S06.EP07 - Smarter Brand Growth: How to Align Marketing & Sales (with ABM/ABX) with Jennifer Mancusi

29:32Fire them all. Fire them all. No, I mean, maybe actually. Maybe if people can't get on board with a company strategy, then they're not a good fit for the company. I don't know. I guess I've never had a situation where maybe people don't start out an agreement, but they usually get there by the end if you involve them throughout the process. I guess maybe one tactic I would take is, and again, I think it depends on the culture, and some of this might depend on company size as well. But I believe in a culture of like experimentation and let the data show what works and what doesn't. So if at the end of a workshop or a strategy session, you kind of like still have a couple of camps like, hey, we think we should go this direction, we think we should go that direction.

30:25well maybe there's an experiment that you can play with and say let's let the data tell us where what direction we should go and maybe you can kind of like i mean for lack of a better term a b test it i wouldn't call it that because this is probably bigger than that but but let's try it let's see what works like i'm i'm not one to claim i know what's going to work for really anything i do let's put it out in the market let's try it if we agree at what success looks like we should know really quickly what we want to keep going with and what we want to turn off. And typically, data will be the decision maker if there's opinions that still differ.

31:04All right. So we've set the strategy. We've got the objectives. We've defined the customer profile. We've created the target account list. Next step. Well, I don't think we've quite built the list yet. So this is... Talk about the list. Yeah, it's own steps. So we've defined the profile, but building the list is actually quite hard. It's maybe easy if you're focused on expansion, because you'll probably have a pretty tight list of customers that fit with that profile where there's growth potential and you want to really focus the team on expanding them. When you're looking at new logos, it could be a little harder to define.

31:44It's easy to pull a list of a thousand companies you want to go after. It's really hard to create a list of 25, for example. And that's where I recommend you get started. No more than 25 companies when you're first embarking on an account-based strategy. I think this is where a lot of companies go wrong because we want to, as salespeople and revenue leaders and marketers, we want things that can scale, scale exponentially, but account, a true account-based strategy doesn't scale very well. You know, you can do sort of industry-based, you know, marketing efforts that are kind of like your content is tailored towards a specific industry, but like a true account-based strategy with really hyper-personalized content.

32:33I know there's a lot of AI out there that thinks it can do it. I think it will eventually. It can't yet. You got to start small. Otherwise, it's too resource heavy to create relevant content for too many companies. So my recommendation is to build that target account list to start with less than 25 accounts. Prioritize your ideal customers, of course, align with your sales and customer teams and make sure that everybody's on the same page about who those 25 accounts are. some companies, again, depending on your size and your resources and what you want to put behind this effort, you might start with one account and just sort of see what the process is to build that relevant content and then launch it and see what the results are.

33:17Now, if you're starting that small, I wouldn't can the strategy if it doesn't work right away. That's not enough data, but I have seen companies start there with just one at a time and then slowly build once they have some proof points and some examples of what works and what doesn't. You had some phrases there that you said like drive new logos. I hadn't heard that. Does that just mean like you're choosing the accounts and that's what you're like, that's what you mean by logos? Yeah, exactly. Like if you just have the, oh, we've always wanted to work with this company. They're a perfect fit by our ideal customer profile.

33:50We've never gotten them to engage with us. That's that new logo that we want to be on that target account list okay so it's just the the company company name more or less yeah exactly so and you know on that account list sorry jen another question you know at the start of this we were talking about the two tracks like maybe like new accounts new logos and existing would you jumble them all together in other words like hey or would you would you really focus on new ones or existing ones like to start with like for people yeah i think to your point earlier you said this, like, are the strategies different?

34:25Like they are a little different. So even though maybe some of the tactics would be similar, I would keep those on separate lists. You're going to have different success metrics, right? The success of growth of existing is very different from the success of building awareness amongst a new list of accounts. It doesn't mean you can't do them both at the same time if you have the resource to implement that, but I would definitely keep those lists separate and focus on them a little bit differently. Here's a tough question. If you had limited resources, which ones would you pick? Would you pick growing existing or targeting new?

34:58So that sort of depends on the ideal customer. Let's assume that you're working with global enterprise brands. I would focus on an expansion strategy. I think the customer acquisition cost, the revenue acquisition cost is significantly lower when you're growing existing companies as opposed to winning new business. Typically, the sales cycle is shorter as well. Again, especially if you're working with those big enterprise clients, you talked about it earlier, you know, we're, we're already an approved vendor, we're already through your procurement process, which typically takes 12 to 18 months, even just letting people know that, hey, we're an approved vendor, we work with your neighbor on the other cubicle over there, maybe you didn't know that that's going to be a shorter path to revenue than than building awareness and winning new business.

35:48So if you're very limited on resources and you're working with that profile of company, then I would definitely focus there. Now, if your customer profile doesn't have multiple buying centers, you know, you're really centralized, like you're in that client and that's all you can be in that client. There's not like another division that could buy your software or your services, then I would not focus there because, you know, it will be less impactful and you'll use a lot of resources on customers that don't have the growth potential to expand. So that kind of goes back to defining the profile of who you're going to be going after is whether or not there's, you know, are there 25 buying centers or is there one?

36:33And if you're already in the one, then probably wouldn't be the focus. right and another tactic you can use if you're doing that sort of expansion strategy is you can obviously use your current contacts to then expand across their buying centers so you know you you've got an in the door hopefully the door's open if you're doing a good job and the value is being created then it shouldn't be too hard for you to say hey do you know what like you know is there anyone else in your business we should be talking to because we'd love we love working with you and you know i'm pretty sure that we could probably offer some services to x department or x division And, you know, do you know anyone in that division that we should be talking to?

37:10So you almost get your contact, your relationship in that business to start doing some, you know, initial awareness for you before you even get there. So super smart. OK, so we've got we've got our list. Let's get into the next step. Yeah. So now this is probably the hardest part. And it's about creating personalized, hyper personalized, relevant content for that account. And so even as you were just describing like, oh, maybe you can use your contact to give you referrals. That could be something that you do, but maybe they want to work on the content with you or are willing to participate with you in creating that content.

37:50maybe you want to make a case study of the work that you've done together, or maybe they'd provide a testimonial. So oftentimes, especially in these big, huge enterprise companies, your main client might not actually know the other buyers in the other buying centers. They might know some of them, but not all of them. So would they be willing to be quoted? Would they be willing to work on a case study with you and just provide a little bit of social proof? That's great content to put in an account-based campaign that you might build. Another thing that I, this is my first step for building any account-based content, whether it's for new business or for expansion, is research.

38:31You have to research the company that you want to get into and understand what their priorities are. So this could be, you know, reading their latest earnings reports, sitting in on their shareholder meetings. like if you can go to someone and say, hey, I just heard your CMO talking about this being a priority for the year. How are you doing that? We can help you do that. Speak to them. This is why you have a list so small of 25 accounts because you have to put the resource and effort into creating content that actually speaks to them. So saying, hey, I care about you. I care enough about your business that I've done this research.

39:10I saw you just launched this new product. There's a new flavor of yogurt. how's that how'd that launch go how can i help you to do this better you know that type of content really really connects with people and in a world where it's difficult to cut through clutter from a marketing perspective this is the best thing you can do is reach people with something that they go oh my gosh yes that's exactly what i'm thinking about right now how did they know that Right. And it could be because you have a contact there that you're talking to. You've done the work to sit on that shareholder meeting or read that earnings report or just Google the business and see what's in the news about them, good or bad.

39:55I mean, I've had experiences where, you know, I found some some bad press. Maybe there was a bad ad that got some backlash and you go, hey, you know, this seems like a little bit of a PR crisis. I can help you with this. And when you reach people at the right moment with something that's really top of mind for them, they're a lot more likely to engage versus think of all the other things that are in their inbox or on their LinkedIn feed or just in the universe. It's, let me tell you about this cool feature I have and how great my tech is. Well, they're glossing right over that. So if you can interrupt that flow with something they really care about, like that's the goldmine right there.

40:34I'm so on board with that, Jen, because we get so many emails about coming on the podcast and the first line is always, I love your recent episode X. It really like X, it was just like a copy paste, like AI, not, they try to personalize it, but it's, you know, you can see through the BS. And when you get something that's actually personalized, like a video message that talks to your product or your problems, like it cuts through. And I'm going to get 50 videos of folks, Jacob. like yes check out my video i love that you know what i think even that can be done wrong and you then you put in a ton of effort and time into something that doesn't actually work like i've gotten videos where people say the thing that you just described in the email hey i saw that post that you did about marketing i i really enjoyed it all my posts are about marketing like be more specific let's have a conversation i want to hear that stuff from people and i want to connect and other people want that too.

41:32But you have to, like you said, you got to put in a little bit of effort to actually make a connection versus, and this is why I think that AI personalization stuff isn't quite there because that's what you're getting. Saw your episode about X. I thought it was Y. Cool. So did everybody else, right? So tell me you actually listened and you actually resonated with something and you actually can help me with a problem that I've articulated and I'm in. Exactly, exactly. Hello folks, Matt Davis here with a very special offer for just branders. Do you ever feel like you need a bit of extra wind in your sales as you navigate the crazy world of brand building?

42:14Well, my coaching services might be just what you're looking for. I'm offering one-to-one coaching with a very small select number of individuals to basically help inspire them to push them forward to share what I've learned over 20 plus years in the game. This coaching is particularly useful for you if you are thinking of going more into a consulting approach or if you want to learn more about strategy and how to offer it to your clients to really create high paying, high value work. But hurry, there's only a number of seats available and once they're full, they're full. So why not grasp this opportunity right now and get in quick.

42:58Head over to my website, mrmattdavies.me forward slash coaching and apply. We've now got some personalized content. What's next? So now you have to get it in front of people. So you could create content and it can just sit, but this is where you're back to that cross-functional collaboration and thinking about the different ways that you're going to drive people to a single location. So what I like to do is build a landing page that's dedicated for a single account. And the content that's on that landing page, it could be a video, it could be a case study, it could be quotes, it could be other logos of similar companies, some stuff about your service or your tech that is relevant to the problem that you've articulated, but some kind of all-encompassing landing spot page that we're driving people to from an, you know, omni-channel distribution perspective.

43:54So those different channels could be, you know, classic marketing, you know, email, nurture, LinkedIn, in-mail from your sales team, cold calls from your business development team. Maybe there's, maybe this is where a demand-based or a triblio comes into play. If you want to do targeted ad serving, you can get some of the way there on LinkedIn with paid ads, retargeting, website personalization, if you've got the tech for that. So even something like HubSpot will allow you to create a list of people. And when they hit your that only that list of people gets a particular pop up when they hit your website, drive people to that personalized content from all these different methods.

44:37So sometimes you're going to have all the people that you want in your CRM already. So maybe it's a heavier email strategy. Maybe you want to invite people to workshops or conferences or lunch and learns. This is a great strategy if you've got a contact that's willing to promote you internally. Maybe they want to set up a lunch and learn session and invite their colleagues to join you and hear you talk. That's a great way to do that. So, you know, think of all of the marketing tactics that are your favorites and throw them all together, marketing and sales and customer success tactics and drive people to that one location, you should have a call to action there that allows them to learn more or to meet with somebody when they're ready, but also like a transitional call to action that just gets them into your customer journey.

45:28So if they're getting there and discovering you for the first time, you give them just enough information that gets them excited, allow them to do a little bit more research or maybe download something or express some intent and also give them the opportunity to get in touch and actually book a meeting or something, whatever your process is, your sales processes to get them further down the funnel. But I think the key for me is once you've created that really hyper-personalized content, you put it in one spot and everybody in the organization who's involved in getting people there is getting people there in different ways.

46:03Nice. Are you doing this on an individual level, like per logo or brand that you're, or are you doing this in like a bulk or does that change depending on the size? I would recommend doing it on an account level because if you've got some like incredible, you know, I'll give you an example. I, you know, one of the companies that I worked for in the past where I was CRO, we were, you know, a video survey platform. And so we captured a bunch of videos from consumers about their opinions on a particular product. It was a product we knew was important to this business because we listened to their shareholder call and this was a big focus for them.

46:41And then we said, hey, we've got some videos from consumers talking about this product. Come take a look and see what you think. The video snippet was maybe 90 seconds or two minutes. And we said, we actually have 30 minutes of this content to share with you. It can't by its nature be broadly applicable to multiple businesses. To do it right, to actually get people excited about talking to you. It's got to be hyper personalized. And then we had, you know, our business development team, you know, cold emailing and cold calling with that message. We had marketing serving ads through LinkedIn to people that fit the ideal profile.

47:20And we had our, you know, our client team talking to our contacts about, you know, hey, would this be something you'd be willing to send to anybody on your side? And, you know, or are you interested in it? And through that, you know, there's exponential growth potential by getting people interested in something that they're really interested in. So even better, if you have a product or service that you can actually demonstrate what they're going to get within the marketing content, oh, that's even better. Not everybody has that, right? It depends on what your offering is. So if you've got that, leverage that as well.

47:55Give them a little taste of what they're going to get by working with you so that they, you know, they want to learn more. All right. And at what point are you measuring, tracking, tweaking throughout this process? Yeah, I think that has to happen all the time. There's certain metrics that you can track really short term. If you're running ads, right, I would measure and optimize your ads just the same way as you would any paid ad strategy. So pretty regular look at engagement metrics and testing different creative and that sort of thing. So that could be a daily or weekly effort, maybe a lead generation or number of MQLs that needs to be more weekly opportunities, maybe monthly revenue, monthly and quarterly.

48:44So it kind of depends on the metric, but I think everything should be looked at, you know, kind of all the time to make sure it's working. And the other thing is like watching for the content to decay because it will, right? If you're reaching a sort of short, a small group of people after a month or six weeks or so, the engagement metrics are going to start to go down. So you want to be able to identify that, hey, this was working for a bit. It's kind of starting not to work a little bit. So what's the next phase of that communication? If you have that ready to go beforehand, great. And you can kind of build a sequence of content that goes on for a little while.

49:26Or maybe it's more timely and it's more based on immediate research and kind of saying, oh, let's see, is this company talking about anything new? or maybe one of their leadership did a session at South by Southwest and they talked about something that you want to incorporate, right? There's so many things you can be monitoring to keep the content fresh. But if you're checking those performance metrics, the engagement metrics pretty much daily, then you'll know that moment where, hey, we need to kind of change it up a little bit. But I wouldn't recommend just turning it off and saying, okay, we're done with that client, right?

50:02If that's your number one top target account, they're still your number one top target account. So thinking creatively about how you can, you know, keep it fresh and keep the keep the content exciting and interesting and engaging until you hit that revenue goal. Maybe that client has a$500 ,000 revenue goal. So you work until you get there. At what point would you like stop or like, when do you know to move on to the next account? I think if you're not getting really any engagement, if you're not even getting people to the content, then there's probably something wrong. Maybe it's the target list.

50:40Maybe it's the channel. I think this is where tools like SparkToro that I mentioned earlier are really helpful because the profile of your target or your prospect, they might not exist on LinkedIn. Maybe they're spending a lot of time on Reddit and you've never done an AMA on Reddit. So I think watching that, like if you're not getting any engagement, you're in the wrong place, right? Most likely figuring out how to get in front of the right people in the right place. I think you might turn it off if you are working with your sales or customer team and they're like, hey, we're getting people on the phone.

51:17We're getting people excited and interested, but it's the wrong people or they don't have the authority to buy. We thought they would. So maybe there's a problem with your ideal customer profile at that point. Yeah, I think those are kind of the reasons that you would turn it off. but I wouldn't say it's much different from really any other marketing strategy. You've got to, if you have done a good job at the beginning of saying, this is what success looks like. If you're not being successful, it's time to either optimize or cut it. So maybe if you've got several of these campaigns running at once, that could be another reason to turn it off.

51:55If you see a lot of traction with one and you want to invest more resource and more money in the success of that one that's really flying, then maybe you want to cut some of the bottom 10 % or whatever's not working quite as well, just to free up resources to do more with something that is, that could be another reason to turn something off. Love that.

52:25So I think that that's got us through the seven steps, right? That was six. The distribution strategy is six and measure and scale is seven. So yes, that's, I guess, what we were just talking about on the measurement is tracking the metrics that matter along the way, making sure you're optimized for conversion. and eventually... The scaling part we haven't necessarily tucked into, let's say it's working really well and you've landed a few logos. Like how do you just, do you keep just adding to it or like what do you, it's the process? Yeah, I would just keep adding accounts to your target list until you've maximized, I guess.

53:09Yep. The thing I wouldn't do to scale is say, okay, now we're going to do something. We're going to do like industry-based content. You're diluting the account-based strategy immediately. That's not to say that industry-based content doesn't work. Super effective. It's not account-based marketing. It's not account-based strategy. It's a different pillar, isn't it, of a strategy? Totally, totally. So if you've got an account-based strategy that's working and you want to scale it, keep it account-based. That's my recommendation. And I say this because I did this wrong. I was running account-based strategies with specific accounts and said, we are resource constrained.

53:53We can't do any more of this hyper-personalized content. Let's try to do industry-based. And kind of fell flat a little bit. Worked okay, but not great. Not the way the account-based strategy was working. So I thought, okay, well, what if we actually selected the specific accounts within those industries? So say it was, we had an alcoholic beverage campaign that we wanted to run. We chose the top, I think it was 75 global, you know, alcohol brands to target within that. It was still not personalized enough to have the same effect as the account-based strategy. So we went back to an account, a true account-based strategy.

54:38So again, I think that industry-specific content could be very effective. I think it's better than really broad content. If you're starting from a space where everybody's getting everything, then maybe you do want to try industry-based content, but that level of personalization doesn't get to the specific goals and challenges of those accounts that you really care about the most. And again, if you like, I wouldn't recommend this if your target accounts are maybe like really small companies or ones that, you know, don't have a lot of growth potential, but you're working with these big enterprise global businesses, you know, it's winning one could help you meet your goals for the year as if you're a salesperson, right?

55:26Like maximizing that one account could help you hit your quota for the year. So focusing all of, or a good portion of your energy and resources on that one is actually more effective than, you know, just sort of trying to spray and pray to everybody. And I think the market that we're in right now, people expect more personalized content and more personalized experiences, because there's a lot of fluff. And there's a lot of a lot of people saying the same thing, right so if you can say something really unique and really personalized i think it has a much better effect so that's my my rant on scaling i think scaling means adding more accounts not trying to actually scale abm or abx i guess i guess you get a bit of an engine going as well right like you start to learn what is working what's not working in your industry for your product or service in your sector with your team right because you might find someone's got a particular nose to sniff out like you were saying like some of those really intricate details about that business and and so you can you can deploy the people the resources and the attention where you know where you know it starts to work and i suppose the temptation is always to try and go broader but as you say that's not an account-based strategy that's that's you know that's another that's another story for another time i imagine so cool look i had one other quick question before we start to wrap, do you incentivize people within this?

56:49I mean, do you see sort of more, you know, traditional sort of, you know, sales targets with bonuses attached and, you know, that kind of stuff? Like what's your sort of thoughts on incentivizing teams throughout this whole kind of thinking? Yeah, that's a great question. I think salespeople are going to have commissions and bonuses as part of their comp package. I think that it's important to incentivize them to sell to ideal customers. So regardless of if you have an account based strategy, I think it helps with net revenue retention and churn rates if you incentivize your sales team on ideal customer beyond just selling any revenue that might come through.

57:27So that's one thing. And yeah, if you want to incentivize on those top target accounts, then yeah, great. Though I don't know that it's necessary. I think that typically when I've implemented this and gotten sales teams on board with it, the value is that they sell more anyways. So they don't necessarily need to be additionally incentivized. You know, I guess more broadly, I would, I don't cap commissions, and I wouldn't recommend capping commissions. And I would put accelerators in place for people over 100 % of their quota. And maybe that's part of that incentive that, hey, if you adopt this strategy and you work with us on this and we all work together on it, everybody's going to make more money.

58:14And usually that's enough incentive for people to get on board. And I think, you know, sales, marketing is always looking for more collaboration with sales. Sales is always looking for more support and collateral and content for marketing. So this is a great way to kind of create that environment where that's going to happen. And last question, you said you had some lessons learned, you know, going a bit broad before. Do you have any other lessons from the trenches that you'd like to share? So some of the lessons learned, definitely on the scaling side of things, which I already mentioned. So don't try to scale too quickly with account based strategy, because you'll you won't be able to invest in the content the way that you really need to, to be effective.

58:57I think not mapping out the customer journey effectively. And I think I might have touched on this, you know, serving the wrong content at the wrong part in the customer journey. That's a mistake as well. So making sure that you're still thinking about your core marketing principles of like, what's the type of content that someone would need when they're first engaging with you? What's that like, you know, that second touch that they would need and sort of building that social, like build the story. You don't have to give everybody everything all at once, right? But follow those same core principles.

59:31And then I think one other thing to be mindful of, specifically, if you're working on an expansion strategy, is to make sure that you're working closely with your contact at that company and let them know about your efforts and the work you're doing. If you are, I have had this happen to me before, where you're doing targeted ad serving at a particular company and the your contact goes hey like what is this where did this come from you know I didn't know this was happening or sometimes people will see ads and they think everybody in the world can see it even if it's targeted at a specific company so it's good to like make sure you're on the same page with your clients and you don't want to you know create any any challenges with those clients that you're working with and and let them know hey i'm this case study that we worked on together this is only going to be for other internal abc company people right they're the only ones that are going to see it here's how we're going to do that that open communication i think is really important so you don't rub anybody the wrong way when they see their logo on an ad or on linkedin or or on your website um and think hey everybody's seeing this and they if they don't understand the way you're doing your targeting So that's another thing to be conscious of, especially, and maybe not even just with customer expansion, but again, the importance of working cross-functionally with your sales team.

1:00:57If somebody's got an opportunity that they're pretty far down the funnel with, make sure that they are aware that you have these efforts in place so that it doesn't mess up an opportunity for new revenue that one of your teammates has worked really hard on. So I think some people still don't necessarily understand the way ad targeting works or the way personalization works. And it's complex, right? It's not easy to understand. So making sure that people are aware and on the same page. And maybe you even need approvals, right? If you're using somebody's logo or using somebody's likeness or a quote or something, you want to make sure you get your proper approvals because these are your most important accounts that you care about the most.

1:01:42you definitely don't want to put them at risk. Amazing. Good stuff. Well, look, we've covered an awful lot there. I'm sure there's even more we could probably dive into if we had time. But sadly, we're going to have to kind of come to a close on this. And Jen, it has been an absolute honor and super amazing to have you on. Thank you so much for sharing all of that knowledge. But before we close, how can folks, if they did want to find out more, get in touch with you, follow you, understand more about what you do? Where did we find you? Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn as with the rest of us. Jennifer Mankusey on LinkedIn.

1:02:18You can go to growgetter.io to check out our website. We have our own podcast, Marketing Demystified. You can listen to me and hear my old episode with Matt Davies featured a couple of months ago. So yeah, hopefully I'll hear everybody there. Amazing. Definitely don't listen to that one. There's plenty of other better stuff on that podcast. But no, amazing having you on. Thanks so much. We really appreciate it. And folks, you know, I hope you enjoyed the show today. Get account-based, everything. Get going with it. See you later. Thank you very much. Bye.