What elite B2B Marketers do differently to support Sales teams (w/ Pam Didner) | S3 EP4

Speaker A: We have to please AI. We also have to please humans. It's sad, pathetic, but utterly true.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to the Paid Media Lab. My name is James.

Speaker C: I'm the content lead here at Lunio, and in this episode I'm joined by Pam Dittner, author, speaker and B2B consultant who specializes in making marketing, sales and

Speaker B: AI work together for measurable growth.

Speaker C: She helps B2B and SaaS businesses prove marketing's ROI through measurement systems that connect marketing spend directly to closed deals. Whether it's building a lead conversion system that helps vet MQLs, creating handoff processes that prevent leads from falling through the cracks, or designing marketing attribution dashboards that track true revenue impact, Pam has done

Speaker B: it all, and she knows exactly how

Speaker C: to equip marketing leaders with the data they need to confidently enter into challenging strategic discussions with their CFO or their CEO, especially when it comes to budget allocation for them and their departments. So if you work in B2B or SaaS and you know the struggle of trying to protect and increase investment in your team, this one is for you. At the beginning of the conversation, we briefly discuss AI and how to optimize your marketing efforts for the new era of conversational search in platforms like ChatGPT, with reference to a few insights from Palm's book titled the Modern AI Marketer

Speaker B: in the GPT Era.

Speaker C: After that, we move on to our main focus, which is all about how to bridge the gap between marketing and sales and B2B and SaaS businesses. We get into Pam's definition of what a genuine MQ actually is. How to connect the dots between upper funnel awareness campaigns and bottom funnel demand capture, as well as Pam's framework for running more successful account, uh, based marketing or ABM campaigns. Pam is a brilliant speaker and personally, I learned a lot from this one that I'm going to take away and apply in my own role at Lunio.

Speaker B: So let's get into it. Pam Dudner, welcome to the Paid Media Lab. It's great to have you here.

Speaker A: Oh, it's wonderful to be here, James. Thank you so much for having me. Yay.

Speaker B: So I'm really excited to get into our main topic today about bridging the gap between sales and marketing in SaaS, particularly because that's relevant to our team here at Lunio. But before we dive into that, I do want to speak briefly to you about AI first, because that's one of your areas of expertise and I know you've actually written a book about it titled the Modern AI Marketer in The GPT era, which you can see on the shelf there. And uh, people should go check that out on Amazon. We will put the link to the book down in the description of this episode. And I actually know, and we were speaking about this briefly before we switched on the mics, Pam, that you are good at AI search and optimizing for that. Because when I was researching for guests for season three of this podcast, um, myself and our producer Ben, we were going through ChatGPT and we were looking for the most prominent B2B influencers in the world of marketing. And your name kept coming up repeatedly and we thought, you know, we have to get in touch with Pam Dittner. She must know what she's doing. So, you know, with that said, um, maybe briefly, could you just say a little bit about the things that you've been doing over the past, you know, six to 12 months to really boost your online visibility and the amount of times that you're referenced within places like ChatGPT.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Thank you so much. And uh, it has been a lot of hard work. Um, I want everybody to understand if you really want to rank, uh, or be mentioned in ChatGPT, you have to be very intentional and purpose about it. And uh, that's number one, be very intentional and be very purposeful. Number two, it's a lot of work and there's no shortcut. Number three, nobody knows what's going on, me included. We are all experimenting and trying to. So these are the three mindsets that you need to have, right? And then the next things that you have to do is you, you know, a lot of SEO, uh, search optimization that you do, it still applies. Many of the rules from SEO still apply to geo, which is generative AI search optimization. So don't ditch SEO completely. That's another thing I want to share with you. And uh, another thing uh, I did specifically and I want to bring to both of you, uh, everybody's attention. Actually there are two that I did. Number one is you really have to understand your offerings, like what your products about, your proposition and then, um, what kind of service offerings that you, you provide to your target audience. And in the past I created nine keyword specific service pages. And why did I do that? Search engine optimization. But for this time around, I changed that service offering to kind of like have a categories on the top, which is, you know, I have a strategic, uh, planning under. Underneath that there's a go to market strategy and a strategic planning section. Right. So I have a major category and a subcategory And I do a lot of coaching. So in the past I have a one to one coaching and then I have a specific page underneath that and then I create category say personal branding. Yeah. And underneath that I will put a subcategory. So you have to think about your service category and treat it in the way that how you people to understand. But at the same time for AI, AI is very logical. So you want to create things that's very logical for AI to actually understand to crawl. So the number one thing I did is change my service offering. Instead of keyword driven, I make it more category. And also under categories what are the specific subcategories that makes sense. So that's the key. The second thing I learned and I want to share this with everybody in the future all of us marketer's job will be doing basically we have two audience. We have to please AI. We also have to please humans. It's sad, pathetic, but utterly true. So we have to please AI, we also have please human. And that's the way it will be actually for a long period of time. And you have to think about how you need when you create a content how are you going to please both sets of audiences? That's going to be very challenging. And the one thing I have learned on the website copy. I try to make it more, how should I say it nicely, more like a little bit more business like so the AI can read it kind of like more like FAQ type of structure but not that you know, dull. You still make it a little bit um, explanatory and conversational. But it's more business writing then for original content such as a blog podcast like what we are doing right now. The video. I try to, I try to add more my personal voice to it. But again still optimize. Uh, you know like a lot of time you write content to optimize for keywords SEO you still need to do that. That layer of cleaning or editing will not go away. You need to think about how you should optimize. Optimize that for uh geo. Does that make sense? So the way I write the copywriting on the website is more tilted for machine to read. The why the way I write original content more tilted for human to read but still with the, the expectation of optimize for geo. So that's the two biggest takeaway and I want everybody to understand that and think about it. That's all.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great point. And now that you've said that I need, I think we need to Go and look at our site structure navigation and see like what are those catego dropdowns underneath the main category. And I'm sure there's a lot that people can uh, take away and go look at their own site and think how do we want LLMs to read our site and kind of crawl our site when they come across it?

Speaker A: One of the other things, James, there's one additional point I would like to add if it's okay with you. So there is this term called zero, uh, clicked basically after Google launched AI Overview. When you do a ah, Google search and there's AI Overview that comes up to explain uh, the specific term or the specific um, content you are looking for and there's AI Overview to explain a lot of things for you. Because of that, nobody go down further to do any clicking. That's a zero click. So many websites including mine has been suffering especially for organic traffic because nobody is coming to my website. And that begs the question, you know, is website dead? No everyone, the website is not dead. It's your uh, virtual home base that you can defend, promote and also being crawled by AI directly. Does that make sense? So you still need to optimize your website. Don't have this feeling if you will like hey, the organic traffic has dropped dramatically. Therefore I don't need to update my website because organic traffic has dropped dramatically. That's even more important. I want to emphasize that one more time. It's more important that you optimize your website. Why you optimize that for AI to search?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, 100% and I think it's something that we've seen at Lunio, you know our click volume definitely decreasing since about March this year when Google really started the AI overviews that all the work that we poured into building up that traffic over years and years, it was difficult to watch the numbers go down. But as you said Pam, it is a different landscape right now. And I'm hearing that you know, to your point that yes, the traffic to these kind of long tail keyword blogs that might have performed well in the past is going to go down but your homepage and your website is still super important and that's going to determine how many times that you get referenced and mentioned within places like ChatGPT. So yeah, that's uh, an important part to stress that you can't just abandon all the traditional elements of, of SEO and content marketing.

Speaker A: Well said, well said. I cried. I literally my heart aches when I look at my organic traffic. In the past six months. It's like, why do I even exist?

Speaker B: And then I don't know if you noticed recently.

Speaker A: I just don't deserve my stomach anymore. I'm sorry.

Speaker B: Uh, if you, if you notice recently, like first we saw the clicks go down and then. What I've noticed recently is impressions went up, but now impressions have been cut again because there was another Google update. And all of a sudden I don't, I don't know the details of what they changed, but I think massive amounts of domains saw their impressions drop, uh, in in September, uh, of this year. So a lot changing. But we could spend the entire RPM talking about AI and I know there's so much that you could say there's.

Speaker A: The thing is, ultimately we all need therapy sessions. I swear to God.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a difficult time to be in marketing. There's a lot to take on. But yeah, for now we're going to get on to the main topic of today, which is about how to bring marketing and sales teams into closer alignment, uh, in SaaS specifically, um, something that's relevant to me. I have experience of that in working in SaaS. But I suppose to start out with the most foundational question. Why is there so often a disconnect between marketing and sales and SaaS? It's almost a cliche at this point. So. So why is it such a recurring problem?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's because we all have a different mindset. You know, marketing is. Folk tend to focus. Marketing, uh, tends to focus on top of the funnel and the sales is the bottom of the funnel. And the marketing is really about brand awareness. And, uh, sales is about closure.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And the marketing is about, you know what, that's, nurture the prospects. The salespeople was like, you know what, you have no budget. You are dead to me. You know what I'm saying? It's like they are different mindsets and then salespeople are hunters and they move on to the next target very quickly because they have sales quota they have to meet. So from my perspective, it's different mindsets, even though they actually have the same overarching business goals, but they approach, say, outreach of the prospect just a little bit differently. And also, um, in the SaaS base, depending on the products, if you are selling to, say, enterprises, the purchasing cycle is so long. And uh, the marketing field, the marketing people may feel that they need time to actually nurture that. But the salespeople was like, I have a quota. Okay? Even though my purchasing cycle is very long and I need to keep engaging with my prospects over a Certain period of time, why can I do that better? And the nurturing part of it and also actively engaging with your prospects are kind of two different approaches with that in mind. Sales, uh, and marketing tend to be a little bit, you know, coming from a different perspective or at odds. But uh, at the end they still have the same revenue goals.

Speaker C: Nice.

Speaker B: So let's say there's a marketing leader and they recognize that they have a problem with a disconnect with the sales team. Um, from your experience, because you've done this work with a lot of different businesses and I think you have seen a lot of different scenarios play out within the SaaS road. What are some of the biggest mistakes that you see marketing leaders make when they go to try and build that bridge with the sales department and try to increase alignment?

Speaker A: Um, I don't think they make mistakes a lot of time. What I have seen is more communication breakdown, if you will. And um, to me, marketing leaders and the sales leader needs to have a constant communication and um, that they should have a continuously, continuous open dialogue, if you will. And um, that they should talk to each other all the time, kind of like as if they were courting each other. But anyway, um, the thing is, um, it's that communication that's number one. And number two is, you know how men and women, this might be a sensitive topics, like um, like from guy's perspective, like, oh, you know what? We have a date night like twice a month. That should be enough. And then for a woman they were like what, only twice a month? That's not like we need to spice up. We should actually have a date night every week. So I think there's a different expectations, um, in terms of like how they should communicate as well. And um, the when marketing leader basically said this is the content list that we have. And then salespeople was like, okay, that's great, but can you explain to me how to use it? So obviously a list of marketing content will be used differently by the salespeople. If you just share a list of marketing content with sales without explaining it how that needs to be used in the context of a sales stages and salespeople will be crumbling down. I don't know how to use that. You know what I'm saying? And then the marketing people were like, you know what, you should figure this out. You are smart. Sales people was like, I am very smart, but I'm very smart. Chasing quota, but I don't really have time to figuring out how to use the list of marketing content in the context My sales stages. So then it comes down to argument who should do that? Well, I hate saying this is a marketing's job to kind of classify your marketing content in a way that salespeople needs to understand. Because seriously, from my perspective, they don't have time to figure that out. So I think the biggest mistake is basically the devil is in the detail. You need to figure out what some of the challenges that the salespeople have, especially using some of the marketing materials and they explained it better in terms of how to use it. And uh, but a lot of times marketing leadership built. That is a salespeople's job. That's subject to debate. But that is something that you, you know, as a couple.

Speaker B: So, so is that. So, so for every piece of content that is published or every piece of content on that list should have some notes attached that are relevant to the sales team. For this content should be used at this stage of the funnel. Like just give me an idea, what does that look like in practice?

Speaker A: Yeah, I love that question. So a lot of time the list of a marketing content probably will be broken down, say okay, this is a brain, this is for more for awareness. And this piece of content is more for consideration. And this piece of uh, content is more for evaluation, for example. Right. And uh, that sounds pretty good because you break down the marketing content based on the purchase funnel. I mean the different stages of purchase funnel. But the way that to actually make that relevant that will resonate actually with the salespeople has a lot to do with can you break that content in the context of sales stages. So you have to think about within your company, how does your salespeople, uh, how do your salespeople actually sell? First of all, they have to prospect somebody. Okay, Prospecting. Once they have quality, once they prospect someone, they have to qualify it. Once they qualify it, they probably will, um, start, um, uh, a demo request. I'm just making things up a little bit. Okay, so now you know the sales stages is prospecting, right? Qualifying and the request for demo. So this is the three sales stages. You should actually take a list of marketing content that you categorize based on the top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom funnel in a way that Salespeople understand the 10 piece of content that you have. What are some of the content pieces is actually good for prospecting. So you list those content out. What are some of the content pieces are actually good for qualifying. And then so on and so on is based on the sales stages. So it's not necessarily a little Note. Trust me James, I love my salespeople dearly. They don't read notes, they just want that to be put in a proper cheat sheet and they have something they can reference to. It's on one slide and easy for them to comprehend.

Speaker B: Yes, no, that's a great point. And it's something that I think we'll need to look at, categorize in some of our content and how can we make this more useful for the sales team. And I guess you know this is really applicable to um, content marketing and organic activity. Um, but I suppose this breaking things down into the stages of the funnel does apply to paid media as well and performance marketing.

Speaker A: 100%.

Speaker B: You know, if you're, if you're running ads, you need those top of funnel awareness pieces of content as well as, you know, then you need to qualify and then you need to look at these kind of very high intent um, bits of ad creative or campaigns that you're running. Um, so when you think about that broadly in terms of mapping paid media activity to the sales funnel, one thing that you know I've come across uh, from, from speaking to different people in the industry is oftentimes there can be a heavy over reliance on bottom of funnel activity and really focusing on capturing those high intent leads on Google search for example. And there's not a lot of activity often going on on top of the funnel mid of the funnel because it's harder to prove the ROI or there's as much slower.

Speaker A: 100% agree.

Speaker B: So can you talk a bit about structuring paid media especially to speak to those top of funnel, mid funnel, um, type areas where sometimes a lot of brands do fall down.

Speaker A: So you are 100% correct. And I encountered that problem even for myself running paid media because I want to track like the performance of my pay media actually works for me is I want to have a conversion to sales. So if you want to actually have the conversion to sales, most of the people tend to focus on their pay media on the bottom of the funnel and with a very specific call to action such as contact sales call 1-800-Numbers request for demo, right? Because those are very, very uh, specific and undisputable action items that we can report to management. So the way I would do, and I advise my clients that yes, you should focus on top of the funnel and uh, what is some say, what are some of the options in terms of tracking the top of the funnel down to middle of the funnel conversion? From my perspective you should track a lot of people track inbound traffic. But that's not tangible enough or that's not something from my perspective is sticky enough that you can report to management. And I would focus on conversion of the number of NQL or the conversion NQL to SQL the conversion rate. The reason I said that is a lot of time when you do top the funnel, unless you are really, really looking for the broader brand awareness, right? So you are looking for broader brand awareness like how many people actually see the brands and the number of impressions, all that things. And uh, you want to build that, but if you want to do that, you have to spend certain amount of money over like you know, 12 to 24 months at a time, right. In order to build that brand awareness. And that's a huge amount of money. Unless you can truly come communicate clearly and then your CEO, your founder truly understand that the top of the funnel is a long play most of the time none of the CMO can kind of take that heat of um, not reporting clear metrics, you know, over 24 months at a time. Does that make sense?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So, so without a very solid, solid metrics, the only thing I can think is you still have to bring that media from the very broad, if you can see my hand, very broad, uh, the, the top of funnel down a little bit. So this is a broad right? You down a little bit and then focus on your, your media spends a little bit tighter tied to the nql. It has to tie with some sort of some tangible uh, metrics that the management feels comfortable about. Does that make sense?

Speaker B: Yes. My follow up question for you on that is if we drill down on MQLs for a second?

Speaker A: Um, sure, please.

Speaker B: One of the perennial difficulties between um, marketing and sales is marketing being a bit too fast and loose with what they classify as an mql. Maybe they just want to, they're incentivized to drive as many MQLs as possible. Therefore any and every lead that comes

Speaker C: through the door, even if it's obviously

Speaker B: spam, is going to say, well that's an MQL and we're going to send that over to the sales team. So in your head, what are the criteria that a lead needs to meet in order for it to be a true MQL icp?

Speaker A: So there are probably two stages. If I usually tell my clients not to track every single MQL as mql. And uh, just like you said, you know, there's a lot of NQL is not necessarily high quality. And that's the issues that majority of the marketing teams run into is when they count mql because if they be measured by, uh, quantity, that's what they're going to deliver is quantity. If they are measured by quality, then they will focus on quality. So a lot of time how the marketing people are measured drives their behavior.

Speaker B: Yeah, um, it's a super important point. And I think like you said, the intent is so crucial. And a website visit where someone checks out a blog or a piece of content. Yeah, but a website visit and you see that person move to the case studies or customer testimonial section of your website and they're looking through how have people used this product in the past. Then signals slightly, slightly higher intent.

Speaker A: That's a higher. That's a higher. You can gauge it. That give you, that, uh, gives you a little more clues. Yes, I agree. Yes.

Speaker B: So is it, is it possible to, is it possible to automate that full system or is it always. You kind of need a human in the loop to sense check what's being passed over? Like, because, to be honest, like, I just feel more comfortable personally if I just look at the leads because we're not dealing with a super high volume of leads. It is possible to manually kind of investigate and try to gauge the intent. But I'd just love to know from you, is it possible to automate this or is it more hassle than it's worth?

Speaker A: James, that I'm smiling because I was like, that is such a great question. Kudos to you. If we were together, I would buy you a cup of coffee, actually. Latte.

Speaker B: Thank you. Palm.

Speaker A: And, um, I want to answer that question in two ways. You actually answered it 50% of it. Because your volume and my volume are not that huge. From that perspective. I encourage marketers actually vet it manually. Your volume is not very big. You should definitely do that manually because that would, that would give you a sense and the feeling and uh, how you can better gauge the prospect. So to me, that's very important. Like, like for example, when you start doing a little research about specific prospect, you check this person up on LinkedIn, you run say, zoom info, intent data. You do additional data enrichment. You actually get a feel about that prospect. I'm telling you, once you get that feeling, you're like, okay, you can literally can tell this one is on and off. Should I pass this one to sales? You can immediately gauge. You can immediately make that decision. Um, I personally love manual, um, uh, uh, vetting. Okay. I do. However, if you have like hundreds and thousands and you cannot do that and um, from my perspective, this is where AI can come to play. And uh, you can create an Excel file with those hundreds of prospect and also added the intent data and add additional data enrichment fields into the Excel file. And then you upload it to the, you know, the chatbot and have the chatbot do the analysis for you. Of course, if you are sophisticated enough, you can work with your, uh, uh, data analyst to create predictive model. Right. You write a certain kind of selection criteria and then you build a model and see if the model can give you a recommendation on which prospects that they, that give you a list of prospects or high quality, potentially high quality prospects for the sales to go after. So I think, um, the AI can play a role on that, but you have to build a selection criteria to guide the AI. And that's the holy grail, honestly. And then you have to optimize that selection criteria on a regular basis.

Speaker B: Yep. And, uh, you need to be very careful about getting that right. But yeah, that's a great point. And you know what? I felt like I was in the stone age doing some manual, you know, but absolutely, you've kind of given me some reassurance there that no, it is worthwhile. And like you said, sometimes you are looking at a, uh, contact record and you do just get a sense of yet this person by intent. And this is worth passing over to the sales team. So thank you for that palm. I feel much better about some of, some of the work that I'm doing now.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's not stone age. And he's saying, I just feel like a lot of people, they are, they will. We have to standardize, we have to skill, we have to automate. Trust me, I'm all for that. But I also believe gut, sometimes your gut doesn't work for you. Healthy gut, that is, anyway. And uh, like when you look at the information and you have a certain kind of intuitive and you, uh, intuition and you have a certain kind of gut feel like, you know what, this one is going to work. And a lot of time I will pass that to sales just to test my gut.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: And, uh, I can tell you one thing, James, 70% of the time I'm right. I mean, I got it wrong sometimes. And then the sales people come to me, what are you doing, Pam? This lead is useless to me. I was like, okay, sorry. I was trusting my God, it was not working that day.

Speaker B: 70% is pretty good though. Yeah, uh, that's, that's not a bad hit rate. Um, Pam, um, there's Two more things that I want to talk about with you before we wrap up. So, uh, before we close, I want to talk to you about ABM and that kind of stuff. But before we get on to abm, you know, we could do a whole episode on that. But you have written elsewhere in your content that marketing can still play an important role even after that initial sale has happened. So especially when it comes to customer retention and expansion.

Speaker A: Yeah, customer success and customer expansion.

Speaker B: Yes, yes. So on that note, like how, how do you go about in the context and through the lens of paid media? Because that's the primary audience for this podcast. But how do you approach, you know, targeting those people that are already customers in a way that doesn't feel intrusive or over the top or like you're really kind of getting quite aggressive with your messaging to people that are already within your customer base?

Speaker A: You know, Great question. So the way I go about doing that is usually work with the customer success team. The customer success team also has a very hard job because they are dealing with, if they're not dealing with happy customers, subscription or renewal is very easy. If they are dealing with, um, say customers are difficult. I just don't find your tool useful or I have not been using it actually in the past one year. You know, then you're like, okay, well let's work on that together and see if we can find to get them to renew. So it really depends on the retention rate. Obviously when you are working with the customer success team, um, like what's the customer retention rate and what's the customer renewal rate? If the renewal rate is very high, you know what, as a marketing team, you can back out. You can just say, you know what, you're doing a pretty good job.

Speaker B: You don't need that.

Speaker A: But if the retention rate or the renewal rate is very, very low, I think marketing can actually provide a hand to help them. And a lot of time, I call that win back campaigns. W I n and back win back. And that's assumed they are just kind of like at that stage or the mindset, they don't want to renew. And what can you do to actually help them or convince them? But a lot of time you also have to understand when a customer made up their minds, very hard to change that. And you are just doing the last minute, uh, effort to see if you can change their mind. But a lot of time that has a lot to do with can you give them a discount? Can you, what kind of effort, what kind of additional, uh, features or what Kind of additional things you can do for them. In addition to that then what marketing can do is I always feel like pay targeted campaigns very helpful because you know who they are already. And uh, you, you kind of do a very targeted pay ad that usually help or you do kind of like you know where they usually go, you know how it is. And then some of sometimes people think like the ads following them is a little bit creepy. And uh, I do believe that. So you need to be very strategic about it in terms of how you go about doing that. Right. Or you can just do a very, very genuine and uh, email outreach. A lot of times you have to work pretty hard on your copy. Like hey, um, understand that you have not been using say our um, platform for uh, several months. What can we do? Right. So you basically fall down to your store and say I'm here to help you. Tell me what can I do. So you can do a win back campaigns in many different way. Obviously on the PS side you just have to be very very careful how you go about doing it. To me the copy does matter. It matters so much that I always tell my clients, spend as much time as you can on the copy, get it right. And uh, you don't want to sound creepy. The thing is any kind of retargeting or any kind of abn it can sound creepy. And how do you balance that? That's the hardest part. Is that helpful? So I personally think there is a play to it. You need to work very very closely with your customer success team and then create very very customized outreach.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great point. And yeah, I hadn't really thought about those win back campaigns but um, I am aware of the creepiness of uh, how these if they're overdone and maybe if you don't put a frequency cap on how many times people are seeing.

Speaker A: Yeah you have to certain ads, uh,

Speaker B: you really need to be quite controlled with those frequency caps. But yeah, that's a great point. And just one question because I'm interested when you talked about sending that email and just saying like hey look, I've noticed you haven't used the product in a while. We want to build an understanding. Is that email coming from the marketing team or is it coming direct from the customer success manager who might be

Speaker A: handling the account manager. Yeah, it should not come from marketing team. Marketing is behind the scenes to help them.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, that's great. So you touched on it in your answer there. And ABM we're going to close out with, with A few points about ABM here. Uh, so I guess what are some of the big misconceptions or misuses of ABM that you've come across? Uh, especially in relation to paid media. Yeah.

Speaker A: Okay, so ABM is nothing new. ABM is really account based marketing. And uh, so if you think about it, salespeople always talk about accounts like HP is an account, American Express is an account. Right? They always talk about account marketing. People tend to talk about decision makers. We talk about the end user within hp, we talk about the end user within American Express. That's also the fundamental difference between sales and marketing. We tend to focus on the end users, like specific people. But when salespeople, they still talk to people, but when they talk about um, their business, they, they say accounts, right? They say HP does blah blah blah blah, American Express needs blah blah, blah blah blah. Right. They, they rarely say, oh, the CIO of American Express needs blah blah, blah blah blah. Right? So account based marketing is really basically marketing support specific accounts. In a way what marketing is doing is actually supporting sales. So they have a specific accounts they want to go after. Marketing identify those accounts. Well actually sales identifies those accounts and marketing provide outreach to support those accounts. That's abm. So but ABM has been done for a long period of time for back in 20, 30, 40 years ago. ABM tends to be eventually invitation only events for specific accounts. That's abm. But now I think ABM has been defined as like account based marketing for like okay, pay media effort targeted for specific account. That's okay too. Okay. But I want people to understand account based marketing because it's marketing and the target to a specific account. It can be multiple different marketing outreach. The pay media is one option or one option plus invitation only, plus email outreach, plus dynamic website. Does that make sense? That can all add it together to target a specific account. So the biggest misconception I feel people, um, marketers have at this time is like account based marketing is only targeted for like uh, pay media. But you need to think in a very holistic term. Like think about it. If we want to reach to that specific strategic account with our sales collectively, what are the different marketing channels we need to dial up to help our salespeople to win that specific account, not just pay media, which is very important. That is the one thing I want to close with you and share that with the uh, marketers and your listeners.

Speaker B: No, it's a great point. And you know, just as you were answering the question, you know, you said invite only and in person events. And I think like, I feel like that's something that we've had success with at Lunew, you know, getting people face to face and interacting with them. And I think also in the era that we're in now where everything is digital, everything is AI, I think year on year there's going to be an increase in premium on real world activity and getting together with people in the real world. And I think events and in person meetups are going to be a ah, real key driver of revenue in the SaaS.

Speaker A: I totally agree. I don't think that will ever go away, honestly.

Speaker B: M. Yeah, it's um, it's it's working for us. But before we wrap, just if you're like, let's say you are a mid sized SaaS company with between 100 and 200 employees and you know, maybe you've got uh, between 15 and 20 people on your sales team and maybe five or six on the marketing team. What is a reasonable number of companies to have within your ABM target account list? Because you can't, you can't say that we're going to target these 2,000 accounts but then also you don't want to say we're only going to target these 20. So is there a sweet spot in terms of the number?

Speaker A: You know that's a numbers game. I don't have a specific number I want to share but if you really want to push me very hard, I can tell you probably 50. But the problem is ABN on 50, you have to work very hard on those 50 and uh, to increase your uh, probability to win. And um, I would go by the revenue for example you have to take into the number of the account needs to be aligned. If you can see me, the number of account you listed on Excel file needs to be aligned with the projected uh, probably the revenue you're going to get from those accounts. The salespeople should have a sense like, based on those accounts. Like what? Even though they're going to pull the number from the thin air, they still need to know what kind of revenue they are going to drive from those accounts as a baseline. This number will continue to change when they start engaging with those account and they have to update those number as time goes. But if you look at the top 50 account and also the projected numbers and then you can look at those projected number to do the first round of the outreach or ABM with your salespeople and your ABM will need to change over a period of time because now you see if Some of your marketing effort is working and the public probability of engagement has gone up on some of it. Then you will move some of the accounts. Does that make sense?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And then you can determine which one has a higher probability to win. And um, I don't necessarily have a number to go with it. Like I said, I usually say top 50 or top 100 because I heal is manageable. For humans like us the top 50 is manageable. Right. We can at least remember 50 accounts. So look at frequently enough to understand who they are and what they do. But anything beyond like 100 is way too many. That's why AI can come to help.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's ah, it's a great point. Sorry to press you for a hard number there in the end Param. But that was great. Oh no worries. Don't worry about it.

Speaker A: It's all, it's all. I don't. Like I said, you have to take revenue into account.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: I mean if one, if you got a couple whales like there's a couple of strategic account can bring huge amount of dollars, you know what the number of the strategic account can go down. But at the same time you are betting on those whales, you know that means you are really doing the calculated bets.

Speaker B: Right? Yeah. Comes with risk. But yeah, I just want to say risks. Thank you so much Pam for joining us today. It's been great to connect with you and uh, it's been a very useful and enlightening conversation for me to know that I'm not in the stone age doing my manual.

Speaker A: You are not. You are not.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: But before we wrap up, Pam, is there anything else that you'd like uh, to mention or let people know about?

Speaker A: Yeah. So if you actually have any sales and marketing challenges, reach out to me anytime. I'm actually on all the social media channels including TikTok, but LinkedIn is my uh, go to channels, always come to LinkedIn, ask me any questions you may have and I will make an effort to answer them. And also check out my book books, uh, on uh, Amazon.com and they are very short. They're only 100 pages. You literally can read a book and watch Netflix at the same time.

Speaker B: Nice, nice. Link to the book will be in the episode description. Also the link to Palm's LinkedIn profile so you can connect with her. If you have any questions about sales and marketing, fire them over to Palm. But yeah, thank you again Palm. It's been great. Thank you.

Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me. You rock. Take care. Bye bye.

Speaker B: That's it. For this episode of the Paid Media Lab. Thanks for tuning in.

Speaker C: If you found it helpful, hit the subscribe button to get the next episode as soon as it's released. Subscribing costs nothing, and it helps us bring you the best possible guests in the next season. And if you want more advice on how to boost your return on AD spend, head to Lunio AI, where you'll find loads more free tools, resources and guides. Lastly, if you know any other marketers who benefit from the tips in this episode, you can do them and us

Speaker B: a favor by sending them the link to the show.

Speaker C: That's all for this one, and I'll

Speaker B: see you in the next episode.