The Truth About Your ICP with Hailey McDonald, VP of Revenue Marketing at Sprout Social | Ep. 417

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0:21Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. Cool, we are back with another episode of the Marketing Millennials podcast and today I'm here with the new VP of revenue marketing of Sprott Social which is day one I get to talk to her on day one of her new job but she was previously a Marigold she's been at a bunch of other companies before leading marketing so excited to chat welcome Haley to the podcast thanks for being here yeah thanks so much for having me I'm super excited I'm a long time fan of the podcast.

1:19I'm a super millennial for sure. So I'm just happy to be here and to chat with my people. I want to start off like, how did you, how did you get into marketing? Yeah, no, it's kind of, I feel like it's probably not that different of a story for a lot of people, but I, um, I got into marketing kind of by accident, but I, it's a very happy accident. So I knew I wanted to write, I think, when I went into college and thought I'd go into journalism. And just by way of that, I ended up working for the student newspaper. And I had some other students teach me graphic design. I kind of kept picking that up on my own.

2:03And by the time that I graduated with a degree in economics, I was like, where do they want the economists? And that wasn't a thing. And so I ended up just using the skills that I had, which was, you know, like in telling stories and, you know, creating beautiful visuals to do that as well. And I got into marketing just by way of agency. and at an agency it's a great place to start to some degree because you generally have the opportunity to go project by project and get all different kinds of experiences with different kinds of companies and the rest is really history after that I mean I think the economist rod I think is like it's funny you just like come out of college and you think you there's like this perfect role for you and it's never that perfect package role but it always ends usually you find a path that works for you, which is great.

2:58Um, but I want to go so surprised find it. Like when I'm so surprised when I like meet people that are like, I had this intention. I went to university for it and I got out and I have that role. I, I actually, in the last year have met a lot of like marketing purists and I've been like high praise, you know, like you went and got your marketing degree and then you've like turned this into a reality. And I find that there's the, the passion that comes from those people is almost like undeniable. And I've been spending a lot of time in the last year trying to like unearth some of that from them because I didn't have that same sort of experience coming into marketing like that.

3:34But yeah, I think it happens for a lot of different roles, but especially in ours. I want to go into some tactical stuff. So I know you've held, and we've kind of talked about a little bit, but leadership roles and a bunch of different B2B SaaS companies from MarTech to digital health to workforce intelligence. But what's one consistent mistake you see companies making across all of them when it comes to actually knowing who they're selling to? Yeah, man, I have had to learn that one the hard way. I think, you know, just through, sometimes you learn the lesson about, you know, like how you are nailing down the right message to the right person at the right time, you learn it backwards.

4:24You know, like we, I think it becomes a default reaction sometimes for people to lead with the like, what do we need to do? So, you know, we need to put out this campaign, we need to bring in leads, we need to bring in opportunities. And through that way of planning, you kind of just end up producing these things and they might get attention of people that are in, you know, the realm of who you're trying to target. But it doesn't mean that like they will turn into opportunities. It doesn't mean that those opportunities will turn into revenue. And it doesn't mean that they'll be happy customers.

5:00And so I think really kind of moving in that direction versus reverse engineering, you know, the data within the organization from your happiest customers that, you know, spend the most with you over time to determine your targeting is probably the biggest and the most expensive mistake that I've made. And I have seen other teams make over time. I know you've talked about this before, and I know you've said that people say they're doing account-based marketing, ABM, but they're really just doing lead gen with a target account list on top of it. So how could you tell someone's doing that? And how do you know within five minutes from talking to their marketing team that their ICP is actually broken?

5:47So I think the best, the best and easiest and quickest way to determine that, and it's a great actually practice if you want to do a little exercise as well in your own organization, is go have all of the different functions across revenue. So it could, I mean, like you can go as high level as marketing sales, CS, you know, like, and like rev ops or something, or you can get a little bit more granular, like product marketing, demand generation, revenue operations, like sales, right. And ask them what the definition of their ideal customer profile is. And I almost guarantee you that no one, it's not going to be this kind of like same answer.

6:27It's either going to be way too broad where it's just like a couple demographics, you know, or it's going to be completely different from each group. And there can be some shared properties. But the problem is with that is like, when you then go and have your campaigns and are kind of deploying those in marketing, you might be the those definitions might end up being targeting a totally different group than who sales is actually going into. And so that level of alignment if that's not there i can immediately tell like there's either a lot of inefficiency going on or something is completely broken that makes a lot of sense because i mean the key that i see a lot is like the ads not connected to the landing page it's not connected to like when the landing page like people marketers don't share enough of like what the campaign they're doing and who they're targeting and then like having a conversation with sales and saying like this is what the ad says, this is what the landing page says when they come to you they know X, Y, and Z this is what you should be doing and it's a good when you don't have that conversation with sales and marketing sales could be like actually we're trying to get this customer and you're targeting this customer or they're not going to close the opportunity because sales are talking about problems that another ICP has and not this ICP and you're like that's who you're marketing to so could you walk me through i mean you're day one at this job but like you coming in day one how are you thinking about if you went day one in an organization you want to like get everybody on the right page on icp from like the marketing team to the like the product team to the bdrs to the strs to the aes to everybody like how do i get the alignment and work backwards so everybody knows who the ICP is and can answer at least closely the answer of who our ICP is.

8:37Yeah. I mean, I think that's a question that every marketer should be asking themselves today and hopefully all of your other partners and the other functions as well because it truly is the start of everything. And if you don't get that foundation right, then you might as well set a pile of money on fire. Um, so I think a great way of going about this is really like, first of all, understanding the definition of ideal customer profile marketers, I think anyone in go to market is so used to like jargon soup, you know? And so we like beat the, we like beat these definitions and like these acronyms to death.

9:14But I mean, really just kind of coming back to the fundamentals of like your ideal customer profile, your ideal customer is going to be the customer that is most satisfied, that stays with you the longest, and that generally, you know, like spends the most with you that shows that they're happy that they're getting value out of what your solution is delivering to them. And so when I say that out loud, I don't think of like, oh, and let me just construct a couple of demographics that are going to describe what the ICP is. Think the nut of what I really just said in there was that the ideal customer profiles are getting value from what your solution delivers.

9:53And so really, it's like the use case that they're using you for. So what use cases, you know, like across your solution, are you solving for and then really rolling that back into creating your kind of core segments. And generally, if you have your ICP segments that are mapped into your use cases, you're going to directly kind of get those revenue outcomes that you're reverse engineering from. And a lot of times, I think for enterprise sales companies, you're going in and it looks like verticals. You know, organizations identify as a vertical, they have certain verbiage and like vernacular that they're using within their vertical, they call their customers something unique, they're using your product in a certain way.

10:35And so I think it's a lot about defining that. And then really the rest is about another big picture, sending the right message to the right person at the right time. And so that's where all of your like filters come on as far as what buying stage are they in? That's neat that sales wants to sell to, you know, this big logo, Coca-Cola, but are they even in the buying stage, right? Should we be sending them like messaging that's all about our solution when they really might not even be aware of the category and really making sure that you're kind of campaigning and writing your playbooks around that.

11:07And then one thing that I got out of that, which people make a big mistake, and I've seen this because I was in ops, is just because there's a group of people that is an audience that buy from you doesn't mean that they're actually going to be the best users of your product. And they might end up churning down the line because they're not the person. Like you said, value. because I think a lot of people get people in the funnel, they get to the opportunities, they close, and they mistake that those are actually ICP, but some of that audience churns within three months instead of the ones that have been there for two, three years in your product.

11:50So I think separating those out of, if you want those audience, maybe we need them. It's a product conversation because they're not getting value out of the audience. Or we just are not doing the right targeting and people are buying, but they're not staying for a long time. Because I think that's a thing I've seen a lot, too, is like we assume this is IICP because people are buying. But doesn't mean because they're buying, they are actually the best users for this product. And 100%. Yeah. We're feeling that. Like, we're feeling a big pain of that right now. I think across a lot of the SaaS industry, especially organizations that like, kind of had the market pull them forward.

12:34And, you know, like at the tail, like, like through COVID and the tail end of COVID, there was this like, big boom. And, you know, like, folks were kind of recalibrating and trying to fix a lot of things with SaaS solutions, just like throwing some technology at it, right? Because like, the whole world of work had been disrupted. And now we're truly seeing, you know, a few years down has kind of crossed people have come off their three year contracts and aren't renewing because they're not they weren't the ideal customer profile. And I think that like, one thing that I'm also seeing, it's been really exciting in the last, you know, 10 years, like five years, especially just as far as like technology that's emerging to support the intelligence that we have to kind of define and triangulate across our ICP.

13:22but we get happy ears and we index and model off of like, well, we need it. We're in marketing. We need to create pipeline. So let's model off of what opportunities we've like opened. But again, like those opportunities, you know, that that's not modeling off of the ones that have closed. And that's definitely not modeling off of the ones that were then satisfied customers and stuck around for a while. Right. And so I think what I saw in kind of this first gen ABX approach with technology is modeling off of pipeline at best closed lawn revenue, but not really those long-term revenue outcomes that people like the CFO and the board care about.

14:02And so this has been like a really cool moment, especially with AI, you know, like making a lot of things easier for us to really inspect on that and boil it back and like rework our models so that we're working off of the right data that we want to hit. I don't want to be six years from now having people churn, right? I want like my NRR up, up, up. Yeah, I think that's one is that's the issue. Two, I think another issue is you stated this, you said the Coca-Cola example, like people get so enamored by like the shiny name companies when they like they're doing marketing that, And the CEO is saying, I want to get these logos and the, and people saying we're going to get the, and these logos aren't really the people who should even be in our product.

14:54So talk to me, like, so once you've defined an ICP, so you've decided like, okay, they're this, they're this, these are our best type of customers. um how do you start uh like this goes to the ad abm method like how what does the building process of a list look like and then the other thing is like are there stuff you like i know there's like form fields and stuff you could put to get closer so you're like people know that when someone comes in they're close to icp versus not icp so let's talk about like the first like how are you building that list once you've defined an ICP. Nobody designs bad marketing ops on purpose.

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16:15Yeah, so I think, you know, like, similarly, as far as, you know, philosophically, you want to be aligned on what the ICP is. I think like equally, if not more, more important, like technically you really need to make sure that like the mechanisms that you're using between your sales operations, your marketing operations, you know, kind of are all working from a single source of truth as far as that goes. And I think like, I can't, we're still here. It's like these transformation things take a long time, but the one thing that's going to immediately kill you from doing that is if you're still on like an old leads data model.

16:53You got to be on an account based model. And like, if you're going to go in and do ABX and like focus on segments of ideal customer profiles like that, you have to be measuring on like marketing qualified accounts. And not just like leads, right? Like this sort of like leads object. And that's a boatload of work in itself. Because like, frankly, some of the technology that shall not be named, like kind of can work against you. If you know, you know, you know, as far as like being able to have an account based sort of like data model. But after that, it's really, I think, one of the exercises that my team at Marigold did, which I just had a bunch of smarties that worked with me there was like, coming up with our highest level of segments, like this is the highest level that we would segment and the definition is for us, it was by vertical.

17:48And then after that, it was really like layering on an actual playbook of like, these are the 10, 12, you know, 15 ABX plays that we want to do. And they span across the whole buying stage range from awareness to, you know, consideration, decision and purchase. and um you know through that filtering down always in a few different ways depending on the campaign or the play's intention but always the methodology behind it is to get the right message to the right person at the right time and so it's really like if they're high up in this stage you ought to be doing a play that's about education and like just getting them used to your logo, right?

18:35And if they're further down in consideration, you want to be shortlisted and tell them why you're best. And so having a set of plays that really fall into where the majority of your accounts are falling in on the buying stage is really important. I think two things I want to bring up you said is one, I think people don't think about how much the technology they're using could screw like their marketing um like the technology has false metrics that you not false but metrics that you shouldn't maybe not be tracking because distracting potentially yeah yeah distracting um or like some metrics that um are inflated because of how the market is of like the same i mean email you were at email email is like one of the most like open rates is one of the most inflated metrics out there because of bot clicks of like apple like opening things so you can get if you have a lot of apple users in your your list it can inflate how people actually go but i wanted to us go into the second part of this but it's like how how are we determining or how are you determining um how what which stage in account is because for example like there could be people who churn like you just like if i was targeting you and marigold and now you're at sprout and now i have to go target marigold again and target whoever the your replacement is they might not may be now in the education phase of like who we are like going back because they you might be have gotten all the messaging but um they might have not got it so i just want to know like how are we determining okay this p these p this this these accounts are in the buying phase like in the like the education phase is these people are closer to buying these people are like are well educated they've done the research they just need to like they just need us to put the push to get over the line yeah and i mean this can be said i think for kind of like any like my my response to this is going to be like this can probably apply to any go-to-market motion right now really you know like whether you're doing eight like abx where you kind of have like enterprise segments or even you know like on the smb side and product-led growth is you're gonna you have a few components that you're working with, right?

21:09Like you have your accounts and how you're defining what your ideal customer profile is. You have, and like at an account level, and then you have your buying groups, and that can be like a couple clicks deep, depending on your size or complexity of organization. You can have your buying centers where there's like departments. And then you also have your buying groups, which is like the people that are involved in the deal, right? So that's another component. Then you have like your signals component or object, which I would say like includes intent, but it's not limited to intent. And then ultimately, I think when you think about those three things as a multi-dimensional object, I think that's your journey, like your journey for the account.

21:57And I feel like just taking a pause here, just if I'm going to give like real talk, this is something that I think conceptually and philosophically, a lot of marketers, like the really, really smart marketers, like have this down right now. Like they can see it like a chessboard, like, oh, you know, with all this new technology and AI, like if I can just configure all of these components and have all of this data speak to each other, you know, like theoretically, I can model all of my marketing. against these journeys that my ideal customer profile take and reproduce these like perfect journeys over and over and over again.

22:37Unfortunately, I think when it comes down to brass tacks, like the tech is not quite there yet. Like the tech is still catching up when we talk about like big pieces that folks are using typically at kind of larger organizations. So like that's where you get false positives. And like, I find myself, you know, building programs really reliant on like, okay, we're going to rely on this piece of data that we have that says that they're an XYZ buying stage, just like you said. And the fact of the matter is, is that it's, it's like by nature, a little bit more complicated than that. Unless you have like a whiz team of like GTM engineers, you know, that is like, programmatically orchestrated every single data piece that you have in some like, living context layer, then you are not hitting the mark on this.

23:30You're not and I don't know, I like, I'm not gonna say there's no marketers out there that aren't doing it. There's certainly there's got to be a few. But I would say at scale in enterprises of like, companies that have been around for a while. That's what we're all working on right now that's what we're all losing sleep over the the problem is is there's so many walled gardens um in marketing with like facebook's gonna tell you what meta's gonna tell you one thing google's gonna tell you another thing your tool is gonna tell you another thing there's like realities of of these dark social stuff that is happening that people are doing that you can't It's harder to track.

24:14There's trackable ways to track it, but they're doing activities. And the buyer journey is imperfect for all these different people. And the person who, like, if we're going off of, like, the same, let's say, like, play for this company or this company, but the marketer in that other company, like, likes golf and this person likes this. And you don't, like, actually get the personalities down for different people. You might miss the mark if you're trying to do the same firmographic play like this company is the firmographic play where there's humans behind all these companies and you have to also align with that as well.

24:54So I think that it's so hard because there's Wall Garden ad platforms, there's Wall Garden tools, and all these tools are meant to keep you in the tool and give you metrics to make it look like their tool or their ad platform is performing better than it actually is as a marketer. Totally. I mean, you know what? I think like because of that, that's also why or I mean, one of the big reasons, that's also why I come back to indexing off of the use case and the value that your solution is delivering, you know, and like how you're thinking about personalizing and segmenting. because I mean, hopefully that's holding true across personalities, across people, across people changes.

25:44You know, you can always get like bits and pieces, right. To make an experience feel extra special for an individual. But I would say like, that's the other thing. When I look at ABM programs is really like, if you're going to try to do that level of personalization where you're trying to say, Hey, individual in the buying group at a company, I know you, I know you like golf. Um, that company, you better know a heck a lot about the company, a heck a lot about the buying center. They're probably very far down the pipe. Like this should not be an awareness play, you know, like that, like you need to have a lot of information about them.

26:22And I do see teams a lot of the times, you know, kind of trying to be, we're doing ABM now. Right. And there's this like really strong, just association and push for personalization but like you got to make sure that if you're personalizing you're doing it at the right level in the right time or it's gonna feel weird yeah i mean yeah there's a creepy level of personalization and there's like uh i honestly think personalization is just like personality at scale that's that's me like i think like the way you personalize is by personalizing your like like your personality is like the scale of personalization like that's super interesting i haven't heard that take i like that your brand if you have a personality and you're scaling that personality at scale like that's personalization to me because you're doing something different than what the market is doing um and you're like you're showing a personal level of like communication to that audience like i think that that's how you do real personalization of scale is scaling the personality of your brand and knowing this is the personality we're going to stick with in the ICP.

27:37Even if you said, I flew to Chicago, like Haley, the marketer at Sprout Show, talking to other, I flew to Chicago today to talk to a bunch of social media people and we talked about X, Y, and Z. That's way more personal than, like, hey, social media manager, I'm doing like, that's why I think like person, if you could scale personality, I think that's personalization to me right now. So I think that's such a good point, actually. And it's something that I really, I really learned a lot more about in my last role. The last CMO that I worked for, Ashley, she's amazing. And she has like, a really strong background in brand.

28:18And I think, you know, I'm coming off of a decade, maybe more of like, the marketing world and the SaaS world really favoring the demand generation side and the like number side and go make money, like sort of thing, which like, you can't blame people, like, I get it, like, we're all looking out here to like grow our businesses. But it's been like, marketing's favorite child. And really, I think now with AI, with markets getting harder in general, right? Like you can't rely on those sort of mechanics exclusively. And I really felt that in the last couple of years. And then conversely, like really saw the power of someone that like deeply understands brand.

29:02Um, and Ashley is definitely one of those like marketing purists, like has just like is marketer through and through. And so brought, um, that love for brand and that understanding of like how we build our brand expression into all of the forms of marketing and sales and how that's both your kind of jumping off point, you know, to have successful campaigns, but it's also your safety blanket for like where those mechanics fail you or, you know, can only go so far. If you have a great brand that's telling a great story and a great message with personality, you know, then you're going to go far no matter what.

29:39yeah i totally believe that and i also think that that's why i was saying like firmographic people look at so much but there's also like okay most my audience is millennials like what do millennials care about okay like they love reality tv they like uh they like they will probably love the devil's for his prada stuff like because they that's a movie they grew up like are they mostly woman or man if you if you start going down that rabbit hole and you say okay here are the age groups of the buying people like our buying committees here's like the generations here's what type of people they are you don't have to personalize like golf for this person but you could know that like if i talk about reality tv or if i talk about um like american idol a lot of the audience would get that and feel like it's personal because they it's like they get me versus saying it feels genuine versus yeah like superficial right yeah yeah like because most Some people won't care and some people will care, but it's like you could have different messaging to get people to.

30:44I'm just saying that if you work in those type of relevancy factors along with your brand, I think that is a way to do another way to do personalization. I also liked how you like, I like how you talked about personality and personalization too, because again, like getting caught up in the mechanics of personalization, it's like, at best, you're indexing on the value points, you know, and you're like reaching out to folks and trying to get your message about the value that you deliver. But like, man, it's also just like, undeniable right now, how hard it is to get people's attention and eyes. There's just information is flooded more than ever before.

31:27And so that personality part is what stands out, right. And so I think it's really that balance of the personality, like the personalizing your brand's personality and its voice. And like, there's so many cool ways to redefine what that looks and feels like right now and what you stand for with the mechanics, right. And I think if you can get both of those, right, that's where you're getting your like, most memorable, best in class brands like those are the ones that i'm looking out for like and looking at who works for them and like you know like those are smarty pants i want to know them like you said like okay you take icp first it comes you can't do this if you don't know like icp like you and icp goes longer than just like firmographic because you are targeting humans too so you like knowing like who those humans are at those companies is very uh but then once you've come up with that like messaging and knowing the icp you could distill that personality that brand personality throughout every touch point and going to product and going to um sdrs and going to sales like helping distill all that through the through line of that i think that is where the great brands do it and the the the brands who don't understand aren't connecting like their messaging, their like values on every touch point.

32:50And then the ICP could see that because the ICP, because you're not going back to your core of ICP and messaging for that ICP and what problem. 100%. And people feel that, like people feel that immediately, right? Like people feel the disconnection in your customer experience. If you're not having, you know, starting with that same definition and that real kind of core understanding across every, you know, group that contributes to your revenue generating, you know, organization, like, people feel like we've all had an experience, you know, where we have seen ads for a company, maybe and like gotten another experience when we've been messaged by BDRs or SDRs.