SPECIAL GUEST!! Steve Armenti 🚫 Your "ABM" Is Just Cold Email | Ep. 548

0:01Welcome to Do This, Not That, the podcast for marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for Do This, Not That, and we have a guest who is very awesome. He's an incredible human being. So who do we got here? We have Steve Armenti, who you may follow on LinkedIn because he's a big deal. So this guy has had a wild career. First of all, he ran a lot of demand gen at Google for like a zillion years. That's a hard job running demand gen at Google, right?

0:39He's been ranked the number one ABM expert in 2026 right now. And he's helped to build pipeline of over$2 billion, $2 billion. I can't even get$2 ,000 of pipeline. That is wild. He's the founder of an agency called 12th agency and he's really all about abm and attribution and ai slop getting rid of it and all the things so we're going to dig into it all fired up that he's here steve welcome to the show man thanks jay wow i i'm uh i'm so grateful to be here i want to take that clip and maybe put that on my website because it's so damn good all right well before we get into like everything about you know your your take on what's working with abm what's working with like how to get people in pipeline and stuff.

1:21What did I miss? What that what do you actually do for a living? Yeah. So, I mean, that's a great question for a living these days. I would say I'm helping clients figure out ABM in all that means. Right. And so if you follow, you know, best practices, there's, you know, there's one to one ABM, there's one to few, there's one to many. That's all been disrupted by AI and the access to tools and data we have now. And so companies that are selling large ticket, high ACV deals to the Fortune 1000 is where ABM plays well. And so they're either navigating how to set that up properly, or they're navigating how to modernize it with AI and a lot of technology today.

2:05And so that's pretty much the day-to-day is figuring that out, right? And I have a team of really senior strategic folks that help bring it to life in the day-to-day. But my job is like what's what's going on in abm three months from now one year from now that's what i'm thinking about all right so let me jump in there for a second question so everybody out there is listening like i know what abm is right well if you don't we're talking about account based marketing you have a set of accounts of these companies that you want to get business from and that's who you're marketing to that's who you're doing all your outbound stuff whatever and i got to be honest of course i do a lot of abm stuff but when i hear abm the first thing that comes to mind is cold email.

2:45We're just going to set, you know, get a bunch of these cold emails that we don't have permission or whatever on, and we're going to send out a zillion emails. And that's when I think of an ABM program, that's what I think of. Is that still the current state of the union? Is that still how brands are doing ABM or is that a thing of the past? So two things. One, that phrase there is the bane of my existence. And I'm actively trying to dispel that everywhere I go. And the second thing is, so one thing that's happened in the market around ABM is that smaller, ambitious, you know, startup scale up type companies caught on to this idea of ABM because they all want to sell larger deals as well.

3:30And they said, we're going to run ABM. And then in parallel to that, you had a bunch of offshore agencies and, you know, micro consultants type folks that say, I do ABM for startups. startups. And in my mind, that is completely contradictory. You cannot do ABM for startups because the complexity that real true ABM requires. And so what happened is a lot of these companies flooded the market with these services and they'll say, Hey, we will build you an account list. We'll go scrape contacts off of zoom info, clay, um, you know, whatever tool you want to use. And then we will start sending them personalized messages and that's your ABM.

4:11And so like on the surface, that sounds pretty good. But when you pull back the curtain, all that is, is cold email. And that is a hundred percent not, you know, not ABM. We can, we can get into that and I can, I can rant for hours about how terrible of an idea that is, but yeah, that's, that's what's happening. And so right now there's, there's folks that, you know, really practice ABM. They're ABM experts and practitioners. They work at companies like Snowflake, Red Hat, you know, big enterprises at Laceon, they're running true ABM, right? And these programs produce hundreds of millions and billions of dollars in pipeline.

4:46And that's where I came from on the Google side. And then you've got this whole other world of startups that are trying to apply ABM to companies that are selling a few thousand dollar ARR deals. And it just doesn't work. The economics will never work for you. So, okay. If the idea of true cold email is a little bit of a relic, which I'm pro that it's a relic because it kind of annoys the crap out of me. Demand gen is getting hard. I mean, is it now, is the move to generate, you know, this inbound opportunity, just create a bunch of AI slop and it's all about quantity and not quality. And then the phones are going to ring or is that like, how do we actually generate demand without the cold email garbage?

5:29Yeah, it is getting really hard. And I personally have been on the front lines of it, right. And, you know, on the 12th agency, we've set up cold email programs. We've set up, you know, ad programs, email lifecycle programs. We've done it for startups all the way to multibillion dollar enterprises. And so we've had a front row seat to watching the decline of these channels because it's not just cold email. What I think is happening is that, you know, two things. One, where the channels are getting more crowded. So there are more and more companies being started. Every AI company on the planet right now has a distribution problem.

6:07They maybe have a good product, maybe they don't. They're trying to find product market fit. And once they do, the next thing their investors say is distribution, right? Go hire a growth leader and start pumping your product out there. So everybody's flooding into demand gen, trying to generate demand. And that's having an impact on the economics in these channels where I've been looking at some data that shows the rising acquisition cost in B2B on Google Ads, for example, as a channel, the rising cost on LinkedIn. in. And then in parallel, looking at the declining performance of cold email, you know, open rates, reply rates are dropping 50 plus percent year over year, because again, everybody's flooding to it.

6:52And then the other element, which is, you know, a bit contrarian right now is that AI is making it worse. So it is incredibly easy right now for an offshore GTM engineer to build a list, set up instantly, set up outbound email infrastructure, mailboxes, DNS, all that stuff, automate some messages. You can even personalize them with cloud code. I've seen some good personalization, but then just basically relentlessly blast those messages to thousands and thousands of people, which you think like, oh, that sounds good. Like unit economics means if I email 15 ,000 people, I should get a few opportunities out of it.

7:32Where early last year, that was true. Now it's not because you have that other factor of everybody's doing it. And so, you know, the person that really suffers from this is actually the buyer. Like it's the end buyer who's going to suffer because they're getting bombarded with all of this slop. And, you know, I just, I think creativity has been lost in demand gen and amongst all those other factors, that's kind of the recipe for why it's so hard right now. So I, first of all, I agree with everything you're saying. And my hot take on all things is that when we actually do get people to fill out a form, to maybe call inbound, to do whatever, we are, I think as a companies in general are slow to focus on those people.

8:16And yet if somebody sends like a nasty unsubscribe, take me off your list, why are you emailing me? All this energy and meeting time goes to, oh my God, we have people that are upset over here do is there an intentionality of your clients and people that you're working with about inbound and phone calls and form fills like is that something you have to like make sure everyone's focused in on it and like how do you do that yeah you know i think that is is true you know where you know outbound had its moment last year and then i think inbound inbound brand PR is now having its return moment after that, because all of those tactics were abused.

8:55And so folks realized quickly, or some are still realizing that it doesn't work. And so I think, you know, one of the ways I think about inbound is value creation. So if you want inbound, you need to create value. Otherwise, there's no reason for someone to come to your website, right? And so, you know, even though I kind of bash on these channels frequently, oftentimes what I find is that it's not the channel, it's the purpose, it's the means, it's the intention behind the channel, right? And so if you're, for example, just, you know, running that workflow, I mentioned of like clay plus instantly in cloud code, and you're, and you're sending thousands and thousands of emails a month, and you've personalized based on the same template that everyone else is, which, which is basically, hi, I noticed something, here's what my product does, would you like to book a demo?

9:44That's not creative. There's no ingenuity there. There's nothing unique about that and so it's not going to perform well whereas where i have seen these channels work is when you offer something of value whether that's in you know an audit or an invitation to a webinar invitation to join a podcast or um some of the things we're doing now around one-to-one experiences is super unique and so the the channel can work but what you put into the channel is becoming more and more important. And then how you, you know, distribute and really like compound that message across all your channels is ultimately what we see work, right?

10:23So it's more full funnel across multiple buyers. And that's, I think what the promise of ABM is when you can get that right. So how do you measure that? I mean, I know that's a loaded question, but everyone's saying, you know, not everyone, sometimes I say attribution is garbage. And even though it's not, I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth, because I feel like sometimes it's hard to get your arms around real attribution. I mean, how do you measure attribution? Yeah, that's the question. And it's such a loaded gun on LinkedIn, right? The pro attribution, anti attribution. I probably fall somewhere in the middle where we actually have a unique attribution model called account progression, where we're actually measuring or we're indexing the accounts that we're targeting.

11:12So let's say there's 100 accounts that we're targeting in a program. We actually look granularly in the behavioral data at the account level over time. So we can see our people from that account and therefore that account in general moving towards a lower funnel sales type conversation. And there are some pretty good tools out there. We do a lot with data analytics and tool called CallRail, which can do inbound call attribution tracking, which is pretty cool. And so collates all the data for you. So like we might pull a signal from that that says, oh, you know, somebody from this company or this person called in the other day and it was after hours.

11:55And so you missed that call. But we now have a signal that something's going on, like, you know, with that person or within that that business. And so we like tie that back to the account progression model. And then when you're you know, when you're doing this right and you have ads firing, you have events going on, you've got, you know, media, you've got emails going out and you're tracking web visits. Now, all of a sudden, demand gen becomes a function of generating signals. And if you track those signals properly, you can get a pretty good sense of what's happening with your buyers and the companies you're targeting.

12:30And then you can action off of that. And so there's a whole model around it. There's scoring involved. And as you move accounts from high funnel to low funnel, you can predict and orchestrate next steps. And, you know, to me, that's kind of the future of marketing, right? It's a lot more science now with AI, but we can't forget about the art. We can't forget about the brand and the creative side. Well, I see. I love the fact you talked about inbound signals and using cool tools like CallRail, which I'm obviously a big fan of. I always talk about them. And the reason I'm happy you're talking about the signals is I think there's so much energy at brands, business brands, consumer brands.

13:07It doesn't matter about negativity, meaning, like I talked about, nasty unsubscribes. or we need to figure out how to wake the dead. How do we get people that have not opened or clicked or done something in six months or 12 months or whatever, how do we get them engaged? And there's all these endless meetings and discussions and whatever, how do we get these people that are not really invested in what we're doing that don't care about what we're doing to get involved? And then there's not as much time spent on, how about our new customers? How about the people that just signed up? How about we focus on the people who give a crap about what we're doing?

13:37So when you talk about signals, is that's coming from such a positive mindset. And speaking of positive mindset, before we run out of time on this thing, give me some rapid fire, quick tips and tactics on, here's how you should be using AI. Here's something else you shouldn't be doing with ABM. Whatever it is that the Steve Armenti secret to life is, hit us with what you got. Ooh, okay, secret to life. I'm still figuring that out. I just turned 40. And so this is my decade to figure that out. But on the professional side, I would say there's a few key concepts. And one is I used this phrase a while ago on LinkedIn.

14:19I called it first draft marketing. And this applies to AI. Do not do first draft marketing. And I'll explain what this is, which is you have a problem. Your boss asks you to do something. Your peer asks you to do something. Like you get an input, right? And I think the habit today is, oh, let me take that transcript. Let me take my notes. Let me just drop it into AI. AI is going to give me something back. And then I run with it. That's a first draft. That is a horrible idea. And you need to, one, curate the context way better. Just a transcript with no other context about your role, your company, your market, your ICP, your problems.

15:00That's not enough context to get a good output out of AI. So you need to be ruthless with the context. And then I think you need to be ruthless with the editing. And if you tackle those two things, I think you can get a lot of good output out of AI. All right. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Keep going. Oh, I'll say that's one. I'll give you one other fun one, which we're doing a lot of right now is point AI behind the scenes. So AI rampantly, in my opinion, ruined the sales process for B2B. If I don't know when the last time you bought software, Jay, is but like if nowadays there's there's no humans involved, like you're getting on the phone, you're maybe talking to an agent who's asking you a bunch of questions and running a band or like medic process on you.

15:42And then you maybe you're actually genuinely interested and you get an automated email like the whole thing's automated. And, you know, as as a former corporate buyer and now I buy little tools and stuff for the agencies, I hate it. And so we point AI behind the scenes and we do it at the research level, at the scoring level, at the insight level, so that then you can enable actual humans to go and sell to other humans. But yeah, we could go on and on. I would love to hear what you think. All right. Well, more important than all this stuff. So you just turned 40. I just turned 50. So I can tell you about the 40s.

16:15But I want to know. So you hit this big milestone, right? Because I just did it when I turned 50. When you turned 40, were you like, okay, now on the personal level, you're like, now I'm going to bungee jump and skydive and, you know, go touch grass. Like, what did you decide you had to start doing when you hit this milestone? So I'll go personal here for a bit. I think for a long time I got lost in my career as my identity. So, you know, when I worked at Google, I mean, that was the biggest accomplishment of my life. And I loved it. I loved the people there. I still love that company and what they stand for.

16:50But it wrapped me up. It became my identity. And I lost track of actually living, right? And like having hobbies and doing things that are not B2B marketing. And so I went like way too deep on that side. And now hitting 40. And I've been on this thought journey for the last two years. is, and one of the reasons why I wanted to work for myself and be a founder was, man, the things that are important to me, like in this order is like my health, my wife, my kids, and like going on vacation and having fun with them. Like that's, that's the priority. And I'm, and I'm orienting everything else in my life around that.

17:29And I've found, you know, that's my North star. I'm like, that's what keeps me happy. That's what brings me joy. And it also fires me up. Like I get motivated to go to work because I'm, you know, I'm doing this for other people. Oh, well, first of all, I wish I would have figured it out when I was 40. I'm starting to figure it out now that I'm 50. And then my son, who's 20, said, Dad, you're closer to 100 than zero. I go, you can also shove it. You're like, hey, I'm still stronger than you. I can still beat you to wrestling, man. Meanwhile, he can like outlift me easily and I'm not that strong.

18:02I go, I don't care how much you lift. I will kick your butt for the rest of your life. Yeah, that's what they do. But everybody should follow Steve. All right. Steve Armenti on LinkedIn, A-R-M-E-N-T-I on LinkedIn, 12th agency. The guy shares incredible content. We're going to put it all in the show notes. Steve, what else do you want to tell everybody about you and tell everybody why you're awesome? Yeah, thanks, man. I go to my LinkedIn, you know, decide for yourself if I'm awesome or not. But I'll leave you with one thing that we've been doing a lot of, which has just It's been a blast is these signal-based one-to-one experiences.

18:37And so we're deeply researching prospects and then we're curating experiences. So kind of like gifting, but think, you know, rounds of golf, ceramics classes, sushi making classes, at home chefs, driving Ferraris around, you know, sports tracks and stuff. And I'm so fired up about it. Like our clients are thriving with it. And I would encourage anybody to think about that. Think about how you can bring more human back into your marketing. We're doing a ton of it and it's working. Love it. Love it all. All right, Steve, man. Appreciate you being here. Likewise. Thanks, Jay. Wait, don't go anywhere.

19:15There's two really important things I want to tell you. First off, my book is out. Stupider people have done it. And I don't know how, but this book has made it to the USA Today bestseller list, one of the top books in the entire country. Now, all net author proceeds are going to the V Foundation for Cancer Research. And between this book and things that we're doing, we've now donated$130 ,000 in the fight against cancer. If you buy this book, if you buy the Kindle, the audio on Amazon, on Barnes and Noble, anywhere, money is going to fight cancer. We need your help. Please grab a copy of Stupider People Have Done It.

19:52The second thing is I want to work with you. I want to amplify your brand. I want my agency to help you get more customers, more subscribers, more whatever. I want to partner with you in so many different ways. All you got to do is go to jschwedelson.com. jschwedelson.com. And then there's a button in the upper right-hand corner that says partner. Fill out that form. Let's work together. Let's do stuff. And if this wasn't the worst podcast you've ever heard, it would be amazing if you follow the show, if you leave a comment, if you tell your friends about it. I appreciate you and go out there and crush it.

20:25Thank you.