Goods to Selling High: How to Make ABM Actually Work with Snowflake's Head of ABM, Hilary Carpio

All right. Nice to see you guys tonight. Sam couldn't have given me a better introduction and he didn't even do it on purpose. But I'm going to talk all about sales and marketing alignment, specifically with SDRs, in addition to our sales team. So my goal today is to give you guys a good mix of the foundation and the aspiration of account-based marketing. But to get a read of the room, how many of you here are thinking about starting an account-based strategy or know what it is as opposed to have already started? Okay, pretty good number. How many of you are actually executing on an account-based strategy? Okay, cool. So we've got a pretty good mix. So to give you a little bit of an intro of where I sit in the organization, what we do, I am the head of account-based marketing at Snowflake. I have a team of 15 people in North America dedicated to ABM. I also have a counterpart in APAC building a team there as well as EMEA. We really sit under the demand gen organization, yet still have a demand gen org separate. So Jackie Kyler, the head of demand gen at Snowflake, she's my colleague reporting into the VP of demand as well. As well. My team in North America works with about 200 SDRs and 200 sales reps, and we run 2,200 campaigns each quarter dedicated to the accounts that our sales reps choose. So we cover about 30% of all named accounts in North America. I really like to think of account-based marketing at Snowflake as integrated ABM. Whereas a lot of people will jump straight to tactics, we really think about flipping the funnel. So this is your traditional lead funnel that you see on the screen, and this is an account-based funnel where we start with who we want to go after, go after, work on nurturing, engaging, building a relationship, converting, and then growing. You can see in the middle I put an arrow for mindset shift because part of it is an actual change in strategy, but a lot of it is a change in how we think about marketing, how we think about our prospects, and what relationships we build with our prospects instead of just an interaction or a transaction. So we can see here we have to start at the top identifying who we're going to go after in a very intelligent way, and the key to all of this at Snowflake is our really tight integration with our sales development team and our sales team. So we have to be in lockstep every step of the way. And later I'm gonna show you some metrics of what this actually creates down funnel. So getting started is we have to create infrastructure for hypergrowth before we can jump straight to those tactics. A lot of people will jump in and say, I'm gonna do account-based marketing. I'm gonna throw a company name on my ad. I'm gonna throw a specific industry on my ad, and then I'm gonna have sales do whatever. We need to actually take a step backward. First, identify what are the accounts we should be going after. So we're actually going to start with first-party data. At Snowflake, we use website visitors, we use campaign responders, so anyone who filled out a form. What data do you have available about the people that you're targeting? And then we also have third-party data, right? So we have intent. Intent, for those of you who aren't familiar yet, is They have groups of publishers on other websites. You can subscribe to topics related to the goods that you sell. So understanding what your target accounts are surging on, have abnormal buying activity on outside of your site. They might be in the middle of the buying cycle and you don't even know it because they haven't made it to your first-party site. And then we also have technographic, firmographic, everything else, right? So are they using the, the vendor of your competitor? Are they using something that you partner with? How can we get that other technographic, firmographic data? You can see on the right-hand side of the screen, just for context here, this is an example of what somebody in an account-based marketing campaign at Snowflake would experience. The content is curated based off those different data points you see on the left. What pages have they visited? Was it about data science? They might get data science content. Do we know that they're working with a specific competitor? They're gonna get content about competing with that specific competitor. Do we know they're working with one of our GSIs or tech partners? There's gonna be content about that as well. So it's gonna, feel very natural when they experience it. Before we actually start targeting the accounts, we really need to understand our personas, right? So you see IT Ivan, Marketing Mary, I just made them very generic for the sake of this presentation. But too often marketing is sitting in their cubicle or their open floor plan with their personas, and sales and sales enablement are sitting with their personas, and they're not connected. So we need to make sure that, do we agree between sales and marketing what the problems are that each of our personas are experiencing? Do we also agree what the value-add is? So when you're doing your marketing efforts, your emails, your events, everything there, are sales saying the same thing to the same people, or are you actually sending conflicting messages to your same buyers? Once we get this sorted out and we truly understand how do we impact our persona, not just at work, but do we save them time that they can have Dinner at home with their family more often? Do they get to take the vacation because they're not so stressed? Are they gonna hit their targets and exceed their quota? We have to talk to them as humans, not just as B2B people, right? They're humans. This becomes the foundation for your ABM approach. We have to know who we're talking to and what they care about before we can then market to them. So this is what I call my magic matrix. Once we develop who these people are, literally create a table on Google Slides, in PowerPoint, in Excel, wherever it might be, and list those out. You can do it by persona, you can do it by solution, you can do it by industry, whatever segmentation you're using at this point or this time, you can list them out here. So the first thing, why should they care, right? It doesn't have to be polished, it doesn't have to be fancy ad copy. Why should they care about what you're doing? and then what are the intent keywords, the SEO keywords? What are the things that you think that they would be looking for to solve that problem that you're helping them solve? Uh, then I start developing ad copy. What is the ad copy? And this starts connecting to your SDR motion, right? What are the case studies that relate to it? What is the link to the sequence? This becomes your source of truth that then you can hand to your SDR team. You can hand to your sales team to align so that when they're sending out a sequence, they're sending out the same case study that you are. This is the starting point, but you can continue to add complexity. So if you think about copying and pasting this, adding extra rows, adding extra pieces, you can add complexity for different industries, personas, etc. I also added another little aspirational, inspirational piece here for you as well. We actually take all of these inputs and create little puzzle pieces of sorts and create custom one-to-one content for most of our ABM campaigns. That means that the piece of content that Brex may get from us is gonna be so specific to them. In fact, they might have multiple pieces of content, one for each persona that we're selling to within that company. And we serve this via content experience on our website that they can see, sales can print it, SDRs can print it and actually hand it physically should we ever end up in a physical room together post-COVID. So then we think about what's next. We've identified our personas, we thought about what the messaging is, how we're gonna put it together, we now need to think about our funnel stages. Obviously, hopefully we're all familiar with the top, middle, and bottom of funnel, but I actually prefer this terminology, which is problem education, right? Instead of top of funnel, do they know what the problem is that you're trying to help them solve? Are they aware that they need to solve it? Before we go further, we need to know that they know that they have a problem. Second is solution research. So have they started researching how to solve that problem? And then solution selection. Have they actually selected a solution in your solution, therefore? On the downward column, if we've already created content for each of these 3 stages for IT Ivan, we can use it across our different marketing channels. So too often marketers are creating a piece of content here, a piece of content there, a blog here, thought leadership, right? We have all this content and sales is still coming to us saying, hey, I want more content. Like, well, what about the content that we created? If we're working with sales, getting their feedback on our top accounts of what content they need, and putting it across the funnel, we think then can put that in an email drip, 3-part email drip, top, middle, bottom. We can do social snippets, so break it down into little, little pieces. We can put it in our ads, and we can also connect it to our prospecting sequences. When you do this, you now have content that you can reuse over and over and over, replicating your message across all 3 stages. That's when we think about converting. Uh, so then we think about how does an actual account-based sales development motion happen? So Lars Nilsson, uh, is a friend of SaaStr. He is our fearless leader of sales development at Snowflake, and he was kind enough to let me share his methodology here with you guys today. Uh, Lars likes to say the most important thing in account-based sales development is the subject line. So in this example, we did research on the leader of this organization, Anybody receiving this email would immediately recognize this name. After the subject line, the second is the hook, right? Why should they care? We've done research about this individual, about this organization, so that when you receive this, we understand the company. Next is the after scenario. If you read this email, if you connect with us, how's it gonna help you? I mentioned in the beginning, how's it gonna help the human, not just the company? How will it help them personally? We then go to positive business outcome. If you take this, if we do this, let's discuss what your organization is going to look like after. And then we have the call to action. Are you available Tuesday or Wednesday? Are you available at 2 PM? Give them the opportunity to say yes as opposed to having to fight to find the right time, going back and forth. We're all busy. None of us want to sit there and go back and forth to find a time. He was also generous enough to let me share actual sequences. So the— what I just I just showed you is the first step of 14 in a sequence. So every opportunity you have to talk to your prospect is an opportunity to share your brand. So like I mentioned, we've already talked about what the message is going to be across ads, what the message is going to be in a case study, what it's going to be in the different content or thought leadership. It's another opportunity to touch on that so that all the touches become familiar. Then we're going to tie it all together, and I'll go ahead and build this out. We have a little glitch there. The most important part of account-based marketing at Snowflake is this first column. Every 2 weeks, the ABMer, the AE, and the SDR sit down and talk about who they're targeting. We come to the table with data to help them choose that list, and then we take their feedback as well. So it could be they've been targeting an account for several weeks, several months, several years. We often get accounts they've been going after for 2 years and haven't gotten into. And we'll talk about who should we go after next? How are we going to do it? What is the message? And we're aligned in that way. We next prioritize based off the data we have. We use Bombora as a tool that we live and swear by to help us understand what they might be interested in. We then target them with ads and a content experience like you can see on the screen. It's a little bit difficult to see here, but you can see these are labeled with Comcast. If you were to take Comcast off that ad, you would actually still know it was for Comcast if you worked there. The actual ad copy is developed in response to what they're going through with their business. The imagery is media and technology and relates to the exact persona and age demographic. If they're in a business suit versus sitting at a computer, all of that is crafted to create the look and feel. The experience, you can see there's a note from the rep. The rep handwrites a note for the account we're going after so that when they land on this page, it has a link and says, Hey, thanks for coming. Here's what I'm trying to share with you. Here's an opportunity to book a meeting with me or email me directly if you're interested. So we're getting very, very personal. The last step is actually the SDR motion. So you look at the title warm calling. This is a term that somebody at our organization in the SDR team actually came up with. He responded to me and said, hey Hillary, I'm no longer cold calling, I'm warm calling because account-based marketing has already introduced Snowflake. It's already taught them about the message. When I call, they're warm, they know who we are, they know why I'm calling, the message is consistent, and we see incredible results from it. So at the start of the pandemic, we introduced not only sequences that aligned, right? So we know if they're surging in this topic, if they're this persona, we already have the sequence written. We just connect A, B, and C. If I'm an SDR, I know exactly what I need to do. I have my 14 touches, I know who I'm reaching out to, and I have my research. We introduced an e-gift card as well. At the time we used DoorDash to help put money back into the local economy and said, hey, let's, let's talk over lunch. And we saw our numbers go up from that. On the right-hand side, you can see measure. I purposely didn't include metrics here because a lot of people struggle with how to measure account-based marketing. How do you know it works? There's a lot of influence and it can be difficult to capture. But what we do is lift. If an SDR an SDR or a salesperson is going after a set of accounts they've deemed as important, how likely are they to get into it with our help or without our help? Can measure the lift in meeting completed, opportunity rate, deal size, et cetera. When we do that, um, we are consistently seeing 4x our SDR benchmark. Now this isn't the SDR benchmark outside the company with somebody else. This is a year ago when our SDRs were calling and trying to sell Snowflake. They were getting into X number of accounts consistently quarter over quarter. We've quadrupled that working together. If you knew that for your SDRs, they were gonna have a completed meeting for 1 out of 4 accounts they targeted, would you consider doing an account-based marketing strategy? Would you consider aligning your team so that you are all talking about the same thing to the same people at the same time when you know the timing is right? In addition, from the lead funnel perspective, right? Lead still matter. I know there's a lot of change going on in the industry, but we are seeing 3x the number of leads in account-based marketing accounts. Again, these are the accounts that are harder to get into. They're larger, they're just more difficult. So seeing these numbers is really meaningful. 80% increase in ACV, an average of 34% meeting rate for one-to-one. We've seen it go up from there. Something to mention here as well, I talked about intent for selecting accounts. The last round we did with this, We had one sales leader say, hey, I just wanna go after a separate set of accounts. I just need your support there. We said, great, right? We work for sales, whatever you need. They experienced a 14% meeting rate. Our highest meeting rate in that same cohort was 60%. So sometimes we think as sales leaders, we know exactly what to go after, and sales leaders do know a lot, but when we work with marketing to understand the data, we can be better together. A couple more stats for you here. We had an RVP, select their top 5 accounts. We went after them for 8 months together. We got meetings in 100% of them, one of them in the last week of the program. We generated over 200 meetings, over 40 SQOs. 29 of them were sourced from SDRs. These accounts were selected for what I call my Roomba vacuum cleaner method, which is, hey, they're hard as a rock, they're cold, they're cold. If we try to walk through a door, we'll most likely run into it and get bounced out the other way. But what does a Roomba vacuum cleaner do if it runs into a wall? Right? It goes into another one and it just keeps going and then it goes down the hallway. So when you think about these massive accounts, 80 subsidiaries, many lines of businesses, we want to be Roomba vacuum cleaners. If we need to get in, we're going to find our way in. If we get stuck, we're going to change our filter, we're going to keep going. Next up, we have insane meeting rates basically, and we maximize the use of our marketing materials. We're minimizing the waste of things being created that aren't being used and getting into the hands of the folks who are actually doing the selling. I also wanted to touch briefly, won't spend much time here, but lifecycle ABM. What happens after the opportunity is created? Where do we go from there? We keep working accounts if the sales team wants us to. So do you have a champion at one account that is in the same industry that you can do an account-based program and put them in an event to speak to the other account? Do you have an account that has 10 subsidiaries? You're in one, you need to get the other 9. Use that person as your speaker on the event for the other 9 subsidiaries. It went one past there. Also multi-threading. How do you get into multiple lines of businesses at the same time using multiple strategies? So we will have one campaign, so to say, but we'll have 5 different messages going to 5 different personas and 5 different lines of businesses. And then what happens is they start talking, it starts crossing, and we call it the snowball effect, right? That's those accounts I was just talking about. And then user groups and trainings. When you have your champions, leverage them to teach others, and that's that expansion portion. I did want to give a peep into our tech stack. I do know we have a huge blessing that we have the tech stack we do. My advice to you is start with what you can. Tools won't solve your problems, smart people and strategies will. Hire smart people to use the tools for the way that you need them to work. Oops, sorry. Good. Focus on how you can add value. How can you actually help them? Not what do you want to push to them. Not what do your sales team just want to sell. How can you help your prospects? The next is keep it relevant. So we often talk about personalization. Personalization is really important, but it's really relevancy. When you log into Netflix and the movies and TV shows are there waiting for you with scores of what to watch, right? It's relevant. You don't have to think hard. We want our prospects not to have to think hard. It's sitting there waiting for them to consume. And then think about serving the right content, content to maximize impact. I mentioned before, how can we use our resources in the smartest way to deliver what we need? And then the last thing is be flexible. What works for Snowflake may not work for you, but you can take ideas and tweak them and try one thing and bounce off of that. It's all a learning process. And I always say, this is my, this is my thing, find one advocate. You don't need this whole sales team or the whole marketing team to be willing to work with you. You need to find one person. My previous company, I guess I should mention, I did not do, do ABM as my main job. I found one person who wanted to do it and we built an entire program from the ground up. Snowflake, we started with 5 people and have grown to 15, will be 18 by the next quarter. So find that one advocate, create one win, let that person share their win with another person, and all of a sudden your program's gonna start building and salespeople wanna hit their quota. And if they can make it easier, make, make their quota easier, what's gonna happen? Your program's gonna grow. So that's my top takeaways. And we're gonna take some questions from here on out.

You mentioned a few tactics. One of the first things I wanna dig into is like, what have you found works the best, right? Because you guys have like a mult— 14 step sequence, right? It's email, it's LinkedIn, it's ads, it's targeting. Like, have you seen anything that's a sweet spot that works really well? Like one email, then a phone call? Like, do you guys change up that sequence? Like, what works the best?

Yeah, the recipe I showed during that portion, if I can go back, that recipe is our bread and butter, right? So within that, you can exchange out the different content, the different messages, et cetera. But it's really that piece. We don't want to call somebody every day. We don't want to email them every day. We want it to feel natural. I think one way it was described to me before is like we have more account intelligence than we ever did, but if you were going on a date and you went on Facebook and like saw that someone liked blue roses, then you would walk up to them on your first date and like hand them a blue rose and be like, "Hi, nice to meet you." But you wouldn't walk up and say, "Hi, here's a blue rose. I actually found it on Facebook from 2013 and I hope you like it," right? So it's the same concept when we're having all those touches. We want to be subtle. We want to like the content that they're sharing, bump it, comment on it, etc., engage with it so that it doesn't feel creepy.

Yeah, on that point, actually, that's a good point. Have you had any SDR— I'm gonna wait for the plane.

Hold, hold, hold. Okay, it's gone. It's leaving. Okay.

Have you had any SDRs, like when they're first starting to do ABM, do something where you're like, that's like, is there a line where you're like, that's too personal and creepy? Like, don't use that in your outreach.

I think anybody in the SDR world, sales world, every marketing, whatever, right? We've all made mistakes and we all need coaching and it's an opportunity to keep coaching, uh, for them in their careers. Uh, SDRs are the biggest sales talent pipeline in our organization. So yeah, it's an opportunity for coaching and, uh, they can help make each other the best from learning together. Yeah.

What's the right, mix, or what's the right number of accounts per rep that you have found, right? Because I know many of the audience, when you were polling them at the beginning, said they were either starting out or mid, like mid-funnel and starting their ABM efforts. Like what's the right number of accounts that you would recommend?

Yeah, you guys, I'm really passionate about this. The right number of accounts is a number that you can do well. Okay. So to go do more accounts, to have a larger number, you're gonna dilute your resources across your sales team. Find the number you can do well and build a little bit at a time. There's no pride to be taken in going full gusto right off the bat. There's a ton of pride to be taken to have a really strong relationship with your sales team that they trust you and that you're the first person they're coming to in the marketing organization to get into the accounts they care about. That will take you way further than any number. So start small, build a little bit at a time. We've done a couple, we're like, okay, that's too many. We can't do that many. Right. And I'll scale back. So it's all a, all a, um, learning. That makes sense.

When you're doing this for different size companies, maybe doing it more for enterprise accounts, do you attack it with multiple stakeholders or do you do APM just like one person per company or do you try and do like 5 people as you go enterprise? Like what's the right mix there?

Yeah, so it depends what tools you're using. Yeah. And I, there's a, a mix, right? So something like LinkedIn, if you're gonna use LinkedIn for targeting, they have a minimum audience size of 300. So we're going to have to adapt our message for that cohort of people. Now, if you have an SDR, they're going to be going one-to-one for the most part. The sequence that I showed you guys went to 30 individuals at the same company and was relevant to all 30. If you need to go after a CIO, for example, we have one that we've gone after. We know that she loves Post-it notes and we know that she was really passionate about her kids being involved in STEM. For her, do you create custom Post-it notes with your logo on it? right? Do you give her STEM kits for her kids? That there's a spectrum of, of relevancy and personalization that you have to find what you have the resources and time for and what's worth it. Right. So you, okay.

So you go kind of deeper when it's a more enterprise company, you do more than one version.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So one thing I wanted to ask, cuz I know we're a lot of marketers, we've seen move accounts, a lot of stakeholders are moving accounts quicker than ever these days. Like how do you adjust for that when you're like mid-sequence and you're like, oh shoot, that person just left. Like they were super engaged and then now they're gone. Like do you follow, do you do ABM at their new company?

Do you, what do you do? Yeah. Do you slot in someone else? I mean, I would do both, right? If I have someone that's been engaged and they're going to another target company, then heck yeah, I'm gonna send them a kit with Snowflake swag and say, hey, welcome. Can't wait to continue the conversation when you're ready. We're here for you. Here's a gift card for when you're working late your first week. I don't know, something like that. But you should be multithreading, right? Right. The, again, the sequence that I showed you guys went out to 30 people, 9 people responded, 3 meetings were created. So we, we need to be talking to multiple people cuz what happens, like 60, 70% of the buying cycle is done outside of the room with the salesperson. So we want to be inspiring those conversations. Right. We'll go so far as to say, hey, once there's an open opportunity, we're gonna target the CFO. Because he's the one that's signing the paper. So we don't want that signature to be the first time he's heard of Snowflake. So you can actually go as wide as your buying center, your decision makers go.

Okay, that's insightful. Maybe kind of the last question is, you chatted how your revenue team meets twice a week, right? Like, how do you make sure sales and marketing is on the same page, right? Like, that they're agreeing on the accounts, that they're agreeing on the messaging. Like, if sales is constantly asking you for new content, like when do you decide that you create it versus having them use what's already there?

Yeah, we meet biweekly, but at the end of the day we lead with data, right? I gave you that example of somebody going after accounts that had no data to back them up, 14% meeting rate. Those that did had up to a 60% meeting rate. It's data. So we do it, right? We work with sales. Sometimes it's hard to measure, but sometimes you have to do it, see how it performs and say, hey, somebody in this region had this success, let's try it.

Yeah.

And our salespeople are constantly asking us, how do I stack up? What's everyone else doing? Am I doing okay? Right? Like, so really competitive. Exactly. They're competitive. So we use the wins from other teams to help guide that. And then sometimes we just have to help them with their need because they know their market and it's our job to support them. No, fair. Okay.

So last question, as our founders and community scales up, what's your final advice for as they're scaling their ABM program?

Be willing to fail. Try it, fail fast. If it doesn't work for you, use the learnings and move on and try something else. You know your market better than anybody else. Use data and have grace because there's a lot of judgment in the ABM world and we don't need that. We just need to do really cool marketing and make it work really well to help our sales team. All right, Miami, please give a big round of applause for Hillary for coming all this way.