← The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
ABM: What Ramp, Snowflake, and Hightouch are doing in 2026
00:50:27
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, it's me, Dave. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Knack. Knack is a no code email and landing page creation platform focused on a problem every marketing team runs into. Have you ever had a really good marketing idea but then it takes forever to actually ship it out the door? It's usually not because your idea is bad, but because the process in the middle is slow. Briefs, more briefs, approvals, reviews, tiny fixes that somehow turn into weeks. And by the time the campaign is finally ready to go out, it barely even looks like what you originally wanted to ship. Yep, that right there, that is the gap that Knack exists to close. Knack is a no code email platform built for modern marketing teams. They have AI built into the platform that lets you prompt ideas and instantly generate on brand email assets so you can create, review QA and launch your email all in the same place. No jumping between tools or messy handoffs halfway through after the email goes live. Knack also gives you performance insights and recommendations so you can see what worked and how you can make the next send better. So if execution is the thing slowing your marketing down or you just want one system that takes you from idea to shipt to learning to improving, you should check out knack. Go to knack.com exit5 that's k n a k.com exit5. You're listening to the Dave Gerhardt show. All right. Hey everybody. I'm excited to be here. My name's Dave. I'm the founder of Exit 5. Twice a month we do these Exit 5 live sessions where we bring on subject matter experts to go deep in a topic that matters to you in marketing today. Huge turnout, super hot topic. Always for some reason a hit for us is when we talk about ABM. And today's session is ABM. What to start, stop and scale in 2026. We have a group of awesome marketers from High Touch Ramp and Snowflake hanging out behind the scenes right now. But real quick, if you're listening to this, I just want to make sure that everything's working okay. Audio is okay. So I want you to go in the chat and I'm just curious, put your name in, where you writing from and then why did you take an hour out of your day to come hang out with us and learn about abm? Is there something specific you want to learn? Is your boss pushing you to do the to research this area? What do you want to know about abm? Why are you here? Why are you taking time out of your day to come Here. We had an awesome number of responses for this. We had a great prep call yesterday. Behind the scenes. We're already, already going. And so I'm excited to talk about ABM with everybody today. Well, do questions in the chat. You can put the questions in the Q and A. That's really helpful for me as the moderator here, so I can sort them and we can pick them by up votes. Other than that, all these are recorded. We'll send out the recording after. One of the best parts is being active in the chat because everybody here is also a marketer working in B2B marketing. So please ask questions, share what you're doing, help out each other, and I hope we're going to have a great discussion today about abm. But real quick, before we hop into this, I just want to give a shout out to High Touch. They're the sponsors, presenting sponsors of today's live session. And since you showed up today, I know you care about abm and I can assume you're probably trying to improve your ABM efforts beyond just picking a list of target accounts and running ads, which I guess that's not how you do abm. There's a lot that I have to learn today because the teams doing it right now are the ones using data and signals to influence timing, messaging, and personalization across channels. But that's also where ABM gets messy fast. It can take an absurd amount of steps to build the right list, suppress correctly, and ship just a simple campaign. And that's where hitouch comes in. Hitouch is a data and AI platform built for marketing teams that help you activate the data already in your warehouse so you can build ABM audiences, trigger lifecycle plays, and run smarter segmentation across email ads and your CRM without relying on engineering. Heck, yeah. And as a bonus, the hitouch team put a bunch of effort into this. The hitouch team created an ABM playbook for you and breaking down how they do ABM internally. And you're going to hear from their CMO in a minute. Brian, I think you'll be like, that guy's pretty smart. I want to learn how, how they do it. And so they'll send that to you after this webinar. Brian's here and we got a great group of people today. Let's kick this off. Allison, send the crew out here. We'll do quick intros and we'll, we'll get right into the meat, which is, which is everybody wants. So let's go. Kasey, Drew. And then Brian. So Kasey, intro. Like who are you? Quick background about your company in the role just to set context for everybody.
- [04:33]
B
Absolutely. Hi, I'm Kasey. I work out of Denver. I'm in San Francisco today working out of our HQ at Snowflake. Snowflake is a data warehouse company that layers AI on top of good data. As we all know, if you sick AI on a bunch of bad data, you basically get bad answers faster. So Snowflake is the answer to that. We organize your data well and then we layer the most efficient AI on top of it. What's really cool about Snowflake is that we're using it internally for our ABM program. Meaning today sales reps are going to be able to go into Snowflake Intelligence, which is one of our new launch tools. Sales reps are marketers and say, are my accounts being targeted by ABM today? How's the performance on those accounts? And that's the power of Snowflake is that it brings marketing and sales together, which is basically the foundation of AVM. I've been in data tech for about five years now. I started out at Fivetran, which is another data tech company in ABM and moved to ABM. Over here I manage a team of 23 ABM marketers. So we have a very robust ABM program that we're very fortunate to have. And sales alignment is our number one rule and goal for everything. Really excited to talk to you today. Thanks.
- [05:36]
A
Love it. Wait, say what you said, you said you said something about first time, long time behind the scenes made me feel good. Can you say that here now?
- [05:42]
B
Oh my gosh, absolutely. I said longtime listener, first time caller. This is a huge deal for me. Dave, I've followed you on LinkedIn for a long time. I read your post yesterday about burnout and AI and I was like, I completely resonate. I think that we're in this flex period with AI that is, it's almost like the Internet. It's kind of like this whiplash thing where we're over rotating and then companies are competing and then there's going to be some, some winners. But basically we have to jump on the train and get messy with it, which is what we're doing today. So really admire you and Exit 5's work.
- [06:12]
A
That's awesome to hear you say that. And a last minute audible. What a gift. Hillary had the flu. She called in Casey. Casey Hoham runs a team of 23 ABM marketers. And here we are. Drew's in the mix today. Drew's Director of growth and data science at Ramp live from New York. Drew, welcome. Welcome to the show.
- [06:28]
C
Thank you, Dave. I'm also thrilled to be here. Also Big Snowflake and High Touch user. So excited to be here with Brian and Casey. I run the sort of data science function for Go to market at Ramp. And in case you don't know about Ramp, we sell finance automation software across corporate cards, expense management, bill pay, procurement, and accounting, and it's all in one platform.
- [06:48]
A
Dan's my CEO. Guy should have a Ramp tattoo, like, down his ribs or something. Like the biggest fan.
- [06:56]
D
I love to hear it.
- [06:56]
A
I got some beef, though. We reached out, we were trying. I was trying to get him a brand deal with Ramp, and they were like, we could send you a hat.
- [07:02]
C
Talk. Talk to me after. I think we can.
- [07:03]
B
All right.
- [07:04]
C
Yeah, that's Ramp and our go to market motion. In case that's helpful. Context. We're Both hybrid product led and sales led and about 30% of our business comes through self serve and 70% is, like, through sales. Yeah, that's Ramp.
- [07:15]
A
Awesome. And Brian. Brian I've known through connecting over this space. Brian was ran demand gen at Intercom. I was at a company called Drift and had him on my podcast and have kind of continued to follow his work. Super sharp guy. Like what you're doing at High Touch. Did I just do your bio for you or do you want to say something?
- [07:32]
D
No, it's a pleasure to be here.
- [07:33]
C
Yeah.
- [07:34]
D
So High Touch helps you orchestrate and run awesome ABM programs, and we're honored to be a Ramp customer as well. But also, we support a lot of the cool stuff Drew's going to share with you and do a lot of the cool things Casey's going to talk about. So.
- [07:46]
A
All right, so I told you I was going to ask you. The first question I was going to ask you was what you're going to stop, But I actually forgot that the first thing that I wanted to ask you all is just a level set for everybody here today. Can we try to define ABM? And I don't really care about the LinkedIn, like, cute definition of it. I want to hear how you each talk about it as a go to market strategy inside of the company. Kasey, you mentioned the number one thing that matters to you all is sales alignment. And so maybe I'll let you kick it off. Like, how do you talk about, hey, here's why we do abm or here's how ABM works at our company.
- [08:18]
B
Yeah. Thank you for, like, bringing it Back to first principles. You know, ABM is nebulous. It changes at every company. Obviously here we talk about it as bringing sales strategy to life through marketing channels. So we don't start with the marketing part, we start with the sales part. Meaning, like these are the sales target accounts. Sales does not think in terms of the marketplace. They think in terms of accounts they want to go after. And we basically double down on those accounts with our marketing spend and our personalization to make sure that every single sales metric is elevated on the accounts that they care about the most. Obviously the whole database, the whole TAM is important and we want to generate high level demand in all of those places. But what we really need is the director at this customer account to give us the time of day so that we can get into this new line of business and ABM can go procure that contact, nurture that contact, deliver it to sales outbound. All of those things are what sales cares about the most. So bringing sales strategy to life through marketing channels.
- [09:12]
A
And Brian, you, you mentioned this before backstage, but you said you have data on this of the accounts who got ABM from you and didn't. That would be an amazing way to show this to the board or to the CEO or whoever, right?
- [09:22]
D
Yeah. Yeah. So the way that we think about it is efficacy of ABM is always very challenging to demonstrate. It feels like it's the right thing to do, but it's not always obvious. So the way we think about it is we essentially similar to what Kasey does is like we really work very hard to pick the right accounts and figure out that territory that we're going to pursue with our sales friends. But then actually, even though they're dream accounts, we don't do ABM for a bunch of them. And we essentially have a treatment group and a control group amongst these amazing targets that we want to pursue. And what we have found is that the accounts that are in the treatment group, the ones receiving the digital programs, receiving the joint sales motions that we're executing, they'll convert from unengaged to a stage one opportunity with us at about 32% higher rate than the general population. And then even further down funnel of those that convert to stage one, about 38% of those will convert to S2 at a higher rate than stage one. So you're seeing this really powerful like double dip effect where even among the universe of great accounts that you're more likely to win anyway. They're more likely to enter a sales process with you and they're more likely to qualify to buy with you. That's what stage one and stage two mean for us. It's are they engaged with the seller and are they qualified in and out?
- [10:29]
A
That's what's so great about abm, by the way. Just from an outsider standpoint, I'm not doing this. I'm just a podcast host and a thought leader. But it feels like you can actually show the efficacy of marketing and you're not looking at like, did they click on this ad and did they buy, but did they listen to the podcast and did they immediately become an NQL after the podcast? It's like you're able to look at the bigger picture. That was initially what drew me to Hillary's stuff at Snowflake and obviously Casey, you're a part of that. Brian, I want to just circle back to something you said, which is funny. Matt on my team sent me this in the chat and I wrote this down. You said we work really hard to pick accounts. Well, how does that actually play out? How do you do that?
- [11:05]
D
It's actually pretty much like a CRO level activity here because we really want to be pursuing the people that we can sell to effectively. And you see this all the time, like in non ABM shops where you're selling to everybody and the conversion rates are just utter garbage on many accounts just because they're not the right people to buy. The way High Touch works is it runs on top of a data warehouse. If you don't have one, we have no business talking to you. And that's why Snowflake's a great partner to us. And so as an example, so if you don't have Snowflake, what exactly am I going to sell you? So those should not be in the list. It's a very simple example, but there's many other indicators as well. And so we're constantly as part of territory planning, working as a genuinely as a CRO level topic, which account are we going to send seller A, B or C to pursue and why? And then once they're in the list, I can talk more about this. If it's interesting, all these business processes and workflows get kicked off because if you're in the list, we want you and we're going to all no holds barred, we're going to pursue you. If you're not on the list, God bless you. If you want to buy something, knock on the front door. Maybe we'll sell to you, maybe we won't.
- [12:04]
A
When you say it's a CRO level activity Is the CRO actually like looking at that company, going to the website, checking it out personally, or is it like, oh, there's some, you know, you've showed me this spreadsheet that says they have this many employees, they're using Snowflake and so we're good.
- [12:18]
D
No, our CEO's not manually doing it, but like, so no, we have a lot of pre work that happens at a data science level, at an account enrichment level, at a research level to equip us with how we're going to prioritize. And so the weighting of what we're going to prioritize and the strategy of what we're going to prioritize and then the final sign off of who makes the cut.
- [12:36]
A
Okay, Drew, does this blend into your world a little bit?
- [12:39]
C
Yeah, it's super similar to how we do things. I mean, I think the key thing for us is it's really a partnership between data science and sales. The first cut is like a data science model of who's a good fit, who's high intent for ramp. That list then goes to sales leadership and they're going to whittle down and like, figure out how to parcel out the accounts. But the key piece is, like, it's a really dynamic process that the list changes throughout the year. So the people who know the accounts best are the salespeople working them. So a lot of times they'll work one, they'll be like, hey, like this account, they've got a three year contract with Amex. We can't sell to them. So we put them on the list for like three years from now, take them off, they get the next highest ranked company goes to them. And you keep updating it. But at the end of the day, it's like, we're really supporting sales here. And I think it's important to look at it that way because they just know these accounts better than anyone else.
- [13:22]
A
Kasey's smirking as you said that. What's your learning there?
- [13:25]
B
I say this all the time. We can come up with a data science model that says this account is the best to book a meeting or buy Snowflake next. And then we go to the sales rep and they say, I actually golfed with the CEO yesterday. It's not like I put in a salesforce task for my golfing session, but they're not going to buy for another two years. We're like, okay, we obviously trust you in that there's no amount of intent that company can show that will outweigh the fact that the sales rep knows the account intimately.
- [13:47]
A
So it's this constant evolution. It's constantly moving. It's not like here are the hundred accounts and we're just going to market them. I mean it makes so much sense. Think about how much money you spend on marketing to Amex when they have a three year contract with another company. Like, all right, great, let's take those funds and apply them elsewhere. Okay, first one on my list is the stop list. We promise we're gonna do stop start scale. So let's go around and I wanted to hear just pick one. What's one traditional ABM best practice or specific tactic that you've officially killed in 2026 or decided you're not going to invest in anymore. We talked about this a little bit on our prep call. Like maybe something that you used to do in ABM to book meetings. You're not doing it anymore. Feel free to take the mic whoever wants that one.
- [14:30]
B
Okay, I'm taking the mic again. Just so I don't smirk in the background and get called out.
- [14:35]
A
No, that's good. I'm just showing you I'm a world class host and I want you to.
- [14:39]
B
Know you are, you are. Okay, great. Actually, Brian mentioned this a little bit earlier. I think we've fallen into the trap of targeting too many accounts. And sales loves ABM because we are talking to them every day. We're telling them exactly what's happening in each account and then they want more and their appetite increases. And we are salespeople like on our ABM team. Half of my team is former salespeople. We want to please. We want to do whatever sales wants. And so we will add too many accounts. And each of my team members now has an account limit so that we're not going to 200 accounts. One person cannot know 200 accounts intimately. That's not ABM anymore. That's kind of targeted demand gen that it doesn't scale in the way we're doing it today. So we're limiting that list and making sure it's like Brian said, the CRO aligned or like if anyone went to that account list they would say, yeah, obviously that is a target account.
- [15:24]
D
How many can.
- [15:25]
A
Do you have a sweet spot number? How many can. If it's not 200, what's the right. I'm, I'm Dave, sales guy. How many accounts can I handle?
- [15:32]
B
It depends on the size and the type of account. So we have two teams that support customer accounts. One team support majors accounts, which, that's the Disney's of the world. The capital ones, they can handle maybe 20 accounts and that's pushing it each person because you want to know everything about those accounts. You want to have one to one campaigns going for every one of those accounts. On the total opposite side we have our prospect team that only does non customers and they we say they're supporting like 40 reps each, we gotta limit it to like 2 or 3 ABM accounts per rep. So that is about 12150 per ABM.
- [16:04]
A
Nice, helpful. Go ahead Brian.
- [16:06]
D
I was just gonna say for us, the maximum we let an AE hold is 20. And to Kasey's point, there can be some folks that have one, but the absolute maximum let's 20. We just don't believe that a human being, even with AI tools can do a good job for more than 20 regardless of size of account.
- [16:20]
A
Is that 20 for the year? 20 at a time?
- [16:22]
D
20 at a time. And there is flex but there's friction on switching out new ones. You can't just randomly go through and change them in and out, in and out, in and out. But 20 at a time with the flexibility through decision chain to make changes, they might stop.
- [16:36]
C
We're stopping paid social ads for ABM brand awareness. And this kind of fits with what Kasey's talking about where when you're doing ABM very top of funnel like this, it can quickly just morph into targeted demand gen. And we found it's not super effective. And additionally I think everyone on your nose this digital is getting more and more saturated with how easy it is to pump ads out in digital. So we're super focused on going back to in person and physical.
- [17:01]
A
Wow, that's interesting. So abm, if I can paraphrase there you all are kind of saying ABM is actually not targeted demand gen. What you're showing ads to a select group of companies. That's demand gen.
- [17:13]
D
I agree and I disagree. And you actually do to compare notes. I guess we could do it live with everyone here if we wanted.
- [17:19]
A
I'm like if you guys why don't you take this offline and compare notes. So do it now.
- [17:24]
D
Part of that experimentation project I described to you where we had a control and not control is we also had a digital only group and in such a tiny audience of only 20 accounts we just went like crazy and super saturated. And we did see lift relative to control. I have some evidence that would say that you can use paid social display. Pretty good effect. But the one thing I did want to mention on the call here is that the creative fatigue is. Happens so fast that that's nuts. When you only have 20 accounts with only 10 people inside of each that you care about and you're buying every impression LinkedIn and Facebook will give you for those people, they see the ad like 300 times like a day.
- [17:59]
A
You just grow to hate the company. The exact opposite.
- [18:02]
D
So we actually need to. And we, we. Part of our program is minimum every two or three weeks all the creative changes it has to. So anyway that. And then. But to add to your point where I, I agree and, and have data that very much aligns to what you're saying Drew is the way we think about it is once you're through that initial introducing phase and there's a little bit of a relationship between the company, there's some indications of behavioral engagement and stuff that starts to move what we call kind of like into mid funnel and in there by far the highest efficacy thing is stuff that's not on the Internet, it's talking to them in real life.
- [18:34]
A
Let's dive into that. So you're going to do digital. You may or may not do digital, run display to your target accounts or whatever. There definitely seems to be this converging of like everybody's doing more stuff. Dinners, events, not online. Can we talk about specifically at High Touch Ramp and Snowflake? Like what are you all doing there then? What's working? What plays are you running right now? I'd love to unpack some of that, please.
- [18:58]
C
I mean I would go back to what we said about this being sort of sales led. The best in person events we've seen are the ones where the salesperson comes up with the idea and sometimes they're like hyper specific dinners around like a specific pain point in a specific industry that on the marketing side we probably wouldn't have thought of. There's like a lot closer to it. And they'll have an idea of like a bunch of accounts they want to get in the room. We'll help them get a few more in the room, set up the event. But those are the things that actually tend to work really well for us. What else?
- [19:27]
B
For us there's a few things. Data enrichment on specific accounts is really important. So if for instance, we're selling into a new line of business and sales doesn't have any contacts or any valuable contacts in that line of business, we need to go find those contacts, nurture them and that's where the digital comes in. We can, you know, get them to engage or at least get some awareness from those people. We can research them, we can figure out what the SDR says to them on that email outbound. We can figure out what we should send them as a gift that gets some brand affinity straight to their desk. And then after that gift, we can work with our field marketing team to say let's get them in a room with similar customers at a dinner in their area and get them to talk to each other. Maybe the Snowflake rep is there, maybe the Snowflake rep isn't there, and we're just having customers talk to customers and say what's going well and what's not for Snowflake. But I agree with Drew that all needs to be in alignment with sales and sales needs to be able to say I know what line of business I want to go after next, or I know which account I wanted to go after next so that we can then spend all those very detailed resources on that whole journey.
- [20:23]
A
I want to keep talking about in person stuff, but there's a ton of questions in the chat that are relevant. So just to go back to the ads real quick, James said there's a bunch of upvotes on it. How are you building advertising audiences for such small groups? Brian, that's probably for you.
- [20:36]
D
So I don't mean to plug our software in Snowflake, but I have to plug our software in Snowflake because this is how we do it like genuinely. So we hitouch has the ability to essentially group contexts that have been enriched that we've loaded into our Snowflake into account groups. So like it kind of natively understands the notion of account in a way that most technologies do not. And so you essentially tell high touch for this group, show them this vertical type of ad. Now we can't do like one to one ad groups or one to five person ad groups because just privacy laws prohibit that. But we are able to say all these accounts are in this vertical, show all of them this creative, or all these accounts have this problem set, show them this creative and so on. And so we essentially have three different kinds of ad creative that everyone in some way fits into at any given time. And we're hammering them and hitting that like max impression limit that the platforms will give us at any given time. We also have a product called MaxBooster we use, which essentially can enrich all the incremental identifiers that we don't have and can't legally procure onto the record so that when we go out into the world to try and find these B2B people in consumer channels. We actually can find them on Facebook, on TikTok, whatever and show them ads. Nice.
- [21:46]
A
How would you have done this without High Touch? Just to give the opposite side of this is this. I don't have experiences here. Is this possible? Drew, you're nodding along.
- [21:52]
C
It's manual. We're on Snowflake and High Touch and I don't think we could really do it at scale without those tools. We do have six Sense as well, but a bunch of questions.
- [22:01]
A
Actually let's talk about so a bunch of six Sense and Demand based questions. What tech are you using? Only six Sense and Demand collection of tools. I saw Ramp has an internal revenue tool. Do you believe in tools like Sixent Demand Base? Feel like this is a big part of your abm or do you see these as noise as well? I know you all have opinions there, so go for it.
- [22:17]
C
Yeah, I mean six Sense we have. I would say it has its place. It's pretty good at plugging into like ad platforms and uploading audiences and they have a really nice sort of UI for marketers to like design trigger based conditional logic for ABM campaigns. So we like that piece of it. But High Touch is much more flexible in terms of what it can plug into. So for a team with like a mature data sort of org like what Ramp has, it's really useful to be able to like build whatever you want in Snowflake and then use High Touch to get those outputs into any sort of platform you want. So like as an example for gifting we use a platform called Goody that's not supported by 6sense but hitouch can like easily pipe data into Goodie and like Trigger ads.
- [22:58]
A
Kasey, what do you all use for gifts? Somebody asked earlier and I meant to ask.
- [23:01]
B
Yeah, we use Reach Desk for gifting. We've gone through many platforms but we also have select kind of bespoke gifting partners that are more tailored. Basically not a warehouse full of swag but instead like how do we create a specific experience for this one executive?
- [23:18]
A
If you're a Fortune 100 CFO or CIO you get a custom curated piece of high end art that right you.
- [23:24]
B
Do not get a $25 gift card to book a meeting. It's not what the experience we want to provide.
- [23:30]
D
We do the same as Kasey. In our case it's send doso for like the scaled stuff and then we have layered on top that a person can put incremental effort into and to respond to the six Sense Demand based stuff. I'm sure it's valuable in certain situations like what Drew is describing, but I find it to be very, very expensive. And the stack that we use that Drew also uses, which is the Snowflake High touch stack, we find it to be much more powerful without all the cost.
- [23:51]
A
Oh my God. I didn't expect to go off the rails for my questions so quickly, but the questions in the chat are so good. Will you all just each take a look really quickly and see if there's one there that stands out to you that relates to this that we should talk to. Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is also brought to you by Optimizely. Okay, everyone is using AI right now. Point blank, that part's done. We're all using all the tools for copy ideas, baseline stuff, but there's still a gap. Most marketing teams are using the AI tools to think and not actually do. That's where things are headed next. And our sponsor Optimizely built this platform called Opal that lets you use autonomous AI agents to go and do the stuff you shouldn't be doing manually versus just being another chatbot. Here are some examples. Opal can create and optimize on brand web pages, emails, SEO content and campaigns by audience segment. It catches brand, legal and accessibility issues before anything else goes live on your website. It pulls data from your other systems like Google Analytics, your CRM and sales tools to auto build reports, summaries and recommendations and more. And guess what? It's completely no code. So marketers like you and me can build and leverage agents for any use case we dream up without having to rely on developers. That is freedom. So get this Optimizely has this incredible offer for Exit 5 listeners. They're offering a free personalized 45 minute AI workshop to help you identify the best AI use cases for your marketing team and map out where agents can save you time with a practical plan that you can actually go and use right away. They're giving everyone who attends Live a free pair of meta Ray Bans, which are awesome if you haven't used them yet. So you should go grab a seat right now@Optimizely.com exit 5 it's optimizely.com exit 5 check out the workshop get smarter about AI the future is here.
- [25:42]
B
I feel strongly about Duke's question, how much of a budget do you need to be successful with abm? Budget is one lever, sales alignment and executive alignment is another. You can very easily carve out some budget from your digital Spend, not add any net new budget and test ABM and say is this worth it for our company? It might not be because not every company sells to enterprise level accounts. It might not be the right mix for your sales team, but I feel very strongly that you have to start small, test something. And like Brian said, we measure everything by a lift metric. So it's very scientific method. You know, there's a control group, there's an ABM group and you can just apply different tactics to those groups and see what measure of lift you get. And I would also encourage you to track down funnel, not just can we get a lift on meetings booked or opportunities, but like Brian said, are they qualified opportunities? Do they convert? Do they convert at a higher rate? Do they convert at a higher dollar value? I know that's not a perfect answer, Duke. And I would say get as much budget as you can and you have alignment for, but also just focus on the basics of what are some things you can augment just for your target accounts and then test against non target accounts.
- [26:46]
C
I think the other important point on budget, you need to like prime the finance team and whatever stakeholders are controlling the budget, that you shouldn't really measure these the same way as traditional marketing campaigns. A lot of times on an MTA basis or other measurement techniques, they're going to look like they have terrible roi. And that should be like, okay, and.
- [27:04]
A
You should know going in, what's an example of that? What might have terrible engagement but end up.
- [27:08]
C
I mean a great example is like if you do anything on like a paid ad platform with abm, right? On these platforms, the black box, right? You want to just give it a big audience, let it cook and optimize to whatever signals you're giving it. But with these ABM campaigns you're limiting it to these really small audience. So it's going to be very expensive to get impressions on that audience. And if you just look at like your traditional marketing reporting, it's going to look incredibly inefficient. So you have to look holistically like what Brian was talking about across, like how are these accounts doing overall? Not how is this like individual campaign on meta doing really quick.
- [27:38]
B
To add onto that, it is simpler math to do a people engaged MQL squo, whatever that is. Simpler math than ABM is a true funnel. Everything lines up and it turns into this many squos. That's not what ABM is. ABM is more complicated math, but better experience for your customer and a better return on investment on specific accounts.
- [28:01]
A
I love that. When I worked at Drift, the founder David Cancel was like, he always would say, that's a company problem. The company wants you to have those steps so we can properly measure and track and like, yep, step one, step two, step three. But that is not how things happen in the real world. And then, you know, then all of a sudden you're talking to someone, it's like, oh yeah, they have a three year contract with X, but three years from now they're going to come back and re engage. Maybe because they saw like a Kevin Ramp ad or something like that. It's. But the internal systems, we want to try to measure it perfectly. It's like, let's UTM everything and see if we can track everything.
- [28:34]
D
The only other thing I'd add is picking good accounts is not free in terms of time, but it's borderline free in terms of money and is the thing you should be doing anyway to ensure your salespeople are concentrating their efforts correctly. So if you want to do ABM for effectively $0 and start immediately, just pick good accounts.
- [28:52]
A
There's a question about measurement. Actually talk about some of the KPIs that have been most useful for sales. And I thought of a related one to this where, okay, I hear you. ABM makes a lot of sense. On the flip side, Drew, we talked about, you talked about consumer. In the beginning consumer, you get that dopamine a little bit quicker, you get the data, you get the feedback much quicker. Here it's like we might not know for 12, 18 months if our marketing is effective, but I'm guessing there's signals along the way. How do you all tell the story when you want to show marketing success leading up to closing the deal? It's going to take some time. What are the KPIs that matter?
- [29:28]
C
I think you don't need to do this to get started, but as you get more mature, you should do the data work to figure out what does it take to convert an enterprise account? How many people do you have to talk to at that account, how many times you have to talk to them and how often. And you can use that as sort of a metric of success to see if your ABM programs work. You're not going to have perfect measurement on how those things are going, but you can get a rough idea based on historical data. So for Ramp, we like to talk to a person like somewhere around eight times every few months who's in like an ABM account or at least, at least hit them with like some sort of communication, which is a lot. But we don't see like diminishing returns as we go high. So like we're not worried about that.
- [30:04]
A
Brian, how do you know your bosses, CEOs on you, zero's on you. It's coming, it's coming. Progress is coming. When's it coming, Brian? When's it coming?
- [30:13]
D
Well, we very consciously, culturally as a company, we adhere a lot to what David can used to coach you on Dave, which is that fighting over attribution. There's no bigger waste of time in a B2B company and so just don't do it. We've explicitly talked about that in our C level alignment discussion. This is stupid. Many companies have gone down this road and culturally it's just been so damaging and not helpful. So just don't do it. So that's the first point. And so what that allows us to do is again, I hate to be so repetitive, but really focus on control groups and treatment groups. Progression and when we think about progression to be very specific and tactical, we literally have three opportunity awareness stages that are defined in data and there's six of them. It's like completely unaware. I won't name the little stages because I forget, but it's like lightly engaged, medium engaged, quite engaged. And this is all pre opportunity and this is visible in the data. And we're doing different treatments for each of those six micro steps before there's even the first Opti. Now we have an Opti, now there's more steps and there's more things that we're doing. Each of these things are prescribed and they're actually verifiable. Like you could run a query and see how many accounts from the list we want are in those stages and how many have moved. And so you can just look at that and say is this working or not? And I get. The last thing is there's a qualitative element here which Are the AES making money? If the AES only have 20 accounts and they started with only three of them they were talking to, now there's 10. And of the seven that changed, marketing was in the mix doing stuff that really helps. And then the last thing, this is a really useful LLM thing that we do which is we actually run a lot of LLM based manual attribution stuff. We actually have LLMs. Every time a deal closes or moves to a certain stage, it actually looks backwards at every bit of scrap of data and activity we've had with that account in Gong, in Salesforce and Slack Everywhere. And then actually writes a little deal story for us of what caused what and how. Best we can understand. Now admittedly the fact that they went to golf, as Casey pointed out, is not in there, but most things are. And the LLMs actually do a really good job of developing a deal story and then helping us understand what did what. And we look at those very seriously. Much more so than like arguing over last touch attribution for some God forsaken mess that nobody cares about.
- [32:15]
A
Well said. A couple questions in the chat. Tasha said, what's your strategy for picking good accounts? Well, we covered that in the beginning of this, so I'm not going to go back to that, but we'll make sure you get the replay after. Katie said, if you had to start in one area in order to sell the value and generate excitement around abm, would you start in generating a net new op or current op progress slash Velocity?
- [32:35]
B
Depends on what your company cares about. If you're in a high customer environment that we want to grow our customers a lot, start with accelerating opportunities or accelerating existing customers. If you're in a startup, you don't have any customers. You need to just get net new customers in the door. Start with getting those salespeople the opportunities that they need to close.
- [32:52]
A
Anybody have a good pipeline Velocity play? What have you actually done?
- [32:55]
D
So not too long ago for our highest value accounts here in sf, this is Mid funnel. We already know these people. I would actually say one of my stops is you don't do this for people you don't know. Everyone just wants to like magically conjure up pipeline, but this won't work if they're not somewhat engaged. Is there's this really fancy restaurant here called Saison. It's like holy crap, is it expensive? And we were very nervous to do it because in SF everyone is just like overwind and over dined. So the attrition rates, our events are ridiculous. But we figured okay, this is mid funnel, this is people we know. Let's just go all out and book something that we otherwise wouldn't. And it worked a charm and that was really inspiring for us and we've actually replicated that technique out. But I have to really emphasize that had we done that for people that we didn't already know, at least somewhat, I don't believe we would have worked at all. And these weren't all necessarily paying customers, but I mean we knew them. That's, that's kind of the.
- [33:44]
B
I have another one for Pipeline Velocity. And to go back to Drew's Point about in person. We did a localized activation where we had a truck park in a city center in the middle of New York where four Finserve accounts were and we served coffee and we had all the AES there and we invited everyone down for a coffee break. We had screens, we had demos prepared. Obviously we had to do a lot of coordination to make sure those were the right locations, localized, all those things. But that is a totally offline activation that we just invited folks to. But it was an account based out of home activation for Pipeline Velocity.
- [34:18]
C
I'll throw in out there too. We got two suites at the super bowl this weekend and obviously too early to say, but very positive responses from account owners so far. And obviously you can't do the super bowl now for another year, but there's a lot of events that you can buy a suite at. We've done a Beyonce concert before and we invited a lot of. Yeah, right. See how we got like a ton of interest in it and we invited like women CFOs and we said you can bring your daughter or son.
- [34:44]
A
Oh, that's amazing.
- [34:45]
C
Yeah. So there's a ton of opportunities out there to do in person events like that. And I think if you get creative, you can sort of find things that other people aren't doing.
- [34:53]
A
What's the low budget version of that? That going to some like, open bar in Burlington, Vermont. You get a free invite, you.
- [35:01]
C
You joke.
- [35:01]
D
But generally speaking, I think people are pretty eager to. I mean, gosh, the Internet is just robots talking to robots at this point.
- [35:08]
A
So for sure, dude. I mean, we've, we're building a whole business around this like that people want to hang out and they want to talk to each other. So I am just being silly, but it is. And I think there's just like a rule of marketing and everybody's read, you know, Robert Cialdini's influence. And one of the principles was reciprocity. And it's why gifting vendors started out. It was the premise that, like, if I want to sell something to Casey, I'm going to send her some really good Lake Champlain's chocolates. And there's no ask. But now that she's had those chocolates, there's kind of this unspoken obligation that like, she might take a sales call for me. And it does work.
- [35:41]
D
Right.
- [35:41]
A
And if you can execute at a level where you put in a little effort and you're not doing it the way everyone else is doing, I think it's an important point.
- [35:47]
C
Brian, he said, what is the Key to keep people engaged after a live suite event like that, which is like the right question to be asking. It's partnership with sales again, so they need to be bought in on this. They should be helping pick the accounts. They should potentially be there. And since I'm a data person, I'll throw this in. Reporting for, like, accountability is also key. So it's very easy to build reports and see, like, okay, we had this big budget event. How many accounts have, like, salespeople reached out to after that? Have they been talking to them? If not, why not? And that's an easy question to ask. So you can kind of like enforce this stuff as well.
- [36:18]
B
Nice.
- [36:18]
A
Gosh, I. If I could hug you all, I would. Just the amount of people that don't just take the ball and run with these things, it's like, God, Matt on our team just said, look at Drew in there. Just snipe that question right out of the chat. It was great. Brian, did you have a important thing to say?
- [36:32]
D
I don't know if it's important, but I would just. I would say we have this concept of like, pg pods, pipe gen pods, and there's a field marketer sensing each one with like a consistent group of AES that they know well. And that really helps to drive that accountability, which is that I expect the field marketers on my team to ensure that if I spend all that money at a nice, even not a super expensive dinner, a simple dinner, that the follow up happens, and it happens the next morning. I'm not talking eight days later when the data enrichment or whatever. No, no, no, no. If you have a great date, you don't. Well, maybe there are dating rules. I don't date anymore. But you know what I mean, like, you don't wait a month to check in on the great date you just had. I want to see follow up immediately. And the field marketers are really tightly intertwined with the sellers to ensure that that happens right away.
- [37:14]
A
Man, I'm just thinking about how lucky I am to be married because if I went on a date and I would be like talking to Gemini about how to follow up in the right way with my wife. Like, here's the context. We went to this restaurant, we held hand. Like, what should I. All right, this question's from Angie. This is actually. This is a fun one to play out. So let's pretend like we're not. We. Let's pretend like you're marketing experts and answer this one. Fascinating to hear about the high end plays, like super bowl suites. But for those of us with smaller budgets or deep data pools, where should we be placing our bets? What are the one or two tried and true tactics that consistently deliver ROI for lean teams? Each of you are at bigger companies, bigger budgets. You're doing that cool stuff, but. But, like, let's get scrappy. You're at a new company, new market. You want to help them do ABM at a scrappy level. What would you do?
- [37:58]
C
I do direct mail.
- [38:00]
A
I think it's direct mail.
- [38:02]
C
I would do direct mail.
- [38:03]
A
Let's talk to each. Write down your thing. Write down your thing on your whiteboard, and we'll. We'll go to each. Drew, you go first. So, direct mail. How would you identify accounts? What tool would you use? What would the direct mail play be? Would you try to book a meet? I want to. Let's just riff on that real quick.
- [38:16]
C
Let's say I have nothing. I'm starting from zero. I think I'd go talk to sales. I'd figure out, like, who on the sales team. Like, I pick one salesperson who's, like, excited about abm, wants to work with me. I'd be like, what accounts are you, like, most excited about? And then I guess we'd have to go get addresses. I'd probably use clay, go get some addresses. I don't know. That seems like the easiest thing to spin up. And then I'd go, what do we use for direct mail? I get blanking on the vendor, but I'll drop it in the chat. But the vendors are great these days. It's, like, basically programmatic at this point. Once you upload a list and you get pretty good tracking on if the thing was delivered, you can put QR codes on it, personalize the cfo.
- [38:48]
A
Okay. And what would be the offer on it? Like, if you're going to cold direct mail something to me, what would be the next step from that?
- [38:54]
C
Free AirPods. If you take a demo.
- [38:56]
A
Free AirPods. If you Take a.
- [38:57]
C
If we're getting out of cheap territory, tell me. But I would. I'd give them some sort of, like.
- [39:02]
A
Well, this is my beef with cheap, though. It's like.
- [39:04]
C
Like anything.
- [39:04]
A
You have to spend money to make money. And so it's like, let's put some skin in the game. I think 200 bucks for AirPods to book. You know, if you're doing this type of marketing, right, And I think you're.
- [39:12]
C
Calibrating it with the funnel stage.
- [39:13]
D
Right.
- [39:13]
C
I wouldn't just send them AirPods because they haven't, like, shown Any intent. But if they actually, like scan the QR code and they go to a site, a landing page like that to me feels like enough intent where I'm willing to like offer them the AirPods at that point.
- [39:25]
A
I like it getting some pushback in the chat, which is healthy. But I'm going to tell you, I'm going to stand up for you. I'm going to tell you the reason why I like it. The reason why I like it is just the pattern interrupt. I think if you execute on this. Well, I still mail is like the one thing my phone gone to shit. Inbox gone to shit. Everything gone to shit. My actual mailbox up there that I get my mail from. If you did something like it was one of those handwritten envelopes and looked like I'd actually open it, I would. So at least you'd get my attention. All right, Brian, what's your play?
- [39:50]
D
I kind of default to teach them something and would probably pair that with meeting them in real life. So I'm like a big believer in like lunch and learn type offers. And if, like, if you've picked the right account, you can actually kind of figure out what their biggest pain points are and what their problems are and what you can teach them that relates to that. And you can actually develop an offer that's like borderline free, especially with LLMs and like just your time. Can I come to your office? Can I bring you the famous sandwich place from your city or the famous cookies from your city? And teach your team over lunch they have to eat anyway about this thing. And if it's credible enough, if it's interesting enough, like, this technique has been around forever. It's essentially the earliest form of content marketing and I find that it always kind of works. It works super well if you pair it with something Kasey said earlier, which is customer voice. So it's like, okay, let's have a customer teach you and three others this at a dinner or something. People do want to get better at their jobs. People do have to eat. So these are two universals that you can drive offers off of in a very targeted way. The trick is though, it can't just be like generic. Come learn about web personalization. It's like, well, that's not interesting. What specifically for that account do they need to know to be successful?
- [40:55]
B
Kasey, I'm back to basics on this and I would go a one to one landing page, $0. If you have a landing page building tool, get access to it. Write hey, account name. We know you Need X, we provide X and then put content on the page, give it to sales, Sales sends it to that account. And I think one of the biggest values of ABM is that people feel seen and like they know what they're looking at and the person sending it to them knows them as well. It's not AI generated, it's not an email, it's not something random. It's something that you've formulated alongside the salesperson to show that account that you care. And like Brian said, educate them. And put at the, at the bottom a CTA that says hey, get a free gift and we'll, you know, book a meeting. And there you go, there's a little one. You don't have to, you don't have to promote it digitally. You just give it to the sdr, the salesperson and they're, they're your distribution channel for free.
- [41:45]
A
What else? Anything stand out in the chat? Anything got a hot take that I.
- [41:48]
B
Should have asked you Dave, where start, stop, double down. Are we going to do them? I'm so curious.
- [41:54]
A
Sure. We talked about stopping something that you all want to start this year that's in your mix. Like exciting new thing you want to go roll this out.
- [42:02]
B
Something we're going to start doing this year is using AI. Uh oh. To help us get people through these journeys. So High Touch does this. I have a slightly optimistic view of AI that I hope will bring a little bit of hope to marketers. If AI can automate and generate the things that today us marketers are doing, we can spend more time on creativity which is those out of home activations, those messaging pieces that we need a totally different way of thinking about things that AI cannot do for us. AI spits out whatever it's given. Marketers are creatives, marketers can go change the message here, change the flavor here, get those gifts to those people, have those out of home activations. So we are going to start automating those clicking around tasks and trying to reduce the amount of UIs that we're using to launch just one account based campaign.
- [42:51]
A
Nice. Good answer Brian.
- [42:53]
D
I guess I'll dog food the idea I was just talking about. We're going really much harder with that lunch and Learn Motion. We essentially have a bunch of subject matter experts with prepared content about how to use AI for content generation and like effective marketing. And we're going out into the world and we're doing our best to actually visit the HQs of these companies and hand to hand educate them. The reason we're pulling much harder on that lever this year is because we've had really good early signs of that. It's like we're in a moment where there's so much uncertainty about what's happening to all of our jobs as marketers and what's happening in all of our jobs with in terms of data and stuff that there's an appetite to learn and there's a real overwhelm when you go into LinkedIn or wherever else. And so you need to be credible, of course, and that's not always easy. But that's one thing we're, we're at least going to try to double down on this year. It's hard to replicate. Like if we can scale it and do it effectively, our competitors may struggle to do that. You're not one Facebook ad away from booking hundreds of really quality subject matter expert led meetings with your buying audience. So do hard things is, you know, one of those good life lessons. And that's certainly part of how we think about evm.
- [43:58]
A
Drew, you got anything on your wish list over there at Ramp?
- [44:02]
C
I do. My team just built a similarity model. I don't want to get too data y in the weeds, but for every prospect, it tells us who are the top customers we currently have who are similar to that prospect. And I think to circle back to all the AI in person stuff, social proof's kind of like been around for a while. I think it matters more now. I think if you can personalize a message with, hey, your competitor or this company that's similar to you uses Ramp and they love it, that goes a long way. And to go back to the high touch point, like we've got this model built now. We've piped it into like a billion different places. So we've got it in ad platforms, we've got it piped onto our website with high touch for personalizing landing pages and we've got it right in like our CRM tools for our salespeople. So they're on a call now and it pops up and it says, here's like three companies you can use for social proof. Yeah, I brought the data weeds.
- [44:48]
B
Judy.
- [44:49]
A
I like that.
- [44:50]
C
But yeah, it's been super useful references too. That's a.
- [44:52]
A
To take this back to just the timeless marketing stuff, it's like show timeless marketing principle number, you know, 37. Right. Show me who else like me is already having success with this thing.
- [45:02]
C
Right. It's not something AI can replicate. You need to actually have those customers to say that.
- [45:06]
A
Yeah. And there's a lot of nuance. The nuance is like AI Surfaces Amex. But it's like, well, we just played golf with them yesterday and we know that I want to be that guy. That sounds fun. Just playing golf with like these big companies.
- [45:17]
C
That's.
- [45:17]
A
I like my job, but that's still. Ah, no, it sounds awful. That sounds awful.
- [45:23]
D
One thing I would add to Drew's point, if you've got those models and you're piping them out using High Touch, or there's other ways, but I would suggest High Touch, you don't actually have to stop at the landing page though that like model and the associated insights and the customer references that you've kind of gathered and structured. You can be like generatively constructing nurture emails. You could be pre building things for your SDRs to send. Those can be like pre generated content that then you send out to your direct mail vendor and so on. So you actually get a lot of scalability and reusability from the data work Drew is describing. Like you do that enrichment, you do that association between customer accounts and proof points and then it's just like the job then becomes what are all the interesting ways I can brainstorm to use this? And with the right technology, it's actually quite easy to push it one to many federated out to everywhere might be valuable.
- [46:08]
A
Cool. All right, look, we're going to wrap because lesson number three on webinars is end on a high note. And this has been awesome. I'm getting blown up by my team about the three of you and like we need to do more stuff together. There's a thousand questions in the chat that we could go deep on. I thought this was great, but we do measure everything. We're just like you ABM folks. We're highly data driven organization here at exit 5. So we're just going to roll the ratings poll real quick and just put your ratings here. We asked 1 through 5 rate today's session. I thought it was, I'm pretty biased. It was one of the better ones we've done recently. Just getting really specific here. I know there's an infinite amount of questions that we, we could have got to, but I thought you all did a great job. Drew, Casey and Brian, let's give it up for you all. We'll send you all the ABM playbook from High Touch after and then also just go connect with each of our speakers on on LinkedIn. Everybody's super kind and friendly here as it relates to marketing. I found that if you send a connection request to one of them and drop a quick message after. Like they'll respond. That works. Shout out to you all. This was awesome. Really useful stuff. Makes me want to do an ABM part two because there's so much we could do here. Thanks for giving us in 52 minutes of your time today. I'll give you eight minutes back so you can go check your email or go talk to Gemini before your your next meeting and we'll see you on the next one. I'm Dave. I'm the host here at Exit 5. I'm out of here.
- [47:20]
B
See you all.
- [47:20]
A
Thank you. Bye everybody. Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what, I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place than to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days so you can go and check it out risk free. And then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community. Hey, it's me, Dave. Our friends over at Customer I.O. are sponsors of today's episode. They're a really cool company that helps marketers turn first party data into engaging customer experiences across email, SMS and push. And they built their platform for marketers who actually care about the craft. Because marketing is a craft. It takes creativity, thought and taste. Right now, everyone thinks they're magically a marketer because they have access to AI and the result is kind of painful. More robotic emails, more noise, more bleh. AI isn't magic. It's not going to fix bad strategy or write great copy for you. Magically but the best teams also aren't ignoring it. They treat AI as infrastructure. When it's built the right way, it actually makes marketing feel more human, not less. And that's what customer IO is doing. Their AI handles repetitive work like setup, orchestration, and tasks that should be automated so that you can focus on what actually matters. The craft of marketing, the strategy, the creativity. This is how good marketers are using AI right now. Not to replace thinking, but to support it. If this landed with you at all, this idea about the craft of marketing, I want you to go and check out customer IO. It's customer IO, exit 5. Go and check them out. Customer IO, exit 5.