ABM Playbook for Niche B2B Markets

Speaker A: Winning is crazy.

Speaker B: Your opportunity. Your opportunity.

Speaker A: Sometimes I also invite sales to join me on those calls, but then I tell them that they have to shut up and listen. Um, because they, they always want to jump in and to say, oh, but we can do this or we can sell you more. It's really weird. But as soon as they see the spreadsheet with the list of companies, uh, they get really excited. And then sales reps also find it a lot easier to relate to. Oh, wow. So we're going to make sure that all of these companies see our advertisements so they have at least heard about us. My campaigns, 9 out of 10 times are pretty niche, so it's always one too few. I try to get more than 300 accounts, but usually it's not even possible in the markets I work in. You cannot do it alone as a marketing team. Like, you really have to do it together with your sales team.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to the We Marketers podcast. I'm Andrew and my today's guest is Michel Walls, uh, senior product marketing manager at Beyond Product. Michel is leading, uh, marketing for IT and, uh, security, uh, industries. Michel, happy to have you today and I want to give you the stage to share a bit of your background. So what you do there.

Speaker A: Thanks for the kind introduction. I'm very happy to be here today too. You're very right. Like right now I work as a marketeer only for cy, cybersecurity and IT companies. I started out a little bit different. If you look back at my resume. I studied history and business and then I did a master's in economics because I was sure that I was going to work for the government. But, um, I, by coincidence, after my master's degree, I met someone working at a travel data analytics company. They were looking for a marketer. So I was like, why not? Um, it was in Valencia. I wanted to stay in Valencia. And I ended up liking that a lot more than the government job that I was preparing myself for. Like, it's a very fast moving environment if you work at a tech company. And what I also really liked was conceptually understanding the product and the technology behind it and then explaining it in a way that a lot of people would actually understand. Um, because especially in B2B, you have A, ah, buying audience, usually multiple people, and the decision maker is not, not often a technical person. Like, they will listen to the technical people, but, you know, you have to convince them in another way. Right. So I, uh, really liked being that translator and later I spent six years at this company. So I really really liked it, and then made a switch to a compliance company which was more focused on privacy officers. But it already bordered cybersecurity because a privacy officer quite often works together with the ciso. Um, and this was an industry that I liked even more. Um, I've never had such a critical target audience. Um, we sent a few cold outreach messages and people would reply saying, your privacy policy is incorrect and until your privacy policy is updated, I won't talk to you guys. Or one time we ran this marketing campaign and we wanted to, we linked to a type form, um, and people said, oh, what a lousy link or a shady link. Like you can't do that. This is cybersecurity. So yeah, it really triggered my interest and also it feels like I'm helping, you know, making the technological world a safer world. So yeah, yeah, it's, it's a very cool market to work in.

Speaker B: Yeah. And that's, that's a great story. Uh, I know so many marketers, I don't know why it happens in marketing, but I know so many people, uh, who landed in marketing accidentally by the way, include, including myself. I couldn't have even imagined that I will be working on events and all this stuff.

Speaker A: But it happens, I guess also it doesn't really have a very, um, I don't know. I didn't think very highly of marketing before I joined. I thought it was basically selling shit that people don't need. And I actually start working in marketing and it is so much more. I'm very focused on the positioning aspect of products and, and that's not something that you learn about in school, right? Or I mean, I guess you do, but you don't really understand it yet.

Speaker B: Yeah. And uh, I think this brings us a bit to the topic that we are going to discuss today. Uh, and I'm very excited about this because account based marketing is something that really uh, on top of minds of marketers, especially in B2B. So many marketers define ABM as A, so. So they have their own definitions. What is it for you?

Speaker A: Uh, that is a very good question. It started out for me. The company that I used to work at, they had a few industries that they targeted and within those industries there was only like a limited amount of companies that were actually relevant. Um, we cooperated a lot between marketing and sales. The sales cycles were really, really long and every time we had to start from scratch saying who are we targeting right now? And I realized that on LinkedIn you can start targeting by uploading a company list. So that's how it started for me. I was really thinking from the perspective if I upload a company list, I can rent, uh, targeted LinkedIn campaigns to the same audience over and over. But then I guess if you do only that, it's more of a comprehensive LinkedIn campaign and not really an account based marketing campaign. So what really makes the difference for me is if you also do additional things on the side. So for me, the corporation with sales is super important that they go after the exact same accounts. Um, we also talk about, like, which accounts have been warmed up. Warmed up sounds so lousy, um, what accounts have been interacting with our content, uh, who have been visiting our website, um, who saw our LinkedIn advertisements and we also tried to, or I tried to link it to events. So from a cybersecurity perspective, if one of your focus areas is healthcare in the Netherlands, there's an event called IT and Healthcare. So, you know, everything lines up if you want to target the same audience there. So I guess that it's a very comprehensive and long description of what it means to me, but it's quite comprehensive.

Speaker B: But when we look at the process itself, uh, and let's say we want to start, um, account based marketing, uh, for our company, uh, where do we start?

Speaker A: So, funnily enough, this morning we had a kickoff session for a new account based marketing campaign. And, um, we already have some just Excel files with company names that we want to target. This morning I asked the sales team, the commercial team, to add additional companies to this list, but also to differentiate them. Even though it's one group of companies, they work more or less in the same industry. They all do a slightly different thing. So they're now categorizing all of those companies. The next step for me is to work on the messaging because we have a positioning for the specific market. And with one sales guy, I'm going to look at which companies represent this industry best and I'm going to invite them for a research interview, uh, in which I ask them to open the landing page to share their screen and then talk me through the landing page to see if the messaging really resonates and if our, uh, product really like hits a nerve in this market. If this is all positive, like I share that feedback with sales. I usually record everything and I make a short five minute video with like the most important feedback. Sometimes I also invite sales to join me on those calls. But then I tell them that they have to shut up and listen, um, because they, they always want to jump in and to say oh, but we can do this or we can sell you more. But it's good for them to also hear everything that I'm hearing. Now if this is all correct, uh, then we start working on the collateral for the marketing campaign. I upload the company list into LinkedIn and we just start targeting them with different types of content. Um, there's always thought leader content, there are always case studies, um, there's always some more technical stuff about the product. But it depends on how big the target audience is. So, and the types of profiles that we're targeting.

Speaker B: Let's uh, make a little bit, step back and to see how you prioritize which accounts to include on this, uh, Excel spread spreadsheet. So what's your approach?

Speaker A: Yeah, so my campaigns 9 out of 10 times are pretty niche, so it's always one too few. I try to get more than 300 accounts, but usually it's not even possible in the markets I work in. Prioritizing is like, can we find more companies that do something similar? Right?

Speaker B: Yeah, but do you define these accounts together with sales or is it something, um, that you always. Always in collaboration.

Speaker A: Always in collaboration with sales.

Speaker B: Yeah, but, and who is the main owner of this, um, account based marketing spreadsheet in your case, is it more sales and marketing supports or marketing drives this and sales more like, hey, okay, we see this information.

Speaker A: It depends which is not the best answer. So in the company that I worked at for six years, the owner of the target list was the segment owner, which in most cases was the sales rep, uh, responsible for that market. Because I as a marketeer had to manage like five or six markets. So it's just too much work to be the owner right now. For my clients, I am usually the owner because for most of them account based marketing is completely new. So when I talk to them about a target list, they don't actually know what I mean. Or they give me a list with 10 companies and I'm like, I cannot run a campaign to 10 companies. Again, if the companies are really big, then that would be a different situation. Right. Then it would be a one. I would usually do a one on one linksin campaign.

Speaker B: Mhm. And uh, do, do you also define kind of tiers for these accounts or. Anyway, all the accounts that you put on a spreadsheet, they are like super important.

Speaker A: We don't need to define tiers. If the target group was bigger, then I would definitely do that. Uh, then I would probably include more filters as well. Um, so sometimes I do filter also by company size. Um, uh, we try to specify the niche markets or the product that they're selling more so we try to condense the groups. I always like to keep the campaigns as small as we can because then they will be as, adjust it to the target audience as possible.

Speaker B: Once you created this list, uh, sorry, I just tried to, to make, to make a kind of playbook out of this because this is, I think this is really important to understand the, the process itself because many, many people were talking about abm. But yeah, what, what it looks like in practice. For example, when uh, we started building this for our company, I had to Google a lot of, to find out how actually people are doing this. And I found nothing but just general, uh, you know, general approaches.

Speaker A: Yeah. And also I found a lot. Like I started to look for ABM tools to help the work go easier. And also I was like, now we're only targeting companies on LinkedIn. Could we also target them on Facebook or you know, on other platforms? And how would we have to do that? And then you find tools like metadata, but it's all like very big and extremely expensive tools. Especially if you run very small and niche campaigns, then it's not even worth uh, the effort. So yeah, you kind of have to figure out by yourself. Right. How to do, how to do what's right for your organization.

Speaker B: Yeah. And what the strategy for you look like. Do you implement kind of the same approach for everyone or do you look at the each and every account and see, okay, for this company we will do these activities. For these companies we will do something different.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I guess like if I take the meeting that we had this morning, their target audience is super niche. They all, everyone works in digital identity. Um, so you can think about the easiest way to represent it is like you know, the E Wallet on your phone. They work in this industry and um, it is extremely specific and they have two different products. So I always think from who are we trying to reach and how big are those organizations? Like in the case of the Wallet company, we wanted to target governments, but we didn't know exactly who to target. Like within the, within the government organization that we wanted to target, there was maybe five people that were relevant for our campaign. But the organization itself was like, I don't know, hundreds of people big. Um, so in this case I decided for a one on one marketing campaign because there was zero contact with this client right now. Um, we had never met them at events so we really wanted to draw their attention. So then we decided to invest a little bit More. But it also worked like they did reach out and they started talking to our sales team. So um, um,

Speaker B: yeah, but, but what it was, it was uh, email messages, LinkedIn messages or invites for the events. Uh, what was that?

Speaker A: It, it was literally advertisement. An advertisement campaign? Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: It was a LinkedIn awareness campaign uh, for one organization only to try and target. But the campaign was really, really cheap. I think in total we spent €180, uh, in advertisement budget. Uh, I mean we spent a lot more on the, creating the ads and creating the landing page. But really the only objective was getting in touch with this organization, this one organization.

Speaker B: So you created landing page for this one organization?

Speaker A: For this one organization.

Speaker B: Uh, that's so good.

Speaker A: It was so targeted. It was like hello, government organization. All of the ads were written this way.

Speaker B: Nice, nice. And um, do, do you widely use this approach, tailoring landing pages for the, or only for very specific companies that you really want to.

Speaker A: Um, only for a very specific company.

Speaker B: For very, very specific.

Speaker A: Yeah. Like another target audience that they have are telecom providers. And here we know that a few telecom providers are active in this industry but they're really difficult to target with a generic campaign. So I think that for those telecom providers we will also do the one on one campaigns to get in touch with them because right now we don't know them yet.

Speaker B: So even in the banners you say like hey, um, company and um, we have something for you.

Speaker A: Right, exactly. Like we could potentially do one with T Mobile. Right? So it would be like hello T Mobile.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's, that's really great approach I think. Yeah, yeah, especially, especially for um, high, high value, high value companies. When you are building targeted accounts, how do you choose? Um, because yeah apparently we have accounts like companies but also we have uh, behind these accounts there are ah, real people. So how, how, how do you choose people uh, which you want to include in this uh, targeted group?

Speaker A: Usually the sales team has a pretty clear idea of the people that we need to target. Like I always just ask them, uh, when you have sales, do you speak to like who joined the conversation? That helps if they don't have a clear answer. I have also, you know, downloaded lists from HubSpot and then just kind of manually going through the job titles and seeing what kind of people are they and then those are the people that I add to the uh, to the campaign. But once the campaign is running on LinkedIn, I do also check like I don't know, after the campaign has been running for Two, three weeks. I check which job titles interact most and best with the campaign to see if we can filter some of them out.

Speaker B: Uh, you mentioned several times LinkedIn, I think it's a golden standard for. Right. But also you said that uh, you are trying doing some other channels. Uh, could you, could you maybe share here what, what exactly you do and which channels really work here?

Speaker A: So I have tried uh, meta a few times because they also, I don't know, I haven't done this recently, so I don't know how it is now. But they also allow you to upload company lists. Um, so I have done that. It didn't work badly in the past, but it was just that the match rate of the uploaded list was super low. It was like, I don't know, a 10 or 20% match rate. So the conversion was good, but then the target audience was just tiny. So that one I don't do, I do do Reddit sometimes, but it's best for only, uh, awareness. And you can really only use it if there's a very, very specific and niche subreddit.

Speaker B: That's very interesting. Could you give an example?

Speaker A: So one of my clients, they focused on system administrators and at schools in the United States and there's a subreddit called k12sysadmin. So that is like the perfect target audience for this campaign. So in this case I did do it because you can do the same. You can upload a list of all of the K12 schools in the United States to LinkedIn. So you target them on both platforms.

Speaker B: M and on Reddit you use native, uh, ads or.

Speaker A: Um.

Speaker B: Yeah. So you use ads. Yeah. I thought maybe you're participating in these discussions.

Speaker A: So this specific subreddit doesn't allow you to participate in the discussions and then you can prove that you are a K12 sysadmin.

Speaker B: Um, I see.

Speaker A: Because they don't want, um, suppliers to also reply to posts. So their mods are super strict in who can reply to posts and who cannot. Um, so for this one specifically it is only advertisements.

Speaker B: When we look at abm, just from a general, uh, point of view on all the work that you do, what is the most intimidating thing for you with abm?

Speaker A: I think the part that we struggle with most is still the preparation phase with sales works really well. Um, but we are also very much, we believe in demand generation. So it's mostly about building awareness. We hardly do any lead generation campaigns. So I hardly ever do a download this white paper type of campaign.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So the difficulty really still is. When do we ask sales to contact one of the accounts that I see are interacting a lot with our campaign? And then how do we contact them? I think this, this is probably the, still the most terrifying part of, uh, of the account based marketing campaigns.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's, that's really interesting. And, and how, how do you usually overcome this?

Speaker A: Um, um, so right now I do it by being a little bit more involved. So like I said, when I asked sales in the beginning, can you create a target list? They didn't really know what I meant. So now also with the accounts. So, um, I would on a weekly basis open LinkedIn, show them what accounts are interacting with our campaign. And now I'm making very specific suggestions saying this account has been interacting. I looked into their profile. They have been doing this and this. One of their employees shared a post about this topic. You could write them a personalized message saying that you saw the colleague's message, um, and then introduce yourself without being very pushy. This is how I'm solving it now. I don't think it's a perfect setup yet. So, uh, if anyone listens to this podcast and they have ideas, then I would also very much be open to them.

Speaker B: Yeah, but if we imagine about perfect setup, what that would be for you?

Speaker A: Um, Well, the perfect setup for me would be to work with a sales rep who does consultative selling and who isn't very pushy in that sense. But they really understand, like they see the list of accounts and they just know how they're going to reach out to the specific accounts. Like that would be the perfect cooperation. Um, but especially in teams where account based marketing is new, that just doesn't happen very quickly. So yeah, it takes a little bit longer to find the right way of working together.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's very interesting. Uh, so in most cases, um, these are clients that, um, you work with. Right. On abm. Yeah. So they already understand, uh, why they need abm. Or is it something that you need to sell to them?

Speaker A: Uh, no, we definitely have to explain it to them. But also it does always really resonate with them. So it's not like I have to convince them, uh, that this is what we should be doing. It's more explaining why it works and how it works and what the different steps are. But they never really argue whether or not it's a good idea. Like they all, as soon as they have, it's really weird. But as soon as they see the spreadsheet with the list of companies, uh, they get really excited and then sales Reps also find it a lot easier to relate to. Oh wow. So we're going to make sure that all of these companies see our advertisements so they have at least heard about us.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And how do you measure the success of your campaigns, of ABM campaigns?

Speaker A: Um, I do that in a few different ways. Like I look at the engagement rates, of course I uh, look at how many accounts are engaged like beforehand based on industry standards. I make a quick and dirty calculation. Like let's say we target 300 accounts. Then my quick and dirty translation would be at least 30. 30 accounts should be interacting regularly with this campaign and if we don't reach that, then something is going wrong. If we do thought, uh, leader ads in the campaign, if they don't get a click through rate of more than 5%, something is going wrong. Like all of these things I keep into account. If we do get the web traffic but then they don't convert, then I always go back to doing the interviews with prospects. So then with sales, I pick out a few companies that fall in the target audience. I send messages. We always pay people for those interviews. So I literally contact people.

Speaker B: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Uh, let's dive deeper into this. So you pay people for participating in interviews. What it looks like, for example, you have these uh, 300 targeted companies. Are those people from one of these companies or they from similar. Okay. And yeah, please.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, they always are from the, they have to come from the list of accounts. Um, I look at the uh, job titles of people like, who really fall in like the heart of our audience. And I, I looked them up on sales navigator, LinkedIn, sales navigator and I sent them a message saying um, it, it helps that I'm, I work at an agency so I always tell them like uh, in exchange for a hundred euro voucher for any web shop of your liking, would you want to spend 30 to 45 minutes with me? Because I need, I'm looking for feedback. Um, the clients won't join and if you want you can be completely anonymous. So I don't even share your name with the uh, with the client. It's just sharing feedback. And in those conversations I always ask them about, you know, what problems are you perceiving when it comes to this topic. M. Are you currently already using a product? Um, and then I ask them to open the website or I ask them to open the advertisements and I say can you read out loud what you're looking at or can you explain to me how you would navigate through this page? Can you read this section for me and let me know if it resonates. Um, so that's how I get feedback. It's very, uh, qualitative feedback, if you will.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. It's such a great approach that you not making guesses, but just go to people who are relevant to you and just ask them. It's so good. It's so good.

Speaker A: And also internally, I think we've all written landing pages and then you share landing pages with your colleagues and then they say, uh, oh, you've wrote this. Really weird. I would write it like this, or this is not really what we do. You should change it. But now I have videos of prospects who say, yeah, I really don't understand what you say here. So it's like, it's also for internal reports. It works really well.

Speaker B: Michel, um, when you look back at all your work, uh, what was. Maybe you can recall some fuck ups or something that uh, went wrong in your work.

Speaker A: So one time for one client, we wanted to do a one on one, um, campaign. So one campaign to one company. And uh, I thought it was a really good idea. We made very good ads, or so I thought. I mean I wrote them, but they were very, you know, we went full in. So we told them, you know, you really need us, your technology is not, not good right now, you really need us, blah, blah, blah. And then we had this campaign running, um, and the mistake that we really made was we already knew them, but I wasn't really aware of this. So the sales team had already have connections with a few people in the organization. So they started to reach out to us saying, are you spamming us? Is this real? Is this a phishing attempt? And also like as a good or a best practice, I'd read somewhere like, you should also use the logos of the companies that you're targeting. So we used their logo in the ad and then we got a letter from them asking for money because we had violated the rules around using their logo.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So this whole campaign, like, I mean we were able to turn it around and the sales guy was able to make it into a joke. Like. Yeah, we just wanted to make sure that you remember that we existed. And then they, they were applied nicely. They say, oh, we remember.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: But yeah, so next time I always ask, okay, you want to get in touch with this organization, but do you already know people there or not? Because if you know people there, then it can get awkward. And I don't use logos anymore in the, uh.

Speaker B: You don't, you don't use. You don't use.

Speaker A: No. So we address them by name. So we would say hello organization, but we wouldn't use their logo. And also because they couldn't see right. Who we were targeting, so they thought that we were abusing their logo to appeal to other organizations.

Speaker B: So uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we were, we weren't.

Speaker A: But yeah, it was uh, it, it was awkward.

Speaker B: Yeah. And what was the biggest learning for you? Let's say in the, in, in the last one year or two years, could you recall something?

Speaker A: The biggest learning? Well, I do remember the Hallelujah moment when I first did a account based campaign on LinkedIn just to click through rates and the engagement rates were just so much higher than what I was used to. Yeah, I was like, oh my God, this actually works.

Speaker B: And when something is not working, uh, for you, for example, you see that um, these, um, how it's called warm up rate or response rate is lower than um, you expected. Uh, what are the main things you look into, uh, to make sure that you know, to fix, to fix the campaign?

Speaker A: That's a very good question and you should. Yeah, I think in general I've seen two problems occur. One is fixable, the other one isn't. So the fixable mistake is always the messaging is just not correct. Like you're assuming that organizations have a specific problem and they just don't have that problem or they don't perceive that problem. Um, so in that case the interviews always help to find this out the second problem, and that was one time when we were trying to target um, small and medium enterprises, um, in the manufacturing industry and they are just not on LinkedIn. So it was just not the right channel to target them. So the conversion rates were also extremely low and we were essentially where we're just wasting money. Um, because I did interviews and kind of the messaging kind of resonated. So then I decided like, okay, let's go full in and we do a message ad, advertisement campaign so we make 100% sure that all of those people actually read what we have to say. And even then the mess, the conversion was just so low. So we, it was just not the right channel that we were using.

Speaker B: And what was the solution in that case? In general, it's like if company doesn't have LinkedIn, what to do?

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, I don't think we found a perfect solution. One of the solutions that we had was we started visiting more events, but more like manufacturing events. So they weren't cybersecurity events, they were manufacturing event and that worked to get to meet the right people. Um, I still kind of wanted to test more on Instagram and LinkedIn and Facebook because I know that a lot of the manufacturing guys are on Facebook, but I never really found out how to best target them. So it's a problem that is still not 100% solved.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Michelle, we have covered a lot today. I think we have the whole playbook of how to start and where to go with abm. What would be one piece of advice, uh, from you to someone just exploring, uh, ABM to implement in their company?

Speaker A: Um, well, my piece of advice would be that you cannot do it alone as a marketing team. Like, you really have to do it together with your sales team. And that would be my one, uh, piece of advice, like talk to sales and make sure that you also buy into the idea and that you have like a good follow up to actually convert the accounts that you're making aware of your company's existence.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I would that pay, pay your potential customers to have interviews with you.

Speaker A: That is also like, that works really well.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Or at least, or at least ask them. Who knows, maybe, uh, people already have good relationships. Right. And they, they can just, they, they can just ask. Like on a serious note, this, um, very, very valid, uh, practice.

Speaker A: Yeah. I always say don't be afraid of your clients. They don't bite.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker A: Don't be afraid to ask. Like, people like talking about their job. So.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Start your own podcast and invite your potential customers. Right.

Speaker A: That is also a good idea. Yeah, absolutely. Give them something in exchange.

Speaker B: Yeah. Michel M. Thanks a lot for joining me today. It was a really great conversation. Uh, what is the best way for our listeners to connect with you?

Speaker A: Definitely on LinkedIn.

Speaker B: Perfect. Everything is, uh, in show notes. Uh, Michel, thank, uh, you very much and have, uh, a great rest of the day. Bye bye.

Speaker A: Thank you for having me. Bye. Bye.