85. From PLG to ABM: How Datadog Built an Account-Based Growth Engine

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the latest episode of let's talk ABM with me, Declan Mulkeen, CMO of account based marketing agency Strategic ABM. ABM is one of the hottest B2B strategies right now, helping companies to win, grow and retain their most important accounts. This podcast allows me to spend some time talking to account based marketing leaders about their ABM programs and share their insights with other B2B marketers wherever you are on your. So today I'm joined by Kevin Driscoll, who's the head of ab, ABM and Campaigns at uh, Datadog. Kevin, thank you so much for joining us today.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Great to be here.

Speaker A: Well, thank you. So we've been back and forth a little while now and trying to set this up. So I'm delighted you could make some time today to um, talk about all things abm. Now I was just checking out before we came on the call, um, your CV on LinkedIn and obviously ex IBM. I think you were there for about seven years and a plan and now Datadog. And what I also thought was really interesting was the kind of the marketing journey, demand field, product marketing, campaign marketing, growth marketing and obviously now at Datadog, um, abm. So I think it's a fantastic journey that a lot of people are on, um, a similar journey from an inverted commas, traditional marketing through to account based marketing. So let's just kick off with a question actually around um, your ABM philosophy. I think when we were talking before the recording, I think one thing you said to me was that a lot of marketing is getting lost in the shuffle. I thought it's quite interesting. So I made, you know, made notes on that. How would you define ABM and the kind of the ABM mindset over at Datadog? And how do you think, um, this kind of approach to marketing is actually helping you to um, deliver what you need to deliver there?

Speaker B: Yeah, ah, absolutely. So, you know, the most important thing is that we are an account based growth organization, meaning we are very focused on pipeline growth, um, within top accounts and ultimately that's how we're measured. And so I think having that North Star metric for ABM and really any marketing, um, helps solidify a litmus test of should we do something or should we not? Because it's a question of is it going to produce measurable pipeline impact or is it not? Um, and that helps kind of guide most of the decisions we make. I mean my philosophy is that abm, especially when you start getting into hyper personalized one to one campaigns, a lot of the effort that can go in doesn't always translate to impact. Right. So really being very clear about what the outputs are for whatever your inputs. So for instance if you are customizing messaging, you're sitting in account planning workshops with your sales leaders weekly. Those need to be turning into landing pages or something else. Right. And ultimately I think that pragmatic approach has been beneficial in driving impact and really prioritizing time management for my team.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's couple of things. They really talking about a North Star I think is such an important thing that not everybody in ABM talks necessarily about that. And um, but just, just out of curiosity over at, at Desert, in terms of your North Star. Ah, what, what are you measured there?

Speaker B: Pipeline? 100%.

Speaker A: Just pipeline?

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: And that's, and that's obviously aligned then with the sales, the sales teams as well, right?

Speaker B: 100%.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think we'll dig into that a little bit later. We'll try and dig in a little bit into the roi. So let's talk a little bit about paint for the audience. Can you paint a picture of what ABM looks like in your organization? Are you going, you know, White glove? Are you going wide deep? Talk a little bit about that if you can.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I think or we started certainly as a one to many kind of wide approach, casting a big net. Um, mostly because we didn't have a dedicated team that was focused on top accounts. That, that has since changed. That's really allowed us to kind of flex our one to one, our more bespoke uh, it's kind of, that's our term for White Glove is bespoke but allowed us to flex those muscles a little bit more. Um, which has been a lot of fun kind of working directly with salespeople. But um, you know Datadog when I joined did not have an enterprise marketing function. They did not have sort of a, you know, multi threading marketing motion. And so I've tried to kind of you know, translate ABM to help support some of those more nascent uh, functions as well. And that's really how we started this account based growth journey that um, I think has been pretty successful.

Speaker A: And that's because obviously Datadog was more in the kind of SaaS world.

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely a PLG company from, from its early beginnings. And not only that just really focused on volume trials. Um, all types of accounts are served by Datadog. Everyone from garageband startups with two or three people in them to fortunately have 100 companies. And so a lot of our marketing was built with the expectation that anyone could just download this and try it. I think that is certainly still true today and it's certainly a huge driver of our continued growth. But ultimately there's certain accounts that are just, you're not going to get on the hook that way. They may have security protocols in place that prevent trials. They may just know, be very satisfied for the moment at least institutionally, with competitive uh, installs. And, and those types of things require a different approach I think from, from the generic, uh, wide, uh, broad marketing.

Speaker A: So I mean that's interesting. Kevin, you said there and going back to the, the, the opening, when I said that you'd been across everything from field to demand to, to campaign, you. So you've, you've had all those ha, you've worn all those marketing hats. So you know what each one of those is able to do. And you just said something very interesting. Then you said that the approach that with the wider PLG is just not going to get them or get them hooked. Um, so what is the magic thing that makes ABM work to hook them?

Speaker B: I think it's a couple of different things. First of all, it's personalization, which I know we'll talk about, uh, more at length, but I do think when you have a very broad horizontal product doing some sort of specification, either industry or the type of company or what you know about their existing pain. Right. Those types of things can be really beneficial in increasing your response rate. The other thing is too, if they're not, if you're not able to get in with a trial, a lot of times you just need to generate a broad swath of leads. And so really going back to the basic fundamentals of demand gen, generating a bunch of leads from one account can be really helpful in getting a better picture of what's going on inside, um, for, for sales reps. And that, that is a lot of times the first step towards getting a deal done. So, so I think it depends on the exact account but really you know, we have to take approaches that are meeting accounts where they are in that particular, you know, awareness journey with Datadog instead of just um, you know, throwing our spaghetti against the wall and seeing what sticks.

Speaker A: Yeah. And obviously you mentioned there as well Kevin, about multi threading as well. That's a huge part of what you do, I'm guessing, right?

Speaker B: Yep. Um, I am, I'm a huge proponent of multi threading as a, as a com, you know, a big component, uh, of what ABM should look like because frankly, um, you know, it's one of the things that's very tough for sales to do on their own. And for marketing it's relatively easy, right? If you've got your developer team, you know, really locked down, how are you going to break into security? A lot of times salespeople don't know exactly how to go about that. And marketing with our intent signals, with um, you know, the contact databases we have access to, that can be something where we can add real tremendous value quick. Um, so I really am a big fan of that.

Speaker A: And are you running campaigns like through LinkedIn and other media to kind of multi thread into them?

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, it's also an event strategy, right? If you're having great success at kind of, we call them the hoks, hands on keyboards. But you know, you can think about it like your users in most SaaS organizations. Um, if you're having great success there but you're struggling to break into the cio, you know, executive roundtables can be, you know, a huge uh, or hospitality events can be a huge win. The flip side, right, if you're, if you've got executive buy in, but you just don't have a lot of exposure to users, some more, you know, uh, less, less expensive, let's call it lead generation around content syndication, LinkedIn ads, meta ads even. Um, certainly with some of the enhancements uh, they've made to their targeting, I think meta is a great place for B2B advertising these days. Um, so yeah, it just really depends on where you're looking to break in and then tailoring your tactics appropriately. But certainly LinkedIn is a huge part of our strategy now.

Speaker A: It's interesting you mentioned Kevin there about meta. Not too many ABM has mentioned that to me. So it's an interesting one for the audience to dig into as well. Right, because you're saying that they're doing a lot a better job.

Speaker B: I think we're starting to see the match rates with business profiles, meaning either work emails or um, uh, you know, matching to a particular account on the native side on Facebook are improving. Um, but we're also seeing the portability uh, of audiences between different channels, you know, out of, you know, whatever ABM tool um, you're using is, is doable these days on a smaller audience count than it used to be for Facebook. And so both of those um, are giving us better access to Facebook. And I think, you know, if you've seen anything happen on Instagram in the past couple years, the amount of B2B ads that I'm being served from the marketing perspective are increasing tremendously. I do think that it benefits in comparison to LinkedIn because the CPMs are a lot cheaper. Um, and usually if you can get your targeting right, that means your cost per leads are going to be cheaper. So, yeah, I think it's a real burgeoning platform for abm.

Speaker A: That's a good tip there for the audience to check out. Both, obviously, the whole universe of meta and all the different, um, companies and platforms that they own. Um, one thing you were saying to me when we were chatting previously, Kevin, you said that, um, your team wears. We're talking about hats again. Your team wears two hats. One I think you said was campaign builders and one I think you said was enablers. Yeah, talk me through what those two hats are and how you handle that.

Speaker B: Yeah, so, I mean, first of all, we have to actually execute the programs that are going to develop the pipeline. Right? I mean, that's what we're gold on. Um, you know, but the reality is abmers typically are the ones sitting on a treasure trove of intent and engagement information that needs to be shared to sales. Um, you know, we frankly don't see that the ROI is there for ABM for our commercial and SMB business. Um, but they can benefit tremendously from intent and engagement data. Um, you know, website information about whether accounts are visiting that can help help them tailor their outbound strategy. It can help them tailor their account penetration strategy. So all of those things really need to be, I think, a component of an ABM team. Right. Like how do we get, how do we serve the top accounts and generate that pipeline? But how do we also spend, uh, enough time focused on every seller that's out there at the company, every sdr, to help enable them and learn how to use the tools, how to use these signals appropriately to improve their pg, because, you know, ultimately that helps the bottom line for the business and that's going to continue. Increasing the budget for abm, it's going to help continue, you know, the growth of the business and that it's just the right thing to do. So that's how I think about balancing it is like pipelines are north store. We got to focus on that. But whatever time's left over, let's make sure that we are providing as much access to this data as we possibly can.

Speaker A: Because one thing you were saying was around packaging up insights, I think, for your sales teams, right?

Speaker B: Yep. Yes, we do a number of different things. Salesforce dashboards, we give them direct access to our IBM platform, which they're able to um, use to determine signaling. Um, you know the other thing is we're constantly on the hunt for more uh, nascent, you know, intent products. Right. Comparison review sites. Um, uh, you know this type of stuff can be really valuable as opposed to the kind of old school black box intent products out there. Um, you know so, so all of those we try and package up into email reports. Salesforce dashboards plug into how sales is actually executing. Right. Because as soon as you ask them to go outside of their normal workflows, you're going to lose half of them. And if you don't do a good job enabling on how to actually use that, you're going to get the other half to use it once or twice and then kind of forget about it. So the more we can plug into how sales is actually operating on a day to day basis and make our use cases really specific for them on when to use ABM tools and signals that I think helps with adoption rates.

Speaker A: Well, I think just if we're going to jump onto that for a second, I think one thing you were saying was that your team spend going back to the point around whether they're working on pipeline or whether they're working on the enablement or campaign building or this kind of insights work I think you were saying, or you quoted a figure of 30 to 40% of their time was spent on, on these kind of activities. And then it's so encouraging you say that, you say that um, sales have direct access to your ABM platform. So and what's the uptake like on that?

Speaker B: We currently we have about 65% of our total sales force, our monthly active users on the ABM platform. More than that on um, on our Salesforce dashboards which are you know just kind of summarized information from ABM and leads and that type of stuff. So I think the uptake is, is good. Certainly we've got a lot of um, you know, sales promotions. Right. SDR is constantly getting promoted to commercial sellers, that type of stuff. So there's, there's a lot of turnover. We need to constantly keep re enabling and so templatizing. Sure. We've got you know the right folks in the room to, to keep that drum beat going has been important. Um, but you know I, I have a PowerPoint deck that is like 20 slides long of just thank yous and, and you know, stories from sellers uh, who've talked about you know, how it's helped them break in, improve their PG and, and ultimately if we can get those outbound rates, the response rates, the open rates up by 2, 3, 4, 5%. Those can have massive downstream impacts with the number of meetings that sellers are booking and SDRs are booking, number of opportunities that get open. And so that's, that's the way we look at it is that initial kernel, very small changes to those response rates and PG efficacy will impact the bottom line tremendously.

Speaker A: So in terms of, if you can make it a little bit more tangible in terms of a salesperson or an sdr, what is it that they're able to do or ah, see that is actually making the impact that you just said.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean one of the most important things, you know, and this is not necessarily an ABM problem, but it's something that I think we can solve because most of my team is pretty well versed on Salesforce dashboard building and just understands data maybe a little bit better than the average marketer. Um, is give him access to all of the leads that are out there. Right. As a PLG company we produce a ton of leads, trial leads, demo leads, um, a lot of times we accept personal emails. So data cleanliness and data hygiene is uh, a challenge for us. Um, and so surfacing all of those information, Even if it's 95% accurate instead of 100% to salespeople and having them you know, in one place figure out where are their leads and where are their contacts living so we can show the full, you know, impact of marketing touches, they can start to consume that information quicker. That's been a huge driver of what we've been trying to do and the success that we have produced. In addition we can also show them what is intent and who is surging uh, in their account patch. Some of our commercial sellers manage hundreds uh, of accounts at once and so prioritization week to week can be tremendous. Um, and then lastly we show um, intent and website engagement data um, directly so that they can see what topics are these accounts interested in and then we link them to product based uh, outbound flows and templates that they're able to just quickly add accounts into. Um, and hopefully it's kind of one journey of managing leads and then managing accounts and then getting them into outbound.

Speaker A: So it's probably accurate to say that you've got a good reputation within the sales organization.

Speaker B: It's something that we have to cultivate every single day. But I'm happy to say that our sales uh, folks, I think if we look at our MPS surveys are pretty happy with ABM today.

Speaker A: It's good to Hear. So one thing you mentioned there earlier, Kevin, you said, um, around the whole idea about personalization. And I think you, I think it's a very strong topic for you, how you feel that you should go to market with a kind of almost like, I think you said to me, almost like a B2C style creativity.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Can you share a case study or an example of how you guys have been doing that?

Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, look here, here's the story, right? We, we ran a test, multivariate test, admittedly, but, but nonetheless, uh, you know, we, we changed up our headlines on LinkedIn ads, keeping the same banner, same imagery, et cetera, um, five different times. All of them performed within, you know, 10%, let's call it on a click through rate and CPL basis. Uh, we changed up the color scheme and the imagery in our ads. We saw variations about 25% between the top and bottom performers. Right. Now what that tells me is that it goes against everything that I've been taught growing up in B2B marketing, which is messaging, messaging, messaging, messaging. In this world where B2B ads are being commoditized, we are seeing that people are consuming more of B2B advertising on their phone, on mobile devices, etc. You have to stand out. And I think that that's a learning that we are constantly trying to take from our B2C brethren, if you will, uh, which is their advertising is incredible, right? Uh, in terms of the imagery, in terms of the focus they put on the brand, in terms of the ability that they have to link to trending topics on social etc. We are attempting to do, to mimic as much of that strategy because ultimately what we are seeing is that being right and on time is a lot more important than having the exact message that you need, um, to convince people to click and engage and everything else. And ultimately I think that that is the learning we've tried to take in is like, how can we start to vary our creative strategy? How can we start to vary our trend strategy rather than constantly working with PMM to refine the messaging and everything else?

Speaker A: It's fascinating, isn't it, to think that. And does that mean that you're breaking away from your brand colors because of what you're seeing?

Speaker B: No, not necessarily. We have a very strong brand design team that is very, um, protective of our brand and rightly so, but know, they give us a lot of license to kind of play around with different variations of imagery and, etc and it's really just we can stick within our brand guidelines and still be eye catching. And that's what we try and do.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's great, great point. And I think, um, I think you were saying that it's better to be right and on time than actually be.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: With the, um, all the different messaging and I think it's a great message for the, for the audience to hear that you very often think, oh, the message is wrong, the value prop is wrong, and it may well be something as simple as you said. Change the colors and you might have a better impact.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Right. So let's talk about scaling. How, how are you going back? Because you mentioned there that you're running, you know, you know, um, bespoke, tailored ABM kind of to your top accounts. Which would you call that a one to one approach or a one to few? Would you?

Speaker B: I think it's, I think it's one to one for, for our top account, certainly.

Speaker A: But then you're also then scaling out to a much wider audience as well, right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: How are you managing that on the one. That kind of, on the one hand, you know, trying to do your best to get deep into those accounts and at the same time trying to run abm, which some people say, well, you can't really run ABM into a wider group. But that's, that's an argument for another, for another day.

Speaker B: You know, again, I kind of like to pull myself out of ABM and just call it account based growth, because I think that helps kind of assuage some of that, uh, uh, you know, definitional pain, let's say. Um, but, but you know, really, I again come back to our North Star of pipeline, right? Personalization. You can spend hours and days on each account building the perfect landing page and the perfect advertising set and all those things. The question I have is like, if you test it, what is the excess your incremental results going to be from all that personalization? Um, and I think in general what I've found when I test it is, you know, there is a, like kind of a curve of diminishing returns. Right. A little bit of personalization gets you a lot of results, a ton of personalization. It starts to tail off. Right. So, so a lot of what I do is really just focused on can we call out the company name on a landing page or in an advertisement? Um, you know, and, and typically we'll see 2x engagement, 1 1/2 engagement with ads or, or landing pages that call out company names, even if the content is pretty static with our normal flow. Right. Um, so that's really how I think about it. Um, and, and certainly with technology, right, you can start to scale the ability of advertising customization. You can certainly scale the ability of landing page customization. Um, you know, I'm hesitant to start using AI for, for landing, individual landing page. But you know, we're starting to use that to discover pain. Right. You know, what's in the news, what, what are the CIO of this, you know, particular organization saying in the news that we can tap into and start to, you know, up level our value props. We don't use it necessarily to customize our messaging, but if we can bring in some of that external pain, you know, that is huge for us in terms of creating engagement and creating connection with the audience through personalization.

Speaker A: Yeah, and you mentioned AI there. I think we'll touch on that a little bit later and just uh, dig into a little bit more about what you're doing there in that area. One of the things that we were talking was obviously about running different ABM motions I think you were talking to me about into different sectors. And I think one of the ones that you kind of raised with me was the um, campaign. I think it was into the retail sector. Yeah. How does that play out? Tell me, what was your thinking? Was retail new to you? Was it a new approach then? How did you approach that?

Speaker B: Yeah, so retail is not a new industry to us. It's an industry that's very important to our business. Um, frankly we offer a lot of front end products that link to our back end products that are really important for retailers that need to optimize every individual visit and click that happens on their website because that translated directly into profit. Right. Unlike websites that are more informational for products and services that are purchased or executed offline. So um, especially in E commerce or retailers that are aspiring to go more E commerce, uh, we have had good success. But uh, really we had to figure out how do we tell a story that's retail specific around Black Friday, Cyber Monday? Um, how do we tell a story that's specific around, um, the pain of modernizing your retail environment to help support E commerce. All of those things are areas where our solution plays a really big impact. And again, my goal was not to be writing novels that were well written and thoughtful and everything else. My goal was to convince people that we were the right solution. And so, you know, with that we took an approach of modernizing older assets. Right. As opposed to saying everything needs to be net new and to help support this new theme and then combining that with newer advertising. Right. Kind of reskinning a lot of what we were doing specific to retail. And what we saw was, you know, doing that which is sort of in between like full scale personalization and nothing, you know, we were able to drive excess results like 20 or 30% over what we'd expect coming out of our, our paid strategy, um, from that. So. So, you know, it's definitely an area that's new to datadog. I don't think we've done a ton of industry marketing, but I expect we'll, we'll do more of it as we continue to scale.

Speaker A: Yeah. Particularly as different industries kind of surface and other ones, you know, become more important. Um, for example, the AI industry a couple of years ago was, nobody was really thinking about it and obviously now everybody's kind of after that industry. Right. Um, you talked several times about North Star, um, which is really encouraging to hear that kind of focus on pipeline. One, I think you said to me that the one question, when you bump into another ABM app, I think the one question you said that you asked them is, you know, um, how do you go about measuring abm? Right. And I think that was kind of like kind of a hot topic for you whenever you're talking to your peers. Um, so obviously going back to the fact that pipeline is so important for you, what are the metrics matter for you?

Speaker B: Yeah, um, you know, one that's, that's always been important for me is sales meetings. Right. Um, a lot of times pipeline is, is a pretty lagging indicator. It can be difficult to optimize against, it can be difficult to measure appropriately. Right. There's always questions about, you know, is this sourced, is this influenced, how are you defining pipeline attached or so. And it can be very frustrating unless, you know, however you define pipeline. I would, I would figure out a way and just get sales and get leadership buy in on that because it's so important to be able to put, you know, pipeline numbers down on the table and say this is what was driven as opposed to. When you start to talk about SQLs and influence and a bunch of stuff as your North Star metric, I think those get very confusing for salespeople that only care about pipeline and sales meetings all day long. But with that said, meetings I think are really important. Um, you know, because again, it's something that's pretty immediate. You know, usually a week or two after a lead comes in or, you know, you can start to see some of the influence on meetings from, you know, your awareness, advertising and, you know, your Plays, uh, to help support outbound. So I think that can be really helpful as a leading indicator towards pipeline. The one thing that I get very nervous about within ABM especially is optimizing exclusively on leads. Because a lot of times I've seen when we are solely focused on cost per lead or trying to optimize the lead funnel, we lose a lot of meetings and pipeline down the line because these people are either low level, right. And they're cheap and that's why we're getting them in the door. Or you know, a lot of times they're just interested in whatever your offer was, but they're not necessarily interested in the solution and you're not driving that kind of additional value for them. That's convincing them that you are the product and that you know, they need to buy you. So, you know, that's the one thing I'd caution, um, marketers on is, is getting too obsessed with the leads because those can often damage your downstream impact, you know.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting. Well, it's interesting that you say interest, um, because um, one of your peers, um, who was over at Microsoft, um, he talked to me a lot about the difference between interest and intent.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And so you could be interested, but doesn't mean you have any intent. You know, I always tell people I'm really interested in Volvos, but I've got, I haven't got the budget to pay for a Volvo. So uh, um, if Volvo, looking at my website visits of their, of their uh, of their website, they would see that I'm very interested. But um, I drive a Toyota, so that's the difference there. Let's talk about AI because you mentioned it a little bit earlier there. Um, obviously hot topic for everybody in every walk of life, whether it's in people's personal lives or whether it's in their uh, professional lives. Talk to me a little bit about AI. Talk to me a little bit about what you're doing there and perhaps, maybe kind of shine a light perhaps on is, is there anything interesting coming down, coming down the road as well?

Speaker B: You know, there's, there's a phrase that I, uh, grew up hearing a lot in finance, which was talking your book. Uh, and it essentially means that you are talking up the stocks that you have a vested interest in seeing go up. You know, I'm a little nervous that I'm seeing some of that in, in the ABM world and in the marketing world as it relates to AI. Right. There's a lot of practitioners, consultants, AI companies that are saying hey, you know, AI is the hottest topic you need to get on this, don't miss it, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think there's elements of that that are true, but we need to be kind of careful about where we are in the hype cycle with AI and what's realistic, I think, for the returns. Right. Some of that MIT study that said 95% of enterprise installs of ABM have not shown meaningful impact. You know, I think there's elements of, there's a lot of hype. And how do you actually, you know, seek value out of it? Like I mentioned before, one of the greatest things that, uh, AI can do for, for Abmers is translate the news and all the stuff that would take a bunch of time to go research into pain just from publicly available sources. You don't need to train AI on your messaging and your brand voice and all these things to go figure out. Okay. Wells Fargo this year is concerned with, you know, margin impact and, you know, um, modernizing digital infrastructure or whatever. Right, whatever. Those, those areas of interest are from 10ks, from earnings releases, all those types of things in, in public companies. So that I think is an area that we're seeing AI have a huge impact for us today in, in terms of personalization and customization. You know, the, the other areas I think are once you've got something written that you're happy with, email copy, ad copy, subject lines, et cetera, having AI run a couple of variations to speed up AB testing can be really helpful because again, like we talked about with the creative stuff, you don't always know, right? The perfect message that you've coordinated with your PMM or whatever might not land with the audience. Right. So having AI just extend your impact to test more and let the audience tell you where their interest lies or how they best, uh, are going to engage with your, your messaging can be helpful. Um, those are the two ways that. And scaling the creative. Um, you know, we are using software today to, uh, automatically, uh, import, uh, you know, company, uh, names into our advertising creative. So scaling that personalization, that can be huge too. Um, but really the most important ones I'm seeing are scaling the impact of A to B, uh, a B testing and then, um, you know, gathering research information for, uh, pain customization on landing pages and an ad copy for our customers.

Speaker A: So, yeah, and I think there's some really, really good examples there as well of obviously, um, we kind of talk in the agency about human first AI fast. And so it has to be led by the, by, you know, abm. If there's one thing that defines abm, it's the human element.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Of getting under the skin of your customers and really knowing them. And you can only do that really through what you were saying before about your sales, your SDRs, the marketers who are on the telephone, uh, listening to calls or talking to customers, etc. So I think if it's human first and AI fast, that's the right way to approach it as opposed to the other way around. And I think that whole concept of ABM as well, which is, I think ABM is all about, you know, failing fast, learning fast, and you just, you just don't know. You think you've got the most marvelous messaging campaign, ad, etc, and you put it in market and it fails.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: And so that, there's a lot of humility in that as well, because you just need to test it and, and be very quick to test as well. So I think if AI can help you to do that, then that's, that's, that's marvelous. Um, one thing you said, and I just wrote it down before, you know, when we were talking before this recording, but you said that there's a certain flavor, a certain ABM flavor at Datadog. I just wrote that down. So I thought it was really interesting way of putting things. What is the flavor of ABM at Datadog? How would you define that flavor?

Speaker B: I think it comes back to this concept and mindset of account based growth. Right. Like we are really interested in growing the pipeline for our target accounts. Um, and ultimately that could look like expansion, but a lot of it is new business that we're trying to drive against our core products. And a lot of times what that means is it's taking things from other teams and kind of putting a slight personalization spin on and getting out the door fast. It's, it's, you know, collecting old assets that might be kind of a little bit long in the tooth, but if you can make some quick tweaks and get it out there, it helps. So I really do think it's a pragmatic approach that is, is not trying to, you know, break the existing cycles, but really just augment them in slight ways and, and put it out there. Um, you know, and then ultimately also one of the most important things I think is we don't have a, today a very large campaigns function. So there are a lot of Abmers that I talk to. They're pulling from campaigns, customizing them quickly and getting them out the door. Really. We have a content generation Motion and an ads generation motion that puts leads and trials on the table and that's been how we've generated growth. But there's not a lot of existing messaging that's been built for large scale campaigns that I think abm, um, typically benefits from. And what we've been doing is sort of making micro campaigns that can work across both paid and outbound on the marketing side, but also outbound on the sales side via email, um, and PG and doing that to kind of grow the business and grow our numbers. So, um, you know, it's a unique strategy, but I think it's one that has forced me to adapt. Um, you know, my thinking about what ABM must be and what it can be. Um, and it's one that I've been really impressed to see, you know, just how quickly we can show results and how agile we can be there. So.

Speaker A: Well, I think pragmatic, I think that's a great way to define it really. And I think uh, a pragmatic approach to ABM is a good one. And I think abg, new acronym, maybe Growth, I like, I like that as well. So that's another one we can add to the table. Just. Kevin. Just to finish off, I ask all guests four very quick questions. So quick questions, quick answers. What's been your greatest ABM learning?

Speaker B: If you don't have a connection with sales to run ABM campaigns, you're going to struggle from day one.

Speaker A: Great answer. The hardest part of abm, uh, getting

Speaker B: buy in, keeping, uh, people, you know, connected throughout the lifecycle of a campaign.

Speaker A: Fantastic. And misconception. What would you say is the greatest misconception about abm?

Speaker B: It's expensive. I hear that a lot from, from demand gen colleagues or growth colleagues. I think there's ways to do ABM pretty inexpensively, even for free. So it's uh, all about tailoring your tactics.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good one. And finally we're recording this on a Monday, Monday morning for you, Monday afternoon for me. Uh, but let's fast forward to Friday. It's been a tough week there. You've been doing a lot of pragmatic abm. And you, uh, just about to shut down that laptop, you get a call from an old colleague saying, hey, Kevin, I need to present a, uh, strategy on Monday morning of ABM to my CEO. And they ask you, what's that one thing I must include? What would be that one thing you say? Make sure you include this or say this.

Speaker B: I think your menu of activations by segment or if it's just one segment like exactly what it is that's going into the accounts. We can get hung up on strategy and multi touch and all these types of words but if a lot of times I don't see people lay out we're doing LinkedIn, we're doing direct mail, we're doing email like you need to tell them what your strategy is tactically in addition to all of the the big uh uh themes. So that I think has been really helpful in making ABM tangible for my stakeholders and certainly leadership.

Speaker A: So making the intangible tangible. Yeah great great answer. Great way to finish off as well. Kevin Kevin, thank you so much for sharing your ABM journey rather with us today and I wish you and the team there at Datadog every success for the future.

Speaker B: Thanks Doug.

Speaker A: If you enjoy this episode of let's Talk abm, be sure to subscribe so you're notified when a new episode is posted. Feel free to rate and review this podcast. Thanks so much for listening.