Danilo Nikolich and Nick Bennett explain why static ICPs create bias and how ABM teams should test new segments instead. They outline RevOps-led tactics like intent-triggered gifts and concrete metrics: activity within 14 days, demo conversion rates, and closed-won percentages.
Chapters
1, 2, 3, 4.
Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com. I'm playing around with this idea that ICP has evolved. And what I mean by that is ICP used to be like, oh, we plug into Salesforce. So anybody that uses Salesforce, okay, fine, that have this to this many employees in this geography, cool. Then even evolved to using this competing product or have their contract ending a certain date, cool. I think it's evolving to intent. Like, is your ICP really somebody who's like, like, sure, they could buy, but they're so far out there? What do you subscribe to that? Like, I, I mean, I don't know if many people are doing it. I'm, I'm just trying to think outside the box a little in, in the evolution.
Yeah, um, I can touch on that a little bit. I mean, that's— it's, it's one of those things that you just got to be super careful about, right?
Right.
Because you ICP could be an evolving variable, right? Because sure, when you start off as a small organization, when you think about an ideal customer profile, you might have some ideas as to what that is, right? Just based on some early adopters and just kind of where you think your product would fit, right? You just don't have enough data points to figure out what does that ideal customer profile look like, right? And so as you evolve, Right. And you have more and more customers, you find out what are your best customers, what are their traits and so forth. So ABM helps, you know, with, you know, classifying what that should be to help you actually create that target account list and then even score it. Like, here's my A accounts, B accounts and so forth. But you just gotta be careful to your point that it's not a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
Right.
Because if you don't step out of the box and experiment a little bit in some of these other areas, then the algorithm is going to get— continue to get essentially the same data over and over again, right? So you definitely want to try and branch out, uh, have your, you know, your focus, uh, 90% here. And then I'm a big believer in pilots. Do some pilots by all means, right? Yeah. And figure out where else, you know, You know, your technology could be, you know, appreciated and useful, right? You know, and sometimes you're gonna crash and burn and that's okay, right? So I would say the pilot route is always the best route to take.
I think that's a really thoughtful retort because just because they're the most likely to buy now, that's like severely limiting your TAM and like your overall business vision. So understood. Now bringing it back, Nick, Alice, you know, how does ABM support the sales?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to like just remember that ABM is a strategy to acquire at the end of the day. It's not just inviting, you know, accounts to events from your, basically your key accounts. I think it's what does that account list building look like, like the exercise? And it shouldn't just be sales coming up with the list. It shouldn't be marketing coming up with the list. It's led with RevOps plus sales plus marketing. And then you have that intent data piece Which you know it's something that is important to us. Like what what does that account engagement look like? Are people moving you know stages? What's the average number of days that someone is in a specific stage? And actually you know within Alice, an exciting piece is we now integrate with you know we're almost we're in beta right now, but we're finalizing it with all ABM providers like RoleWorks, Six Sense, DemandBase, all those companies. Like we can now trigger gift sends based on certain stages of that intent, where they are within that kind of journey. And so gifting playing a big piece of that to make sure that one, you're keeping the warm accounts happy, surprising, delighting them, pushing them through things like that is definitely important. And then I think it's like the account scoring from the MQA perspective. What should MQA success actually look like when marketing thinks about it, how to help sales in that outbound? So like, A percentage of all MQAs should have activity against them within 14 days of the MQA date. Whatever you did pick, like 90%, 80%, whatever number it is, there should be a percentage that has activity against them within 14 days. Then there should be a percentage of unique MQAs that turn into a demo stage plus opportunity. And then lastly, what from that turns into closed won business? So One, you know, as a marketer, you're thinking more revenue focused to help the sales team. It's not, let's just pump MQLs. Let's make sure that our account scoring from an MQA perspective makes a lot of sense mixed with, you know, the tactics that are optimized for ABMs, like paid ads, direct mail, events, content, website landing pages, the personalization aspect. If it's, you know, personal, relevant, and thoughtful, that's gonna connect with someone a lot deeper than just, you know, spray and pray and let's just see what sticks to the wall. And then the last piece was, as a marketer, I feel like sometimes goes unnoticed, especially in the outbound piece, is like AE and BDR, SDR enablement. Like as a marketer, I do a lot of that enablement to make sure that they're up to speed with the questions to ask, the acronyms that other marketers are using, the tactics that were being used, the activity and intent that's showing up, all of that good stuff. If they're not enabled on it, what, what are they going to do with it? They're going to look at it, they're going to see all this stuff, but they're not going to know how to accurately basically work those. And I think that's important to know for sure.
That was music to my ears, Nick. Sorry to interrupt.
Yeah,
Jared, but yeah, I mean, that's, that's the perfect idea from a sync perspective, right? What, what Nick just talked about, right, is Perfect alignment along the stages supporting that, but then also coaching and training, right? So I'll have our senior director of marketing as well do some training and coaching and development for the SDRs because like I said earlier, right, and Nick mentioned this to begin with, it's like each person's environment is different. So make sure you understand their environment, but more importantly, the questions you want to ask, right? That's what, you know, what Nick was touching on, right? Spot on.
This has been awesome listening to you and learning from both of you. You know, everything from ABM's evolution, right, to MQLs and MQAs, how to work with sales post-handoff, how to work with sales pre-handoff, right? Like literally how marketing and sales could align. It was really enlightening to hear. The oversight, especially from Nick, right? Like with, you know, making sure that he was following the process to generate revenue. And for everyone watching, I hope you got some awesome takeaways from this and how better to like help structure your work, do some, you know, cool things working in alignment and better drive revenue and better delight your prospects and make them customers and make them stay. So Thank you both for your time. Thank you, Rollworks. Thank you, uh, Nick and Danilo. Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Hello, hello. All right, well, that is it for GTM Series Marketing Plan. I want to thank all of the attendees and all of our speakers and sponsors, starting with Elise and Jessica from Syncery and talking about embracing distributed truth, and Nick, Danilo, and Jared on these strategies for ABMifying growth. Thank you to our sponsors, Rollworks and Syncery. Make sure to check out these sponsor booths. It's in the tab called Boots in the top left corner. And we also have our RevCon annual conference coming up on October 12th. Have a great rest of everyone's day, and thank you to everyone who joined and participated in our GTM series.
Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free, and it only takes like two seconds. And you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.
