Your ICP Isn't Real Until It Shows Up in the CRM (with Christy Behnke from Terryberry) | Ep. 279

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. Hello and welcome to Scrappy abm. This is your podcast with practical playbooks so that we don't break the bank. This is your host, Mason Cosby, and today I'm joined by Christy Behnke, who is the VP of marketing over at terryberry. Christy, thank you so much for joining me today.

Speaker B: Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

Speaker A: I am super excited to have you one on the show for a variety of reasons, but one, you've built ABM at multiple organizations and have some incredible results from past organizations as well. As we're going to dig into a little bit on what you're doing at terryberry, but it's just always fun to get to interview people that didn't just get ABM right one time, but have done it at multiple different organizations with different org structures and politics and people and audience. So, like, you've got some really good principles that I'm excited to dig into. So that said, um, where we always like to start is essentially like, how do you actually figure out the accounts you want to target from an account based marketing perspective? There's so many different ways of actually determining that target account list. I'm curious how. How do you actually approach nailing down the exact companies you wanted to focus in on?

Speaker B: Yeah, so the first thing I like to do is I like to pull, uh, some sales reports. I want to see where we've won because that's really important because your icp, you hope that it matches what you're winning, but it might not. And so that's why it's super important to pull your closed one. But it's also just as important to pull your closed loss and understand where they fell out of the pipeline. If you, you have closed lost, that falls out at your stage zero or stage one, like a lot of them. And it's showing a specific icp. To me, that means there's no product fit and that's great. But if you have something that's pulling down the funnel, like you see, say your ICP isn't retail. We'll use that as an example. But you see that you've gotten to negotiating and like stage four before closed one, and you're losing a bunch of retail or you're winning a bunch of retail, but it's not in your icp. That's a great test set segment. And I'm going to pull that and I'm going to talk to sales about pulling that. So that's the first thing that I look at is who we're winning and who we're losing. And then the second thing I want to look at is who's in the opportunity funnel currently, right. So because they're going on my. They're going on my list. So all of them. So because we want to help sales pull them through all the way to closed one, so they're all going on my list. And then you've got to have a great relationship with some sales. You have to. And you need to talk with them about who are they trying to target, why they're trying to target what has worked in the past, what does not work in the past. Like you want to talk to product, you want to talk about product fit, what looks, what the roadmap looks like. Right. Going forward. Because if there's some big updates that might open wide your icp, you want to have those people on your list depending on how long your sales funnel is. So, so like for us, our sales process is any like from 6 to 12 months. It just depends on how large the deal is. And so you want to get in front of those people six months prior. So when they're ready to buy, you have the product roadmap feature that you are talking about. So those are just a couple of ways that I build my lists.

Speaker A: I really love that initial call out because I can't tell the number of times we started with a client and we look at their ICP and it was like we call it the idealistic customer profile. So like not really based in reality of just like, you know, we, these uh, are who we want to work with. It's like, well, one of the tests we now run is we put in the ICP criteria into their CRM and then just put on the lifecycle stage of customer. And if no one shows up, it's a pretty good sign that's not a real icp. And I just, I think that it's probably one of the most helpful exercises for everyone to do when building out their EVM program. It's just like, should I take this?

Speaker B: Yeah. And it's so good for you. So I'll just talk a little bit about what we're doing at Terryberry real quick. So we migrated from one marketing automation tool to HubSpot. That migration got completed in February or March, so it hasn't been very long. And then we started their ABM program. We weren't going to start our ABM program until like the second half of the year, but we pulled it forward and so we started in March. We started pulling things together in March, got a platform and we just, just finished our icp. I call it ICP Grading. Right. Like, who is our. Like, we have A's, B, C's, D's. Right. So your A's and B's is where you want to live, but you know you're going to get a lot of Cs. And that's what I like to look at. Right. Because your A's are pretty much 100 ICP match. Usually most of the time your B's may be missing one element of the four elements you're considering your ICP match. But your C's, like, if you're seeing like a big, like a weird funnel shape and it's not like this, but your Cs are bloated. There's something in there, like, and you need to look at that. And so, yeah, I agree with you. That's definitely part of the whole ABM process, is making sure that you're grading. And I love it. Because then you can target better too. Like, targeting is so much better when you have your grades because you can pull lookalikes. It's so easy.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love that breakdown. And then the other thing you outlined that I think is often missed is specifically looping in product to actually look at, like, where is the product actually headed? Because in the context of some of these ICPs, they may not look like the historical context because there is a huge market shift that we want to capitalize on where product is already headed. So I'm curious, how do you then actually map product roadmaps up against firmographics when you've not got the historical closed one or closed loss data to support it?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's just a guess. No, just kidding. But I mean, uh, sometimes it is.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But, um. No, so what I look at is I just like, you look at what we're already pulling. This is where that grading comes in and you look at that data and you really have to have a good relationship with your product team and just how is this going to impact, what's the functionality of this? Have you done any research? What do our competitors have? Right, you have to know your competitors and have created battle cards. And sometimes, sometimes it's a copycat. Sometimes you're like, our competitors have this and they're pulling a ton of. Again, we use retail as an example, so we'll just use it again. They're pulling a ton of retail and we're not really pulling a ton of retail. And so this seems like a huge benefit for retail. So, so there's that and then there's just outside of your replicating, we won't call it copying, but replicating some of what your competitors are doing to try and steal market share. It's really doing your research. So Forrester Analytic reports, Gardner reports, those, those, uh, product, product marketing research pieces that you're going to go through to figure out what industries are being served by these type of features is really important. And so that's, and that's how I've. I figure it out. And then like I said, sometimes it can be a guess. And then when you put it out there and you do your tests. So, uh, I know we haven't talked on testing, but you're testing your ads, you're testing landing pages and different messaging. You're going to start seeing what's coming in and it might be exactly what you had hoped for and other times it might be completely opposite. And you're like, how is this a fit? But then you get your prospects through the funnel, they become clients and you realize this is how they're using it. And then you can use the what their language, how they're using it as a use case to pull more lookalike accounts in from that. I know that was a lot all at once.

Speaker A: No, it's. So if I'm repeating it back to make sure that we've got the step by step. Step one, pull closed one, to understand why we're winning. Step two, pull close, lost, identify not just why we're losing, but actually where in the process we're specifically losing because some of you're going to lose on a call one, so you're going to lose after contract stage. And if we wait those the same like we're missing a lot of the anecdotal information. That's pretty helpful. Next is then understanding the product roadmap and understanding largely there's the competitive landscape by reviewing analyst reports. And then, you know, it's a fun little exercise to go on the competitor website and see what logos they have showing up there and saying I sure would like some of those logos too and replicating what they're doing. And then I think the last thing that I wanted to specifically call out is the specific grades of prioritization around. You know, with all of our clothes, when these are perfect fit, it sounds like your B tier would be like great fit and maybe even a future looking like we don't have the functionality today, but it's on the product roadmap and we'll get them, um, you know, six to 12 months from now. But we want them to know we exist and be engaged with our brand current state. Is that a fair way of assessing like the B tiers?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it is for sure.

Speaker A: And then the other thing that you said, very, I loved it. But there is an acknowledgment here that some of this is going to be an educated guess and that we're going to need to do some testing, actually put some stuff in mark to see how uh, the market responds. So as you actually approach that testing phase in your build process, I'm m curious what channels you actually use to engage these audiences and validate the messaging and positioning.

Speaker B: Yeah, content syndication is a great play with ABM because you know, you get all those, those leads from content syndication. It's a great play to get some fast leads to be able to test your messaging on your display ads and put them in a segment that you know is testing and you label it testing. Right. To see if it works. And so you know from content syndication you have your general audience already because you're purchasing those ads, they've downloaded some content. Depending on the vendor that you use, they maybe have downloaded two or three pieces of your content. So you know that they're already mildly engaged with terryberry. They already know who terryberry is or whatever your organization is. Right. So using them as a test is to, to me is always a great way. Well to test because they, again, they don't, they didn't engage. They engage with your content and it's just a really great tool. So. And then you can just do, you know, your A B testing with different landing pages and you have your target account list. So if you want to put your like 10% of your target accounts on your testing list, I wouldn't go, to be honest, I don't, I wouldn't do more than 10% because you want your, you want to be very careful with your budget. If you have a really ginormous budget, go for it. But I don't have a giant, a ginormous budget. So like either I'm like 10% right. Most, I don't think most marketers do. I uh. Right. I don't think they have an endless budget to be able to be testing. And so 10% of the budget is used to test. And so take a small 10% of uh, your target accounts from sales and test them out on this messaging. Test them out and see and just see what happens.

Speaker A: So um, I think that's such a practical approach to doing holdout groups. Most of the time when I hear people talk about holdout groups it's like a 50, 50 split and it's like we're going to run these accounts with ABM program, we're going to run these other accounts with you know, standard demand gen programs. And it's like, well that feels like a lot of accounts to exclude if you're pretty bullish that your ABM program is going to deliver better results. So I like holdout groups for validating purposes, but it's tough when it's just like we're going to not engage half. So I like 10% as a good benchmark. The other question I have is once you've nailed messaging like we talked about, content authentication is a good testing channel. What are some of the other core channels that you're using to engage your audiences with proven, validated, good messaging?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, one channel that's relatively new that we're using to test is the chat GPT ads. No one knows how those are going to work out. Right. They just launched. Are we 30 days in from launch? It's not been very long. I feel like it's 30 days that ChatGPT ads launched. So that is a channel that, that we're testing. We test like I feel like normal, like Bing, Google, so your paid search ads. Right. So we're testing that. So those are some of our big channels that we test. And then I, I find it interesting that you, the way that I interpret what you just said is that there's an ABM and then there's a demand gen and I feel like they go together and so I do too.

Speaker A: But a lot of people just don't think that way.

Speaker B: I think that's a huge mistake. Like I think ABM is a play for demand gen. And so like when I'm testing, they're coming in like we test. Uh, when you think about your demand gen funnel and you've got the leads that are coming in your net new contacts, the ones that aren't hand Raisers, you're going to nurture them. And so you have to have different nurturers to test also. And you have to have AB subject lines or AB content. Right? It depends on what you're trying to test for all the way through the funnel. So you know what is working and HubSpot's a great tool for that. Like I um, know a lot of people would plug HubSpot so but like, so anyway, I just feel like ABM is a part of your holds a man gen strategy. I wouldn't treat them separate. I think it's a very top of the funnel approach and a middle of the funnel approach and then it can plug in like it's very good at top of the funnel brand awareness. And then you plug it in your opportunity pipeline and you can plug it into clients who are coming up to renewing. It's just a great strategy to use throughout your whole process and your funnel. So I just found that interesting what you said and I was like wait,

Speaker A: I am on your same page. I just find that most people have this debate of like demand gen versus abm and it's like well I think ABM is actually just a subset of a demand gen program for target account prioritization where you have higher sales involvement. Like if you look at the marketing side of the programs, it's the same channels that you're using in demand gen as you are with abm. It's just ABM has typically more personalized content, more intentional multi threading efforts uh, at the account level and more involvement from sales. So those are I think the core differences more often than not from a demand gen program because I also just push back with people and they're like, it's so different. It's like social demanding program just going after bad customers. Then like why, like why is it, what are we doing here? So uh, I wanted just as I think through the content piece you reference with content syndication or I want to also come back to chat GPT ads in just a second. But like what is the actual content that you're using for your ABM program that gets people not just engaged but actually like interested in having a sales conversation?

Speaker B: We use all different kinds of content. So I think when you're just. So if you're just starting out and you only have like one or two pieces of content, the first thing you need to do is you need to map them um, to the funnel stage that they're at. Are the, is this my brand awareness play or is this like a bottom of the funnel play. So like your top of the funnel, like brand awareness is like, I like to say are like checklists and guides and like educational pieces. Right? So, and then your bottom of the funnel are your proof points, so your case studies. And then in the middle of the funnel are other pieces of content. Could be more guides, could be more educational, but there also could be more product focus. It's kind of a mix of things. So for us we run all three. So we map our content on um, what is top, middle, bottom of funnel. And then as we have our target account list, like I know I already said, hey, we pull the opportunity funnel in for our target account list. And so those, those people are obviously bottom of the funnel. So they're going to get more proof point advertising, they're going to get more case studies, they're going to get those things. Right now we have a piece that's running very top of the funnel and it's actually, we've been running it since we started our ABM campaign in April and it's running really well right now. It's called the Engagement Maturity Map. And it's a checklist where our prospects can map themselves out on their engagement journey to understand where they're at in their own journey. How do they create a team of extremely engaged employees and how do they take that and then drive that to build a culture that, where people want to stay. Right. And so we have this map and again it's a very top of the funnel piece. It's a checklist. People love those things. They love checklists. And then we also have ads that we're running that have little videos with them. So, and so those are also part of it. Like what videos do you have that are they top of the funnel, Are they middle of the funnel? Most ads or videos are honestly bottom of the funnel because you're talking usually about yourself. And so that's a bottom of the funnel play. So those are the type of content we also have that we run that are long scrolling ads. So we do that as well through the platform that we use. So those are just a couple of the, the pieces of content that we have right now.

Speaker A: I mean it sounds like you and your team have done a very, uh, intentional job of just mapping content, actual buying stages. And you're not hitting somebody with a book, a call, email, when they'd never heard of a Terry Berry. And you're making sure that once they are highly engaged, you're not still just running checklists, you're actually running like case Studies we try to categorize content like the three categories of pain, product and proof. So pain would be I don't like I'm um, struggling with something and I need some way to understand one, pain identification and two how do I ease the pain in the short term. So I think it sounds like your checklist are pain identification of like how painful is my actual pain? And then are there ways to easily start to, to solve some of this product is in long term solution. And then proof is we are who we say we are. So we try to map those for all programs. And I find that proof always works throughout the whole process because you know, people just like to know that you are who you say are. So I love that.

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, absolutely.

Speaker A: I'm then also curious as you think about again we've talked about buying stages of the funnel account progression model. A lot of different language around just like how buyers move. I'm curious how do you actually think about measurement through the whole ABM journey? Because sometimes it's hard to measure until you're uh, at like the pipeline stage and you see like 12 months of engagement history. All of a sudden you're like, oh, good to know. But like how do you know you're actually headed on the right track earlier than just like they booked a sales call.

Speaker B: Yeah. So I think one of the things you have to look at, I think you, you do have to start at the very top. You cannot ignore your top of the funnel metrics. I think the last couple of years have really like you have marketers that are how many MQLs, um, can I get? Well, there is a bunch of stuff that happens before they become an mql, um, that you need to pay attention to. So take a look at your website, like how much organic traffic are you getting versus AI search traffic? That is a big thing right now. Right. Like you should be getting LLMs on your website and AI referrals. Like that's a big thing. So look at your website traffic, look at your sessions, look at your bounce rate. So some of those things that when you were think about back to when you were a marketing coordinator, that stuff doesn't just stop. So we look at that really top of the funnel metrics. But when you have your ICP grading or whatever you want to call it in hand, that's not just for your MQLs, that's for all of your contacts. So you want to be paying attention to the net new contacts. So now you call your marketing captured leads. How many of those are like Matching your icp, that's very top of the funnel. And I know that's. But that's a signal that you can use to make an adjustment before it gets to mql. Um, if you know how many net new contacts you're getting, where they're coming from and what their grade is, you can make adjustments before your MQL quality quality dissipates or your MQL volume goes down. So you look at marketing captured leads, you look at marketing engaged leads. Where are they? In my lead scoring. So I still in like, I think lead scoring is still a big, is a big thing, right? You're always making adjustments to it. You're always being flexible with it. As seasons change, as things change, as different campaigns might have a different lead scoring metrics attached to them. Right. Success might look different for one campaign than what it is for another campaign. But where are you seeing a, ah, stop? Like, are you seeing your, uh, leads getting to halfway to what you think an MQL is? And then they're just stopping. So how do we turn that faucet on? How do we get them? And which leads are stopping? Now that you have your ICP grading in place, you know which leads are stopping. Right. And we're actually, we're trying something new. I've never done this before. We're trying to see if uh, if a lead request a demo or. And there are certain lead score or they become an MQL through nurturing and there are certain lead score, what that looks like down the funnel. It's just a test that we're doing and I'm really excited to see how that goes. And then to. So we know when. So it's time, it's timestamped of what their lead score was when they converted and what it is at the time of say closed one or when they fall out of the funnel. Say they fall out of the funnel in solution design to see if there's something there. So I don't have any data on that yet, but it's just very interesting. And the reason that I still track all of this at the top of the funnel is because like I said, if you have a problem or if you have an issue, it's a lot easier to figure out why your lead volume is down or your MQL volume is down if you know what's happening at the top.

Speaker A: I always find the leading indicator so interesting because some people in their ABM programs are like, we're killing the mql. There's no lead scoring there's no anything. There are others that uh, you know they maintain a lot of the lead based metrics as again these early indicators but uh, they layer in. Well are uh, the MQLS coming from target accounts as well? So I just, I think that's still to this day one of the hardest challenges because it is honestly where you actually need technology because like for some people where they eliminate the idea of the leader of the mql, that's fine. If you have website de anonymization capabilities based on your current tech stack. If you can't deonomize website traffic or see through the impressions at an account level for your ad programs then it's really tough. So I think I have very firm opinions later in the stages earlier. It's more like what are the proxies that you can measure to show progress.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I think I know one thing we haven't brought up is also cost per lead. Like is it going up, is it going down? How much is it taking you to, to get these people in? It's not cost per mql but you should track that if you're not cost per demo. Right. Like all the way through the funnel but your cost per lead like you still have to keep an eye on it. So. Yeah, because that's also really telling.

Speaker A: I'm curious how you balance that because what I often do see are some of those metrics like cost per lead or cost per MQL or even cost per opportunity do go up on ABM programs because we're going after typically higher value accounts or and typically higher value means, means more people involved in the decision committee longer sales cycles from a standardized perspective. I have typically looked at though the LTV side and then tried to figure out from a ratio perspective of if these accounts are worth more, is it worth more to spend and then is the ratio still fine at like a 10 uh to 1 return? So I'm curious like how do you balance that? Because again a lot of people just get scared by the increasing cost of a CPL and not recognizing yes lead costs may go up but revenue also goes up with it because these are better accounts.

Speaker B: Yeah. So I think the biggest thing that you look at is the difference in the efficiency between your cost per MQL and your cost per demo. So your hand raise and then it does obviously go up as the further people go through the funnel the cost goes up. I like a good rule of thumb that you try not to go higher than 25% of the cost of the contract Value. So the cost of this lead should not have cost more than 25% of the cost of or whatever they signed up for, whatever their contract value is. So you have a $10,000 sale, you want to make sure that didn't cost you more than $2,500 to get that person all the way through the funnel, right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So obviously if it's less than that, that is so awesome. Um, and then your CAC, you mentioned LTV, but your CAC, we know that a good BAS, 3 to 1, obviously if you can get 4 to 1 or 5 to 1, that's world class, that's much better. But trying to keep your cac, three to one or better. And then we don't want a three to two.

Speaker A: No. Are you looking though at like year one or are you looking at from an uh, like a true lifetime?

Speaker B: True lifetime.

Speaker A: Okay, cool. I think it also depends on like industry because SaaS margins are so much better. So like if you're, you know, professional services, gross margins are a lot more compressed. But anyway, that's super helpful context.

Speaker B: I uh, and it's, it also the caught like your average contract value. I know I use 10,000 as an example. That's probably not a great profit margin though for a $10,000 contract now that we're talking about it. So I was like that's not a good margin. But if you think of like a hundred thousand dollar contract. Right. Like it, it's a little bit better. Yeah.

Speaker A: I even go to the extent that like I don't even think you should consider an ABM program unless you've got a minimum of a 50k ACV with the asterisks of like you are. We did have one client that came in where they served government run utilities and they had a total addressable market of 700 accounts. And it was like, okay, at 700 accounts, like you should only be running ABM. But so if you've got a clearly defined super niche tam, maybe run abm. Um, if you don't and you could serve lots and lots of different kinds of customers, 50k ACV for a year. One is typically where we set the, the baseline to even get started with abm. So I'm like what's been your experience on even where it makes sense, what

Speaker B: I'll say is I think that you can still go smaller. I think that you just are more selective in the dials that you use in your program. So. And you're just a lot more, you're just cautious in the budget that you have. So, uh, your top of the funnel plays are going to look a little bit more like LinkedIn and SEO and G AI search visibility. Right. And so you're going to have more thought leadership blogs. It maybe is more like a, uh, one to few play instead of one to one, but you can still run some really good one to one plays. But maybe just start with like 10 clients instead of the 20 that you would do. And so, I mean, I've done that before and it still works so cool. You know, it's just, you just have to be really selective and make it super personalized like, because then you know your return on investment is going to come back to you.

Speaker A: Yeah. Uh, the one thing I just want to make sure everyone hears is so few marketers actually look at the LTV side of the LTV to CAC analysis. They're all focused on the CAC side and you can get away with a lot on the upfront if you have a great ltv. So if you have customers that are going to stick around for a very long time, the 50k m recommendation is based on getting the return in year one. But if you have. We had a client where There was a 10k purchase price, but they stayed for 10 years and expanded 200 on average every year. So it's like, all right, the first year we're gonna make no money, but we'll make a ton of money. Come like years three, four, five, six, like so. Yeah, you just. When you know your math like that, it makes things a lot easier.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Christy, this has been really fun. I like, I've had a great time. I always like to end on one question, which is if you were to go back to your first ABM program, what's one thing you wish you had known before you got started?

Speaker B: This is that HubSpot. That HubSpot at the time had a smart feature for landing pages. Instead of building a landing page that was personalized to each person, like we did like 20 different landing pages. Yeah. Like this was years ago that that HubSpot had a smart feature that would allow the person, if they knew the IP address, it would say, Paul, like here's your whatever. Right. Like, I wish I had known that. I also wish that the very first time that I ran an ABM campaign, I would have mapped things by funnel stage. I don't. I did not. I was just like, we've got this and we've got this. Let's just get it out there and let's get it to the target account list and Basically the program that we were using, the technology, I'm like, it'll sort itself. I mean that's not actually what I said, but I'm sure that's what I was thinking at the time. Right. And. But I didn't map it by stage and by the content type. And you. And today obviously I know better.

Speaker A: Yeah. Uh, first of all, I love the HubSpot story. Like my first ABM program was exclusively HubSpot and the HubSpot CMS is one of the most under discussed ABM tools of all time because it just can do personalization based on CRM data at scale. Like it's just, it's crazy what it can just do so easily that people just don't use it for. So that's. I love that call out. And then the second is just the, uh. Yeah, we now with all of our clients, we actually build programs one stage at a time and try to start at the bottom to move our way up versus like building it all at once and then just kind of shipping it because of that very reason of you need to be able to showcase incremental progress and like actually have results and yeah. You know, be able to organize the program in a way that ensures right message, right person, right time in the right channel. So I love that call out. Chrissy, this has been again so fun and probably one of my more favorite interviews. I'm curious if people want to find out more about you, where would you point them?

Speaker B: Yeah, you can, uh, you can head over to LinkedIn to my profile. So Christy Banky. So, and that's pretty much where I live, so I love it. It works for me. So perfect.

Speaker A: Well, Christie, thank you so much again for joining us today. It's been Scrappy abm. 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 you have the actual ways in which you can start to build an ABM program today. Just go to scrappyabm.com newsletter to subscribe. 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.