Scrappy vs Enterprise ABM (Tools, Budget & Setup)

Speaker A: If you are trying to get ABM stood out in the most efficient way possible and you're worried about the budget, the best thing to focus on is the offer, like, what can we put together that will really be high value for this account and will have the least amount of friction for them to get started.

Speaker B: Hey Tristin, thanks so much for hopping on today. I'm super excited to talk about so scrappy versus Enterprise abm. I think there's a lot of companies out there that are trying to get really creative with doing ABM and doing things in a more budget friendly way. And there's like so many different levels of how you can do abm. So in this episode we're going to just talk about some of these differences. And you have so much experience doing abm, which is why we wanted to have this conversation.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Definitely looking forward to getting into it here.

Speaker B: Just to get started for our audience. Want to just define a little bit what ABM is for maybe those who don't know a lot about it.

Speaker A: Yeah. And it's funny, Bailey, to ask me to define something like abm, um, is hard to begin with because it depends on who you ask as far as uh, what that definition or the proper definition of account based marketing. I think when we zero in on the accounts or the clients that we typically work with, maybe we start there. We're typically on the helping side of working with clients that are considered to be small scrappy marketing teams, typically with teams of 0 to 5. They are most often working in a Technology Company, a B2B technology company that has experience in product market fit, they have a good client base, profitable, and they're looking to grow from that standpoint. It's much less a situation where we are coming into a, uh, VC backed B2B tech company where they're looking for hockey stick growth and they're just trying to hack a certain channel. That's not really the route we take with abm and we're not a good fit for those situations. So given that context, when we think about abm, I really do think really a way to target a very specific segment of your ideal customer profile. Those accounts that you already know are a good fit for you or you have seen some signals where you have a small cohort of customers now and you want to perhaps grow in a certain area and push into that segment. And how we define those accounts, there are a number of ways that we can do that, but it's firmographic information, size of company, their type of team, and then you can really get as detailed as you like from there. Are there other data points that you could put around that have they, for instance, has your potential accounts, have they raised money recently? Have they hired for a specific position that triggers the, the need for your technology? You know, there are a lot of other factors involved there and that's where you get to how big that that group of accounts is going to be. And so really when you understand the accounts that you're going after, then it's all about how do I really get a foot in the door into those accounts and how do I strike up a conversation either, you know, with marketing and trying to get these accounts to consume some of the content you have, or if you're trying to get your sales team a foot in the door to have an early conversation to see if they're in market right now for what your technology provides?

Speaker B: Yeah, there's a lot of ways you can execute it, but when you come down to the bare bones, it's reaching out to people in your target audience, trying to get them to talk to sales eventually. But so what are some of the ways you've seen that or some of the biggest differences between scrappy ABM and enterprise abm?

Speaker A: Yeah, there's this notion that, well, uh, people come to us for account based marketing from all different perspectives and standpoints and I think we're always just trying to find those clients that are a good fit for us. These are typically clients that are looking to really roll out more of a scrappy approach to abm. And if you think about account based marketing, if you're going out to engage with a certain prospect that fits your ideal customer profile, that can be done on a one to one basis in a very targeted way, in a very non scalable way. You can build a custom landing page, an offer for a specific point of contact and an account, try to get an early conversation. And this is even some of the work that I used to do before a lot of this technology was involved. I've been around for a while, Bailey, and in order to even build business, uh, in a certain area, you would have to go to networking events and just try to figure out who on the other side of that account will be the best person to speak with and to see if there's a pain point or a need for the type of services or the type of technology that you're offering to that customer. And when we think about enterprise versus a scrappy ABM concept, I think the enterprise side is typically thought of when you're Buying an all in one solution that you're going to implement. You're going to get it connected to your CRM, it's going to help you run display, ah, ads, it's going to connect to LinkedIn, it's going to give you some of the quote unquote signals that you need to, to, to maybe create a targeted list for your sales team. And, and I won't mention some of the larger platforms that are in place, but a lot of these platforms are 50, 75, six figure annual contracts just to implement in your current environment. And as before that you create any type of ad programs before you spend money on paid advertising campaigns, before you have a team that's in place that's creating content and really producing the material that you need to justify the types of technology that you're trying to offer in the marketplace. We typically roll out more of a scrappy approach to ABM and that can take a lot of different shapes for clients. But it does involve infrastructure that you really have to set up and stitch together a lot of different types of technology and then you need to really build that system to, that is a little bit more flexible. You can swap out different components and such. That's really the big difference I think.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's maybe not as sexy as the super expensive tool, but I think a lot of times companies just need to test ABM or even just understand what it is and try some things out before they go on to a bigger tool. And I don't think we're talking about the in this episode. We're not just saying these tools aren't great, they are amazing. If you have the budget for it, you should definitely go and try it. But a lot of the companies we work with don't and there's just cool things you can do to try and, or just to run abm. So what kind of tools you've been talking about? Putting together some different tools together. What kind of what would be like your bare minimum just to get started to run abm?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think ABM can be, you know, very simple where you, you are doing like cold outreach to accounts that aren't aware of you. You can put together like a smart lead campaign, a cold email system with different domains and a lot of people equate that to cold email versus abm. But there, there are folks that, that view that as account based marketing. We're developing a list of accounts that are likely to be a fit for us and we want to at least present them with an offer through cold email. The way I view account based marketing, especially for a lot of the clients that we're working with, is really an omnichannel approach. Approach and omnichannel is uh, an overused word as well, but there's really no other way to describe it. It's multiple layers to an account based approach to your marketing. And we typically roll in an email component and that would involve more of a cold email platform like Smart Lead. So that's one piece of it. And you are also introducing an ad campaign layer. So doing targeted ads predominantly on LinkedIn and some other channels as well, you can do some retargeting layers as well through like a platform like AdRoll. So you've got your ads, you've got email also we like to blend in a uh, LinkedIn sequencing approach as well. We use technology like Heyreach to facilitate that. And now Smart Lead and Heyreach work well together. And then you also have some, some website de anonymization technology that you can put in place. Technology like factors that will help you identify some of those accounts that are checking out your technology, your product pages, pricing pages, et cetera. And that can give you some signals as to perhaps the ad campaigns that you're running. Are they getting in front of the right people, are they checking out your website, are they looking for more information? And then that can help you to at least get some idea are we heading in the right direction, people consuming some of the material that's out there. Would it be helpful to maybe put a custom offer in front of a smaller group that has shown some activity, et cetera. So that's like our activities layer and those are the ways that you're getting in front of your accounts. There's also like this middle layer that we like to call like an intelligence layer. And this is where your we most often are using N8N. It's a workflow builder. It's more advanced than like a Zapier or make.com allows us to use a lot of custom code in there as well. But that essentially takes a lot of these events and we through web hooks, so we process the these events in N8N and then we're able to then populate different systems from there. So we could add a contact to your CRM for example and we could add notes. So for example, if someone from a certain account is viewing ads or they visited the website, we can drop that into a custom events table that we track ourselves or if it is at the contact level then we can record some of those events within your CRM directly. So there's really three layers that we put in place. We have this data layer at the bottom, which is your CRM and any custom databases that we build to track events. And the middle piece is where we basically send the events and do all the logic for the different activities and signals that we're getting. And then the top piece is all the marketing activities that we're doing, the outreach, the ads, et cetera that we put in place there. So that's really the core set of technologies that we stand up for all of our clients. It does involve a lot of coordination with a lot of different systems. That is the balance that we're trying to strike there. Is there to, to have more of an all in one system that connects with your CRM out of the box. It's very expensive. You also typically have an annual contract that's required there. And at least with this way we're able to stand up these systems very quickly. We're able to run campaigns and we're able to, to really get some momentum going to see if anyone's reacting to what we're putting in front of them. And it gives us a chance to evolve quite a bit from there.

Speaker B: You've probably noticed, and I think a lot of people have noticed this, that just in general, I think in it like in the world, that people are filling out less forms and they're responding to emails less. So I, I love having this layer of data because you can see these indications that someone's maybe looking into you before they're raising their hand and saying, hey, I'm ready to put on my credit card now. But these really help to show. Okay, we're starting to get some traction. People are visiting the website, they're clicking on ads, they're maybe showing some interest before they're like super ready to take the next step. And that helps us maybe cater the messaging a bit and have a more personalized approach for those few people that are seeming to be a bit more ready.

Speaker A: That's right. We're putting a lot of these systems in place because our clients are asking for this data. There are a lot of different perspectives out there as to whether you even need website data points if you detect visitors. And the fact of the matter is our clients are asking for this information, so we have to have a way to provide this data in some of the signals. For example, uh, the LinkedIn ads that we're running factors connects with LinkedIn ad platforms. So we can see if the ads that we're running, Are they getting in front of the right accounts? And we're able to show that to clients and that is important. A lot of the folks that we're working with because they do need to report some of these early signals to management. And it's really nice to sit back and say account based marketing is just good marketing and people will reach out when they're ready. The marketers that we're working with, it's not good enough. They need to report to management. They need to have something to show and this is a way of doing that to gather some of these events, the early signals, before people reach out. Does this group of accounts know who we are? Are they at least seeing our ads that we're putting in front? Have we seen them open emails? Have they replied? Have they connected with us on LinkedIn so that when we do post on LinkedIn, there's a higher chance that they'll see our organic content. So it all really works together. And I think when we put together this infrastructure for clients, it does help tell a little bit of that story before people are ready. And I think, Bailey, the other challenge with a lot of this, we are doing account based marketing. It typically is, uh, higher annual contract values. So you're not going to run account based marketing typically for something that's under 10, $15,000 a year. And we even like to be 25, $50,000 and above to run these types of programs because are really dealing with a very tight market and you have to invest more to reach out to those folks. So it's not like a very broad, uh, spray and pray type of situation there.

Speaker B: Yeah. And when you think about the budget from that standpoint too, the way you can stand up a scrappy bit of marketing is way less expensive than what you're going to get out of even just a single deal. So if we break down a bit further, some of those tools that you mentioned do, you know, like roughly, like what's the cost of maybe some of those tools just to get started.

Speaker A: Yeah. So the technology stack for like a scrappy ABM type of an approach would be anywhere from 500 to $1,500 a month. That's typically where our clients are going to land. And that'll get you your email platform, LinkedIn Outreach. And it depends on how much website, the anonymization technology you want blended in. Then it also depends on, you know, what other ad platforms that you're running and you know, what your CRM is and how we're connecting to it. But that's typically where folks are going to land five to fifteen hundred dollars a month in technology. And then from there you're spending on services to create ads, run ad programs to make sure we're setting up all the workflows and monitoring that you're going to escalate from there. But if you are that, that five to $15,000 a month range with an account based marketing program, and you know that's on a monthly basis, it gives you an opportunity to get these programs rolling and to get some signals and to figure out do I need to invest more in one area versus another. And that's how we get a lot of our clients that, that have a smaller market team. That's how we're able to enable them to, to push more in this direction with an ABM campaign and really have a uh, proactive approach to their marketing versus always just reacting to what comes inbound through like a pay per click ad strategy.

Speaker B: Yeah. When would you say, or when would you recommend to a company to go and try these things themselves versus when they should maybe reach out to an agency to get support?

Speaker A: Yeah, there are some definite routes you can take to just see if abm, um, would work for you. I mean quite simply, if you have an event marketing initiative for let's say 2026, you could even think about what am I doing around those events. And I know Bailey, we work with some clients that have events every quarter and they want us to help them do outreach before that event. And I view that as almost like uh, a test for abm. So let's run a certain offer or sequence with a group of folks that might know us already, they might be in our CRM, but we're going to target them in a way that allows us to, I don't know, break the ice or give them a specific offer with something that we have going on. And that's really just marketing. Right. It's like how do we put something in front of them that they would be interested in that we do think is something of value? And how do we uh, maybe even take a group of 50 companies and let's build a list within each one of those companies. Let's see if those folks are going to the event. Let's reach out, see what they're up to. They want to meet up for drinks or coffee or something like that, or is there an event that they're attending while they're out there, like a sidebar event or something like that. All that can be done. And that I really view as like a mini ABM campaign almost. And that'll give you some clue as to whether this might work at a different scale.

Speaker B: Yeah, that kind of goes into this next question, which I feel like this is a bit of a leading question, but bear with me. But like, how much of the success of a campaign do you think is based on, on tools versus maybe your messaging or your process?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think the messaging, the offer,

Speaker B: and

Speaker A: making sure that the target, like you understand the customer. I think that is so much import more important than the tools itself. Like the tools just enable everything. But, and I know Bailey, we've done work for clients on the ABM side and really figuring out what we're going to offer or promote, um, to a, uh, cohort is always the hardest thing to figure out. You don't know necessarily what's going to resonate with them, but you just have to try a lot of different things and you never know what's going to strike, strike a balance. It might be something that's unexpected and it might be something that, on the flip side that you never really got in front of this audience through email before or something. There's a lot of just different variables there. But I do really think that that offer and the message and just really lining that up with exactly who that person is on the other end is probably the most important thing versus just the tech stack itself.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I feel like that can be a good message to marketers out there, is that it's just a lot of testing sometimes and trying things and you don't need to spend a ton of money on your tools just to get started. The tools do help a lot with the data review though, and it will help you analyze what messaging is maybe sticking more quickly.

Speaker A: I will say that the tools you can assemble like uh, an ABM infrastructure in that five to fifteen hundred dollars a month. I will say though, you do need folks on the technical side to make sure the data is clean, to make sure the events that you're capturing. Like when we set up abm, we have webhooks coming from a lot of different systems. We have ways to standardize that data in N8N. So we take a lot of different event sources and we standardize the event types and we make this consistent for all of our clients. There might be 10, 15 different types of events that we're tracking for an ABM campaign and we're able to then reproduce a lot of these workflows using those same standards that we've built over time. So I Do think it does take, uh, a lot more technical knowledge to, to connect all these different tools. Otherwise you end up in a scenario where you're building your list in clay, which is software I haven't mentioned yet, which is where a lot of the list building starts from that and we use that heavily here. Otherwise you have clay and then you're sending Messages, emails and LinkedIn and you might be adding to a custom audience in, in LinkedIn to, to run ad programs, but everything's scattered around. You don't really know what's going on. And have a way to pull all that information into one place. Does make it very difficult to really just understand am I making some headway with this audience or not? And that's a lot of the work that we've done is to help really standardize those events and track it in a way that makes sense across the board.

Speaker B: Yeah, um, that makes things a lot easier and gets to my next point, which is attribution. And especially if you're not using enterprise tools, this can be an area that, uh, people get really confused on or a little contentious about.

Speaker A: Yeah, attribution. Once again, there are platforms out there that cost two, $3,000 more a month to help you stitch together all the events that accounts take before they ultimately become an opportunity. What we like to do is typically have a client that has a CRM in place. HubSpot, Pipedrive, two common scenarios. And what we'll do is we will build a list of accounts that either are in their CRM already or they are not, and they represent a group that are likely to be a customer. And what we do from there is a lot of times we will track all these events and activities we're doing outside of the CRM because these folks haven't, they haven't downloaded anything, they haven't filled out a contact form. We don't even know if they're in market. But we will still track all the activities that we're doing. From a marketing standpoint, you know that this account view a LinkedIn ad, do they click on the linked ad? This information we can gather from factors and we pull in all those events into a database at the account level, this isn't at the person level. But still there are some accounts information that we can gather and this is really the best way we can get some of this attribution. It's not foolproof. There's still a lot of data that we can't gather by folks that visit the website or what have you. But we try to gather as much as we can and say, hey, we're. We are getting in front of the right people. We are reaching out to the folks that are most likely to consider our technology as an option. And that's where we just start to add layers to it. Stay in front of folks, keep changing the messaging and keep working with our customers to understand what can you maybe try or change and cycle that through the programs that we're running?

Speaker B: Yeah. What are some indications that you would look at to tell you, okay, this, this is starting to work?

Speaker A: I believe when you do see accounts, when they're taking some action themselves, when you see that someone has replied to an email, obviously, where they might be interested, or they've clicked on an ad, obviously, or they've seen an ad several times and they come and visit the website, those are definitely some events that we like to stitch together. Uh, one of my favorite things to do is when we do see someone fill out a contact form, it is nice to go back in factors or in our custom events table and just see, okay, this account, we very clearly see that they were shown ads for like two to three months before they reached out.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And so that's, I think, an indicator where you could almost go backwards in some cases with your management and say, hey, here's 10 scenarios where these contact forms came in and here's some of the events that took place before that happened. And then on the flip side, you can say, hey, here are accounts that are a good fit for us. You could see that they're seeing ads, you can see that they're viewing our website, but they just haven't filled out the form yet. And so it's always just trying to tell both sides of that story.

Speaker B: M love that there's a lot of stuff you can look at before that will just, just definitely help that story. So, um, just as we're wrapping up, what is one piece of advice you'd give to a team trying to do ABM on a budget, ABM on a

Speaker A: budget, come up with. I think if you are trying to get ABM stood out in the most efficient way possible and you're worried about the budget, the best thing to focus on is the offer, like, what can we put together that will really be high value for this account and will have the least amount of friction for them to get started. Some examples I can think of is can you do a custom report or an analysis or an audit that is, you know, very deeply using their data or, you know, using information that you gather from the client? It's very customized to them. Is there a product that you can put in place to help them get a lot of value? Is there a piece of your technology that you can solve a problem for them? You can kind of siphon off maybe uh, a certain feature or something within your technology and say would you like this type of report or that type of report? What can we demonstrate with our tool or our software that's going to help you out? And I think it has to go beyond just a general 101 guide or just a general how to. That's kind of table stakes. It's like what can we do for your specific company with our technology to show you, you know, what you could get ultimately with our platform. So if you can focus there. And that really goes for both uh, technology and also on the professional services side too. You know, is there a short project that you can productize for, for a company to, to demonstrate the types of work that, that you would do in a uh, full time engagement? Those are typical scenarios that we, we like to take.

Speaker B: Yeah. And if I understand correctly from just stuff we've done together, it's you should still do those things. You said they're table stakes like ebooks or freebies and things like that. But when we're talking about abm, these free offers, we really want to get on a call with them. Like you want to get things that are more personalized from them. It's going to be more time consuming probably on your end, but it's going to be much more valuable.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think it's a mix like you always want like good content to share. I mean that, that's got to be a part of your marketing mix as well. Industry reports, research, ebooks are still valuable video content to show like thought, leadership and perspectives within your organization. And I think all that is those are layers to, to what you're getting in front of these, these ideal accounts. But when you want someone to take action and at least start a conversation, that is where I think to get them over the line and fill out a formal reply. That is where you really want the strongest offer as possible.

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for hopping on and talking about scrappy abm and we'll talk again here soon.

Speaker A: You bet. Thanks Bailey. Thanks for checking out Tech Qualified. This show is brought to you by New North, a, uh, marketing agency that helps turn your small scrappy marketing team into a growth engine. To find out more about New north or check out more episodes of this show, go to newnorth.com techqualified.