few companies do it.

Okay, and then what is the company, the company that you're at now? What, what does that company do?

Oh yeah. Okay, so Crosscheck, Little weird spelling, C R O S S C H Q. But we are a higher end intelligence platform and we're really helping talent leaders optimize their recruiting efforts and just continuously improve what they call quality of hire.

What's the marketing go to market motion at this company.

So it is heavily driven by Demand gen and we actually don't have an AVM function right now. And I actually very consciously chose not to do it right now because I really don't think we have the right foundation in place. So there's a lot of things that I'm setting up, whether that's team structure, the processes, the data, and most importantly sales and marketing and alignment. Because we actually just hired a new head of sales, a new VP of sales. He started yesterday.

Awesome. This is great. So there's so much to go in here and this is not a knock on other podcast guests, but you actually sent me this awesome, this awesome outline of things related to abm which is great based on some of this discussion that you saw in the community, which is Great. But I'm just curious even just to jump off from there. So when you say you're not, you're not ready or it's not right, like what about, where do you start? Like if I'm, if I'm at a company, like how do you, how do you start to. What's the first move to decide that like this is the strategy? Because I think it's not just abm. I think it comes back to like all the way back to first principles or like exactly the root of this, like how are we going to do marketing? Is that, is that where can you just talk through that? Like how does that start?

So yeah, as I'm building up my marketing plan, my por, I'm looking at all the different channels and the performance and I'm also looking at the close one deals and looking at are the signals there that actually indicate that ABM would be something for us to go after. So we're actually closing a lot of enterprise deals, especially as of late. So that says okay, great, there's signal there. But now I actually got to look at to make sure that we have all the processes and structure in place. So that's foundational things like lead to account matching, that things like lead routing, calendaring for your reps, all those sorts of things that you really need for that ABM foundation. But also I'm looking at the team, not just hey, do I have an ABM marketer or do I not? I'm actually looking at things like do we have an enterprise implementation specialist? Do we have CSMs that can actually support enterprise deals? Do we even have ABM or enterprise sellers? I've been at companies before where it's been a false start for ABM because we do a lot of the ABM stuff in marketing and then we're driving all this demand and then we send it over to the sales team. They've never run an enterprise sales cycle before so of course they're going to fumble it. Right. And then after that, okay, so maybe you do have those enterprise reps. Okay, we closed the deal. Great. Do you actually have an implementation team that can onboard an enterprise company? Because that's a lot different than an SMB. Right. And then after that do you actually have the support team and the success team to give that or give those ABM accounts the proper attention to make them successful? So it's not just the marketing team, it's across the whole organization. And that's why this is a whole company wide thing and it really should be.

Yeah, I Think that's a great guardrail for like any marketing strategy, which is like, for any of these approaches to really work, it does have to be. I like how you broke that down. Like, it has to be the company wide initiative for it to really work. And I've seen companies where they're doing three or four different things. They, they're doing freemium and abm and it's like one person on the marketing team is, is doing it even. I've been at companies where in the early days, it almost seems like what's happening at your company now, which is, are you doing abm? No. But are you. Are some of the deals that are coming in through the other channels, they happen to be enterprise. Yes. And you start to look for those signals and start to figure out like, well, is that a lever? And should we in this next year try to create a process around that? And that could be one. One channel that we go out and scale.

Exactly, exactly. And the other thing that I'm looking at a lot right now too is everyone still talks about sales and marketing alignment. It's kind of crazy because we've been talking about it for years and a lot of people still struggle with it. And the way I really see sales and marketing in alignment is there's aligning with your sales counterparts strategically, and then there's also the tactical side of it. So strategically, you have your agreed upon definitions, your metrics, you have your shared goals and objectives, you're speaking the same language, you do joint campaign planning, you do retrospectives together, you do QBRs together. All of that is really baked into how you operate as a go to market team. And then ideally too, if you can find a way to be compensated similarly, it's not going to be the same, but similarly, that is always going to be a huge plus for alignment. Because if there's one thing that I know about managing people, it's people respond to incentives. And the best incentive is money. Yeah, right.

There's been two times in my career where my base salary has always kind of been fixed. And then my bonus as an executive or director or whatever has been based on not some arbitrary marketing goal, but company revenue.

Exactly.

And that goal came from the founders and everyone on the executive team had a goal. We all sat in the room and we said like, hey, here is the company goal. And I remember I got a paper from the cfo, like, I got a raise in a promotion and I got a paper from the CFO that said it was actually when I got promoted to be a VP for the first time. I didn't know how any of this worked. And they were like, congratulations, you're VP now. That means you'll get a executive bonus if we hit our numbers. And so I was like, cool, what does that mean? And it was great. I had this like, really simple piece of paper and it said, our goal is, I'm just making this up, right? Like we say we. We want to get to 10 million ARR this year. And if we do that, you get a. You get a bonus of X. And that's the same across the board. If we achieve 90% of that, you get this. If we achieve 80% of that, you get this. And if we achieve less than 70% of that, you get this. And then less than that. There is no, there is no bonus. And, and that was great because, you know, there's there, there might be different, like overall salary, ways people get paid across the team, but that made me feel like, oh, this is great. Like, it made me feel like we all want to win because if the company wins. Exactly. We're defining that as revenue. Like, that is how you get sales and marketing and CS and all those people to work together on something. So, yeah, I agree with you. It is crazy that it still gets talked about. And it's one of my biggest rants. It's like, man, so much of the stuff that we see in Exit 5 or in LinkedIn or wherever it's. It comes down to internal politics and people not being aligned. It's like one of the things that's. Like, sometimes it almost might be easier if marketing did report to the CRO, because sales and marketing would have one really damn clear goal in that world. I'm not saying that that is always going to be the path and it's always going to work, but that would give you one set of clear goals. Hey, let's focus revenue.

Yep, 100%. I cannot argue with that at all. I do like marketing having a piece of it based off of just qualified pipeline, but I really do think the majority should be revenue. Like revenue.

When you say having a. Having a piece of it based on qualified pipeline, meaning, like there might be some additional upside in your comp. Based on pipeline goals.

Exactly. Exactly.

Okay, can I ask you a random. This is a random thought, but somebody mentioned today this metric of. Just as it relates to pipeline and budget, do you still believe in the 10 to 1 pipeline to budget ratio?

That's always tricky, right? All these ratios. I actually want to break that out by segment. If, if we're trying to do blended 10 to 1 across all channels. Great, go for it. Good luck. I think that's going to be tough for you to do, but just seems.

Like that would be like 10, 10 to 1 blended across all those channels would have to be just like, you just have so much momentum and just like, you know, you're just drowning in new business.

That I know.

Good luck.

I, I would love a ten to one, but.

All right, that's good. No, I just want to hear your reaction. And I think your reaction to me says a lot, which is like, like any benchmark, you have to see it as a big goal and then like adjust your. Okay, hey, maybe we could strive to that. But if it's actually 4 to 1 or 5 to 1, are we going to be upset about that? And, and, and look at your own business. Okay, let's talk about abm. So if we go all the way back to the beginning first, what might be the reason that a company would decide to adopt an ABM as their marketing strategy?

Again, after we're looking at our marketing plan, we decide, all right, we know that this is our number at the end of the year and then we're breaking up, how to actually get there. And then if our demand gen efforts aren't going to quite get us there, but we see upside in abm, then we can actually put together some compilot programs and tests to actually figure out is this viable and can this help help us make up our difference? And that's what I'm always looking at too, when I'm building my plans is I always start at the top and work down. But you also have to work bottom up just to make sure all the numbers add up. I always start top down and then, and then go back bottom up. Because if you have a crazy goal, and of course that's going to be given to you by the executive or usually by the board, right? And it's like, okay, let me figure out if this is actually doable and then you actually put all your resources and your budget against it. Then if it's going to come up short, you got to say, all right, here's my budget based on historicals. This is actually what I can get you. And if there is a gap there, you go to the team and you say, okay, here's what I'm going to actually need and here's my plan for how to actually use that additional budget to hit our goals.

Is there something even earlier than that? Is there a particular, hey, we are selling this type of widget to these type of companies that, that gives you a signal that like ABM might be a better approach versus like if we're selling a photo sharing app or a screen capture tool. Those are, you know, two not great examples. But is there something that's rooted into like the what, what are you making and what are you selling and who are you selling it to that, that might push you in this direction to go account base?

No, not necessarily. I think, I mean really it is, it's about the who. Right. Like I think a good enough signal is are we actually closing these large accounts?

But it has to be large, it has to be large accounts. Like it's not going to be. You're not going to take this approach for $50 a month?

No, not exactly. Exactly. A lot of people try to put a number on it, but ABM only makes sense if you're doing 50k deals or larger. I don't know if I believe specifically in that and I think with technology that number has really come down a lot. Maybe you can use it as a good guideline. But yeah, if you're really doing a lot of high velocity deals and you're getting a lot of inbound interest, then yeah, you might not need abm.

Okay, so it's more about, we believe that instead of waiting for a market to come to us, we believe that, hey, we think this is a great fit for this, this group of people. We, we want to go outbound to them and go and tell them about our thing.

Yeah, exactly. Also, ABM is a great approach for expanding existing customers. Right. So one of my last companies that I joined, their deal size was around the 15k mark, but they had huge logos. And one of our biggest accounts was doing a million dollars. But we were only in one, it was Amazon. We were in one small piece of Amazon. So we could sell them more seats, we could sell them different products, but we could also sell into different business units within Amazon. So I think you also have to look at your existing customers and maybe ABM is an approach that you do just for expansion opportunity. So there are signals that you can look at of how you're going to be doing abm. I think a lot of people these days, it's the fun, sexy thing to talk about generating new demand. I did this new fun creative campaign and it brought us in these many logos and now we're in deals with them. But don't forget to look at your existing customers too. Are there opportunities there?

I also think it's just so easy to chase different, you know, new channels and new strategies and try different things. Like, one of the reasons that I, I like this approach is because I just think it is. You're being very clearly defined about, like what things we're going to do and who are we going to spend time on. I think when you don't have that clear focus, it's very easy to be like, we have a podcast, we have a blog, we have a YouTube channel, we do dinners, we do events, we do. It's so easy to do all those.

Things versus, like, campaigns are easy.

Yeah, campaigns are easy versus if you're like, hey, for this quarter or this year, there are a thousand accounts that matter to us and we're going to work as a team to go after them.

Right, exactly. And honestly, I even think a thousand is too much. We can get into actually count tiering and scoring and all that stuff. But that is actually probably one of the things that I saw the most is when people are picking the number of target accounts, they pick way too many and then they can't meet their SLAs and they're not getting the results that they need because their focus is spread so thin. I mean, my team is probably so sick of hearing you say this, but like focus matters more than anything, especially at startups. And especially like that is what ABM is all about. It's about focus.

Well, especially like if you're, if you're at this stage where it's not a full blown function yet, it's not how your company does business right now. Like, why not start with 50 logos and try to win those companies and take the learnings from those and then, and then expand from 50 to 100. But let's talk about that because people want to know, where does this start? And so there's another question for later, which is like, what do you do once you have the accounts? Don't you just send them emails over and over? So let's, let's get there next. But first let's talk about account selection.

Yes, totally. Okay. Account selection is probably one of the most important pieces, right? Because if you get this right, a lot of the other dominoes fall easy. Later, when I'm thinking about account selection and I mean you always start off with doing just a one sales analysis. You're looking at the deals that you won, what are the commonalities? But what people don't do often is actually look at, let's look at just the larger deals instead of looking at all deals that we've ever Closed. Because if I'm, I'm looking at, for example, my current business at Crosscheck, if I look at all the deals that we've closed and which ATS they're using, it's probably going to point us to a more SMB ats. Right. So let's actually look at the larger deals and then let's also get CS involved. And I really want CS involved because they actually have more anecdotal evidence and they can say, hey, this account that you think is a really big logo that's paying us a lot of money is the biggest pain in the ass ever. Right. Don't work with those. And maybe they identify a few of those and you're like, okay, it's because of this integration that they have. Let's not worry about, like, let's actively not seek out companies with that integration.

Yeah. And I think this speaks back to the point about you were talking about earlier where like, I remember a specific time when I was at Drift, for example, where there were some sales reps that were closing much bigger deals and it looked great on paper, but we actually, the product didn't have like the capability to support a specific thing at that time.

Yeah.

And so like we made a company strategic decision to actually not focus on those deals because they weren't, they weren't right for the CS fit, they weren't right for the product fit. And so it does have downstream functions. So I love that. Which is like, make sure that the customer success and product teams are involved in this process.

Exactly. Yeah. And your support teams too. I also think people should really be looking at their closed loss analysis too, of those deals that they're losing, why they're losing those deals. Factor that in and then you can come up with what you think is going to be your icp. Right. And usually this looks like a one pager that's listing out. It's mainly firmographic and technographic data. Right.

Okay. So you go look at these deals, you look at close one deals, not just all of them, but you look at some subset of them, the bigger ones, you make sure that they're actually good fit. And you find maybe it could be 5 or 10 or 3 or 1. It could be any number of customers. Okay. We like this pocket of customers. Then you kind of try to, you do an exercise where you actually try to define like, well, how do we articulate who these customers are? Oh, well, they are B2B SaaS and they are HR, you know, companies that have a chief HR person and they have at least this many employees and you, and you map that out. Now you've built a picture of this ideal customer, then what the heck do you do? Just Google, like go to LinkedIn. How do you go and find fifty to a hundred or even if it's twenty, how do you go and find those companies?

Okay, so hopefully you have a lot of these companies in your database already. Or you can actually there's a lot of data vendors out there that you can say, show me companies that look like this. I do want to layer in some other signals as well on top of that. So I'm looking at intent data and engagement data. Now that I don't work at a company that sells intent data, I'll be honest, I'm not that hot on intent data.

Can you explain those two things for people that are listening that might not have familiar. Can you explain like let's go and explain all those things actually, like, because there's going to be people that are listening. You can just get a list of companies. So which tools might provide you with a list of companies? Talk about engagement data, talk about intent data.

Cool. Yeah. So you can go to companies. I mean the biggest one out there is ZoomInfo, right? There are some others out there. I've always used Zoom info. They've acquired a lot of companies. So at this point I think they probably are the most complete data provider out there. Although they do a lot more than just data these days. I do like zoom info for that intent Data. That's like third party data. So you're engaging on G2 your. There are other signals. Ad networks.

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That actually can tell you that they're searching for these things or even doing specific branded searches they're looking for specifically crosscheck is in their search. So that's intent data, that's third party data. And then engagement data is your first party data. So any of your internal tools that you use, that's your marketing automation, your CRM, your sales engagement tools. I will tell you, I'll tell you why I'm not that hot on intent data. Although I think there are two places where intent data is actually pretty useful. I think it's useful when, okay, this is from my, from my own experience. It's, it's a close lost opportunity and you lost it to no decision. And then they're surging on intent keywords again. Then that has a high propensity to come back and buy. So that's worked really well for me in the past not intent data. As like, there are some companies out there and these are the intent companies that say, only go after companies that are in market that are surging on intent. If you have a company and you just are given a name of the company, that doesn't actually help you that much. And there are companies that say we have to pair it with your first party engagement data. And I feel like that's cheating because first party engagement data is your strongest data. Of course, if you pair anything with your first party engagement data, it's like saying, right, this player is only good if he plays with Michael Jordan.

Well, right, like if you like reverse all the things that we just said, that's saying like, hey, here's a company that we've defined as a good fit in our market and they match on this intent data and they visited our website and done something within the last two weeks. Like I would hope that would be first on your list.

Exactly.

They're going to go call.

Yeah, it's kind of obvious. Exactly.

I like what you said about the first party engagement data because I do feel like that with ABM and just with anything in general, I think people's natural tendency is to sprint before they they can walk. And so first it's like as we're defining this list, the first question is like, are any of these companies like already in our database and in our funnel and somewhere? Because I've always been surprised, like, oh wow, someone from Shopify is actually on our email list and someone is subscribed to our blog and someone has attended a webinar already. Okay, like, cool, let's start to build that. Like, let's go focus on that versus just pulling some cold company list from Zoom info.

Exactly. Okay, so how I like to do it is you have your just your ICP match and then they get a score 1 to 100. And then I'm layering in intent data, but I'm going to only give that like a small weight. Like maybe it's 10%. And then I'm layering in my engagement data. Maybe that's a bigger weighted percentage of my overall score. And then you have an overall score, an overall fit score and then just stack rank them. And then I actually go to my sales team and I say, okay, you guys get to pick these accounts. We did all the research for you. Here's what we did. Explain to them so that they have confidence in your model. And then you say, we stacked rank these now rep go pick X amount of accounts. And a lot of Teams these days still use the like, tier one, Tier two, Tier three, or maybe it's just two tiers, but you really have to define what each tier means. And you have to say, okay, These are the SLAs that you have to hit. Each Tier 1 account gets X amount of direct mail budget. You have to do a full account plan for every tier one account. You know, here's all the time, energy and resources from your team that you get for tier one accounts. And then they can say, I mean, this is speaking from previous examples is, I had one rep that's like, I hate account plans. I'm going to take the fewest number of tier one accounts that I can. And then I had another rep who was like, okay, I can knock account plans out all day, I'm going to take more tier one accounts. So then this is also another way to make sure that you're allocating your resources properly is you're looking at all the resources that you had and you're actually breaking it out based on the tiers and the number of accounts in those tiers so that you're not using all of your, for example, direct mail budget on tier ones and you have none left over for tier 2s. Or you're spending all of your time personalizing tier 1 emails and then you don't have any time left for tier 2s and then you end up not doing anything to those accounts and then they go cold or. Right.

I have a bunch of follow ups to some things that you mentioned there.

Okay, cool.

First, you mentioned basically doing this scoring of ICP match on a 0 to 100 scale. Are you doing that manually?

Yeah. You can build simple models and just use Excel to do that.

So you're looking at, you're building a model, you're taking these three. You're taking ICP Match, Intent and Engagement. And that's just kind of like a system that you've made up over the years and learned. And here's how we're going to define our account list. We're going to use those three. Those are the three factors. And then you're just making up that score and you're just, it's a hypothesis that you have to like, exactly as tight as you can on this definition of who we should sell to.

Right? Exactly. Exactly.

Okay. And like, is that tedious? I just feel like, like to score someone on 0 to 100, I, I think I found that people have a hard time like in an interview grading a candidate like one to five.

Yeah.

How do you how do you grade in a, an account from 0 to 100? Like, I don't know, it's a 64.

Yeah. So you're looking at. Okay, we've determined that headquarters in the US Is extremely important to us or they're in X industry. So you're actually looking at all these signals and you're saying, or it could be company size. We need companies that are 10,000 to 15,000. So there might be a company that meets all your criteria but is 8,000. So they might not get a full score on company size, but they get a full score on everything else. And you're rolling that into that overall fit score.

Got it.

And then you're layering in the intent data. Are they surging? If they're surging, they might get, again, I don't want to weight that too heavily. They might get, you know, an extra 10% there. If they have a lot of engagement on your account, I'm going to also bump that score up. So that's our first part of engagement.

When you say surging, is that a specific, like demand based or something like term? Like what does surging mean?

Is that demand based, specific? No, I think, I think that's general intent. Vendors. Yeah, some might use different words that they've tried to coin themselves. But it's basically looking at these intent companies look at signals.

Okay.

And then. Yeah, and then it's just saying, hey, yeah, they've, they've searched a lot for this term.

Got it. Okay.

So it's like you define your keyword terms.

It's like activity.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay. And you can look at different types of activity too. So you can define terms in based off of like pain points or you can actually define terms based off of your branded keywords. So if they're searching for cross check, that's a lot stronger of a signal. And I might set that threshold for what surging actually means as something a little bit lower. Whereas if they're searching for quality of hire platform or talent intelligence platform. Right. That's going to be a smaller intent. So I might set that threshold a little bit higher. I want to hit, I want them to hit that higher level before they say, hey, this is an account you should be paying attention to.

And then you're, you're not getting individual. They're not, they're not going to tell you like Dave at this company is doing that. But you're getting a signal that someone at that this company is interested in this thing.

That's why I don't love Intent data. So it's not that helpful if it told me. Yes, Dave was actually searching this exact term. Easy, right? Easy.

Especially like when you're selling to bigger, like typically bigger deals. It's like, oh great, now I'm people.

With a director title at this company, right?

Yeah. Like someone at Salesforce is looking for exactly an HR thing. You're like, oh boy. And then like what the heck do you do? Okay, we're going to get to what do you do? But then my other follow up is a lot of people ask like this exercise you're talking about, do you believe that this is typically should be owned and led by marketing or is it just you've done it that way and then you present it to sales? Like talk about the who does this at the company?

Yeah, so earlier days, you know, five, 10 years ago. Yeah, really fully owned by sales. Although with the emergence of this rev ops function, I actually see the revops function the most able to do it because they're the ones pointing the data, they're the ones that are really good in the spreadsheets and they have a good purview over sales, marketing and success. I mean usually it's just sales and marketing, but I think revops these days, if you have an actual revops function that does sales ops and marketing ops, then that's your person.

Yeah, I was just thinking about like people that I've worked with in the past and it's like we don't report to each other, but we're counterparts in this. And so it might be like sales ops and marketing, like hey, we're going to do this ABM initiative, blah, blah, blah. Cool, let's get in a room. We're all in the room talking about the criteria. Ops is going to take the lead on actually like taking these inputs and like presenting the first pass at the list. And we're kind of going to have to talk, you know, marketing is going to talk through it, sales is going to talk through it. It seems like it's a little bit of trading, like, you know, bartering in some ways to get to. Okay, now we're ready to go. Like we have now blessed this and now let's go do it.

Right, exactly. And the other thing too that I think is worth talking through a little bit is just like capacity planning for your reps. Because again that's the biggest thing is companies choose too many target accounts and they can't effectively actually work them. And I've been thinking about this a lot and it's just like how many enterprise deals can a rep actually work at once? Effectively work at once. And how I've been thinking about it recently is just okay. If you're doing true enterprise sales, you're probably having two quality meetings per day and that's the prep, that's the meeting itself. That's a follow up SLAs. You're filling out the account planes, you know, you're making sure your data is properly input into salesforce. So maybe two a day, you have five days a week, you have four weeks in a month. And let's say that your sales cycle is like three months. So that's 120 meetings. And for the sake of easy math, let's just say it takes 10 meetings per opportunity for a close one deal. So that means you can, your capacity has 12 enterprise opportunities. Now that's just like some easy math and just a good way directionally to think about it. Now there's a lot that goes into that. Like again people do different tiers. So if we're looking at, you know, that's your tier one, how do you actually account for tier twos? So that's, that's just like a good way to think about where do you start. And then actually after you actually are going then your management should actually along the way look at signals that they are able to actually effectively handle 12 enterprise opportunities. You're looking at. Are they meeting SLAs, are they actively adding new contacts to the accounts? When was the last inbound email sent? When was the last outbound email sent? Like a lot of these things you can actually look at and say okay, this rep, they can't actually handle this many opportunities. We need to cut back. And if all your reps can't handle all the opportunities, then it's a signal for you to actually go fewer accounts. And there's also just the calendar eye test, open up their calendar. Are they busy or not busy?

That's the hardest thing for marketing. Oftentimes when like the marketing team feels really busy but the sales, it doesn't translate to like busy sales team.

Then you're like, oh right, exactly.

I love, I love the way you break these things down because I think it's, you know, there is so much science in marketing today, but a lot of it is the root of it is like to get there you have to do this. It's a little bit of like lick your finger and like we think that it was 12 opportunities. Okay, cool. It's like the same way you build, same way you build a Headcount plan or same way you build a budget, plan or forecast. Like there is science and data involved in it, but it often starts with like you're doing bottoms up and top down. You're like, okay, roughly, we think we need 12 opportunities. Okay, let's, let's work off that. Okay, this is great. So you do this. Obviously it's a lot of work. I would just push people. Like, if you haven't done this before, what brand is talking about is tier one, tier two, three? There's a lot here. But like simplify this. I think you need to, like, if you haven't done this before, like, you need to be getting feedback as quick as possible. And so like, I would hate to be part of an organization where it took you months just to define the damn accounts versus, like, how can we simplify this and start getting feedback and like start to actually test this. And so maybe it's, it's pick five accounts to start with, pick 10 accounts to start with. But then that begs the question of, let's say you do this, you're more sophisticated company, you come up with your Dream250 account list. Tomorrow we're starting this campaign. What do you do? You just send emails to these accounts and say like, hello, hello, hello, would you like to buy our product? Like, what do you do? And this is where I see most, this is where I see most of the questions come from outside of like defining accounts.

Yeah, it's okay. Yeah, there's so many different channels and so many different tactics. I think that companies really should just start with the ones that they are really good at and just do ABM with those accounts. Because honestly, if you're choosing the right accounts, does it matter that you are reaching out with direct mail versus email versus ads? If you, if you selected your accounts correctly and you have proper messaging, it's almost just a matter of doing as many activities as you can to just catch that person at the right time. One director or one VP might check his LinkedIn all the time. The next, he's never on LinkedIn but he's in this other group or well.

In, in an ideal world, in a dream scenario, there wouldn't actually be many tactics because if this was so well defined and your company has a product that has product market fit and there's a strong need for, then literally I am just sending you an email and telling you that like, hey, we can fix this problem that you have and.

You take a meeting, right?

So like, I do think that when you say do abm I don't understand why the first step wouldn't be like, what's the pitch? What, what's the, what's the outreach email? And it might. Okay, then you start to learn. Well, like, yeah, we've sent that great outreach email to 50 companies and we have no responses. Great, that's awesome. Now we have some feedback. Now we can start to go, is it exactly. Are we reaching out to the wrong person? Is it the wrong pitch? Is it the wrong mess? Are we asking them to like cold. They don't even know us and we want them to jump on a sales call. And I feel like that's when you can start to go down the, like, what are the next plays here? Right. I feel like, you know, I think one of the things that you did, you did back in the day really well, which is like you, you had some really great content at Engagio about just the, like how you thought of things as. It's not just a one off thing. You thought of these plays. Can you talk a little bit about like maybe some of the, some plays that you've run in the past where. All right, we got our accounts selected. What actually, like, how do you actually book meetings from this?

Yeah, totally. Okay, so some of my favorite examples and this has worked before Engagio, at Engagio and since Engagio and also pre Pandemic. Post Pandemic, one of my favorites is an executive event with strategic partners. And the strategic partner piece is really important because we all know it's easy to get your customers at an event if it's a VIP dinner or whatever that is. But it's actually harder to get prospects there. If I go to one of my strategic partners and say, hey, you have a lot of customers that are on our target account list. Can you invite, here's 20, can you get 10 to this event and vice versa, right? So a lot of, if you're, if you have a strong partnership function, you're already hooked up with like Crossbeam or Reveal or any of those software that say, here's your shared customers. And then you can say, all right, now they give you a list and they're looking at people for you to invite your customers to invite that are their prospects, then you can actually look at that and say, okay, this is a great customer that looks like these people that I'm going after. I want to make sure I get that person there. And then, I mean, recently this happened to us. We were at an event and one of our prospects was talking with one of Our customers. And the prospect was like, well, how do you use this data in crosscheck? And she was like, well, here's the data I actually use. I pull it this way and here's how I send it to my executive. And it was like game changing for them. We tried to explain that to them, of course, the sales rep, but it's not going to be anything like coming from your actual customer's mouths. So it's a play that I love doing and then I do really like having some educational piece around it. So maybe there's a presentation, you have your subject matter expert and maybe some third party person there to really help you. You talk through some of the challenges that they're having. It's about delivering commercial insight. I mean, honestly, that, that's what ABM really is about. A lot of people think it's about personalization. I think personalization is actually just one piece of it. And personalization's like, hey Dave, we went to the same school, hey Dave, we like the same hockey team. Cool. But that's not relevant at all. Itsma, who's actually the, the people who originally coined the term ABM 15 years ago or whatever, and they're the OGs, they say the three most important factors in shortlisting and making a final decision on an enterprise deal are knowledge and understanding of unique business issues, knowledge and understanding of the industry, and fresh ideas to help them advance their business. So in other words, the number one reason is actually knowledge of their market. It's not, hey Dave, we share this piece of affinity.

Do you want to take a demo?

Yeah.

It's like, if you're selling HR software, how do you position? And this is where marketing plays such a big role in this. And people ask, well, isn't ABM just outbound? And it's like, well, no, because ultimately the goal is to make the brand the expert in this niche that you're selling to. And so if you are selling to HR pros, the goal is to make your company this great source of education and information for your dream customers who are, who are in hr. And so like outside of just direct mail and email and stuff, like great offers, might be a great industry roundtable, industry research report. Hey, we're putting, hey you, you have no idea who I am. And like, wink, wink, I'm going to try to sell you something later. But that's later in this play that we're running. But right now, Brandon, I want to, I want to invite you to this event that we're doing where we're bringing on X, Y and Z people and we're going to talk about ABC things. And you're like, there's no sale at all. But you're like, oh, you're in hr. You're, you're probably going to care about this. And I think that's when the campaign then begins because, oh, great. Hey, we got Brandon there. He now knows about our company. He had a great time. He learned two or three new things then like number, like piece number two in this now kicks off. Okay, now we're going to reach out and do x, right?

Exactly 100%. And this is also great for CS because you can invite customers that might be on the fence for renewing with you and you can get, you can run an executive alignment play with customers at that event and make sure your executives are there. Right. So there's a lot of reasons why I love that place specifically. And then you hit on another one that I love too. And it's actually, it's industry reports and benchmarks. So send a survey. And this is actually mainly run by demand gen, but there's a strong ABM component to it. So want to know the latest trends in hr, like how much budget is HR getting, who they report to, what are they measured on, et cetera, et cetera. These are all things that I actually want to know about my target accounts. So you do the survey and you're blasting it out to a lot of people, but also you want to make sure your target accounts are on that list too. So you might do specific ABM ads to those accounts. You might do one to one emails. There's a lot of ways you can actually get them to fill out the survey. And then boom, they just told you all of their pains. They told you their priorities. Send that over to the rep, the rep has those insights that they can now deliver and then they send them the report and then you as the rep can say, you specifically, I know your account is this industry. I broke out, I did a little analysis on specifically this industry. Here's how much headcount that your industry generally has. Here's the benchmark for resources, here's the benchmark for metrics or whatever.

The more you dig into this though, you can see how it, in order to truly be great at this, you have to be bought in at an organizational level because this is not just going to be like marketing spun up some great report. It's like it really comes from like product engineering ops, cs. The company go all the way back to like to give Like a meta lesson to this. It's like you need to have a strong. If you, you don't have a strong company story and strategic narrative and reason for existing and why this company is here to solve the problem for X like this, like any other marketing tactic is going to be really Damn hard.

Exactly. Yeah.

100 you mentioned like, oh, demand gen might do this because to me I see abm, at least in this context. Oh this, this is how we're going to generate revenue. But are there different functions? Like is there abm, an ABM function and a demand gen function? Or why wouldn't ABM just be like how you do marketing and they kind of do all of the demand gen type channels? Or are they different roles, different companies? What's your point of view on that?

I'm actually glad you asked. Honestly, I think it's the same thing. Not a lot of companies think about it that way. But like ABM is a function of demand gen. It's just a different way to do demand gen. A lot of people still do have those split out into different roles. So you have your ABM manager and you have your demand gen manager. I think it should be under the same person. Maybe that's how it should be. It's your VP of demand gen. Then you have your director of ABM and your director.

I feel like it's only like if you and me were starting a company today and we were doing this, it would be one team and that would be the way to do it. Right. It's typically like when there's like more legacy. Well like the company's been around for seven years and they've always had a demand gen team and there's demand gen people. And now we brought in this ABM person and again it goes back to internal alignment and like it actually would be easier if you blew the whole thing up and said like we're actually here's some people on the team who are developing a new marketing strategy and forget the job titles for a minute. This is how we're doing marketing as a team. It gets weird when it's like the company's kind of always done it this way and. And now there's a new ABM function and like what does demand gen do now? And that's where it gets messy. We could obviously talk for hours about any of this stuff. One thing that I want to hit on and specifically in your notes you said this could be an entire podcast, but let's stick with the basic metrics and give people some benchmarks but we got to talk about metrics and measurement because you, you do all these things, they're very, at least in my head, they're hard to measure because they're not always direct response things. You send emails inbound emails from sales, emails from marketing, you're doing ads from reports, you're doing events, you're doing dinners, you're meeting somebody at trade shows, like, how the heck do you actually measure this? And in marketing, we love to try to find ways to like have to justify our efforts and justify our job. This feels really hard to measure versus the reason that we love Google AdWords is because I know that I can spend X and I'm going to get Y and I can tell, hey, here's what we, here's what we got from this is, is this all hard to measure?

Right? So I, I don't think it is. I think people overthink measurement. And I mean, it gets really hard. If your CEO is expecting you to use met metrics to justify things rather than like using metrics to prove things, it really should be used to help you improve things. Right? So I think you can use your, your funnel as it exists already and just look at, at every stage of your funnel, you're looking at value, volume, velocity and conversion rates and then break that out into your different functions. So value, volume, velocity and conversion at every stage of the funnel for demand gen and then look at it separately for abm. And then you can actually look at is one of these metrics off? And then from there you can actually dive in a little bit more and say, okay, why is this off? Am I not getting what I need specifically from my direct mail efforts or my ad efforts or my, whatever that is? We got to model all those things out and then examine the funnel like that. And then for abm, I think there are additional things that we are looking at that give you early indications that ABM is going to work. So for example, I mean, at every stage of the funnel, I do think just engagement in general is going to help you. Are companies at stage three still engaging with me at a certain rate? Right. But I also want to look at maybe their stage one and it stalled a little bit. Let's look at coverage metrics. And am I like, are we adding enough context to that account? Are we getting more coverage at that account if that's stalled? So there, there are some certain things that we can look at that are indicators that it is going to be successful. And then you can look at things like again, like coverage metrics I think that's more of like a manage by activity which I don't love as a manager, but it's just a good way to hold people accountable to make sure that they are doing what they need to be doing to advance these opportunities.

I want to wrap up and selfishly talk about you for a minute. You've grown your career to be a VP of marketing at a SaaS company. Like a lot of people that are, that are listening to this want to be. If you were to rewind back five, six, seven years, eight years ago, what do you think are like a couple of the things that have been most instrumental for you to put you on this path to know the things that you know now and be running marketing at a SaaS company. What are the things that, that you wish you maybe you wish you knew back then or like would attribute to your success in growing your career?

Good question. I always knew that I wanted to lead a marketing organization one day and early on in my career took the thought of just surround myself with people way smarter than me. I've always believed in community. I've always believed in connecting with people that have both got to where I want to be. But also I think kind of an under appreciated piece is someone who just got to that next step. Let me go talk to them. They just went through going from, you know, manager to director and then managing people. That's their first time. They just went through that eight months ago, a year ago. There's actually a lot more for them to teach you than the person who's been a BP for five years. They probably forgot what it's like or the space has changed so much they can't really defectively relate to what you're going through right now. So one really just having that vision of what you want to get to and then surround yourself with really smart people. And I don't think mentors necessarily have to be like hey, hey Dave, can you mentor me? Can we meet once a month? I think there's a lot like since so many smart people are putting a lot of great content out there, they can be a mentor for you from afar, right? Just like consume all of the content. Like early on in my career I know you're a big Dan Kennedy guy, right? I read every single book from Dan Kennedy out there. I bought his super conference for a few years. Like I'm a huge Dan Kennedy guy and I consider him one of my biggest mentors and one of the most influential people. Earlier in my career never talked to the guy he has no clue who I am.

Yeah, I love that. I was actually thinking about this in the. I was driving this morning and I was thinking about that. I never once set out to be like, I'm going to find a mentor. And I know a lot of people have this approach. Like, I'm going to find a mentor and I'm going to cold email everyone. And I get emails like this. I'm sure you do, too. Like, hey, can I pick your brain? I'd love to have you be a mentor. I think when you take this approach, which is what you've done, which is like, find somebody, become a student, be like, you know what?

I don't.

I don't need to meet with anyone directly. I'm going to learn this stuff on my own because I'm passionate about it. Then you take that, you apply that, you get inside of a company, you start to grow your career. You end up finding mentors, whether it's CEOs, founders, executives, CMOs that you've worked for who, like, want to take you under their wing because you're the person on their team who's like, like working their ass off and, like, trying to get better. And I think that's how you put yourself in that position. So I actually didn't know that about you with the Dan Kennedy stuff. I did something similar with. With Russell Brunson, and I, like, went back and. Yeah, and I listen. I. I listen to every podcast from, like, the very first one he did marketing in your car. Marketing your car in, like, 2014. And I just. In a sea of, like, I. Because I remember I was trying to learn marketing, and I'm just drowning. And like, there's. There's so much. I don't know what to focus on. And I was like, you know, I'm just gonna focus on. On this one person. And I learned a lot. And I. I even think, like, it's why I'm building Exit 5 now. It's like, yes, you can go and listen to somebody else's podcast. You can go and join somebody else's community, you can read somebody else's website. But I think, like, you just gotta pick one or two and, like, go deep on that. On that resource and you can learn. And to your point, there's so much knowledge and information available. However, it's not that you just read Dan Kenny, though I do feel like you. You read it and then you're, like, applying it. You're like, okay, cool, I'm at a startup. Like, I can go and try to break.

Exactly.

I'm going to go try to do something. I think that's. You have to be. You have to balance that. Like, you got to actually try to go and do things.

Right. Right. Exactly. A lot of times people read something or they get advice and they're. And their mindset is, well, that doesn't apply to me. Whereas my mindset is, okay, I got to figure out how I can actually use that information at my current job or at my current company, 100% or.

Like, you know, I know people that are right now at companies that are doing, like, because of what's happening in the economy and everything. They're doing complete strategy overhauls. And I think as a marketer, you could be like, oh, man, this is not what I signed up for. Or you could be like, actually, you know what, Maybe I can, like, learn a bunch of new things that I. That I wasn't able to learn like before, and I'm going to add those to my resume and my skill set, and we're going to learn this new approach. And then, like, maybe I'm. I'm not at this company in a year or whatever, but I get to learn some stuff and apply, and I'm going to keep building my personal resume that way.

Exactly. Earlier on in your career, you should really be optimizing for learning, like, a hundred percent. That's. That's exactly what I did, and I wouldn't do it any other way. And then just. I mean, I'm always optimizing for learning, too. But then as you. As you're getting a little further along in your career, you can start to look at things like title or pay. But early on in your career, learn as much as you can. Connect with smart people.

Love it. All right, Brandon, this was amazing. I could have talked to you for hours. Thanks for doing this. Thank you for reaching out and just for being a part of the Exit 5 community and willing to help people.

Absolutely.

Where can people go, send you a message and just, like, tell you how great this was after.

Just find me on LinkedIn. Brandon. I think I'm the only Brandon Reddinger I don't know, but pretty active on LinkedIn.

All right, Brandon Redlinger. Thank you so much. Good to see you. I'll see you around and maybe we'll do this again in a couple months and you can share an update on what's going on at Crosscheck in your first year, you know, running marketing over there. Be fun.

That sounds good.

All right, see you, man. Thank you so much. See you later. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode. Episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com we've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates. Plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow, grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there you can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friend at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do. And they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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