ABM That Works: 4 Marketers Show Their Best Campaigns

0:00Dasha, remember when McKeel from Optimizely won our Exit 5 live AI agent showcase? The 2000 custom landing pages? That was really impressive. So he's their director of AI innovation and he built them with Optimizely's agent platform, one for every account in an ABM campaign. He built them from signals like job postings, press releases, and leadership changes. That's like the holy grail of ABM. That's why today's sponsor, Optimizely, is where I'd point anyone who wants to know what AI agents can do for marketing. Their agent platform is built specifically for B2B marketers. Build your own agents or pull from a directory of 50 plus prebuilt ones.

0:35They also launch virtual teammates. These are digital team members that learn over time, can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your website optimized. Why do I need to go to work? Let me get those. Okay, I need one of those. Same. Being asked to look into AI agents, which I know a lot of you listeners are right now, go check out Optimizely. Put them at the top of your list and you can go build cool stuff just like Mikheel did. Check them out at optimizely.com slash exit five. Hey, quick shout out to Webflow, who is also sponsoring today's episode. Their team actually ran one of the highest rated workshops at Drive this year, which is our big annual conference.

1:11People raved about that one. Guy, their chief evangelist, really knows AEO, and he shared a ton of advice on turning your website into an ongoing revenue driver. And that matters a lot right now, right? AI is cutting into organic traffic. I don't go to Google and search anymore. I'm talking to my AI agents all day long. So AI is cutting into organic traffic and buyers, just like you and me, are using AI to make purchase decisions about 95 % of the time. Webflow, they're a great team to follow on this. More than 300 ,000 brands, can you believe that, build on their platform. It helps you get discovered in AI search, build fully custom sites without a developer, govern your content, and see how agents read it all in one place.

1:48And they just launched Webflow campaigns. Agents help you write a campaign brief from your brand system, then generate on-brand landing pages and matching ads together. Check it out at webflow.com slash exit-5 and make your website your biggest growth engine in 2027. That's webflow.com slash exit-5. You're listening to the Exit 5 Podcast.

2:22Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here. It is every other Friday in my books. I'm in Vermont, which is a small state in the northern eastern region of the United States. I'm here. My name is Dave Gerhardt. I'm the founder of Exit 5. I'm here with my co-host, Dasha. We do these every other Friday. It's called Exit 5 Live. And the whole goal here is to give you something that you can actually take back to your job. So not fluff, like specific examples from real marketers doing the work because I think right now it's harder to separate the signal from the noise. That's our job at Exit 5. We've done a bunch of different topics today.

2:56We're switching gears from AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI to ABM. We're going to talk about ABM that works. We have four marketers here that are going to show their best campaigns live. Dasha, how are you doing? How's everything? I'm good. I just moved homes, so I'm surrounded by boxes and this very, very bland background. So hopefully two Fridays from now will see me in a different environment. But I'm in Ontario, a province on the other side of the border from you, Dave. All right. Hey, that's right. Just make sure you take the right when you get here, take the right border. You're VP of marketing. You're in the seat right now.

3:27What do you know about ABM? Yeah, actually, we run an ABM program at Proton where I work and it's going really well. I'm a big fan of ABM and I'm very excited to hear these plays. I'm sure there's going to be something that I can take back to our team. But I think for anyone that knows who they want as customers, ABM is a no-brainer. And that's our world. I love this topic because I think a lot of times it's the one thing that really, you know, so much of what we talk about, it's like, how do you get marketing and sales on the same page? And ABM does that unifying sales and marketing producer Maria, who this, her first show today, I'm going to shout her out, embarrass her head producer.

4:03Marissa is out right now, which is great. Taking a well-earned vacation producer Maria is behind the scenes today filling in. And so we got a great show. She's already in my ear, like enough of the BS, let's get going. So before we get into this ABM session today, I just want to give a quick shout out to Vector for sponsoring this session. If you run ABM, let me know if this sounds familiar. You pick the accounts, map the channels, get budget approved, and then launch. But then somewhere in the middle, it stalls. You're not sure which accounts to prioritize. Sales isn't bought in. Personalization is hard to scale.

4:30And by the time you act on a buying signal, the moment has passed. And when your CRO asks what it actually drove, you can't prove any of it worked. That would never happen, obviously, right? If that's you, your ABM strategy probably isn't the problem. It's the system underneath it. And that's what Vector fixes. Instead of targeting job titles and hoping the right person sees your ad, Vector blends contact level signals, transparently scores every account, puts your ads in front of the buying committee and proves that they moved pipeline. This is ABM that finally works the way that you thought it would.

4:57And if you want to see how your program stacks up, check out Vector's new report. It's called The Reality of ABM. They surveyed over 200 marketers running ABM to find where programs break down. It's in the resources tab on your screen. We'll drop the link in there. check it out, The Reality of ABM. Speaking of ABM surveys, we love data, a little data here at Exit 5. And we did a little poll before this. We got a little survey data of our own. Dasha, what did we learn about the folks here and what they're doing with ABM? Yeah, just call me Data Dash Reporting Live. I like that. Data Dash. Data Dash.

5:28Okay, so we surveyed a bunch of you guys, 614 marketers to be precise. And I mean, the good news is that a lot of you are here to learn about ABM. The bad news is that only 9 % of marketers can actually prove that their ABM strategy is working. So that's what today is all about, getting more people in that 9%, growing that slice of the pie. Yeah. You're in the chat right now. If you didn't participate in this survey, but you feel this, like only, is this true? Only not? Can you prove ABM is working in your company right now? We'd love to get your quick reaction there. Then we have this next piece of this, which was interesting.

6:02If you just want to hit us the next slide. So how did the 9 % judge whether ABM works or not? Obviously, it's pipeline, right? But I think this is interesting because we were only measuring this only did this generate pipeline or not. And I think so much of us know out there, there's a lot more nuance to the effectiveness of marketing other than like, did this, can you directly show that this podcast episode drove pipeline? So there's a lot we're going to get into today. I'm excited. Dasha, kick us off. Tell us what to expect today. And we're going to get into it. We're minutes away from getting into this today.

6:32So give us the overview, please. Let's do it. Okay. So first, we're going to introduce our four ABM marketers, Rapid Fire. Then each marketer is going to get seven minutes to walk through their ABM play. And what I love about this session is that every marketer here has a very different take on ABM and a very different tactic that you're going to learn, which is awesome. We're going to spend some time on Q &A with each presenter. So if you have specific questions, please, please drop them in the chat or the Q &A box and we will get to them. and then my favorite part as someone who's very competitive, we're going to pick a winner.

7:07So the ABM play that you're stealing and bringing back to your team, you're going to vote for that person and they are going to get, Dave, what are they going to get? The world famous, the now world famous Exit 5 trophy, which is actually making its way around the internet. So for a while, people didn't believe this is real, but we do. We send you a trophy. Dan actually hand engraves these in his office in Arizona because we believe in doing things that don't scale. There's Logan who won, I think the last one. Molly from Customer.io won that. Plus featured in the newsletter, bunch of social love, all the fame and glory.

7:41And hey, one last thing, this is a little bit different format. We've been doing a bunch of these more rapid fire. Just wanna show you that we're listening. A bunch of the feedback was like, wow, that was really good, but I want more. It was almost too fast. And so that's why today we have four speakers, seven minutes. We're gonna get deeper into these ABM tactics for you. So let's say hi to our speakers for today, please. All right. Okay. So let's meet our speakers, our seven minutes in ABM heaven. We've got Joycey. Joycey, why don't you introduce yourself and give us like one teaser of your play?

8:11Hi, my name is Joycey. I do account-based marketing at Snowflake, and I'll be talking about scaling one-to-one customized personalized videos. So super excited to chat about that. Awesome. Jordan. Hey, everyone. I am Jordan Voskel. I work for a company called Amsov. I'm our head of marketing. What I'm going to share today is a little bit different. It's flipping ABM around where it's starting with no plan and building a plan as we go. And it's more of a one-to-one ABM rather than more of a one-to-many programmatic approach. Jen. Hi, guys. I'm Jen Lever. I'm the senior director of DemandGen at Recurly.

8:48And my theme for today's campaign is a wake the dead approach, which I think is very appropriate considering we're in October and Halloween is days away. So really excited to get into the weeds with you guys today. And round us out, Sean White with a W. That's right. What's up, guys? I'm Sean, Senior Lifecycle Marketing Manager at Lendio. I work directly with Spud Rule and Jake Newby to cook up an AVN campaign that activated cold accounts at a sea level and why it changed our perspective and why we think most gifting campaigns are abroad. Ooh. That's good. Love that. Goosebumps. Okay. All right.

9:23Well, are we ready? I feel like we're ready. Joycey. Lock in. Hey, real quick. I'm going to give you a challenge at home before you go. I want you to be here. You're here. Take notes. Do something with the information that you're going to get today. Otherwise, there's no need to be here, right? So we got some good stuff coming for you. Joycey's going to set us off right now. Yeah. No pressure to go first, you know. You got to kick it off. Somebody's got to go first, you know. I know. I'm really excited to chat with you all today. I like to pose the question of what if you could replicate your C-suite, your executive, and have them talk to your top 25 accounts all at once.

9:57And so that's what we did with this play. We created one-to-one personalized CMO demos that we sent out digitally across our digital channels. All right. I want to start off by saying I am really lucky to be part of the Snowflake team. I want to do a big shout out to Amanda Way, who strategized, operationalized, and allowed us to execute out again this day. So why videos? Why did we want to do this? What was the purpose? In the beginning, the real problem that we wanted to solve for is we're launching a new feature. And for the first time, this feature was for a non-technical audience. So we're breaking into business personas.

10:32We were marketing to marketers like you and I. And as a marketer, we know that we needed to show the product rather than tell them via text what it can look like. So we wanted to find a way to break above the noise, to stand out, to be creative, to bring in a human element, and to really cut above what we normally do and market to a new non-traditional audience. So we thought, what if we can take our CMO, take her charismatic way of speaking and replicate that across our top accounts. So we got her into a studio, we had her record, a walkthrough of the process and we really wanted to focus on if we can only look at decision makers and VPs only, how can we operationalize against that?

11:13So on my end, what do I mean when I say one-on-one personalized video campaigns, one-on-one ads, how did we do it? So what we started with, like all great ABM campaigns, is picking up the right accounts. We wanted to start small. I think our instinct is to pick 50 accounts and really go big with something where we're involving our executive. But we realized that by starting small, we're able to centralize our efforts and actually utilize for time in the best way. We worked with sales to look at past pipeline opportunities to look at open engagement and product signals to actually pick those top 25 accounts.

11:47And we worked with not only the account owner, but also the sales VP of that region. So we had top-down alignment on the program at the very beginning. Then we brought her into our studio. We had her record these custom account intros that our team worked with sales to write independently. So each account owner wrote a custom script and introduction for that account that was relevant to our partnership, to the use case, to maybe something they were already doing with the company themselves. So there's that personalized element up front. We then had the middle of the actual video was a base demo that our CMO used to talk about how she leveraged the feature for her team.

12:27Remember, we're selling to VPs of marketing, we're selling to demand generation leaders, we're selling to business personas. And so having our CMO come in to talk about how she used the feature allowed us to establish credibility within the space. And then lastly, it's not a good one-to-one ABM campaign unless you're multi-threading. And so we built, along with the videos themselves, custom landing pages that allowed us to add in more account personalized data from the account executive based off of relevant content that we know. So from the first ad engagement where our CMO is calling out the account directly to the landing page that they end on that has the account relevant information to the sales outreach that we follow up with, there is that one-to-one personalization thread that is pulled through.

13:13And so as we scaled it out, as we launched the campaigns, we made sure sales was bought in every step of the way. So as the accounts and contacts engaged, we handed those contacts back to sales. They were then able to have conversations, bring up the conversations, and continue to drive and convert over. Usually at this point, people go, what happened? How did we operationalize it? what were the results? Was this fruitful? It seems like a lot of effort to bring people into a studio and someone to go through and talk through some of the results. We saw compared to the rest of our static ads that we had a 3.3x engagement.

13:49So as a marketer, I'm always really stoked to see this. This means that our investment and trying a new channel landed with the audience that we wanted. But ultimately, when you're talking about a program and you're going to sales, it's really what are the meetings? What are the conversions? What is the impact to pipeline? And so we saw that 42 % of all of the accounts that we targeted actually had VP plus meetings come in. We actually had some of those meetings come inbound where the VP of an account will email our CMO or their account owner and say, hey, we saw your ad with your CMO. We saw this on LinkedIn.

14:23We actually want to talk about this and have a conversation. And that really allowed us to get that increased buy-in with sales and show improved value and worth. Why it worked? One, human connection. It's peer-to-peer. On a video, you're able to see someone actually talk to you as an individual. And as our executive and CMO, she already has credibility that we can really tap into for that decision maker. I think what's also really important is that our base demo for our non-technical audience came from someone who's non-technical herself. And it's marketing for marketers, right? We didn't bring in a technical CIO to talk about the very many benefits and features that we had.

15:02We had our CMO talked about how she leveraged it internally within her org. And lastly, sales buy-in. We had sales buy-in from the very beginning. They came in at the very beginning with account selection. They were there with the right accounts. They helped write the script. They were really excited that our CMO was working with them on this big account of theirs. And so they were really excited to actually do the follow-in, continue the conversation, pull the thread through. Lastly, how are we scaling this out? So we are taking on a new vendor called Capsule. That's a lot going to allow us to take that base demo, but really personalize additional account intros from our sales teams themselves.

15:41We can't pull our CMO to do 50, 60, 70 account intros, but we can't ask the account team. And then we'll additionally scale that out as we can. Okay, so my team, just real quick, we did get a bunch of questions submitted, but now that we're on this live, it feels like the more relevant thing is to do the live questions. Dasha, are you good with that? Yeah, totally. Can I kick us off real quick? Please, go for it. Maybe while I do that, Dasha, summarize some of the trends in the chat right now. One question I had is just, why do this with a human? I think everyone right now is like, look, you could do an AI.

16:13I could use one of these tools to do an AI avatar of the CMO. Like, what does it matter to actually have a real human? You guys are all very, you know, tech forward at Snowflake. Was that part of the decision at all? And does that matter? Yeah, I think that's a great question. I actually think because there's so much content being created by AI and so much content that is focused around AI, we don't want to lose that human element. I also think that as ABM and as marketing overall becomes more and more automated, what's going to actually stand out is a human connection, right? is that face, is that individual that's taken the time to walk through why this was beneficial further or why this was beneficial as a product and allows us to just connect a little bit more.

16:55So we were really testing to see if this allows us to break them out. But yes, I think as AI kind of continues, having that human touch is going to be great. And then we can use AI to help us scale the ads out and scale digitally how we get there. One theme in the chat, a bunch of people are asking how the videos were delivered. It sounds like you ran them as ads. What ad platforms were you using? Talk a little bit more about how you were serving up these videos that you created. And then once you're off the Q &A, if you can drop a link to one of the videos in the chat, a lot of people just want to come see the video, the script, how it looks and how it all came together.

17:32Yeah, we launched them primarily on LinkedIn because we found that we had the best control understanding who our audience was and delivering directly to the account that we wanted to. and I could share a version of the video as well. The base demo we then ran as a one to many across more of our like general marketing lines of businesses. Awesome. And then one other theme is like on account selection and the stage of the accounts. So there's some confusion around whether these were existing customers and you were running an upsell campaign or net new accounts. Give us a sense of where things were at.

18:04We actually did both. So primarily a lot of them were existing customers where there was white space where we identified that we would potentially be able to break into a new line of business, new opportunity. And then for the accounts that were evergreen and prospects, they were accounts that we saw were really interested and shown a lot of engagement already or in late stage pipeline opportunities with us. Amazing. All right. Jordan's up next. Who approved this slide? This slide did not come across my desk before this presentation. Okay, let's be honest here. So this is something that most people don't know.

18:37So this is an iconic photo of Dave, which is probably on a book. It's probably on podcasts. He actually used Claude to put his face on my body. So I just want to say, totally untrue. Dave's fit. I'm not. So, okay. So what I'm talking about is how we learned our way into an account. So we do do programmatic ABM at an organization. We do do one to few campaigns, but we also have a budget for stuff that just happens randomly, like a signal happens or, you know, door opens. And so I have a random acts of ABM budget in place. So it doesn't always start with the perfect plan. In this case, there really wasn't one at all.

19:16Something I like to think about too is that when I first started doing ABM, I was doing one-to-one ABM. It took me two weeks to build the thing. I was running DemandGen. I was also head of marketing ops at a small software company. It's a lot. Doing one-to-one requires a lot of work. There are jobs specifically dedicated to this. It doesn't mean it's not possible. I just sometimes think that we overcomplicate it. And there's a space for making very thorough plans, but there's also opportunity to do things really simple. Can we just collectively hear that and go, you know, like that is such an important message.

19:50Maria is going to kill me because I'm going to take time, but I read this book, Chet Holmes, The Ultimate Sales Machine. You ever read that book? He was basically, I think the first person to coin like even ABM and he just called it like the dream 100, which is like, hey, these are the top 100 people we want to sell to. Let's just like just try to call them individually. And I think sometimes we get lost in the sauce on like the what ABM actually is. So that's a very encouraging message there. Yeah, I mean, real quick, I mean, the first ABM program I did involves targeting a media company. I hired Ernie Hudson, who's a ghostbuster in the move.

20:21Ghostbusters are all of the 40 plus people on this call. You'll know what I'm talking about. He recorded a video. We create landing pages. We set up a private cocktail event with Death & Co in New York City. It was great. It's awesome. And thankfully it worked, but it took a lot of time. And so what I'm trying to say is it doesn't always have to be that way. So coincidentally, when I first started at this organization, this is another conversation entirely, but I helped set up a referral program for our own employees who could refer leads. And we created meaningful bonuses for it, up to$10 ,000, which has happened at our organization where there have been a few folks who have gotten that.

20:58Second, I wanted to lead by example. So I made my own list in LinkedIn, figured out who I wanted to reach out to. So I had one of my former colleagues at one of my previous organizations, who's now the head of HR at that organization. I just messaged her and said, hey, do you mind introing me to the person that manages the marketing team? She said, yeah, that's it. No, I'm just kidding. So that was just the start of really kind of a 12-month program, but it opened the door. And the important part about opening that door is what I... Another big conversation, obviously, is this marketing sales alignment thing, a whole bigger conversation.

21:29We can talk about a different time, but it's important, very important to nurture and do things side by side and be a collective revenue team together. We've built camaraderie by doing lunches with our sales team. We rally around events, et cetera, et cetera. I jumped on this call with sales. So sales could do what they did. I got to do what I did. Sales got to do their medic, bat, whatever you're doing. We figured out some of the challenges. I got to be the person who likes to talk to people. I'm a relationship person. I'm a psych grad. I just like people. and a friend called me a golden retriever, which I would say I don't quite see, but it actually is really true.

22:07I'm very much like a man's best friend type of thing. I just, that's just who I am. What I learned on the call too is like, he's a new dad, he's up for promotion. We got some mutual connections in the city we live in. He's passionate about underserved neighborhoods and part of the organization itself focuses on underserved neighborhoods. And I happened to volunteer and live in that same community at one point in my time in my life. So like there's this connection that was created because it's really, as Dave mentioned, I think before this call started when we were in the back room, how important empathy is.

22:39This wasn't just Knicks for Knicks tickets. It was Knicks because it mattered to him. This really mattered to him, which is different from being like invited to a Knicks game, even though you casually watch basketball. But like for someone who's passionate, it does matter. Next, we created familiarity. I want to kind of pick up the pace here a little bit. Obviously, we want to do air coverage. So we've got webinars. We've got emails. We've got LinkedIn ads. We're using programmatic advertising. We're hitting them on all different fronts. But the next important thing is to layer in that credibility and provide value.

23:10So there's familiarity, but then there's credibility. My colleague, I think, is on the call. He created this gem of an offer which helps do AEO assessments. And then he personalizes it. But we did an AO assessment for them so that they could really understand where their challenges are against competitors. And then something that coincidentally happened, which it's not luck because we put ourselves in that position, which was built a partnership marketing program at our organization this year. And one of our shared partners was a client of theirs. They plugged us for them. I mean, that's incredible, right?

23:43I mean, it's about relationships and building trust. And that was a home run for us. Then I became a patient. So the company that we were targeting, this is not a real urgent care. The company we're targeting is an urgent care. We have not closed this deal yet. We're in the final conversation. So hopefully, fingers crossed it does. So keeping it private here. But this urgent care also happens to be right in my neighborhood. So I took my son there because everything else is closed. He had what turned out to be an ear infection. We really enjoyed the process and gave a good review. I go there now when I've got some minor things going on.

24:16I'm pretty accident prone. You probably can't quite see it, but I hit my head when I was in a lighthouse recently and I had to get stitches, liquid stitches. That's just who I am. The other thing is sometimes we do nothing, right? Like this is a 12-month program for us. It turned into a 12-month program. Because I built that relationship with that person, I also kind of understood when was the right time to ease off the gas and when to actually accelerate. We're kind of here at the last stage. So hopefully it does close one because I'd love to build a relationship with these people. I think it would work really well on both sides and I'm just excited about what they do.

24:46So at the end of the day, what worked? It wasn't a single one of these things, like the Knicks tickets, the audit, whatever. Again, it's higher level than that. It's familiarity, credibility, being patient and having human attention. Quick break for Zoom webinars. This is the platform behind the world-famous Exit 5 Live. Someone on LinkedIn just said, I compare all other webinars against Exit 5 Live now. How good is that? So good. I want to print that out, send it to my mom, put it on my fridge. In a world of AI slot, we just want to make something that's worth showing up for, even a webinar. Especially a webinar.

25:21But don't you dare call it a webinar, even though I break my own rule and do that all the time. It's a live session. Our team puts over seven hours a week into each one of these, choosing the topic, the prep calls, building to run a show, and making it valuable and engaging. Zoom webinars is a big part of how we pull it off. We average 1 ,500 plus registrants per session, hundreds of people show up live, and the chat goes off. Yeah, the last time we have a new high watermark, we had 527 people live for an hour with us. Zoom does registration, emails, polls, analytics, and it all lives in one place.

25:54So running a polished session every two weeks isn't a scramble. At Showtime, our team swears by Zoom's production studio. They preset every scene and push each one live on cue. Clean transition, zero chaos, at least that anyone can see. Just please do not look at our internal Slack. Okay, all the caps lock in there. Don't share that. That's our pro-level webinar production powered by Zoom. Check it out, zoom.com slash exit5. Learn more about Zoom and all the webinars and all their products there and come see it live. We do these basically every week now. Go and check them out. It's called Exit 5 Live and learn more about Zoom at zoom.com slash exit5.

26:30All right, if you're at a B2B tech company spending over$50 ,000 a month on paid media, Compound Growth Marketing wants to give you two free sessions to build out your 2027 plan. Free? Okay, I'm listening. What do you get? I know, free is usually too good to be true, but check this out. In the first session, they're going to learn your business, and in the second, they will deliver you a custom plan. So you'd know how to split demand capture and creation, which channels drive the best ROI, and where you're reporting has gaps. And look, I trust them with it. I've hired CGM twice. They're one of the best agencies I've worked with back in my day as a head of marketing.

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27:42And then the tactics evolved as the relationship evolves. And that's why I like having a flexible plan is that you're not building a campaign. You're just hitting a run and then assuming like the leads are going to start coming in here and start closing deals. It's like, no, pay attention to the person and let them lead. And that's it. Okay. One question for you. So because this was a 12 month effort, you mentioned like backing off at times. how did you pick when to back off? And I guess, how did you report on that progress internally to have like, hey, like we're deliberately taking a step back right now.

28:14When did you decide when to move back versus push harder? Let me let me build on that, too. And just because like the number one thing people these things take time, right? And especially your world, like you have the ultimate B2B buying example and like selling into health care. How does marketing show progress when we got to wait? We just got to wait. We got to wait. We need some leading indicator to show that things are working? Just kind of mash those two things up and give us a good answer. I mean, short answer is I work for a marketing agency and the CEO is the founder of the agency. So I'm like, he doesn't really like, he knows marketing works.

28:44So I don't have that same pressure. A lot of folks on this call do. Now, how do I know what is working? How did I make that decision? Again, it comes from working closely with sales. They did all the ban, like they understood timing. I also understood who the incumbent was. We started to build a personal relationship. So like, I understood at that point, when timing is right. And if I wasn't hearing from them, I wasn't saying, I'm just gonna, hey, send that follow up email. Hey, did you get my message? You get messages? I'm just like, cool, doesn't really matter. I buy all the time. I understand that I ignore people, and people are gonna ignore me.

29:13And when the time is right, they will reach out. So it was kind of a series of decisions that were made. And then more recently, I just reached out again and just said, Hey, do you want to meet myself and one of my colleagues for cocktails in Chicago because we're going to be there. And he replied and said, sorry, normally I would, but I can't. But I have been meaning to talk to you about X, Y, and Z. Can we get a call for the next week? We'll find out there. One more thing. Speaking of the connection about in-person and things that take time, we're doing an event next week. I'm getting on a plane again.

29:45I still have the drive flu. It wasn't a flu. It wasn't a super spreader event. I got to stop putting that in. We're doing an event in New York a week from today. I'll be there. It's next Thursday night, exit5.com slash NYC if you want to come hang out with us. And we're doing a live podcast recording with Rob Sobers. He's the CMO of Varonis. Really cool story about how we took them from startup to IPO, $700 million cybersecurity company, plus networking, bingo, good apps, more events from exit5, exit5.com slash NYC. Okay, let's kick it over to Jen. Jordan, thank you. more ABM stuff. Let's get Jen popping up.

30:20Jen's ready to go. All right. I am ready. So as we've talked a couple of times on this call already, most ABM programs start the same way. Marketing picks the accounts. We build the creative, we launch the campaign, and then sales never touches it. So we took a slightly different approach at Recurly. We actually listened to some of the feedback that we were getting from our sales team, they had a hunch around an opening with large enterprise brands that we were never able to crack in the past. So there was a bigger question that we were trying to answer here. And that was whether or not we could take one of our larger product offerings and actually take pieces of that to offer it as a standalone, which would be a much lower risk for some of these larger brands to come on board with us.

31:04So we didn't want to start on that hunch though. And so we used ABM to test the market first. And so what I'm going to walk you guys through is how we reached them, how we landed on those accounts, what was this handoff to sales, and then what did we actually see in terms of return? So like I mentioned at the beginning of the call, we called this campaign the Wake the Dead campaign. This was targeting close lost opportunities over the last two years. So these are accounts that evaluated our full platform, got pricing or a demo, but ultimately said no. So we looked at why, and it wasn't because of the product.

31:37It was really breaking it down by the personas that we were talking to. So for some, the CTO vetted that touching the core billing structure of some of these subscription brands was going to be too much of a lift. Others were saying, you know, we don't have the budget. This is going to require board approval or some, it was just simply our billing already works. We just have a payments problem. So the insight was that these accounts didn't say no to us. They said no to a full rip and replace migration. So we had a standalone offering with no migration, a couple of API calls. And then we also looked at, okay, what sort of pricing strategy can we also put in place to really make this seem as if it's a win-win for both us and those merchants that we're working with.

32:21So our core message for this campaign was really around, you know, you said no to ripping and replacing your full billing system. This is not that. The closed loss pool for us was a great place for us to start to test this offering. These buyers already knew us. They already felt the pain. And we had that intel from the close loss reasons that we got from our sales team around, okay, what was that reason? So really helped us kind of reframe versus having to re-educate or educate for the first time a brand new market. So when we looked at tiering the accounts, we built a list of 200 accounts, again, close loss in the last two years.

32:58Then we tiered it. So we worked with sales to identify our top 50 accounts that we wanted to get into. These are the ones that got the high personalized touch from our AEs. AEs and SDRs work together as one team to do a lot of deep account research, understand the stakeholders within the accounts, and then leveraging things like event invites. We also created a cloud skill around kind of a back of the napkin math around how much revenue they could recover with this standalone product. and then tiers two and three were the other 150 accounts in this mix and they got digital air cover. SDRs also led outreach backed by persona level research.

33:38The accounts got digital surround sound, persona specific content, email nurture, et cetera. So tiering the accounts and having those dedicated swim lanes really helped us heavy up on the spend where we saw the biggest upside without completely blowing our budget. Again, since this was kind of our test in the market for this new offering. So what I would push you guys to copy today is that we did not go deep in terms of industry. We went deep in terms of the persona. And we've talked about this a couple of times too. It's all about that human, right? And at the end of the day, and what is that pain that they're really trying to solve?

34:13So we didn't just target accounts, we targeted those buying committees. So the CFO was our economic buyer in this instance. The VP of growth was the champion. This was actually somewhat of a new persona for us to break into. The CTO is the gatekeeper most of the times, again, kind of vetoing that full migration, the resources and things that would hit his team if they were to do a full rip and replace. And then the product lead was our influencer. In terms of how we started to kind of structure this for the sales team. So we really wanted to take a step back and understand, okay, who are these stakeholders?

34:49What really makes them tick? And then why does it matter for sales to have them a part of that sales conversation? We also wanted to be very, very specific around what is that re-entry hook that sales needs to lean into if they're talking to the VP of finance versus the VP of engineering or growth or product. So it made it very, very prescriptive and easy for the sales team to activate in the field when they started those conversations. And then signals that we listened for around, you know, deciding when sales was going to step in. So marketing ran six things in parallel. So we had persona map display and LinkedIn ads, C-level content.

35:27We had that revenue recovery benchmark, clod skill that we had created that the sales team was leveraging, email nurture from problem to offer. And then again, leveraged events and listen for all of those signals to understand, okay, when is that sweet spot for sales to enter into that conversation? Then we worked with sales to build a very coordinated outbound sequence. So sales owned that outreach, marketing helped make that easy. So again, we use that Claude skill to research the company, do that back of the napkin math, and provide a high level estimate of that revenue that folks could recover if they were able to recover that revenue from some of the failed payments that were happening on the subscriber side.

36:10So the AE opened that up with a personalized email to those stakeholders. So they walk in with the prospect's specific number instead of just a generalized sales pitch. Then we had SDRs and AEs followed up with a very tailored version by persona. So very specific messaging for the CFO versus the VP of growth. And then third, marketing never stopped. Not only to bring those accounts further down the buyer funnel, but also once those opportunities were opened, How did we continue to have that steady drumbeat in the market to maintain that top of mind awareness for them as those deals progressed forward?

36:46To give you guys a glimpse of kind of how we activated this in the market, this is like one of my favorite slides in our campaign decks. It's called Campaign on a Page. So this shows you guys how we activate across all of the different funnels, channels that we leveraged, et cetera. So I want to just kind of give you a glimpse of how we activated across everything. Within the first two quarters of us launching this, we were able to open up 20 net new opportunities with accounts, again, that we had had previous conversations with or had never had a conversation before. And we were able to open up around$3.3 million in total pipelines.

37:20So overall, this is a huge success. I know I'm at time. So I will end on this slide of the five key moves that you can take back to your team today. Again, I think it really comes down to the strategy, the alignment with your sales team. You can have the best technology in the world. But if you don't have that strategy and that alignment knocked down, then again, ABM is only going to go so far. Good job, Jen. Good energy added. Jen, we got a bunch of questions in the chat. Dashie, you want to pick your favorite here and set us off? Yeah, Jen, I think across a lot of the presentations, one question that we're getting consistently is like how the account selection process happens.

37:58How do you pick which one is going to which tier? Can you give us a little bit of color? How did that process happen? If someone wants to sit down tomorrow with their sales team and pick accounts and put them into different buckets, what would your suggestion be on how to do that right? So a couple things. So all of our accounts in our CRM are tiered regardless. What we did then is we looked back at accounts that we had closed-loss opportunities with around our subscription management platform. So that helped narrow the universe down that way. Then we backed into closed-loss reason. And, okay, did we have a previous conversation with them?

38:34Or are we going out after the net, you know, cold completely? So that allowed us to select those top 50 accounts versus the other 150 that, again, had the digital air cover. There are also firmographic data points that we pulled in as well. So this offering was not going to work for anyone who is a Shopify merchant. So that also allowed us because we wanted to make sure that from a tech perspective, because this was such a low lift and an easy win for these merchants. We wanted to make sure that we were going after the ones that this would actually, you know, help push the needle forward for. So that was how we backed in that account selection.

39:09We are now expanding this campaign, though, because we saw so much success with it in the first two quarters. So, you know, expanding that target audience and giving sales more at-bats with some of these larger brands. Love it. That's like such a win for a marketing team to be able to say, we're going to double down on this because this experiment freaking worked. Nice job. All right, Dave, shall we pass it over to Sean to shred some ABM gnar? Sean's going to close it down, right? Sean's our cleanup hitter for today. So let's go. Like I said, Sean, Lifecycle Marketing Manager here at Lendio. Most ABM gifting campaigns are bribed.

39:43You might be wondering why an LCM guy would have such a bold claim. Number one, to nail the headline. But number two, this campaign crushed it and completely shifted our perspective on direct mail and gifting at Lendio. So high level in case I run out of time. It was a personalized five-minute podcast with custom AeroPod sent to the C-level at all of our top accounts that we identified in sales. It was$8 ,000 in spend and 300K in source pipeline and 30 % account booked meeting rate. I would encourage anybody, feel free to draw any skepticisms throughout this entire presentation. You can roast me, whether it's what I'm sharing or who has the best haircut between me and Dave.

40:22Okay, me and Jake Newby at Lendio we're trying to think of a way to stand out amongst noise everybody else is. We're really inspired by wildcard, but we wanted to test something similar ourselves. So we landed on this headphone idea, which a lot of people do. And we know that, you know, when it comes to gifting, one of the issues that we've seen is it's purely transactional. When somebody books a demo and we get a gift or the gift is gated behind a demo, they usually show up out of guilt. So it kind of feels like a bribe. So we wanted to shift the narrative. We wanted to send, ungate the gift and the content, just identify the context, send it directly to them, make the gift personalized to the account, use it as a way to educate them, establish relevancy and start the conversation and highlight the fact that it's specifically about the selfish benefit for the account that we're targeting that talks about like what their needs are, what their customer needs are and how Lendio fits into that narrative.

41:12So what the gift was, like I said, it was custom engraved AirPods, a handwritten card using the handwritten software with a QR code to a five minute podcast. we built with Notebook LM and AE's Contact Info. The podcast, High Level, covered why the company is a fit, what they're focused on right now, with the external signals that we had available and the research that we've done, what their customers need, and where Lendio fits in with their story and the narrative, which basically took a 60-minute business case, all this data and compressed it into five minutes. You also might be wondering, why do we target C-level?

41:46Mainly knowing that they're so unengaged, hard to get ahold of. Well, number one, we know that the buck stops at the C-level. We also know, we sent it to all the members of the C-level and we knew that at least one of them got it and caught the attention. Then it was likely to make it around to the other C-level members or the heads of the departments that are usually in our buying committee. At the very least, they would think it was annoying, but clever. And they'd potentially have a small exchange of words about Lendio. Just to get five minutes of a C-level's attention was the goal. The other piece of it is, you know, headquarter addresses are super easy to find.

42:15And since this is ungated, you know, we were able to find that. We were willing to bet that most C-level are either in office or nearby, which was true. High level, this is the campaign. I think this is a very similar theme to what you've heard with every presentation today is our sales team was super involved. And that was the only way we could pull this off. And the only reason it worked so well, both internally at Lindio, but also how the campaign performed. So starting with how we selected the accounts, we identified our highest value accounts closely with sales. We looked across all of our target accounts and realized that our home service platform were likely to be our highest ACV.

42:49We then spent a lot of time with our sales team, each AE and hand-selected which accounts we want to go after. So we landed on 10. One thing I want to emphasize here is these 10 accounts were ice cold. There was absolutely zero engagement and hardly any prior outreach. The reason for that is we wanted to test to see, can we activate cold accounts with a campaign like this? Prior to sending anything, we had three to four weeks of kind of a surround sound approach. You've probably heard that term before. Just basic marketing coverage, LinkedIn plus CTV, doubled down on vertical specific content and outreach.

43:21We targeted the executive teams, heads of departments, and anybody in the buying committee weeks before anything got sent. We had the additional data. We used Vector to track which contacts were engaging with our campaigns, visiting our page, et cetera. And once we knew that the account was warmed up and familiar with not just the product and the brand, but also the person and the AE who was going to be talking to them. And then from there, we sent the gift and then follow-up podcast. One thing that's, you know, is very clear throughout this is, this is a concept that you've made, some of you might be familiar with.

43:54At Lendia, we make the AE, the account of center of our marketing. So they're the person that's in the ads, in feed, they're the person in cold outreach, all the nurture campaigns. So the one who hand wrote the gift that was sent and obviously the follow-up. And then when they're on the call, they're the first person they see. And some of the self-attribution there has been really cool saying like, oh, I've seen your face everywhere. Several people in the company have heard from you, yada, yada. But the idea there is to build awareness and trust, not just at a company level, but like a person to person level.

44:21Here's how we built it. We use Claude to generate the brief. Claude has all the context of our go to market motion, our product features, why it's fit. Obviously did research on the company and the URL of each account and created a brief that we gave to Notebook LM. They created a five minute podcast. So we put on a QR code and use the handwritten software to actually use handwrite notes with a QR code from the AE and then sent it to the prospect. And then both before, during, and after, we used Vector to track any sort of buying intent. And then by the time it got to the sales team, it was the right person at the right time.

44:54So obviously, as an LCM guy, I'm really stoked about this. Here's what it did. 30 % in book meeting rate and 30 % in pipe, which to be honest with you, it totally looks awesome. And it is really cool. I'm personally stoked about it. what I'm really stoked about is we just wanted to see if we could activate one account. That was all we were trying to do. But the fact that we got so much feedback and replies, and the fact that all these are still in later stages of our pipeline and nobody's closed loss is huge. And there's only$8 ,000 to spend, which is sweet. But this is one thing I, as an LCM guy, am personally stoked about.

45:23We got cold replies from C-suite directly back to our, like they emailed us. Most of these weren't replies to an email to the rep that we sent that was on the gift. And it's like, maybe not the most exciting emails, but they was warm handoffs to the right person buying committee. Some of them did call out how this is really cool marketing. I remember on one of the calls that we were on, they were like, wow, we're going to try to teach our marketing team how to do this. So another big win is the fact that this worked great from a campaign perspective, but also internally to get sales alignment and the executive team bought in.

45:56Last thing I'll say this, I would love to take credit, but this was from the two brilliant minds of Jake Newby and Spud Rule and all of the team that was a part of pulling this off. This was not just a me thing. Anybody could probably present on this way better than I can. But those two guys were where this idea came from. And he's humble. Okay, Sean, I hope you read the love in the chat after after you're done presenting. I promised Rhea in the chat that I would ask her questions. She says this is a stupid question. I disagree. I had the same question. So it can't be stupid. How did you know that made no, sorry, that means it's definitely stupid.

46:30Okay, yeah, sorry. Sorry. But at least we're both stupid together. So how did you get the addresses for the folks that you were sending the gifts to? And did they know the gift was arriving or not? Did it arrive cold? Did it arrive warm? Yep, it's a fantastic question. We use clay. That's what we use for everything. We identify the contacts to validate, you know, that they were in the US and find the HQ address. And as far as did they know they're getting the gift? So I I didn't have time to jump into it, but in that camp, that slide, we had part of our sequence from the sales team was sending a tracking link with the picture of the gift that was coming in the mail.

47:07So basically said, Hey, we got something coming to you. And then we wrote the day of we'd send the tracking link and then we'd follow up saying, Hey, did you get this? If not, here's the link to the podcast we've created with notebook.com. Sick. One other question, sorry, on addresses. We also use clay at proton. We always struggle to figure out, okay, like, is this person working from home or from HQ? Did you think about that? What did you do? We gambled. Okay. And I just like shot from the hip, fingers crossed that they're close by. And also like if one of the ideas that Spud had is that we sent it to like the, knowing that there's probably a, some sort of like secretary at the office, like addressing it to them to then give to the C-suite.

47:46So we're almost marketing to them that we know is in person. So we don't have to worry about getting an address. Smart, really smart. Okay. This is awesome. Do we have questions for the, do we want to bring everybody up real quick? We have a couple of minutes before we want to keep the momentum going. So if we have a bunch of questions for the group here, I know our team is trying to pull some of these up right here, but let's get the panelists up right here. Rhea says there's so much to learn and absorb from this webinar. I have a question for all of you. What's the biggest mistake that you think that people think or make with an ABM campaign?

48:18Like, Hey, we're going to do an ABM campaign. It's either a false belief or something that they think, feel free, whoever wants to take that with a strong opinion. I'll take that one. So like I said before, I think that people sometimes can get over-reliant on the tech. And if you don't have the strategy in place, it doesn't matter how solid your tech stack is, you will not be able to scale it if you don't have the strategy and the alignment from sales. I think that's number one. And then Jordan, when you were going through your presentation, you had said, this is a 12-month initiative. ABM is absolutely a long game.

48:49And I think that sometimes people get very excited that we're going to do ABM and it's going to bring in all this pipeline, which it will if it's done right. But sometimes it does take time for you to start to see the results. So I think it's important to understand those early indicators of success and then what those long term goals are that you're trying to solve for. One other question in the chat throughout all of the presentations is a lot of this, like a lot of ABM is rooted in experimentation. A lot of companies are not running ABM and running ABM sounds like this big, scary experiment.

49:20And some people might see the value, some people might not. How did you all go about convincing whoever that this is worth the experiment? What can you share with the class? Yeah, I can go first. I mean, I think on our ends, what my CEO likes to hear is I'm not committing to this. I'm creating a pilot. two to three months. We'll see where it goes. Some of the stuff needs to go longer. Like, you know, if it's like a long tail play, like 12 months, like obviously that's longer, but like frame it as a pilot, be clear about progress and own the mistakes. And cause mistakes happen. We're all human.

49:55Like I make mistakes all the time. I can do an entire webinar on all the mistakes I've made, but like you learn from mistakes, right? I mean, and you learn more about the person you're marketing to when you make mistakes as well. So yeah, I mean, I think part of it is just framing as a pilot and that it's you're not investing we're not saying spend 30 40 50 000 on a new abm platform those things are valid and good and obviously vector is a sponsor i love vector i love jess all the folks at vector and shout out to them because i'm gonna try and think about doing that next year but at the end of the day you can do things that are meaningful without spending a whole lot of money so try that first before you invest a lot money into tech?

50:34And you should start small. Sometimes the ABM win is not actually ultimately the deal at the end of the day. It's finding that internal sales champion that's going to say, I tried this really cool thing with my ABM-er. It got me a meeting with someone I hadn't gone in front of, and I want to replicate that out. And that internal sales excitement is what then gets the rest of the leadership team to say, hey, you did that for one account. What if you're to do it for 10. Now let's try 50. So start small, find your internal champion. Remember that the win doesn't have to be this big thing you're delivering.

51:06It could be that one meeting that we were trying to get in front of. Yeah. Josie, I think brings a great point. It was like, ABM doesn't necessarily mean revenue for the business, close one. It can mean just a small step. It's like, it's cold. We've never been able to get in front of them. A booked meeting can be the goal. I think that's important too, to think about it as like steps. Yeah. Love it. All right. let's run the poll ben from backstage is going to set the poll live you should see it in front of you now which abm idea are you going to try with your team who's taking home the trophy that's our abm campaign we're going to do an abm campaign to one of these winners who's going to one to one i one to one dash and i will record a personalized podcast talking about how great the winner is but not who was the best presenter not who had the best slides or best haircut which of these plays did you learn the most from that you're going to take and take some inspiration and ideas from and go run at your company?

52:00Is it Joy C, Jordan, Jen? We got the triple J's and Sean out there. I don't know. This is tough. Look, I'm biased. Maybe it's the head on Sean, but look, I love the tactical specificness of Sean at the end. And I think, I think the math, my team is in my ear telling me it looks like Sean is our winner. Way to go, Sean. Congratulations. Speech, speech, Speech, speech, speech. Just, you know, holding it down for the spud and team. Good job. You did a good job giving credit to other people. I liked your presentation, by the way, because you had a strong hook right away. It was like, boom, here's what I thought about this.

52:33Here's what I did. All the examples, screenshots, specifics. You nailed it. Great job. Why do you think people like this, sir? That's my one question for you. Well, thanks, Dave. I was going to catch, see if you caught any Easter eggs. I quoted laws of copywriting a couple of times throughout the whole presentation. I almost put it in the slide, but I was like, I'm not going to do it. I don't vote. I don't vote. So it's okay. Right, right. I mean, I don't know. Everybody else's presentation was incredible. I have no idea why mine won. I think honestly, it's just maybe it's just like the practical steps from the beginning to the end.

53:02Like, you know, this isn't a super scalable campaign because of how manual it is, but how we're planning to reiterate on it will make it more scalable. But from the beginning, it was, you know, 10 accounts and we literally hand packaged these and wrote and I manually ordered each one of the custom AirPods. I was like, it took a shit ton of time. Good things take time. Okay, good job. You won. Congratulations. Way to go. Good job. Okay, we got one more. We measure everything. Okay, so a couple things. I'll get to the poll in a second. We're going to try to get all these smart ABM folks. If you have more specific questions, Maria is going to get them in the community.

53:35This is a nice little extension of this where if you want to go back, take all this information, you have a specific question about your company that you want one of these great ABMers to answer. They'll do it inside of the community. And then real quick, just we measure everything that gives us some data. What do you want more of, less of? So from one to five, was this a good use of your hour? A great use, very good. Was it okay? I didn't get much from this. Was it a huge waste of your time? Just give us some data here. We look at all these. We figure out what we want to do more of, less of, how we want to change these in the future.

54:05We're marketers to feedback. You're only as good as the feedback and how you can action on it. So, okay, we got what we need out of this. Thank you, everybody. I hope I'll see a bunch of you in New York next week. If you want to be on one of our future sessions, you can get in there, exit5.com slash network. our whole thing is driven on like the real marketing stuff that you're doing real humans doing real marketing just like our great crew today thank you all for giving us an hour of your day today i'll see you in new york next week and then two weeks from now we're going to be back here our next live session is all about aeo so thank you everybody i appreciate it we got everything we need i hope this was useful go put some of this stuff into play though don't just be on the webinar asking about questions go take some of this stuff put it in play in your business dash good to see you panelists.

54:46Great to see you. Appreciate you all. Okay, we're out of here.

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55:43The best marketing leaders have a strong agency or two backing them up, and Convertive is one I'd put on that list, especially if AEO is a priority for you right now. It definitely is, and a good one is a lifesaver. They bring fresh creative angles and go deep on specialties like AEO when your team's short on bandwidth. If you're shopping for a B2B agency, check out Convertive. They help enterprise marketing and ops leaders grow revenue across the business. Who do they work with? They work with legit companies like DocuSign, Databank, and Constructor, and they build on the search work that you're already doing, optimizing your site so more buyers find you and turn it into pipeline.

56:20And this month, Exit 5 listeners get a free AEO search snapshot. They'll run your buyers' real questions through Google and AI tools, show how you stack up against competitors, and tell you what's worth fixing. So if you're building your AEO strategy for 2027, start here. Go and check out convertive.com slash exit five. That's convertive.com slash exit five. And you can see the link in the show notes.