How to Create your ABM Playbook

Hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar, How to Create Your ABM Playbook. It's a super interesting topic. I received many questions about ABM plays, ABM playbook, how to orchestrate, how to create a strategy. So Today we're going to dig very deep into this whole scenarios and different ways to create the playbook. So we're going to really analyze all the different plays and look behind the scenes. But before we do that, as usual, very quick introduction about this webinar series because this is actually webinar number 4 of this comprehensive account-based marketing guide for SaaS from $0 to $100 million in annual recurring revenue. And if you have missed the previous 3 webinars, you can always look for the recording on our website, sasandql.com, and you can also sign up for the future webinars. We're gonna have one every Tuesday until we complete the series. So very quickly about me, I used to be working in Silicon Valley. I worked for many different venture-funded SaaS and cloud companies. I started SaaS NQL in 2018 to really focus on account-based marketing and helping SaaS companies scale with targeted programs. And, uh, so super briefly about SaaS and QL, we basically create, manage, scale ABM programs for SaaS companies. We work with some of the best VC-funded companies as well as some public companies as well, and we are really focused on getting results, pipeline, recurring revenue for SaaS companies. So that being said, let's jump to the agenda for today. So we're gonna talk about all the different use cases for ABM. We're gonna talk about what is an ABM play and go into details about each different ABM plays. I mean, there is really no limit of what kind of play you can execute, but we can identify the 10 top plays that you wanna really evaluate. When you create a strategy for, for your company. Then how you choose the right one, we're gonna touch upon that. How you orchestrate all these different campaigns across channels. And then we're gonna talk about direct mail campaigns as part of ABM strategy, as well as LinkedIn Ads for account-based marketing. So very quickly, ABM use cases. I think I don't have to convince anyone of the value of doing account-based marketing. It's not for everyone. Obviously, it's not always a good approach. It depends what's your business model, what you focus on, etc. But with account-based marketing, you can try to generate new opportunities. You can nurture your best accounts. You can accelerate existing opportunities. You can re-engage lost opportunities. Reengage churn customers or decrease churn as well. And you want to convert initial top of the funnel engagement into opportunities and then obviously open the door with net new accounts that are ideal customers for your company. So these are all very good use cases for account-based marketing. And obviously, you know, it depends what the stage of your company, depends what your goals are for next quarter, next year, etc. But All of these things can be accomplished with a good ABM strategy. So when we look at a play, is what is an ABM play? How is it that different from a campaign? Is that the same? Is that a synonym of a campaign? Not necessarily. So an ABM play is a campaign, but is where you have multiple channels that needs to be orchestrated together. So it's different, for example, if you're running a Google Ads campaign for a particular product or for your software or for anything. You're running the campaign, you set a budget, you create your assets and you go live and then you track it. With maybe Mplay, now you are orchestrating, for example, an email campaign with an ad campaign, with an event, with a direct mail campaign, with a outbound phone call touch. And you know, this, that requires a lot of complicated orchestration because it needs to be aligned, needs to be timed together. So it's very different than just running a simple campaign. And that's why I don't like to call it ABM campaigns, I like to call it ABM plays. And so a play is normally specific for a particular segment that you are targeting. So the easiest segmentation to do when you look at your database or your prospective or existing customer, your whole CRM, basically, you will have a list of cold accounts. Usually that's the biggest bucket for everyone, or almost everyone. You have engaged accounts, active opportunities, lost opportunities, existing customer, churn customer, then you might have identified the top, top accounts, your whales that, you know, are particularly valuable in terms of potential deal size or as a logo recognition, brand recognition, et cetera. You have a bunch of contacts and accounts that are unresponsive. So all of this segmentation, A, is very easy to do, but also it unlocks a lot of opportunities because now you can create a play to target specific stage of your marketing funnel and your sales funnel based on this simple segmentation. Obviously, that's, you know, we talked about segmentation in the previous webinar. This is not the only dimension that you want to segment your database. You might have different verticals, you have different product line that you sell, you have different persona, you have different account tiers. You have different territories, maybe your campaign in EMEA might be different from the one in the US. These are all very important segmentation to do, but for the sake of today, I want to highlight particularly this, this type of segmentation because it's going to be very relevant for our place and is also the most important one. And so when we see a the different plays. So these are the 10 ABM plays that we have identified as the most common, most popular ones. So the first one is the Open the Door play. And that is, you know, the name says it all, is dedicated to target cold accounts where you have no relationship whatsoever. And you want to generate that initial engagement, that initial intro call, that initial interaction, basically. You want to start a relationship. So auto display, obviously, and ABM in general, when we talked about use case, are for target accounts that are valuable, where the relationship is valuable. So this is not a volume play with SMBs or small companies. This is— auto display are very valuable, but because the targets are valuable. So we're going to touch upon each single one in detail. So before we do that, I want to take a quick look at what are the available channels for ABM, because these are going to come into consideration when we look at the plays to orchestrate. So for each play, I'm combining these different channels depending on what I'm trying to do. Why did I select these channels and not, for example, I don't know, Google Ads or SEO or inbound, things like that? So these are channels that allow me to target specific companies and ideally specific people within those companies. So with Google Ads, I'm targeting an intent. I'm targeting people that type a certain keyword, certain query. But I don't— that could be from Bank of America, someone, a VP of Bank of America, could be an intern at a small 5-person company. So you, you have no control over that. And from an ABM purpose, from our play, you want to have full control. So I want to target only the companies that I spend time identifying and I segmented and I have my whole strategy. So these are the main channels that we identify where you can you can really do that. And there are some obvious ones like emails and phone calls, like LinkedIn messages as well, very popular now these days. Then you have direct mails, you have LinkedIn ads, you have display ads. And for display ads, I mean targeted display ads. So think about Sixth Sense, Demandbase, that type of display ads. And then VIP events, which are typically like the steak dinner, or maybe you do these VIP events at a baseball game where you, you rented a booth or specific VIP seats and you invite the top VPs from your target customer or existing customer, those, those type of events. So those are actually very, very effective still today, um, are driving pipeline, increase, increasing engagement, etc. But we'll talk about that. So now that I know what channels I have available, I need to start adding them into my plays. So let's look at the first one that I showed in the previous list. So this opened the door. Like I said before, a lot of companies see this as the main play because cold accounts are always the biggest bucket and we always want to drive new logos. We always want to engage new accounts that are not responding maybe to other campaigns. So we are focusing on companies that we have no relationship yet. That's the segment. The CTA is typically book an intro call, book a meeting, request a demo or get a free audit depending what you sell really. And the conversion rate of this play, of this type of play is normally like 5-10% on kind of overall sequence. Obviously this is a play that should be constantly running because you're constantly targeting cold accounts, you're constantly driving new opportunities. And you can also increase that, but it depends on what kind of channel you add into the mix and it depends how much budget you're investing. Obviously the higher the budget, the higher the conversion rate, but also the higher your acquisition cost. So there is a trade-off there, but here I put a simple example of a campaign flow for an Open the Door play where you have a small sequence of warm-up emails, email 1, 2, and 3. Then I might get a response or maybe not, that's fine. It's expected. Then I follow up with a custom direct mail, a branded package where I created a nice, theme and concept and an experience for, for the prospect to receive. And it's aligned with my messaging, it's aligned with the, with the email theme as well. I create a dedicated landing page for, for that direct mail, and typically we include a QR code that drives to the landing page. As soon as the direct mail is received, it triggers the follow-up email sequence, and that's what you see there. In this case, you have 4 emails that follow up to the direct mail. At the same time, all those accounts are being targeted with LinkedIn ads, with content and display ads, with just a brand kind of awareness. So imagine you have a list of 1,000 accounts that you're targeting and you go live with this type of play. All of a sudden, all these prospects are getting the emails, they're getting the direct mails, they're seeing the ads on LinkedIn, they're seeing the ads on the display, you know, the other third-party websites. And you run this for 3, 4, 5 months, you're gonna see results, especially if you have selected the right accounts and the right people, because obviously all of that is the crucial part of this. But they're gonna become aware of your company, they're gonna start seeing you everywhere. So very effective. Obviously, this is just an example. You can change the flow, try a different one. We We do that all the time with our clients where we start with maybe 3 emails and then we see the results and we see that maybe we can do better with 2 and then we add additional follow-up and then we might retarget with a second direct mail. Like there is, there's a lot of different optimization that you can do. This is not a set and forget type of approach, but it can really drive a lot of results. We have clients that close 7-figure deals deals with Fortune 500 companies with this simple approach. So something to keep in mind. So top account nurturing is kind of like a segue to that. So here I'm taking, for example, 100, 200 accounts, but they are big ones. They are, they are my whales. They're like the top ones that I— each one of them would be something that you, you present at a board meeting on, like, how, how important it is, but I'm maybe exaggerating now, but these are the valuable ones that it's worth to continuously target. The goal of this play is to remain top of mind for these accounts, even if they're not looking to buy right now. They're not in a buying cycle. Maybe it's something they're gonna be looking next year or even after potentially. But when they're gonna be looking at your solution, you're gonna be the brand and the company they're gonna think first because all of this time, you've been targeting them with messaging, with direct mail experience, with a phone call inviting them to a VIP event, and then more messaging, and then a different direct mail experience the following quarter. They've been seeing your ads, they've been seeing the display, your logo on the display ads, they've been downloading your content. So all of this is very effective, and each one of them, one, usually one customer generated from this list pays for probably like 6 months of this whole campaign or more in the case of many of our clients. So it can be really, really worth it. It's a lot of orchestration involved and again, it's a long-term play. So you shouldn't be expecting results in a month or two. This is, you know, that you want to continuously target and nurture those accounts. So let's go to the next one. So this is a perfect play, conversion uplift, for companies that have a really strong inbound type of program, and they get a lot of leads from, from content marketing, from Google, from SEO. And so they generate a lot of top-of-the-funnel leads, including from target accounts. But then they're not seeing maybe a lot of conversion into opportunities. So people download a whitepaper, they register for webinars, they attend, they're very active on their website, but the opportunity, the sales opportunity, the meeting book, the demo, they're not seeing that conversion. So the goal of this play is to increase that conversion. So that's why the name Conversion Uplift. So converting MQL to SQL and you want to track what was your baseline. So what was your conversion before you go live with this play and then track after a few months that you've been running if you see a lift. And normally we see very high conversion rates here, even as high, I think the highest I saw was above 40%. So in this case, like we target 100 companies, 40 of them turn into opportunities. So really, really, really high. Here I split high intent and low intent. High intent, for example, could be someone that came to a wine tasting event that you did. You had a presentation there, like someone, something in person maybe, or maybe they attended 3 or 4 different webinars and downloaded white papers for a while. Those are, you can determine them either by scoring, by number of actions, a lot of different things. And then you have the low intent, maybe someone who just downloaded a white paper and that was it. And you can have different flows for the two segments. So this is a sub-segmentation of your kind of warm accounts and warm contacts, high intent, low intent, and create different flows. You can easily do that. Obviously you're gonna see one conversion rate here and a lower one here. Very likely. So, but that's expected. Also by lead source, you can have a different flow. So someone that comes from a webinar, you can have a flow and one that comes from white papers, a different one, or from your wine tasting can be different. STR retargeting, also very valuable play because every company that has 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 STRs, What they're doing, they're doing outbound outreach all day. So they're targeting hundreds, thousands of prospects and accounts to drive X number of opportunities per month, per quarter. However, the majority of those prospects are gonna end up as unresponsive. Typically, like you have 2, 3% response, many of them negative response, some unsubscribe, but then the rest is unresponsive, just crickets as we say, no response. So what do you do with those 97%? The typical SDR that I've always seen, they just change the status to nurture. That nurture means that it goes into some sequence in HubSpot or Marketo where they start getting content. That's a typical approach. Or maybe they just stable them and retarget 6 months from now. In the meantime, or people change companies, so your list gets stale and you cut 30% of it 6 months later. However, there is this opportunity to target them in a different way than what your SDRs are doing. So this is something— all these plays, by the way, are organized and managed and orchestrated by the marketing team, not by the sales team. So you don't want your SDR to run this play. It is something that you run for them, with them, but not It's not run by the SDR or by the sales team. So since your SDR probably bombarded those prospects with emails, with cold calls and LinkedIn messages, those are the 3 typical channels. So that's why you see here, I still included some emails, but they're all gonna be related to the direct mail campaign, which takes a center stage of display because your SDRs have probably not sent any direct mail. So we wanna do that. And maybe invite them to a VIP dinner, which maybe you're doing one in different cities. Maybe you have one in San Francisco and one in New York. So you're gonna bucket people that are in New York and San Francisco or Austin or whatever it is. Or maybe you skip the VIP event, you just do have it like a nice direct mail experience and then follow up to that. So that gives another excuse to the STR to do after another follow-up to make sure that they receive the package that they were sent to them. But it's all orchestrated at scale by, by marketing, probably targeting hundreds or thousands of different prospects and accounts. But this is super valuable because you're gonna see the lift of number of opportunities coming from the same list that your SDRs are targeting, have been targeting. And these are a little less cold than an open-the-door campaign because your SDR have been generating some awareness, even probably small, but still some awareness. They saw the name, maybe they received a voicemail or they saw the LinkedIn message, and now we're sending them a package or we're inviting them to a VIP event. So all of those very valuable, but you want to have it as an always running campaign. The pipeline acceleration, this is obviously to target active opportunities and has a few goals. One is to shorten the sales cycle to those that are probably closing but they're taking a bit too long. And also you want to increase the close won percentage. So there are some that maybe would have not closed without this play. So that's another additional benefit. Typically this is run, I see this play run a lot in Q4. Obvious reason, trying to close as much pipeline as possible while companies dedicate Q1 and Q2 to generate new pipeline for the year. And in Q4 then you have to close, so a lot of budget shifts to this play to try to close pipeline. That's very typical, not saying that is the right approach, but is a natural approach. And so here the goal is not to book a demo, it's not to book a meeting, that's not a call to action. This is to create a very positive, memorable experience already showing excitement for the new partnership that is hopefully happening. And so you want to send them something really cool with more marketing information or something that would, uh, go into details about part of the feature or the solution, and then also address common objections that they might have raised or like a lot of prospects raise, or showcase studies as much as possible with other happy customers that you can include in the package and in the email. And then if you are able, you can also create a nice VIP dinner with 20, 30 guests but let's say 70% of them are your active opportunities and 30% of them are happy customers. So you can get them to interact with each other. I saw that live. We were doing that a lot when I was at Branch, and it's amazing to see like prospect asking questions to the happy customers and every customer basically solving any doubt that they have, and they were ready to sign at the end of the dinner. So is something to consider. But again, create this very, very positive experience. A nice gift, nice unboxing, nice branded, curated direct mail can really take you far. The other side of the coin is the lost opportunities. Retargeting, this is actually a very, very profitable and valuable play. And when we work with new clients, this is one of the first things I look at. It's like, do you have a ton of lost opportunities? Because we could retarget them. And we retarget them again, creating a nice experience, reaching out to the same people, ideally, if they're still at the company, or it could be someone else. And this is Very important to do. Obviously you don't want to target closed lost opportunity from last month, but maybe those that were older than 6 months that were lost like 6 months or last year or 2 years ago. And just say, can we— the call to action is, can we reconnect? I want to show you what is new with our solution. I want to learn about your goals, etc. But still, this is not about bombarding and annoying the prospect. That's why I always include a direct mail. And the reason for that is, is much nicer to get a nice branded direct mail at the office than getting 50 new emails or LinkedIn messages or cold calls, even worse. And it's much more memorable. And you're gonna see the results of this. I always see a super high conversion rate when you target those lost opportunities, which too many times are forgotten and almost never retarget, at least not purpose, you know, with purpose. It's usually one sales rep that takes charge of looking like some old opportunities instead of doing this like programmatically and systematically once or twice a year. So the Event Boost is for those companies that spend a lot of marketing budget for events. I see clients that spend literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in tradeshow sponsorships. So they have a big booth in multiple tradeshows. One single event can go for $200,000. So obviously you wanna put a lot of efforts to get the maximum out of that investment. And that's why it's important to have a plan also before and after the event. And so what we do at SAS and QL is many times to create this campaign flow where we follow up after the event before sometimes and after, but particularly after with any kind of target accounts that stop by the booth with a nice direct mail, a great experience that is aligned with the same theme and messaging that was showcased at the event at the booth. So it's something that is going to become immediately familiar to your prospects. But also, it's something that avoids a lot of people after the event, 3 days after, they have forgotten everything about that event. So even weeks after or sometimes months after, you want to bring it back. And so that's what this play is designed for and is very, very effective. And then the last few plays here. So this is customer upselling, normally for larger companies that have a lot of customers, but maybe they have multiple products or they want to target different departments or they just want to get more seats from the same customers. So we created a specific play again using direct mail and email combination. I think that's the best approach for this type of play. Keep it pretty short. So it's not something you want to drive for 9 or 10 touches on an upselling. You want to take it carefully and normally you're gonna run this play. The front person for this play is the main contact person at your company for that particular customer, targeting the champion at that customer. So there's already a relationship, very, hopefully very strong already, but there's already a relationship and you want to nurture that relationship and hopefully trigger a conversation about, you know, selling more seats, selling different products, expanding to other departments. The customer appreciation play is normally done once a year to your top customers. It's all about the experience. There is no real call to action here other than thank you for being a great partner. We really, really appreciate working with you, and hopefully everything is going well. But if you have any feedback, any comments, please let No, let me know. This is our personal play. And so that's why I included a few emails, very few, 2 or 3, and direct mail, and maybe a VIP event, maybe. But typically the direct mail at the end of the year is almost a must for the top customers. And, you know, they receive a lot. That's why, you know, I know this is very popular in Q4, in December with the holidays, of running, sending a package to customers, that's why they're going to appreciate it even more if you do that in May or different months. So they're not getting 20 other direct mail from other vendors. And so something to keep in mind, always do what your competitors are not doing or other vendors. And finally, this is the last one, another obvious one after the lost opportunities is targeting customers that have churned in the past, hopefully not because they had a bad experience. Those, maybe that's going to be a really tough mountain to climb, but you want to target those that maybe they have to, to churn because of budget. Maybe the champion left the company, or maybe you were missing a few features that your competitor had, but now you do have those features. And so It's something to just reconnect with customers that are no longer such, but you want to show what is new and you never know, it's something that can be effective. And again, you have to curate the list and create a specific flow for this play. So how do you choose of all these different plays which one to use? It really depends what are your goals? What is your current company stage of growth? Like how is your database segmented? And you wanna look for opportunities and bottlenecks. So if the majority of your database is cold accounts, that's an obvious answer. You know, you're gonna go with open the door and probably top account nurturing. If you have a strong inbound program, you choose the conversion uplift first. First, but you can also run in parallel, um, and open the door. You run a lot of events, that's another natural spot. You have a lot of lost opportunities, you have a lot of churn customers. You know, all of this is part of the strategy, but it always starts from your data and where is the biggest opportunity. I always recommend to start from whatever is closer to revenue and then move your way back. So closer to revenue, you obviously have active opportunities, lost opportunities, maybe churn customers. That's what I will always start, then moving back to engaged or very warm accounts and leads. Maybe those that booked a demo but didn't attend, or they only have one demo in the past, or anything like that. And then those are very engaged with content, and then anything before I go to the cold If I don't have any of that, then obviously I'm gonna start with a call. But so from here you can create a very structured plan and strategy. You can hear I've done it by quarter and this is just an example, or, and you can do it by segment as well, but you wanna have a plan that is converting into a table like this, even by month, by quarter and what plays you're gonna run. What's going to be the segment target for each play? What's going to be the budget allocated for each play? And what is the goal for each play? And you can shift. You see, for example, here I put Q2 and Q3, two event boost play, because maybe we have events sponsoring these two quarters. But then in Q4, I'm doing a customer appreciation play and the obvious pipeline acceleration play. But in the beginning of the quarter, I'm trying to engage in new accounts that are cold, and so we can drive them into the funnel. So all of these are options. This is just an example, very simple one, but this is how you should structure your plan, ideally by month. So then you can put it into the calendar, you know, when you go live with these plays and your sales team can expect them. And you want to track always, you want to always assign the budget and track the goals and the results. So the difficult part of doing this is obviously to juggle all these different channels at once because you cannot go live with the email channel, for example, as part of the play if the direct mail is not ready or if the VIP event is in 3 weeks. So all of this needs to be timed together to be effective. If you send 3 emails now and then 4 months from now you send a direct mail, not very effective. So that everything is to be ready and you have to time them together, and that's the difficult part. That's why I think this image represents well what it means to orchestrate ABM plays or multi-channel campaigns. Um, so you're gonna do all the plannings first, and then you're gonna go live with one play, and then maybe a second play, etc. Uh, you have to test the different connection between channels and how you're gonna push contacts and accounts from one channel to the other and when or at what condition. And you want to have a quarterback, you want to have someone who is orchestrating this and is responsible for this management, for this orchestration. And obviously sales should be aware of the plan, should be aware of what is happening and when. So they know what to expect and if they play a role into this. And many times they do, actually they should. And so your orchestrator, your ABM orchestrator, should be the one calling the shots when something is happening and how it's happening. And now touching on those two channels that I mentioned many times during this, this presentation. The, the main one for us is direct mail. Why is the main? I talked about this a lot before, but there's not a lot of noise in direct mail. In my whole career, I received only two. I still remember what companies have sent me those direct mails, while at the same time I receive 1 million emails every month. And, uh, is more memorable and it can really drive action. It can drive engagement and convert a prospect into opportunity. Sometimes we see 10x or more increase in conversion. That's why we do a heavy use today of direct mail. Hopefully, you know, if everyone started using direct mail as part of their outreach, then obviously it's going to become less effective. But for now, that's not the case because it takes a lot of work. To execute a proper direct mail campaign as part of this integrated plays and outreach. So it's not enough to just ship packages. You have to make it part of an aligned strategy and orchestrated strategy. And that's the difficult part, but it's worth it. Super effective. And then the other channel is LinkedIn ads, which is still very effective. But this is LinkedIn ads run as part of an ABM play, which means it's part of this strategy. I'm targeting the same accounts that I'm targeting with the other channels. So let's say I have these 800, 1,000 accounts, ideally even more because LinkedIn requires larger audience. So this is not something where you can target 20 accounts. So forget about that. But if you have, this is your top of the funnel strategy, you have maybe 1,000, 5,000 accounts, whatever it is, you can segment them a bit, but You want to target the same companies that you have as a focus for the other channel. You create a list with the company name, company domain. There are specific templates to do that in LinkedIn. You upload the list, you filter down by job titles, ideally no role, job titles, please. Takes a while to select all the job titles, but it's way, way more effective. Like I said, you need the larger audience, think of your, all your ICP accounts. So those that are good targets, and that's your target for LinkedIn. And you want to focus on a mix of lead gen ads and traffic ads, but all with content ideally. So you want to drive engagement via content. Some of them are going to be gated ads like lead gen ads where they fill out a form on, on directly on LinkedIn and they can download the whitepaper. Some of them you can drive directly to an ungated landing page or a blog where they can read the blog, but both of them are effective as long as you focus on very good content, very useful actionable content. But then when you have a prospect from a target account that engages, then you want to funnel that prospect into a conversion uplift play to turn that into opportunity. So imagine this, You have a prospect that is part of this list, sees one of your ads with content, with a white paper, fills out a form on LinkedIn, download the white paper, that leads, triggers the conversion uplift play. So that prospect immediately receives an email within a day about kind of mentioning with more content maybe, and then another email, then receives a direct mail. Than more emails. That's a super effective play. We do it all the time and it works. And with that, that closes the presentation. Thanks everyone for attending today. As I mentioned at the beginning, next week we're gonna have webinar number 5 of the series where we're gonna talk about how you can plan, measure, and optimize these ABM campaigns. ABM program, so you don't want to miss that. Thanks everyone for, for attending today, and hopefully I'll see you at the next webinar. Thank you.