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We think of ABX as a very coordinated customer centric go to market that aligns sales and marketing as well as our investment in resources to our highest growth opportunity in accounts. So basically spend more money on the people that are going to give you higher growth, more money, time, resources both in dollars and in people, less on those that don't.
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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.
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Now we're bringing the insights from the stage to your ears.
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I'm Claudia Tirico. And I'm Kelly Lindenow. And this is the B2B Marketing Exchange podcast. Hey folks, welcome back to another episode of the B2BMX podcast. We've got a really great session replay for you from B2BMX east in Alpharetta, Georgia today. I know you're all eager to hear about how marketers from various enterprises tackle their strategies in today's satur buyer driven world. So today you'll hear from Brittany Bartlett, Cisco's VP of Global field marketing. Cisco competes in a highly competitive and complex market, providing customers with solutions to their most critical technology issues. The company needed to modernize its marketing engine to drive growth and needed to make the most challenging shift from scale based to account based marketing. So in this episode you'll hear all about how Cisco moved toward an account based strategy to strike a balance between targeting its most valuable customers and ensuring they invested in the most effective marketing levers to drive demand. You'll hear all about it from Britney herself. So let's roll the tape in 3, 2, 1.
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It is such an honor to get to be here with you today. Want to do a quick introduction so you know who I am and what we're going to talk about? So my name is Brittany Bartlett. I am coming to you as a, as a peer. We're going to have a conversation about a little bit of a case study. I'm going to share with you a little bit about what we've done at the organization that I work at. I work at Cisco Systems. Maybe you've heard of us, maybe you haven't. We're a technology company, B2B tech company. And I have the honor today of leading global field marketing. I have had a number of things though that I have done. I've actually been at the company for over 18 years, which is wild. Never ever thought I'd be in one place that long. But I always say I had the opportunity to sort of do all the things and so I've stayed because I've had opportunities to kind of move around. I spent 15 years actually in sales doing a lot of what we call marketing in sales, which was an interesting thing. A lot of go to market. I've done operations and then I've actually spent the last three actually going on four years now in marketing in a couple of different primarily field marketing roles. I also had the opportunity to build our virtual demand center. So all of our SDRs, we have a team of over 200 SDRs globally. So I actually established, established that program and built that out and then was asked to come over kind of formally into marketing to say, hey, how do we connect all of the demand gen and all of the things that we're doing and how do we evolve so that we align sales and marketing in our holistic go to market more closely? And I will say that's sort of the place that is my really happy place. I love the intersection, I kind of nerd out on the intersection of sales and marketing and customer experience and how all of that actually improves outcomes for our customers, which is actually the thing that's the most important but can also drive really, really incredible growth for companies. And I've had the opportunity to do that for one company but across lots of different businesses. I'll share with you a little bit about sort of the complexity of what we deal with, but hopefully what we can actually talk about is how do you actually or what we've done And I'd love to hear more about what you all have done to look at your market and go, hey, we all don't have unlimited money, time or resources so how do we actually drive the highest growth? I'll share with you a little bit of the journey about we've been on and then I'd love to hear either during or after the session more about what you guys are doing and hopefully you can take some things away that we can apply every day. I'm going to try to make this as practical as possible of like this is literally what we went and did and happy to answer any questions following that. So little bit about Cisco. So you probably or may have heard the name. We enjoy the position of actually being the number one most valuable pure B2B brand according to Interbrand on the planet. That's pretty exciting. Most people have seen our logo. Most people have heard of the company. If you're in B2B, particularly B2B tech, most people have no idea what we actually do. That's a real problem. We run a pretty Complex business. So we actually, our core business is networking products, right? The things that make the Internet work. Wireless routing, switching. Not the sexiest products in the world, but they are literally what makes the Internet work. So can't connect without them. But we've also expanded over many years and are a player in some really, really important markets. Security, maybe you've heard of that. Cybersecurity, right. AI, huge piece of our business, data center. But most people either A, have no idea what we do or B, if they know us, it's because they've been in tech for a long time and so they know that we do this core part. But maybe we haven't earned the right to actually go into some of these other markets. And so we compete every day with fast moving startups. Some of you may work for them, right? And so it's a real challenge to go, hey, we have to scale across thousands of customers, lots and lots of different businesses and compete like a startup in many of the markets that we're in while also dealing with a lot of big company stuff. Right? And so the actual reality is the challenges are not that different. Whether we work at really, really large companies or we work at really small companies. Maybe the resources, maybe the way that you communicate and collaborate can be a little bit less complex or a little bit easier, I don't know. But it always comes with its other challenges too. So sort of the challenge that we've been faced with over the last few years is hey, we've got this really amazing brand that we can leverage, which is incredible. But we also have. I'm going to see if. There we go, probably the same challenges all of you do. And I'm going to call it an opportunity because I like to frame challenges as opportunities. But first of all, we absolutely have as a business very, very high accelerated growth expectations either in individual businesses or holistically as a company or in certain markets around the globe. Contrary to popular belief, we do not have an unlimited budget. As a matter of fact, by just pure SG and A spend, we actually spend far less than most of our competitors on marketing. In particular, we tend to favor investment in R and D. And so that is a unique challenge that we have to raise. And maybe unique, maybe not, some of you may deal with that, but also reduced resources. So very public. So this isn't private information. We've gone through two rounds of significant cuts. That's public information that absolutely impacts the marketing department as it does every other organization. Maybe some of these things are familiar to all of you. Maybe they're not, but you go, okay, so in this environment, how do we then think about how to prioritize our limited budget and resources? That's what I'm going to walk you through today. What did we do? What have we done over the last couple of years and what has that gotten us so far? And then hopefully we can have a conversation about how this hopefully applies for you. So the first thing is we have been on a multi year journey to really say, okay with growth expectations, limited budget and resources. The anchoring point for us was all about improving marketing roi. So yes, do we need to have top line growth? Do we need to add more to the pipeline? Is it important that we're handing off more meetings to the sales organization? Absolutely. But with the limited dollars that we have, we have to show that those are operating as efficiently as humanly possible. So ROI has been a core anchor for us. And so in order to do that, we've been on a multi year journey where we've said, okay, we're going to look at pulling key levers in the business to try to improve ROI over time. So the first thing we did was actually start with really simplifying our campaign themes and market. I just mentioned we cover a lot of really, really complex areas of technology. We have over 30,000 products. There is no way that we can do product led specific marketing. The number of audiences, the businesses we cover, every segment on the planet, almost every market on the planet in terms of small businesses scaling up to the largest enterprises in the world, service providers, et cetera. So it's all about how do we simplify our campaign themes and get really, really important about the top level messages aligned to the outcomes our customers are trying to drive. I know we all want to do outcome based marketing to our customers, but decid which ones were important that actually met our growth targets was really important because that meant telling some people, usually general managers who own our products. No. Which they did not love. But you have to do that aligned with growth and data. Right. What is it that's actually gonna drive opportunity for you? Number two, and this I will say being in field marketing, coming from the field, from a sales perspective, this was the hardest. We prioritized certain markets and certain countries where we were going to deploy the full arsenal of our marketing tactics. And then words where we were not, that makes making really, really hard choices about your highest growth markets and which ones are not your highest growth markets. And that did mean that as the salespeople popped up and said, but that means our competitors are going to take this market. And you went, yes, they are. That's a really, really hard conversation to have. But we had to do that because otherwise we were peanut butter spreading our very, very limited budget and resources around the whole globe. So we couldn't actually be effective anywhere. It made someone feel really, really good that we showed up to a small event and had a booth there that ultimately didn't return anything in terms of opportunity or pipeline as opposed to not being there. But we were able to prove that when we actually invested in a much bigger, more impactful thing in another market and that turned into real opportunity, that that was the right decision to make. Hard decision number two. The third thing, and this is the one I'm going to dive into the most, is actually deploying what is a very popular topic obviously at this conference, for all of the right reasons, what we have defined as abx. And I'm going to define for you what ABX is because obviously we heard in the keynote this morning there are lots of definitions. So I will share in a minute what our definition is. But really thinking about, okay, again, three things. One, what are the key messages in market? Two, what markets are important to us to drive growth? And three, which accounts are actually the ones that have the highest growth opportunities for us? And so that's the one I'm going to dive into because that's sort of where we've been on where we are in the journey. Our plan is to then move to more full life cycle marketing. We're establishing a new customer marketing and lifecycle marketing function that probably seems kind of odd for a very large software company, but in reality it's something that we've sort of fallen into, but something that we're going to be expanding further and then fully we do have a plan to get to full lifecycle revenue marketing and sort of the vision of what that looks like over time. So this is sort of the journey we couldn't jump all the way ahead to the end, which sort of seems like, okay, well, why not? You have to take. For us, we had to take these other steps to say, okay again, we can't jump to driving change if we haven't prioritized where we're asking our people and where we're spending our dollars. So let's talk a little bit about some of the keys to success. For us, it was all around, number one, data had to be the thing that we were anchoring on to make all of these decisions. And so we look at all kinds of information, right? We all have so much data at our fingertips and we have really, really smart data scientists that help us do this. But they are absolutely using ML models and also now AI to help us pull out the insights. But really prioritizing and understanding. When we look at markets as an example, it's a pretty complex. We had to look at not only where our sales targets were, where our growth targets were, where the opportunity for our highest growth products was. We also look at GDP and we also GDP growth in certain markets and we also look at concentration of highest growth accounts. That is part of the things. Well, that all goes into a really complex scoring model that I do not pretend to know all the details about, but at the end of the day produces for us clusters of markets that help us understand how we deploy our different tactics in market and then also allows us to again use some of that data to identify which accounts we go after. And I'll go into that in more detail in a minute. Number two is all about our processes and our platforms. So yes, there's a tech stack piece of this. I'm not going to show a tech stack slide because we all have, you know, kind of, you know, what the different components of the tech stack are. But we had to make the tech stack work harder. But most importantly for us is we had to improve the process. How are we actually operating differently when we're talking about something at this scale? I don't care what scale you're operating at. The truth is, if we got to create the right connection points, who is the person who's responsible talking to that person and what are they trying to accomplish is a really important piece of the process. Right. Because this is a lot of complex business. We had to get buy in at every step of this journey. Right. When you're talking a product and you're talking to general managers who own those products, getting them to agree on the campaign themes that we're going to be taking to market and how that aligns to our customers was really critical. When we got to markets, I just talked about the really uncomfortable conversation with our sales and our sales general managers. But they had to be bought in that this is the way that we were going to drive growth. And ultimately that also meant same thing for accounts. Right. And so that's a detail I'll go into here in a minute. And then third was all about organizational design. Because the reality is we had people who were doing something different before and we need them to do something new. And not only it's not enough to just say, hey, go do this thing, but do you have the skills to actually be able to do that? And are we providing you the tools to be able to do that as well? And so that's been a big component of what we've done to help drive this change. So first of all, I said I would define abx. What do we think ABX is? We think of ABX as a very coordinated customer centric go to market that aligns sales and marketing as well as our investment in resources to our highest growth opportunity and accounts. So basically spend more money on the people that are going to give you higher growth, more money, time, resources, both in dollars and in people, less on those that don't. Some people call that account based go to market. Some people call it account based strategy. I don't care what name you put on it. This is how we define it. So I'll just tell you when I talk about abx, for us, this is the go to market strategy. Within that we deploy different tactics. For us, ABM is a tactic, right? That is a way of us for approaching those accounts. I realize everybody may have a different view on that, just telling you how we think about it, so happy to debate that at another time. But this is how we approach it. So for us, we tier our accounts, right? And then we align how we go and target them. And when I say one to one, one to few, one to many or non target accounts, I'll show you exactly. But that is across both marketing execution as well as sales execution. So that's been a really critical step for us as we've been part of this journey is actually to get our sales teams to align as well. From a coverage perspective, that is still part of the journey, but is something that we are seeing actually happening in this year and that's proving to be really successful. All right, so we know this is some old Gartner data, right? But I think it's. How did we convince people that this was the right strategy? Well, we knew an account based strategy would drive growth. And so these are the stats from Gartner, right. In terms of the NMI on a pipeline and the increases that you can see. But I can tell you when we did our own pilot, we started sort of in a pilot in the United States, which was one of our larger markets because we knew we could see an impact. And a couple of the things that we saw five times larger deal sizes for those that we were targeting through our ABM programs than those that were at the bottom in tier four. And we saw a 30% increase in average opportunity size as well, as well as close ratio. Excuse me. So, yeah, 5x times average deal size, 30% increase in close ratio, which was pretty fantastic. We also saw that those accounts bought more across our, what we call architectures, our different technology groups, and we were selling more of them EAs or what we call whole portfolio agreements. Right. So effectively they were adopting more than just one of our core technologies, which is a really important indicator for us in terms of long term success. So that was sort of our proving ground. A lot of questions that I get is, okay, how did you determine who the accounts were? What data did you use to determine your highest value target? You can absolutely go to your sales team. Everybody in sales is going to go. I got my quota, I got my list of accounts and I categorized them. ABC Baby D. Usually that is based off of bookings. How much did this person spend with me last year? How much growth did I get on that account that I then need them to spend that next year? If you're looking for growth, do you always want to go back to the accounts that spent the most with you last year? In our business, no. Depends on how much wallet share you've actually gotten from that account, not how much they spent with you. The opportunity is how much could they spend with you, not how much are they spending today. So this was a really important difference that we also had to accept. Explain in terms of getting alignment, right? Yes. Here's our total addressable market. Here is who we define as our ideal customer. Who are our high growth target accounts, meaning those that fit our ideal customer profile but have the most wallet for us to go capture. Because they're spending it with our competitors, they're not spending it at all. But they have a new project or we haven't gotten to that buying center. Those could all be reasons. Right? But who are our highest growth and wallet opportunity accounts? That is a really, really important distinction. Right. And that is something that as marketers, we can come with that customer intelligence and insight that most of your sales teams typically are not looking at. Right. So I would really, really encourage you to lean in here. This is how we did it. It looks really complex, but I think really it's looking at three, three vectors. First of all, what is our strategic position in this account? How much are they spending with us versus our competitors? Bless you. How many of our different technologies are they actually looking at and how fast are they to adopt technology? I'm sure you have your own version of this in your business, right? What is it that Makes them someone who's early on the adoption curve for a new technology or expansion or thinking differently versus those that may be out there just buying whatever technology or whatever solution is best in the organization that you provide and then cobbling out all together. That's our version of this. Right? But I'm sure that there's something similar for you. We then looked at who are accounts to acquire, which ones do we need to upsell, which ones we need to cross sell. And we did that across product solutions and also services. And then finally we look at, okay again that competitive engagement versus Cisco engagement, meaning out in the ether, if they're engaging on the topics that are really important to us and this is where our intent data was super, super critical, how engaged are they with us versus our competitors? So where do we sit? So we know how much work we need to do in the early stages of the funnel. They say, hey, this may be a really, really important account for us, but we need to do a heck of a lot of awareness and thought leadership and relationship building with them before they are ever going to give us a seat at the table to actually talk about an opportunity. So that really helped us understand where do we plot them in terms of our marketing and sales. Coordinated action and these things together is what allowed us to then go, okay, based on the score. This is a big scoring model, right. Where do the accounts rank overall? So it's not just a pure dollar calculation. Yes, dollars and wallet are important. You also got to know where do I stand in this account? Because like in our example, you may have someone who has a ton of dollars that we should potentially go after. And you know what, we had a really bad experience and the CIO hates us and they're never going to take a meeting and we are going to waste hours and hours and cycles of time. And you've got to know that. Right? And so those are some of the that we had in helping determine these accounts. So in terms of our account based go to market activation, this was where I start to think about process. Right? You could look at this and go well it's organizational design, but I really think about process here. And so yes, we've got our highest growth accounts, we've got our growth accounts, right. Sort of tier two. You've got at scale high value targets but maybe aren't at that very top. And then we've got everybody else, maybe non target accounts, but we still want to capture them in the market. So how do we take the full breadth of our marketing kind of capability and apply that. So again, you're spending the most money, time, resources, effort at the top of the pyramid, less at the bottom. But you don't want to miss someone who's a market. Right? So what are we doing? Baseline campaigns, digital basic retargeting, SEO website, email nurture. The stuff that you're going to do anyway, that's relatively free or low cost, that's what we apply as our baseline campaign. Everybody gets that. We capture those that are in market, we do basic retargeting. We absolutely get those that weren't anywhere on our target list. And then we can start to see intent and we can do all the normal marketing things. Do an email nurture, qualify them as a lead, have an SDR follow up. Right? Okay, so we've got the basics, but what do we do as we start to go at the pyramid? We do really, really targeted digital and demand gen for our high target accounts. So this is where we start investing in paid social content syndication, making sure that they're on invites to some of our high target event lists, doing more outbound, specifically with our account development reps, having them help support that based off customer intent data. So again, we're applying a little bit more money, little more resources as we go up the stack, much more personalization. And at the very, very top, those are fully bespoke campaigns. And the way that we divided this is the campaigns team, kind of corporate campaigns team, baseline campaigns and DG up to what we call tier three. But they cover the whole stack, right? That's like covering all your bases. We have evolved our field team to be what most people call hybrid abmers. Right? They do some level of field marketing, they have responsibility. And I'll talk about what their responsibilities are here in just a moment. But they really are responsible for that top end of the pyramid. And it is their responsibility to ensure that we have really, really coordinated action with their field counterparts. One of the biggest challenges, and I'm sure this applies for everybody, was getting the sales team to realize that we're not going to do a lot of accounts. Like, like 15 accounts, 10 accounts. At the very top, it's five. That was a really, really hard conversation because they're like, we don't do this for everybody. I'm like, yes, I'm sure you do. So this was all about making sure that we can do it again for those highest target, highest growth opportunities. So one of the other things that was really critical, I mentioned earlier that I helped establish our virtual demand center that has proven to be an awesome opportunity to put the pieces together because we actually have been able to take and deploy our SDRs and our ADRs very strategically aligned to this pyramid. That may sound for many of you, like, well, yeah, of course for us, we were using a much more at scale, sort of traditional inbound model for the virtual Demand Center. And now we've deployed ADRs really from that top third of the pyramid to ensure that we can proactively go out and target some of those customers, while also ensuring that we have a traditional inbound funnel that applies all of the normal tactics that you would expect. But it's really, really important because what this means is particularly at those top two peers, we call it pods, but basically account team, field marketer, adr. They are a pod. Together we expect them to be meeting weekly or bi weekly to talk about progress in the accounts. They are absolutely involved in integrated account planning. And I don't know if you guys ever deal with this, but for us, we have this thing where salespeople go, I don't want an ADR call on my account. I don't know this person. I don't want them calling. They're too junior. Guess what? If you want to be in this program, you will leverage your adr, Period. End of story. Not up for debate. Because otherwise what we get is we sent you all this stuff and you never followed up because you told us you didn't have time. So that's kind of a hard, fast rule for us in terms of wanting to be in this program. So let's keep moving here maybe. All right. Yeah. Adr, field marketer and account manager, or for us, account team. Yeah. And so they do integrated account planning together, and then they do what I think some people call, we call them basically ABX standups, basically weekly or bi weekly to talk about progress in the accounts, share insights, that kind of thing. Absolutely. So for the role of field marketer, we had to really go in and define what we were asking of our field marketers as we evolved their role. We had very traditional field marketing before. Lots of sales enablement, lots of field events, lots of insights. And we really wanted them to now take a much more proactive role in leading and actually developing the overall plans. And so, first of all, we do ask our team to be business leaders first and marketers second. Their job is to know the customer, know the customer, know the market, know how this opportunity aligns to the broader goals of the business, and make sure we are investing appropriately. This was a hard one for a lot of people on Our team to go to people who are subject matter experts. We all love what we do, right? Our teams do too, and say, hey, we want you to come as a subject matter expert. You've got to be a business leader first. And then what are the tactical things that we're asking you to do? Well, we want to make sure that you, number one, are driving new demand through your accounts, right? The target accounts that you are aligned to. Number two, if there is an active opportunity in pipeline, but it's not on your ABX list, that's okay. Get it involved, get it enrolled in one of the campaigns included in some of our dg, make sure the campaign team is aware because we have to support opportunities in pipeline and opportunity in pipe is not always going to equal an account that's on the target account list. So that's super important. Number three, we needed them to get more engaged with customer marketing. And we know that customer stories, customer evidence, customer success and wins is a critical, critical part of underscoring the success of our campaigns. And so we asked them to be very connected with customer marketing. That was a critical piece. And then number two, insightful audience acquisition. We put an incredible emphasis on high target C level engagement accounts. We needed to make sure that we were not just inviting what we call friends and family, the same people that we all know that we come to every event that we love, but we need some new people there. So we actually asking the field marketers to own and drive that. And then finally, of course, support sales and partner enablement. We primarily go to market through resale partners in multiple different parts of the channel. And so we do ask them to go there. So this is the core foundation of when we define the roles and responsibilities of a field marketer. This is what we are asking them to do. I don't know how wildly different that is for many of you, but this is sort of the evolution that we've gone through the other way it is how we actually collaborate. So this is actually within marketing. But I mentioned this concept of pods. So we have the smaller pod, right, that they're meeting on a weekly basis, talking about accounts weekly or bi weekly basis. But we also like how do you coordinate with all the people? Because there's a lot of people for us, there's a lot of different functions that have to go in and we need to know if you're in field marketing, what is the campaign team doing, what is the content that our customers are going to see, what's coming out that I could leverage so that I'M not creating fully bespoke content every single time, but I can actually drive personalization. How does that actually get into the SDR outreach sequences for us? We use outreach salesloft, take your pick. But whatever sales engagement platform they are using, what is it that actually shows up there and how is our content being leveraged? Are we using the same offers? Are we drawing the same drive to what's landing in market and what's not? And so we have teams, we've got campaign teams that sort of operate in pods on a weekly basis and then we go out and we talk to the group that's actually doing execution. That's usually on a monthly basis, but we actually have a business cadence about sort of this pod operating model, who's in them and there's a who's on first for every one of these. This is Susie's part time job. I don't know why I picked up Susie today from everybody, but this is Suzy's part time job and she's showing up just to kind of have this conversation. That is not how these run. This is somebody's full time role and they know that. This is the group of stakeholders that they are accountable to or peers that they are accountable to. And everybody's got to show up and do their part, otherwise it doesn't work. So this has been a really big game changer for us. The other thing has been all about how we invest in our people. So really thinking we have this concept of a legendary team. We want our team to be inspired to be out doing legendary work. So how do we help them do that? Well, we had to make a number of changes to how we actually help people be successful. One of them is the slide I just shared like, hey, I wrote your role down in a lot of detail. There is like a whole playbook behind the one slide that I just shared that literally says, this is your job, this is what we expect of you. Here's your KPIs and here's how you show success. So you also can see your career path within the organization. That is something that I think all of us think about doing, but not a lot of us do because most of us are moving so fast. It was a lot of work to sit back as an organization and as a leadership team and go, we want to dive in and just do like, no, we have to set the team up for success in a very, very different way. And so a lot of this was not only asking the team holistically to take a new mindset about how we were going to market and how we, we thought about our role, but also actually going through a lot of work, administrative work that probably felt like busy work at the time. Like, oh my gosh, we're not out doing marketing, talking to customers. We're focused on internal. But I call it slowing down to go faster. It was all about actually creating a detailed field marketing playbook. How do you operate? What is planning? What does activation look like? What are the metrics and measurement that we're going to be holding you accountable to? We had to do a ton of work to actually talk about how is it that we're actually able to operate within the systems and tools that we had. This is going to sound super crazy. Our marketers before six months ago did not have access to Salesforce. Yeah, super exciting. So that was step number one. Yeah. You're looking at me like, how'd you do your job? Dashboard. That's what they did. But what that meant is you're not actually having real conversations with the sales team about what's happening. You're not reading notes. You don't understand what's going on. You don't know what contacts you had. We had a marketing database of contacts and a sales database of contacts. How crazy is that? Oh, and CX had a whole different one, by the way. Super fun. So we had to do a lot of work around, like, hey, one view of the customer, one understanding of how the customer's engaging with us. Everybody working in Salesforce, defining the metrics that we all agreed collectively across the entire go to market and revenue organization were actually aligned. So some really, really, I mean, hard stuff, but stuff that some of you are probably like, well, yeah, I don't know how you operate without that. But these are some of the things, right, that for us were foundational. But the biggest thing was ensuring everybody really did have the tools that they needed in order to do the new job that we were asking them to do and to operate in a different way. And that took a lot of sitting down and thinking and going, okay, I'm asking them to do that. Can they really do that? Is it real? And if not, then going and fixing that from a systems and tools perspective. And then finally we have ongoing role communities where people talk about, hey, how is the role going? What do we need to do to evolve? What are your roadblocks? What is stopping you, preventing you from working in the way that we're asking you to work? And then ultimately continuing to invest in ongoing training. And so for us, that means making sure that we are not only doing ABX training, but AI training, et cetera. And I think I am going long, so I'm going to wrap up here in just a moment. So couple of things. What's actually happened? So this is sort of the proof of progress. We are really, really happy with some of the early results that we have seen. First of all, we have had in three years 150% improvement in ROI. We went from 7x ROI to over 20, so a little higher than 150%. Our goal is to get to 24x ROI across marketing holistically, which puts us I think in pretty good company. So we're really happy about where we're headed in terms of the changes that we've made in our target accounts. We are seeing two times larger deal sizes. I mentioned five times in the pilot group. It's come down a little bit as we expanded, we expected that to happen because we expanded to some accounts that weren't quite as large, right. Bigger, larger accounts, you get a little bit smaller. But in any event, we know that the ROI improvement says that we're focused on the right accounts, we are spending our dollars in the right places and that that's producing higher pipeline ultimately for the organization. And then I can't put the dollars up here, which is why you have the xx. But one of the things there was sort of a flagship moment for us. One of the largest opportunities in our Q4, which just ended in the end of July, was a for us, this is a very, very large deal. It was a $350 million opportunity that was part of our high target, our tier one account list that actually grew from 100 million to 350 million. And we have all of the data to actually show that that was from the impact of expanding outside of the IT contacts that the sales team had, working in coordination with them to reach over 200 net new contacts within the business, set up meetings with over 50 net new people within that organization, which actually expanded from a single opportunity to a multi year, multi architecture, multi technology opportunity for us. So that is the kind of wins that we are looking for. And we don't need a whole lot of those, right to actually hit some of the numbers that we're talking about. So with that I'll just leave you with. I hope this was helpful for all of you in terms of some practical ideas of things that we have been able to deploy. Our focus is really on making sure that we can carry this journey forward and bring all of our people in our organization with us with that. Thank you very much for your time, everybody.
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All right, everyone, that's a wrap on today. Today's episode with Cisco's Brittany Bartlett. I really loved to hear how the Cisco team pushed past the roadblocks and learned from challenges during their journey toward a successful account based model. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Don't forget to subscribe to the POD so you get first dibs on all upcoming episodes. And if you enjoyed this talk, you're definitely going to want to be in Scottsdale for B2B. Ms. West. Our agenda is packed with success stories from real practitioners from companies of all shapes and sizes. Don't forget to use the discount code in our show notes for an extra 15% off your ticket. Have a great day everyone. We'll catch you next week.