EP 55 - Why Your ABM Strategy Might Be Failing with Andrei Zinkevich @ Fullfunnel.io

Speaker A: Andre, you have um, built your entire practice around abm. And you and I have known each other for many, many years. And one of the things that is always interesting in the space of marketing is that there always seems to be another trend, another motion, another playbook, another something. But you and Vlad have stayed incredibly consistent around ABM as a motion and I think also have stayed very consistent with respects to how you actually execute abm. And I'm sort of just generally curious like how you guys got to the focus of ABM and what you thought others were missing as it relates to that motion.

Speaker B: That's good question. And I think we need just to reverse engineer a little bit to my early days at Kimberly Clark. So um, I have started my career as um, sales rep, as we call it SDR today, right. And um, um, I just made my career, uh, in the first five years. These were purely years in sales. And then I was uh, kind of genuinely interested in how can we um, make our sales process easier. Right? And as Kimberly Clark, it's international brand, obviously we were selling, it's a mix of B2C and B2B model, right? So we are selling obviously to consumers, but also, uh, the biggest customers were the major retail chains, right? The major pharmacy chains, et cetera. And these were multimillion contracts. Then, uh, back to my region, uh, we had 50 plus, I don't remember exact number, but let's say 50 plus major retail chains, right? And the annual. So we were signing the annual, uh, contracts. And the annual contracts, uh, right. From let's say 200k to 50 million per year. Right. And then the question is, with that deal size, right. And with that number of accounts, what else can you do aside from account based marketing, right. On the B2B side of things, I'm not touching the consumer part of the business where you need to promote the brand, et cetera. Right? So basically I learned IBM the hard way since my early days, since being in sales and then um, uh, apparently moving the corporate ladder when I was uh, the um, chief marketing officer for key accounts. Uh, this is where I was establishing the methodology because when I was promoted I apparently saw that we were not doing nothing particular in terms of constantly engaging strategic accounts, right? So that was pretty purely, um, let's say sales responsibility and marketing was just in charge maybe of trade marketing, uh, per se. So which means that obviously we were doing a lot of activities to promote our brand in this, let's say retail chains to increase the sales. So it was win, win for everybody. But at the Same. At the same, uh, let's say at the same time we were not doing anything to engage our strategic buyers, our buying committees. We had no idea what were their strategic initiatives, right? Um, are there any, let's say upcoming compelling events that we need to know and we need to kind of adjust our offer and we have had no idea what our competitors are doing. And then basically what happens then you have the annual conversations about the new contract, right? About the um, let's say how many um, SKUs. Basically SKUs would mean the stock, stock selling units, right? So how many of them will you have? What would be your presence, etc? Because that heavily impacts your, your, your sales, your revenue. So this is basically how I learned it, right? And then coming to the days when we founded Full Funnel IO, the point was that we saw that marketing and sales historically in many organizations worked and still works in silos, right? So both functions are ah, foreign, um, let's say uh, responsible for completely different metrics, right? While organization lives on revenue. So it's mostly the sales main metric while marketing's more in charge of print on top of the funnel. And all of this is uh, important. But the question is why do we have silent motions, not the one that drives the revenue. Right? And obviously if you have long sales cycles, if you're selling enterprise product or if, let's say if you, if you are selling to mid size enterprise organizations, there is honestly no way where you can uh, afford uh, not doing abm, right? Because then you are just uh, you just try to catch everybody and catch nobody. So that's, that's, that's the point. So this basically how we came to it, we saw this consistent pattern and saw a huge demand for it. So uh, that there were definitely, I'm not saying everybody, but there were too many companies that wanted to fix that issue.

Speaker A: You're so right about the sales uh, and marketing alignment point. And it feels like it's just the endless headline on LinkedIn or wherever on a blog or on an article or a guide of how do we get sales and marketing to be more aligned. And to your point, you said something really interesting and it's something that I think still happens to this date, which is that they were measured with different metrics. And I'm wondering what are you seeing is leading to that? Why are teams being evaluated on different metrics? And have you done anything specifically with some of your clients where you've had conversations to get them aligned around the same metrics? So they instead work as a team and not in different silos.

Speaker B: I love it. Let's split it into two parts. Uh, because um, I have done my research and obviously it would be maybe my subjective opinion. How did we get here? But, but I feel that all um, uh, basically it started when the demand waterfall model was invented and the problem was, right, market marketing lost, let's say the seed in, let's say in uh, the meeting where the decisions are made, right? Let's put like this. And we wanted to gain it back. So that was the. This model was invented as a way to prove marketing impact on revenue, right? And then we all know the history the MQL to SQL model was invented. MemQL was a model to present marketing impact on pipeline and revenue, right? And it immediately created the silos, it created the uh, let's say the mindset that we can allocate the budget. And then it's basically John, I, I think John Miller, uh, ex market and demand base CEO, he nailed it down. He said like we kind of created the mindset and we indoctrinated the leadership CFO. CFO that you can take $1, put it in and get like two MQLs out of it, right? And then you kind of create an um, utopia funnel around it, right? Utopian funnel where you can think, okay, I need whatever x thousand dollars to put in. And then with this conversion from MQLs to SQLs, I will revenue, right? And obviously everybody bought it in. Why? Because it's easy to launch, it's predictable, it's measurable. And then like marketing, they are doing their job and then they hand off MKLs to sales and now uh, it's a sales problem to close them, right? And then uh, obviously we came to the conflict where sales started complaining about the lead quality, right? And marketing started to kind of retort on this with the basically blaming the sales skill set of call on this MQLS etc. But then what happened next? We invented this funnel, right? And then suddenly we realized that kind of the conversion from MQLs to closed one is miserable. So um, smart people saw a huge opportunity into it and said hey guys, it's just the problem because these people are not sales ready, right? They are not buying in right now. What do you need to do? You need to nurture this. How can you nurture them at scale? Obviously, uh, and in automated way you need to buy marketing automation. Here we go. Right? So what's the next playbook nurturing at scale? You know the drip email cannons, which is. Hey Jonathan, thanks a lot for downloading this PDF like five points. Why you need to buy our software, book a demo the next one. Like what will happen? How life. Your. How will your life be miserable if you won't buy our product? Um, I'm obviously kidding, you know, but like let's say the mindset behind this elite nurturing sequences is, is what I have described, right? It's literally like marketing promotional emails trying to push people to book the demo, right? So then we said okay, whenever. And uh, obviously the question, uh, we still need to kind of present our impact from marketing. So what we wanted to do, if these people now MQLs but they are not booking the demo, we invented the lead scoring, right? So when these people are opening the emails or clicking the links but not booking the demo, we say okay, like they open that email or even they signed up for our webinar, boom, 100 score sales. You have a hot lead, go chase them. Right? That's kind of the problem. And with years everybody was kind of like the truth to be said. Everybody knew that this is the pr. Why? Because we can't control really the buyer journey. But everybody pretended that we can create these funnels and then we started optimized uh, these broken funnels until we got here where uh, marketing and sales are working in silos, uh, reporting on completely different metrics and the organization is struggling to grow the revenue. So um, that's the first part and the second part to answer a question, um, how do we do this with clients? So obviously I'm not saying that uh, too many of our clients have uh, the problems on the, let's say reporting level, um, or basically the companies that are running on this specific model. Yes, we have some of them, but let's say uh, mostly companies that are reaching out to us, at least they have marketing and sales leadership that understands uh, that running MKLC is absolutely not helping the organization to grow. Right. But um, what we are doing quite often to fix the um, to fix that mindset and kind of align everybody on revenue where we kind of run a very simple exercise. Not just, and I think everybody could replicate this, um, we take just the recent 5 opportunities or recent 5 closed one deals depending on the data that you have. So it should be done really fast. Right. You don't need to overwhelm yourself. Then we just try to uncover um, all the data that we have about these deals. The way how we do it, we just look at all marketing systems that we have, let's say 10 data and we can have completely different stack. The entire point is just to extract as many touch points as we can about these deals, about these accounts. Right. Then, uh, talk to sales. What were the touch points? Maybe looking at Gonc. Looking at the sales cadences. Right. If they were running any outreach cadences to these people. And then what we want to do, we just want to create a logical timeline of these touch points. Right? These were the channels. Maybe we had some lead getting ads and these people engaged. Maybe this, they liked our post, maybe they are following our company, whatever. Right. And then we create the chronological of these touch points across multiple channels. And then the next step is basically gathering the leadership. Uh, I mean, depending on how many people, it depends on the size of your organization, but let's say the leadership who can make the decisions. And then you present the data and then just ask open questions. Right? Okay. Among all of these touch points, which one should get the credit? Right, the last one. So what we are doing about all the previous ones, I was saying that all of them are irrelevant. And the point is, uh, if you see what I'm doing, I'm not pushing any narrative. I just want to hear from people. They are looking at the real data and I just want to hear from them what they would say. Okay, so, uh, let's say if I had, um, 15 marketing touch points and 22 sales touch points. Uh, should we say that is just sales created this opportunity or it was equally created. Right? So this is the point. And then we say, okay. And also if, if that would be possible, that would be an ideal scenario. Right. Um, that's why I mentioned the recent sales opportunities or recently closed bond deals. If you can interview a few people from the buying committee. Right. Maybe champions, maybe power users, because they all have different experience with your brand. You can just simply ask them about their buyer journey. Have you ever evaluated us? Uh, and if. Yes, if you can remember what were the main touch points, maybe they would say, okay, we saw this case study on your website and we reached out to that customer and asked about your experience. Now this is what we call the dark side of things. Right? But by dark, I mean that we can't track this. And so the question is, okay, so we know the story now, did it create impact on this opportunity or no? Right. So what our thoughts? Because with all of this, uh, they can mention like, oh, guys, we have seen a couple of good posts from you on LinkedIn. We can't really recall who posted this. Maybe it was CEO, maybe it was on the companies, or maybe it was a promoted LinkedIn post. Right? For them, it's all the same. But uh, now the question is like we can't really see this in our analytics but they mentioned it. So what and where we are heading with all of this, what does this all mean to us? The decision that we need to make out of this, that in complex B2B there is no way that you can create sales opportunities in silos. There would be always a, ah, plenty of sales and marketing touch points across the entire buyer journey, right? Maybe the logical question that you'll always hear. Okay, so what you suggest and um, here's what we suggest based on this. We suggest to stop uh making the decisions based on the last click attribution, right? What we want to know here is that uh, we want to see what actually influences that opportunity creation. What programs, right? That's the first thing. The second one we want to stop the debate about market and versus sales credits. Why? Because uh, because of these reasons that we have discussed, right? And also the truth to be said. Have you ever seen a scenario where marketing is getting the bonuses right for for all this opportunity is created? No, it's all sales, so why even having these debates, right? So like when sales are closing this we applause and say okay, here is your bonus etc for attaining your quota, right? When marketing sources this pipeline just okay, good job guys. Uh, but if we don't hit the targets we say oh uh, it's all marketing problem right? Not enough awareness etc. Etc. So I'm heading with this. We uh, just whenever we do let's say uh, we agree that if we have multiple touch points we just create uh, or attribute it as all bound or whatever. Marketing and sales source, whatever you'll define you can call it anyway or ABM source if it selected a set of accounts and we are just creating this uh, like we are running shared playbooks, right? To create opportunities with this account we just presented that way right in the attribution. If sales uh, close them specific accounts purely of their relationship, it's fine, right? Maybe they have some contacts in this account and then you can just make it okay, this is purely sales attributed deal which is absolutely fine. But aside of this we have the soulbound attribution. And lastly all the credits for this uh deals are going to the account owner. And usually this is a pair of SDR and account executive. They already have this named accounts, right? They know them. So why even having this debate? So this way we kind of solve it and it becomes logical for everybody. Now maybe if the question that you want to ask does it mean that we need to immediately change the entire measurement system? No, because it's not realistically possible to do it, you know, right off the bat. Why? Because nobody wants the revolution. As simple as that. So we suggest we say, okay, we're not going to pause anything for now, we're not going to change how we are reporting, et cetera. But can we agree that for the next quarter, not necessarily saying that you need to do it, uh, with abm, with ABM it just becomes easier to prove it. Right, but let's say even without abm, can we just do this measurement for the next quarter and then we can just see how it works for our organization and compare the outcomes, the results, etc. So, and when, uh, because then if you come to this agreement, it would be much easier to protect the budgets, right, that you allocate, let's say for LinkedIn leadership or ads or working with specific agents, et cetera. Right, because then you have a, uh, kind of visible timeline with all of the touch points that uh, you had when creating the opportunities. So more or less, uh, I want

Speaker A: to go back to a point you said, because, I mean, I think that there's a lot of things there that clearly are, uh, uphill battles for, I know a lot of CMOs and VPs of marketing. And so we're talking about changing the attribution model and the way we assign credit to different channels. We're talking about actually collaborating on the same exact accounts between sales and marketing. That's a whole nother thing. And then you've got the issue of making sure whether or not you've got an ABM platform or not getting accurate enough data and the right data feeds in to address the conversation you're mentioning, which is, hey, how many different touches, at least that we can see, uh, were attributed to this account. And so you've got a lot of different things there. But you said something interesting at the end that I think would be probably pretty applicable to. I know a lot of VPs of marketing we talk to that are maybe on a last touch type of model. And there is a separation between M Sales and marketing from a credit perspective. And you said something where, hey, we don't have to change the whole model, we can instead have a separate test, it sounds like, or an impact test for a quarter where we focus in on a very specific set of accounts. And I wanted to expand on that a little bit more because ultimately how do people get justification and approval to go do that? Right, because they've got a budget that's allocated. They need to justify that as much as they can. So how does one decide, hey, I'm going to do this thing called abm. I'm going to do it for three months and I'm going to compare this to my efforts today.

Speaker B: A couple of things here. As uh, I mentioned already, right? You do it as an evolution to your marketing and to your, let's say, to your marketing and sales mix. You don't. The first thing, you never involve your entire organization. And I think this is where most ABM programs are failing. You know how it usually looks like. So there is a desire, good, let's say a good will of marketing leader to launch abm. And so maybe the marketing leader or CMO prepares the deck right on boards. Everybody, everybody says, yeah, fantastic. So what's next? Oh yeah, let's plan the accounts that we want to work on. Right. I'm just keeping the entire strategy because I know that's never the case. So then what happens next? Marketing receives a list of accounts from sales that are coming mostly from the sales territory planning. And I don't want to blame anybody right now, but I know that in too many organizations the territory planning is very opportunistic, if you will, in a sense that the sales reps, they just pick up the biggest logos from their territory, uh, without looking. If I have any relationship with these accounts, are these companies even aware of us, of our product? Have we had any historical interactions? And the most important, is there anything that tells us that these accounts are likely to buy in the next three to six months? Right. So I don't want to call it the buying intent because I remember once we were chatting with you about this, right? For me it's not the buying intent. For me, I call it the product need evidence. Is there anything that tells us that they are likely to be at least interested in what we want to offer to them? Right. So that's the key. And um, that's never the case. So what happens next? Right? Nobody plans the real capacity for abm. Right? Right. Um, because we don't know what, uh, what is the real capacity of our team, Right? How many? Because we are not selling the accounts, ultimately we'll need to map out the buying committee. There is no real agreement. How many buyers per account do we want to engage? Right? Because then you can easily calculate if you have 500 accounts multiplied by five contacts, right? Then you have already 25, uh, hundred context to nurture and engage. And that's already hard. So what? And the last problem is that um, we have a full plate of all other things running in parallel, right? So everybody is busy. It's not common that you have nothing to do and just you need to do abm. You have your targets to hit and then you have this. Then when marketing leader, the marketing team receives that wish list, they see that they have too many accounts and too many contacts. The next logical question, okay, so even I had this Playbooks idea, et cetera, but they wanted to target these 500 accounts. What can we do? Let's say, let's set up programmatic ads, right? Or let's set up LinkedIn ads, et cetera. And then that's it. So literally what happens to apm, it just becomes one tiny thing which is kind of, honestly, it's the same lead gen, but under a new source. So we just do air cover and outreach to the named set of accounts. Maybe a little bit better than just standard, let's say standard, uh, cold outreach because there is some air cover, but that's literally there is no real account based marketing. So, uh, where I'm heading with this before even doing this, because this is kind of the typical setup for failure and this program will spectacular fail in a couple of weeks because then, um, you won't see the results, everybody would start questioning this. And because you are investing money in their cover, everybody would be immediately questioning this. So you shouldn't be doing this. The first thing that you need to do is just to define the use case and the region where you are. Because let's say if you are smaller team, region may be your case. So uh, in that case you just need to define the use case that you know how to sell. Well, you have a strong, let's say strong, um, proof, good case studies, good clients, et cetera. And then you start planning this cluster program why we always do the use cases, not verticals. Because in one vertical, um, let's say the same accounts might have completely different challenges and needs and you have no clue until you'll be talking to them. And so then what happens? Then you need to combine kind of all the content, all the messaging from these use cases into something universal and see to whom it sticks, right? Which mostly doesn't stick to, doesn't is not relevant to anybody. So with use case, we deliberately make our bet on, okay, this is use case A, right? These are the typical challenges related to this use case. These are typical buyer Personas. This is the, we see this, we have strong, let's say, presence, uh, with this use case in this one, two verticals right? And then you start doing the deal analysis. The best accounts that you have one, right. Closed one and you see the patterns between them, they might have different. And it's different right? From the, from the vertical approach you might see they might have different patterns. Uh, the most important not just looking at thermographics and technographics, but trying to uncover m different patterns. For example, um, we did this uh, we do this every year uh, for, for our company for full funnel. Um, what we have seen an interesting pattern that our best accounts for the use case of launching a new pilot ABM program. These were ah, the companies that have at least five marketers with ABM keyword in their LinkedIn profiles. What does it say to us? Because then we were digging deeper, right. Um, and um, you might be wondering why this data? Because that means. And we validated this with the clients that they tried some sort of abm, it didn't work. But they already have the people, they have technology in place and they need to do something right? So for them what they want to do, they now want to launch a structured program. So let's say they learn the lesson the hard way and they don't want to fail one more time. So this is kind of an um, interesting uh, finding and this is what you want to do with this deal analysis. You need to involve sales and for this use case you just need one sales rep. You define you might my honest recommendation, just find the friendliest sales rep. The person who is open to collaborate with marketing shouldn't be the most experienced person and shouldn't be your A player. Why? Because that person will say okay guys, leave me alone, I know what to do, right? But the person who is open, who is willing to try new approaches, who's willing to cooperate, et cetera and then you just do the entire program planning together. And when you do this pilot program, right, it's not about the volume and it's not also about the revenue to be honest. Because if you have long sales cycles, it's not that the case that you are likely to close something, but you set up the better expectations. So a few metrics that we pay attention to. It's account to pipeline ratio, which is probably the best indicator of your efficiency of your program efficiency. Let's say you selected certain accounts. Uh, let's say with five of them you were able to book the discovery call, right? So that's already a good indicator. And then you can compare it to any other motion that you are running in parallel, right? Because when you are Selecting these accounts, first of all, you are focusing not on all the accounts, but you are just selecting on Tier 1, Tier 2 accounts with the highest revenue potential. Right? So you can always even compare the way value of these discovery calls, right? Which is a fantastic indicator for um, for the leadership you can present. Then you can do a lot of manual engagement and what is good for the sales rep. You can explicitly say, I know that you'll be busy with other stuff. So let's just, let's define what's your real capacity, right? What can you do? 5 hours a week, 10 hours a week, you just tell us. Then we define how many account accounts can be fit into it, how many buyers per account, and then you start plan joint programs. It could be a cluster program and we prefer to do two things in parallel. We still do the cluster program where we kind of do the decomposition of this use case. So we create some content for sales that they can. Quite often we host some events depending on the organization. Could be a webinar, could be a field event if they have a lot of companies in the region, right. And um, uh, then in parallel we do just one on one, one, one to one planning for these accounts, nailing down the buying committee, preparing the account narrative, running in depth account research and start constantly engaging with these buyers. So we have a constant flow of touch points. Every week something happens, right? Maybe we are tagging them in the LinkedIn poster, maybe we found something interesting, we send them a message, Marketing helps with air, cover other touch points with the narrative, with the content, et cetera, right? So on sales and they do this engagement, they invite them for the event. When these people sign up, they try to ask, okay, what would you like to learn? Would you like to be connected with someone? So a lot of this engagement, right? To build that relationship and to uncover some additional insights. And at the end of this program, what we want to do, we want to create kind of a call. It's uh, our point of view. Basically it's the presentation of if I'm not selling to you. But if, like, basically based on everything that I know about you and your strategic goals and some challenges that I know you guys are facing, here is my vision how to solve it. It's not sometimes, uh, I hear skepticism, but like maybe it's not 100% accurate and it won't be because you are not in the sales process and you don't have the confidential uh, information. But what it helps with, it helps to build the trust. It shows that you have done your homework. It shows that you understand their business and their needs. Right. And you take it from there. You start building the potential business case or project memo from this point. Right. And again like I said, marketing can help a lot with that narrative, with the thought leadership ads, with the specific events. Right. Uh, so that's kind of the simple thing. And then we present, okay, as I, as I mentioned, you don't do it full time, it won't be possible. But don't need to pause anything. So we do it part time as a proof of concept. And then just at the end of this program, uh, we create a simple comparison report. Okay. These are typical motions programs that we are running for years with these results. And this is our, one of the most interesting metrics here is our account to pipeline ratio. Right. And now we have done it, let's say for 20 accounts or 30 accounts and we were able to book six discovery calls. Yes. Maybe it's not yet sales qualified pipeline because of our sales cycle length, but look at the accounts, look at the potential value. Right? So potential pipeline maybe would be if like let's say average deal size would be 200k. Right. With six discovery calls it's already more than 1 million. Right. And with our let's say typical cold outbound, we need to book whatever, 40 discovery calls just to get to that point. Whatever. I'm just sharing an example. So this, this how I handle this.

Speaker A: Your point on use cases is really uh, spot on. It's something that made me think about. I talked to a head of Demand gen, um, back when Clearbit, before they were acquired, uh, a bit about their strategy and how they approach things. And it wasn't necessarily an ABM based strategy but it was very specific to use case. And I remember a specific ad from them that ran on Instagram, uh, and Facebook, which was firmographic targeting on Facebook or replace Facebook with Instagram depending on the platform. And uh, Clearbit at the time did a number of different things from a product perspective. But what he told me is that one of the entry points for their product and the way that people generally found them was that specific use case. They were marketers trying to market to their audience on Facebook or Instagram that didn't have really good audience data based upon what was available natively. And so they said they spent about 60 to 70% of all their budget literally just on that one use case and making sure people knew them for that use case. Because what they did after that is then they upselled them and talked about all the other products and things that they could do in Clearbit. And so I think it's one of those things that's so interesting to your point on use cases, to figure out, all right, what are the things that people think of us for or the triggers, the biggest pain points that they have when they first get on that sales call? And that's the thing they're talking about. They're talking about the same pain point, they're talking about a very similar use case. And sure, like there are other things the product can do, there are other use cases, there are other pain points, and those are maybe nice to haves or maybe there's additional things that they can do with it. But there was a reason that they got to the call. And so I think that's a really, really important thing. Um, I wanted to go to one thing though. You said earlier, uh, that we didn't get to, which was, uh, lead quality, which I think is really interesting. And it related to a point that you mentioned on LinkedIn. I just wanted to read this off real quick. If you remember this, this is about a week ago you said, I just don't get how we bought the idea of account scoring as a, predictably, as a predictable way of buyer. Uh, so you said, opened automated marketing email, 5 points, click the link, 20 points, signed up for webinar, so on and so forth. Right. So each thing had a point. And so your, your whole big thing was why, why are we doing this? Why are we setting up these arbitrary thresholds for scoring? And I think that we all know that some of this originated from marketing just trying to do a better job of passing the right types of people to sales based off of some type of readiness score. But you had a different point in that post and I wanted you to maybe expand on that a little bit because I think it's one of these things that is often implemented either in ABM strategies or even demand gen strategies, where marketing is trying to, even if they haven't explicitly filled out a form, tried to identify in market intent. So they can then shift that to sales once they meet some type of threshold. But could you expand on that a little bit more or did I miss anything there?

Speaker B: Absolutely. So, ah, um, it kind of aligns with everything what we have discussed so far. Right. Remember I was mentioning the marketing automation problem and how the lead scoring was invented. So basically you nailed it down. Right. Obviously, uh, what I said in that post, it was kind of a bit ironic in a sense that how could you even know that Email Open should be 5 points or not 10 points, et cetera. So for me it was like whenever I was asking this question, honestly I have never heard a good answer around that current model. I mean, uh, as, as you said, we know where it's all coming from. But uh, the entire point is it doesn't give you anything on the account level and doesn't tell you anything about the buying readiness. So as we spoke, like for us, what we do always, um, we kinda merge the insights on the contact level and on the account level. This is important when you select which accounts you want to engage. Right? Um, one of the maybe fundamental questions that we want to answer and we use it as a litmus test with marketing and sales teams. Um, well now let's say they want to do ABM, they have already maybe the lease, etc. I'm just simply asking, okay guys, if we were going to bet your compensation on specific accounts, right. What characteristics, what behavior should these accounts demonstrate? And at this point quite often we move completely away from email opens or thermographic criteria. So nobody mentioned this. Quite often they start talking about, oh, we need to have this relationship. I'm immediately following up on this. Okay, what does it mean to you? Right? Because for each of us it could mean completely different things. And they would say so we met them at the event, right? Or these people signed up for our recent webinar and they came and engaged, whatever, right? So this sort of things. And then they start thinking about this similar uh, patterns like I mentioned you how we uncover this, um, good signal that if five plus marketers have ABM keywords. So quite often they might say Samson. I'm just thinking about um, the recent project. They could say, oh, these people have like, let's say their warehouses in these specific locations or like what? There could be plenty of things change of the leadership or on contrary they would say we want to have CTO who has been in this position for at least three years. Right. Uh, they need to have a specific role in their organization. So there could be plenty of things. Right. But the discussion immediately moves towards relationship awareness. Right. And product need evidence. Samsung tells us that this company is know us. Samsung tells us that we have somebody who is engaged, who can, who can reply to us. And uh, it moves to this, to the third bucket which is all about something tells us that this account is likely to be interested in what?

Speaker A: Do you think you can be too specific? Do you think you can be too specific with that, with the criteria you use where you have added on too many different variables to the point where you simply don't have a big enough account list to go after. And if so, is that just a matter of backtracking the variables a bit? To your point about hey, this CTO recently started and hey, they have X amount of warehouses, so on and so forth. Is there a point where you can get too specific with that?

Speaker B: Yeah, yes, exactly. It should be as specific, as concrete as possible. Why? Because then, uh, basically what we are doing, we are segmenting all the accounts that we have into three sub lists. The first one is the cluster icp. Basically these are just the accounts. By cluster we mean the use case or use case ICP if you will. Right. So uh, basically these are all the accounts that fit the ICP criteria for specific use case. But we have no relationship. They demonstrate zero engagement, uh, very, very light engagement that you can't call as this companies know us, right? And uh, we have no idea if they are looking for products like our, for solutions like ours, right? So if and for the majority of companies that would be the biggest sub list, right? Maybe 60, 70, 80% of or uh, maybe even sometimes 90% of all of the account that they have selected. The truth to be said is that you have miserable chances to create the pipeline with these accounts, right? Because they don't know you. And the first step that you need to do is to create awareness among these accounts. And if you look from the ABM perspective, this is our one, uh, this all accounts are sitting in one to many layer or more. Honestly what we do, uh, we don't call this one to many abm, but mostly this is the use case based demand generation and print awareness. So they're all sitting in this programs for this, for that specific use case. Then we define the awareness criteria or awareness threshold if you will. And this is not mine, this is not uh, yours. We make it as a team together with sales. What specific behavior an account should demonstrate, Again both on account and contact level. Because quite often, let's say if person signs up for your event, this is just the contact level event. But that impacts also the account awareness. So what behavior this account should demonstrate? And then we map it out. Maybe it's just like they signed up for the webinar and whatever, right? You put other, let's say awareness criteria. They engaged with our ads in the last 30 days, whatever, they have visited our website, you name it. The entire point is now we have companies that more or less know us, but we don't know if they're in the market, right? Or if they might Be interested, right. There is no evidence of the need on our product. So what we are going to do now we are going to dig deeper into account research. Right. And for the ABM program this is the biggest list which we are working with. We start mapping out the buying committee, we start uh, preparing the in depth account research, trying to uncover the insights if they are likely to be in the market or no. Right. Because if they are likely to be in the market and we start also engaging with these people so they become familiar with us, with personalities behind our brand, with our brand as well. Right. We try to involve uh, them in our playbook. So uh, there is more like let's say personalized nurturing. Right. But this is what happens on this one to few level if you will. And then we have a couple of accounts that are ah, moved to active focus list which we call this accounts with known product evidence signals like you said. So for example warehouses and specific locations. We know their strategic initiative. Maybe somehow we were able to capture some of the goals that person, right. Or maybe some of the challenges. So we have good insights, we have people who know us, who are engaging with us. And for these accounts we start working on this kind of prototype solution. The point of view that I mentioned, right. Okay. This is my vision based on everything that I know. This is how um, it feels to me the kind your goal could be achieved or your problems could, or your challenges could be solved. And then you start working on fully personalized engagement. Right. You have the obviously the nurture and touch points one on one with everybody and committee member. But then you start thinking as a team, okay, what would be the next uh, the next best step with uh, each of these accounts, right. Maybe I start thinking, okay, I need to connect. We have the one of the potential power users and we have a uh, super cool client. Right. The power user there. Maybe that could be a good idea if I will connect them both and they will have a chat because they have similar challenges. Or maybe you'll come up to another idea. You say okay, this is really strategic account tier one, big revenue potential. Maybe I will invite that power user and we'll just host an exclusive session just for this account. Right. But uh, there could be multiple opportunities. But the entire point is that you are moving towards how can I help out this specific company which will help me to create sales opportunity with them. Um, if that makes sense. So that's why we want to have this characteristics as specific as possible. Because what we want to avoid is just gut feeling decisions. Oh, I Feel this account is engaged enough, right? Oh, I feel this is the good account. We need to move it to active focus. No, we want to apply specific criteria and then we make this decision. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah. Gut and instinct, I think will get you so far. There's an element of that that's I think always important. But to your point, yeah, you've got to have this stuff well defined. And I think, you know, one thing, you know, I've learned over the years too, with anything in marketing is that so much of this comes down to setting the right expectations, making sure there's good, strong communication throughout and just making sure everyone's aligned from the get go before you ever even start something. Same is true of anything like an impact test or an experiment or a new program or a pilot. But you really have to lay these things out because the moment that you have something happening without clear criteria of what a win looks like versus a loss, then you just get into a very weird, murky world of cool. We did that thing. We didn't have clear criteria or we weren't aligned, we didn't have the right expectations for this. And then therefore everyone gets angry, frustrated on these things. So um, it's uh, a difficult balance to get everyone, especially when you've got bigger orgs with more personalities and opinions that want to weigh in on each different program that's running. I wanted to, before we run out of time, uh, talk about, of course the thing that we all can't stop talking about as it relates to abm, which is AI. And I think that clearly you and I know that you can't go a second on LinkedIn or really anywhere without a headline talking about AI. And I think clearly there are a lot of positive uh, aspects of it. Obviously. I think there's uh, clearly a lot of fear and negativity around it. But I think in the world of abm, we're talking about uh, custom micro sites, we're talking about one to one ads, there's a whole lot of different deliverables that often need to get created in an ABM type of motion. And it feels like AI can have a huge impact there. And then on the other side of that is that it feels like there are moments where we can lean too far into AI, things get too automated, we don't include the human as much in the loop. There are fundamentals that are overlooked and we want to just scale and automate and leverage AI where we can. And I'd be curious, um, how you all are thinking about leveraging AI. In the scope of ABM either today or anything specific, maybe you've done with any clients or clients that are using AI and where the line is of where you say this is not something that we should leverage AI for. We need to have someone actually do some analysis, talk to some customers, get in deeper with us. What are your thoughts or what are you seeing in the real world?

Speaker B: So my take is really simple. AI is an advanced automation. So what does that mean? It means that you need to accelerate the proven robust processes that you already run manually. Let's say we spoke about this scoring criteria, right? Can you do it with AI, obviously. And then M, it won't be biased like I mentioned. Oh, this my gut feeling, right? So you have the tangible criteria, whatever, you can export the data from all your platforms and then it would classify the accounts, right? That way. Or um, you can connect it to your CRM, for example. Doesn't really matter, right? The account research, if you have a robust process, which is the truth to be said, where is the problem that most teams, they don't have this, right? But the robust process is uh, for me, their country search. Know what information you need to find about the account, where to find it, how are you going to use it and where you're going to store it, right? And then there is a typical output and every single sales rep, or if you have a country searcher in place, everybody is running the same report with the same quality and this data is saved the same way in CRM. And the truth of the set, I think you have the same experience, not so many teams, teams have this in place, right? The truth is that everybody is running their own type of research, collecting completely different information, saving in completely different places, etc. So what happens then with AI, right? Maybe let's take this example. So then every rep goes to AI and ask, hey, run, uh, to me that I want to research this company. Maybe in the best case scenario, uh, the rep would say I'm working for, let's say full funnel research this company, if that's a good fit to me, right? And then AI is just a robot. But I, I'll give another example. Imagine what will happen if instead of AI, you'll go to Upwork and you'll hire like a guy for $5 to run the account research, right? Guy brings you some information like, come on, this is not what I'm looking for, right? It's complete trash of uh, PS I can't use it the same as with AI, right? If you want to have, have Good outputs. You need to onboard it the same way if how you would onboard employees, right? Your team members. And then it means that you need, you need to have standardized processes. You need to have the quality benchmark. You need to have it. Which means this is how the good research looks like, for example, right? Then you need to have human, uh, verification in loop, right? So you verify a couple of times if that's the relevant information. Because I think, uh, I will share with you the best quote I have heard. I saved it just for different conversations. We have an enterprise sales rep, uh, at one of our clients. And we had the weekly ABM planning meetings and, uh, the marketing team brought the research for one of the accounts. We were kind of moving to active focus, right? And he is quickly looking and it was done with AI guy. And he was quickly looking and, um, he saw, okay, this is the strategic initiator one of the CTOs mentioned. He's just clicking because it kind of gives you one liner and then the links. So on the paper it looks fantastic, right? Good research with where the information comes from. And he clicks the link and, um, like, I see his face suddenly changed and like, come on, guys, are you kidding? I'm like, can you please share your screen? What's happening? And he's like, look, this is two years ago, right? And so it's completely relevant if I will use this insight and for example, reach out to this guy right now saying, hey, you know, like two years ago you mentioned this. He would just think that I'm out of my mind. So can we please improve it? Right? But obviously everybody was proud. Look how fantastic it is. It just, just in my, it just kind of collected all this strategic interviews. So obviously you can say you, you can create a constraint, find anything that is just three months, uh, old or six months, whatever. But the truth to be said, this, this is the same you would tell your, your team member, right, who would be running this research manually. So this is where I'm heading. You need to define the processes where obviously, maybe a country, some research. It's a strategic part, but it's a mundane task, right? And obviously it's more about following the process, collecting the proven information and then, um, uh, structuring it properly. So can you do it with AI? Yes. But first you need to create the good. You need to create a good process. You need to operationalize it. You can before even outsource it to AI. The simple litmus test. You can give it to your colleague who never ran the same process and see the Output and if the output is bad, if it's not to kind of your quality standard, if it's not aligned with your quality standard, then you know it's not ready, you need to improve it. And then only then you can onboard AI, right? And the AI will, then everybody in your team would then um, one thing I forgot to mention, you need to onboard your team how to run it, right? So everybody would be using AI the same way, right? Uh, just to avoid the same story, if you had, let's say a guy from Upwork and five different SDRs who would give that guy completely different requests and then have a completely different output. So that's kind of the point. You find the mundane processes, you create good, robust operations, you create quality benchmarks, you verify it, you then onboard your team and this is how you use it. But definitely it's not the tool that uh, kind of substitutes your, your judgment. Uh, and maybe if you'll ask me, uh, which of the processes you shouldn't automate ever, I would say anything that uh, relates to the relationship building what I hate. And I think this is, maybe this is the easiest way to hurt your friend and your own personal reputation. I see a few people even like, with whom I was connected for quite a long time on LinkedIn and I clearly see that they are applying there. I'm chatting with them on LinkedIn and they're apply using ChatGPT or Claude because they never spoke to me that way, right? So, and we're all not stupid, we all know the patterns, how AI writes, right? So I can, and it's not about M dashes, but you know, the, like the sentences, the word and etc. It's uh, it's, it's, it's, it's the problem. And so when you try to engage the AI, written comments on LinkedIn AI content unlinked in, I mean AI, it's not the AI content in a sense like, hey, write me a post for ctos, you know, that sort of stuff. Uh, the messages that you are sending is just horrible. Now today it's more about uh, damaging your brand than uh, helping you.

Speaker A: So it's so funny, it's so funny you say, uh, I think it was the article or something was two years old you said. And um, I've gotten, I kid you not, probably at least 12 emails over the last three months or so around one case study that we did with a company named Shipwell about five years ago. And uh, the first sentence almost, um, always starts the same way, like, hey, I Saw the amazing success you had with Shipwell, where you achieved a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And then they go into whatever service or product they're selling. And so I think it's just funny because, you know, of course these things stand out. And whether they're using clay or whatever they're using to, to do some research, um, it was old research, it was not new. And, uh, of course everyone's doing the same thing. So now I see the pattern of ship well, ship well, ship well, ship well, and also very, very similar headlines. And so, yeah, to your point, I mean, AI is so interesting to me. I mean, I think that, uh, to your point, you said it earlier, the inputs, you need the right inputs and judgment to get the right outputs. And what's so funny about it is there's always these prompting playbooks and best ways to prompt and all sorts of things, but it's really not that different than giving context to you or to me or to any employee that works for you. I mean, the employee needs to understand what good looks like. They need to understand what the overall methodology is. They need to understand what the tone of voice should be. You can't have these things just up in the air. Now, there's some nuance where humans can figure it out to a degree because they've got maybe a base of knowledge or experience they're coming from. But in most cases, if you really want a consistent output, you need to do the same types of things. And so to your point, taking a step back and saying, all right, what are the things that we actually need to input into this to get something pretty good into it? That's the stuff that actually takes some time. And so often people are rushing to scale or to automate or to create an output just because it feels cool or they want to talk about it or brag about the workflow that they just built, when really they never got some of the fundamentals right on the front end to get something that was legitimately good. So I don't know, there's, um, so many use cases of good and bad with AI. And to your point, I think you said it, relationships are king. And so people are going to know it really quickly. And I think, uh, these days we all just want to know we're talking to a human at the end of the line because for now, until AI agents take over, we still are going to want, uh, to engage and interact with real humans. Um, so I think that's really spot on. Well, let's call it here, my friend. Um, I really appreciate everything you do. I mean, you're one of the people that I've followed for a long, long while. I mean, last, I don't know, we've known each other, I think, for four or five years or something like that. A long, long time, you and Vlad. And so I still appreciate people that are keeping it real in the world of LinkedIn, where it feels like it's gotten completely coated with noise and headlines that are so clickbaity that it just feels like the whole entire platform has degraded at some level. But, uh, but I still read, uh, and follow a lot of your content, man. So I appreciate everything that you're doing.

Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker A: All right, well, thanks for listening to another episode of the Demand podcast again. I'm Jonathan Bland, the co founder of Omnilab. I'll also have with me Jason Steele, who's the other co founder of Omnilab on this podcast as well. Uh, we're a demand gen agency for C2 Series B SaaS, startups. Um, if you like this episode, uh, or you're looking for some help with demand gen, please feel free to reach out to us, us, um, on LinkedIn over a DM. Or you can go just directly to our website. It's omnilive consulting.com. otherwise, uh, we look forward to seeing you on the next episode where we'll be talking about all things demanding. Until then, thanks.

Speaker B: Bye. Bye.