Sales Training: Account-Based Strategy is Mission-Critical in Sales

Hey everyone. Welcome back to Inbound Sales Day. This is our final live session of the day and I get the feeling we might have saved the best for last. So what we've got this afternoon is we have two incredible guests with us. They're both from Terminus, which is the leading account based marketing company right now out there in the space. And this is definitely a term that's being thrown around and people are talking about really differently. So I'm excited to dive in and get some perspective on how Tony and Mike are actually thinking about it. So welcome Tony and Mike.

Thank you.

Hello.

Good to be here.

I'll tee you up real nice. I'll give a little bit of background on the both of you. So Toni, vice president of sales at Terminus and has grown the team from one to 30 salespeople over there right now. So massive growth. She previously has led sales teams in a bunch of different SaaS companies including Salesloft, Pardot and Matter. So we're really excited to have her expertise today. And Mike Venable, he's an account executive currently working with Tony over at Terminus. And Mike has actually had some experience leading teams in the past as well in his prior role at Career Builder. So really cool dynamic duo we've got going on here. Really cool subject. I'm pumped up to get started. How you guys feeling today?

Awesome.

Yeah, happy to be here.

Thank you. Cool.

So tee us off. Like, what is this? This is such a hot space that you both are a part of right now. Talk to me a little bit about the space that you're in and the work that you're doing over there right now at Terminus.

Absolutely. Well, account based marketing is certainly a hot space right now, but there's also a lot of confusion around what it means, how it works, what kind of technology someone should be using. So we are seeing a bit of market confusion. But the way that we think about based marketing is that in some ways it's kind of the inverse or the opposite of a lead based kind of strategy. So in lead based marketing, we're typically focused on volume. We want to fill the top of our funnel with as many leads as possible because we know a bunch will fall out. Actually, according to Forrester, less than 1% of leads turn into revenue. So account based marketing is about being really, really focused, almost flipping that traditional funnel upside down, focusing first on the key accounts that we want to do business with that we believe are a great fit, finding not just one lead or one stakeholder, but expanding to reach as much of that buying committee as possible. And then of course, putting relevant messaging and content in front of those individuals is personalized across as many channels as possible. So account based marketing is about just focused marketing on key accounts. And so the reason we were excited for this topic today is we wanted to put a little bit of a sales spin on it. Sales has always been account focused. Account based marketing allows marketing now to focus more on what sales care is about, which is helping to push the right accounts through the funnel, helping them to make more money and the company to make more money. Would you add anything to that?

Yeah, I mean, you know, it really kind of comes along with a shift in the way that we're looking at things, you know, shifting from traditionally looking at just a volume play of how many leads are we able to get in and get in front of salespeople to instead flipping that around to focusing on the highest revenue potential accounts and in that context trying to figure out how quickly can we get them engaged and through our pipeline to opportunity and ultimately revenue.

Very cool. So as we've been doing all day, we want to hear the audience's questions. We're going to prioritize your questions versus the ones that maybe I'm just interested in. So write them. Inboundsalesday. Tweet @us. Tweet a terminus. Let's get some activity going. But I'm interested in this topic. Seeing that it's inbound sales day, how do you think that you really marry the account based marketing strategy alongside of an inbound marketing strategy together to really find the true harmony with these two solutions included. How do you do inbound and account based effectively together?

Wanna start this one?

Yeah. So you know, there's a variety of ways we always say kind of that one feeds the other. So you know, you've got maybe your inbound hand raisers that come in and oftentimes we need to implement an account based approach to expand our reach within those accounts and bring them into a relevant opportunity. And so, you know, there's kind of ways where we can take the intent that's shown within that inbound program and tack onto it with an account based program and bring them to bring them through our pipeline faster.

An example of that, one of our customers, high spot, who is doing account based marketing, they actually have a really robust lead based program. And so instead of just focusing on a list of target accounts and going outbound into those accounts, they actually let their inbound feed that ABM process. So every time they get an inbound lead, it goes into marketo it gets a score and a grade. If it's scored highly, it's pushing the sales force. Merged with an account, that account is in tiered 1, 2 or 3. And if it's a tier 1 account, those are the companies they know are a great fit. They now put an ABM spin on that, find other contacts in the account and expand it. So the cool thing about an inbound approach is that the two are certainly not mutually exclusive. Someone should have both running at the same time and to Mike's point, each should kind of feed the other.

Yeah, it's cool. It makes total sense. I really like that, the concept that you're talking about with tiers. And I know when we were chatting ahead of the session, we were really talking a lot about the way that this ABM strategy can really create synergy not just within your sales and marketing teams at your business, but actually through all of the different departments that coexist within an organization. Talk to me a little bit about what goes into like in that example of that customer, what goes into that tiering concept and how do you think about that as an opportunity to drive alignment across the entire business?

At the end of the day, an account based strategy should, to your point, be across the entire organization. So it should start with marketing and sales, but also go to product to customer success. All these things should be connected on. These are the key customers we're building products for that we want to bring on board and that we want to make successful and stay with us. So I mean, at the end of the day it comes down to effective collaboration, which is hard. It's much easier in some ways to work in a silo. Both of us have worked at previous companies where it was very much that way, where sales and marketing in each group was totally separate. For all this to work well, teams have to get together as team leads and have conversations about, okay, what does our ideal customer look like? Let's make sure we're all in agreement on that and then let's come up together with a strategy on how to approach them. And so one key way to do that is tiering accounts by clearly identifying what categories, what things have a best fit customer, whether it's industry in size or something totally different like the tech, they use those things. You can then say this account is a Tier A or Tier 1 account. So this is where we want to focus more of our resources on. And then it's prioritizing your budget, your resources so that the tier 1s or the tier AS are getting the most Budget spent on them and the most time and attention and it goes down from there.

Yeah, I think it's all about just being really deliberate about how we're going to market with these things. You know, we see them split up by tiers of importance, we see them split up by a lot of different ways. But you know, it all comes back to having a kind of deliberate like.

Pace that we're working at with these. Have you seen anybody call it something better than like tier 1, tier 2, tier 3 or tier A? Have you seen any cool ways of naming it which are a little bit more in touch with the customer?

I haven't. I think we mostly see that because 1, 2, 3, ABC. Have you seen anything else?

I mean We've got our Terminus 500. Some will have a more specific initiative around our top accounts and then may have some flashy names to them.

We were talking about this the other day at HubSpot. We were just talking about. Yeah, you know you've got this concept of like a tier one account that you really want to go after and it makes total sense, right? The behavior patterns, the demographics, the likelihood for that account to retain or such. We want to align all of our goals around getting this type of business to purchase within our organization. But we were riffing around the table like could we call this something better than Tier one? And I've never heard anybody have a good name for it. Sorry to put you guys on the spot but I don't have any idea either.

We don't have any great suggestions.

So we're starting to get some questions from the audience. This one I think is actually really interesting. On riff a little bit. Talk to us about how important industry verticals are in your ABM strategy. Like how do you think about industry verticals alongside of the approach that you're taking?

I mean usually that comes into play as it relates to a creative message. We deal with a lot of software companies. Usually there are some that may serve different markets. And so we bring industry in as it relates to different creative messages that go out across there sometimes within our ad operations team as far as where we're placing the ads as well. So it's really kind of content targeting specific stuff.

Yeah, it also depends on of course the company. So us at terminus industry doesn't matter as much for our own strategy. Use cases can be in common across companies based on their go to market strategy. It's less about their industry. So I think for each company, back to the conversation around tiering and figuring out your icp for some people, that's a very important indicator and an account based strategy. They want the messaging to each vertical to be very different. In other companies, it's more about other things. So it could be how engaged they are with their content. On our website, like you seem to suggest that you guys look at. It could also be the tech they use. For us, if they're using Salesforce and certain marketing automation platforms like HubSpot, that's a really positive sign for us. So we might want our messaging to be different based on those factors and stuff.

That's cool. So continuing to kind of break down the concept of what actually is this abm exactly. So what we understand so far and the conversation we're having is it's really about flipping this funnel. It's really about saying let's not just take all the demand that's coming our way and maniacally focus on selling to that demand the way it comes to us, but rather, let's be very thoughtful about who it is that we want to engage with. Let's identify and have a concept for what that target account actually looks like. Based on that, let's engage very deeply with those accounts to ensure that we maximize the opportunity when we do have the opportunity to engage with one of them. My question to you is, what channels are you finding that folks are using most with this type of strategy and where are they finding success?

Yeah, and one quick note, when you were talking, you kind of got my brain starting to think a different direction real quick. One thing that we've noticed, of course, as salespeople ourself and as we're working with our customers who are starting abm, is that this also requires sales to think a little bit differently about the way they do their job. And so most of us are used to asking marketing, give me more leads. And once I start, you know, once I generate opportunity, don't touch my accounts. And one of the big things we're finding in terms of channels is that it actually works well when marketing and sales are focused on the same accounts and have enough trust in each other that they can say, okay, sales, you're responsible for these touch points. Marketing is going to run these plays. But all of us are on brand, on message, so we're all saying the same thing across these different channels. And so again, for sales to get the benefit of having marketing being really focused on these accounts, they also have to give up a little control. But back to channels, I mean, we're seeing, of course email sales of course will do more phone Calls and social touches. Marketing, aside from email, events, webinars, direct mail is getting really big and of course we're in the advertising space. So most of our, all of our customers are doing some form of advertising. So all of these together. When a prospect, when an account really when multiple people in an account are seeing your message across all these channels, it becomes very powerful.

Got it. So it's less about the concept of finding a new channel and it's more about leveraging the way way that sales and marketing actually collaborate to deliver messaging within the channels that most of us and probably a lot of us that are feeling confused about what this is, we're already familiar with.

Yeah, I mean this isn't a new concept. Some of the pieces of technology that are out now that enable companies to do this at scale, such as ours, is new and it's brought this term back into vogue. But you know, the renaissance here is the reconnection of sales to marketing in lockstep to be able to have a very deliberate way that we're going after the accounts that are most important to us.

That's cool. We've got a couple new questions that have popped in, so this one's interesting like is ABM for everyone? Is it suited very specifically towards a specific type of business model?

I don't think ABM is for everyone, but I do think the majority of B2B companies can benefit from it in some way, shape or form if it's not their full strategy. So the more transactional, the smaller your deal size, the less you probably need account based marketing or account based strategy rather. And the bigger the deal value, the more that it's valuable. If you're Lockheed Martin and you have 80 companies total that you can sell to, generating 1,000 leads from a company like Terminus doesn't matter to your sales team. You have to focus on their accounts. So it totally depends. In a lot of organizations we're finding their SMB team focuses mostly on the lead based model. Their mid market team is a good mix of both. And as they get to enterprise, it's really account focused. So it really goes across the board. But the complexity of your sale is a big factor.

Yeah, I mean the idea is that we're expanding your reach and giving you a way to get in front of these people, specific people in a new channel. And that kind of lends itself to the idea that we're addressing a buying committee that is of some decent size. So it usually is bigger deal.

Very cool. And I guess we have a question here about We've been talking a lot about acquiring net new business and that's a lens we've been viewing it through. But what strategies have you seen that apply best to actually growing an existing larger? And how should salespeople be thinking about that?

Yeah, actually the way we think of account based strategy is not just in demand gen. Account based strategy should be from taking a net new company to a customer, excuse me, to an opportunity, an opportunity to a customer and a customer to at least retain the business, if not expand the business. So we think about it in demand gen pipeline and customer marketing. So demand gen is a key area that we see companies starting with their ABM model. But certainly customer marketing and using it to drive pipeline are key things too. So on the customer marketing side the campaigns look similar. It's just a different, different approach or different messaging. So a company doing a cross sell campaign may say I want all customers using product A. Actually this is great for a company like a HubSpot that has a great diversity of offerings. You're using our CRM product. Here's you know, more information about our marketing automation product. And so the sales team would be on point. Marketing would be putting ads and direct mail and things in front of that account that speak to that other offering and how it lends nicely into the offering they're already using. So it's very much the same kind of model. It's just attacking customer accounts to help grow those, whatever that goal may be. It's still about sales marketing in that case customer success, really working together to reach those accounts.

Awesome. And the next audience question that we're really seeing here is like, I know you're talking about segmentation based on, you know, like if you're mid market, small business, we're talking about transaction volume. We've got some good context there. Are there any other like telltale signs that it may be time to take a look at this strategy more seriously for somebody who has not?

Yeah, I mean, you know, usually when we talk with someone who is, who is looking into an account based strategy, it's for one of a couple reasons. Either, you know, they have kind of exhausted the beginning market and are starting to have trouble generating new leads and are looking to get a little more deliberate about logos that they've been shooting after for a while. Maybe they're looking to move up market and if we're trying to push into more middle markets, you know, enterprise accounts and there's a bigger buying committee that we're working with, you know, our salespeople aren't able to get engaged with all those people. We need to wait to get engaged with them whether or not they are engaging with our content. So usually it's kind of that. It's the volume play has exhausted itself and we're trying to get bigger, better move up or we've developed a new list of target accounts that are very important to us.

Yeah. And to add to that, many times it's just a company wanting to get more strategic developing a named account list. There's a local company here in Atlanta that I had lunch with recently and the person I was speaking with was a true demand gen marketer. He kept saying, I'm old school, I'm so used to the, the lead model. And I know the only way we're going to hit our revenue goal this year is if we get aggressive going up market to some larger accounts. So I know we have to take more of an account focused approach. I just don't know how to get started. So that's a really common one we see. And then lastly, sometimes sales teams are just feeling like my marketing team is great, they're putting in all this content but a lot of the leads that I'm getting in just aren't really relevant. They're not the accounts that I want to speak to or, or I'm in deal cycles and I want more marketing support to help drive that account forward. So sales team saying, hey, I want marketing more aligned. How can we support that? And they're coming together and starting to move towards an account based strategy.

And how do you think that. So for somebody who's trying to take this concept and get it actually put into practice inside their business, how do you think that they go about selling that internally? Of course we have to show roi. There has to be some tangible benefits of the approach. How do you think about showing that in this particular case?

Yeah. So I know Mike also has lots of opinions about this because he's talking about the ROI of AVM all the time. But I will say account based strategy does require a different way to look at metrics for success in a lead based model. And I keep going back to lead based just because that's what most companies we see are so focused on the metrics for success. Are we generating leads, are we getting conversions and form fills? And again it's back to that volume metric and an account based strategy. It's less about a net new name because in this case we know the target accounts we want to reach for the most part. It's more about how do we drive engagement in that account? That helps us to bring on more business. So the kinds of metrics that we look at for ABM are, are we generating more opportunities? Are we generating more pipeline? Is that pipeline getting further down the road? And ultimately are we generating more revenue? And so a lot of our customers, when they evaluate our product or other products, will do an A B test. They'll take two groups of accounts and they'll say, this group we're doing ABM with, this group we're not, or this group we're using the terminus product, in this group we're not. And then they'll compare. And in a lot of cases, in virtually every case, we're seeing customers see significant increases in the number of opportunities they generate when they're doing abm, increases in the number of accounts going from stage one to two to three in their pipeline and ultimately coming on board.

Anything to add there, Mike? You look pensive.

I mean, you know, that's it. It's kind of, I think we have a lot of people come in with the strategy where we're going to generate as many leads as we can and push toward the revenue from that. And account based marketing is more about we've got the companies that we know can provide the revenue we need and we're going to work backward from there and try to figure out strategically how are we going to get in there. And an A B test is usually a great way to measure that. Usually we're looking for some sort of benchmark from stage to stage for pipeline velocity, but that's something that a lot of marketers struggle with. And so an A B test is a good way to be a stopgap for that while we are helping them develop those benchmarks.

Very cool. And I guess what are the tactical strategies that you would want to put into place? So a question we're getting right now from the audience is like, can you provide some actual essential strategies that sales and marketing teams would work on together? I'm sensing an interest of the audience to get a little bit more tactical here.

Absolutely. So Mike brought up our termist 500 campaign. So we have a demand gen campaign where our entire sales team, we have a list of 500 accounts that we're targeting and over time. So I can also, we can tell you a lot of what not to do because we've certainly made our own mistakes along the way.

This is what to do, by the way.

Yeah, so we've actually done the 500 is too many. So next time around we're going to be limiting the list, but 500 accounts as an org we're working on for the quarter. So each rep, each SDR is assigned a certain number of accounts. And what we're doing to get into those accounts is the team has a cadence of emails, calls and social touches that they're going to run simultaneously. Marketing is doing retargeting across social platforms. They're using our own advertising product and they're sending direct mail at key parts within that cadence. As well as we're having marketing send one email in there, inviting the audience to join us for an event. We're also doing a lot more with video. So our SDRs in particular have gone haywire with using video in emails. Vidyard has an incredible platform for that. So they'll get on video and they'll say, hey, Mike, I see you're the VP of marketing at ABC Company. I thought you might be a really great fit for this because of X, Y and Z. And they'll have their LinkedIn page up and can talk through it. So we're seeing just by personalizing our message and having touch points from both sides to get the attention more people who previously some of the same accounts we've been reaching out to for months that were ignoring us.

And then on the pipeline side, we've got the ability to communicate with the marketing team for our late stage ops that we think are close to closing. We've got a couple of different creative options that we can put out depending on where they are close to the end of the cycle. That's been really helpful. I know it's helped me close some deals here over the last quarter. So that's kind of the pipeline side of it.

And we do send a copy. Our co founder wrote account Based Marketing for Dummies. So we have a triggered campaign with PFL that as soon as an account hits a certain step of our sales process as an opportunity, a book is triggered. So I know we just said a lot of things at once, but the idea being if you're getting tactical, you want to come up with sales touch points, marketing touch points that you think would be powerful, come together and build a plan for how to execute on those.

Yeah, in a lot of ways it gets back to the core challenge always of creating a super compelling and relevant message. Right. I mean, that's what we're all in the business of doing. It sounds like with the strategy. You're very thoughtful about how to get the message in front of the audience. At the end of the day, there still needs to be a tremendous amount of value that exists within the message.

Yes.

That seems like really one of the core components of this whole thing.

At the end of the day, think about it. We're all so busy getting texts and emails and just calls and all these things that are distracting us while we're at work. What's going to get someone's attention? It's hitting them up across as many channels as possible, but most importantly, having an effective message. I rarely respond to sales emails, but when somebody says something that I can tell they put time into and it's unique to me, that's when I'll respond to a sales email. So yeah, I think that's always been true. And more so than ever, the more tools we have to automate things, the more it's important to slow down, not go too fast, and actually create a personalized message.

So I'm a small business and I'm just starting to think about getting started with this now. What advice do you have for me?

The phone broke out. What was the first thing you said? You're a who.

So I'm a small business and you've kind of convinced me. I'm just starting to think about trying this approach. Where do I start?

Well, I mean, you know, we talked about several different strategies here, from the demand gen side to the pipeline side to the customer marketing side. And there's a lot more capabilities than that that you can do with account based marketing. But it's also very scalable. We see a lot of people that come in. Demand gen is always an important part of it. And then if there's a lot of upside opportunities. So I would say it's about finding out what your top ICP companies are that are most important for you and then picking a couple of strategies that you can start with and making sure the sales alignment is there. The idea is let's get some messaging out there that sales can capitalizing on it. And when we show success within those first couple of strategies, you can scale it from there.

Yeah, I think to Mike's point, when you think about the different ways you can start, first you need to think of a goal. Obviously like with anything, what do we want to impact? Is it taking some existing customers and upselling them, etc. So pick a goal and then once you pick that goal, start small. So don't create a campaign like our T500 where you have all these touch points. Don't start there. That's what we did. And the first round was a nightmare because we didn't know anything. We've gotten better and better over time. So instead start small. Just start with the sales cadence and have marketing do one thing to help when that goes well for a month or two, add in more touch points and make it more complex. Because this kind of model salespeople, we're used to going rogue and doing whatever we want. And we have to slow down and work with marketing. It often like trips salespeople up. So my advice for someone who's starting, who's a small business, if you're a small business, it's actually a benefit because you have less stakeholders, you have to involve less red tape to go around. That's a good thing. But don't get in over your head. Start with a couple touch points, create a strategy, execute upon it, and then slowly but surely add additional touch points and channels. And when something doesn't work, stop doing it. When something works well, do more of it.

Very cool. So we're approaching the end of the session here. What do you both want to leave everybody with an understanding of? And how do you want to. How do you want to really kind of crispen and sharpen the axe on what we've learned here today?

I mean, you know, I took this job at Terminus because for years I had kind of been trying to accomplish this on my own, poorly. And so, you know, it's been very refreshing to me to be here and see what can be accomplished, you know, from what I've seen in the market and from what I've seen in my own sales numbers specifically. So I would say, you know, for salespeople out there that are watching this, this is a process that, you know, may be a little uncomfortable at first, but it's something that you have to trust and the results will be there, you know, and for marketers, I think that it's so valuable what you are providing within this to sales that, you know, we're really on the crest of the wave with this thing. And I think that this is going to be certainly kind of the de facto way of going after accounts going forward.

Yeah, and my sentiments are very similar. I've worked at a lot of companies where marketing sales work together where they didn't work together. And something that I've learned as a salesperson, I've always been very impatient. I want to do things my way. I want to be in control of my accounts. But to mirror Mike's point, this ABM thing or this account based thing, it is hard. It takes slowing down. It takes more coordination at first. It doesn't feel right. But when you commit to it, when both sides work together, you know the first round isn't going to be perfect. Incredible things happen. We've seen significant upticks in our productivity as we continue to perfect our process. A company that we work closely with, WP Engine, saw a 28% increase in the number of opportunities they were setting by moving to an ABM model. So it does work. It's not just a buzzword. And ABM does impact you as a salesperson person. It should make your life better. But know that at first it might be challenging, it might be a little different. Strong alignment and agreeing upon accounts.

Awesome. Well, Tony and Mike, thank you both for joining us today. Super enlightening session. I think we debunked a lot of myths, so we got a ton of awesome information out there to our viewers. Everyone, thank you for an awesome day. This is the final live session of Inbound Sales Day. If you enjoyed the content, if you have anything that's quotable, tweetable, hit us up on the hashtag Inbound salesday. Thank you again and thank you, Mike and Tony. It was an absolute pleasure.

Thank you.

Thank you, everybody. Have an awesome one.