OK31: Corporate Gifting: A 2-Step ABM System for Tier-1 Accounts & Prospects

Today let's talk about the system you can use to send gifts to the prospect of your top accounts. A few weeks away I saw this post on LinkedIn about the CRO of Venta Stevie Case and she was sharing about the gift she got because she was a professional video game player of Quake and she booked the meeting because she received this. So obviously I say, oh yeah, that's interesting. And then I saw this other post from the same person that sent this to another person, Tom here, the CMO of Incident IO, and I was wondering, hey, let's think about how we could reverse engineer this because I think gifting, it's similar with Outbound. Most of the time the gifts are generic. They send the branded gift to the prospects. So I was thinking that here, this person, Brennan, spent a lot of time to research those two prospects to send them a gift. So I was thinking, hey, let's think about this system. Hey, how we could use that for example for an ABM approach on your tier one accounts. Because here obviously if you are using this, you know that's going to be a bit expensive for those gifts. So let's say if your top accounts are worth between 200k and 1 million error or even more, a gift like this could definitely stand out because it's well researched. And also, yeah, we have a note that we could be using here on top of it that I'm going to share after. Okay, so it's a podcast about Outbound and why are we talking about gifts? You might be wondering, hey, maybe this is a marketing damages. I think if you have an ABM approach, I think that should be the work of the Go to Market team and the thought process behind this. It's the same way with Outbound. It needs a good research system because if you want to send a super specific gift like those gifts, you need to research them well to stand out. And if we think about also that Coat Rich and Outbound in general is getting harder. That's I think another way to stand out. And gifts and virtual, not virtual, physical gifts. It's a great way to stand out on top of all the other channels you could be using. And I did this because also I was talking with a customer about this, about how we can instead of doing this manually, basically that's something you can use with clay or cloud code, whatever you use, you can test first on 1020 accounts and then you can run this on all your top hundred or 200 accounts. And so basically the first step is to find the clue about the, the prospect because unfortunately not all your prospects are going to share enough online so you can use that with them. Because here we are talking about two people that shared something specific online about them. So the CEO of Venta, she shared in an interview that she was an ex pro Quake player. And so that's definitely something that you need to to find online to find these GIFs. So this is super specific. This is not. I don't think a lot of CROs have this. If you spend time manually to find this, it's going to take a lot of time. So that's why we. I think you need to use AI to find this quickly, quicker. But I think there is four buckets that you can think about. It's the first one is identity, being an ex pro Quake player, super specific about the person. Then you have the passion, the album, the music album that I was showing earlier. And I think that's the two main buckets if you want to send something specific. And then I think if you can't find something specifically and I think that will be the case for most of the people on your list, you have two other buckets. It's the milestone. If they got funding recently, promotion, did they launch a book for example, if they are a writer. Because sometimes you might have someone like this and then you have the last bucket. No gift that I think it's we don't need to send gifts for the sake of sending gifts. Because I've heard some podcasts or read on leading that some prospect for complaining about sending generic stuff. It's not helping. I think it's if you can't find anything. Yeah, don't send anything. But let's keep going with step two, how you can find the clue, turn the clue into a gift. Plus, not so like I said here. Also like I was saying here. Yeah if step one fails, step two doesn't happen. So basically if you can't find the clue. Yeah, don't focus in. And I'm not talking about stalking people here. I'm really talking about what you can find on LinkedIn, what you can find on interviews or podcasts that they talk about publicly, not Facebook or Instagram. Same here. I've was a few years ago talking with one of the marketing leaders at Chili Piper and she mentioned that she got once something super creepy from a salesperson that they found the address of the marketing leader and then they talk about the street where they were living and I think it's too creepy and you shouldn't do that. So it's really more about the stuff you can find online, publicly on LinkedIn or interviews. So more business context. So step one, the clue. So here an example I think you should think about. So if we take about again the example of music and gaming. If you say oh yeah, the person says oh I like music or I like video games. It's not specific enough. So I don't think you can use that in the gift. Then you have something yeah, it's more specific to the passion. So here into indie rock plays FPS games. Same here. It's more niche but it's not specific enough. And then you have the two layers we're talking about the passion and the signature. The identity of the person, for example, if they shared oh yeah, I'm a big fan of Radiohead, seen them seven times for example. Or if we take the example of video games used to compete in Quake tournaments, for example. And then if you go to take it another step. Another yeah if you want another step on top of this signature clue. I love supreme is my favorite album of all time. I was a former pro Quake player. So here it's super specific about those and I think the gift should be focused on those two because here it's specific about the person and it's yeah will be the main focus. So once you get you found those you basically the way you can find them. I was talking about that earlier but you can check LinkedIn, podcast appearance and interviews, conference stores, YouTube videos or keynote for example. Do they have a blog, a substack medium? Do they have a null page on the company website of Nick Story? And I was taking the example of Kyle Norton, the chief revenue officer of owner.com that I got on the show already if I was prospecting Kyle and Kyle was if owner.com was if I owner was on my top 200 accounts to go after how I would approach it. Okay. And here you can see the outputs of the help prompt I've created for this and you can read so clue analysis. Kyle was a co owner of OpenMath mixed martial arts in Toronto from 2009 to 2017. Nine years. So this is the declared past identity in the venture podcast in October 2024. He says in his own words. At some point in my late teens I got into mixed martial arts, jujitsu, boxing, wrestling, kickboxing. I just got obsessed, fully obsessed. All I wanted to do was train. In the Project 33 podcast in October 2025. He says I create a lot of my career success to lessons I learned in martial arts and I will tell anybody if your body can handle it do Jiu Jitsu LinkedIn confirms Koh owner Open math a mix of martial arts in from January 2009 to December 2017 so this is disqualified as signature club because basically you have a declared past identity. I used to be the co owner of MMA gym in the past life I was with the MMA Brazilian Jiu Jitsu identity central to who he is Specificity check is not just I like fitness or into martial arts it's he coned a professional MMA academy for nine years trained in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, boxing, wrestling my Thai stop only due to two knee surgeries repeatedly CT sites he said that a few times already and spritzer and also focus on Brazilian Jiu jitsu as the DFC he focused most. The clue is multi source confirmed LinkedIn profile corner role listed the Venture podcast quotes press project 33 podcast transcript also if you are listening to my show reading my newsletter, I'm testing a lot of the AI prompts to see which is the best manual for research. Specifically My last benchmark ChatGPT was working well when I was doing this in newsletter actually in this video perplexity worked well but ChatGPT failed to this so yeah just a good reminder to always test their models. Okay, now the let's talk about the decision and what to do with this. So you have the GIF decision tree here you have two questions for outcomes. So when you use the research on one prospect did you find any clue? Yes or no. And then you have the identity gift, the order passion gift. And if you could not find anything, we use the trigger in the last 90 days funding or promotion for example as a main story gift. And if we don't find anything, we don't send anything. We revisit this in 90 days so that make it easier in terms of making the decision. Because like I said you don't need to send something if you can't find anything. You do need to faucet. It needs to be a great gift on almost no gift at all basically. Now let's talk about step two the gift plus a note. So now that you have the the clue that you what you could be using. So if we talk about the identity gift, for example we can in the example of the CRO of Venta she got a rocket launcher replica. So this is super specific about her specifically and it needs to be specific to the entity basically. Then we have the passion gift. So we could focus more on the niche or on the person for example. Or the passion for example if the person say yeah, they are into coffee, pour over coffee. You could send like a grinder for example. So that's another example milestone gift. Now it's for example if they are announcing a new funding round, for example you could send a frame print of their funding announcement. For example promotion to a new role. Like for example they got promoted to a chief revenue officer role. You can send a signed copy of the qualified sales leader. And if they are launching their book, for example you could buy 10 copies of their book. And like I said, if you couldn't find anything, don't send anything. Now let's go back to example of Kyle. So next step was finding ideas. Gift ideas based on the identity of. Based on the clues I could find about Kyle specifically. And here using perplexity I could find this. So this is a solid oak martial arts belt display and trophy rack that I could find on Etsy. And you can personalize it and basically what I love with this AI output actually it also gives you like this you can personalize and you can add some text for example on it and it gives you the quotes or the stuff that for example Kyle loves about. So I know that Kyle mentioned on a few podcasts that he loves this quote here. Slow is smooth is fast and that's I think yeah great way to personalize this. And then here another example. So he was a black faiz or black belt and then open mat mml yeah the name of his business basically any and give you also yeah, production shipping time. So yeah I love this. When I was doing working on this specifically I was asking to the prompt to focus only on stuff that you can find and not saying hey go on Google and search because the first output I was getting was that so it's more specific. And then here that we are talking about the gift. Now let's talk about the notes. Stevie the CRO of Venta. I got this note actually so you can read, you can read it if you're on video but if you are listening to this going to read it. But it's hey tv. I was doing research on you plus Venta and was blown away by your past life as a professional gamer. I went down a deep kill creek rabbit hole. And so Vanity Fair quote about the rocket launcher being your weapon of choice and and boom. I couldn't think of a better way to introduce myself plus my company Wildcard. At Wildcard we create one on one campaigns like this at scale for companies like amplitude and their prospect love it. Not to mention 25% of them convert into sales meeting chat next week about doing this for your team and I love this actually. Super simple and showing what you can do. Basically the services of Brennan. He's showing what he can do and I think that's a really good example. So if you think about the templates that you can reuse with this because it's a. Yeah, that's the example from the CR event. Basically the template for this is the first you focus on the research proof. You show the where you found the clue and using the prospect language. Then you have the rabbit hole a deeper detail that requires real effort to find. Then you have the gift bridge one line connecting the research to why you're assigning this. Then the pitch proof one sentence on what you do with logos on a number self task specific reflection chatting fake not we love to connect for example and then you give your name and direct email. So between 60 and 90 words. So I said yep, now let's do the same for Kyle. What I could send for example if I was sending a note to Kyle with the gift I was talking about earlier. Hey Kyle, found out you co owned an MMA academy in Toronto for nine years. Then heard you say on the podcast last year that Jiu Jitsu built your leadership philosophy. Sending gift, figuring out it belongs with you more than in the warehouse at Outbound Kitchen I had to go to market leaders build Outbound system account Word first chats Eric erictbond Kitchen and that's it. So basically you have now the process and the system you can use if you want to run that for your top accounts. If you want to get this in my paid visitor I have the three prompts to help you with all of this. Prompt 1 Researching Plastify so you know what you can send to the prospect. Obviously if you can't find anything, no need to send a gift. Prompt two going to give you like three gift ideas for each prospect that where you could find some clues and prompt three they want to help you write the note. Thanks for watching and I see you in the next episode.