Why the Next Era of ABM Targets the Person, Not the Account (with Casey Patterson, Snowflake)

0:00Hey, it's Dave. So Zoom Webinars and Events has made our recent Exit 5 Live sessions way more pro lately. But don't just take my word for it. Check this out. This is what Kelly B said. She said, I compare all other webinars now against Exit 5. I love that. And look, in a world of AI slop, we just want to make something that's actually worth going to. It's not easy to get an hour out of your day. I'm just the on-air talent though. So I'm going to kick it over to Marissa and Maria. This is our Exit 5 Live production team, our content team here at Exit 5, since they're the ones actually making this all happen.

0:29Marissa? I've been doing B2B content a long time. I know. It's hard to hold attention for more than 30 seconds, let alone a whole webinar. But Zoom webinars helps. Recently, we've had nearly 2 ,000 registrants, over 500 live, and hundreds of hours of watch time on our sessions. Maria, what would you say is driving that? It all starts with prep. We do up to seven hours per session. Choosing a topic, prep calls, building the run of show, and so much more. With Zoom webinars and events, everything's in one place. Registration, emails, polls, analytics. So it's simple to run that cycle every two weeks.

1:02At Showtime, I hand it back to Marissa in Zoom's production studio. With Zoom's production studio, I can set the scenes in advance. So on the big day, I just send them live with speakers and content already in place. Clean transitions, crystal clear audio and video. I feel like I'm running the big game back there. So this is why our webinars have been crushing it lately. Look, they just said we're spending seven hours per session on this. And don't just take our word for it. Come and see firsthand. We run these every other Friday. It's called Exit 5 Live, now powered by Zoom webinars and events.

1:32So come and check us out. See this whole thing live. And if you want to learn more about using Zoom at your company, check out zoom.com slash exit5. That's zoom.com slash exit5. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Convertive, a B2B marketing agency that helps enterprise teams build an AI-powered go-to-market strategy. Q4 is the time of year when having a great agency partner matters more than ever. If you're shopping for a new agency, Convertive is worth looking into. They work with marketing and operations leaders to help grow revenue across the business and AEO. One of the things I know you're thinking about right now is one of their specialties.

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2:38It's convertive.com slash exit 5. That's convertive.com slash exit 5. And you can also see the link in the show notes. You're listening to The Dave Gerrard Show.

3:02Hey, it's Dasha. The episode that you're about to listen to was recorded live in Stowe, Vermont at Exit 5's Drive event. And I sat down with account-based marketer, Casey Patterson. She is the director of North American account-based marketing at a company called Snowflake. Snowflake is a huge company and Casey has spent almost four years working there purely on account-based marketing. So when I think of someone who knows the ins and outs of account-based marketing and has a large budget to work with and run a lot of creative plays, Casey is the first person that comes to mind. She actually had a sold out workshop at Drive where she talked about agentic ABM.

3:43So we touch on that in this episode. And then I just talk about what worked for her in 2026 and when she's betting on in 2027. If you're listening or watching and you're wondering what the heck is going on, we recorded outside and it was the windiest day probably of my life. And so you might hear us fighting for our lives against the wind. I hope you enjoy the episode. I sure enjoyed sitting down with Casey. She is one of my favorite people that I met at Drive this year. Enjoy. I'm here with Casey from Snowflake. Hi, Dasha. Hi. Great. We met yesterday. Yes. We locked eyes. You did a presentation yesterday.

4:19What was your presentation? And we fell in love. Yeah. For anyone listening, if you are watching someone present on stage and you are not looking at them directly and nodding along and smiling, start doing that. Don't be blank faced. Smile. Yeah. Look at them and verbally or in verbally communicate that they're doing a good job. Is that how I made you feel? Yes. Great. And that's why we locked eyes and fell in love. And now we're here. I'm so happy for it. Now we're here. Now we're here. Have you been to Drive before? No. It was my first time. The energy is insane. I've never been to a marketing conference like this.

4:47And the Stowe is just my favorite place. I want to come back here or move here. It's the cutest little town. It's so fun. What made you want to sign up for Drive? I got signed up because I followed Dave for a while. I was on the podcast. And then I saw it come up. And I was actually asked to speak and did a session yesterday, which was fantastic. So I wanted to come just to feel the energy of what's happening in marketing right now. Not only did you do a session, your session was one to sell out within what, like the first 30 minutes. Let's talk about what you do at Snowflake and then you'll talk about what session you did.

5:20Okay, great. Yeah. So I run North American ABM at Snowflake. I have about 20 folks on my team who each line up to a district of sales and do custom marketing for that sales team. I love my team so much. They're amazing. And they're part of the reason I'm here. I'm so thankful for them. And then the session I did yesterday was about agentic ABM, what's coming next in terms of ABM and really in marketing in general because of AI. Why do you think your session sold out so fast? Like what do you think is happening in marketing that made a bunch of marketers look at the list of like 20 or so sessions and pick agentic ABM?

5:52Yeah. So I think that my session was particularly interesting because a lot of marketers right now are very excited but also very unsure about what's happening next with AI. understandably any transformation comes with unknown risks and unknown rewards so abm is kind of this new wave of i would say marketing in general but i think there's a step beyond that but snowflake is taking now where we're not only looking at the account but we're looking at an individual and we have enough processing power now to look at everything around an individual what makes them tick their linkedin presence where they you know like to vacation what they do in their spare time and give them a marketing experience that's tailored just for them so that's kind of that next era beyond CRM, beyond ABM.

6:33Now we're going into individualization. And that's what I talked about yesterday. And Snowflake is actually enabling that through our tool itself. So it's really exciting time to be both a consumer of Snowflake as someone who works there and works in the tool, but also a seller of, I think, the next generation of where marketing is going. That's awesome. We're obviously at a conference. So I've been asked about a dozen times, like, what am I taking away to my own team? And your session really resonated. I think I work at an early stage startup and we have Claude and we have access to like basically unlimited AI tools and we're sitting on top of all this data and I thought okay like we're leveraging it but not like you shared some really great examples of you probably know enough about the individual at the account that you're trying to get into to send them like a really tailored personalized gift and at our team like we've tried gifting in the past but it was pre-AI era and it was when gifting was gifting meant you would pick some sort of gift, maybe make it on theme and then send the exact same thing to, I don't know, a handful of people and then hope that that your team could book a meeting from that gift.

7:36But I think what you're doing at Snowflake, where it's like personalized for that unique person, what was the stat you shared? It takes your team from idea to like delivery. How long? From an intense spiking at an account to delivery of a gift. We had one in four days. Like that's crazy. That would be impossible before AI. So as much as we get to hate on AI and AI slop, there are things that it unlocks that are really cool. It really does. And that's the part that's exciting to me. There's a lot of, like you said, slopaganda, AI slop. Slopaganda is a new one that I learned. Slopaganda. You also taught me a cool new term, tokenomics.

8:07Tokenomics, yes. Regulating your tokens throughout your different tools to make sure that the tool, the AI tool that is best used for whatever you're trying to get it to do is the one that's being used rather than just one AI tool for everything. But yeah, it's been such a great conference. And And I think I've learned, I actually went to just a budgeting session yesterday. So it wasn't about AI or like anything new. It was just how to budget when your channel mix is uncertain, when you don't know what's going to happen in the next year, what getting buy-in for that budget looks like, creating ideas and buy-in from Christy at AirOps.

8:38And it was like, excellent. So it's not only just what are we doing next in the future? It's like, there are some basic things that we're learning here too, that I, as a leader, need to be up on, the latest ways to do things, latest thoughts around how to get people internally to buy into what you're doing. So it's just been a great, well-rounded conference. And I'm so thankful for everything that Exit 5 has done. I love it. What are you taking away from the budgeting session? So Christy talked about Bob Sob, which is fear of being seen as behind in marketing. So it's kind of what are your competitors doing that you're not doing?

9:13What channels are companies similar to yours in that you're not in. And then saying if we're going to be up on what is not behind in the age of marketing, if we're just doing email blasts to everyone, we are missing out. We are behind. And the fear of being behind is definitely a motivator for innovation and then for also teams who are innovating to get more budget or resourcing. Cool. Yeah, that's neat. We are in September, which is kind of like the new year. I don't know for you, for me, at least like September always feels more new year-esque than new year, new year. Yes. So as you reflect on the last, I don't know, school year, we were long out of school, but the last school year, what is a win for you, your team in 2026?

9:57Yeah. So thank you for telling me this question in advance because now I have an analogy or a metaphor to share. Oh, heck yeah. So I grew up in California and for my whole life in California, there was this fear of the big one and the big one, California, if you don't know, sits on the San Andreas Fault, which is a meeting of two tectonic plates. And the big one, quote unquote, is when these two tectonic plates are going to shift and create a very life changing or earth changing earthquake that would be very bad for many people. And that was something that was always on my mind. Oh, the fear of the big one that's going to really shift and change California forever.

10:29And so whenever a small earthquake happens in California that does not affect lives, maybe affects property or buildings, but is small enough to not be, you know, life altering, geologists are very happy about it because it is not the big one. It's releasing a little bit of tension from the two tectonic plates. Does that delay the oncoming of the big one? It delays or prevents. I'm not sure. But there's always a relief. It's like a tension has been lifted from these two tectonic plates. So something that I'm really proud of with my team is that we've done those little dissolving and little earthquakes for ourselves to disrupt what we've been doing this whole year, every week, like we're not waiting for the big one where someone comes and says, what are you doing with AI?

11:11Like every day, my team has been disrupting how we do things or changing or building something new to make sure that tension is released gradually, rather than having a big, you know, shake up in a year that that really changes everything that we're doing. So I like to keep the disruption going, because it actually helps keep consistency going so that we're never behind enough where a big one happens in a huge shift, you know, really changes everything that we're doing. So I'm very proud of that for my team.

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12:38Go and see how they can help you reclaim your time and build cool stuff just like McKeel did. Check them out at Optimizely.com slash exit five. That's Optimizely.com slash exit five. Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Compound Growth Marketing. They're a full funnel demand gen agency that I've personally hired twice. Yep, before I was just the thought leader. I was a real marketer and CGM was one of the best agencies that I worked with. They help high growth software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are forming opinions about which product to use.

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13:47That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five. That's a great metaphor, a stunning metaphor, if I may. What steps did you take to set up an environment where you can do that. I feel like there was this moment in AI where like if you were using ChatGPT and had set up some like projects, like you were making it as a marketer and you could say like, yeah, like I dabble. And then there was almost like overnight this shift where Claude came out and then it was if you're not in Claude code, like you are immediately behind and why don't you have 20 agents running your business? Exactly. For me, that meant I really needed to throw myself into AI so that I could teach my team Claude code.

14:25What did that look like for you to be able to say, okay, like I want everyone on my team. And you were on a big team. Like your team is significantly bigger than mine. How do you bring so many people along on the AI journey? Yeah. I mean, you're a hundred percent right. I think it starts with you. You can't ask people to do things that you're not willing to do yourself. You don't know how to do. Yeah, exactly. And so you need to be challenging and disrupting yourself, which is definitely something that in tech you just can't not do. But I think the resistance to AI won't create action. Like you You have to just say, I understand that there are risks and things associated with things I don't know, but I have to at least try.

14:59So it starts with you 100%. And then Snowflake did set up an AI accelerator program where different AI adopters on different teams got together within marketing every week to talk about how are we accelerating adoption within the entire Snowflake marketing team? And then what projects are we going to kind of flesh out and escalate to leadership to say this deserves, you know, time with dedicated engineers and members of the data team. We want to get managerial buy-in, get C-suite buy-in to get these projects done. So we did those two groups really early. We started early last year making those two groups happen and ensuring that not only do we have like bottom-up transformation, everyone is using different tools and innovation, but also top-down transformation to say, you know, how do we replace this whole system across multiple teams that will really impact how we do things forever?

15:46What are some examples of the projects that you brought to the team and they were like, heck yeah, let's put a dev on this. Let's give it like a life of its own. Yes. One of them was, it's not super flashy, but it's a database washing machine. So basically we have our database and you have your database that data expires by like 25 % every year marketing data. Right. Because like people leave companies like the phone number, that kind of thing. Yes, exactly. Change emails, you know, yeah. Leaving companies is definitely a huge one. Or just, you know, the data is like it's students, it's consultants, it's all those things, all those exclusion lists.

16:22And so we needed kind of a washing machine for our accounts. I love that term. Yeah, it was so fun. Jeremy, who's on our marketing ops team, came up with that term. Basically, we put in all our contacts and it sorts them into like this one just needs an email like and we're good. So let's go purchase an email through one of our data management tools. And then now it's been washed and cleaned in this one. And this one needs four pieces of information and it needs to be made marketable where it's not marketable today. So this one requires a little bit of a deeper wash, you know, delicate cycle, whatever it is.

16:53And then let's go, you know, purchase those contacts. And then it also sorts it by, you know, seniority and buying groups within the account. So we're not just spending money on let's get all of our contacts up to date. It's more like which are the most significant contacts? What is the AI recommendation for how we should update them? And then we can go purchase that amendment to those contacts to make sure that they're complete. This is so cool. And not just because it has a cool metaphor, but like I hate laundry. Laundry is the worst chore. Don't fight me on this. But I can get behind this type of laundry.

17:20What about dishwashing? You're fine. I mean, I have a dishwasher. Loading the dishwasher. You don't have a dishwasher? I do have a dishwasher. Yeah. I don't know. For some reason. What about taking out the trash? That's a blue task. We have in my household a blue task and pink tasks. Fortunately for me, recycling and trash is a blue task. So my husband takes care of it. Amazing. But laundry, we each do our own laundry. And so like folding it is the worst part for me. Is your husband good at laundry? My husband is so good at laundry. My husband throws everything in the washing machine together and doesn't sort colors.

17:49And it says that that's like fake news. And the only time you need to sort colors is when you just purchase something for the first time. And the colors will bleed. So that's me. You're the. But you're Luke. You're my husband who's like. I'm separating. I'm going to hang it. I'm going to make sure that it's, you know, washed properly. We have, you know. We have complimentary husbands. Our husbands need to be. What's like another example? Do you have another example of a project that got by in? Yeah. Or a project that didn't get by in that you were excited about? Ooh. I haven't had one of those personally yet.

18:20I think another one was how we communicate with sales. So our field marketing team is incredible. And I've been really lucky to be involved in all these projects, even though they're not my remit necessarily in this AI accelerator. But our field marketing team, they run so many amazing events across the country all the time, big and small. So our field marketing team was making sure our sales team knew which events to invite all their people to. Are you hosting your own events? Or these are like... Yeah, yeah. Field marketing team does events alongside sales, like either at a specific account, like a snow day is what we call it, or larger scale events, but or dinners around town in specific locations.

18:55And our field marketing team is amazing. So sales can now just go into our internal tool, which is called Snowhouse, Snowflake on Snowflake and say, you know, I have this person at this account and I want to invite him to an event in their area. Which one should I choose? And it just prompts and recommends and then says, like, do you want to send this? And then they can just send it through this tool. Sending is what it's something physical or it's like a mail invite. Yeah, usually like an email invite or pick up the phone and call them and invite them, either one. But it's just a way to easily recommend next steps for an account from a marketing perspective to a salesperson.

19:27So cool. Yeah. You are from the era of like you've been doing ABM since before AI, right? You said yesterday you were doing it for like five years. Yeah. You've been in ABM. Yeah. What is something that you used to do without AI? Like what is something you don't want to lose now that a Gentic ABM is here? The sales connection. I don't think there's ever a time and I don't think we should make AI an excuse for not talking to sales one on one and talking about their specific struggles with specific accounts that they want to get into. marketing and sales have historically been those two you know departments that are at least known for and not at snowflake but in general kind of blame passing between departments which is kind of why abm was spider man meme it's literally a spider meme like oh it's your leads oh no it's your follow-up and it's just not productive like it does not generate pipeline it's not productive so talking to salespeople and being in their conversations making sure we're informed informed on their account strategy, I never want that to go away.

20:22And we can definitely do things to make the follow up better. But I never want that personal connection to be lost. Let's talk about 2027. What is your big bet going into the next year? Yeah. So we are betting big on AI as a whole business. We are automating more of our workflows, but then also augmenting how we do ABM. So it's not going to be the same, same, but more. It's going to be different and better. But with all that automation, with all of that change to how we do, you know, day to day activities, I want to see what we can do different and better. So this year, we've experimented with things like account based billboards, how do we put a billboard outside of, you know, an account in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where we're having a field marketing event that day, and say, hey, we put that up for you, as if the billboard was right there.

21:06And it was like, we put this up to make sure that you saw us. And, and sometimes those activations are, you know, less expensive than most of our marketing campaigns. So what are we doing that's new, and then one-to-one and individualization. And we've also run and filmed and produced videos with our CMO talking to other CMOs that calls out the company name, calls out exactly their challenges and exactly our current place with that business. And we've had a lot of success with those businesses recognizing, oh, this is CMO to CMO. She knows who I am. I'm gonna email her and we're gonna set up a call with the rep that's responsible.

21:37So we're getting into new lines of business but doing it in different ways than we ever have before. Okay, before we blow away, let's let's wrap this up Casey you're awesome thank you Dasha so are you I am in love with you and this is obviously just like a taste of what Casey knows what she's talking about when it comes to ABM and you did a podcast with Dave on the exit five show so if you want more of Casey yes you should go listen to that you're awesome it was a great episode and thank you so much and I attended your session and like yeah it was awesome I'm so glad you were there I was there I'll always be nodding at your sessions.

22:10Yes. Thank you. Awesome. Okay, that's a wrap. Thank you.

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