Episode173: How to Create an Account-Based Playbook For Long Sales Cycles and Multiple Decision-Makers with Andrei & Vladimir

Speaker A: This is The Full Funnel B2B Marketing

Speaker B: Podcast brought to you by Full Funnel IO.

Speaker A: Let's dive in. Hello, uh, everyone, uh, we are back with the final episode before the Christmas pause. And um, as we promised last time, we want to share how to create account based playbooks for long sale cycles and multiple decision makers. Again, uh, the reason for this topic is really simple. What we have observed this year is that there are a lot of people talking about ABM and how ABM playbooks should be orchestrated. But when we look at these playbooks in nutshell, what it means, it's not real marketing, right? Because ABM first of all stands for account based marketing. It's a hyper targeted lead gen with some layer of personalization and that's it. Right? So there is maybe in the best case scenario there are some personalized landing pages and air cover. But there is no playbook that is really aligned with the length of the sales process and with the length of the buyer journey. So today we want to share exactly this and let us know guys, where you all joining us from? This last episode we are broadcasting from not so sunny Spain. Uh, let us know where you're all joining us from. And while you are typing what we are going to share with you today, we'll very quickly present the reality of enterprise process. We spoke about this multiple times, so this would be a very brief introduction. Then we'll show how to create the playbooks that are matching the B2B buying B2 behavior. And uh, there would be tons of examples. Also with the screenshots from our recent program and the step by step guidance on how to create this playbooks. As always, you are very welcome to ask any questions. And with that being said, um, let's dive in right into B2B reality. Um, quick question. How many touch points does it take to generate and win a complex or enterprise B2B deal? How many touch points do you guys think type in the chat today we

Speaker B: have a bit of shy audience. 6, 10 to 30.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: I think somebody has read their literature for 100 plus.

Speaker A: And then we have also, uh, 10 approximately. Cool. Now imagine if your cell cycle length is 18 months. Do you think that across this 18 months, 10 touch points would be enough to create the sales opportunity? And uh, to answer that question, we always love to share this report. Uh, the Hockey Stack team, they ran this report and they analyzed the different types of companies, right? So we'll focus for now on the enterprise deals, right, that are um, what we mean by the complex deals. So the deals with uh average contract value above 100k. Right. So in nutshell it takes 417. So uh, Jinkia was uh, most accurate with the prediction. Right. It takes 417 touch points and around four, five and a half thousand impressions just to create that. It means that you need to constantly to be on the radar of that company and always have this value added. Touch points obviously not in famous 21 cadence email sequence. Um, uh, again this is something that we have shared multiple times. We know the complexity of uh, our uh, prospects, uh, journey. But once out of curiosity we asked Dream Data to give us the access to the account to track this, uh, just to share it as a part of the research. And even in our case we have seen that it's proven by the digital analytics. Nine months, 87 touch points. And these are only the touch points that were captured by the digital software. Uh, the truth is why it's happening, right? And why it's so long. Um, because the demand on the buyer side is not happening according to our playbooks and our timeline. Right. We can't actually push our buyers to buy. Right. And just the fact that we have selected specific accounts or we marked a certain account as a strategic account doesn't mean that they are willing to buy from us. Any signals that we are tracking, they're also not meaning that they are ready to buy concrete from us. Why? Because we have shared, we have a good article lot once uh, wrote an in depth guide. Maybe if you can find this and drop the link that would be helpful. Uh, the demand generation for long sale cycle, right. The truth is that the demand is created in multiple stages and they are not linear. So it all starts from the learning experience and then there is a curiosity. Then when a need happens, the buyer starts looking for the solution. But not necessarily for our solution. Right. They might be looking for multiple alternatives, not even in the technology space because even doing internally something, it's also a solution. Right? And then they might be willing uh, to investigate your solution then being willing to pick up uh, what you are offering and then they might be only ready to buy from you. So where I'm heading with this, right, all of this, it's not while on the previous uh, diagram and it feels as a linear approach process. Right. But we just use it to visualize the stages in reality this is back and forth between multiple buying committee members, they can come back to the different stages, et cetera. Right. And that's why you have seen on that uh, screenshot from TRIM data that uh, it takes quite a lot of time and when the need happens, there might be a spike in activity, et cetera. Right. So with that being said, how can we create the playbooks that are uh, actually influencing this entire buyer journey and matching it? This is what we are going to share next.

Speaker B: All right, so the rest of the presentation goes in details, we'll share a bunch of examples and we structure it around nine principles that uh, we always follow when we are creating ABM playbooks either for full funnel for ourselves or together with our clients. And the first one should be obvious, but unfortunately it's not always the case that you need to optimize for the length of the sales cycle. If your sales cycle is six, 12 or 18 months long, you can't expect to have kind of transactional, uh, cadence that you send and then you forget. And maybe every once in a while you knock again on the door and ask, okay, uh, are you maybe interested now? So what we need to do is we need to take that into account. It's also important with complex deal cycles. Uh, sorry, with complex deals we know that we have multiple buyers, up to 12, 15, sometimes even more buyers that are involved in the deal or that are on one way or another influencing the buyers that make decisions in the deal. So multi threading needs to be part of your ABM playbook and we'll show some examples you need to have in order to be able to optimize for the length of the sales cycle. You need to have a consistent flow of touch points and not just any, um, not just like we said several times, not just yet another reminder or yet another email. Actually that's the point for we want to have a variety of touch points beyond, let's say the classical things that we always think of such as the LinkedIn emails or uh, ads. And you want to be able to come back to the buyer in new ways and to try to engage them in a different way. And we'll show also why,

Speaker A: uh, what

Speaker B: is very important is as we saw, uh, the way that the buyers are buying is not the way that we want to sell. So they go through a number of stages and they share this example of how they go from I want to learn and discovering through making decisions. So we want to also align our playbooks with their stage. So we'll share also practical framework. Uh, we use there with really a lot of examples there. We really broke down a full campaign and gave examples and screenshots of how we do this. Um, it's also important not to look at these different touch points as Disconnected, uh, siloed activities that some are done by one team, some are done by another team or another person. We uh, want to think about, okay, what is the actual experience of that account and how can we connect these different activities in a way that one activity is going to build on another one. Number seven is it's very important that we don't just push the playbooks on sales or create those playbooks in silos. Sales creates their own, marketing creates their own. That's what we've seen many, many times and it never works. The best approach is when these playbooks are co created between uh, the two teams. Um, and whenever we talk about playbooks, you need to have very clear steps, milestones, including both sales and marketing activities, showing the example there, and also have clear metrics and expectations. So for each of these points we want to dive a little bit deeper and show concrete examples. And I just like to share the following example, Andrej, if you don't mind, because I was uh, talking to our uh, customer who described this whole situation with me and I think that's interesting for people to know how this actually might look like. And we mentioned we want to optimize for the length of the sales cycle. We want to have multiple touch points. And this was a story that one of our clients, uh, their sales rep shared with us, uh, shared with her colleagues and with us. And so what she did is she took one example target account and she said, okay, what is actually, what are all the different touch points and things that happen with that account that obviously I, as a sales rep am aware of. We know that there uh, are many other touch points that could be captured by our analytics software such as Hockey Stack. We know that there are also many, many more that are never captured by no software. You know, internal discussions and things that happen, maybe, you know, then consuming content on platforms where there's no tracking, where you don't have insight. So these are obviously just the touch points that are proactive. So where the sales rep actually tried to uh, provoke a conversation, start a conversation and create an opportunity. So it all started with awareness. She shared, um, we always talk about account cluster. So she shared some content that was relevant for these accounts, uh, that they were targeting at the time. And it started with an engagement. So one of the buyers uh, engaged with her post and then she tried to follow up on that as we always uh, advise and we always do ourselves. She tried with the direct message. She didn't get a response. She then tried to follow up on email. She didn't get a response. She tried to distribute content. We'll show some examples of what we mean by content distribution. She didn't get a response. There was a roadshow. She invited her to a roadshow. There was no response. Then she tried to actually leverage. They started a podcast and she had an opportunity to also invite buyers. She tried the LinkedIn, no response. Email, no response. Finally she called uh, her up and uh, the prospect said yes. Actually she was flattered and interested. She just didn't have the time to respond. I mean she kind of like saw all of these touch points as value added. None of those touch points were pushy sales messages. They were always about um, different um, either a piece of content or an initiative that was relevant for the buyer. Something personalized, something relevant, something valuable. So there was no negative experience. It was kind of in the back of the mind of the buyer. And she finally was ready to talk to uh, our client. She said yes to the podcast interview. And then actually from there on um, um they actually had a nice experience. They had a podcast interview. They had uh, what we always do, like a pre production call where she got some insight into what was happening in that Target account that she couldn't just see based on the research. Um and then after ah, the main interview and publishing the podcast and connecting with her colleagues she also suggested a one on one session with an internal expert. Uh, that was one of the account executives who knew a lot and um, was able to show our clients prospect how they might solve the problem, how they deal, how they did it at other clients, et cetera, uh, which they found very inspirational. And this is actually where it progressed to further conversations, opportunity and the deal itself. So the reason why we like to share this is that this happened over more than six months and that uh, there were many, many points where there was no response. Uh, and that it wasn't the question of hey, let's just try the same approach but just reminding the prospect. But how this sales rep actually tried different approaches at different times before she finally came to uh yes, I think that will be the point of this. So we promised we are going to go through the different principles. So optimizing for the length of the sales cycles. The first one. Let's look at the next one. Andre, you want to share about multithreading?

Speaker A: Yeah, if you don't mind I uh, would love to mention that uh, we have interviewed the sales rep that you actually mentioned. Uh, her name is Magaly Finette. Perducci is working for um, our client. Yes, a company Called cross knowledge. Um, so I dropped the link in the chat where you can listen uh, to the interview and also see the outline of this playbook. Um, if you don't mind Vlad, I will just jump to the third point and then we can come back to the multi threading. Uh, what is really important, what you have shared, right? Uh, the playbook is aligned with the longevity of the buying process, right? So there is a constant flow of actions, how Magaly was engaging with her target accounts. And I think what is really important to give this distinction between two types of uh, touchpoints flow. The one is the time based what we were presenting, right? Something that we attempt to engage the person, right? So this month we are going to do this activity, for example invite to the podcast, invite to the roadshow, uh, doing any type of activity that is relevant, that helps us to engage. This is what we call the time based activities, right? This is something that every marketing and sales team needs to incorporate into uh, their ABM planning. And then we have the second type of touch points. These are the signal based. Probably we don't need to tell you that uh, on from every corner today you are hearing about the importance to track the signals, right? Everybody is talking about there is a new even definition of go to market, signal based GTM and whatever. Uh, we always laugh at it because the signals, so they became the commodity, right? They are accessible for everybody. Just buy technology and you'll have access to all of the signals. The entire point is what you are going to do with the signals, right? And these signals should be a part of this engagement playbook. So what is really essential to mention, uh, it's not even um, related to the playbook, uh, that we were sharing before. Uh, it's what we do all the time. In between this time based attempts we track these different signals to do the timely outreach part with a nuance. We don't try to sell all the time. Hey, I have seen you raised money. I have seen you hired that person. I have seen that you changed your job title. I have seen you have purchased your technology. Let's book a demo. The third party signal doesn't mean the buying intent. Um, the third party signal should be ah, a trigger for you to analyze all the interactions or history of interactions with the target account and then making sense of that signal. What would be the next relevant, let's say action practical example if the person was promoted, right? The person, let's say was I don't head off demand gen and became VP of marketing instead of saying congrats I saw Congrats was the promotion. Let's have a demo. Uh, what about like for example with flat we once wrote the guide the first 90 days for uh, VP of marketing, uh, in enterprise B2B. So in that case why not just reaching out and saying hey, congrats and etc. If you're engaging with that person constantly. By the way, uh, we once wrote that guide but if you'd like to check can share it's a meaningful and value added touch point that is aligned with that signal, with the intent of that signal. That is really important and this is how the nurturing is happening. Because the goal if the person like in this case the person is not replying to you at all, the first thing that you want to achieve is ignite the conversation. Right? That's the key. And um, so that that is really important to keep in mind. You need to have the signal based playbooks but they shouldn't dominate. They should be a part of the nurturing process and they should be executed in parallel to time based playbooks. And with that being said, I think it was logical extension of the playbook that you were sharing. I think I will pass back a mic to you to talk about it.

Speaker B: We mentioned this in one of the previous episodes but uh, we wanted to stress this. Um, I think what you can take three points to take out of this diagram for those who are watching uh, about multi threading of the buying committee and the people that influence our buyers is that first of all we want to be aware that there are different types of buyers in our buying committee. This is something that all salespeople are aware of when they're selling to enterprise. Um, but also there are people within the organization that might be able to give you an introduction. Maybe they're able to give you some feedback. Right. Especially when it comes to like very large companies, a lot of salespeople would like to be able to speak to executive suite, but that's very difficult. And sometimes actually the person who is kind of the one who feels the most pain, uh, such as maybe like a power user or M. Sometimes it is a technical buyer, sometimes it is somebody who is just as we call them, like the power user of the product, uh, is the one who would be recommending that product. And so understanding the different roles in the buying committee, but also roles where like I mentioned might be influencing might be creating awareness, help you create awareness of your brand, of your product, um, or even just help you connect. Um, so if you map out in such a broader way and also look at roles that are, uh, maybe outside of your target account very frequently for complex deals. You might have, you know, consulting companies that are involved, let's say in digital transformation, who are heavy influencers in the deal. Or you might have, you know, just, you know, specific industry channels, communities, associated association discussions where you have basically uh, our buyers hearing and discovering solutions from their peers or from, you know, the industry voices and learning about the solution. So when you map your target account ecosystem, if you like, in that way now it's interesting to think about, okay, from our perspective in our company, who are the people who could be engaging these different roles? Could we maybe split our responsibilities in uh, such a way that we cover um, a broader, you know, ecosystem, not just, let's say the uh, very narrow decision makers where you will obviously have your, for example, account executives be focused on that. I remember, for example, one of our clients saying, you know what, it is impossible for our junior SDR to engage executive, you know, let's say the cio. No way they will ever respond. What do they do they have their executives actually invite the target account executives on conversations, uh, peer to peer conversations, on their podcast, on roundtables, they go and speak at the industry events and this is the way they start influencing these um, uh, executives. Uh, so whenever we are talking about creating a playbook, um, this is another, I think, principle to have in mind. How do we engage different buyers? Uh, how do we also create awareness, especially when we talk about, later, talk about the different buy stages, when we are creating awareness, not thinking very narrowly, just about, let's say LinkedIn, email, etc. Uh, but also thinking about other people, niche industry, um, voices or channels or communities. Which actually brings me to the next point, uh, which is all about these channels and activities. So when you're creating playbooks, you need to be thinking about it in a broader way. Uh, so on one hand, not just, let's say, uh, LinkedIn, emails and ads, but also, um, about variety of uh, uh, touch points. Maybe Andrey, if you want to take over.

Speaker A: Absolutely. So when it comes to the variety of touch points, um, what I think is important to mention, uh, is that we don't need to think about touch points directly with the decision maker or champion or the buying committee only. Right. The touch points could happen across the ecosystem. By ecosystem we mean all the channels and sources of information that our target buyers are consuming. Right. Honestly, we always say it doesn't really matter from what angle or from or where we can create that awareness. Right. If let's say if there is a thought leader that is talking about uh, our product or engaging with us, that helps us to create the awareness. If there is a specific commute where these buyers are actively consuming the content and where, let's say if we are doing co marketing with that specific community. Right. It also helps to create that awareness. So what we need to ensure when we create this uh, long term playbook, we need to define the places, how can we influence our buyers from multiple angles. And then when it comes to running the playbooks, this is something that we have covered in the previous episodes. And, and uh, uh, in a moment I will share the link where we spoke about um, the ecosystem. What is really important to keep in mind here, right. When you orchestrate the playbook, think about how can we leverage this, let's say these different channels of influence. If you are running the webinar, is there an opportunity to involve a specific SAT leader? If you are doing the market research, is there an opportunity to involve SAT leaders or partners or some communities or industry as a, that can help us with the distribution? So uh, this is really essential. And then quite often uh, we observe another problem. For whatever reason ABM is planned in silos. What I mean is that it's completely disconnected to the top level initiatives that the company already scheduled. Simple example, let's say every year you are uh, going to to a specific industry conference, very popular, that all of your target accounts are planning to attend. Think about how can you leverage it, how can you make it account based, right? So maybe you can arrange a uh, private event before or after the conference. And again if you are not well known vendor, maybe it makes sense to record one of the speakers. It would be the paying geek, right? But this person will host the workshop. Maybe one hour workshop. It could be Q and A session or it could be roundtable. Right? And you use it as an opportunity to invite target accounts. Why? Because otherwise they simply won't come. But for you it's a fantastic opportunity to build that relationship, right? Maybe you can integrate uh, let's say uh, 20 minutes, 30 minutes presentation from some of your subject matter experts. Or that could be an opportunity. You're coming to the conference, you know that there would be a target accounts potentially you can make quick interviews with them, right. You can do any co marketing for example, simple idea, sales rep meeting, uh, their prospects and just asking like what's the number one trend you are observing in our space for the next year or for this year? I'm just thinking out loud, right? Then you Collect five responses, seven responses, doesn't really matter. And you already can make a nice, you transfer it to market and you ask market and can you create a nice carousel with the quotes from these people? And then you have a nice, nice, nice collateral, right, that you can share. Like I have uh, spoken to five, let's say senior IT managers and they share the trends, they are absorbent, right? And then you distribute it, you can distribute it to the same people, they might share as well. And as you know, usually the more, let's say conservative is your market, the more everybody knows everybody, right? Which helps you to create this additional awareness. And you can use the same, uh, let's say the same piece of content to do multi threading. What Vlad already mentioned saying, hey, we featured your colleagues, thought you might enjoy and you create this additional awareness. So this is really essential to keep in mind. How can we incorporate everything that we have already scheduled, all the, let's say high priority initiatives and um, make them account based. And then how can we use additional channels that our buyers, where our buyers are consuming or engaging with their peers to create this additional rounds of awareness? Because to be honest, just constantly reaching out, only reaching out and trying to pitch, you won't be able to do anything, right? So this is essential to uh, create this, uh, to create the brand awareness and do this nurturing holistically. What's next? Uh, basically uh, we always try to document these examples. We can show all of them, but that's the exact reason why we have created the full final academy. We have tons of this. Uh, I need to give credit uh, to Vlad for making the complete revamped redesign of the Academy. So we created now collections of different playbooks that are aligned with certain jobs to be done. And there are one to one playbooks, one to few, deal acceleration, expansion. And if this is something that you guys might be interested in, check our full Funnel Academy, Full Funnel IO Academy. This is where I mean you can, if this is something that you're working on, you'll have tons of different examples. With that being said, um, let's move to the next principle.

Speaker B: And this principle is all about aligning the playbook that you're using or the playbooks with the stage of the buyer journey that target accounts are in now. You could make this very complex and start thinking about, you know, the mapping the different steps of the buyer journey and how can we figure out where they are, etc. But we use a very practical framework that I think everybody can implement. And what we ask ourselves is okay, so when you look at these accounts that we are after, what can we actually conclude? Well, we know that if these accounts are not even aware of us, if they're not aware of our brand, our goal is going to be awareness, uh, generation to generate awareness within those accounts. This is the number one complaint that we hear from each and every uh, sales rep is we are reaching out to these accounts. They're not aware of us, they are not responding, they're ignoring me. They, they receive so much email that they're only actually reading email or LinkedIn messages from people or brands that they know. So this brand awareness is very important. It's also important, especially in the enterprise accounts because we know now that the vast majority, more than 80% of target accounts actually shortlist vendor they were aware of before they even started the buying process. So this awareness becomes actually critical for you to uh, end up uh, in their consideration set. So this is the first stage and we are going to share a bunch of examples, uh, in a moment from our campaign about what are the activities that you can uh, run example activities to generate awareness. The second one is, okay, so there is awareness. Um, we know that there are some multiple maybe touch points that we can look at our intent, our engagement data, uh, such as multiple visits to the website, signups to our newsletter or activities, activities on social, attendance to events, etc, etc, together with sales. We defined it, we believe that there is sufficient level of awareness when let's say we actually not only have website visits, but we actually have multiple visits or visits from multiple people to our high intent pages, such as the product page, the pricing integration pages. And we are somehow connected to one of these people because if you're not connected to them, how are you even. We actually had this situation where we had like, I think it was McKinsey or not McKinsey, um, McAfee. I'm sorry.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Huge, uh, company, they visited their website multiple times and we tried to even identify the target buyers. It was very difficult because they had hundreds of marketers. A lot of them are B2C, a mix of B2B. It was impossible for us to know. So being starting those connections is important, but also like, you know, that we, in this case, we had to decide to not prioritize that account because we were not connected to anybody. We couldn't like identify a named buyer at that stage. So, uh, and in other cases where we already had. Why? Because it's very simple. Who are you going to reach out to? Right. Okay. So that the next stage is where Next to now they know of you. But uh, you also need to learn what their challenges are. Before you can even know if they're actually uh, a good fit and whether they have the need to your product, you need to learn more about them. So you start doing things like account research, but also connected to the buyers and uh, trying to also get some insider information. By that I mean get some information that you cannot just read from their website. And we'll show some examples of that in a moment too. And then finally, uh, the third group, or the third stage if you want, is uh, what we call the active focus, which are the accounts where they know you, you know them. What I mean by that is that there is a strong indication that they actually have a need for your product. You've gotten some information, uh, that makes you think that they have a need for your product. They are sufficiently engaged, you have some relationship, you can actually start, you have some back and forth conversation with them. And these are the accounts where you focus the majority of your sales time on. So these are the accounts that you prioritize for one on one marketing and one on one outreach by sales. And let's say we always like to think of 80, 20, this is where the majority of the time on your sales rep should go. Um, and the rest should go to the future pipeline where marketing usually focuses more on the awareness creation. Now for each of these stages, what we wanted to say is basically the takeaway from this is that you need to think about these different stages, align the playbooks for each stage, um, and then uh, we'll share in a moment the example and also I think we'll come back to that point also. As you can see on this diagram, for those who are watching, these steps are somehow connected. So not only thinking about the individual activities, but also how you can connect them. But let's dive into those details uh, in the next slides. So I think I would. Yeah, maybe you can start with the activity example activities for awareness creation and we can go on like that.

Speaker A: Yes. Um, so as Vlad said, what is really important to have in our playbook, right? The activities that help us to create the awareness, the activities that help us to create engagement among the buying committee members, start activities that help us to start conversations with them and activities that help us to book the discovery call. So what we mean, the activation part and all these three processes, we call them the account development. Right. In essence, how we move accounts from being completely unaware of us to accounts that want to talk to us. The first activity is creating uh awareness with the cluster ICP accounts. Right. And uh, when it comes to awareness we're also I mean while primary mentioned the cluster ICP because we want to make as many accounts uh that match our ICP criteria that we have selected for ABM program as possible to become aware of us, it doesn't obviously exclude the companies that we are already targeting, companies that are sitting and future pipeline and active focus lists. The key is to define uh the content based strategy, something that we have already covered and um, if you guys would be interested we'll share the link. We have a good guide on our blog. Um, when you have this narrative in place then the key is to define the activities that uh, will help you with nurturing and that will help you to create this feature. But first party engagement signals that you can use for the connections for the conversations with the target accounts. If you look at the orchestration of our program, uh basically what we had, we had the webinar which we called how to survive as uh, how to survive as uh B2B CMO in AI era and drive enterprise pipeline. This was the core narrative for this. We did the entire decomposition of the challenges that our uh target buyers are facing and we define the core LinkedIn pieces of content that we want to create. The infographics that we'll need to create the uh newsletters where we can cover let's say longer pieces of content and the market research what would be actually interesting for our buyers to learn, right? Because the key of the market research is not to pull in the facts that now chatgpt or Cloth or uh Gemini, can you just turn on the extended mode or the research mode and then you'll get the market research, right? No, if this is what you are going to produce, forget about this. Nobody is going to read it, right? But something that will contain the proprietary data, something that will contain the data from the peers, this is what is really interesting, right? And then that became the orchestration of our entire program and the second part for this, right? How can you distribute this content? Because again this is uh, where we feel the program usually fail the company. Uh, for example the company think about oh we'll create this content and publish it in our blog. But who is going to read it or we are published, we'll be publishing it on our company's LinkedIn page. But let's be honest. Are your buyers actually engaging with the content that is published on your corporate page? Because if you are not working for Microsoft or uh, Apple or uh world known companies where people are actually following the corporate page. The chances what we observe that the only people who are engaging with the corporate content are uh, the colleagues of the marketing team. What we need to ensure is that we have, have good playbooks for distributing that content organically. Right. Publishing this content in the channels that we mentioned, LinkedIn, maybe industry communities, newsletter, etc. Right. Something that helps us to distribute that content. Next, paid distribution. Obviously uh, you need to promote only the good content and I think this is a good litmus test. Right. If you are not willing to spend money on that content, if you don't, then it means that you don't believe it's good enough to be distributed to the target accounts. Right? So uh, obviously today we have the short leadership ads, conversational ads, etc that can easily enable us to uh, distribute it to the strategic accounts, to the strategic buyers. And lastly the best channel, to be honest, the best distribution channels that sells uh, one to one distribution. Because ultimately for whom we are creating that content, we are creating it for our target buyers. We want to somehow influence their decisions. We want to make sure that they would consider us, that they would pay attention to our product, et cetera. And then who has direct access to your target buyers? Sales. Right. So there should be playbooks in place where sales can actually leverage that content that you are creating and distributing it to your strategic accounts. We have an idea with Vlad next year to record uh, a new course to add it to our full funnel academy about account based content strategy and this distribution playbooks and more specifically how sales can use uh, content for the distribution. So maybe a quick check, let us know guys, if this something that uh, you might be interested in, type, uh, plus or. Yes, whatever works for you. Just curious if this is something that resonates for you. Uh, it up. These are the three channels, right? Make sure that you have this in place. Organic distribution, paid distribution, and involving sales, the next stage.

Speaker B: Uh, if you remember I mentioned now we have accounts uh, that are aware of you and our goal is to create what we call a future pipeline. Because we know that the pipeline of today is a pipeline that has actually been created to create six months ago or nine months ago. Right. And if you are not creating future pipeline, it's not going to be there. Uh, a lot of companies that come to us actually kind of say, you know, our pipeline has dried out and that is why it's so important to have the future pipeline creation. What are uh, some of the playbooks that we use here? Well, the main goal of these playbooks is that we really want to go from awareness to actually engaging the buyers in the buying committees. We want to understand who these people are. We want to start researching these accounts, mapping those buyers and start engaging them one on one and, or one to few sometimes. But basically what uh, are some of the examples that you can see here on screen are? Uh, reaching out to buyers. For example, in our campaign we reached out to a lot of buyers, uh, and ask them for their quote about the, you know, the challenges that they're experiencing and their best practices when it comes to AI, uh, how they're using AI actually to drive revenue, not just to do quotes, unquote, more with less. And you can see this, maybe it's very small, but you can see Andre reaching out to a buyer or to one of people from our audience asking from, for their contribution and them actually replying and giving us quite a lot of details. So I want to mention here what's actually happening is that you're engaging those people. You're starting conversation, two way conversations about relevant topics. I mean you have selected this topic because it's going to be relevant for those target accounts, but you're also getting insider information, somebody shares some challenges or priorities. Excuse me, um, this is the inside information that you usually cannot find out on the website. Um, for example we had a client who was starting to do, who is selling into banks and financial service companies and uh, some sort of a technology platform. And they were interested for example in you know, how many different pieces of technology they're using, uh, to support their uh, agents and advisors. Well that's a kind of information that is very important for them that is difficult maybe to find out behind uh, let's say the firewall of a bank, but that sometimes you can get through these interactions. So the examples that you see is Andre reaching out here to buyers, collecting the quotes, then we publish those quotes, then we actually uh, distribute them so we can say, hey, um, if you haven't seen this, we have just featured you or we have featured your colleague in this post. So this gives you also an excuse to connect to the other buyers and say, you know, this was a great contribution. Maybe uh, you would like to give us a quote for the next piece that we are working on. So you are using this as well as a kind of a micro networking opportunity to connect to the complete buying committee. In this case we also ran a webinar that was a great excuse to connect to the people who register for the webinar to say hey, thanks a lot for signing up, uh, what is the one number one question that you would like us to answer? What is the number one challenge that you would like us to talk about during the webinar? Another way that we actually get information from those buyers? We use webinar polls, we ask questions in the signup form. These are all the different ways in which you can collect that insider information. Um, a couple more examples before we move to the third stage, uh, where I already mentioned this once. We, let's say publish, uh, content collaboration piece where we share the quotes, we connect to their colleagues, share, uh, this uh, piece of content where their colleague was featured. Um, we actually, um, what Andre did, I thought that was very cool. We got a lot of insights from these buyers and they shared, shared challenges. And then Andrei said, you know what, let me write a post. In this case, it was a post about the top challenge that he saw. People were sharing in those, uh, in, in this content collaboration in our market research. And then share it with people, share it with people who contributed, share it with their colleagues. And of course, like if somebody already shared a challenge and now you're sharing some content about that challenge, that's another touch point and another way for you to start relevant conversation with that prospect. Uh, as you can see here, uh, Andrey sharing that piece of content and then, uh, our, um, um, Maddie in this case, replying and sharing some information about what's going on in her company. So different activities where you're always thinking, okay, what are the things that we need to know from our audience, uh, to know whether they have a product need and to be able to use this information to create a personalized offer for these target accounts, kind of a perfect pitch, um, for this target account. And basically once you have that information and you know that they have a need for your product and you have this information about that target account, um, that allows you to create this personalized, uh, uh, information. Oh, sorry, personalized solution or personalized proposal, personalized picture, whatever you like to call it. Then we come to the third stage, which is the active focus stage. And maybe Andrey, if you want, we can share a few examples of what we did in this case for this, uh, stage of active focus.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, um, honestly, the key points when it comes to active focus development, it's all about the full personalization. Uh, that is a great question from Sarai in the chat. Uh, what to do if, uh, the only way to sell is through the tenders, and tenders require the lowest price. Uh, what I wanted to say is that, um, if the procurement Team is uh, unknown. You simply don't know who will be there and the only factor is the lowest price. There is nothing that you can do about this unfortunately. There is no magic. But if the procurement team is known, right, Then you can influence uh, them through the playbooks that we were sharing through the touch points. It's just the method to define through what channels you can create that awareness. Maybe that could be through some specific industry associations etc. We had that, that experience and how you can influence that team is just through the whole personalization. It's just like uh, identifying their needs and then presenting the best ROI. What could be the best ROI? Return on investment, simplicity of the process, fastest delivery, etc. Something that is really important for these people. Right. And for us when it comes to, I mean that, that was the part of answer to that question. For us when it comes to the activation, the key point is to define what would really reson with our target accounts, right? What could help us to uh, deliver value to them, not just pitch. And hey, you know you have engaged with us so far so let's have a call about abm. But uh, sometimes we are creating the memo, let's say the project members outlining how the program might look like for that company. Right. Which gives them the visibility. Obviously at this point we are brainstorming on our best knowledge. But at least it gives gives uh, the target buyer a pretty good outline. And even if they are not going to engage with us, it will deliver value for them because they can see the orchestration and they can take it to their team. Right. Sometimes we are offering free strategy sessions, uh, sometimes we pack all of this and send the direct mail parcel. As you can see, uh, what we honestly uh, love to do with flight, when we mean by personalization, it should be really full personalization. And when we send something like in this case you see a pack of specialty coffee, we do this because we know that the person we are sending it to is a, ah, coffee lover and then it's a personalized one because there could be a perception that you can purchase the give delivery platforms and then send the uh, render pack of cookies or whatever. It's a nice, nice gesture but it's not really personalized. Right. So it's more like uh, uh, a gift. What we love to do sometimes we are sending for example if you know that the person is a football or soccer fan, right. We can send a T shirt of the favorite football club or favorite football player etc. We had lots of these experiences but the uh, this is like let's say more advanced tactic. The entire point is what can deliver value to our target buyer and how can we make it fully personalized to them. Right. That's the entire key. And when you finish this, the uh, core point for you, when you orchestrate this playbook, right. For every quarter you need to plan this account journeys again, we covered this multiple times during the previous episodes. The entire point is you plan the quarter, you add the activities that help to generate awareness, you add the activities that help to validate product needs, build relationships and activities that help you to book the discovery calls. In parallel. You are leveraging different signals to continue that nurturing whenever you see that there is something that is relevant to you happening on the account side. So let's uh, quickly share the last few parts and then we can cover questions from our community.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Um, before I just jump into that, I was thinking when you were discussing with Suraj about the procurement and tender driven processes, I was reflecting on a client where we had this, uh, it was a supplier of large pharmaceutical companies and everything was by tender, especially for, you know, big deals of seven figure plus deals. So several things that I learned from that project. First of all, I learned that obviously uh, you need to know these procurement people like of these biggest accounts you need to have relationship. Our client had one account executive assigned per target account. Now we are talking about huge accounts with 100,000 employees. Right. So uh, you treat an account like a market in their case. But they had to build this relationship. That was their main goal. Right. And you need to build this relationship because we have this relationship. Although they say the price is basically the only thing that counts. Of course they have specific requirements. Right. So the better you can understand those requirements, the better you build those relationships, the more you will be able, the better your proposal will be made. But also if you are in contact, uh, with the procurement. And by the way, don't forget the procurement is always buying for somebody, for another business unit within that company. Company. And that that was another lesson that we learned that depending on the type of product, you will have more influence from procurement or more influence from the actual internal buyer, which you also need to understand and their needs etc and influence them instead of just the procurement. And one final point about this, which I think may be very important, is that procurement teams define requirements together with the business they're buying it for. And they won't have their own requirements. But these requirements don't come out of thin air. If they are purchasing a specific type of product they will do their research and study before they define that requirements. So if you are there and creating awareness, you can actually influence the requirements that are going to be put in this request for proposal. Right? So you can actually stack the odds in your favor that the way that they're describing the ideal vendor and the ideal solution is actually much more aligned with what you can offer, where you are beating maybe your competition than with the others. Just some lessons that I've learned by working with uh, this company who does nothing else but has to bid on these large contracts and from some pharmaceutical companies. Now coming back to our principles, um, of playbook creation for ABM programs, very important is we don't want to a, we don't want to push this uh, playbooks to sales. I mean we have seen that happen in some organizations where marketing comes with the playbooks and says, you know, this is what you should do. Here are the signals, uh, that we identified. Here is what you should do now and expect sales to do it. And usually what happens is sales ignores it. And for various reasons we dove deeply into this topic. We even had an episode why sales ignores marketing. But one of the reasons was that you don't just uh, say without really understanding what they need. Okay, this is a playbook you need, this is what you should follow. The best way is to co create this playbook together with sales and to clearly define what are the marketing activities, what are the sales activities? Because um, Andre mentioned this several times. If we have any initiative that is run by marketing for example, we can always think about, okay, can we make for example we have this event, we have this conference conference, can we make it more account based? Right, by also involving sales, can we turn some of these marketing initiatives also into create uh, some um, sales touch points. And we shared a lot of examples of how you might be able to do that. But I think this is very explicit, uh, that you don't just take the presentation that we shared or the academy or whatever and try, try to create kind of the put together playbook. But you can use that as an inspiration and create this together with your sales uh team. Uh, the general framework views here is that as we said ah, previously you have awareness creation. Uh, awareness usually creates some engagement signals and then we define playbooks that are related um, to those engagement signals and align with the buyer judgment journey. But we spoke a lot about it so I think maybe just to wrap things up, uh, we can share the last point or the last two points I believe.

Speaker A: Yeah, the last two points. I think they are really uh, simple and we covered them multiple times. First of all when you orchestrate the playbook you need to have clear actions, right? Uh, there shouldn't be any ambiguity. Everybody should understand what they are supposed to do. Don't just for example don't mention in your playbook reach out to buyers, right? That could mean multiple things. So if you want to, if there is um, if there is a playbook where they should engage, for example pre webinar or if they would reach out uh for this content collaboration for example there should be a simple ah cadence of actions. Day one you are reaching out with this message if they are not replying. Day two you are following up uh by email. Day three if no reply you sent a voice message on LinkedIn for example. Day four, if there is a real target for you to sign up these people for the webinar, you maybe add a call, right? So your sales rep would be calling and try to get this. So uh, every playbook should contain specific concrete set of actions, no ambiguity. This is really important both for marketing and sales. And then what is really essential is to keep uh this dashboard with leading and plugging indicators. Uh, in the previous um episodes we covered this. Uh, the point is really simple, just making sure that your account development process is visible. The worst thing that could happen especially with the long sales cycles is is um having a meeting, let's say with sales or with market and doesn't really matter. And um, then the person just tells you I'm working on it. Better to me I'm working on it. But what does it mean how many touch points the person has done so far? Right? What were the touch points? Did we execute the entire sequence that we planned? Because the devil is in detail. We often absolutely observed that the playbooks ah are or uh the programs are ah failing just because they are not fully executed. The teams are just maybe doing some steps, sending just emails because it's easier, right? You can set up, you can automate that process but ignoring all other steps and not tracking uh or sometimes for example you know that you need to engage 10 buyers but the person is just reaching out to two senior stakeholders. And than nothing else you need to make it visible, you need to track it every single week and then you'll be able to make meaningful progress. Because the core point of this dashboard is having a ah holistic overview of our numbers growing or they are going down. If they are going down then you have a bottleneck that you need to solve. Then the second answer to Your question, are we putting enough effort into what we are doing or we are just trying to create a new shortcut, sending maybe a few messages and expect an enterprise deals coming our way. Right. So that's the entire key. I will, we have a lot of questions from our community. I saw one question from um, Rebecca. I will uh, very briefly cover this one Vlad, as I opened slide slides in the another section. I just need to uh, share my screen for a second. Uh, let me stop sharing the slides. Uh, okay, stop sharing. Okay. And I will share my screen. To answer a question from Rebecca, can you give a practical example of how would you move an account from the awareness stage to the validation date, product needs stage? What signals would you look for? So uh, I will zoom um in and hopefully you will be able to see my screen. The entire point is to sit down with your ABM team, especially with your sales reps and define this criteria. There is no rule of thumb but uh, the only relevant answer is to define this inbox engagement threshold that everybody accepts at your company. Right? What behavior, uh, an account should demonstrate. So you can call this account is uh, engaged account, account that is aware of us. So for example, this is a screenshot from a real project. Uh, again this is what is making sense to this specific company. But you can see the criteria website multiple visits plus named buyer, how to check sixth sense. Check if there are two plus visits to non cseo, uh block pages or there is a buyer in the CRM or marketing automation and there is a LinkedIn connection or engagement from a buyer. Then joins the cluster webinar social and the mail two way conversation. LinkedIn email chat about challenges, priorities, progressive profiling. Right. So the key point here is sitting down together with your team and defining this engagement threshold. Right. Um, you shouldn't look for any, let's say best industry practices, something that is relevant for you, some level of engagement because the playbooks that you might be running could be completely different. Right? And this engagement threshold could mean different things. So define it together with yourself, sales teams and when the account. The only important point here is that this criteria should be tangible, right? It shouldn't be um, gut feeling based decision. Oh, I feel this account is engaged enough. Right. You should apply this criteria. Um, and everybody uh, from your team can apply this criteria and call this account an engaged one. So that's the key. All right.

Speaker B: If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in Q and A or in the chat. Uh, we pasted here the questions that we got when you were signing up so we can cover it quickly in the nine minutes that are remaining. Uh, where to start in abm Syed asked the content out there is scattered, not useful for different company sizes. Uh, start with the academy. Uh, shameless plug. No, we have had I believe uh, specific.

Speaker A: I will drop a link.

Speaker B: Okay, thank you Andre. So I think that's the best place to uh, start from there. We had exactly the session about where to start. Uh, when it comes to the playbooks, uh, where to start is always look at the existing activities that you have planned.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: That's very important and leverage uh as much as possible what is already planned. But just apply these principles. Okay. How can we make it more account based? How can we involve more sales? How can we then also like maybe sales is already doing some outreach, maybe sales is already doing stuff on LinkedIn. How can we maybe go from the outreach they're doing today to doing it Maybe more make engaged base, maybe more targeted to towards target accounts that you are also addressing from marketing. So I would be looking at things that are already being done and how we can improve them using the principles that we shared today and always, uh, we need to add the playbooks that have sales activities and marketing activities. That will be kind of the very basic answer to this question. But otherwise check that episode. Um, we mentioned the multiple jobs functions within the accounts, uh, in multi threading. Um, uh this is an interesting one. How to work in a situation where we can't rely on intent signals or no tool is being used. Actually we have this very often when in niche industries or in target geographies which are outside of the United States. Uh, we don't have any data or simply the company is not for various reasons not willing to invest in the data. And Andre, I know that you have this uh, very recently had this situation so maybe you can share some tips. How do you uh, work in a situation where you don't have an intent data ah, tool.

Speaker A: So I mean again the entire point is to define what other types of uh, engagement we can track. Uh, intent data is just one uh, level of signals. Right. Uh, quite often it's just enough. For example you can uh, define the first party signals and how you can create them. Simple idea. You start with the let's say Microsoft leadership on LinkedIn. If there is your target audience, right. You generate the engagement there and you start tracking who is engaging with your content and who is replying for example for your content collaboration. Right. If you are doing um, let's say if there is an industry association or there Is a specific community. Right. You can sponsor an event or do co marketing with that um, community and then see how many target accounts and target buyers are signing up for it. So we had a nice case study. It was probably four or five years ago with Vie Healthcare and they were selling to the biggest hospitals in the United States, to the procurement teams and financial teams as well. And that was the entire playbook. I forgot how that hospital association was called, to be honest. But they were the major channel. So our client they were sponsoring, we helped them to make the this events more account based, more specific. Right. But the entire, let's say orchestration and promotion uh, has been done by that industry association. So the entire point here is just to understand um, where you can create that awareness and engagement and um, what activities can help you to generate the first party signals. Right. Something that you can observe and you can use it then to move accounts to the new bucket, to the future, future pipeline for example or to the active focus, uh, list. And I uh, think this also um, covers the what this, this also matches what we have shared today. Right? Understand the channels, understand the primary buyer Persona and how you can engage with them.

Speaker B: Our um, friend Jose Garcia uh, asked in health, um, we are seeing uh, health AI. We are seeing new types of buyers. How do we surface these new buyers? So obviously as you are discovering this in your sales process, you will start gaining insight into these new types of buyers. Other than that, I mean it's just part of the deal development as an account executive, uh, knowing or working with your account executives to understand that looking at the conversations that are being had. So maybe who is on CC in email threads when you check your CRM, who is being asked for an advice whenever you have a chance to ask that with of your prospects or your customers, um, maybe you have an opportunity to do a customer interview or you may be meeting prospects or customers at events. A lot of the activities that we shared today are. Well some of the activities that we share today are kind of content co creation with buyers. So for example, if I had an opportunity to interview some of the prospects and have a conversation about this and this could be like a question like who is like with the uh, technology changing and AI being involved uh in and the decisions that are being made, who are the people who are involved? Do you see new people uh, who are involved in technology evaluation in your organization? I mean it can be just a simple question. Is that uh, to the target buyers? I think maybe we have time for another one or two questions if you want to pick one or did we cover them all?

Speaker A: Andrej uh, we didn't cover all of them but uh, uh I say we have two minutes left so uh, won't be able to to cover the rest. So if you guys would love to follow up feel free to send us an email or a message on LinkedIn and Happy to provide an answer. Uh, I would just very quickly uh answer a question from Karen about reporting on multi touch attribution across the multi threaded activity. What tools or dashboards. So I'm sharing a link to our another substack article about uh how to measure ABM with the dashboards examples. You can see it's there for us what is really essential. Um, I will just refer, let's say we'll uh share with you two ways how to do it. One is that uh, you create for example an outline uh or template in uh, in a spreadsheet right where you put all of the buyers and then essential steps and then you can just see the accumulation right if they uh, accepted. So what we typically do we have let's say the leading indicators or the sequence that we want to do for example invites, connect, uh, send the message etc. I'm just oversimplifying it, right? Obviously before this there is account research, buyer enrichment etc. So the necessary steps and then kind of the outcomes connection. Request accepted. Right? Message replied, signed up for the webinar. You can do this in spreadsheets, you can do this in HubSpot as well. Well aside from this uh, in our case we create a custom view in HubSpot with this uh, uh, you need to add custom fields for this obviously. Then we create a custom view with uh, all these custom fields and then you can see where it's empty, for example where people didn't reply or what actions were not executed. One more specific metric that we add as a custom uh field to HubSpot is, is account penetration with how many buyers were actually able to connect. So there would be a number 1, 2, 3 etc. Which gives you a pretty good um overview of how engaged this account is. And with that being said uh, I think we can wrap it up. Thank uh you so much guys again for fantastic attendance and engagement. Fantastic questions. Welcome back Next year with the new season of Fulfana Live life and wish you a merry Christmas and all the best in 2026. Take care everyone. Cheers. Bye bye.

Speaker B: Happy holidays.