The ABM Strategy Starts by Aligning Sales and Marketing - Chris Dutton - Revenue Today - Episode # 087

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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.

My apologies if I wasn't. This is the first time you're hearing this. So Chris Dutton, coming to you via Sixth Sense, where I head up our demand generation and marketing operations team here. I've been in the products and industry services for roughly 15 years with a lot of focus around demand generation and marketing operations. So really excited to be talking about our topic for today, which is gonna be, you know, practical breakthroughs that help generate real pipeline leveraging, you know, ABM and AI. So real quickly, any questions that you have, get them in the chat. We will answer those at the end of the presentation. I've got about 35 minutes worth of content here. So the goal here is to get through this. Leave you all with some real-world examples that you all can take with you in your day-to-day efforts. And yeah, so not only that, we're gonna address the elephant in the room. Generating high-quality pipeline is hard. It's not an easy thing to do. So we're gonna kind of give you a little reasons of the why it's so hard. And then we're gonna dive into some of those real-world examples to help combat that and put you into a position of success. All right, so why is it hard? Why is generating high-quality pipeline so hard? 97% of website visits are anonymous, right? So it's— you're, you're already, you know, behind the ball with just getting an understanding of who is on your website. And only 7% of your target customers are actively in market, right? So that's a relative— that's a small number of, of potential customers that are actively looking for a solution that you may be providing. And then the last is 30 to 50% of sales time is focused on the wrong accounts. It's unproductive prospecting. So as a result, that's just a lot of calories being spent in the wrong areas. So when we think about the dark funnel, right, today, Our buyers are armed with so much information. They have the website at their disposal. Google is their best friend. So buyers prefer to remain anonymous. So think about this. A buying team today is made up of roughly 10 to 20 people, and they're only spending roughly 17% of their buying journey with vendors. That's not just you. That's all vendors, right? So that makes it extremely difficult, and that creates wasted efforts across your revenue life cycles. How much? $2 trillion in waste. That's right, $2 trillion. And BCG claims that sales and marketing teams collectively leave that $2 trillion annually on the table in productivity shortfalls, Lost opportunities, insufficient sales and prospecting, which leads to revenue leakage. And we're gonna get into some of those areas here in a second around what some of those revenue leakages may look like. All right, so when you look at your revenue teams and where that revenue responsibility and where some of those pitfalls might start to happen, Right, so imagine if you could arm all of your teams across all of your revenue cycles with the insights. So marketing, operate— operations, and sales could effectively generate pipeline, right? Because pipeline is a team sport. It's a shared responsibility across— excuse me— all of these different personas. So here are some of those, those leakage, um, examples I was talking about. So these are areas that Probably look familiar. Missed opportunities, not understanding buyers' needs, misaligned sales and marketing. I can't emphasize that enough. Misaligned sales and marketing. It's one of the, it's one of the most common things that we hear when we're having conversations with customers and/or prospects is how do you create a tight relationship at sales and marketing? We're gonna get into a little bit of that. Um, here in a little bit. But how do you minimize the impact here, right? How do you replicate that ideal proven pathway of what success looks like for you, right? What are those top deals? What are the deals that close the fastest and the ones that have the highest or higher ASPs? So that's a little bit of the why. Creating pipeline is hard, quality pipeline. Now we're gonna get into what are the ways that you can start to combat that? What are the ways that you can arm your teams to be effective? And the first thing we're gonna talk about here is we're gonna talk about identifying your ICP, right? Define your ICP. What does that mean? Your ideal customer profile. And the way that you do that is there, there are a few ways that you can do that. You can, you can look at past performance. You can look at technographic data, firmographic data. You also want to look at what's your future go-to-market strategy. Where do you, where do you expect the organization to go? Are you going to be expanding your geos? Are you going to be going into different verticals, maybe expanding your product line? Are there certain technologies that your customers that are using that seems to be a trend within a majority of your customer base? So it's taking all of that information and, and I, this is where I also wanna mention, this isn't a marketing decision, this isn't a sales decision or a CS decision, this is a unified approach from the top down. This is where you have your executive team having these conversations, looking at this data here to decide what the ICP is going to be. And then from there, your marketing and sales team are aligned. They're focused on those same accounts. So when you're running marketing plays and you're running sales plays, they're very complementary of one another. It, it, you know, one of the biggest things or biggest challenges we see Is, you know, the MQL. The MQL can be— it actually can be a really good thing if done right. And what I mean by that is if you're handing over MQLs, but you're still doing it in accounts that sales and marketing are aligned on, that is a step in the direction that starts to build that relationship, reduce friction between sales and marketing, and that will also help you get and start to work towards perhaps like an ABM methodology. Now the other thing that's really important here is identifying and defining those behaviors that are gonna trigger your sales activities. And what do I mean by this? So what I mean is there are unique indicators within every organization that would classify or at least alert you 'Cause someone is in some type of buying motion. Here at Six Sense, we call that our custom 6QA. And what we have done is we have defined those 5 qualifying factors for us that says, hey, someone here is in market, they're ready to engage in a conversation, and these are the triggers that we utilize every day to be able to identify those accounts. And by doing that, we're putting our sellers in a position, they're able, in a position to be more successful. We're putting our BDRs in a position where they can prioritize the accounts and/or contacts in those accounts, right, that they're reaching out to. All of that combined with your ICP starts to put sales and marketing in alignment. I have a template here that I've included here down at the bottom, and I'll make sure this gets out to everyone, but This is a great exercise to go through if it's something you're not doing today. It's the pipeline, it's a planning template. It's a great exercise to go through with both, you know, sales and marketing leadership, identifying, you know, what, you know, looking at your revenue goals and then doing like a work back, you know, work backwards type of approach to get your pipeline targets identified, right? So looking at you know, your velocity between deal stages, look, you got conversions between deal stages, looking at what are your ASPs and having that exercise and going through that exercise and then coming to an alignment to say, hey, these are the pipeline goals that sales and marketing are striving for. And again, this is a great exercise to go through as you're starting to think about or Where if you're thinking about where to start as far as defining your ICP, defining those behaviors, going through the pipeline exercise is a great way to start to get that alignment regardless if you're in an MQL or ABM environment. The next thing we're gonna get into is let's talk about a revenue operating model. So when we talk about, you know, sales and marketing, you know, that's great, that's great. Okay, we'll work together, we'll get that done, Chris. But where do those swim lanes come in? Where does marketing's responsibilities start and where do marketing's responsibilities end? Where do sales responsibilities start and where do they end? So the way that we think about this is everything to the left. So everything you see to the left of marketing qualified account stage is typically where marketing is running, you know, your demand gen plays, whether that is If you have display ads, if you're running nurture emails, if you're running events or direct mail, so, you know, gifting, for example, marketing spends a lot of time and a lot of energy on in those particular categories, in those areas leading up to a qualified account. And their primary objective there is to get accounts downstream. Get them further in market so they can become qualified, and then we can hand those over to sales. We can hand those over to our BDR or SDR teams or sales teams if there's— if those BDRs don't exist, to start to focus on those accounts, right? Because those are the accounts that have shown the interest, they're engaging with us, those revenue moments are happening. We want to capitalize on those. So getting sales involved And then letting sales start to run their motions. Now, marketing doesn't stop there. Marketing continues to run plays. We continue to do our ads. We continue to do paid. We continue to do all of that through the entire cycle, you know, leading up to an opportunity, post-opportunity. It's that air cover that helps move those deals along. So So let's get into an example here. So this is a great example of someone that, you know, if you think about where you are in your ABM journey, some of you might be well on your way and very, very heavy from an ABM strategy. Some may be, you know, really just in early stages, like still primarily living In operating in an MQL. This here is a great way for anyone, depending on where you are in that journey, to start to think about how do I either expand my TAM, right, go outside of, you know, that sort of predefined ICP, if I'm starting to think about expanding into new verticals, if I'm thinking about expanding into new personas, new product lines, or if I'm already running those motions, this here, so content syndication is a great way to start to think about that. So content syndication, you know, think of it as a third party that you work with. You know, they will, you know, put your content out on your behalf. And the goal there is, you know, to, you know, get leads to, to interact with your content. And in an ABM world, you're probably thinking, well, all right, we're doing ABM today. Why would we do content syndication? Why do we care about leads? We're going after the account. And if you're, you know, an MQL, you know, say, yeah, we run these plays all the time. So here's where things can get, you know, I think here's where sort of the rubber meets the road. If you're, you know, if you're just starting ABM, this is a great way. Take those leads that you're getting from content syndication, and before you even work with your, your partner, tell them the accounts that you want to work on. Tell them the personas that you're most interested in and only work through that lens. So at a minimum, the contacts that you're getting, the leads that you're getting through content syndication are the ones that are in your ICP. They're the ones that have the higher propensity become customers because you've gone through that exercise. You know what your ICP looks like. Not only that, you know the 10 to 20 people that are typically part of that buying committee. So make sure your partner knows these are the contacts we care about, these are the accounts that we want to get into, and these where we think we have the highest opportunity of conversion. So you get all of those contacts, you get those leads coming in through content syndication. What do you do now? Now, if you're already doing ABM, you're going to multi-thread. And if you're not running ABM, you're going to multi-thread. So what I mean by that is you're not only going to engage and reach out and start doing your follow-up and your outbound motions to those 1 or 2 individuals that came in through syndication, but you're now going to start reaching out to all of those different personas within that account to try to increase your odds. Increase your chances, get in front of as many people as you can with the right message that's gonna resonate with them, whether it's content, whether it's particular areas of topic, correlate that back to what it is, what is the value of why you're engaging with them. It's a great way to start from an MQL segue slowly into an ABM. Or if you're already running ABM, this is a great way to think about expanding into different verticals, different products where you haven't historically been able to get in front of these individuals. The last thing you want to think about is how do you operationalize this? How do I take all of these, all of this data that I'm getting, all of these different contacts? You know, think of a way to create a program. You know, for us, we use our map, we use 6sense, we use our CRM. And we've come up with a way to be able to take title-level information and break it out into a function and seniority, and then that drives back a persona value. So, you know, right now we are populating 29 different unique persona values. That allows us to feel confident in making sure that the right person is in the right persona bucket. So when we are doing these types of motions, we can start to report out like that And again, feel confident that the right message is going to the right person.

Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today.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.