Eric Siu shares what he learned from 100 ABM calls with agency owners and marketers. Most platforms are expensive and don't deliver results. He built Carrot to run personalized LinkedIn ads at scale, and walks through customer pain points, pricing strategy, and why talking directly to customers shaped his product roadmap.
You have a topic in here that you did 100 calls. What did you learn?
Yeah, so I'll give a couple of things. So this is Carrot, which allows you to run personalized, scalable LinkedIn ads. What's interesting to me is I would say 90% of the calls, and most of these are mid-market to enterprise companies, they're like, we really want to get going on ABM this year. I'm like, so you guys have been doing anything for— yeah, we haven't been doing it. It's like, so their budgets, they're like, yeah, we're planning to ramp it up, but there just hasn't been like a good solution out there for ABM. Like, but don't you guys pay for some of these solutions out there? You know, some of these These are like $120 grand a year platform fee, plus you have to pay the ad spend on top of it.
Yeah.
So it's pretty significant, right? And they're just like, everything sucks there. So one is, it seems like almost everyone's starting an ABM motion this year, right? It's like new. The second thing is most ABM companies from what we've seen suck because everyone complains about all the ABM software out there. And then a lot of the things that they want, it's pretty easy for us to build in, right? So we're using a lot of these sales calls. My CTO's on the call as well. We're using them as customer development calls too. And so if people start to say, the same thing multiple times, that's signal for us. And that helps us prioritize our product roadmap. The fourth thing is they want to move very quickly. It's— so when you have something that isn't quite out there, people are just like, dude, can we get started like yesterday? And it's, it's different than an agency type. And you know, you've had software before too, you know, the different types, like usually the software that like, it'll kind of pull you with it. But with agency, you have to kind of do this dog and pony show.
Yeah, well, software is also easier for people to get onboarded with than an agency. And it's substantially cheaper. So there's less hoops to go through.
And And a lot of people ask for free trials, right? Especially, you know, yeah, the homies. So they'll ask for free—
He's not saying homies. He's actually saying different— some people just ask for free trials, and they expect it, and they expect him to make changes to their product without paying for it either.
Oh, yeah, exactly. And so what we say is, hey, look, no, we're not doing that. But we're doing a paid pilot. So you pay, you know, 3 grand for 90 days or whatever. And then we expect you, you're going to do a shared Slack with us, we're going to white glove you in. And then that's what happens. And so that way you have some skin in the game and they have some skin in the game and they take you seriously. Because you and I both know when we receive things for free, we don't really use it. And when we get things, when we give things for free, people don't respect it.
Out of all the points you made, the only one I would say, because I know quite a few ABM companies, people that do ABM and software companies in this space, I would say the only point that is skewed for you is your point number 1, where a lot of people are getting into ABM this year. Is because you got into— created an ABM software, you're getting tons of inquiries, but the market's massive. And from everyone I know who has ABM companies that are like large, the quantity of people that are jumping on the ABM bandwagon for corporations isn't that big, but you're spot on with something in which most people are not happy with the solutions they're using. They're expensive and they're not getting results. And that's why I think you're getting, you know, just a shitload of inquiries because LinkedIn is one of the best places to go and you solved a problem that LinkedIn didn't give people.
Well, here's the thing. So a lot of these companies, they're already paying for like the big ones out there, right? So they are doing ABM, but they're also not doing ABM.
Because it's not working that well.
So they're looking for a solution desperately to like solve their ABM problems. And that's all it is. I think more than anything, if you're going to build software, just understand that you're constantly doing customer development and you can't build in a vacuum because if you think you know all the features, you're already screwed.
Watch this, everyone. So Eric, out of these 100 calls, how many of them were you on?
All of them.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So the point I'm making here is if you really want to do well, you need to get involved yourself, listen, learn, and go and fix.
Yeah. Look, by the way, any business is like that. You're constantly just solving problems. And if you get it right, you've probably hit lightning in a bottle, but it's also not fun if you get it right No, but I do prefer getting it right.
Like we're running a lot of Facebook ads right now. Yeah.
Oh, how's that going?
It's going okay. It's not converting as well as we want. The numbers aren't panning out well enough right now. When we looked at it, the first thing that Mike and I did, my co-founder Mike, he's like, all right, LinkedIn ads are great, but let me give you the bad news first.
The bad news is that you can't personalize the ads and you can't scale the ads as quickly. The good news is if you're in a B2B space, you're doing account-based marketing, we have a solution for you called Karrot. That's K-A-R-R-O-T. And the good news is is that you can create a lot of these campaigns with the click of a button. You can personalize the ads and there's a whole host of new things that are coming. If you want to get on the waitlist, just go to carrot.ai. Again, it's carrot.ai and we'll see you on the other side.
Let me just go listen to all the calls. So he starts listening to the calls. He's like, you're doing this wrong, you're doing this wrong. He's like, let's fix this. He'll get on the phone with all of them and be like, here's what I want you to do. So that should start improving some of the numbers. And we have a pretty fine-tuned sales team, but yet, You know, as I mentioned, the purpose of this is Eric still gets involved. Mike and I still get involved. Even if you hire amazing people, sometimes you're better at some things than other people are and they're better at you than at some things than you may be, right? So it counterbalances each other and you need to just be involved.
The good news about Karat, it's coming out with 1-to-1 personalized landing pages and you could do Meta and Google.
All right.
So I'll hook you up.
All right.
I'll hook you up. Yeah.
All right.
So that is it for today, guys. Go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association. And that's the group where you're going to see our churn numbers get even better. Goodbye.
