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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Hey everybody, welcome. Welcome to our workshop today with our special guest Steve here. We're waiting for some folks to trickle in, but we've got a bunch of you pouring in now. Hey, wherever you are, drop in the chat. We'd love to hear where you are joining us from. I know it might be early for some folks if you're on the west coast, so. Yeah, go ahead. Let us know where you're calling from. San Francisco. Very cool. Hey Kelly, Steve's in Colorado. That's awesome. I'm in the Toronto area. We've got some South Carolina, it looks like amazing. Some to two folks from Colorado. That's.
- [00:45]
B
Oh yeah.
- [00:46]
A
Meet up.
- [00:48]
B
Yeah, I know. Nicole.
- [00:49]
A
Oh, awesome. Great. I'm super excited for the session. We're going to dive right in because we've got an amazing presentation with just so much value. Hear from Steve and I definitely want to make sure that we get what you guys came for. Came for. All right guys, so just starting right away, we're going to go right into the material. We're going to make sure to leave time to have Q and A at the end. So please, please, please make sure to use the chat. We love looking through the transcripts after and you know, following along with that with whatever's happening there. So anyways, if you're here, thank you. This is part of our monthly workshop series that we do at Paseto today. Um, today's session is all about account based marketing and sharing the real system and some of the magic behind some of the fastest growing SaaS companies. It's presented by us at Passetto. I'm sure many of you are familiar with Passetto, but if you are not, we are a SAS SaaS based marketing analytics company and we work with CMOs and VPs of PE backed companies to help them understand what's working, their marketing and really prove their impact and understand what's not working. And we've got content here by 12th agency and that's Steve and I want to turn it over to Steve to give a little bit of some context around his agency.
- [02:08]
B
Yeah, thanks Carolyn. And hey everyone, thanks for joining. I'm psyched to dive into the content today. I'm Steve, I've been in marketing for almost 18 years now. I led ABM and Demand gen at Google for several years and that's where a lot of these principles come from. And founded 12th agency in October of 2024 and have been working with at this point almost 30 different companies developing their ABM foundational strategies and you know, getting into AI and all sorts of fun stuff that we'll talk to today.
- [02:43]
A
Amazing. Thanks. And Steve and I, we met maybe, I want to say probably a year ago and I just think you are really the best in the business when it comes to, you know, abm. And we got on a call recently because, you know, know we're looking at using you guys for ABM at Pesetto. And you just, even in that like 10 minute call, I think you had shared, you know, your four tier, like 360 degree ICP index thing. And I was like, oh man, we gotta get you back and share that all with, with our audience. So thanks Steve, for being here today and for all of the material that we're gonna cover. So just a quick sort of agenda on what we got here. We're gonna talk a little bit about some of the biggest fails with abm. We definitely see a lot of them at Pesetto, a lot of people spending a lot of money to basically do some like glorified outreach and it's not very effective. So we're going to cover, you know, why that tends to happen. We are going to look at Steve's signal stack. We've got some really good visualizations there to share with you. We're going to talk about, you know, just the GTM motion in general. You know, a mix of having a GTM engineer and also a strategist as well and who owns what. And then we're going to share a full funnel ABM framework, sort of like an example campaign, campaign play. There's a lot of material in that and we'll make sure to give you all of this after. So if you're here and you want this deck, you're going to get all of it. All right, so just quickly I want to start off with a poll and let me figure out if I can get this going. Okay, so we've got two questions here. Please go ahead and answer them. If you are tuned in, take a sec to do this. So question number one is, what is your biggest challenging challenge you're facing with ABM right now? This is multiple choice, so just go ahead and drop in whatever is relevant to you right now. If you're on here, come on board. Answer, answer the question. Great. Seeing some responses come in. This is just great for us to, you know, understand where we should focus things like that. Execution capacity seems to be number one right now. Great. And then question number two is a short answer. What's your number one question you want answered in today's session? Making sure we can come back to that at the end in the last 10 minutes for Q and A. So we'll give it just a couple more, couple more minutes. It looks like 50% of the audience has done this so far, generating real ROI success. Now that seems to be the leading. Yeah, that's a tough one for sure. And if you want to share any more context too in the chat, go ahead and do that. Share why you're here today and maybe what you hope to get from this. Okay, guys, I am going to end the poll if you participated. Thank you so very much for doing that. I'll just share the results here quickly so you can see generating real ROI and success. So that seems to be the biggest thing. So we'll do our best to speak to some of these themes as much as we can. So, so great, great. Thanks for participating. Okay, so we're gonna kick it off and start with a topic of why most ABM programs fail before they even start. So yeah. Steve, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you're seeing in the market. I know you talk a lot about like, you know, mass outreach with a list and, you know, this notion of high volume personalization. So what are, tell us what you're seeing sort of like in your world with abm.
- [06:10]
B
Yeah, yeah. So I've been looking at it through a few different lenses. One is the data, you know, we see with, with clients and I love how you included some of your own data in here. It's going to be great to get into that and then also just kind of tracking industry data. There's a lot of reports being published around the effectiveness of cold email in general ad performance. You can actually track back LinkedIn's ad performance benchmarks over years. And when you, when you look at that, there's several trends that emerge and it's not good. You know, some of the data I'm looking at shows reply rates of cold email dropping 50% year over year for the past several years. Like basically to zero. Right. Google Ads, cost per click, overall acquisition costs are skyrocketing. Meaning it's like, it's harder to acquire people through these digital channels. Same thing's happening on LinkedIn. I hear very frequently when we start with a program, they'll say, oh, we tried LinkedIn before and our cost per lead was over a thousand dollars. That's, that's insanity. That just economics there will never work. And I think, you know, if I had to boil it down sometimes I, I worry that as marketers and GTM professionals, we're looking for the shortcut like we're looking for the easy button. And, and that's just not how this works. Right? Like any success story never was built on one quick hack that they found. Right? You look at the fastest growing SaaS companies, the big, huge public companies, they don't publish like, oh, we crushed LinkedIn outbound. Like, that's why we got to a billion dollars. Right. It's not that. It's like in the trenches over and over. And so I think that part I've been kind of digging into is like, why are we so obsessed with this shortcut? Right? The thing that actually works. You know, what we'll talk about of like putting in the work and understanding your icp, developing really unique buying experiences and focusing on signals all along the way, ultimately to create, you know, a market of 1 for, for each account. But, you know, there's a few nuances in there. But I think in general, like, we're just, we're trying to cheat the system and the system can't be cheated.
- [08:29]
A
Yeah, that definitely resonates. And I think too, I think part of what causes that from my vantage point, you know, seeing like the board pressure and all of that, is just companies really wanting a shortcut to pipeline growth and revenue. And obviously in marketing, so many of the metrics that we're measured against are really narrow. For one, they're not really like common sense or real life either. And then part of that too is just a lack of understanding at the executive level on how the buying journey happens. And we don't have data to either, like communicate that story either. Right. And so I think it is very narrow and shortsighted, but it's like a symptom of a bigger issue just around how we're tracked, how we're measured, how we're expected to operate. So when you put those two things together, it kind of creates a storm of just bad sort of behavior. Right?
- [09:26]
B
Yeah, it's a great point too. If your leadership is off track in their understanding of how this stuff works. Works, Right. It's just fortunately or unfortunately requires the go to market team to be, you know, to level up and have that evidence to go and have those conversations with leadership and, you know, probably assume that, you know, leadership saw a LinkedIn post somewhere that talked about some hack or trick that generated 40 million in pipeline because of some, you know, Claude code personalization workflow and like those things don't work, in my opinion. But if that's what your leadership is reading you know, you can't just say that doesn't work, right?
- [10:09]
A
Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure. Okay. Yeah, definitely. So this market of one principle, you had alluded to that before, and I know we were talking about it. Can you explain what that is for the audience?
- [10:19]
B
Oh, the market of one. Yeah. So. So this is. So I've been in ABM before it was even called ABM, right. Like, going on 10 years now. And there's a company called It'sma Itsma. They're kind of like the O. Like the Gartner, the forester of abm. And when they first started putting some definitions and frameworks around this stuff, they. They called it. They defined it as treating each customer as a market of one. That was the definition. It's very simple. But I personally love it because philosophically it should inform everything you do across abm.
- [10:56]
A
Right.
- [10:56]
B
And you can ask yourself, is, is me uploading this list into Claude code to create personalized sequences, treating each account like a market of one. No, it's not. Right. And so it's a good barometer for how you want to manage the program.
- [11:11]
A
Yeah, that's great. I think it's a really good analogy. And I think too oftentimes, at least from what we see from our point of view, is just such a disconnect between marketing and sales. And especially when you have that disconnect, there's definitely not a market of one happening. There's marketing doing a bunch of stuff in their world and then maybe sales over here. And then that's what really creates a lot of bloat, I think, and a lot of inefficiency. So I love that concept of market of 1, because the most successful organizations are the ones that just operate with that philosophy. You know, it's not marketing or sales or marketing versus sales or who gets the credit. It's just what. Who are we going after and how are we going to do that intentionally and like actually using some common sense.
- [11:56]
B
Common sense, Yeah. I think that's maybe a good, like North Star for today's session. Like, let's use common sense.
- [12:03]
A
Okay, so I wanted to share a little bit of some data from Passetto. So this is coming from our sort of customer portfolio and just, you know, piggybacking off what you're talking about, which is this notion that ABM has really just become, you know, glorified cold outreach, unfortunately for a lot of companies. And so what they end up doing is basically like personalized, outbound at scale. And from what we see, it is always the single biggest source of GTM bloat in ABM programs. And unfortunately for a lot of companies, they don't even know what's happening. And so the average, sorry, a little bit of a typo there. The average cold out region outreach conversion to pipeline across our customer portfolio is 1% or less. That means for all of the people and accounts that teams go and actively try and work, they have identified them, they call them, they email them, they do whatever it takes to get on, you know, on a phone call with them to, you know, book an opportunity. Less than 1% of those ever turn into anything. And so you can imagine just how inefficient that really is in practice in terms of the money it costs organizations and just how impractical it is when it really comes to your strategy. And so we're going to get into this. But effective demand creation, while those leads convert oftentimes 3 to 10% better. That's a data point from our own customer data. And so what we're showing here is really the conversion from basically contact worked to opportunity created. Here on the top you see basically top quartile performance, which is anywhere between 6 to 8% of what people are working turning into pipeline. And then on the bottom, this is what we typically see as bottom quartile performance, which is like 2% or under, really inefficient. But the difference between these two examples here is volume and strategy. So this, this company on the top here, a large company, but they are very specific about who they work, how they work them, how they go to market, how do they, you know, how do they, who are they even reaching out to. And this company down here on the bottom is pure volume. It's like we're going to pay SDRs because they're cheap, we're going to pay BDRS because they're cheap and we're going to get them to call as many people as possible. So you can definitely see sort of the different, two different types of ABM plays happening here in this example. So I wanted to show this visual from Steve here and maybe Steve, you can explain what this dual funnel approach is and this idea of signal convergence. Can you explain this?
- [14:36]
B
Yeah, yeah. So this was a framework I came up with probably within the last year. Because you know, what I notice happening is the traditional account based marketing, you know, foundational principles were changing with AI. And if you think about, you know, even two, three years ago, right. Account based marketing was really truly. We have a list of accounts we're going to target Those accounts with ads, with emails, with, you know, full funnel marketing activities. But marketing teams were focused on the accounts only and it, and it left a huge gray space for the contacts. Like what about the contacts? At the end of the day we are putting human beings on a phone call together to discuss, you know, potentially working together. And so I felt that there was this need to bridge the gaps there between account and contact. And you call it contact based marketing, whatever you want. There's already acronyms all over this. But the dual funnel basically says if you have a fully functioning, mature ABM program, you're able to accurately track and measure both of these funnels. So what I mean by that, if you look on the left side with accounts, you're able to properly identify the accounts that you're going to go target through different parameters and data. You're going to actually go and engage those companies and you're going to do that through multi threading because again, ABM is good for high value, complex, multi person deals. So you're going to go and do that and you're going to focus on measuring how you engage and nurture that account through the sales process. And then at the same time, in parallel, we're going to look at which contacts, which actual people are starting to surface within those accounts in showing intent or just showing some sort of behavioral signal that they might be interested. And this is where all the fun tactical stuff happens, right? So you can use website de anonymization, you can use intent data. If you're scraping LinkedIn, if you're doing things to basically understand behavioral data of contacts at that level, this is where this comes into play. And ultimately at some point these things merge, right? Where you've had your accounts showing this progression and some kind of intentionality and then you have contacts doing the same thing. And the really good teams are like you said, a team of one like go to market. Marketing and sales are looking at this data together and kind of analyzing what's happened across the account and the contact and then making decisions. So they're looking at, hey, this account has been progressing through the funnel steadily for a few months. We've seen the chief procurement officer pop up on our radar, the chief security officer talk to this other person. And then we've seen a bunch of demo requests or we've seen some lower seniority activity. They're looking at that and then determining what the right plan is next. And so that last piece I think is the key to running this properly and actually securing pipeline from large enterprise companies. But in order to do that properly you need some, some element of this in the data that this would provide to you.
- [17:55]
A
I think data is a big piece of that. So I was going to say what do you think is like what have you seen be the biggest failure point? Do you see teams like over rotating on one one aspect and not the other?
- [18:05]
B
Yeah, probably. I think that's a good description. Like over rotating on, on one versus the other or you know, sometimes I think being too dogmatic about the attribution can, can get teams into trouble and, and like for me, one of, one of the most favorite frameworks that we talk about and implement is what I call account progression framework. And it's really simple, like it's not that complicated. You take all the accounts in your target universe and then you draw a line in the sand which is today you measure all of their historical engagement before today and you measure all of their engagement after today. And then you can baseline and average that out and then track over time. So, so if you have account A, which in a prior stage was maybe engaged with some ads and some top of funnel stuff, you can index them as aware and then as you track their progression over the next weeks and months, you should see them move forward from aware to engaged to interested. Whatever your funnel looks like and however you define it, you can apply it, but at the end of the day it's momentum, right? It's momentum and progression and that's, that's ultimately what go to market is responsible for. And you know, we get caught up with all these fancy multi touch, last touch, incrementality type attribution models which are great once you hit a level of maturity. But if you're kind of sitting there today and you're like how do I prove marketing is working? My suggestion is focus on progression. Show that marketing can progress accounts forward. And I mean it's hard to argue with that is what I found.
- [19:44]
A
And I think to your point, what you were saying is I think a lot of companies, even the more mature ones tend to want to jump like 20 steps ahead and oftentimes what we end up doing is like undoing a lot of those things and working it back to basics. And the reality is what I'm trying to get to is there's no real single source of truth. You've got marketing operating in their marketing automation platform and then you've got the account data and some contact data stored in CRM and there is no real unified single source of truth where all of the account data really, really lives and unfortunately it's hard to really understand what marketing is doing and how they're being effective if all of that data that really matters is anonymous because those people don't even have a record in HubSpot or wherever you're actually doing your marketing. So I see that a lot where marketing is just blind because they know that the contacts might be in Salesforce. But it's almost just like this breaking point between the two platforms where you can't really see what's going on.
- [20:46]
B
Yeah, yeah. And you have to, I'm sure you find this, but you have to at some point roll the contact level data up to an account level if you're looking for those account level insights and you want to run a true ABM program, so that can help. And you know, the other thing is I find a lot of marketing teams are afraid or just not willing to, to go into Salesforce and like, like just do that. You know, don't glorify it, just do it on your spare time. Like get familiar, go click into some lead profiles, look at the campaign history and the activity feed and just like familiarize with how yourself with how like sales is selling to contacts. I think, you know, you usually get some ideas from that. Right. When you, when you look at the, the data and the, the historical nature behind contacts.
- [21:35]
A
Yeah, Hannah in the chat says, well we're all in HubSpot so that makes things easier because that insight. Yeah, definitely. If your map and CRM is all in one system, it, you know, gives you an advantage over others. But there's a lot of companies that we see where the map is in an entirely different ecosystem. So I agree with what you're saying is to just get in there and you know, if the sales activity is logged, take a look at what people are saying, how you know your reps are talking to your prospects and things like that. So you had mentioned now we don't have a visual for this, but you had said there's four different signal types that you typically look at to basically create like an ICP profile index. Can you walk through what those are, Steve?
- [22:15]
B
Yeah, yeah. So you know they're, they're essentially a categorization of, of what you see here too. So, so I think these can, these can change or be augmented based on your go to market. But you know what you're looking at is first and most easily is like third party data. So this is your stuff from Zoom, info from Clay from Common Room, which some of those companies are now cons validated but this is like wherever you're sourcing contacts, where you're maybe sourcing intent data into your CRM and into your marketing programs. The second would be first party intent data. So first party is going to be data that you've created and this could be like through some custom scraping or some custom research. It's tool agnostic. But think of it as intent data that you source like you created. There's some IP to that. The third would be behavioral data and engagement data. So this would be data that your contacts are creating on their own as they progress through the funnel. And this is your website tracking, email opens and clicks, registrations, downloads, any action that a prospect can take along your funnel. And then the fourth would be, you know, the product data. So if you're, you know, software company, if you're a product led growth company, you're going to have that, that behavioral data inside the product. I suppose even if you're a service led organization, you still could have some of that type of data like NPS scores and things like that. But this is, think of this as like usage, like how are they actually using whatever it is you sell from a, from a qualitative standpoint. And you should have a process for understanding, tracking, measuring and activating this data and decide where it plays a role in your ABM program. Because the caveat to this is with all the data we have access to, you can very quickly become stunned and stuck of well, what do we do with all this and that? We have a framework for looking at the data to see essentially the profitability of that data. And that's just using those signals, mapping them to your entire funnel so that you can see, okay, when we anchor off of this data or this group of data, we see an increase in velocity or we see an increase in deal size and try to tie it back to some sort of revenue metric. So you have a North Star of, of what data to use and when to use it.
- [24:57]
A
Okay, so with all that said, I think I want to jump into this section here because I want to talk about tooling. Yeah, let's talk about these sort of like signals and the tooling piece and how imperative is the tooling to actually help you deploy a successful ABM campaign? Like what comes first, the chicken or the egg? Right? Is it the strategy or the tooling?
- [25:23]
B
Yeah, yeah, I love this question. One of my favor quotes, and I've forgotten now who told this to me, but it's, it's something like if you buy software without a problem, you now have a Problem. So, so I think the strategy has to come first. And, and I think some level of analysis and insight has to come first too, right? Because what's happened in the go to market industry, especially now with all these AI wrapper tools, is they're trying to sell you a problem, right? They're, they're, they don't know what your problem actually is. They are trying to sell you the problem they think you have and they're convincing you that you have this problem, which is crazy to me. And so I'm sure you bump into this too. Caroline is like, we'll come in and they're like, oh, we have this tool, we have that tool, we have this tool, we have, you know, we have all these tools. But yet you're sitting here in the meeting saying that you can't generate pipeline and that sales doesn't trust you and that the quality of leads is poor. And so what did that software actually do? So really reckon with, with that first? And so I think strategy has to come first. Like I sort of alluded to this, but like you should, you should have some conviction of what your top workflows are that generate positive sales activity, right? Whether that's meetings or pipeline or revenue. But you have to have that and you have to be able to look at that without it. I think you're guessing. And so in my opinion it can be as simple as, hey, when we sponsor an event and we take that list and then we run an email follow up program and then we invite them to some asset or some, you know, leave behind type of interaction, we see a 20% lead to SQL rate, right? And the, the value of those deals are, you know, 1.2x higher than other channels. That's a great insight. Like lean into that and then, you know, stack rank, all of those. And then I think the, you know, the real value comes when you start to integrate those things together. So when you, you know, how do you integrate your LinkedIn with your webinar program, with your event program? So starting to think about that. But to your question about tooling and signals, I think that you should evaluate the tooling based on what I just mentioned. Basically the profitability of those workflows and then find tooling that will allow you to accelerate or improve those workflows or make them more efficient. Because two things happen. One, you'll get the output you want, which is the increase in performance, and then two, you have a really good ROI story to tell internally. So instead of saying, hey, we spent five, six figures on this tool and it's made everyone's lives easier. You can say, hey, we identified a workflow that had a profitability rate of X, we purchased this tool for Y and it improved that profitability by Z. And that, that, I mean every finance leader is going to love that story. And now you have a framework for like how you evaluate software, how you deploy it, where you use it. And it just becomes much easier also too in, in talking to vendors because you're like, no, no, no, I know what we need. And you know, what you're saying sounds good but like we don't need that right now.
- [28:43]
A
Would you say that when, you know, a lot of these companies start to, you know, deploy abm, they know that or they don't. You know what camp do most people fall in?
- [28:53]
B
I think they don't. And it's part of, of what we kicked the conversation off with is like just looking for the shortcut. And I think that's what a lot of software companies do. Well, I mean, you know, think about it from this perspective. If like, if you're a person of one who's evaluating a platform, right, there's an entire marketing team and company of people out there producing thoughts and evidence to try and convince you like you're, you're one brain that you need this, right. And so you're outnumbered. And I think that's why teams get into some of these long term deals with software providers and then they quickly find out, oh man, this isn't delivering what I thought it would and what was sold to me. And I think that's because strategy, again abm, we're treating accounts like a market of one. So how could any software platform truly allow you to do that with all of the uniqueness and complexity of your market, your customer, your product, you know, your, the way your business functions. Right. Like there's a lot of nuance in that.
- [30:05]
A
Oh definitely. And here's the other problem is that most companies only track last touch attribution or you know, a single field on the opportunity record what was the deal source and that never like that, never 100% of the time does not give you the full story into what the buyer journey actually looked like. And especially for a low volume, high ACV products. And I'm going to share an example soon. But I can think of one mutual customer that we have in common, Steve, where their buying cycles are sometimes years. And the journey snapshot I'm going to share has eight people involved in it, has 44 different trackable marketing touch points that we can see there's probably even more. And that journey from basically first touch to close one is like, like three or some odd years. It's crazy. And they didn't know that most of their journey started with an event that happens years before. Right. And so sometimes when we do things in marketing, like host an event, you know, we assume it's not performing well if it doesn't bear fruit right away. But it could really be like a super integral part of like the bigger story. Right. And so I think that's part of your strategy that you're, you know, executing with this, with this company, I believe.
- [31:22]
B
Yeah. And I mean, you touched on something that's so important. It's like knowledge is, is power. Right. And like knowledge is strategy. So without that knowledge, you know, frankly, like me and my team, like we're pretty ineffective. Like we try to find out exactly that insight you just found, like who purchases, who signs up for demos, how long does it take, what channels do they engage with, when do they engage with those channels, how many channels, how many? Like you're trying to figure out all of this stuff so that you can gain some knowledge of what the current purchasing experience looks like and then design your entire strategy against that. Right. And so that's what's hard with, you know, the way I preach ABM and what we do is they're like, oh, give me the framework. People are always like, give me the framework. And it's like, well, we have some principles and there is, there's a framework for how we operate, but at the end of the day, everything's different. Like every strategy is different, every go to market is different. And I think that's if you're looking to be in the 1% of top performing ABM programs. You have to think about that. If you scraped your strategy off with some LinkedIn influencer post, it's probably not going to work the way you want it to.
- [32:32]
A
Oh yeah. I always say that every company has their own unique DNA. I never see one strategy. And now this is, having looked at dozens of SaaS companies, there is no one strategy that works for every company. Every company, like each of you know, us here, has our own DNA, our own genetic makeup. And the only way to optimize growth and performance is to optimize what your data is telling you. It all starts with data, right?
- [32:58]
B
Yeah, it does.
- [32:59]
A
Back to that. So let's talk about mastering the GTM motion. And I don't want to spend too much on this because I really want to get into Your framework.
- [33:07]
B
Right.
- [33:07]
A
We're talking about framework works. What is sort of like break down the GTM engineer slash strategist role and who owns what and where. Do those two functions sort of like fit into the ecosystem of building a full funnel motion?
- [33:21]
B
Yeah, yeah. So, so this is how like I've, I've staffed our teams and what, what I'm even seeing like larger companies that are more mature doing as well is you, this, this can be lean. Right. And I think the model is strategy plus, you know, technical or even more philosophically like art and science. Right. And I think that's, I, I love that for marketing because marketing is art and science. And so what you want to think about is the, you know, a role or a layer that has the insight and the knowledge that we're talking about. So, so they are almost like, you know, conductor across the, the marketing team and they're looking at all of this data, they're looking at the funnel, they're looking across channels, they're collaborating and they're, they deeply entrenched with sales and they're, they're running the show for like what are we doing in three months, what are we doing in six months? They're, they're thinking ahead and then the engineering function which, you know, I think GTM engineers are great. I've, I've hired an employee, a handful of them, but you know, give them something meaty to work on. Like the stuff we're talking about just like automating cold outreaches. I, I, you know, I don't, I wouldn't classify that as a true GTM engineer. Like we're talking about people who are building workflows, they're using engineering principles to develop marketing. And so you have that person who's thinking more technically like they're going to create a schema for your buyer journey and they're thinking about all of that data and how this person goes from here to here to here to here to here. They're plotting all of that out and then helping the strategist with automations and efficiency and improvement so that you can run complexity, I won't say at scale, but much easier than you know, if you were doing this manually. So I think, you know, that's, that's where those two roles come into play. And I think marketing teams now are starting to, you know, kind of, kind of build that way where you might have one strategic operator and then very technical, very hands on, knowledgeable folks who are, you know, punching the keys on the keyboard.
- [35:33]
A
Yeah, definitely. That really aligns with our philosophy around the art and the science. Because I think most marketers come up through the art sort of camp, right? It's brand, it's messaging, it's positioning, it's channel strategy, it's all of these things. And now with the rise of AI and all of the complexity that comes with systems integration and workflows and everything like that, there is just no world where you can be good at both things. And so I think, well one, I do think that GTM engineers are, have become totally glorified, right, where you have sort of like somebody who's building lists calling themselves GTM engineers. But I do think it's a super important role. If you really find, you know, the right type of operator for that function, I don't think you can be successful without it. Okay, let's walk through this one here. Can you explain this visual around strategic resource allocation?
- [36:28]
B
Yeah, yeah. So, and there was a question in here from Steve Cecina, so I'll try to answer that as I talk through this.
- [36:36]
A
Awesome.
- [36:38]
B
Actually, I would recommend starting here before you get into the convergence framework. But this should tell you after you've started to look at your go to market, you started to look at the funnel and some of the data, where do you need to go? And so if the data tells you that, let's say you're in that top, left, left quartile, you're really good at demand creation, right? So you're going to have a lot of top of funnel stuff. You're going to have a lot of leads coming through the funnel. You have multiple channels running at the same time, but you're really only seeing performance from an account lens. Then what you're going to do is, you know, basically follow the arrows and look towards contact based demand creation. So you know, tactically, how do you do that? Right? It's like, okay, we need to identify contacts that are coming into our ecosystem. We might need to get more, you know, more like isolated and precise in some of our campaigns and targeting so that we can get that feedback loop of who's engaging. Let's start to bring some of the people at these companies like into our ecosystem with you know, webinars, virtual events, you know, other tactics that require people to sign up and share some sort of information. And so, you know, philosophically that's kind of how the framework works and then you can, you can follow along, right? So if you're, you know, going back to the left, if you are in that account based demand creation stage, you also need to go down right into capture because you're effectively creating a good top of funnel. But then how do you progress those accounts closer to the bottom of the funnel? And this is where retargeting more signal based activity, maybe even direct mail or like one to one gifting and experiences type stuff which we're doing a lot of these days, try to personalize that journey so that ultimately you can, you kind of want to get to the bottom. Right. You know, like you want to get to a place where you're able to tie performance and activity through to a contact and not just a contact who like went on your website.
- [38:49]
A
Right.
- [38:50]
B
But actually came into the funnel, you know, generated a meeting, you know, is in pipeline. Some of the stuff you said you're, you're looking at.
- [38:57]
A
Yeah, I, this, I just jumped ahead to this image. I'm just bouncing around a little bit. It but I think that you know, sort of leads me to the, to what I typically see which is just like a total over indexing on bottom of funnel because it's like the easy thing to track. Right. Typically there's a, you know, a clear last touch that we can often see. But as we know when you're focusing on that you're really only focusing on what's easy to track. Where the demand capture happened and not really where the demand sort of creation happened further up. And I think I want to talk a little bit more about sort of like the, this demand creation approach now. I know we're getting into just you know, demand, you know, demand gen 101. But I don't know like it's just this is one of those principles that I think is still so commonly overlooked. We've been talking about this since like 2019 and I think a lot of the market is trying to catch up to this now, but just this reality that 95% of your market is just not in market today. And so you're really playing a long game and unless you get you know, really lucky, like the vectors of the world where you just like get a grand slam and skyrocket to multiple millions in a year, which is totally the exception, you are needing to plant seeds now for something that might not harvest for 12 to 18 months, sometimes more. So can you give me your you know, perspective on that?
- [40:16]
B
Yeah, I, I, I couldn't agree more. And you know I have a background in, in actually like storytelling and content marketing. So I was at a content agency years and this is what we preached every day and what we were actually building was media destinations for brands so like I was responsible for B2B. I had IBM, HP, Samsung, I had Google at one point. And these companies understood that two things, one, the advertising economics are garbage. And so instead of spending money on someone else's channel, they said, I'm going to just build the channel. So instead of IBM paying millions a year to, you know, advertise on, you know, CIO.com, security.com, whatever, they created their own media destination and we, we grew those destinations to millions of page views a month. And then they implemented, you know, profile frameworks so that people had to sign up and now they gained all of this rich data that was owned and it was contact level data, right? But me saying that all this took years, right? This took years of investment to doing that so that then eventually they could get into a sales process and you know, they, they knew that long game, right? To get a, a security team to spend eight, nine figures with, with IBM, they're not going to see a LinkedIn ad and sign up for a demo and convert. Like it takes time. And so that's, you know, one, one tactic to do that. But I think, think, you know, again, it's like chasing the shortcut. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you, you know, you kind of catch fire. But for most of us that, that's not the case. And so you've got to kind of actively go against that desire to, to find the shortcut.
- [42:08]
A
Definitely. And I think it's setting expectations, I think, with your board. So one of the biggest things I think the smart, real smart CMOs are doing is one, getting at the data from successful opportunities that have closed in the past and saying, okay, let's just reproduce what the journey has looked like for these accounts and use data to set expectations with our board. Like, hey, all of these accounts that we have won in the past, their journey, you know, even before they entered our sales funnel was like, you know, two years, maybe it was three months. You know, it's different for every company. But once you actually have that data, right, anecdotes don't work, right? So you can know that. But as soon as you have a quantifiable metric trick to tell your board, hey, historically this is how this works. So if we go make these investments now, the data would suggest that it's going to take us eight months to a year to actually see the results from this. And I think once you actually have that to anchor against. I know this was a question in a chat is like, how do you set expectations? And I think it really just comes back to having some intelligence to know what that's going to look like other than just assuming it's going to be this silver bullet it fast, you know, success story that probably won't happen.
- [43:20]
B
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And Callie just asked a really key question on this too is once you know what that journey looks like from the data you're talking about, Carolyn, then I think you can try to reverse engineer, like how to shortcut it. Right. So like one example, we've been running these like super bespoke onetoone campaigns where we do really deep research on a contact. We find what their like, hobbies are, what their interests are. Like, are they into golf, they like sports, are they into cooking, yoga, that sort of thing. And then we, we craft and curate a experience for them. So like, if you're a golfer, we'll go and book you 18 holes with, with a car for you and a friend to go and golf and, and then you can go out to contacts with that message and that, that can work because again, one, you realize like where the gap is in your funnel from the data. And then two, you're not scaling, you're providing something completely unique and personalized and folks are going to respond to that. Right? Like that's going to stand out in the sea of AI slop that they're getting in their inbox today. And now you do actually get to shortcut the funnel a little bit because you've got high value contacts who are now raising their hand and saying, okay, I see you. Like, that's pretty cool. Like, tell me more.
- [44:37]
A
It's so funny because you had said something to me recently on our call, which is to really be, be successful, you kind of have to do the hard things. You know, anybody can put on a workshop like we're doing today. There's a lot of that anybody can put on, you know, content online. But it's like, how do you actually cut through the noise and create something super personalized in a world that is just filled with a lot of robotic AI generated garbage? Anybody can produce content. So I think at one, you know, maybe half a decade ago, creating like a, a, you know, like a real content engine was the advantage. But I don't think it is in the same way anymore. And so I love this notion of like driving towards a moment that's actually like genuinely going to be memorable for the person. Right?
- [45:25]
B
Yeah, I just heard the phrase this morning and wrote a LinkedIn post about it actually, because I was so motivated about Anti marketing and how, you know, ba. Basically, like if you define marketing, right, it's, it's like messaging to the masses. B2C and in B2B. And so anti marketing is the opposite, which to me is, it's one to one, it's personalized, it's, you know, can we get from this definition of treating every account as a, you know, market of one to like, what if we treated every person as a market of one and you, you met them exactly where they are and got to know them and like, you know, the stuff I'm saying is like old school salespeople know this. They're like, yeah, duh, that's just good sales. Like that's how we used to sell seven figure deals like Google Cloud and Amazon and Microsoft, right? And it's like, that's what they do. You create a relationship, you get to know a person and then, and then, yeah, then your medic and your spin and all these other frameworks come into play of like how you actually sell. But underneath all that is just people connecting.
- [46:26]
A
But don't you think marketers might, you know, we've had decades of, you know, what I would consider like bad decision making and I think it really comes down to the metrics, like MQLs. Like, don't you think if you stripped away the shitty metrics that this industry has been measured against for so long, that might actually change the decisions that we make? Like maybe we wouldn't do all of this mass marketing that doesn't work, but we do it because we've got to hit some target, some arbitrary target. Makes no sense.
- [46:55]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, what a like profound point of view. I couldn't agree more. I, I need to like, I want to write that down and like think about that for, for a weekend. Because yeah, it's true. Like we're, we're being misguided. Right. And I think the inputs come from, yes, the marketing terminology, but also sales frameworks, like the predictable pipeline framework. Right. That whole thing was made popular as in like, hey, I need, you know, this much revenue. So I'm going to work backwards and create the, you know, the numbers that hit that. And then I'm going to look at like my pipeline coverage and all this stuff and so we all now fit within that system and you're kind of forced to, to, to scale and like make some of these poor decisions.
- [47:38]
A
Oh, definitely, yeah. I've been there myself. Like, I've been trapped. It's really hard to like just, you know, psa. It's really hard to, you know, turn a boat around when you don't have, you know, like a band behind you. Like. So if you're a cmos, you know, trying to break through that challenge alone, it's difficult. You gotta get a Rev Ops buddy. You gotta get, you know, a buddy over in sales. Like you really have to go at it as a unified GTM engineer to, you know, do things differently. But one thing I want to share, I want to get into a few more examples of, from some of this. So I'm going to gloss over it, but what I wanted to show here, guys, and I hope you can see this, this is a snapshot from one of our customer accounts, also happens to be one of your customers, Steve. They are a high acv, low volume business operating in a extremely, I would say competitive category. But for them, you know, they're running, you know, an account based motion. They're trying to get as much data and insight around the buyer journey. And so what this is, is a snapshot of one opportunity. It's a closed, one opportunity that closed in the first half of 2026 and we traced it back to understand, okay, everybody that's associated with that account, what happened, what happened in that journey. There's eight different people. There's a, you know, 44 signals that happened over, you know, three years and eight months. And now while the deal source was RFP, right? Sure. RFP gets the credit or you know, gets, you know, like the, the label on the deal, you can really see just how much engagement they have across the full buying cycle with marketing. And the other thing too is you can see that only 18% here of the engagement actually happened before the opportunity was created. So much of that marketing engagement actually happened in the sales cycle. So, so just a really unique point of view. I think when you zoom out and you look at the account as a snapshot, the people in the account, you know what type of account it is, what people are doing, what programs are working, what channels are working in just one sort of like bird's eye view. So yeah, and I think that's really where account based marketing comes in. So you can see for this, you know, this company so much of that anchors against events and you know, with their last touch attribution model, they couldn't really see that because nothing really came from events exclusively. It came from you know, accumulation of things that happened over time. So I just wanted to share that example. All right, so let's maybe talk about quickly and we'll get into maybe a couple of questions, but maybe some examples of some core strategies and tactics. I think this is just sort of like a, an example, you know, blueprint. You want to walk through this, Steve?
- [50:15]
B
Yeah, yeah, I would say, yeah, we're just trying to give some, some ideas here. But you know, know, think about this. If you get to a place where you have some conviction of what your, you know, buying journey looks like for, for prospects and you know, multiple people with, within a company because sometimes the journey is different depending on seniority, then you want to devise your strategy against that. And so like one of, one of the things we do really often, which I think you see in your data too Carolyn, is you notice that C level or VP level is on the opportunity, but they're not the primary contact. And the primary contact's actually like a manager or director who's like signing up for the demos, they're going to the webinars, they're on the website and that sort of thing. And so what we'll do is design a multi funnel campaign where the C levels receive a completely different message, a different experience, different calls to action, different channels than the More Juice Junior folks. And we, and we pull from a lot of these types of tactics, right? So like branded thought leadership on LinkedIn continues to work for us for targeting those C level folks because it's cheap impressions, it's cheap reach. And we know the tactic is like we just want reach and frequency. That's it. And that's what I tell clients. They're like, well I need to attribute this back to like demo requests. And I'm like, well then this is wrong. Like we're not going to use LinkedIn ads to drive demo requests with C level people. Your data says they don't do that. So, so why would we like manufacture this scenario where we're going to achieve that on LinkedIn? So we're really realistic there. And then as you think about the, the flow from there, like if you've got an executive to, to see your brand, what's the next thing you want them to do or see or, or engage with, right? And that's usually something account specific you want to personalize so that they feel that like okay, this is someone's actually seeing and hearing me. And then you can lean into your like strategic engagement which is going to be, you know, maybe a, like a dinner, a workshop, a one to one experience type of thing. And then you want to apply that same thinking to the other Personas in your, in your buying committee. And so you know, if you're, if you've got the data, you know, you could, you know, hypothetically, let's say like a director level. They, they sign up for a demo and that's how they get into your inbound funnel. What are they doing all before that? Like are they looking at different pages on the website? Are they engaging with different type pieces of content? And so now you can use those insights to construct the right journey for them and honestly like pick and test from, from this like short list of activities. You know, like I'm a huge fan of testing. I think with, with today like you can get things into market and get some kind of leading indicator back within two to four weeks of whether that's working or not. And then decide like, okay, is this a profitable leading indicator? If so, let's run it another month and see what happens. If not like maybe let's, let's shift gears or let's optimize and try to change it.
- [53:30]
A
Do you see sometimes when you know, companies identify their target accounts, do you feel like sometimes the emphasis is placed more on like the sales reps and the BDR to reach some versus marketing? Sort of like being part of that story. Because all of this really takes a lot of marketing and what feels more like marketing heavy versus sales execution heavy?
- [53:51]
B
Yeah, yeah. And it is, I think that's the truth of how it should be. And so I think what happens is, you know, marketing gets out there and they're like we're going to do abm. So they survey the channels, they survey the vendors to figure out how can we target accounts. And you get caught in this cycle of running LinkedIn ads, maybe you're using like Google Ads and meta ads with some sort of contact identification middle layer in between. Then you create custom landing pages that put an account logo when somebody from that company lands on the page. But like all the content is the same and then you run, you know, maybe be a webinar invite or like some mid funnel thing after that and marketing does that and they're like we're good, like we ran account based marketing. They're going to package all that up and they're going to throw it over the fence to sales and they're going to say this account engaged, it's surging, whatever sales go reach out. I mean to me that's just demand gen. Like that's just regular demand gen. You're still putting a lot of responsibility on the, on the sales rep to go, go and create the deal versus you think about like an inbound ABM funnel, you're doing all those things I mentioned, but with a higher level of credibility. And now instead of just throwing it over the fence for sales to call, like, they're coming in, they're signing up for stuff, they're downloading stuff, they're, they're coming inbound. And I, that's, I mean, to me that's where every marketer wants to be. Right. If you're managing a good, strong inbound funnel, your life is so much easier than if you are trying to orchestrate like a heavy sales outbound funnel.
- [55:33]
A
Yeah.
- [55:33]
B
You know, sales is always going to point fingers at you. They're always going to complain about lead quality and it's tough.
- [55:39]
A
So then from your perspective, who owns like the account tiering strategy? Is that the CRO? Is that the cmo? Is that, you know, the chief who owns that? Because then I think you can get into like a lot of that finger pointing between sales and marketing if, if there's not real alignment around it.
- [55:54]
B
Honestly, it's, it's a tough one to answer because I think it's a, it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a battle right now because of like, sales has access to all of this data. If you're a larger company, sales usually runs the strat ops organization as well, who's like doing all the number crunching on total addressable market, service, addressable market and all that stuff. So sales comes armed to marketing and they're like, this is who we need to target. But now marketing has access to all of these tools and data. And if they've evolved and they're tracking, you know, signals the way that we were talking about them, now they have data and there's a little bit of a battle of like, well, whose data do we choose and like, which. Which accounts do we pick? So I think, you know, I think what still works and probably needs some refinement in the near future is, is tiering. So, you know, you take all of this data and then you apply some level of, of like quality and credibility to it and then tier your accounts based on, on those data signals. And so you end up with your, you know, like your strategics, your tier two, your tier three, and then hopefully agree as a team on that because that can be helpful for marketing then to decide, okay, how are we going to build campaigns and how we're going to deploy ABM across these different account tiers. You can align resources and workflows and everything to that too.
- [57:17]
A
Well, I know we only have two Minutes left and we've zoomed through everything so quick. Thing is, I'm going to send everybody this deck if you've registered, so you'll have it. There's more stuff and material in here that we didn't cover cover, so make sure to go through that. But one thing, just on the, you know, the topic of Q and A, because I know we don't have a lot of time left, but I just went through the poll responses and there was quite a few questions around. If you've got a lean team or if you're a smart, small marketing team and you know, you want to do this kind of thing, where should you start? What should you prioritize? So I think we can let that be sort of the final question that we can wrap with.
- [57:53]
B
Yeah, if you're a small team. You know, honestly, I would say, like, from my own experience, a lot of the ABM I was running was completely manual and just took it piece by piece. You know, tactically. One of my favorite exercises to do is to go into the CRM, look at like, let's say you're using an MQL model or whatever you call it, Go into the CRM, pretend you're a sales rep, and just go through, through like a few hundred of them and ask yourself, would I call these people right now as they stand in the CRM? And if the answer is no on a handful of them, start to categorize why you wouldn't, and then use that insight to go backwards and, you know, reverse engineer what you need to improve in your program. And I think starting from some type of, like, insight exercise like that will help you figure out where to place your time. And then honestly, just pick, pick like whatever the highest opportunity area is in your funnel and then go run a little ABM play or like an ABM workflow in that place, get some data, get some results, show that it's working, expand to the next one, and then use it as a way actually to build your career. Like, if you take that approach over and over again, eventually you'll, you'll outscale yourself and you'll need to make a request for resources or for budget it, you know, to purchase tools, whatever it is. And that's, it's a win win, right? Like, your company does well and you get to grow. Also.
- [59:23]
A
That reminds me of the podcast episode we did together, maybe like, you know, a year or whatever. I think the, the episode was titled, like, the hidden power of your rejection data. And I feel like this ties back to that. And I'm reminded too, of, you know, a company that we work with that had a counter, but once they actually looked at their close lost by their account tiers, they realized how much pipeline they were creating with like, their tier D or E or something like that. And it's just like the, the win rate on those was abysmal. And I just feel like there's so much to be learned when you look at all of the areas that you're losing and not just what do we go do more of.
- [60:02]
B
Yeah, I remember us talking about that. And that, that's. That's key there, right? Like, otherwise, imagine the teams that just, like, run that motion for years without knowing that data, and you're just. You're wasting money and, and time.
- [60:15]
A
Yeah, for sure. Well, I think this has been a great conversation. I think there's been really good feedback in the chat, so thank you, everybody. I know we're at time, so if you've got a. If you got a hop, go do that. We'll be in touch. But, Steve, you have a little bit of an offer, right, for people attending. Did you want to share what that is and, and how you can grab it?
- [60:32]
B
Sure, yeah, totally, yeah. Anybody's still on? So we're doing these, like, free signal audits right now. And if you, you know, basically what, you just hit me up on LinkedIn or send me an email, just give me five accounts, or quite frankly, if you're interested, I can scrape them off your website and figure out the lookalikes. Then we'll go in and we'll find actual people in your. In your buying committee. We'll source those contacts and we'll run a free, like, custom signal report on them. And these are the signals we use for the really bespoke onetoone stuff. And so, you know, you'll see, like, the whole kind of, you know, dossier of, of this person, how you could potentially go to market with them. So if you're interested, we like doing them. It's fun. So hit me up and we can get one ready for you.
- [61:15]
A
So cool. That sounds like an amazing offer, by the way. Awesome. Okay, great. Well, thank you, Steve, and thanks, everybody. Hope you enjoyed the session and we'll see you next time.
- [61:26]
B
Thanks.
- [61:26]
A
All right. Bye, guys.
- [61:27]
B
Bye, Sam.