Why ABM Doesn’t Work (and How to Fix It) - Andrei Zinkevich

Welcome to Rev Ops FM. If we think about the core idea of account based marketing, essentially focusing your efforts on a small group of high fit accounts, it's not really anything radically new. But if we look at it as a trend in B2B marketing as a kind of branded term, The hype cycle around ABM really started, at least for me, in the mid 2010s. This is when we had the whole Flip My Funnel thing going on.

We had John Miller launch Engageo with this idea of fishing with spears as opposed to nets. That was 2016. And on we go. And all of a sudden, ABM was the answer to everyone's problem.

Lead generation was kind of lame and passe. And of course, an expensive ABM platform was this must have, and everyone's Martech stack after that. Now, here we are nine or 10 years later, and what I want to understand is how is ABM actually working out for us? What's the state of things today?

What's needed to truly make an ABM program? And to answer that today, we're joined by Andre Zinkevich, who is co founder of full funnel IO, a B2B marketing consultancy for companies with complex and long sales cycles. And they have a ton of experience putting ABM into practice. You may recognize Andre and his co founder Vlad from LinkedIn, but they're regularly sharing really in depth resources on ABM and demand gen.

So go Yeah, I appreciate the intro and happy to chat with you. You pretty nailed down all the modern problems of account based marketing. So happy to dive deeper. Well, that really just tees us up for the first question.

I was curious from your point of view, you know, it's been, like I said, about 10 years. what's the state of things today? Because I speak to a lot of teams that have adopted ABM. So they sunk all this money into these expensive platforms, haven't seen the success they've hoped for.

Where do you see most companies going wrong? Putting this motion into practice? probably six, seven months ago, uh, we hosted an ABM webinar and there were like 300 plus people. B2B marketers attending that webinar.

And we just ran a poll asking, how are you satisfied with your ABM performance? And guess what? 98. 5 percent told they're not satisfied.

out of this 98. 5%, 49 told they are frustrated. They failed the programs, right? That's the reality.

That says a lot. And there are multiple reasons. Why this is happening. I would just share the core reason and then we can, uh, dive into details because with flood we did, since the beginning of our journey at full final, we hosted 50 plus audits of ABM programs and we discovered 11 root reasons why the programs are failing, but the core one is thinking that ABM is just a new fancy title for lead generation, which in reality means that Teams, they create wish lists, basically marketing gets a wish list from sales.

sales don't have appropriate territory planning, their territory planning is just based on volume, on product. ICP, they send a wish list of accounts to marketing. And usually this list contains hundreds of logos. And then when marketing receives a list of hundreds of logos, right?

What they are supposed to do? They can just run programmatic display ads, right? And in best case, put discounts in their dimension layer. So in reality, most ABM programs are just programmatic display ads plus outbound at scale.

That's it, right? In essence, in nutshell, account based marketing means that you run personalization, right? you adjust your offering to the needs of specific account, and then You adjust it to the needs of the buying committee group, right? Because different people inside might have different needs, different jobs to be done, et cetera.

So that's ABM in a nutshell. In reality, that never happens, right? And if I look at the most common reasons, you asked why the programs are failing. I would say, one of them I have already mentioned, And especially starting the pilot program for thousands of accounts or for hundreds of accounts.

The truth is, if you are not an enterprise organization with hundreds of SDRs, right, and big marketing team, you simply won't be able to create a, personalized program for that cluster of accounts, So everybody purses the volume, focuses on volume just to get out. Some conversions. one of the programs that we have audited earlier this year, a company hired an agency that was supposed to help with ABM, and they did exactly what you have mentioned. They invested in them.

One ABM platform, I obviously don't want to mention which one, but I believe a lot of people know this vendor. So the total investment was 180k in that program. And then they invested almost 200k into display ads, PDFs that were promoted through that platform, right? Through programmatic display ads.

So in total, out of that program, they generated 70k. for sales opportunities, not sales accepted, but they called it for sales opportunities. Zero close one. So if you'll calculate total costs to run that program, right?

You quickly understand that the total cost was about half a million, right? And that's the modern reality. Now, if I'll dive deeper, so that's, the second mistake that I just touched, right? Purchase an expensive stack instead of building the processes.

In reality, the technology is not the process. Technology can help you to accelerate some processes, but sometimes people ask, do we really need to purchase this technology? No, you can start at ABM just with your CRM, sit down with sales and focus on expansion playbooks, right? Just defining accounts with expansion potential and that's it.

And then start thinking, okay, how can we, how can we, how can we Create cross selling or up selling opportunities with these accounts, right? And you don't need any technology for this. So just, make it really simple. But in a nutshell, for example, always recommend to keep, lean pilots in mind.

stack that just will help you to create your program. And in most cases you need LinkedIn sales navigator, one source of intent data, and there are providers that cost 100, 200 per month, and that would be enough. Right. And that's it.

In most cases, teams already have some marketing automation, some software, if they want to embed. virtual events into that playbook. Usually they have zoom or any other platform, and that's it, right? The key point is that you don't invest into motion that is not proven, Otherwise, You create a pressure for yourself, for your team.

It's just a question of months when CFO will reach out and ask to justify the investment, or CO if you are working for a smaller organization. And obviously, the more money you request for the program, The faster the results would be expected, right? So if you need that money, we want to ensure that there is a solid ROI, And obviously, without having a former ABM background and just thinking from the lead generation perspective, expectations would be set too high. Targeting a wish list, another most common mistake is just like, okay, in most cases, companies, you know, reach out and say, Hey, we want to sell to the biggest North American banks, JP Morgan, you name this, right?

Now, I'm just simply asking, are these accounts aware of you? Are you sure that they have a need in your product? No, we don't know, but we just want to have these logos. if they don't have a need in your product, it's not really possible to sell.

you can think about it as a litmus test. If you were going to bet your compensation on a list of specific accounts, what criteria these accounts should meet? Meet, right? As simple as that.

So then you stop wish thinking approach and start thinking, okay, what accounts I really need to focus on, right? Which means basically that these companies don't have a real account qualification criteria, right? What accounts we should focus on? That's one of the most important Common mistakes.

Another one that I have seen, not very often, but sometimes that happens. when sales apply abroad territory planning, and they have called accounts that are not replying, or they have some lost deals, and they basically send this graveyard to marketing and say, Hey, This is how a target list go and activate it, but ABM is not the magic, right? and no technology, no marketing guru will help you to reactivate these accounts. another one which is associated with the ABM workflows, Is lack of account research, as we just discussed.

ABM in a nutshell is personalization, which means that you need to dive deeper into account research. This is really time consuming process. A lot of teams think that it's just enough, you know, nowadays everybody is talking about clay. So, okay, so let's put all accounts in clay and we'll just see company's mission, et cetera, but that's not the account research.

Account research means What are absolutely must questions or information we need to know about these accounts to be able to create a personalized offer, And this is what not, you can get with ChatGPT or any AI, right? Unfortunately, you need to dive deeper. And in most cases, you need to know. to engage and get this information from the buying committee members, which means that you need to build relationship with them, So these are the most common things, right?

I'm just consequently sharing one by one, right? And you can see where it fails, right? A lot of teams, they simply don't want to engage. Everybody says, but it's not scalable.

Yeah, but if you want to generate enterprise deals, if you want to generate seven figure deals, you need to invest in the relationship. Unfortunately, on that level, B2B is purely relationship based. It's not transactional based. As simple as that.

If you are selling Netflix subscription, I would say absolutely run ads. Do some mass outbound, you know, 5 product and all your value proposition is just, cut your costs and get the same product, but for a cheaper price. Do a mass outbound. That's absolutely fine, right?

But The world where we operate is simply not possible. But teams, just because they have a volume, they ignore this. they don't do account research, they don't do engagement with these accounts. And lastly, lack of leading indicators.

How are we going to track the progress of our program and how do we know we are heading in the right direction. it's absolutely normal, there is a delay between the program launch and the first results. And especially if you are doing the pilot program, if you are doing this for the first time, Sometimes I'm hearing the question, so what is an adequate timeline to measure the efficiency of our program? And I'm always saying it's the length of your sales cycle.

If your sale cycle is 12 months, then this is the time It's not only limited by ABM, whatever you're going to do, demand generation, parent awareness, any program that you are going to launch. You need to give the same timeline as you are given to other motions, right? You are getting this information probably from paid, from outbounds. the emotions that you're running for years.

Same as here. So when you launch the pilot program, right, you need to define what are the leading indicators, the metrics that are under our control. We are going to hit to make sure that we want to achieve some results. And also what should be our expectations, right?

If, okay, we have never done this before. we struggle, we want to go upmarket, we want to sell to enterprises, but we don't really have enough enterprise customers. We don't have credibility in the enterprise segment. Would it be realistic to immediately set up revenue targets, or?

Pipeline targets in reality, no, just because these companies are not aware of you. In most cases, the goal for the pilot campaign would be creating a list of engaged accounts. In our case, and we can dive deeper if you want, we call this future pipeline accounts that are aware of you, but they are not buying now, and we are not sure what is their current priority, right? And how our product fits that priority.

But that means that with a certain level of relationship. We become top of the mind of these accounts. So when the business trigger happens, we become one of the vendors they think about. And that's the modern truth of B2B buying process.

Probably everybody has heard about this. Enterprise buyers, not only enterprise, but also scale ups, etc. Mid size buyers from mid size organizations, before talking to a vendor, they make a vendor vetted vendor list, They prioritize you way before you know they have done it, right? And way before they are reaching out to you.

Hence the goal to get into that list, get into consideration, And in most cases, for many companies, that should be the right target and expectations for the pilot. You know, if I take a step back and kind of distill a central theme that I'm hearing and everything that you're saying, it's companies just not prepared to take the necessary steps to put the necessary work in to go deep enough. and also that fundamentally by design kind of inherently, it's not a scalable process.

And so this notion of scalable IBM almost becomes. An oxymoron. Maybe it would be useful to kind of almost walk step by step through what doing this properly looks like, and with that in mind, like, what's the starting point? Is it defining the target accounts?

Is that where you start? so let's, divide it into several categories, right? First of all, I would love to address scalability question, Companies how they do they think about scalability. It means I put more dollars in, I get more dollars out, and I don't do anything here, right?

This comes from, legendary SaaS stories. you think about Airbnb, Dropbox, and all the unicorns, right? That we have, have heard as I said, this is not transactional world, right? You don't have this.

Channels where you can put more money into ads and expect that more money would come out, right? Or you can hire more SDRs and expect that they will get the same outcome. Now, how do you scale ABM? You scale it by creating a centralized playbook and then creating micro ABM teams, which means that normally you have one marketer, one sales rep.

These are cross functional teams that work together on one specific goal. By applying acceleration on new pipeline logos, right? And then this teams usually with structure quarter seems right. They could focus on one specific cluster or one specific vertical, one specific market, right?

When they feel that market of vertical is saturated, they could move to another one, right? And this is how you scale it. Now, the key point when it comes to scalability is revenue, right? And unit economics, we want to make sure that it pays off.

So. There is a funny question. Once I posted on LinkedIn and said that, ABM program, we generated just four sales opportunities. And people said, yes, four opportunities in three months.

That absolutely makes no sense. And then I'm saying, so from this four sales opportunities, we generated 2 million dollars. Is it worth it or no? So, in our space, a lot of companies just think about only the volume game.

How many leads do we need to have? Sales qualified leads, sales opportunities, etc. While in ABM, you think about revenue. In ABM, we always prioritize accounts with the highest revenue potential.

So when you close the deal, It means that all that investment, including all manual efforts, will pay off, right? And that can significantly boost your revenue. So that's the difference, right? Comparing to other motions.

And if we look, from the perspective of how to structure the program. So I would love to, share two things here. The first one is the essential pillars of ABM program or ABM strategy, And then the playbook that you can use to create the, the program. So when it comes to ABM strategy pillars, eight pillars that you need to focus on.

The first one is the goals and the motion, What do we want to achieve and how it's aligned with our strategic goals? Because for example, if I'm missing revenue targets. Our goal might be expansion if we have a lot of accounts, right, that have expansion potential and we know that the sales cycle will be shorter. Or, for example, we have a dry pipeline and we need to focus on pipeline generation, but this is more long term activity.

So all the goals that we set up for the program should be aligned with this centralized goal. from the scaling perspective, when you have a full motion, you always focus on these four areas. You need to run these programs in parallel. New pipeline generation, pipeline acceleration, expansion, and renewals or churn prevention, Making sure that these key accounts that generate millions won't churn one time.

So, the second step is, the ideal customer profile. So for ICP, we already touched the point that it, shouldn't be wish list based. There shouldn't be a broad target, right? For every market vertical or cluster that you select, you need to have ICP that includes, basically it replicates your fastest deals.

in that region or in that vertical and your highest deals, right? You just look at the patterns that these accounts have, not only firmographics and technographics, but detailed buying committee structure, who are the exact buyers, who are the power users, who are the champions, who are the decision makers, right? Then you review the deal history and the buyer journey of these accounts. Ideally, if you have never done customer research and if you don't have insights from customers, I highly recommend Take a call with these clients and learn from them what triggered their buyer journey, how they were evaluating you and comparing to other vendors, what resonated with them, right?

There are typical jobs to be done, etc. Because this information is a central element. piece of your ABM program. You literally, the key goal is to adjust your program to how your customers are buying.

I remember one of our clients once said when we finished audit, she's the peer of marketing and she said, You know what I learned from this? What we were doing before is literally, we tried to set to the market what we want to say. But it doesn't necessarily mean that our buyers are interested in learning what we want to say. And now I'm clearly seeing the misalignment that we need to talk about what they need, not what we want to talk about.

So that's, the second nutshell, right? Uh, then other pillars is account qualification criteria, what makes account a good fit, and account disqualification criteria. This is something that you can learn from analysis of lost deals, right? And, Quite often, there could be certain patterns that you'll see.

You can apply these disqualification criteria and narrow down your focus. Next one is account list building. How are we going to select accounts that are likely to become sales opportunities, or If we are thinking about expansion, right? in what accounts we can easily upsell, Where can we utilize, leverage the relationship with the current team, with champions, right?

That puts, maybe they have a strong voice inside the organization and they have can help us to get into other departments or business units. So, I will just give an example for the new pipeline, creation, in most cases when it comes to ABM, people just think in terms of, new logos, New pipeline. So we always prioritize accounts by four criteria. And to get sales buy in, you can start with, uh, With their list, but then you can just suggest to segment this list with the question that I already shared, right?

On what accounts we are going to bet our compensation and apply four criteria. First of all, revenue potential. We obviously want to prioritize accounts with the higher revenue potential, right? We just need to be sure that these accounts have a decent potential.

The second criteria is a level of vendor awareness. Do they know us? And for many companies, this could mean different things. You just need to agree with sales, what does it mean to call a specific account vendor aware, right?

That could be a certain level of engagement, signing up for your events, maybe signals from intent data, whatever, that they're visiting your high intent pages. So you agree with them. Right. What does it mean?

Then the level of relationship, we just spoke, right, that if it was enough to send one cold email or do cold call and expect, seven figure opportunity lending in your CRM, then every company could easily become a unicorn. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. So, think about that. What level of relationship you need to establish and with whom, that's the third level of prioritization.

And the last one is, buying signals. Or we call it slightly differently, product need evidence. What tells us that this account has or might have a potential need in our product? And sometimes it could be legacy technology, hiring for certain positions, right?

It obviously depends on your product. You just need to sit down with sales and nail down this categorization. Now, I remember one of the questions you asked in the beginning, where ABM falls down from this decade, right? One of the things is that in the past, when ABM program was presented, or ABM motion was presented, right?

That was like a theory that you have one to one motion for just a small group of accounts, and you do a full personalization. In most cases, it's expansion and just a few proportions of new logos, right? Then you have one to few programs. Where you do more or less job personalization, or segment personalization.

And then you have one to many, which is like a product ABM. I firmly believe that one to many ABM doesn't exist. It's just a lazy excuse for not doing appropriate demand generation. That it absolutely doesn't make any sense for ABM team with all this efforts to focus on ABM.

Low revenue potential accounts, that should come from the main generation side. Now, that's the first thing, Now, the second one is, If you think that way, it means that you create a static list, and then you run your program for 90 days, or for, I don't know, three months, six months, whatever. But in reality, what we do, we have three lists, right? First of all is our cluster ICP, all accounts that fit this qualification criteria.

But these accounts, they don't know us and we don't know their challenge. Hence the first goal is making them vendor aware. When they become vendor aware, they are moved to the second list, which we call future pipeline, right? They know us, but we don't know their product needs or their challenges, right, where our product might help.

Hence, our goal is to identify these challenges. And lastly, we have active focus. Accounts that fit all four criteria that I mentioned. Vendor awareness, revenue potential, level of relationship, and product need evidence or buying signals.

And this is where we spend 80 percent of our time as ABM team trying to generate sales opportunities, creating this personalized experience. Because these accounts are likely to buy from you, right? Opportunity, likelihood is very high. So that's the key.

And if you look at this list, The key metric here is account velocity. How fast we can move from one list to another, right? How quickly we can make them vendor aware, how quickly we can research, engage with them, build that relationship and understand their needs, and how quickly we can create the personalized offer to be able to create a sales opportunity with these accounts, right? Which means by default, your programs are dynamic, right?

These accounts are moved from one list to another. And when they land interactive focus, you always do one to one ABM, you always do a full personalization because you collected this insights and you know that the revenue potential is significant that always recommend for marketing and sales. When they move accounts to active focus, think about what is the opportunity value of this accounts, right? Because when sales see the numbers, They totally understand why it makes sense to invest time into it, right?

Into doing this full personalization. That's the key. as well, while you are running your programs, there would be a certain list of accounts that start demonstrating this vendor awareness, which means you move them. There could be newly identified accounts.

And I'm always saying, imagine if, There is a count that, for example, you are running a field event. They are signing up for your field event. Then, in two weeks, there are repetitive visits from the buying committee members. They are checking your integrations, price, and book a demo, etc.

But they were not in your initial list. A question is, should we prioritize this account or just stick to obsolete theory because they were not on our list? Let's forget about that. Obviously, we should prioritize engagement with that account, right?

which means, what I have described is very simple. similar to scrum methodology that IT teams are using, that's the key. So this is the prep. We spoke about the pillars for ABM programs.

I just wanted to give you that distinction, basically that's process, how we create account list. So that was pillar number four, how do we select these accounts? Then based on our process, We define what technology we might need for this. If we define that's to call a counter vendor where we need to look at this intent signals, then we need obviously some software for this, but never ever invest into something expensive.

Always start with a product that is not super costly, right? So you basically won't create a problem for your team, And something that you can use later, obviously, when you have a robust team. ABM motion. You can upgrade your stack.

That's absolutely fine. But definitely not in the beginning. And lastly, when you finish this pillars, there are three core important elements. One, how we're going to create that awareness, what specific activities we are going to run to make this accounts vendor aware, right?

And that's why I mentioned customer research customer insights in the beginning. Next activation. What activities should we do to it? Create the opportunities with this accounts, right?

Sometimes they might be hearing about you, but they simply don't understand how your product can help with the existing challenges. So they don't associate your product with their challenges. Or they might understand this, but they don't see how it fits into their current workflows. Or maybe they don't see how it Helps with their specific challenge.

Right. So you always need to think from the buyers perspective And then there could be multiple activities that you can install from individual workshops with these clients, right? Sometimes for example We do strategy sessions reviewing the programs on mini audit sessions reviewing the programs and explaining what could be done better Right and how that could be done better. So it's Kind of what we call breach activities between your ABM programs and sales opportunity creation.

When they see a clear path to the value, right, then the sales opportunity occurs. So, and the lastly is how we're going to measure our program, right? What should be our expectations for the program? What should be the leading indicators that we should track?

And one of the most important things, regular. weekly pipeline review meetings where you just go through the list of activities you have done You cross share the collected insights about target accounts and you plan together next actions So just to dig into a few of those things, and that makes perfect sense in terms of like, the structure and the series of activities. starting maybe just with awareness, like if you determine there's a list of accounts that would be a good fit, but they're not vendor aware, are you just running kind of the standard programmatic ad playbook at that point?

Or what do you do to bring those accounts into a state of awareness? ads always come later So think about ads as a distribution channel with guaranteed reach, right? That's the key but ads themselves don't create awareness. sometimes people don't believe me, but you can talk to your colleagues and ask when was the last time you clicked the banner and booked a discovery call with sales rep, right?

So basically how you can create awareness, think B2B buyers are buying, right? if you look at any given B2B market, most companies are not buying. So people are simply looking if they come, for example, to social, right? And you want to run ads, for example, or you want to run programmatic ads on specific platforms, right?

Maybe industry website. where they might be reading news. Think about their intent. They come there to read, to learn something new.

Hence, their buying intent is very low. There is a demand for content, They might be learning how to run their jobs to be done better, how to be better at their work, and just stay updated on the industry trends and news, right? That's the key. How can we attract their awareness?

How can we align with their current buying intent? Right? What topics might resonate with them? Keep in mind that On this level, there is a limited opportunity to present your product.

If you look at our content, right, we never say, hey, full funnel is the best ABM agency, go and hire us, right? So we always talk about the jobs to be done of our target buyers. And we learn this from the customer interviews. So we have a lot of discovery calls.

We've worked with, in the last five years, we've worked with many B2B teams. So, uh, very well aware of the jobs to be done and challenges of our ICP buyers, right? So our top of the funnel content is aligned with this. But always prioritize content sharing.

It's the easiest way. And sometimes, let's say, if you are marketing to conservative buyers, let's say IT teams, cyber security, et cetera, that are not super active. I'm linked to them, right? That becomes super hard to make, to create that awareness.

So you need to start thinking where you can hang out what you can do to attract the attention. So that could be engaging with specific communities. You might be sponsoring this communities and you might bring your subject matter expert to give a webinar in the beginning that could be sponsored at webinar. It's absolutely fine, but you pay a community to make sure that your target audience will come because they trust their peers.

And this is how you start raising awareness. You can co create, for example, run a market research with that community. Sometimes, depends because I will give you an idea, sometimes you can just start collaboration with an industry leader. You can invite this person for the podcast, or even what we have done with some customers, arrange a field event.

Pay a gig and then invite your target accounts in one place. And the previous, the thought leader that there would be a mini workshop or presentation and then somebody from your team would run another presentation, right? And that's the way how you create that awareness. So just think about what would be the right channels.

In most cases, let's say for the broader audience, in most cases, you can leverage linkedin and you can start linkedin and start leadership program, more or less replicated what we are doing at full fun, right? That's not a silver bullet, obviously, but I'm just sharing. Think about Where and how you can create it. Then when a specific post, a specific topic resonates with people, you can use ads to boost the reach.

You can now with the same content, you can start targeting this accounts, right? And, many cases we always prioritize, this is my philosophy, killing two birds with one stone, right? So we're always. Try to co create content with the target accounts, right?

Again, just because they trust their peers more. So we say, okay, for example, one of the posts I published recently was I interviewed VPs of sales, of our target accounts and just ask one question, what is the number one thing you guys wish to achieve? Marketing team will help you with and I got a bunch of answers, right? Sometimes they ask to keep this anonymous, right?

So I'm just saying, okay, I spoke to a person from company X from that industry, right? not naming the person that not naming the company, but when the post is live, I am sharing it and you have the relationship they see. And this is kind of the starting point. Sometimes they're eager to collaborate and cross share, and then you can use it.

And. you can embed it into your marketing play, because then you can, for example, reach out to a marketing team or communication team and say, Hey, I just interviewed your VP of IT or whoever, right? And this is the piece of content that's came out from that engagement. So you might be interested.

And you know that the KPI of this team It's kind of PR, right? They always love when somebody talks about their team, somebody promotes that content. In most cases, maybe in ideal world, they would share that post on LinkedIn, on their, maybe share on their corporate page. But, what you aim for and what they, in most cases, will do, they will promote it in their Microsoft Teams, Slack, their communication channel.

Hey, our John Doe was interviewed. Take a look. What you're achieving with this, you create account awareness, right? You stimulate that so called dark social.

So inside target accounts, people start talking about you, right? That's fantastic. And then if you are able to engage with this bias, you can pick up that piece of content and simply reach out, say, for example, just to make it practical, you are talking to me right now. Tomorrow you might reach out to Vlad saying hey, I just, spoke to Andrej, here is a video clip, very interesting insight, not sure if you have seen it, but might be worth, looking especially at this point.

So, just a simple, it's a very simple example, but this is what Sales team can utilize, right? And you can immediately start a building relationship by being credible, using the name of the colleagues, right? And, deliver on value upfront. So these are the best ways.

And again, as I'm saying, you'll see here, we speak a lot about manual engagement. This is how you build the relationship and this is how you create awareness. And later, for example, went through this video clip, right? And if you ever do an ABM, you can pick up that story.

For example, one part of this conversation and then upload to LinkedIn to the list of your and boosted to the list of the target accounts and then manually reaching out, let's say, from the sales perspective, and that's, that's the key, this is how you create awareness. You see where I put ads, right? It comes And so moving from like awareness to, and this is probably the last question we'll have time for, but, actually getting that sales discussion started. how do you bridge that gap?

Cause that seems to be the chasm where a lot of people fall short in particular. Yeah, absolutely. As I said, One of the key things is to figure out if this account ha are they in the buy and mode, and if there is a strong product, need evidence, right? If there is no strong product need evidence, accept the reality, you won't be able to help.

To help to sell to them, right? If you are sure that they have a challenge or they have a need, right? Specific need that your product can help with. Next step is create and personalized offer, right?

And that could be delivered in many cases. Like I said, sometimes that could be delivered through the workshops, through the strategy sessions. Sometimes it could be just one pager, right? It could be as simple as that.

Hey, Justin, we had a lot of engagement. And I recently saw a few news about your company, right? And you guys mentioned this and that, And I just, for example, I did that analysis and saw a few things. Where, for example, your workflows could be done better.

In most cases, in your account research, you need to embed profiling questions. Remember what we just spoke in the beginning? have discussed this. What we must know about these accounts, right?

When you collect it, and it doesn't mean that you need to have, you know, like, 50 questions. No, no, wait. Three, four strategic questions, right? And then you have three to four bullet points, right?

We saw this and that. For example, if you can't. quantify this data. You can say from what we have seen with similar accounts, it can cost you whatever of not of continue doing it that way.

For example, missing the revenue targets by X percent, right? Whatever. So you try to quantify it to present the value. So if you are, I would invite you and then you define, it could be a call.

It could be as I said, strategy session to review their workflows first, because what we have seen in the past, a lot of teams. They have broken processes. So before selling software becomes a centralized part of that process. But before selling that software, you need to help them to improve their processes so they can see how to feed that software, right?

So if teams are using. Excel spreadsheets, right? First of all, you need to explain where it falls down and how to substitute this process quickly without losing the data, right? And making sure that people will adapt.

So these are the most common frustrations and just sharing a practical example. So that's the key. And then you define in what format to deliver. why it works?

You have already built a relationship with these people. So, there was some, you had some discussions before, you had some engagement, now you come up with personalized help. So, I'm always thinking about sales process as a help, right? It's not about that you just, you know, Try to pitch it.

So it's not the wolf from the Wall Street movie, right? Where you call thousands of people and try to sell. I think about, that process as the process of help. You know that these people have need, you came up, you did your homework, You come up with an offer that you know will help these people.

That's the key. if you run it that way, then there is no problem. In the worst case, you at least will hear a polite no with the reason why. Right?

So, for example, it's not the current priority just because we are focusing on this and that, but that could be a priority in five months. And that's a fantastic answer, right? And that's a honest answer. This is not something, Hey, I'm not interested in the And then what?

or it's just in majority of cases, it would be just, target buyers will simply ignore their reply. That's the key. So, because you are asking now about the bottom of the funnel, To make sure that here you will be getting replies and generating opportunities, you need to do all the prior work to ensure that you have enough level of vendor awareness and relationship with these accounts. It's really different than just ads and outbound at scale.

I think that's, you know, my biggest takeaway from this discussion. There's a lot that goes into it. I think you have a lot of good resources on your website as well that talks about this. We'll get some of those from you and put those in the show notes.

Andre, thank you so much for chatting with me. It's just super interesting. Thanks for inviting me, great questions, great prep, so hope it was valuable.