← B2B Marketing Exchange
B2B Marketing Exchange
Building A Strong Operational Base For Effective Account-Based Marketing
00:21:41
Loading summary
Transcript38 lines
- [00:00]
Nadia Davis
The holy grail of account based marketing is that in the world of multi touch attribution and I would love yet to see a person who would say, I talk to someone at the event and it's a sale every time. Doesn't happen that way right there, all these, you know, 80% of the research happens in a dark funnel. The most famous quote. But people don't really put much thought into the mechanics of how am I going to get this done as opposed to I'm just going to go buy me a platform. Didn't I say that you just buy it, push the button. They say they do integration for you. The implementation team gets you off the ground and you go in, you go. And what you do at the end of the day is just targeted advertising.
- [00:42]
Claudia Tirico
The B2B Marketing Exchange brings together B2B marketing and sales practitioners from across the country to get the latest tools and tips they need to succeed.
- [00:50]
Nadia Davis
Now we're bringing the insights from the stage to your ears.
- [00:53]
Claudia Tirico
I'm Claudia Tirico. And I'm Kelly Lindenau. And this is the B2B Marketing Exchange podcast. Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the B2BMX podcast. We are still kicking live at B2BMX east in Alpharetta, Georgia. So all that shuffling and conversations that you hear in the background is our fabulous show floor where all of our sponsors are chatting away with our attendees and everybody is networking and having some fun. I am here today with one of our fabulous keynote speakers who will be taking the stage in about two hours to close out the day. Her name is Nadia Davis and she is the CE Senior Director of Revenue Marketing and Marketing Operations at Payet. So Nadia, welcome. Welcome to B2BMX. Thank you so much for being with us today.
- [01:44]
Nadia Davis
Thank you, Claudia. Great to be here.
- [01:46]
Claudia Tirico
How are you enjoying the event so far?
- [01:48]
Nadia Davis
It's a fantastic event. I'm glad to see so many thought leadership sessions covering really the mechanics of how to do things as opposed to high level, kind of aspirational, rah rah type of stuff before you get home and wonder, that was great. Now how do I do that?
- [02:04]
Claudia Tirico
Yeah, yeah. And that's always the key here. I always kind of kick off my conversations with our speakers about like, listen, I don't want the fluff. People are, you know, in that seat in the audience wanting to bring back real takeaways to their jobs when they get back home or to their offices and just start implementing and testing out right away. So first things first, let's give our listeners a little background on you. So tell us about yourself, about payette and your role there.
- [02:30]
Nadia Davis
Absolutely. So let me start with the organization. PAID is a GovTech SaaS company. We serve about 100 million people across the United States and Canada. And the way we do that, we essentially enable interactions between residents and governments to run in a very seamless Amazon like fashion. Right. Where yesterday for example, the easiest case for everybody to embrace, you had to stand in line to renew your driver's license and you had to take a day off for work because you knew you were stuck there for however many hours. Right. Today you can do that with just a few clicks on your phone. North Carolina is one of those states where DMV runs through pay it when it comes to resident engagement stuff. Kansas is another state. At the same time, we serve local governments as well. So in many places, Lansing, Michigan for example, being one of them. St. Louis, Missouri being yet another one, people can pay their utility bills or property taxes through paid. And the best thing about that is you actually get a receipt. You pay a government agency, you get a receipt, you can file it away.
- [03:32]
Claudia Tirico
You got the proof?
- [03:33]
Nadia Davis
Exactly. In my role within the organization, I run revenue marketing and marketing operations. And the reason this is kind of one of those weird titles people like. Everybody got a fancy title these days, right? But there is actually the logic behind my title. I started out building out an ABM program for the business when the business started scaling and wanted to reach more people with predictable results so that the board and the stakeholders are happy and can forecast effectively. But as the time progressed, what we found out is that without a very strong operational base, you can't really get to good results because ideas are great. If you're an effective speaker, you can get the buy in, but at the end of the day, the data has to be clean, all the systems have to talk to each other. All of those wonderful things are really not sexy to talk about, but at the end of the day they are the things that make marketing real. So operations and revenue marketing is my role. And yeah, this is my third year into the job and I love doing what I'm doing. Awesome. Awesome.
- [04:33]
Claudia Tirico
Well, like I said, you're taking the stage within the next less than 2 hours now to present our closing keynote of the day titled Mastering Revenue Driven abm. So we're going to touch on ABM today. I know you're a pro. You actually also attended our CMO Exchange, which is a popular roundtable that we host at B2BMX and we're very vocal about many things and I love that. I love somebody that, you know, isn't afraid to speak up and have those conversations. So first things first. What do you see as the most common or the most common challenges if there are more than one? I'm sure there are more than one. What are some of the most common challenges B2B organizations face when it comes to implementing ABM?
- [05:10]
Nadia Davis
Oh, I got one. I'll start with one. I will not go into it because.
- [05:14]
Claudia Tirico
We could be here all day, right?
- [05:15]
Nadia Davis
Exactly. We could talk about it all day. But I think the number one challenge is that people truly underestimate the role of operations. And by operations I mean either marketing operations or sales operations in the process. And the thinking usually is hey, everyone within the company has the login and password to our salesforce marketing team has access to Marketo or HubSpot or whatever it is. Like we know how to send emails. How are we going to justify the headcount for this operations person? But the holy grail of account based marketing is that in the world of multi touch attribution and I would love yet to see a person who would say I talked to someone at the event and it's a sale every time. Doesn't happen that way. Right. 80% of the research happens in a dark funnel. The most famous quote. But people don't really put much thought into the mechanics of how am I going to get this done as opposed to I'm just going to go buy me a platform. Didn't they say that you just buy it, push the button? They say they do integration for you. The implementation team gets you off the ground in what go in you go. And what you do at the end of the day is just targeted advertising and people get disappointed. And I think that missed mark on expectations is so real. And one of the things that I will mention in my address is that an article recently came out in Forbes, it was penned by Forrester, we all respect Forrester, great analyst company that said essentially that ABM missed the mark and now are the sun setting days of abm because we tried it, it just doesn't work. And I think what people mistake is that ABM is not a thing that you add water to and stir. You don't get Kool Aid out of it. Even though the buy in. That's exactly how people paint it. It's a framework and it's a methodology. Just like Agile is a methodology for DevOps. You don't go to a DevOps team and say hey, do you want to do Agile or do you want to do xyz or today we're going to rebrand it and yet call it something else. That's a methodology. If you know the framework, you define what it should be for your company. But people don't think about that. They think you buy a platform and you go. And I think that's. And without ops, you can't even integrate all of this data into places so multiple stakeholders can see. See everything in a single record of truth. And that's where the missed expectations happen.
- [07:29]
Claudia Tirico
Absolutely. And why do you think there's often such this, you know, and it continues to be. There's this gap between marketing and sales within ABM initiatives. Why do you think that's still such a prominent challenge or issue and something that we're constantly still talking about?
- [07:43]
Nadia Davis
That is such a great question. I love it. I love it. I think, well, marketers are jargon people. We're such nerds, especially the tech marketers. We love our acronyms. We have the abm, mql. Like, there's just endless amounts of acronyms. Right. And we expect for salespeople to learn all of that. We expect the burden that the learning curve is high. We expect for them to understand how all of this happens. We expect for them to be able to react to all of these triggers and insights. But wait, go to this tab and then from there you go to this tab and before you know it, look at this score. And at the end of the day, salespeople got a quota and they gotta close something. They don't come to us and say, hey, marketing, why don't you learn the basics of band or medpick or whatever? Like, it just doesn't happen. I mean, we're such lifelong learners. We think everybody else is like us, but they're not. They just need something that they scan through, figure out their priorities, and they go. And a lot of companies, and I mean, I've consulted on this, I've, you know, worked in different companies that try this. They underestimate the learning curve and the enablement piece. And salespeople are not there to learn how cool you are doing all of your little things. Sending a rocket ship to Mars. Right. They just want to sell close. And you are the enablement arm for them. But if your stuff takes half a day to digest, I'm sorry, you missed the mark.
- [09:08]
Claudia Tirico
Wow. Okay. All right, we're going to switch gears just a little bit, obviously still on the topic of abm, but I want to talk about business centric abm and what are really the key components of a business centric ABM strategy that can help secure executive buy in.
- [09:24]
Nadia Davis
I think that's exactly that. It's the alignment across the GTM team, whether it's marketing, sales and customer success, or however that team may look like in different businesses. And at the highest level, at the senior leadership level, that alignment is critical and empowers success for everybody who is all the way down to individual contributor. Because if different teams speak different languages, or if different teams deliver on different okrs that do not really align with the business level okrs, again, that would be just your siloed initiative in your marketing bubble or your CS bubble or your sales bubble. And I think that's the heart for people to break is these silos and just democratize what comes out and make that handoff seamless. Now, if it's a small business, you have just a handful of people. It's easy to have the camaraderie and you know, everybody kind of buys into the thing because it's a small team. But now you take that and you're looking at a business that's, you know, 500 people, 1,000 people, a multinational corporation, everybody working remotely. Exactly. Remote is another thing. And I think the people factor is really, really difficult driving change. And change is the most difficult thing where people will buy into the concept. But then you have to drive behaviors. I want you to do XYZ when you see this. And I think driving this change at the executive level across the business is the hardest thing.
- [10:46]
Claudia Tirico
And when it comes to that, you know, showcasing the value. How can marketers effectively communicate the value of ABM to stakeholders in the organization?
- [10:55]
Nadia Davis
Another great question. And I think, you know, that's what most people are here to figure out. Like, how do I show that my thing is real and I'm remote and my boss doesn't know what I'm, I'm doing all day. How can I show that my thing is real and I produce some stuff? I would go back to hiring an ops person or having an OPS function because attribution, all the haters out there, that's totally fine. I know it's hard. It's data, it's statistics. Like, we don't like that. We're creative minds. Right? We're art people. But attribution is key. If it's not in salesforce, if it's not in your HubSpot, whatever CRM you might have, it didn't happen. If you can track the entire buyer's journey, however long that is, and show stamps that look at all the Things that they did, the board looks at and says, wow, marketing is doing this fantastic job. And then I go and report on all of my target accounts and I can see the momentum, I can see the spread between this and that from month to month. But you have to have data to do that. And it's that daily repetitive motion of you making sure all the systems are a go, everything is connected, the data.
- [11:55]
Claudia Tirico
Flows and it's clean.
- [11:57]
Nadia Davis
And it's clean. Well, I think that's a utopia world, that conversation. It's a utopia world at this point. But that's the hardest piece. And for someone to be curious enough to keep looking for the things that you missed, keep going back and reworking it, continuously optimizing, it's almost like the developer mindset. It's like that IT technology mindset. Do you love data? Oh, I hate data. There's nothing interesting there. But data is what will make you a powerful abmer because now you can show what you did. And no, I'm not talking about your ABM platform that connect, you know, recorded clicks and impressions because they all do. But then what do you do? How does the business connect that to revenue? And that is the magic that happens within your system with the methodology that you put in place. And no, there are no rules of that methodology that apply across the business. You have to develop the rules, knowing best practices.
- [12:47]
Claudia Tirico
So do you have any proven methods that you would recommend for reporting and tracking ABM efforts to demonstrate like a tangible roi?
- [12:55]
Nadia Davis
I do have a secret sauce.
- [12:56]
Claudia Tirico
Okay. But I won't ask for it. But just a little.
- [13:00]
Nadia Davis
The full disclaimer is that that secret sauce will be different for every single company. So I've stood up ABM engines across three different organizations. There were different sizes and different industries and different kind of number of stakeholders who were involved, from very small ones to the ones that are larger. And I've consulted to multiple companies who were trying to get something off the ground. Either it was platform related stuff, what's best for me, or what do you track, what are the best KPIs and the one thing that I will caution people on that, people I think underestimate. When you're running a bm, there are two worlds. There are people because people take actions that we can track. And there are accounts, you sell two accounts. So you want to track accounts through all of your funnels and your reverse IP lookup address of who came to the website, who didn't. But people take actions. And being able to marry the two worlds of accounts and people In a scoring manner that flows all the way through and gets to a dollar number in your CRM. That is the secret sauce. And how you work it out in your company would be different. You have to look at what you're working with and get the buy in your own recip. Exactly. Exactly.
- [14:07]
Claudia Tirico
Awesome. Let's talk about tools for a second. What kind of tactics would you recommend or even just what have you done in the past to kind of train sales teams to effectively leverage the martech tools for ABM practices?
- [14:18]
Nadia Davis
You know, the buy in is so important and the quick wins are so important, but it's so hard to get that quick win with a senior level salesperson who may not necessarily be in that information aggregator role, but who is focused on strategic initiatives and travels a lot and is on calls a lot. So what I've noticed to be a really good first step is to get the buy in from the BDRs or the SDRs, the people who are in the role to look at any type of data. They're hungry. They want any type of tip, like, just tell me where to look and I will go and I will mine it. I will find it. They have the energy. Usually they're in a lot of cases they're kind of earlier in their career, they're younger. So if you get a BDR trained and it's a time investment on the marketing part. Right. But if you get a BDR train or BDR trained in how to go about this, they will be your best advocate on the sales side. Oh, did you see what kind of report came from our ABM platform? I saw this account here and then I saw them in Salesforce. And there is a rapid between BDRs and the sales team, which is much more holistic than whatever relationship marketing can establish with sales. Just to the nature of it, you know, I don't want to say cats and dogs, but ultimately, you know, it's cats and dogs. It's two different worlds. We love each other, but sometimes our priorities are a little bit different. So yeah, go the BDR route, the SDR route. Invest time, train people, get them to see investments and how quickly they pay back. And I think that's your path into the sales team.
- [15:47]
Claudia Tirico
Very cool. All right, let's look into the future a little bit. How do you see the role of ABM evolving in the next few years, especially in the context of changing buyer behaviors and new trends coming in and all of that. How do you see it kind of evolve? Is AI playing? Continuing? Obviously it's a Buzzword now and everybody's talking about it and wants to do it. Is that gonna play a big role within ABM strategies? What do you think?
- [16:11]
Nadia Davis
So the answer to that would come from a recent LinkedIn post that I saw from someone. I can't remember her name, but it was so accurate. So she was saying that she received an outreach from someone based on one of her recent LinkedIn posts where she was sharing with a group about the death of her mother. And it was a post that was emotional and, you know, she was expressing appreciation for someone else who kind of, you know, supported her during difficult time. Well, she gets an outreach that mentions that post and says, I saw your post about xyz. And she goes, I didn't realize that the person was using this very traumatic event in my life as a way to get in and to personalize something so that I would talk to them. And that brings me to the AI question. Do we know how to train AI on sentiment? Not very good yet, right? Go ask ChatGPT certain things to generate your images. You'll be surprised what will come out. Right. And if you're doing that at scale, the level of or the margin of error is so huge, you can get it so wrong to so many people, you will alienate, you will get people mad. Like, I would be very careful with how you let that thing go on its own. We're just not there yet. But as far as other trends, when it comes to just general kind of ABM approach within go to market strategy, I would say that a lot of businesses that I've seen are getting really disillusioned with what they were able to accomplish on the ABM front. And I think they're getting real as far as what it takes to run a successful ABM program and they're investing more into the technical side of the issue. You know, hiring ops, people really looking at their data, really centralizing their salesforce data hygiene approach or whatever CRM that might be. And I think that trend will continue. So if you decide that this is the area you want to play in and be like this demand gen performance growth market or there are so many different definitions these days, it will be a requirement for you to have that technical acumen that in the past people may not necessarily have had because, you know, you just your demand gen, you just, you know, bring leads kind of, you know, populate programs and run multiple email campaigns. So that will be something that will be more stringently monitored.
- [18:17]
Claudia Tirico
Awesome. All right, couple more questions. You know, I want to leave our Listeners with somebody, you know, they might be struggling with abm, what advice would you give marketers who are really struggling to achieve that success that they're likely seeing around them? You know, a lot of people have seen a lot of success with abm and there are people who obviously are still struggling with it. So what advice would you give them?
- [18:38]
Nadia Davis
I think the advice that is not novel but always holds true is that if you start small, and you're not starting small for the business necessarily, you're starting small for yourself. So you can figure out what is the scalable things that you have to keep in mind. You have to control, you have to get the reporting back from and optimize. And if you start too big, that data element will just gobble you up. But if you start small, 1, 2, 3 accounts, just see what you can do with that. Right? Do not spend any money just yet. Don't buy the $100,000 plat. You have tools at your disposal that you can use today. LinkedIn, by the way, is an ABM tool. Like, people underestimate that, but that is absolutely an ABM tool. You have email at your disposal. You have events. Figure out how to marry all of that, figure out how to score all of that, and figure out how to deliver that in a visual way to the sales team continuously, month after month, quarter after quarter, not a one and done. And then we're like 1.0 is ready. Boom. Proof of concept, right? Then you will position yourself, A, to show A win to the business and B, you will have the knowledge of what works and what doesn't. So you can now do six accounts or nine accounts. Don't start too much, because if you hit 100% this year with your 150 accounts and this is your first try, and you just happen to have a good year, Right? Next year they will ask for 300 accounts. Double digit growth, Right?
- [19:57]
Claudia Tirico
Exactly.
- [19:58]
Nadia Davis
Make it triple digit. So I think it's important to be able to scale what you're doing.
- [20:01]
Claudia Tirico
Great. All right, you got a little bit of time left before you get on stage. One last question for you that you hope the audience will walk away with from your session today.
- [20:11]
Nadia Davis
I think for the individual contributors that are being asked to run abm, it will give them the questions to ask of their leadership to consider. If you're asking me to do xyz, have you thought about all of these things? I know they will come up later in the journey. So what do you think about those things? What should I hedge for today? That's for the ICs and for the marketing leaders who want to move their team towards an ABM motion, I would say if you have this little pot of Money, this is Q4. We're going into Q4. You have this little pot of money. You're like, what do I spend this on? Google Ads, Some other programmatic, maybe demand gen campaigns, content syndication. Set that money aside for headcount. Hire yourself an OPS person able pay back in dividends tenfold.
- [20:54]
Claudia Tirico
Very, very good advice. Well Nadia, thank you so much for being with me today and for joining us at B2BMX east this week. It's always a pleasure and I love always getting new faces and powerful women in the space as well. So good luck at your presentation today. I can't wait to see it. And thank you all so much for listening and putting up with all the clinking in the background. We are live on the show floor at B2BMX East. We're going to be talking to a few more speakers for the rest of the week before we go, so stay tuned and be sure to subscribe on your podcast player of choice so you don't miss any of these net new interviews and all of our fun session replays from the event. And that's it for us. We're going to go get ready for this keynote and we'll catch you next week. So take care.