How to Get Started with Account Based Marketing for SaaS

Hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar, How to Get Started with Account-Based Marketing for SaaS. So this is actually the first webinar of the new series that we're launching, which is called the Comprehensive Account-Based Marketing Guide for SaaS: From $0 to $100 Million in annual recurring revenue. So this is the first of 8 webinars and we're gonna go into details about planning, launching, executing, and scaling account-based marketing strategy for SaaS. So if you are interested in attending the other webinars, we're gonna do one every week. So every Tuesday we'll have the next webinars and you're gonna be able to see all the webinars that we're planning at sasandql.com. So why am I here talking about account-based marketing? My background is in demand generation. My name is obviously Franco Caporale. I'm the founder CEO of SAS and QL, but before launching SAS and QL, I was working in Silicon Valley in San Francisco for a few different venture-funded cloud and SaaS companies. And in all of these companies, my focus was to generate opportunities for the enterprise sales team and to scale demand generation. So I developed a pretty strong account-based marketing framework that was being very effective at driving these opportunities. And so in 2018, I started SaaS NQL, and the only focus of SaaS NQL is account-based marketing. We only work with SaaS companies, typically venture-funded or even public companies, to plan, execute, manage, and scale their account-based marketing programs. And we focus on multichannel campaigns that are scalable and very effective at driving enterprise opportunities and deals. So that being said, let's jump into the agenda for today. And then we'll talk about the future webinars. But today I wanna give an introduction about account-based marketing because it's something that not everyone is familiar with or has run programs or campaigns before. So I wanna start today with a good introduction and we're gonna cover the brief overview and like how account-based marketing became a buzzword a few years ago. And what are the differences between account-based marketing and the traditional inbound marketing. And then I want to discuss a little bit about why is important for SaaS companies to at least look into account-based marketing as an option for your growth strategy. And then we're gonna cover the different type of ABM strategies, typically, you know, the one-to-one, one-to-few, one-to-many, and how you can choose the right approach. We're gonna discuss what are the channels that you can leverage to run account-based marketing campaigns, what we mean about account-based marketing orchestration, and then a few common misconceptions at the end that I hear very often from SaaS founders or SaaS executives. So let's start with the first introduction and what is account-based marketing. So when we say account-based marketing, we refer to an approach that is very targeted to focus only to your top accounts. So the top value, top tier accounts that we wanna target to and allocate all the budget, all the efforts only to those accounts to convert them into opportunities and deals. So that means that my entire marketing budget that I allocate for ABM is gonna go towards engaging decision makers and influencers in those pre-selected high-value accounts. So I'm not running campaigns, broad campaigns to try to catch something and then see if some, some of them are relevant to me. They're gonna just be allocated for those accounts. So in order to do that, you need a very strong alignment with the sales team. So typically we see ABM as kind of the bridge between marketing and sales, where in the past you had marketing being very focused on leads, leads, leads, and funnel, funnel, leads, while sales only care about their target accounts and their territory. And a lot of times you will see some mismatch between the two departments. And so ABM was also born to try to align that. And so you will see marketing having the same goals of sales, typically revenue as well as pipeline. And then from, from revenue pipeline, you work your way back to how many opportunities you need to generate, how many accounts you need to target, and how much budget to allocate. Um, so when we look at what accounts we target in ABM, they're not necessarily based on and this is something I hear very often, which is, you know, how do I know which companies are in buying mode today so I can target them instead of targeting those that are not in buying mode or they haven't started really looking to purchase that specific solution? This is not what ABM is about, at least not only. Obviously, you know, if you're able to get some insights about you know, kind of targeting the right company at the right time. Of course we're going to want to do that, but it shouldn't be limited to only those companies because, as I say very often in enterprise sales and enterprise marketing, if that company starts hearing about your solution only now when they are ready to buy mode, you can be certain that your competitors have been nurturing that company for many, many months and they're going to be top of the list and you're going to be used only as a checkbox to, to say that they've done their due diligence, but they're already going with some of your competitors. So we want to use the ABM strategy also to nurture your top accounts, so then when they get into that buying mode, you're going to be the top of the list and your competitors are going to be the checkbox. So obviously, because of their— its target very targeted nature. ABM works well only when your solution is a high ticket, and we're going to discuss what we mean for high ticket. Obviously, there is a lot of different ranges and different ideas, but this is not for high volume, low price type of software or, or solution or services. This is when you're looking for to build those relationships that turn into a lot of revenue. And also, it's gonna work well when you have a clear ICP. So there's not like some vague, well, we do, you know, we work with all these verticals and all different size of companies and all of this, all of that. It's gonna turn into a very, you know, too broad of a campaign. It's not going to be very effective. Your conversion rate is going to be low. So when I hear like clear ICP with a lot of attributes, that's when I know it's gonna work well. And so, you know, spend some time defining that before launching your ABM program. And as a kind of consequence of that, you also need very clean data and clear segmentation to run strong campaigns. You know, if you have stale data that a lot of people has changed companies, or the company might you know, gone out of business, or I don't know, there's a lot of that I see with companies' data. That's gonna turn into a lot of money wasted in running campaigns to people that have— that are no longer there, or, you know, they're no longer relevant. So make sure you spend some time on the data. But in short, even though ABM, account-based marketing, is a little bit of a buzzword, but The concept behind this, no, this is something that is really key for B2B companies and B2B marketing. That is like, why do you— when you know who you want to target, why focusing too much on other strategy, hoping that those companies come through by miracle when you can proactively target them and really put all your budget and all your efforts towards those companies if you know who they are. So now let's talk about the distinction between inbound marketing or traditional marketing, quote unquote, and ABM, account-based marketing. So I took this screenshot from, you know, the Flip My Funnel concept that was created by Terminus. They also were, they were running also conferences with this name, and I like the analogy of saying I'm flipping the funnel because in traditional marketing and inbound, you have the typical, you know, multi-stage funnel where you start, you throw out content or keywords and search ads or Facebook ads. You get a bunch of interest. First you create awareness, then a bunch of interest. You get these leads or, you know, conversion, and then you disqualify 90% of them. And then some of them are gonna be interested and wanna move forward to the next stage. And then some of them become customer. And so, you know, you spend X and hopefully, you know, the math works at the end. However, this is all based on intent, but it's not based on a very specific target. So you really cannot control what companies come through your, you know, inbound marketing on Google, on with SEO or SEM. Those are depending on purely intent, but the intent can come from a Fortune 500 company, or it can come from a consultant, or it can come from an intern, it can come from all over the place. So it works well though when your, your solution is pretty low price and you need a lot of volume. So that's where you're going to spend time optimizing each stage of the funnel and the conversion, etc. And the math should work at the end. However, when your solution is not low price but is a high ticket, that's where we— that's where ABM becomes much more relevant and much more profitable. And it's all based on fit more than intent, as I discussed earlier. We are looking to target every account that we think is going to fit well with our solution and is going to turn into an ideal customer. Regardless if they are in a buying cycle today. So to do that, we have to always leverage multiple channels. It cannot be done on a single channel. Decision-maker influencers, they, you know, they consume different content and material. They go to events, they, they download reports. You know, you want to try to really become relevant across all these different channels. And you can really decide how much budget you want to allocate for, I don't know, your tier 1 accounts versus your tier 2 accounts, or different territories, different verticals, different stages of the funnel. Anything like that can work as long as your deal size is high enough, because you're going to be spending a lot of time creating this custom content, assets, flows orchestration, etc. So it has to be worth it. So when some of these accounts engage with your campaign and turn into opportunity, it should be, you know, a very solid opportunity. So for SaaS companies, account-based marketing is particularly good, uh, as long as your deal size— I like to use this as kind of my floor, and it's $20K ACV or $20K ARR. Um, so I look particularly the first year of revenue, even though many companies sign multi-year deal. But you know, if your ARR is at least $20K, you know that you can, you can focus on ABM and be successful with it. And it doesn't mean that your average deal size needs to be $20K, actually. Um, well, it's better if your average is at least $20K, but what we look in particular is what is your the high end of your, uh, of your deal scale, deal size scale. So for example, if you have a lot of $20K-$30K customers but you have a few $300,000 ARR customers, then we know we can find more of those. And why don't we focus on targeting potential customers that could turn into $300K deals? That's what we're gonna do, and that's where you're gonna leverage ABM for more than the $20,000-$30,000 deals. So the budget allocation becomes very efficient. You have a, you can lower your cap because even though you have to typically spend money upfront to build these targeted campaigns, build the content, build the assets, et cetera, but because it's super targeted, you're not wasting a lot of money with unqualified prospects or accounts. So your CAC tends to be lower than traditional inbound type of strategy. And you can really look at what accounts is, what type of accounts you are having more traction with on the sales side. For example, you don't have to focus only on the super high value accounts. You can create a campaign only to target accounts that maybe have a shorter sales cycle because they have less friction in the buying process or because they really have a need for your solution today. We saw a lot during COVID where certain type of technology like virtual events, for example, was really in high demand. And so you can create a segment and a specific campaign for a product that is in high demand and you know you're going to turn into revenue very quickly. And it's important to align with what your SDR team is doing. So typically the SDR team is spending a lot of time with cold call, cold emails, cold LinkedIn messages. But then when they don't get a response with those 3 channels, what else can they do, right? And so you can really help by creating targeted campaigns across different channels that maybe your SDRs are not leveraging today. To help them get their foot in the door and turn these accounts into opportunities. So when we look at the different ABM models, so we typically talk about one-to-one, one-to-few, and one-to-many. So one of the misconceptions that I'll talk later about is that ABM is only one-to-one. So if I do account-based marketing, I need to create a one campaign just for, I don't know, Bank of America, if it's one of my target accounts. And so my whole campaign, I need to create custom assets, custom everything for Bank of America, and so that's going to be super relevant for them. Of course you can do that, but you always have to make a determination if it's worth it to do it. So there are some rules of thumb to decide what is the actual size of your target list. Or target segment, because for us one segment equals one campaign. So you can have a segment of one. So Bank of America will be your own segment, but how much is it worth to you if Bank of America responds and becomes a customer? If that is worth like $50K, are you really spending your team's effort and budget and time to have a chance at converting $50K, or is it better to create a larger segment and you know, looking for companies that have things in common so that it becomes very relevant campaign, but not necessarily with only one account in it. So I get these questions, this question a lot of how many accounts should be in, in the target list. Should it be 50, 100, 500, 5,000? There is a lot of variables to calculate your list, but the main one is what is your deal size. So if your deal size is half a million, $1 million ARR plus, you know, your target list can be pretty small, even 20, 30, 50. If you are in the six-figure area, like $100K, $200K, typically I like to see at least, you know, 400, 500, 800, up to 1,000 companies in a single segment. Um, if it's smaller, so you're like $30K, $40K, $50K, you need probably larger list, even 1,500, 2,000 accounts, then you can segment them and there are multiple ways of doing that. We're gonna cover that in future webinars, but always be mindful of what type of accounts you're targeting, but most importantly, what is the deal size of those potential opportunities? So when we look at the different channels that you can use for ABM, and as we discussed, you're gonna need to use more than one. So obviously you have to look at channels that allow you to target specific companies because if you cannot do that, you cannot really run any kind of ABM strategy. So what channels are available today where you can decide to what company, to what companies focus this channel on? An obvious one is email. It's, you know, very saturated today, so you're gonna have moderate success on emails as a standalone channel, but it's different when you start combining this channel together. Another one that is great is LinkedIn Ads. It's fantastic because you can upload a list of accounts and really build your campaigns around those target segments. The only limitation LinkedIn has is, you know, your list of accounts cannot be like 20 companies. You typically need larger list, but you have to see that as your top of the funnel kind of channel. So you're using LinkedIn ads to drive that initial engagement, not to drive the actual opportunity, but more to, you know, expose your content to decision maker, maybe some reports, case studies, etc. Then a great one where SaaS NQL and, you know, my team spends a lot of time and with a lot of success is direct mail. Today is very underusing B2B, luckily for us. And so we are able to get a lot of success at engaging companies and decision makers even in very large enterprise companies because a lot of other B2B competitors are not doing it. And that's good for us. And while that works, I strongly recommend to test it out because we are able to engage people and companies that would have never responded to any email or click on an ad anytime, anywhere. So it's something to think about. Another channel where I had a lot of success is VIP events. Like, that's your typical, I don't know, steak dinner that you do with a chef and you invite 20, 30 VPs or C-level executives, um, and have, have a sort of discussion and kind of like a small roundtable type. Or some companies today, they do these retreats in exotic location. I mean, it depends on what's your budget, how much you want to spend. But obviously those are fantastic at generating pipeline, especially again, we're talking about combining this channel. So, you know, you're going to use the emails, you're going to use the ads, you're going to use direct mail, use these events through the same accounts and same people. And you see how you can start creating that engagement that you need. The only problem with VIP events is obviously it's an enormous amount of work, especially 'cause you cannot do just one. When I was at Branch, we were doing, I think like 5 or 6 per quarter of these VIP events across the United States. So you can imagine how much work and budget it takes to do that. Other two channels are content syndication And I talk about targeted content syndication again, where you can upload a list of accounts and show your content based on IP address or display ads like Sixth Sense and Demandbase. Those are all great options. Content syndication, I put a couple of logos here, Madison Logic and DemandScience. There are more obviously, but these are okay. But again, you are mostly creating some awareness with this type of tactics here. And if you, if your whole ABM campaign is running display ads, you know, you're gonna have a tough time driving opportunities as a standalone channel. Pretty much all of this cannot work as a standalone channel, but if you start combining them together and also running display ads or content syndication and then sending them email and then sending a direct mail and then inviting them to VIP events, then you have, you have a program and you have an actual, uh, flow. Um, in fact, when we talk about orchestration, that means combining these different channels together and have a flow on how a prospect and an account interacts with this different channel and with your assets across these, these channels. So here, an example of one of our programs where we use email and LinkedIn ads to warm up cold accounts. And then as soon as they, they are warmed up and they engage, they respond, then we target them with a direct mail. And then we have more emails, and at the same time they're seeing more ads and more content. And then what we look is to drive— what we look for is to drive them into to become an opportunity. And then that's a continuous motion. Again, none of this stuff is a one-off. If you do a direct mail campaign, if you do a content syndication, if you do any of this you cannot look to do it once. These are all programs that run in the background and you optimize constantly. If not, you're wasting your time. So I want to close with a few common misconceptions that I hear a lot when I talk to our clients or to companies that are interested in running ABM. Probably the most common is that they think of ABM, as I said, as one-to-one only. So one account, one campaign. I've done that in the past. I will not do that mistake again. For me, as a rule of thumb, to be honest, for an account to be worth its own campaign, it has to drive a lot of money. And for a lot of money, I mean 8-figure type of revenue or at least high 7-figure, like $5 million plus a year or something like that. Because again, you are limiting your success to one company. Either you are 0% success or you're 100% successful. So yeah, think about the size of the list very carefully. Another thing is we need to personalize the campaign for each individual. For example, for direct mail, I hear proposal of doing something where you send the direct mail based on the LinkedIn profile, like if I like skiing, then I'm gonna get a pair of ski gloves or something like that. That's mostly a waste of time. Um, I know it looks cool, it looks very cute when you present the slides to your board and you show that how, how personalized these campaigns that you're running, but when you look at the number at the end and those that's what matters. Uh, you just have wasted a lot of time for little results because that's not what drives, um, engagement, um, and the effort is mostly not worth it. So it's better to spend time on what you put on your messaging and what people are you targeting and how much they fit your ideal customer profile. And how are you addressing their needs versus sending something based on their likes. Also because 90% of the time you won't find the right thing just based on social profile. But in general, you know, leave that to sales. If I have a meeting with someone and I know that person likes, uh, you know, to go to visit Paris, I might send them some, uh, something cool from, from France. I don't know, but that's more of a sales effort that comes later in the funnel, like when there's already an opportunity. But at the marketing level, when we're targeting multiple accounts, multiple people, let's focus on segments and not a single individual and look at the things that matter more, kind of more vanity or, you know, looking good type of campaigns. So not necessarily You don't need to necessarily spend a lot of money when you start running ABM programs. You can start pretty small, even with, you know, $10K, $15K, $20K budget and test it out. Spend a lot of time really drafting your list of accounts and decision maker. And always look if you have warmer accounts, where do they sit in your funnel, these accounts? Are they all cold or you actually have warmed them up across other channels. Maybe they stopped by your booth a few months ago. Maybe, you know, you have some connection or they downloaded your content, attended webinars. Don't only go towards cold accounts. Actually, cold accounts should be, you know, left last as long as you have warm accounts that are 100% fit. Because again, fit is more important than intent. But you know that cold accounts are gonna obviously have a lower conversion, higher CAC, but because you're driving them from scratch, from cold to opportunity. So spend some time to see if you have already engaged some of these accounts before, but always, always look at fit first and work with sales to do that. But don't let the sales team draft the list only and then work with that. It should be a collaborative process. One misconception that I hear a lot is that startups shouldn't waste time with ABM. That's very wrong. Even bootstrap companies that haven't raised any money can be very successful with ABM, especially if they don't have a lot of marketing budget, because all the budget is going to be used in a very focused, very targeted way. And so you don't waste a lot of budget and dollars to attract companies and people that are unqualified for your solution. I hear a lot that you should use ABM only if you target Fortune 500. Also not true. We do that very successfully targeting mid-market companies, not very small, not SMBs, right? You're not focusing much on SMBs, but unless, you know, these SMBs are worth a lot of money. But typically it's like mid-market to enterprise. But this mid-market can be, you know, 100, 200, 300 employees, sometimes even less. Depends if they fit your profile, as long as the deal size is high enough. But don't think that this is only enterprise. It's not. And then finally, when I hear a company saying, yeah, we're running ABM strategy and the only thing they have is some display, targeted display ads, or content syndication. I question, I question that. You need much more than that. Actually, you're gonna spend a lot of money for awareness, but then you are not doing anything with that awareness that you are generating. And so that's why you want to create some multi-channel flow, and that's where it becomes, you know, pretty time-consuming and a lot of efforts to create the orchestration around those channels. But that's where the fun part starts. And so with that, I want to talk about the second webinar, which we're going to have next week. And, you know, this was just the intro, but next week we're going to actually start talking about real stuff. So we're going to talk about the 10 fundamental steps to implement account-based marketing at your SaaS company, but also at any B2B company, to be honest. But obviously my experience is with SaaS, and we're going to cover them in details and, you know, in order so you can literally after the webinar start looking at if you have everything you need or start creating assets or lists or data and really get started with implementing ABM at your company. So with that, I'm gonna close today's webinar. I hope it was interesting. Interesting. And, uh, I hope to see you next week for the next webinar. And obviously the recording is going to be available right after this. Thank you, everyone.