The 10 Fundamental Steps to Implement Account Based Marketing at Your SaaS Company

Hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar, the 10 Fundamental Steps to Implement Account-Based Marketing at Your SaaS Company. So this is the second webinar of our new webinar series, the Comprehensive Account-Based Marketing Guide for SaaS. From 0 to 100 million in ARR. Last week we had the first webinar, How to Get Started with ABM for SaaS, and now we're going to have basically a webinar almost every week. There are a total of 8 webinars, 8 presentations, so you can sign up to all of them on our website on sasql.com. But today we want to focus on these 10 fundamental steps to get started with ABM. So I'm going to describe each one of them in details. Before we get started, very, very quick comments, a very quick introduction about myself. My name is Franco Caporale. I'm founder and CEO of SAS MQL. And before starting SAS MQL in 2018, I used to run demand generation at these companies in the Bay Area, in Silicon Valley, San Francisco. All venture-funded companies. And so I learned a thing or two about enterprise marketing, demand generation, and particularly account-based marketing. So when I started SaaS NQL, I wanted to really focus on helping SaaS companies to scale faster and more efficiently. And so that's why since the beginning we focus on helping SaaS companies driving account-based marketing programs and campaigns, very targeted, based on multi-channel campaigns and something that we can scale in a pretty easy way and, you know, in a predictable way. So since 2018, we've worked with over 100 SaaS companies including Routable, Legion, Pelago, Insights, and many more. So with that, I want to talk about these 10 fundamental steps. So here you can see all of them in a list, but I'm going to describe to you one by one. So let's start with the first one, which is setting the growth goals for, for your company. So this is an important step because if you don't know what you're trying to achieve, there is how much we can build. And so when we look at the campaign, we always want to start from kind of the broader goal, from revenue if possible. So if your company, for example, is, is trying to close $10 million in new ARR in 2024, so how can we reverse engineer that goal and then come up with a plan based on that goal? So In this case that I screenshotted here, for example, here we want to say I want to close $1.2 million in new revenue that you see here. Okay, since my deal size is $120K, that means 10 new customers. So 10 new logos that we need to close. So how can I reverse engineer that? So 10 new customers means we have to drive 40 new opportunities because my win rate from opportunity, from pipeline to close one, is about 25%. So we'll have to drive 40 new opportunities. But then not every meeting discovery call that my sales team has is going to turn into opportunity. So what is my conversion from discovery call to opportunity? Normally, you might have 40%, 50%, 60%, 70% conversion. That's very dependent, but you need to know that because driving the first discovery call is usually a very easy KPI to track and you want to know your conversion from discovery call to opportunity and opportunity to close. But then how, reverse engineer back to engage, how many accounts you're going to have to engage to drive that many discovery calls. And then based on that, you know how many accounts you have to target at the top of the funnel to drive that result. So this is a simple way to do that. And if you know your conversion rates, then you can be very specific about it. But if you don't know that, then you're gonna have to basically benchmark, but be realistic about what real conversion rates are, especially today. You're not going to close 50% of your opportunities, for example, it's very unlikely. So be realistic about it, but also every stage of the funnel you want to use real numbers that make sense. But then you see, for example, here I'm going to have to target 886 accounts in a certain time frame, let's say 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, whatever. The timeframe is to drive this result at the end. And at the same time, I want to know what's going to be my acquisition cost and my ROI. So here, for example, I input that I'm going to invest $400 for each target account in marketing budget. So now you can see in every stage, what is my cost per discovery call? In this case, it's $5,700. Or you can see what is my cost per opportunity, is almost $9,000, or my cost per each new customer, $35,000, which seems like a lot, but if each customer is worth $120K recurring ARR, that's a great, uh, that's a great, uh, profitable system that you put together. So it's something to track at every stage. But now you know, you have an idea how much budget you're gonna need. Here it says about $350K, how many accounts are gonna have to target overall, and you know, what goal am I shooting for. So now that I have an idea what I'm trying to get, I need to start talking with sales. That maybe can start even earlier when you're looking at understanding your goal, because usually you're going to share the goal with sales in terms of revenue pipeline, etc. But now you want to go even further with the conversation with sales and understanding which accounts we should target, um, what have the SDRs been doing today to try to open the door with those accounts, how can we support them with our campaigns. And if you can get any kind of information on what attributes can lead to a better opportunity or better customer, faster sales cycle is very important. Because a lot of time I see, you know, attributes like just revenue, size, employees, location, etc. But a lot of times there are some qualitative attributes that only the sales team knows. I give you an example. Years ago, one of our clients, we figured out that if, if a potential customer had more than, I think it was 10% of their employees abroad, so not in the US, that actually was a bad opportunity. Even though everything else was good, that fact alone, they see the opportunity were getting stuck later in the funnel, not at the beginning. Everything was working fine the first stages, the demo, scoping the project, etc. But then it will get stuck at the end. But because the reason was that their product wasn't ready for international employees, and so that will always turn them off when they find out that, and they will always find out that later. So what we did, we make sure not to target accounts that have more than 10% of the employees abroad. But that's an important aspect that it wasn't immediate. So the more you can get of this very particular characteristics of what makes it a great account and great customer, the better your list is going to be. And so the target list of accounts should be a collaboration between sales and marketing. And I see it too often where just the sales team throwing the list to marketing and say, target this one. Shouldn't— it shouldn't happen that way. There always have to be a balance between what the sales team is trying to do, what marketing is trying to do. Because at the end of the day, the sales team obviously care about their quota, and maybe marketing can have a view of, or your revenue can have a view of the entire funnel, but knowing maybe that a certain account tends to churn faster than others. So you want to always have that balance in understanding who we target. So the next step is to really build who is your ICP, your ideal customer profile. And I mentioned again about the specific attributes, but everything here should be based only on your actual sales data from Salesforce, from HubSpot, from your CRM about your closed won deals. But not every closed won deals, but your best. So for example, if you don't have any customer in, in the Fortune 500 list, you can't say that your ICP is Fortune 500 companies. Maybe you aspire to, to get there, but you shouldn't put all your marketing budget targeting Fortune 500 if today you don't have any company of that, of that size in your customer list, because you're gonna be hitting a very, very steep uphill bottle, uh, engaging those, those accounts. So look at your current, uh, your actual closed won deals. Look at what they have in common. The best customer, those that are like your case studies, those that are really happy with your solution, they are recommending it to everyone. That's who you wanna, uh, that's what you want to base your ICP on, only those kind of companies. And get very specific also. What technologies do they use? Where are they located? Do they— are they hiring particular type of roles, or do they have particular type of roles in their org chart? Anything that you can write about. And, you know, it's fine if you only have 5, 6, 10, 15 of these customers. It's enough to build a profile of who you want to target. And everything else should be just an experiment, basically. And so you will only allocate a test budget on everything else. So step 4, super important to me. Actually, this is where everything in account-based marketing is based on, and this is creating the segments. So when we work with our clients at SaaS MQL, every campaign we run is based on segments. Everything we do is based on segments— the budget, the ROI, the tracking, the campaigns, everything is on the segments. So what are segments then? So you can have segments by industries, like in this case you have healthcare, you have hospitality, manufacturing, software, constructions, um, I don't know, fast food, gyms, you know, healthcare, sorry, fitness, you know, other things. Um, you can have it by products. If you have multiple products, you can have your segment where you're going to target this, are you going to target that. Sometimes that space based on persona. We have clients that target, for example, HR and they target IT, and those are similar accounts but different segments because their product works— they actually have two separate products for the HR audience and for the IT audience. So that could be your segment there. But then you go further than that. You can segment or sub-segment those initial segments by funnel stage. So for example, in your hospitality segment, how many of your total potential customers are cold? So they never heard about your company. How many of them are warm? And warm can be a pretty broad definition, but let's say is everything that is not cold. So even if they, uh, you know, clicked on your website or downloaded white paper or registered to a webinar or came to an event It's already warmish, warmer than being cold. Then you have your opportunities, then you have your lost opportunities, and you have your customers, and you have your churn customers. And you know, there are multiple subsets, but you want to know where your accounts are sitting in your funnel because your campaign is going to change. You're not going to target in the same way a cold account than a lost opportunity account. The lost opportunity, you're going to mention the fact that, you know, that you have engaged with them in the past and, you know, they want to look at what is new about your solution. A cold account is very different messaging. So that's why it's important to sub-segment that. And then you have, for example, tiers. So Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, that's very common. Why you want to do that is because you can then put more money to target Tier 1 versus the money that you allocate to target tier 2 or tier 3. And that also can be a sub-segment of other segments like healthcare tier 1, healthcare tier 2, cold account tier 1, cold account tier 2, etc., etc. And this is the important part that I put in red here. Each segment that you build where you're gonna spend money, time, and effort to target should have a significant potential value. I put significant— there is not like a real definition of it, but I see too often where I hear from clients or potential clients that they say, um, I want to target these 20 accounts. Okay, seems pretty small segment, but maybe they're worth a lot, these 20 accounts. And for a lot, I mean, they better be worth 7 figures at least each or more. Because you're putting all your time and effort to build targeted campaigns to engage only those 20, knowing that you're not going to engage 100% of them. So best case scenario, you engage maybe half of them. Um, so how much is that worth? And then I find out that they're worth $30,000, $40,000 each if they close. So is that worth spending 3 months targeting those 20 accounts? No. So that's why your potential value is based on your ACV of the accounts that form that segment. So there is some rule of thumb, like if your, you know, if your accounts, your potential customers are worth $40K, $50K, maybe assignment should be at least, you know, $600K, $800K, $500K, $1,000K. Just do the math there. Or if they are, every customer is worth half a million, maybe you can have only a couple of 150, 200 per segment. It's enough because you see the ROI, you see that it's worth the effort, but the math doesn't lie. So you always want to run this. And too many times I see that even in the best case scenario, even if we kill that company, like it works phenomenally. It probably wasn't worth the effort. And so always think in this way for each segment. Put a dollar amount next to the total potential value of that segment that you're building, because you know you're not going to get all of it. Actually, you're going to get only a percentage of it. And so you're going to start looking at the math there. So once you have defined your segments, uh, start building the target list. So you always want to build first all the accounts that form that segment. How many companies fit that profile? For example, for the hospitality segment, that obviously you have some specific criteria in terms of like size of the company, location, what technology do they use, um, you know, they can be the revenue, other things that you look for, or how many sales reps do they have, how many engineers do they have, you know, whatever your criteria is. And you see, okay, this is my total segment, could be like 5,000 companies. Now I'm going to sub-segment that into maybe tier 1, tier 2, tier 3. And then I want to know cold versus warm versus opportunities. So you kind of split them in smaller segments. Now you know all of the accounts that you, you want to target in the next 3, 6, 12 months. And then you start building the contacts list. But even the contact list and the target titles must be based on your actual CRM data. So that should be based on the opportunities that your sales team closed, so you can look at what contacts, what roles were involved in those opportunities. I hear very often, and I'm going to bring these examples a lot because they're actually real and are common mistakes that I see where I hear clients say, you know, we target VP and director or C-level only and VPs, no, no, nobody else. Then you look at their Salesforce data and you see that the best opportunities, those that close for a lot of money, actually started with, I don't know, HR manager was the first one who interacted with the sales rep, and then from there the opportunity developed. They brought out, they brought involved other people, their boss, their VP, everything later. And maybe this, the C-level person only sign at the end, or not even, definitely was not involved in the first call. So it's very important here to replicate whatever was the successful motion into those accounts. So if the successful motion starts maybe with the executive assistant of the VP. Let's try to replicate that. If you see a pattern there, or maybe it starts with the, the marketing manager or the marketing director or whatever it is, try to see what's the pattern into those accounts because you can replicate that. And so if you pull that report from Salesforce or from HubSpot and you look at what titles were involved with your successful opportunities, then you can build a list that's going to mimic that. And because these accounts are based on your best customer, even the contents are going to be based on how you were able to open the door and close those accounts. So very, very important to do that. So like I said earlier, stage and tiers are sub-segments. So, you know, like for each segment, you want to sub-segment them in stage and tiers and look at the value like we said earlier on on the segment. And so you're gonna know how much money you're gonna allocate for to target these accounts, and that will tell you how many contacts you can target within the same account. So how deep can you, can you go into those accounts? Because obviously the bigger the accounts, the more people you need to engage, the more money it's going to take. Very simple. Now that you have your list, it's time to look at how can you engage these people in these accounts. So these are the, the plays that we run for our clients at SaaS MQL, and we have developed this— they're based on use cases and different segments of different stages of the funnel that we see very, very, very often. So for example, an open the door play is designed for cold accounts where you don't have any kind of relationship or there's no previous engagement, so you treat them as such. And so there's going to be a warm-up phase that can be via email. Then you try to engage them with some LinkedIn ads, and then you might try with more emails, and then you send them a direct mail that is introductory with a letter that introduces, you know, their contact person in your company. And then you send more email from the same person. That's an open-the-door play. Um, the top account nurturing is different. This is for only your top tier 1, let's say 100, 200 accounts, and that's the long-term play that you used to keep them engaged, keep your solution as top of mind for them, because you know that most of them are not in a buying cycle today, but you want to be there. You want to be the first thing they— the first solution they think about when it's time to acquire, you know, a solution like yours. And if you have been there for all these months, you're going to be top of mind. So I'm not going to go into each one of this because we're actually going to have a webinar specifically for the plays and the playbook, and we're going to describe them in details with examples. But you want to create this playbook, and you might have multiple plays of this running in parallel depending on where you are as a company and where you are with your growth stage. So example, if you see that a bottleneck is you actually have a lot of opportunities in your pipeline, there is more than they can handle, but they are getting stuck. You see a bottleneck in, I don't know, between stage 3 and stage 5 of your pipeline of opportunities. Then maybe running a campaign just to solve that problem and try to accelerate and create a specific email flow and direct mail and ads and everything, or maybe invite them to a VIP dinner that play can work to solve that problem. But another example, you wanna— you have a new product, you want to upsell your existing customer with that product. We're doing that with several clients today, and that's a great play to do. And obviously has to be specific. You know that those companies are really your customers, so you can treat them like you will do here with an Open the Door campaign. No, you're just trying to sell them a different product that they haven't maybe heard yet, but they love your original solution that they're using. So that's a great play to run. Okay. And so this is probably my favorite topic in all account-based marketing is forecast and plan with your budget. So we talked earlier how you can reverse engineer your funnel based on your goals. And the more data you have, the more accurate your forecast is going to be, obviously. But here you want to do that by segment because each segment probably will have different conversion rates. And then cold accounts where you run an open the door is going to have maybe a 4 or 5% conversion rate while a lost opportunity play might have a 35% conversion rate. You might convert 1 out of 3 into new opportunities. So the conversion rate will change. So your budget allocation will change. Your ROI is going to change by play, by segment. And so like here, for example, I have a healthcare and hospitality segment. I have different conversion rates across the, across the fund. There are different, uh, different value of these accounts at the end because maybe they use different products. And so, you know, they— there's a different deal size at the end. And you see here I'm allocating $90K on the healthcare segment and $140K on the my hospitality. With a goal of closing a total of 3.9 million in new ARR and 207 MQAs, or marketing qualified accounts, which is basically a discovery call with the new accounts. You know, you can map all of this and then use whatever budget you forecasted earlier to allocate on the different segments, the different plays. And this can become a bit complex when you have many plays that have different conversion rate, different ROI. But that's how you can form a great plan. It's probably quite hard the first year you run this, but from the second year when you have actual data, you're going to become pretty accurate and it gets a lot— becomes a lot of fun. And this is based, for example, on direct mail campaigns. You can do with ads, you can do with all the different channels that you are combining, because again, you know, account-based marketing is about running multi-channel campaigns, not just focusing on one channel, and so you have to forecast for that as well. Here you can see an example. So this is the part of creating the actual multichannel campaign. That means deciding what channel you're going to use for that play, right? For example, my lost opportunity play, what channel would I use? I could use, uh, I could run some ads maybe, but I want to be more direct, so I'm going to definitely use email. I'm definitely going to use direct mail when I want to send them a nice package, and I might invite them to an event or a VIP dinner at the same time where they can meet with my current customers. Since they are lost opportunities, they can meet with our successful customers that I invite and get them to, you know, mingle together and learn from each other. So this is one of our campaigns. You see, it's called the Secret Sauce campaign because we have the secret sauce to close and engage your our hottest accounts, um, at SAS and QL. And so you see we keep consistent the theme across ads, across one-pager, direct mail, email, events, with the sauce everywhere. That's, that's the way to do it. So the theme obviously needs to make sense for your solution. This makes sense for us and is what we focus on, uh, you know, right now. And, you know, we can build all of these campaigns that are specific, like I said, if there are lost opportunities, if cold accounts, etc., etc. But here's where you build actually all the different assets that you're gonna need, from the email sequences, messaging, the design, your booth material, your swag, the direct mail, the different ads. Every— everything basically is built in this step number 8. So we have 2 more steps to go. Number 9 is where you personalize your ABM efforts. And this is where a lot of companies get stuck because they like to personalize by contact. So if I sell, if I send an email or a direct mail or something, or an ad showing out to John Doe at Bank of America, I want everything to, to be about that person, be about John. And the email obviously should be about John, but also the direct mail. I want to send John something that he really likes. Maybe he likes playing, I don't know, golf. So I'm gonna send him some golf balls in there because I know he likes to play golf and everything about that person. But guess what? You don't really need to do that at this stage. I mean, it would be cool, right, if I know everything about each single contact and I can do that. But here's what I see in the reality happening. Number one, you're wasting a ton of time focusing on that. And it's not because you know that John plays golf that you really gonna close the deal. If you're focusing on personalizing by segment, and obviously you can keep that segment as small as it should be, but the segments should share the problem, the pains, how this— how your solution is positioned to them. That should be a common element to all the accounts and people on that segment. So if you personalize by segment, they should still be relevant enough for John, Bank of America, that he wants to engage and learn more because your solution speaks to him more than anything. If you focus on, you know, doing this content-level personalization, um, you're gonna— first of all, you're gonna most likely fail. Because what I see a lot of time happening, they look at their LinkedIn or Facebook and see a picture of golf or went to that university, and let's put some swag there. And then I saw that going wrong many times. And actually, no, actually I hate golf. It was just— I don't know how it had went to my profile, you know, like things like that, um, where actually sometimes you go, you know, the wrong way. But also, you know, how much time are you spending to personalize that? Even at the account level, even if you, you say I want to build everything just for Bank of America, like everything with their logo, everything with personalization, okay, how much time of your team you are taking to do that? And how much is that account worth? Even if they close, was it worth spending 3, 4 months of their time to personalize that? Or would you would have been better to target maybe 60, 70 other banks that are similar to Bank of America. Maybe they have a similar problem, uh, but you are able to engage more of them at the same time. So leave the content level personalization for sales. If I'm a sales rep and I meet with John on my discovery call, then I can learn more in my calls and actually have built a relationship, and then I'm going to send him the package of golf ball or whatever I learned from my, you know, hour or two spent on the phone with him. But, and that becomes a one-to-one. But a marketing, we're not there. And even though it's very cool when you're able to do that, most of the time it's not worth the effort. And what it does is it just makes it for great slides when you show to your board or to your CEO, but you know, when you look at the numbers, is usually very bad. And also what happens is many companies, they only do that once and then like, oh, it was too much work, you know, it was cool, we still have the good slides to show and how cool it was, but you know, it wasn't— didn't move the needle on our pipeline or quota or results, and it took us 7 months of work, so we're not doing that again. I see that way too often, and that's why I wouldn't recommend And so last step, once you have personalized by segment and you can be very relevant by segment, if your segment is one account, better be worth it like we discussed before. But let's go to step number 10, which is measure and optimize. And that's when you can also scale because you can see the KPIs, you can see what is working, what is not, what stage is working well. What stages are not, what segments are driving results. So for each segment, you want to track how much new ARR were you able to generate in 6 months, 12 months, whatever the time frame is, how much new pipeline, how many number of new opportunities, how much budget did you spend, how much did you spend per account, so that you know, you know, if you add more accounts, how much dollar you're gonna have to invest to target them. What was your ROI on that spend? What's the cost per each opportunity? What's the deal size that came out of it? What was the account engagement? So the account engagement means, you know, maybe you were targeting 800 accounts and, you know, half of them have engaged somehow, replied, fill out form, have clicked, you know, that's still engagement and you can track that. And then for each segment you want to set specific goals. For example, your cold segment could be how many accounts are now engaged since they were all cold, and you can see how they're moving across the different stages. So if you start 800 cold accounts, maybe 400 of them are now engaged and 70 of them are now opportunities and 20 of them are now cold. And then you can see how they move quarter by quarter, right? So you can, you can track the movement. And so you know that your dollars that are being spent every quarter are actually working for that. For your customer segment is how much upsell revenue did we generate for the new product that we pushed to that segment and how much budget we spent obviously to do that. And lost opportunity segment, how many opportunities were we able to reactivate from this, I don't know, 500 lost opportunities in 2 quarters. So all of this allows you to look at what is working, what is not working, what is your ROI, and then that's where you can start scaling, especially on what is working. And you can start putting more budget, adding more accounts, putting more resources to then driving more and more results. With most of our clients, we always start pretty small, maybe with one or two segments at the beginning. We start getting results and then we scale and we scale, and then two years later they, they close millions of dollars in, in euro ARR, and we keep scaling from there. And we stop doing maybe the— or targeting segments that don't have a lot of traction, they don't seem to engage in the same way, or deal sizes are smaller. You know, you can see all of that if you track it. So very important to track everything from the beginning, allocate a budget up front that is realistic for the goals that you set, and then you can start scaling everything. And with that, we have closed kind of the, the 10-step webinar. But the good news is now with the next webinars, we're going to go into details on many of these steps. For example, the next webinar next week on April 30th, we're going to be talking about how we can segment target accounts for maximum ROI. So what I discussed today, but we're going to go in more details on the different type of segments and things that you want to look for. And then we're going to look at, you know, the next webinar, we're going to talk about the plays and measuring, etc. So please join our future webinars, you can go on sas.mql.com/webinars, you're going to see the other webinars where you can RSVP and sign up, and then you're going to be able to watch the recording right after. With that, thank you everyone for joining us today. And I hope to see you At the next webinar. Thank you.