Brand Recall Takes Three to Six Months. Are You Measuring ABM on the Right Clock? | Ep. 272

Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome to Scrappy abm. This is your podcast with practical playbooks that don't break the bank. In this podcast, we dig into the exact playbooks that ABM practitioners are using today to get their first ABM program off the ground. We'll dig into how they're using their current tech stack in order to create Scrappy programs that rely more on creativity than new technologies. So if you're looking for how to get ABM off the ground in your organization in the next 90 days, let's dive into this episode. Hey, it's Vincent over at Scrappy abm. Thanks so much for tuning in for this episode. We've actually gone back to some of our old workshops, which we do ABM in a day. We do actually every four to six weeks. So if you want to come, just check it out. Uh, scrappyabm.com workshop. That said, we went to our Q and A sections, pulled some of the best questions that we've ever gotten for, uh, you to enjoy. So hopefully you have a great time listening to this. Hopefully it's super helpful for you. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out or just go to our next workshop@scrappyabm.com workshop. See you there.

Speaker B: So we've had some questions that have been sitting here for the, from the beginning of the day, and I'm excited to get very, very tactical with this. So starting with what you had just said about there's gaps, there's measurement, there's different stages here. I want to ask this for Violet. She was saying, how do we measure weekly or monthly success, and what are the monthly or weekly KPIs given the different stages? So obviously she understands we need to measure these wherever they are within the account progression model a little bit differently. But what is the time period for those measurements?

Speaker A: Great question. So we'll talk a lot more on, like, measurement in the next. The next section is literally like measurement and building out dashboards. But the way that I think about it in generalities is brand recall takes three to six months. So that is not Mason's opinion. That is like industry averages would suggest that in order to get someone to remember that your brand exists, it takes like three to six months of dedicated programming. So the awareness stage, you're typically going to have longer timeframes of measuring success. So I would look at the awareness stage, typically through a monthly or quarterly lens of what is the percentage reach of, uh, those that we targeted, have engaged or become aware or had ad impressions. So that's the awareness stage. At more the meaningful engagement and like the initial engagement stage, sorry, meaningful and then MQA stage, you're probably looking at a week over week because these later stages are actually focused on accelerating conversions. So there's a high likelihood that you can actually look at. I'll give the example of like a re engagement program would be something like. Or ah, you could, depending on how you want to categorize it, RE engagement or um, an opportunity program would be a closed loss program. So if you go after opportunities that you previously spoke with, they didn't engage and uh, they didn't move forward and then you go to re engage them, you should know within like a week the early indicators of how that program is going to go because you'll see open rates, click through rates, response rates. And what I found is on closed loss programs, if the timing's right, you actually typically get a response like your first or second email. So again, it depends is the short answer, but higher. In the account progression model, it just needs more time to bake because brand recall takes longer and people entering into exploring, um, buying takes longer. But once they're actually in those later stages, you should be looking at it likely on a week over week versus a month over month or a quarter over quarter. Man, that's a lot of overs.

Speaker B: Uh, perfect.

Speaker A: But I think that answered the question.

Speaker B: Yeah, and I think that's a goodly in it too. Um, Nod was uh, asking how do you keep track of all the signals?

Speaker A: You define what signals you're going to track. So the whole thing of the account progression model, I love this framing because for a lot of our clients when we're doing it at first, you know, they kind of felt like Meredith, where they were like there's so many gaps and I feel like I've got a lot of gaps to fill. We have other clients that are much larger kind of in this enterprise space where it actually becomes a focus tool for them. So I'll give context of like we're, we're currently doing a training engagement quite literally with a $3 billion company. They do not need any more programs. They are doing everything. And I like not hypothetically, I have yet to find something they're not currently doing from a program perspective. What they now need to do is identify what are the signals that actually matter for our buyers in progressing them forward. So they are intentionally excluding some signals because they aren't relevant in progressing an account forward. And they are intentionally saying these are the things that we're going to use as the signals on when to activate our sales team that show us buyers are ready to actually have uh, an engaged conversation.

Speaker B: Yep. And I think as we start to look at some of the earlier stages, um, there are a couple questions around here. So I'll start with Dejan. He's talking about in, in terms of. So there he's looking very, very specifically at ah, oil and gas and vertical. So what are ways to learn how to use channels for big organizations where it's really hard to get in touch because they usually rely on hyperscalers and their partners and they don't give any time of day to like new players.

Speaker A: So specifically, essentially the challenge is he's a newer player in the space and he's trying to get into oil and gas and, and they only go through partners versus going to, to net new uh, people in the space. Yeah, I mean I'll give context. We've broken an oil and gas a couple of times in every time there was a partner involved. So like someone else that was trusted in the space brought us in. So another frame that I've heard recently is like features or bugs. So we could look at oil and gas and say, oh, how do we solve for this gigantic problem? Or we just say like that's a feature of the industry. Like they're a fairly legacy industry. They have trusted partners that they already work with and in order to break in we probably need to go through those partners. Do I wish we could be a direct vendor?

Speaker B: For sure.

Speaker A: But like if you're trying to break into a new vertical, um, a transfer of trust by associating your brand with a brand that they also already trust will make that go a lot faster. And then you use partners in this model as distribution. So data would be second party partner data distribution is going to be your partner's outbound messages destination. Could be a co hosted dinner or a co hosted webinar. That's with both of you and the direction is the opt in. So like that's how I do a partner play to break into oil and gas. And then if you do that well enough, inevitably you become the trusted partner that is already broken into the industry.

Speaker B: So let's build off of this first party second party data. Courtney's asking with leads that they're getting from content syndication, uh, meaning they're requesting our white paper. Would those be first party or they be second party? And how do you, and do you categorize this as like initial awareness stage or do you put it somewhere else in the progression model?

Speaker A: Yeah, so I'll pull this up really quick. Um, I barely, I kind of breeze past it. But when we look back at this. So there's list based triggers and then there's signal based triggers. So when I look at content syndication partners, you're typically giving them a list or a criteria in which they need to go and engage to then get people to opt into your content. So that would be a list based trigger is the initial list or criteria that you're providing your content syndication partners to even get people to engage once they are engaged. Kind of a gray area if I'm being honest because it depends on how the content syndication partner works. Sometimes they like are very brand forward um, and are like this is the brand. Sometimes they're like research forward and it's less brand focused um, in nature. So I would, I would as a caution outline that as more second party because if you think about it like if you're sponsoring an event that second party partner data for sure and they're providing you a list and then the main goal is to re engage that audience that engage with something at the event into your first party stuff. So think about it this way. Content syndication is here. They have engaged through an initial engagement or they then move into an initial engagement play that is a follow up with retargeting ads where you get them to opt into something on your website that's more content like that. So awareness would be content syndication. The re engagement off of an engaged content syndication list would be initial engagement which then leads into a meaningful engagement play which then aims to get them engaged specifically in product content for conversion purposes. That was real in the weeds. Hopefully I did it.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's perfect. And if you want to keep this slide up, there's a couple of general questions I think this would be good but visual to have the, the question from Daniel is that you know, ABM awareness isn't the issue. Conversion is.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So what are some of the common reasons that engaged accounts don't advance and how should teams rethink like next step, uh, to unlock movement.

Speaker A: Cool. I answered this a little bit over the lunch break and Jim, you were, you were grabbing lunch but I, I think I want to take another stab at it given that we're here. So let's, let's outline this really quickly. Of you have an account that's engaged at the initial engagement stage and starts to show or that's a list based signal. So they've opened emails, they've clicked, they've shown engagement on your website but they have not yet actually responded. They've not done anything. Depending on how you want to structure your program, I'm not telling you what to do, you're an adult. But depending on how you want to structure your program, you could dictate that depending on the pages that they viewed on your website, that would then move them to meaningful engagement, at which point that would then qualify them for audience expansion to get them from more high level problem based content into more solution oriented content. So if you've seen engagement, then you want to, you want to dig into specifically, um, the audience expansion component and that would just be what playbook you move.

Speaker B: Oh.

Speaker A: Many of them click book a meeting and don't move forward. What a. This is my favorite. All right, so if they view. Sorry, if they view book a meeting. Sorry, you just literally saw me sit up and like breathe life back into me. All right, if they, if they view your book of meeting page and they don't book first optimize your book of meeting page. Like first things first. There's probably a reason that booking meeting, uh, it may be that you don't have enough proof, you don't have enough anything on that page. Um, so you go to scrappy abm.com contact on that page. There's actually a video that is of me telling people not to book a meeting. And I tell people exactly who we work with and the results that we've gotten for them. So people watch that video and then they book a meeting. Crazy. So like that's the first thing. Second, uh, thing. If you then get them to this stage, that's a re engagement program or it could be a converting touch program. Depends on how you structure your program. Yeah. But regardless, remarket to them like send them programming that specifically is focused on ROI calculate. This is all proof content. So if they've already gotten to book a meeting, they, they need more proof to actually then book the meeting. So that's case studies. That's, that's ROI calculators, that's customer testimonials, that's logo. Like that's all the proof content. So yeah, if they get all the way there, you gotta build proof and you gotta optimize that. Book a meeting page. If you're doing this as a target account program, you should also have a separate book a meeting page that is a specific curated journey for them where you can then customize the logos that they see. They, you can customize the case studies that they see. So if you're doing this as a, as a curated target account program, don't send them to your standard book, a call page, clone that page and then make a very curated industry focused conversion page. Um, so you can really build that proof on the page in a way that's curated for those target accounts.

Speaker B: Let's take this a step further. This was a perfect lead in the Meredith's question. How many accounts is this account progression model tailored to? If I'm trying to go after a handful of like 5 to 10 of our top enterprise accounts, do I build a program per account or a similar program, just change the messaging.

Speaker A: Great question. Um, please, for the love of all that is good and holy, do not build an individual account progression model for each account. Um, one, that's gonna m be so much work. Two, the goal here is to build good processes that can be replicated. So if I, ah, we actually have been recommending for a couple of our enterprise clients, um, like at the MQA stage, a like high touch, one to one, like audit process that they're doing for free. So that playbook is a one to one playbook. But the whole progression isn't customized to every account. Like we're running similar ad programming that's vertical or cohorted. And again, if you're, if you got 10 accounts, 30 people, 10 accounts, 300 match contacts on LinkedIn, you can run ad programming towards that. You're good to go. Then we get them into some kind of an experience generally. So we might do a webinar, we might do in person dinner, we might do something because that's high value. And then we actually do work for them for free. And people are like, why are you like, it's just a CAC calculation. So if it cost us $30,000 to acquire a customer and you're telling me that I can get one of our top 10 accounts that we're focused on and you're telling me I got 30 grand to play with, well, why don't I do $20,000 worth of work for them for free to show so much value that then the rest of my 10 grand is making sure they actually close on the next step. So like it's just a cat calculation anyway. That's all one to one in nature, but that should be systematic so that it's repeatable. Because the worst thing that could happen for you is you build this whole one to one progression model. You actually do find success with one account. And they're like, do it again. You're like, everything was custom. That one account, I don't know how to do it again. Like m don't do that make it systematic in nature so that you can repeat it over and over and over again.

Speaker B: That's perfect. All right, there is another technical question. What works in terms of channel mix and the CTA for enterprise B2B and AI software space? I don't see value in cold email and outreach. Event based makes sense. Educational webinars with peers makes a lot of sense, but haven't gotten stakeholders on board yet. Would love to hear what is something that works and it isn't just email. Cold call, LinkedIn, DMS that would potentially dilute the brand.

Speaker A: Yeah, um, yeah, I think we already answered that earlier over lunch break too. I tried to answer all those for so cool. All right, we're good on that. What's next? Jim?

Speaker B: Let me see. Carrie had a question here. Yeah, the just in the chat. So web optimization customization standpoint, do you

Speaker A: recommend any platforms the ones you currently have? Um, so the. It's a cop out answer slightly. But it's also. If I go and recommend a bunch of tools, you're going to go focus on buying the right tools and it'll take you like two to three months to implement the tool. And like when I was doing that one to one website program, um, we were on the HubSpot CMS so I just cloned the landing page and I changed the URL to be the company name. And like I would just then go, I did unlisted YouTube videos and then I would just do an embed of the YouTube video on the landing page. Um, and then I had the same CTA out to uh, self audit checklist or book a call. So like what we're talking about here is like, you don't have to make it crazy because ideal scenario is you, you implement more quickly, validate this works and then you scale by implementing new tools. Um, but for right now, just use what you have. It'll be manual but like it'll work.

Speaker B: Yeah. The quick side story from everyone, because you weren't at our revenue team on site to plan out this year. Anytime you get a bunch of really smart people in a room, they want to make things complicated because it's fun for like an intelligent mind to build something complicated. But if you start to break this down and a framework that Mason continues to push on us is like, okay, what are we doing that works that we can do more of? What is something that we're doing that is working okay, that we can do better? And then after that what is something new that we can start? And there's a lot that you can do with just doing more of what works and doing things better before you even have to start something new and you think of the energy and investment that goes into starting something new. There's probably most of, if not all of your ABM program that you can run through more and better this year.

Speaker A: Very well said.

Speaker B: With that, that is the end of these questions. We have some more on measurement, which I'll come back to, but I'll see myself out

Speaker A: thank you so much for listening to this episode of Scrappy abm. If you're looking for more content just like this, I highly recommend you go subscribe to our newsletter. We release weekly playbooks so you have the actionable ways in which you can start to build an ABM program today. Just go to scrappyabm.com newsletter to subscribe. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd really appreciate if you'd leave a five star review and hit the notification bell so you never miss an episode. I look forward to seeing you in the next one.