The Scrappy ABM Moves Worth Stealing | Ep. 274 (Best Of)

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. Today I'm joined by Hannah Forsen, who is the senior manager of demand generation at BambooHR. Hannah, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here. So I'm excited to learn from you and hear kind of some of your lessons. So I'm curious, as you did go to your different channel managers, how did you help to make that transition to an account-based approach so that they were also bought in even though they're like, they may have had different goals? Yeah, I think trying to signal as much flexibility as we possibly could. Like, hey, this is kind of our recommendation. This is what we're trying to accomplish, but it can be accomplished in different ways. I feel like it was, again, like a lot of trial and error too. Like we would test out adding this audience to an existing audience to try and help them feel a little bit more comfortable in terms of like cost and not feeling like it's going to balloon up or completely mess up their overall metrics. We've also tried it where it's like, hey, let's do an additional campaign and isolate it so that you can see like, hey, we're going after this really particular group of executives. How can we make sure that like we're able to pull that out of like our overall data if we need to, so that it doesn't look like our CPMs are going through the roof or we're not getting as many form fills. So we've kind of tried both ways and I feel like we've had varying levels of success where sometimes they are still super concerned about CPMs, but even just like over the holidays where typically a lot of B2B companies will start dwindling down their spend because they don't want to be overspending for people who aren't going to be completing form fills. One thing that we were doing is we were running an executive campaign and we kind of had to tell them like, executives aren't going to be taking the same time off as a lot of other people within the organization because they still have ownership of this business. And we want to make sure that like we're capturing them when like, yeah, they're probably, it's not going to be as noisy in the market. Like it's not going to be, they're not going to be bombarded with a bunch of B2B ads because everyone kind of knows that a lot of B2B companies shut down over the holidays. And So to kind of ease the worry of our channel manager, we just said, why don't you just set it up as a separate campaign so that if it ends up impacting any of your reporting, you can literally just exclude that. And then you're not having any issues with saying like, oh my gosh, we had $40,000 worth of spend still going through December. And then they're getting awkward questions from stakeholders like, whoa, why did we do that? We've never done that before. They can directly point back to that campaign and say, oh, well, it's for this particular ABM initiative, and then not feel as much pressure that like it's making their metrics look bad. I love the like deep level of empathy to say, I understand this may affect some of your metrics. Here are some viable ways that we can actually build the business case that you worked with us on this program, and that's not what you're standardly doing. And I'm sure that was super helpful in actually getting some buy-in so that people didn't just say flat out no. Like it, it sounds like you, you referenced it earlier, but having some flexibility in how we got the work done, but making sure that at the end of the day, a lot of the work still did get done. Yeah. Well, and candidly, I think that comes from like, if you get to the root of being human and having a career, like you want to feel proud of the work that you're doing. And if somebody's coming to you and completely blowing up that work that you're doing and potentially like air quotes, making you look bad, like you're immediately not gonna have buy-in. And I feel like that's one of the most critical parts of having a solid ABM strategy is making sure that like, not just with your sales team that you're getting a lot of buy-in and that they also understand the strategy, but particularly with the channels who are being asked to execute differently than they have before. Like I mentioned, this was a completely new motion for us. We haven't done anything like this before. And so it has taken a lot of just understanding that, like, it's— change is hard and it's going to take time. But when you continuously commit to it and, like, try to rally people around and work through any sort of misunderstandings, That's really when you get the benefit of ABM is like once people kind of start seeing it for themselves and they feel a sense of ownership of like, hey, I helped with that. That's kind of when the magic happens. Today I'm joined by Peyton Christopher, who is the head of demand gen and growth marketing over at Delivery Solutions. Peyton, thank you so much for joining me today. Yeah, thanks for having me, Mason. I always like to just dig into how do we find the accounts? Like, how did you find your audience? Obviously account-based marketing focused a lot on the accounts. So I'm curious, what was your approach to determining the best customer that you actually wanted to pursue for your ABM program? I mean, I think when Carter and I both got to Delivery Solutions, if you were to ask, you know, different departments at that time, who, who was our ICP, you would have gotten a lot of different answers. So there is kind of a point of people will tell you what they think your ICP is, and it's helpful, like, to be aligned with your product team, with customer service, with sales, and you want to take in their input, but you also want to look at data, especially if you're, you know, already at a company that has some existing customers or clients. And so that's what we did. We took in their information and what they gave us. We looked within our CRM to see Okay, is there any trends within the type of customers that we're getting? And what we could really see is like, we're definitely sitting on the enterprise space as far as like our cost standpoint, but also from a customer standpoint, the customers that we've held on to the longest have been large-scale retailers because our, essentially our product is able to integrate with the custom solutions that they already have. And deliver a return on investment. For smaller companies, it was a little more difficult. And so really we started with data and then we got more fine-tuned once we kind of saw like, all right, what type of accounts should we really be going after as far as company size, number of locations, as far as their storefronts, you know, revenues, just these different dynamics within that. So then we can go to our sales team and ask like, hey, this is kind of what we're seeing within the data. And who at that company do you think like, you know, is the real decision maker that you need to talk to in order to get a deal to go from, you know, that beginning stages of opening that opportunity to actually winning the opportunity. And so then you can really align with your sales team on that. But what was also really helpful is still going back to a customer service team who actually ends up having, you know, more of a relationship with the end user than your sales team will and asking them, hey, like, who are you regularly interacting with from a customer service standpoint? Who is submitting the tickets on our platform? Or when you're doing an implementation, like, who are you directly working with?, and these people, especially at an enterprise level, they might not have buying power, but they do have influence and their influence really matters. And so you want to take in that information as well to understand, okay, like if we can get in front of these people as well, they're going to tell, you know, their directors, their VPs, their, you know, chief of whatever, this is the product they want to use. And we also worked with our product team to understand, Okay, what is the actual value that it would bring to these specific job titles or these specific departments? So once we kind of formulated all of that, like then we had a really good idea of, okay, this is who we're going after. And then the next phase was how do we actually get in front of them? I especially love just the simple call out of like, let's get our, our like, we refer to them as like frontline or our key influencers bought in. Yeah, and then they take it because like, man, I'm— I've been a CEO now for like 2 years and I get flooded with emails and I pay attention to none of them. But man, if I get a Slack from a team member that says, hey, I think this would be really good for us, I'm all ears. So it just like people just don't think about it in that way. Today I'm joined by Greg Rokisky, who is the senior marketing manager over at Calendly. Greg, thanks so much for joining me today. I'm super excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Of course. So obviously one of the core reasons why I think there's not a ton of content out there on organic social plus ABM is ABM is like very focused on targeting and making sure we have guaranteed delivery of our message to target accounts. Exactly. And the nature of organic social is it's not like you can't target directly. Like, so I'm curious, first, it sounds like you developed target account lists in partnership with sales, but how did you target? Like, how did you actually get in front of these people in the first place? Yeah. So how I kind of thought of, if you think of Sprout Social, we're a social media management platform, right? And so I think two things. One is the one-to-many. So like, how can it be a brand-to-brand moment that turns into a one-to-one moment? So. If a quick service brand is having this viral moment on Twitter that they're— how could we lean in with a very authentic response that's timely, cheeky, gives them their social kudos and like we can get that response back so that like many to many, and then I could hand off that opportunity to the sales team as that outreach, as I mentioned. But the other thing is like you think of LinkedIn, that's where the one-to-one can happen where you're reaching the and targeting the practitioners and the decision makers. So people who are signing off on the budget requests of the practitioner. And so what I did is worked with sales and our field marketing team to, as you said, that target account list, I was like, okay, how can we generate some content for those individuals? And so what I use is actually Sprout Social tagging. Here's some outbound content that is geared for ICP personas. ICP brands, and what is coming inwards of these like persona comments engagements, or these brand comments engagements and created this report. And it actually helped shape our content strategy. And then what we would also do is more one-to-one in our content. So say a brand is having that moment, we would do maybe a Stitch analyzing why this works for social media. So bringing kind kind of that brand into the spotlight as an aha moment. And then our fans would love it on social. But then again, I could hand off, hey, we just did this post around this brand that you're targeting. I don't know if you've had contact with them, but we've been getting a lot of social love. I don't know if they've seen this. Could you use this in their outreach? And so that was kind of, I was looking at social success. So like from the data standpoint, how could we form our content calendar around that? And what were the engagements we were getting? And then where are we getting after that? Like turning a cold outreach into something a little warmer, or did it help in those conversations? And I think the other thing that really happened, like down the line, we had a like custom W model in terms of attribution. So I could actually see like, oh, did this like social content help in any of our deals, whether it talked about that target account or not? And so that was really cool. Not only from organic social, but also like our influencer and creator strategy. Okay, so first of all, this is genius. Second, repeat back, someone has a viral moment, like you guys just made sure to show up and be a part of the conversation. It's like super smart. And I'm just thinking how many, how many company pages specifically on LinkedIn are ghost towns? Like, why don't we just have our sellers or any company content from our team show up on their stuff just as like a basic like, like it's actually not crazy intense work. So like, that's first. Second, like, you leaned into the fact that you're a social platform. So I want to, I want to extrapolate that lesson for everybody else of lean into what you do. So like, Sprout clearly is a social platform. She did social breakdowns and made one-to-one content. And people think about like one-to-one content as like private. So I'm going to make this content, it's going to be super high touch, and I'm going to only put on a landing page for this one company to see. And the best one-to-one content that I've seen is one-to-one for the account, but it's one-to-many for the audience where you extrapolate lessons like I love that. That's so smart. And one thing I just wanted to drill into that you said, like one of the things that we had up front that was really successful too was as simple as like I created that relationship from marketing to sales and more specifically social to sales. And they would Slack me and be like, hey, this LinkedIn person from X brand had a really great moment. Could you just, as you mentioned, like from the Sprout Social account, comment on there, show some love. And that was like one of the early, like, let's get proof of concept. And so I was getting pings all the time and that's easy for me. Yep. Let me comment. Let me do something fun, cheeky, or like authentic from that. That gives them their flowers and kudos. And hopefully that's another jumping off point. So it can really be like to start off with something as simple as that. And then all the other things in the background, we were doing like DMs for private events and all of those like more typical ABM back private message things. But to your point, I think the like social front-facing opportunity is something that I wasn't at the time seeing a ton of, and I still don't see a ton of it on and for B2B brands. And I think to your point, also, LinkedIn is just so ripe for more than just earning recap posts and carousels about corporate social responsibility events. Like, I think there's a lot more opportunity to have fun on LinkedIn. Today I'm joined by Adam Holgrom, who is the CEO and co-founder of Fiddlr. Adam, thank you so much for joining me today. Nice to be here. And Fiddlr is designed to specifically solve a gap in the market around LinkedIn advertising. So before we dig in any further, I just want to ask the very basic dumb question, like, what does Fiddlr do? Yeah, it's very, you know, it was a very niche tool that I started from my own frustration and issues trying to prove myself to my execs, to my board at that time. Which is typically hard when you have a channel like LinkedIn Ads, which is, could be argued at least to be more of a brand awareness channel in many ways. So what we do is very simple. We connect LinkedIn Ads data with your CRM data. And in that way, we can kind of showcase what happens even if people don't click on a freaking ad, right? Not necessarily to say that LinkedIn Ads do it all because That never happens. It's a bunch of things, but it's a way to at least say that LinkedIn ads has been part of the journey. I think the average on LinkedIn for a click is something around like 0.04% or something like that. So it's like people don't click on ads. So if we continue to build ads for clicks and to continue to measure them for clicks, it just doesn't make sense. I mean, if we just look into ourselves, it's very rare that I click an ad. Even if I wanted to click the ad, I would probably just, you know, either I would just type the name in LinkedIn and go to their LinkedIn page or whatever, right? So that was kind of what we set out to solve. So basically connecting that in a way that, and now LinkedIn kind of does it in a way on its own, but they don't, you know, surface the actual companies and the deals that you're influencing. So that's kind of where we, where we stand out a bit. I'm curious from your perspective, when we've been setting up LinkedIn ad programming for a lot of our clients, titles are just all over the map. Um, and so we've been focused more on function and seniority level as the primary approach. But again, in that, you're not— if you use a tool like Fibbler, you're not then seeing the individual contacts that you would want to retarget. You just know seniority level and department. So I'm curious, as you think about the input from a data perspective that makes Fiddler even more effective on the backside. Yeah. How are you recommending people set up the LinkedIn programs to get the most of the data that Fiddler provides? No, I think definitely if you're talking about an outbound perspective, I think title targeting is better in that sense. I do completely, I also use function sometimes because it's also a way to make it a bit easier and to get a bit wider spread. But we have, you know, we have audience insights in our product as well where you can kind of exclude titles that are not relevant. So we can, yeah. We can kind of see if they are part of a super title or not. And that's kind of how I've been using it to kind of hone in on titles that are not part of a super title, right? Because if I add a head of marketing role or something like that as a title, it brings in— it's insane how much it brings in that are— could be a lot of them are relevant, of course, but it's also like marketing assistant. It's also, it could be, you know, marketing coordinator, and that might not be the type of person. So when I'm targeting Fibler, as an example, I'm mostly targeting people like myself. So like Director of Growth, these types of titles, Director of Demand. Yeah, and those are typically not super titles. So those can be quite, quite niche in a way. Can you just quickly define super title? Because I think I understand, but I'll make sure I've got it. Yeah, and that's, that's obviously LinkedIn's own definition of a title that is, you know, a super title is a title that is a part of a lot of other titles, or it has a lot of titles that's part of it, basically. And then titles that are not supertitles, they are standalone. So typically when you add a supertitle in your audience builder, you will see the audience shoot up, you know, tens of thousands in an instant. And it's typically a good tell that it's a supertitle. But on the backend through LinkedIn's API, you can actually see if they are part of a supertitle or not. So that is kind of what we are showing also. You cannot see which title is part of which subtitle though. You can only, so you kind of have to make sense of that. You can just see subtitle, not subtitle. So you kind of have to figure it out on your own. Um, they couldn't make it too easy. Exactly. But it is a mess. And I mean, I get it also from their perspective, right? It's complex. People put in their own titles, so they have to kind of bundle it somehow. Yeah. Okay. So as I'm thinking through it on the LinkedIn ad setup side, function is helpful, but best is specific titles with the exclusion of super titles. Yeah. And then we run very focused programs towards very specific accounts and contacts within those accounts. We then use Fiddler to feed that insight to our CRM. And then that insight in our CRM then triggers other marketing programs that guide the account to the next stage of the overarching account progression model or funnel or whatever your language is. Or we're actually also then using that information to use for sales outbound prioritization, because we know that these accounts are at least brand aware and brand familiar. Exactly, exactly. And that's kind of what we're seeing, right? When people are using these influence models for us, it's often, you know, even if we are selling mostly to SMB companies, the sales cycles are long. Also for SMB companies. So it's like they've had, you know, impressions targeting these companies for years sometimes. I love it. Well, again, Adam, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been Scrappy ABM, and we'll see you guys in the next one. 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 that you have the actionable ways in which you can start to build an ABM program today. Just go to scrappyabm.com/newsletter to subscribe. And if you enjoyed this episode, we'd really appreciate if you'd leave a 5-star review and hit the notification bell so you never miss an episode. I look forward to seeing you in the next one.