How to Do ABM Campaigns (For Real) with Snowflake ABM Director Hillary Carpio

thing that you have to master overnight. What it comes down to is relevancy. So relevancy is a delicate dance of timing, message, and experience. And when done in harmony, harmony, it tells a story that resonates. So to me, whenever we're looking at account-based marketing programs, putting things together, it's coming back to this very basic principle of relevancy. How do we do that better? How do we do that at scale? So I'm going to use a little bit of analogy here in a second. First, I'm going to talk about our tech stack. So I'm going to share this out as part of the presentation when we're done. You guys can have it for reference. We do have a very robust tech stack. Most importantly to me, Snowflake is part of that. So we do use our own product for marketing analytics, but we also use everything from Bombora and Sixth Sense, Lead Genius, ZoomInfo. We use Rollworks, LinkedIn, Uberflip, Intellimize, Outreach, Sendoso, and Tableau as well. So this is where we're starting. I believe the slides will be available to Shaw. Alright, so when I was putting this presentation together, I was trying to figure out how do we do this in a way that is just really simple and tactical that you can walk away from this presentation with, how do I do ABM next? And I was thinking about it like a puzzle. You've got your content, you have your solutions, you have your creative, you have your messaging, you have all these different pieces. And people often ask me like, I I'm not built for account-based marketing. How do I start? I can't redo everything I have. I can't rebuild my content. I can't rebuild my product. I can't start over. And what it comes down to is thinking of it just like a puzzle. So first, taking inventory, what pieces do you have? And then second, figuring out what puzzle you're building based off the intel your sales team has and your company has on the accounts you're targeting. And then we get to the third piece, which I think is what people wanna skip to first, which is building the actual puzzle. So I'm gonna break these down in a very practical way, starting now. So first, taking inventory, sorting your puzzle pieces. This can be super, super simple. It just gets really overcomplicated. So when you look at the different vehicles you have to create account-based experiences, you can break it down. You can fill out this template to your individual organization. But just for an example, we have content, we have SDR outbound prospecting motions, We have content experience, paid media, marketing emails. These are very traditional ways that we as marketers send messages out to our prospects, suspects, customers, etc. If we overlay that with what are the areas you can personalize, a lot of us can personalize by account on a one-to-one basis, right? This is something we know the account name, we know the industry, we know the basic pieces about the account. We can also personalize on industry on a broader scale. We can pro— Personalized by solution. What are we trying to sell them? What is most relevant to that department? What is most relevant to that company? And then we have persona. So are you talking to a C-level person? Are you talking to, you know, in our case, a data analyst? Very different messages depending on who that person is. So then we overlay these together and find the overlap. So if we're talking about customizing content, we can customize it by account, we can customize it by industry, etc. So if you do this within your own organization and start finding those areas of overlap, can be a very simple way to sort those puzzle pieces in a non-overwhelming fashion. Any questions on this? Great, we'll keep going. All right, so the next piece, and I think I skipped a head on some slides here, is to gain intel. So this is what picture are you building? And at Snowflake, we're a very sales-aligned organization. So part of our core marketing values are driving insane alignment with sales. This is true not only in account-based marketing, but field marketing, product, etc., all the way across the board. So my team meets with sales every other week, um, with every single sales rep that's involved in account-based marketing, and we ask them, what are the conversations you've been having? Uh, what have you found out based off of public reports? All of that kind of info to help us build relevant experiences. Um, Tom, I'll get back to your question in just one second about content and content experience. I broke these down into a few different categories for account research. So you have your AE input that I was just talking about. You also have internal databases. Again, this is the point of this is to say, let's not overcomplicate it. You don't need to go hire an account-based marketing firm to do 3 years of research on accounts to start account-based marketing. You need to look at your CRM. You need to look at, for us, data enrichment. Who are the cloud vendors? What intent do they have? We're a big consumer of Bombora. Intent data that drives our strategy a lot of the times when we don't have the internal data to know what to be talking to these accounts about. Then you have your public information. What are they posting on job sites? You can get an idea for, depending on what they're hiring for, what products they're gonna be using, what direction they're gonna be going. Listening to earning calls and transcripts, public reports, articles, posts, et cetera. So you should be able to gain plenty of intel with no funds whatsoever, no resources, all the way up to very robust information. And then we start building with what we have. So we put together this— I keep hitting the wrong button here. Somehow I'm going to go back. Okay, we're just going to go on the fly because this is not working. So long story short, you have your different columns across the top, rows across the bottom. These are the different categories we talked about earlier, only we're adding a data section here on the right. But if you start going through each square, how can I customize content by account, SDR sequences by account, content experience by account, et cetera, we start building out exactly what we have to work with. And in the puzzle scenario, right, we're figuring out now we know what puzzle we're building because we have the intelligence, but what are the pieces that actually go together to build this overall picture, which is an account-based marketing plan. In this example, should my builds have been working here, we would have been talking about like, if you were to take intent data, for example, If we know somebody is searching on data warehousing in our case, then we can start looking across the different ways we can personalize on that intent data across the different fields here. Same thing, we could go by solution across the other way. So again, when we put this all together, you can get as sophisticated as having customizations across every single category, and you can be as simple and starting out with just one or two places. So that's, that's just, you'll see if we can go to the next piece. So then we talk about building experiences. So we have all of the data together. To Tom's point earlier, the difference between content and content experiences is how that content is delivered. So a piece of content could be a PDF, a piece of content could be interactive in the form of a quiz or an assessment, but the experience to me is the full piece of it. It's how they get to the content. So whether it's from an SDR, it could be from advertisements, it could be from the AE themselves. Any different sort of mechanism to the actual experience. So is it just a piece of content? Are there recommended pieces of content based off of intent? Are they recommended based off of company? And then how do they move to that next phase, which is contacting a sales rep, joining the community if they're a customer? That's the content experience across the board. Uh, to answer the question about intent before we move forward here, um, we use intent from a few different sources. Like I said, we are a Bombora house, so we do use their intent as our first source, and then we also are in the process of bringing on Sixth Sense. So we use their custom keywords to then narrow in a little bit further. So the way I like to talk to our account executives about this is to say, hey, let's look at the macro level. What are the topics surging at a cluster level? And then from that, let's look at Sixth Sense and see what are the individual keywords based off our product, competitors' products, to then narrow in really granularly on what we want to talk to the teams about. I'm going to go ahead, just because questions are coming somewhat rapidly, I'm going to go ahead and finish to not get distracted here, and then we'll tie them up at the end. All right, so then we launch experiences. This is an example of a, one of our referenceable customers, Cognagra. You can see on here, this is one of their content experience pages. We do have new ones coming out next week, but not quite ready yet for this presentation. But you can see the different content listed below we're starting to leverage a lot of technology, 6Sense being one of them, Intellimize being one of them, to make these more dynamic and scalable because of the scale at which we operate. So we're pivoting off of everything from company size to industry, etc., to make these pages more relevant after we customize them on a one-to-one basis. And then you can add anything from physical, physical touch, not the love language, but the actual marketing piece of it, to send out boxes, e-gifts, etc. Our SDRs currently leverage e-gifts as part of their touches in their sequences to help gain traction into the accounts. And then the biggest piece here for me is to refresh and adjust. So we don't go more than 3 months without adjusting our campaign. So we talk to the sales rep, what is the message we should be pushing? What is the content we should be pushing? What are the conversations we should be having? And we'll adjust on that basis. Okay. So let's, since we're all out of order here, we're just gonna go to the top takeaways of putting it all together. So to go back to where we started and to make some sense of it. First is sorting through what you already have. Don't overcomplicate it. Just, just start and don't be overwhelmed. The second piece is let research guide your experience. So to put together an account-based marketing program based off of what I'm doing, what other companies doing, what you see online isn't account-based, that's another company-based, right? So let your own research of what your accounts are doing and what they need guide how you put these puzzle pieces together. And the third piece is execute, refine, and repeat. You just keep getting better, like a diamond in the rough, just keep knocking off those rough edges to refine your program as you build it. So I'm going to hop into the questions if you guys are game and we'll go from there. Okay. So the first one is gathering account intel is very time-consuming. Who does that in the company? So I have a rule with our sales team that if I can find it on Wikipedia, I don't want it. So we can all do Google research, right? And we can spend our time as marketers finding that, but it's really the sales reps who have either attempted to get an account and run into roadblocks, and you can use that feedback on what those roadblocks were in order to refine your strategy, or they've had conversations that have led them in certain directions. So your, your sales reps are your first line of input. What conversations are they having? There are vendors if you do want to leverage a vendor to do some research and you have the funds to do so, that exists as well. And then there's also some vendors out there that that are on the broader scale, they can give you insights. Like I said, intent, not very hard to pull. You can get a report every week. You can also get other vendors who are going to give you engagement data on that side as well. ABM pages, do you mean landing pages? Yes, I call them ABM pages. To me, landing pages where you land and there's a form and you fill it out and you get a piece of content. An ABM page is a full experience. So you're getting On our new pages, we have a note from the sales rep customizing it to what exactly the rep wants them to get out of it. We have a link they can book a meeting right then and there with the rep. There's events that are relevant to where they're located, what industry they're in, that kind of stuff. So it's a full experience page, not just a landing page. Next question. When we've identified target accounts, what's the best way to reach accounts where we don't have contacts at those accounts? So we use targeted advertising. That's one of the ways you can target via LinkedIn. We use Rollworks and you in, put in what the account name is, what the titles are you're trying to get after, role, function, et cetera, and start narrowing in there. I call that traffic anonymous traffic. And then my goal is to make it known traffic. So that's where we look for opportunities to bring in a form fill, either via an event, piece of content, et cetera, working with our demand gen team, who's phenomenal at what they do. So we partner together with them. How many total accounts for a small team? 2 reps, 1 marketer, 1 manager. Accounts per rep, 2 target market segments, 500,000 ACV. So here's my point to you, is same as account-based marketing, you have to do what works for you. So you know your market, if you want to focus on 5 accounts that are your highest value, biggest wallet accounts, that might make sense for you. If you want to focus on a few more accounts and do it in a more programmatic way, that may make sense as well. In previous roles, I've done everything programmatic, doing 7,000 accounts is one fraction of my job, and I leverage technologies across across the board to plug things together, jerry-rig to make sure everything could update and dynamically be account-based. And then you can also do one-to-one like we're doing today at Snowflake. So that's really up to you to decide what's going to make the best impact for your business in a way that you can handle bandwidth-wise. Next one. Just want to understand why you're using Roblox for targeting. Do you not get what you want from Sixth Sense audience segments? I'm going to leave that question to the experts at Sixth Sense and RoleWorks. We choose how we use our vendors based off of the data that works for us. I'm a huge advocate of both of the different vendors, so I'll leave you to reach out to those experts for that.

We actually have Sixth Sense on the agenda later this afternoon, so hopefully some of you can tune in for that one.

Attend Latany's session. She's great. And we have one of my favorite Sixth Sensors on the call that I can see right now. He can answer any questions as well. We're just getting started with ABM. What would you consider the main metrics for us to track to see how successful we are? So this goes back to the age-old question of what is your goal, right? So some folks do ABM strictly for awareness to get the right message in front of the right people to build that awareness of your company. Other people are trying to do bottom of funnel conversions to get those final meetings or deals accelerated. So I think that's back up first and say, what are you trying to accomplish? At Snowflake, we do, do full funnel ABM. So we'll focus on top of the funnel where we need to for our suspect accounts. We also have a third of our accounts that are we're trying to do upsell cross-sell, and we'll do some deal acceleration as well. So you can look anywhere from impressions and page visits down to how many touches is it taking an SDR to get a meeting in an account that has ABM versus an account that doesn't, that kind of thing.

Hillary, we're at time, but we still have a little bit more time. And I know you've got a few more questions. If you have a few more moments to answer those, that'd be awesome.

Sure. Yeah, does anyone want to ask a question live so that we're not just reading off of a chat box here? I think you guys have the ability to unmute yourselves if you'd like.

I'm happy to ask a question.

Sure.

Hey, first of all, congratulations. Snowflake is just killing it in the industry. Um, so huge, huge big win. Um, what have been some of your kind of biggest learning since you're really using ABM top to bottom, uh, at Snowflake, at scale, you know, highly visible? What are some of the things you've kind of learned, uh, that you either want to emphasize more or maybe avoid?

Yeah, so my biggest learning this last year is ABM is most effective when it's integrated across the organization. So sometimes we need to start ABM on an island of sorts because that's what we need to do to get started at a company. It's different for everyone, but we're now fully integrated into the SDR organization. Like I said, field marketing, we're doing events with them, demand gen, working with them, partner. Field, etc. So all the way across the board. And when we're a full account-based organization, everybody's on the same page, right? Everybody's driving in the same alignment with sales. And so that's where we're going to see the most effective programs coming out in the end when we have a full team behind it.

Cool.

Thank you.

Yeah.

I'd love to ask a question if possible.

Sure.

Um, you know, I— you're obviously providing a, a general overview here for lots of different kinds of companies, but I wonder if you could specify a little bit on, um, how well this kind of can work if you're not necessarily going after whales, but if you're going after, you know, SMBs, or if you're going after kind of a long-tail market, how much of this can apply, or how might you adapt it based on, you know, different size companies or customers?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think you, you tailor depending on who you're targeting within that company, right? So one giant company with tons of different lines of businesses, subsidiaries, etc., is a collection of smaller companies in some sense. So you're looking at what do those individual people within the individual sections of companies care about. And it goes back to the basics of ABM, of account-based marketing is focusing on the needs of the people making the purchase, not the needs of the company selling the product. And so when you look at it from that perspective, if it's an SMB and you're focusing on their needs, their titles, their roles, and what's going to get them a promotion and make their company more successful, it's really the same across the board. It's just the tools that you use might be a little different, the intel you gain might be a little bit different. But it's the same principle at the end, it's about focusing on the human as opposed to pushing a product.

Makes sense. Thank you.

Yeah, we have just a few more minutes. Anybody else have a live question?

Sure, I got one. It's, uh, if I may, um, we're going to be focusing on, um, for— from an ABM standpoint, we have a broader kind of sales motion to, you know, end-user customers, but the ABM element, we're thinking in terms of, um, you know, focusing on a smaller subset of service providers and providing them a tool to support their customers. In that respect, you know, reaching out to technology service providers specifically and saying, hey, would you use our tool to support your customers? Do you— is there anything specifically that you would want to— does that change anything in your approach from an ABM standpoint?

So it sounds like a selling-through motion, right?

Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. Yes. And it could be, you know, basically a black box, you know, white-labeled, whatever, you know, the, yeah, basically selling through Motion.

Yeah, they can, they can be a little tricky, but you know, it's back to the, the basics again of what is the value to them. And I think that's where we can get a little confused on the selling to versus through Motion of really identifying who are you selling to, because you're selling through but still to, right, at the end. So I would make sure in that case that you have, when we talk about content experience, you have that full content experience ready where you have the different types of content that can help somebody understand the end-to-end value and that you have some type of contact available, maybe through a chatbot or some type of playbook there that they can get those questions clarified really, really easily on their own in a self-serve way.

Awesome. What, what, what type of questions would you anticipate, you know, high level right out of the gate, you know, as we're trying to reach out?

Yeah, so I'd leave that to you as the expert in your space. That's not the space that I work in daily, so I wouldn't want to lead you in the wrong direction there, but Perhaps you could survey some of your reps or some of your customers on the experiences they had going through that experience and then work backward to figure out what the best interaction would have been at the point when they were going through that evaluation.

I gotcha. Makes sense. Thank you.

Yeah. Lindsay, how are we doing here?

You've got about 2 or 3 more minutes if you'd like to take a few more questions. They just keep coming in through the chat queue.

Let's do it.

Okay, great.

Let's do them live. They're way better to have an interactive conversation than to be reading these through chat. So if you put one in chat, go ahead and say it out loud. Chat through it.

Can I ask you a quick question?

Sure.

Um, more specifically about your tool, do you, um, offer the ability to, um, find, uh, leads based on technology stack, kind of like what ZoomInfo does, as well as other tools?

As Snowflake, right? Uh, no. So Snowflake collects all of the data together and makes it very easy for you to process it very quickly, but we do not provide the data itself. We have launched our data marketplace where you can bring other vendors' data into your tool very easily, so that's the area that you would bring data in with.

Great, thank you.

All right, why don't I speak up for, for a few that are still in the queue. So, um, what have been your biggest learnings thus far on implementing ABM?

Yeah, I think that's similar to a question earlier, but one step at a time, right? We want to boil the ocean. I'm a perfectionist. I want to scale and do it all perfect right off the bat, but we need to start with tackling one fish at a time before we get to the whale. To use an analogy someone used later— earlier. But yeah, one step at a time and just focusing on how to do what you're doing to the absolute best of the ability you can, because when you are targeting an account, you do need to make sure you're on point with the right message in a very professional way.

Great. We'll take one more. How about, um, what do you consider as a good conversion rate for ABM?

Yeah, so I'm not going to answer that directly because it really depends on every organization. I encourage you to look up some benchmarks, use the vendors that you have for whatever format of conversion rate you're looking for, and depending on your industry, depending on the company sizes you're selling to, and then you can also use your existing benchmark of your conversion rate and then look for an a lift or an increase in that with ABM programs to determine the effectiveness.

Great. Well, Hillary, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you, everybody, for participating in the conversation and asking Hillary these great questions. We hope you stick around for a few other sessions coming up, and thank you again. Take care.

Thank you, everyone.