Danilo Nikolich and Nick Bennett explain how account-based marketing aligns sales and marketing to win deals faster and cheaper. They moved from separate lead pools to nearly 100% overlap between teams, using shared target-account lists and content-syndication tactics to reduce customer acquisition cost in a tight market.
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. RevGenius's GTM series, and this session is a masterclass on must-have strategies to ABMify growth. And joining me are 2 of the best folks, 2 experts in this field, both Danilo Nikolic, who's the Director of Sales Development at Rollworks, and Nick Bennett, the Director of Evangelism and customer marketing at Alice. So welcome, both of you. Let's, let's talk about ABM-ifying today and also tell everybody a little bit more about you.
Sounds great. I can jump in first. You know, I head up the SDR team for RoleWorks and, you know, I have a team roughly about 35 people. I've managed teams that are super, super massive at like Marketo, for example, building out that team there to really small teams of 5 folks. I've been in the SDR realm for, you know, roughly around 20 years. I was an SDR myself for 3. I know that makes some people cringy, but I love this space. I'm excited about it. And just, you know, eager to kind of talk about ABM here from an SDR perspective.
Yeah, absolutely. I'll hop in as well. Hey, everyone, I'm Nick. You know, I have been— so I'm actually in a brand new role, customer marketing retention. That's all newer to me. I'm a traditional field, an ABM marketer for tech companies for the last 10 years. So I'm— this is something that's near and dear to my heart, something that I've launched at multiple companies. I've seen it grow from zero all the way up to being very successful programs, even when I left the company. So I think, I think this is going to be a really exciting session. I'm excited to be here.
And what excites me the most about this, outside of having 2 awesome individuals here, Is we have a sales development leader, which is traditionally sales line, dare I say, but, you know, inferring that this might be aligned differently at RoleWorks. Is that, is that an accurate assumption?
Uh, no, you know, in terms of reporting, it is actually, uh, under sales at RoleWorks, but, you know, it's just Just in reporting, right? That's just an HR function, if you will. To be honest, you know, the whole concept around ABM is around marketing and sales alignment, you know. So what you'll hear on this, you know, webinar more and more from Nick and I is that, you know, it's all about one team, you know, making sure that we're a cohesive unit, if you will, right? A lot of times you hear that debate. I think as long as you're perfectly aligned I don't think you have to worry about, you know, the HR aspect of where you align, right?
I love that. And, you know, we're, you know, make no doubt about it, it's a down market, which makes it even more important to focus on ABM. And ABM is a buzzword being thrown around a lot, but it carries a massive meaning, right? Like, it's not just a technology, it's not Rollworks, Alice, whatever. It's a strategy. And that's massive. And, you know, we'll start with Nick on this. What does that— what does that mean to you?
Yeah, you know, it's interesting, because being a field marketer, and, you know, Jared, we were talking about this earlier, like, I feel like being a field marketer, I've been doing ABM for years, before it was the cool thing to say. It was like, you worked in a specific region or territory with a sales team, you were incredibly aligned, you were looked at as an asset to that team and your goal was to create pipeline and revenue within the target accounts within that specific region or territory. And so many people think ABM, you just have to buy technology. And working at a martech company, I see this all the time. People are just like, well, I'm just gonna go out and buy technology because our leadership team says we should be doing ABM. And the first question I always ask to them is, what does ABM mean to you? Because it's an interesting question to ask marketers and you'll get completely different answers across the board. But I think it's important to know that ABM and the strategy behind ABM is really just targeted marketing at the end of the day. And there's really 3 kind of core things that I think about within that strategy. It's, you know, how do you win more deals at a more kind of, you know, cost-effective way, especially in this down market? How do you reduce churn? And how do you increase the operational efficiencies to be able to do that? And if you think about that third piece, when you're reducing the CAC, it's actually less expensive to convert highly engaged accounts versus like ice cold accounts. And so with budgets, I'm sure others are going through this as well. Marketing budgets are being scrutinized. Everything is being looked at. Teams are, you know, going through layoffs, things like that. How can you do more with less? And you have to be incredibly impactful with that strategy to target those accounts.
Yeah, I would say, you know, Nick hit the nail on the head, right? I mean, it's absolutely about focus, right? Because when we're talking about target account lists, you know, that, that's what we're talking about, right? We're talking about, you know, a set of accounts that you really feel like are the right accounts to get into, right? That are going to be right for your business and, and right for your customers, right? So that is absolutely one of the factors, right? And again, the second factor here is just making sure that folks in my role and in Nick's role are fully aligned, right? So when we talk about that focus, we can't have marketing going after a set of targets and the SDR team is going after another set of targets, right? And that's where that marketing and sales alignment comes into play because it You know, RoleWorks, you know, if you're— if when we're putting together our strategy, we're not just looking at, you know, MQLs, and we'll talk about this, you know, further down the road, but we're looking at MQAs as well, right? And so we'll talk a little bit about the subtle difference there. But, you know, even from an MQL perspective, that's not going away. MQLs are here to stay. That's a great strategy. And we're just basically ABM-ifying it, Jared's point earlier, right? That's the word of the day, right? But the idea here is, is that my counterpart, who's Jodi Sertani, who's our Senior Director of Demand Gen, is not just looking at MQLs in general, she's looking at MQLs as it relates to target accounts, right? And keeping those 2 metrics separate, right? And again, it's a strategy. It's not just about the product, right? So you can think about this through all different channels, right? Let's say we're picking on content syndication as an example, right? you're gonna go after content syndication leads and purchase those leads that are specific to those target accounts, right? So if you think about the past, you were thinking about always a couple of Venn diagrams. Here's the circle the marketing is going after, here's the circle the sales is going after. And what we're trying to do is bring that overlap as close to 100% as we possibly can, right? Now obviously there's gonna be accounts outside of that, right? But that's really what it's about, right? It's about that focus and that alignment to make sure that both teams are focused, you know, on that same set of accounts.
Now, you know, just me getting thinking, is the MQL a way to measure awareness captured and the MQA is targeted? Like, what's the purpose? You know, like going in, MQLs versus MQAs. MQAs are about the big picture. But what does that look like at RoleWorks, Danilo?
Yeah, that's a great question, right? Because here's the challenge, I think, with an MQL, right? And we were actually talking about this offline before we jumped into the session. Sales has always been account-focused, right? Anytime you're talking about a deal from a sales perspective, you're talking about being multi-threaded, right? You're talking about the bigger picture, right? Who are all the decision makers, right? Even within a small account that's, you know, let's call it, you know, uh, you know, 50 employees, you might still have like 2 to 3 decision makers there, or influencers, if you will, right?
You're reaching out to 50 people that it could be if you're reaching out to Nike and their friends and their brothers and somebody who, who might be 2 degrees connected but also works at Nike in the same geography. It's funny how sales gets targeted, right?
Absolutely, absolutely, 100%.
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 2 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.
