Twenty Email Opens, Zero Replies: What That Signal Actually Means | Ep. 271

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: 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.comworkshop 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. All right, what questions do we have? All right, so Daniel said an abm, um, awareness isn't our issue. Conversion is one of the most common reasons engaged accounts don't advance. And how are, how should some teams rethink the next step to unlock movement? What a great question. When we do program progression modeling, which is not the next section, but it's the section after that, the next section is all about sales and marketing alignment. Uh, we'll actually talk about primarily conversion based programming, but not in the context of like, you'll see, it'll be great. Uh, but we'll talk a lot about conversion based programming in the next section to help align with sales. When I think about it, the main thing that I'd be thinking through is, you know, main reasons that engaged accounts don't advance would be one cost of inaction. So they're engaged because they think it's a, it's a thing that they probably should solve. It's just not a priority right now. So we haven't quantified the cost of their inaction quite yet. And as a result they don't feel the desire to move any faster. That's one thing. Second thing is we often look at it from an engaged account perspective. And engaged accounts do like we do also need the right decision makers involved from an engaged account. So if it's just uh, again I'll give you another example of like if it's only manager level folks that are super engaged but we have no actual like budget holders, the account can be engaged all day long but they're not going to continue to move because we haven't gotten the right people involved. Um, so I would use that through the lens of then a reprioritization. So I've seen this done. It depends on how you want to run it. I see this done really well with PLG motion specifically where a PLG organization will say uh, or PLG run organization will actually go after large enterprise accounts and say 107 of your team members currently are on a free account. And as a result like your team is already using this tool. If you would like to get the full benefits of team based plans, one of those benefits are um, it's typically more security based at that, at that point then people can re engage around that. So you just got to think through within the context of these accounts that are engaged, who specifically is engaged? Are they just key influencers, Are they decision makers, Are they blockers? Like who's actually engaged? And then if they don't have the right folks engaged, how do we then specifically get people engaged that would be able to move the account forward? And have we truly quantified a cost of inaction for them so that if they don't move they understand the real consequences for them and their business? So that's how I think about it. Great question, Daniel. All right, Ruchi, if it's. Oh, that's a big question. Uh, I'll come back to that one. Um, all right Richie, if it's cold targeting and you don't have website visitor signals, what other signals um, would be best for B2B targeting? What a great question. We have a whole section on how to engage unaware accounts. But I think of this through the lens of signals. Sorry, the larger terminology is triggers. So we have list and signal based triggers or engagement based triggers. So at a certain point someone does not know you exist. You have to generate awareness. So that's gonna be a list based trigger. So that's saying uh, hey, we, we want these people to specifically start to engage with our brand. So what you would likely do is just start running programming through indirect channels as a way of generating awareness. And we'll, you're like what is an indirect channel? I got you in like an hour and a half we'll do a whole breakdown on direct versus indirect channels. Problem Product and proof content. So whole. Yeah, we'll talk about that. So hope that's helpful. But yeah, you just gotta build a list and then if you wanna further prioritize that list, you could use third party, uh, intent signals or GT review signals as a way of prioritizing accounts that are more likely than an active buying cycle. Great question. All right, thanks, Richie. Um, how can we leverage SDRS in an ABM program? Can they function as a crowbar? First, I don't know what that means. So can you define what you mean by can they function as a crowbar? Because that sounds fun. That's the first thing. Second thing, in the model that we'll walk through, we've got a 4D framework that we'll dig into for like a lot of of today. It's data distribution, destination and direction. The SDR function is a distribution channel through which they are a direct channel. So we typically like to activate SDRs further down in our account progression model. I realize I'm saying a bunch of words and we have visuals that will come in like an hour and a half that will walk through a lot of that. But SDRS would be distribution towards high priority and highly engaged accounts. Because I don't typically like to use SDRS earlier in the buyer's journey because they're extraordinarily expensive. Distribution to accounts that do not want to be distributed to. So they're expensive and it doesn't align with how a buyer wants to buy typically. So that's how I think about it. All right, what works in terms of channel mix for CTAs in the mid market enterprise B2B in AI, uh, software space? Man, I love this selfish question. Don't see value in cold outreach or email mass volume, especially when the SAM is small event based. Makes sense to me, but haven't gotten stakeholders on board yet. Would like to hear if there's something that works. That is an email, cold call, LinkedIn, DMS that would potentially dilute the brand. Yeah, great question. Full transparency. I'm like real bought in on events and webinars. Like this is just the world's longest webinar if we're being honest about it. Um, so I see that it works. And we do typically have some form of live engagement mechanism for most of our programs with most of our clients because of the value that we can do from a relationship development perspective. And like, I'll be honest for a second, many of you, I've like seen your names on LinkedIn and like, I'm honored that you're here. Um, but we have not previously had, like, a deep dive conversation and now we're spending like seven hours together. So there's a lot of value in this for, like, engaging the brand and having a conversation, all that kind of stuff. So, like, I do like, webinars and most of our clients are in that, like, B2B AI software space. And we've worked with quite a few cybersecurity companies where, like, webinars also do super well. So what I would just outline is this question is going to get answered in extraordinary, extraordinary levels of depth in like, two sections from now. So let's come back to it. But high level, you got to figure out where your audiences live and then identify the ways in which you can get them into more of an owned space so that you can further develop the relationship. That's it. So that's helpful. And then Crowbar is going to shortcut the process of getting in front of potential customers by direct calling. Yeah. So I'll give a quick frame shift for everybody. I don't typically think about shortcuts in the sense of how do I try to make all of this go faster? Because at, uh, the end of the day, many of the customers that would work with us just have like, annual budgeting cycles. So I can do my absolute darnest to make it go faster and shortcut it. But in the day, you gotta have really good offers that align with what your buyers actually want. And that's the best shortcut that I found is the, like, the right offer. And then from a distribution perspective, showing up in places where your audiences are and want to be engaged with because, you know, everybody knows their audiences have email addresses. The challenge is they don't want to be engaged with there. So it, like, dilutes the brand, typically, unless you've got again, a good offer. So, like, I'll give. We actually do run outbound email, but it's all towards content. So, like, we're just trying to get people that we are seeing have signs of engagement and signals and a right fit to engage in content. And then if they engage in content and then they come to other stuff, fantastic. But, like, there's no, there's never a meeting ask in any of our outbound efforts ever. The only thing we ask is like, do you want to come to this free stuff? So that's pretty much it. Uh, hope that's helpful. And. And we. I didn't coin the term. I don't remember where, where I picked it up. But for some of Our clients, we coined the term of like content led outbound. Just essentially, like, what is the value actually delivering in the context of your outbound messages? That is more than just, hey, do you want to book a meeting? Because it looks like you have a problem. Like, people need help booking meetings, they need help having reasons to book meetings. All right, so what questions do we have on sales and marketing alignment?

Speaker A: Yeah, this will kind of bleed into a little bit of the program build, but it's more of a supporting structure alignment type question. So like, what team is needed if we're trying to do alignment the right way and start small and make sure that we can prove out that this works? Like what's your MVP from? Like a marketing and a sales team. So content performance, marketing, social media, sdr, adr, sales. What kind of roles does everybody need to play?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I'll come a higher level for a second. And when I think through any ABM program, it boils down to these core roles. So first is strategist. It's like somebody that could actually build the plan. Second is content. So you need to have people write words. Whether that's distribution content of like ad programming, outbound emails, but distribution content, it's also the destination content. So we're actually sending people. Next is then creative. So you need to have people that actually like design the ads or design landing pages or design the emails out or whatever that needs to look like so it looks nice. From there it's then also rev ops or marketing ops or sales ops or whoever you want to call it. But you need something that actually builds out the process in the context of the tech stack. So that's easy to do. And then from there we refer to it now as like execution owner. But like the, the real real is it's a project manager, like who uh, actually makes sure that all the stuff gets done because it's a lot of stuff to coordinate across different teams. So you do need essentially a project manager. And then depending on the size of the organization, sometimes uh, size of organization and also the uh, program strategy, your rev ops and strategist may end up also doing like channel management. But if you think about channel managers that could be paid, social, paid search, events, outbound, like all of those are different channel managers. So you do need people that are specifically making sure that those channels are performing well. And then last but certainly not least would be specifically sales slash customer success. So I think of these folks typically in three lenses. So sdr, adr, whatever your doctor is, is really going to be Focused in on specifically pre pipeline outbound, um, sales slash account executives or whatever your salespeople are called are typically going to be focused on in pipeline progression. And then above that would be cs, uh, slash account managers which are going to be focused on post sale expansion and retention. Now we got this comment of that's a lot of roles. Oh, a lot of those roles are me. And the reason I break out those roles in that way I referenced earlier like I was a solo marketer so you can sit in multiple roles. Like I'm normally strategist content and depending on the team I'm also sometimes ops, which is like ideally I'm not ops. It's not my, it's not my greatest strength but like I can make it happen. But I'm typically strategist in content cause those are my core strengths. So you can sit in multiple roles. It's just also what I have found is people typically cap out at like sitting in three of those seats. And the seats that typically people are sitting in are strategists and execution owners like project manager plus one other seat. If you're going to sit in three. There are also like our content strategists also happening, really good at design. We didn't hire them for that but like they also are. So like you can sit in multiple seats but what you need to have is as you go to map out the program, which you'll see on the program strategy, uh, doc, you just need to know who's owning those roles because if you don't then like you don't know who to hold accountable. So that's a high level thought process is mapping out all of that up against each playbook that you'll end up building out and then getting buy in on those plays.

Speaker A: I have all also lived in those shoes. So I was a director of marketing and it was a small team and so having to project, manage and set strategy, but also better all the reporting is really big. I think the trade off always comes down to your uh, speed of execution which relates directly to the conversations you have with leadership and reporting on the movement of this ABM program. So certainly you can do this all by yourself, but that is going to take a very long time because uh, we only have so many hours in the week. And so unless you're gonna put in some serious uh, overtime, it's gonna move a lot slower unless you have all the necessary uh, roles filled. So um, the next question from um, this one's coming from Daniel talking about the engagement and I think Part of this is communication, part of this is measurement. Um, so you can take this whichever way you want. But we sometimes see extreme engagement. Uh, you know, contacts opening same ABM email 20 to 30 plus times over multiple days, no reply even after follow ups. How do you interpret that kind of behavior? Um, what is the right way to respond without over pushing?

Speaker B: Yeah, um, so a couple things here. If we actually like play out multiple email opens, it depends on who you're outbounding to. But sometimes email opens are a false start because if you're selling into enterprise organizations, they have security checkers that will open an email like 30 times. So um, there's a, there's an ability to time bound the open. So if you see like 30 opens in like 30 seconds you're like got it, false, uh, false signal there. So that's the first thing, it's just validate that these opens are legitimate. Second, once you've actually validated that the opens are legitimate, what multiple opens and clicks could mean, especially if it's like an odd, odd, it's not like 30 and it's, it's over a longer time frame. These tracking softwares are not actually tracking on a contact level, they're tracking on the email level associated to specific contacts that are in the email. But if they forward that email, it reads as that same person is opening up the email again when it's actually a different person. So if you see a good number of opens and let's say like 16 and five days, what that likely means is that email is actually forward forwarded around internally to be reviewed. So when we see high levels of opens and clicks on emails but no responses, we actually then do audience expansion up against those engaged accounts to then reach more folks within that decision committee or those key influencers. Because what we do know based on those signals is there's a high likelihood that they are actively talking about us. So we follow up with different people in different messaging that's around the same topic. But it's like it's clean out the same exact email. Cause we don't want to break the illusion of personalization sometimes then you end up seeing more um, engagement in a faster reply. So there's all that context. The other thing is sometimes time takes time. So I give you that context to say I have had conversations in the past 12 months. Our average sales cycle from first call to close is typically 60 to 70 days. But we've had a weird number in the past year that were like 12 month sales cycles. And like we're very in the very squarely mid market. So I give you that context to say sometimes they're talking about internally, but they're like, got it. This is next budget. This is next quarter's budget. So I would just continue to, based on levels of engagement, add in new contacts that are surrounding that decision committee. So you stay relevant and top of mind. But I would actually put a pause if you've already gone intently after specific people. I put a pause on those people and go to everyone else around them. So the conversation stays happening in the organization, but it's not to the same person. That was a really nuanced, detailed answer. Hopefully that was helpful.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's good. And your friendly, uh, PSA reminder, if you're building out any kind of, uh, scoring models to have some sort of decay in them because, uh, making sure that you're not waiting somebody that engaged a bunch two months ago is the same as somebody who's engaging right now, uh, is really important.

Speaker B: 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.