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- [00:01]
Gemma Davis
I think when we think about the start and how we align our own program, focusing on those accounts is not only business critical in terms of the growth rates for ServiceNow, it's actually really important to our analysts and our shareholders. If anyone's listened to any of our earnings calls, it's one of the first things our CEO talks about. And what's been awesome as part of the ABM team is actually being able to contribute to those multimillion dollar deals and actually having great representation of how the team are touching account not just to drive pipeline, but actually to accelerate revenue.
- [00:39]
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.
- [00:47]
Gemma Davis
Now we're bringing the insights from the stage to your ears.
- [00:50]
Claudia Tirico
I'm Claudia Tirico. And I'm Kelly Lindenow and this is the B2B Marketing Exchange podcast. Hello everyone and welcome to another weekly episode of the B2BMX podcast. So last week you heard my interview with Claire Noble and Michael Taylor of Agent 3 and Gemma Davies of ServiceNow right on the show floor at B2BMX East. We talked about everything from the increasing pressure of ROI expectations on marketers to the challenge of scaling ABM with reduced budgets. Claire, Michael and Gemma also took the stage at B2BMX east in Alpharetta, Georgia with their session titled With CMOs under pressure to do More with Less, where does this leave the challenge of truly scaling the CMO's jewel in their crown? They explore topics such as how to avoid scaled ABM programs being just a rehash of marketing generated MQLs that sales rejects, the role of automation and AI, and how we can better align sales and marketing to improve program efficiency without compromising effectiveness. So if you enjoyed my interview last week and want to hear more, tune into today's session replay to get the scoop. It's going down in three, two, one.
- [02:09]
Claire Noble
Hello everybody. Thank you for joining us. Appreciate it's the end of the day. You've got three of us on stage today, so I won't waste too much time with an introduction to myself. I've met a few of you already over the course of the last couple of days. My name's Claire noble. I lead Agent 3's North American business unit, really supporting clients in the region with implementing, optimizing, scaling their ABM initiatives. And I'm joined by Gemma Davis.
- [02:38]
Gemma Davis
Hi there. So Gemma Davis, I lead our global account based marketing strategy at ServiceNow. And for those of you who may not be familiar with ServiceNow. We are in the tech sector helping create great experiences for employees and customers around the world. Our ABM program, we'll get into this in a little bit but started about six and a half years ago. So we're, we're pretty advanced. We've learned what not to do and what to do and looking forward to bringing that to you all today.
- [03:06]
Michael Taylor
Hi everybody, my name's Michael Taylor. I am an associate director in our revtek team at agent 3. So we support clients with their marketing operations, use of technology and data. So looking forward to talking to you a bit about that today.
- [03:24]
Claire Noble
Fantastic. So very quick introduction for anyone who's not familiar with Agent 3. We were founded about 12 years ago solely with a focus on ABM. So account based marketing is our heartland. We're a full service agency today. We've grown to support across the whole customer life cycle. We focus on both enterprise technology clients, working really closely with Gemma and her team at ServiceNow as an example and also in the mid market supporting with high growth scale up clients. And that's really the focus of today's conversation. We all are being asked to do more with less and the challenge of scaling ABM is perennial but I think a huge focus on that at this moment in the market. And Gemma is going to be providing us with the enterprise perspective on that with Michael providing us with the more sort of mid market scale up perspective on that. So I'm here as your moderator. So where are we today? Needless to say, the market is constantly changing. We do know that one thing is true and that is that we are in the age of the customer. But more often than not marketing's missing the mark or not delivering on the promise. Certainly from an ABM perspective. And our contention is that account based go to market is the answer to this problem. But how that plays out might look quite different in an enterprise scenario versus a broader kind of at scale mid market environment. So we could talk about this through a lot of different lenses. We want to kind of focus on four key trends that we're seeing in the marketplace over the course of a year. 20% of your buyers may be in the market at any given time, which means per quarter only 5% are. What that really means is that 95% of your buyers are not in the market actively looking for solutions. There's been a talk at the conference already that you may have already heard about the Dark Funnel. There's a lot of touch points that you can influence but are untrackable before Your customers actually come to you. On top of which there's an increasing number of anonymous touchpoints. And we all know that buyers increasingly like to self serve before talking to one of your salespeople. Add to that the fact that decision making units are becoming ever more complex. Decision making times are increasing. Over the last 10 years, we've seen the average size of the decision making unit double in size and we're still talking about a linear funnel. But we know that the customer journey is not linear. We know that it's complex. There's multiple touch points with your brand and that causes challenges for us as marketers, particularly as budgets are being cut and we're asked to better engage our key customers and our key accounts. So with that, how do you drive maximum value and scale from your account based go to market motions? We're going to look at this through five lenses of ABM and again turn to Gemma for the enterprise perspective and my call for them all scale up mid market perspective. So with that jama, how is this playing out in the enterprise environment from an insight and intelligence point of view?
- [06:41]
Gemma Davis
Absolutely. So of all the things I have learned so far today, number one is to define your ABM strategy first. So I think just to be super clear for us at ServiceNow, our account based marketing program was set up to help sales close larger deals faster. So we're really, really focused on the top end of the triangle. We've got about 68 accounts that we truly treat as markets in their own right. So not only are we orchestrating all of the great things from across ServiceNow in service of those customers, but we're also really aligning the message and the value proposition to the business issues they care about most. We then have a one to few program which is essentially a set of clusters or groups of accounts that have similar business imperatives. And the reason why this is key is because really that's as kind of deep as we go. We are not targeting hundreds of thousands of accounts or even 1000 accounts. We are really, really tailoring and hyper focused on a very small number of accounts that represent nearly 40% of our global revenue. So that's a lot. I think when we think about the start and how we align our own program, focusing on those accounts is not only business critical in terms of the growth rates for ServiceNow, it's actually really important to our analysts and our shareholders. If anyone's listened to any of our earnings calls, it's one of the first things our CEO talks about. And what's been awesome as Part of the ABM team is actually being able to contribute to those multimillion dollar deals and actually having great representation of how the team are touching accounts, not just to drive pipeline, but actually to accelerate revenue.
- [08:20]
Michael Taylor
Yeah. Yes. And it's interesting because I think even if you are targeting a larger group of accounts, maybe maybe a thousand, that Gemma sort of. Sort of saying they're not necessarily targeting the same principles roughly apply. And we've heard already from Claire that only 5% of your accounts are actually in market at one given time. And so what's really essential as you look to build a sort of ABM at scale program is to not lose sight of that. What you don't want to do is replace a broken MQL funnel with an inefficient MQA funnel or marketing qualified account funnel. You want to really hone in on what the right threshold is when it comes to what is an actual account in market and then deliver that in a timely manner to your sales team. Not be taken in by sort of weak intent signals that you might get from certain platforms out there and really ensure that you focus on a quality over quantity approach exactly in the same way that ServiceNow would.
- [09:26]
Claire Noble
And speaking of, I know Gemma at ServiceNow that partnership with sales in initial account selection is so critical to find the right accounts to focus on to generate and support that pipeline. Can you talk to us a little bit about what that means in the enterprise environment where you might be working with sales over the course of a year or two years on an ABM program and maybe a step further and also what that means in a marketing environment as well?
- [09:53]
Gemma Davis
Absolutely. So I was talking to someone earlier and saying, a good day right now is when I don't get a call from a sales leader or one of our C suite about an account. And that's purely just because it means that we're in the right places doing the right things for the right accounts. It is so, so important. We hear about sales and marketing alignment all the time. We're all professional marketers. I know I don't need to reinforce that message. The big learning curve, I think for us though, was actually also about educating, empowering and inspiring our marketing teams. So how do we teach and engage and influence the marketing stakeholders around the ABM team to really support the bigger mission and make them feel part of it, even if they're not ultimately responsible and accountable for driving those ABM motions? We needed them to feel like they were part of the mission. We needed them to think about the world through our eyes. And in return we could give them access to customer insights, better customer data that could then help fuel and be scaled through additional programs. So a couple of the real practical things we did, number one, we went through a whole training process so we actually took 150 plus, it may even be more, closer to 180 now, people from across marketing, some from sales and our SDR teams and immerse them in the framework. And we actually used real servicenow customers and prospect accounts so that not only were they learning, but we were actually getting some output that we could then take to market and use. And again, not all of them are abmers. I wish we had a team of Abmers at 150, but it was absolutely imperative that they knew. And then the second thing was kind of building advocacy and champion programs. So elevating stories through our sales team, helping the business realize that perhaps traditional metrics and KPIs weren't a great measure of some of the things that we were doing. And so it was a great way to build those advocates and to help us scale the mission, the purpose and more importantly the insights that we were generating.
- [11:54]
Claire Noble
And I guess Michael, in the AT scale world, which is slightly more demand gen adjacent, at what point do you bring sales in? And I suppose in particular, if we're talking about moving away from MQLs to MQAs and placing importance on that, how do you bring sales along on that journey with you?
- [12:16]
Michael Taylor
Yeah, I think a lot of people probably in this room will feel the sales and marketing alignment pain. What we've seen done successfully is really bringing sales in at conception. So at the outset of any campaign or any particular strategy that you're going to put in place from an ABM perspective, bringing sales on that journey, from selection and insight that we've just talked about, through how you're actually going to deliver the campaign and really translate a lot of the key insights that you're going to drive, the engagement that you're going to drive throughout to the sales team. They want, they want to understand exactly what you're trying to achieve from the outset. And if you don't deliver that message clearly, then you already have a misalignment between the two teams. So that's absolutely essential, I think on the practical points, because I think that's a really good point to deliver a couple of those. For me, I'm very data driven, technology driven. It's how can I really simplify the actual insights that I'm providing, give very clear, direct, actionable insight to a salesperson and make it very, very clear what the next logical action is. If I can do that, then I'm well on my way to achieving success.
- [13:33]
Claire Noble
Fantastic. And delivering the right message clearly is very topical. Gemma, thinking about the role of storytelling and personalization, particularly in a world where you're trying to scale initiatives, how does that play out in your environment and ServiceNow in particular?
- [13:50]
Gemma Davis
Absolutely. So in an ABM context, I very rarely talk about personalization because I think a lot of people might mistake that with adding a logo or adding merge fields into a demand gen email campaign. I really try and focus on relevance by how do we understand what is really driving change within the industries and the markets that are impacting our customers? What are the imperatives and the initiatives that they are highlighting through their own annual reports, through their earnings calls and so on? And then how do we refine and align that message? And often everyone thinks, oh, every customer or every account is so different. But it is incredible when you really think about what are the common themes and threads between them. One of the best examples of this was us bringing two accounts together at some point, who both operated in a highly regulated market, so really, really struggled to openly talk to peers within their same market, but could have a really great dialogue with another organization of a similar size who were in a completely different market and area but had the same challenges around regulation and so on. And that level of insight, that level of data helps ensure that your storytelling is relevant in all of your pursuits. And once you have that narrative nailed, not only can you then roll that out across everything you're sending into a campaign at an enterprise level, but you also have insights again that you can scale throughout the organization. You've got messaging frameworks, tools and narratives that can be applied. So again, although we're at the tippy toe end, we're always thinking about scale, we're always thinking about reuse, and we're always looking for ways to inspire and to educate the rest of our marketing organization.
- [15:36]
Claire Noble
I think that's a really critical point, particularly at scale, because that is the question. How do you go beyond the cosmetic personalization? How do you actually deliver what feels like a very customer centric journey at scale?
- [15:51]
Michael Taylor
Yes, listening to Gemma is brilliant because instantly it inspires me to think about ways in which you can leverage what you have in your particular organization to try and achieve some of those same principles when it comes to storytelling. So in all honesty, it's very difficult to reach that level of depth and at scale model because there just isn't the bandwidth necessarily to achieve it, but you do. We all sit on now a very rich source of data across all of our different technologies. It's really just about how to leverage them. So whether you've got something like six sense or demand base that's providing you with clear account based intent or a digital footprint, it's about how can I sort of hone in on the specific data points that matter and then bring that to the engagement and the storytelling that I'm trying to achieve. So whether it's arming salespeople with particular products or topics of interest, or thinking about how maybe you can use certain insights or certain trends that you might see in a specific industry to sort of inform your advertising and the way you do that, that's the sort of key ways I think you can achieve that at scale.
- [17:06]
Gemma Davis
And if I can just add to that as well. Because I do think there is a fundamental place for tools and technology even at the kind of hyper targeted level foundationally. Everything we do starts with data and insight where we're constantly looking, we're constantly partnering with our insights team, our digital teams, et cetera, to get a kind of foundational view. It's kind of the next level where we're really, really jumping in. But I think it's really important to say that that's because that's our strategy. I know lots of marketers who are running incredibly successful, I would call ABM esque programs, but are really driving that message through the insights, through the intent signals that are coming through and again are achieving really great results as part of it.
- [17:50]
Claire Noble
I think what we certainly see working with so many clients in that enterprise space and enterprise minus one or two is actually we are probably more equipped than ever before to have that single view of the customer and really action those insights. But I'd love to do a quick poll check in here as to who feels like they actually do have an end to end view of their customer journey through their tools in their tech.
- [18:18]
Gemma Davis
I'm so glad no one raised their hand because I was just saying before we kind of came in, I was like if anyone does put their hand up and say I've got this nailed, then coffee cocktails are on me because we are still on that journey. Okay, we have one lucky winner at the back. It is really, really hard. And again, I know some ABM functions have insights, teams and data and analytics functions within their abm. Org. We rely on partnerships with different parts of our business. We rely a lot on our sales organization. So one of the most emailed Person, and probably engaged person is a data scientist who sits within our like digital group and reports into our sales. Org. And that's because again, they have access to certain insights through CRM, through sales engagements, et cetera, that are all critical and fundamental to everything that we do. And if we're not that deep into an account, we really can't do our job or do justice for the investment that we're spending.
- [19:18]
Claire Noble
One of the common pitfalls that we encounter for people who have either had maybe a bit of disillusionment with their ABM initiatives in their organization or are having a hard time maintaining that internal alignment is speed to market. And particularly with the pressures that everybody in this room is under the current kind of macroeconomic environment. How do you manage that at scale? And in particular, Gemma, I think you are best placed to give us some guidance with the way that ServiceNow is handling this.
- [19:51]
Gemma Davis
Have a highly engaged team that are so passionate about their work that they jump out of bed every day and want to get it done. I wish I could say there was like secret sauce for this. I'd say one of the things that we, we try and do is we built specific resources into the team for very specific needs. So over the last two years, we've built out a video capability function within the ABM organization. And that was intentional because we knew that video was having such a powerful impact on so many of our accounts that we needed to have the ability to turn around personalized videos quickly. We needed to have the ability to just find different ways in different channels. We actually over the last three days turned around a video for an exec briefing that happened this morning where we were just highlighting internal customers of our customer and why their brand means so much to them. And I got a text from one of our C switches saying that video nailed it. It not only set the tone for our partnership, but really reinforced to them that we understand their business, we are listening to people who represent their business and it just created a way more open dialogue for the transformation that we are going on together. So in terms of like speed to market, yes, there's high end stuff that takes a time. We have partners like Agent 3 who act as an extension of our group and our team. They absolutely help us scale and help us with speed. And then we also look at how we can create tools and templates so we have some materials and assets that have been incredibly successful in some of our biggest accounts. We'll templatize them, we'll remove any specific or confidential data and then we'll actually make it available on our sales success center and that is mainly used either by our field marketing or actually our Value Inspire Group is probably our number one audience that uses it. And again, it's just a way of them being able to do their best work, but present it in a way that's far more compelling and resonates far more with the accounts.
- [21:57]
Michael Taylor
Michael, you're probably expecting me to come up with a secret source from a technology perspective, I actually won't do that. What I'll say is technology really is the enabler. What you actually need to put the time into is the planning, the configuration and getting the actual tech set up in a way that allows you to then get to market quickly. It is worth investing time in mapping what the buying cycle looks like and then thinking about how to leverage some of the sophisticated functionality that you actually have at your disposal. This isn't about saying let's automate every piece, it's not possible, it's not achievable. But what it's about is really taking the time to think about what is the most impactful way of delivering our message, our particular activity to a set of accounts, and then ultimately delivering a changing experience based on where the buyer is in their journey, where the account is. You now have the tech to pinpoint where an account is. It's now just about making sure you put the plan around it to be able to achieve it.
- [23:05]
Claire Noble
And presumably that comes full circle back to the MQA discussion, which is what are those points at which we need to escalate and personalize throughout the journey?
- [23:13]
Michael Taylor
Spot on. And agreeing, what that definition is, what those thresholds are, what those handoff points are before ahead of time, that's the most the best way to impact.
- [23:25]
Claire Noble
And going back to our opening remark on delivering on the promise of ABM measurement and impact, it all comes back back to measurement and impact. What does that mean in the enterprise world? Gemma, this is a key topic for.
- [23:41]
Gemma Davis
Myself and many of my peers that I meet with weekly. So when we think about measurement and impact, because we work so closely with sales, we've adopted their frameworks, we leverage their language, we think about the things that they really care about. No surprise, these tend to be quite different from a traditional marketing dashboard that perhaps focuses on top of funnel initiatives. And so what we've tried to do is really balance the type of activities and the way that we talk about the work and the impact that the team have. Some of the best ways we've done that is by leveraging our Internal champions. So our sales team or our customers and have them kind of help tell the stories of the impact of the ABM work and the relationship they have with their abmers. At the end of the year there is always some customers that will call me directly and say I'm not going to lose. So and so am I. I'm not. They're going to be working with us next year and help us with the change management plan and so on. And again I think that's just the most powerful indicator of a marketer truly, truly aligned and embedded in the co development of a customer's journey. And ultimately our goal is to help our customers and build mutual and sustainable goodwill and value. And that is the best way to do it.
- [24:55]
Claire Noble
Fantastic. Same question to you Michael.
- [24:59]
Michael Taylor
Yeah, I think Gemma's just referred to those top of funnel metrics though. I think if you focus solely on the top of funnel metrics then you have a ceiling on the impact that marketing has in your organization. We now have the ability to show a broader influence beyond who sourced new logo partners pipeline. It isn't that race to the bottom who added a certain lead to the system who's ultimately responsible for the source of this particular deal that is important. There's no doubting that and I'm sure that's the reality for many of you here today. But we can now show influence beyond that and not just on new logo pipe but also on the full funnel on customers that you're bringing in that you've had for a while. How do you you can now show that actually marketing has a much broader impact on all of those pieces of the funnel as well.
- [25:55]
Claire Noble
Wanted to remove the gray outs for you. Bring us back to some of those takeaways before we move on to our closing remarks. I think what you've just said connects us right back to trying to remember which point it was. Now I want to. It was the organizational alignment Gemma. But when you're focusing on the customer and building that mutual value that tracks all the way back up to the top to your shareholder value and ultimately those metrics that are going to be front of mind on the CMO agenda. Michael, I wonder if you could touch very briefly just because talking about ABX so often you can't help but talk about certain platforms like Demand Base or six Sense and the role in measurement. Just some of the observations you're seeing with how those are deployed in an ABX world.
- [26:47]
Michael Taylor
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's what I was referring to that just there about sourced, who sourced it you can move the conversation on because we now have tools like six Sense Demand Base that give us a full sales and marketing view. It's not just showing you what's marketing's contribution to a deal or what sales contribution to a deal. You now have ability to actually see both functions input which should move the conversation around your organization, give people confidence that actually each part of the growth organization have a role in a deal. Getting across the line We've talked about the complexity of the buyer journey that shows up whenever we look at data within these platforms. And so really they can be leveraged very well to show that it's not just about who came up with the original source of the deal. It's actually these are all the touch points that were required to bring it to close.
- [27:40]
Claire Noble
Perfect. We do want to leave some time for Q and A, so I won't read this verbatim, but we did want to leave you with some takeaways from this. And I think in us having this discussion around ABM at sort of both ends of the traditional triangle, it's been very clear that actually there are some very mutual mutual takeaways and considerations. Again, definitions of ABM may vary, but we contend that the role of an account based go to market approach is ever more relevant today, providing you're taking into account some of these considerations. So the first, as we said, being led by the customer, continuous optimization enabled by tools, tools and technology, making sure that ABM is complementary and working with your other marketing and brand initiatives and not competing with that internally. Again, alignment around the customer and creating those mutual points of value is key within that prioritizing investment. Again, we're talking about 20% of your customers effectively generating, you know, the majority of your revenue. But largely we see organizations that aren't prioritizing investments accordingly. On top of which it's not a choice necessarily between kind of precision, top of the triangle, one to one ABM or kind of blended at scale approach. If you start with objectives aligned to your corporate strategy, the right model will follow for you and obviously that has to warrant the ROI for you as well. So we wanted to leave you with some of those closing thoughts and observations at both ends of the ABM spectrum and really open up the floor if there are any questions for Gemma or Michael.
- [29:29]
Gemma Davis
Great question. The words that I'm going to Give up on 1st January, 31st December this year is scale. Just to test it the minute I hear it. Especially because in my world and in my years of experience, it's the complete opposite to what I see ABM as. That said, ways that we can scale it is leveraging technology, because technology can help us with the buying signals, can help us with how we prioritize accounts, how we serve accounts with certain messages or areas. And that's why I always say ABM should never be compared to other marketing tactics, because really, it's the orchestration of all of those tactics. We don't stop our digital programs for IBM accounts. We don't limit and put restrictions on other programs that we think are going to be really powerful. But what we do say is show us how relatable it is to what this account is trying to achieve, and that helps us scale a little bit. The other key thing with scale and how we addressed it was our asset portal. And some of that was inspiration from others. One person who's in the room who did this at a prior company too. But it was a way we started to realize that actually we don't need to reinvent custom content all the time. And we should never, ever start with custom content. We should always start with what are the big rock initiatives that the company already has planned and how can we elevate the experience for this account? How can we just make it feel extra special? How can we guide them through a journey at our annual conference that is so relatable to them and makes them feel like the hero at the end of it? Then we look at our industry events and activities happening around the world, because again, we have decision makers based in lots of different countries, and we don't just want to serve the ones in the headquarters. We want to enable all the decision makers around the world to have that great experience too. So hence why you need to have all these other markets marketing teams on board, because we need to rely on them to help us navigate it. And then the final thing is when we do create custom assets or when we do respond to a specific brief or an RFP from a client, we then try and reuse that content. We try and use it to reshape some of the narrative for our brand narrative, for our narrative at a workflow level. And so they're just some of the ways that are a bit more tactical and. But that's why part of our biggest strategy six years ago was to build a center of excellence early on so that we had a team that could capture a lot of this insight and gold and then help the rest of the business leverage it. So it takes time to build, and it also takes investment and trust, which is why talking Sales language, aligning to corporate business strategy is so, so important.
- [32:18]
Michael Taylor
Yeah. So it varies with different clients that we work with. But I always say that the best way to have sales engage with MQAs is to ensure they do it as a starting point in the system that they operate in, so in their CRM and then to be very clear about the actions that they need to take. And to be honest, what I've seen done most effectively is clear guidelines on who takes what action. So if you've got a BDR and a sales function function, so AES working together, you think about who takes the right contact based on job level, for example. So for example, more senior people are naturally going to be taken by the ae prospecting, you know, at the MQA to lower job levels done by the bdr and really establishing what those sort of rules of engagement are between that part of the function when you pass that across. The other thing is to provide them with a real clear prioritized list in CRM. So ensuring you build the right list views that show them exactly their latest set of MQAs and give them really clear instruction on how to work through those. So those are the two sort of most effective ways I've seen it done.
- [33:31]
Gemma Davis
One thing I'll just add onto that as well that we found really helpful was to agree upfront with sales. What does the ideal customer profile look like actually at what level and stage do you want this? Because for some of our larger, most complex customers, they don't want to wait until they've had four or five interactions. If there is any interaction from a board level member or a C suite member in any of our top accounts, we need to tell sales about that within like an hour. We're not quite there yet, but we want to be notifying them and informing them. And I think by defining that criteria with them, whether it's a top customer and a one to one thing, or if it's actually just a net new logo that we're warming up, agreeing that with sales early on helps just with that trust. Because then sales know that the quality you're handing over is meeting a criteria that they've agreed to. Otherwise you're just gonna flood them with things that they can't really understand or qualify and they won't follow it up. They say they will, but they won't. Great.
- [34:34]
Claire Noble
I think we've got time for one more question, but after this we will be at the booth directly across the way, so do feel free to come over and have a chat.
- [34:47]
Gemma Davis
Yeah, I can Tell a really personal story on that as well. So the answer is there's no, like, secret to it. I think part of it is don't wait. If, if these accounts are absolutely imperative to your long term business strategy and these are the ones that are going to drive the greatest impact to growth or to whatever the goals may be, you shouldn't stop and not do it because of sales because often that salesperson will be changed quite quickly, in my experience. So what we did when we started our ABM program was I literally got on a plane and went around the world and facilitated account strategy workshops with our first four, four to six one to one accounts. And before I showed up at any of those workshops, we would do tons of research. I'd leverage agency partners, but I would also spend a ton of time on planes reading annual reports, looking up connection points, googling and searching people on LinkedIn, like, really getting to know this account. And I remember going into a workshop in New York for a very large financial services campaign customer and sharing all this information. And of course I felt great because I had spent weeks preparing for this because I knew this was such an important account for the business. And halfway through the workshop, we break, we go for lunch, and the rep kind of pulls me to one side and he's like, jem, that was incredible. But I feel useless because you know more about my customer than I do. And I've led that account for nearly a year. And all of a sudden I was like, I just want the world to swallow me up. So I think it's really fine balance. Go do the insights. But what we do now is we learn all those insights, we embrace it all and we package it up. And then we sit down with the account exec before we even go into any kind of account planning or strategy workshop. And we talk through what we found. Like, hey, what do you know about your account? Here's what we think about your account. We challenge some of the perceptions, but we do it in a really safe environment. And what that does then is enable them to kind of get up to speed. They feel great because they've just been handed some really great insight, that often we have the tools, the technologies and the ways to source that that they don't have or they just don't have time to do it. And then when they go into that meeting, they feel great because there's no surprises. And actually they can have a really good dialogue. And they're also armed then to push back on some of the product leads and product marketing people in the room who are saying, we need to sell security. That's what. What they need. And we're like, they don't have an imperative around security. No one in the C suite cares right now. Security is a bad example because everyone needs it. But you get the gist because product people want to sell products, they want to sell solutions. And what we try and do with ABM is just focus on where can we support the customer and let's focus on selling them value in areas where we know we can really deliver. And then we'll grow security and other lines of. Well.
- [37:38]
Claire Noble
We can take a very quick question.
- [37:43]
Gemma Davis
We have the CXO dashboard of joy and love. So there are a few examples of it. So Bill McDermott, our CEO, is incredibly renowned in the tech sector. So you can imagine he has his list and his network and we want to be really careful and mindful of that. So we want to be aware of those relationships. But we also don't want the whole company or to share the public list of who all these execs are. But what we did do was spend time mapping stakeholders, which often I would map from a sales account plan rather than anything else. And yes, that doesn't always match the CRM data. That's the first hurdle that we have to overcome. And then what we did was we mapped it. We leveraged some tools that helped us for, like, social platforms. We set up like, listening tools, watch lists, Google alerts. It's free, you can set it up on execs, you can kind of watch and follow. And now we color code and we look at interactions. We've introduced a kind of few versions of an exec sponsorship program. And again, that's not only built on, hey, this person knows a lot about this industry or business, but we're actually looking at like, common values, beliefs, systems, things that these executives will have in common. So what does our executive have in common with an executive at bank of America? Do they have children around the same age? Do they believe in the same causes? Are they kind of set up for success in terms of truly building a bond that goes beyond work but truly builds value? So it's not perfect, it's very manual. There is someone who literally lives in that list and is constantly connected, connecting dots. But it is so powerful. If there's one thing that you do, that kind of exec engagement piece is, yeah, it's so, so important.
- [39:30]
Michael Taylor
And I'll just add that level of depth. Certainly not possible just purely with technology. But if you would like me to demo how Demandbase or Sixth Sense. Do that with the buying group in terms of engagement, who's in engagement, then I'll be more than happy to do that for you afterwards. So that's what I was learning that from.
- [39:52]
Claire Noble
Fabulous. Well, thank you so much, everyone.
- [40:01]
Claudia Tirico
All right, that is a wrap on Claire, Michael and Gemma. I hope the session helped shine a light on the constant challenge of doing more with less and how to rapidly adjust to the new customer journey with abm. Thank you all so much for tuning in. If you have any feedback or questions, you can always find us on LinkedIn. And of course, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you get first dibs on all the new episode drops. This season. We're getting really, really close to the B2B Marketing Exchange event in Scottsdale, Arizona. Don't miss your chance to catch sessions like this in real life. There is a discount code for our listeners in the show notes, so be sure to check that out and get more information. We really hope to see you there. Thanks again folks and take care.