Speaker 0: We’re gonna have them take it away.

Speaker 1: Hi, guys. Um, welcome. So let me see if I can do this. Okay. Um, as with any good presentation, I’m gonna include some industry stats that are important, um, to account based marking marketing. So according to Forbes, organizations that implement an ABM type of program see significant benefits. They see about an 84% growth in their pipeline, um, 82% higher return on their investments than other marketing efforts, and there’s a marked improvement, um, with marketing and sales alignment. So as we go through this presentation today, we’re gonna kinda touch on, um, what we have done here at Affinity and then how we have gone through the change management process, um, with our marketing and sales teams. So I will go ahead and let Britney, um, take it over and go over our agenda.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Hi, everyone. So so so glad to be here with you guys today. Um, really, I hate the term account based marketing. I’m a marketer who hates that term. I’m ahead of ABM, and I literally cannot stand it because, really, to make this strategy work, it needs to be a full fledged strategy between sales, marketing, any of your revenue and ops teams. It just has to be ingrained in kind of who you are as a company. So today, we’re gonna go over why account based strategy, um, the org wide change management needed and kinda how to put that in place. Um, a really big section in our presentation is the technology that you just can’t skip, and Jessica will go through that in the way the way that we really shift from leads um, to accounts from that kind of back end side. And then Jeff will be talking about the sales and marketing harmony. There’s no better person here to talk about that than him because he leads our sales team at Affinity. And, um, you know, that’s, again, it’s just so important to have us all kind of going the same direction with this as we kinda toss out that lead mentality. Yeah. So I mentioned company wide change management. Right? This is huge. The sentence in bold right here is kind of the biggest thing. It requires understanding at every level. And when I say understanding, I mean that everyone has to really, really foundationally get it and get why we’re making this shift, what it means for the organization, how we’ll measure it, um, things like that. And so to do that and do that really, really well, you must have that leadership champion. You must, like, have that foundationally ingrained that it’s a full revenue strategy and it impacts your entire go to market. The next slide, Jess. Perfect. And then how to do that, kind of the the nuts and bolts of that and where to start. It’s really about identifying those champions. For me, as we started, Jeff was one of those champions for me, um, as well as Jessica from the revenue side. So those were two of my beginning champions as well as our CMO. Right? We needed our CMO to really preach this at every level. So he was able to get our chief revenue officer on board and our CEO. So our CEO then is putting account, um, how our account based strategy is working in our OKRs. Right? It becomes a foundational goal, and everyone kind of has that clearly understood, and then they’re able to communicate it clearly across the organization. Um, set and stick to reasonable time lines. I promise you as you guys are setting up your account based strategy, you will get the question, when can we get this? Can we get this sooner? Um, Can we move this up? It’s everyone gets very excited when you get those champions on board, but it’s really important to have some of the foundation set first and set reasonable time lines that we can stick to that are clearly shared amongst everyone who’s involved. Um, and then don’t wait to figure out how to measure success. This one is very, very important as well. Um, don’t just throw it out there and then figure out later on how to measure success. I will say this is a little bit of a pitfall that we did because we knew how to measure it, but then, of course, there’s kinks to work out along the way. And I’ll say that, you know, it’s one thing as we’re moving to this transition, really, you know, sticking to our guns with how we’re measuring success because success isn’t an overnight thing and being able to look at these milestones of how to reach success. So don’t wait and figure that out. Right? Have a clear plan and communicate that upfront of this is the results that we’ll see. This is how we’re gonna measure this. This is our game plan going into it. Because realistically, it’s gonna take a bit for that to get working. Right? So we need to figure out that measurement of success and then have it be known across the board. And then making sure leadership has a job in the program rollout, the training enablement, and then the ongoing investment strategy. So I think this is a really exciting motion for a company, but making sure that it becomes foundational to the company versus having it be something that’s a new kind of shiny shiny tool. Right? And then we we go back to the old ways. We wanna make sure that it’s ingrained, and the best way to do that is to have leadership have a really important role in that program rollout, in that program checkpoint, in that program success. Because, again, it’s a whole strategy shift. It’s a whole company strategy shift. Jess, I’ll go ahead and turn it over to you to talk about how we really now from the tech and from that lead perspective change from MQL to that MQA.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So, um, Affinity was very much an MQL type of organization. We sent leads and contacts. It was based off of the scoring. So one of the things that was super important whenever we, uh, went to this new account account based modeling was, um, first of all, changing kind of the language that we talked to with the teams. Um, we no longer say MQL within our organization. It is an MQA. So it’s a marketing qualified account strategy. And the reason why we did this was because we needed to make sure that, um, we had more predictive accuracy. So, you know, we had intent models that were leveraging advanced machine learning, um, and processing languages to analyze our customer behaviors and signals. Um, we wanted to do this so that we could focus on some of the resources and ensure that we were converting, um, accounts that were showing these types of intent signals, both from the marketing and sales perspective. We needed some real time insights. We were able to get some of this information from our marketing automation platform. But with the new ABM strategy, we’re able to kind of show insights that leads, um, current interest. We can enable our sales and marketing team to respond quickly, um, to the changes that they’re seeing from that account, um, across the board of all of the contacts that are within there. We needed enhanced personalization. Um, we’ve done some really cool stuff here at Affinity to ensure that when we’re sending out marketing and sales efforts that it is specific to, um, what the buyers want to see and where they’re at within the journey. Um, and then we also wanted to help prioritize what’s more important so that we can do the ROI. Um, as with any type of organization, you know, you can get kind of lost in the weeds, especially from an MQL. Like, which event is the most important? Who should you be calling on, um, from that perspective? So with the account best strategy, um, and our marketing qualified accounts, we can show the accounts to call on first. So it helps the the sales and marketing teams to kind of prioritize their days and what they wanna do. And then it also help has helped us reduce some of the waste in a lot of our resources. Um, you know, we are no longer marketing to accounts that aren’t showing that intent. We’re helping to move those buying stages, and then we’re also sending signals to sales so that they can call at the right time at the right moment. Um, one of the things that was important is definitely choosing the right technology. Um, so we have three major tasks that we are using today to manage our account based marketing strategy. Um, first, starting with 6sense. So 6sense is the ABM solution that we have chosen for our organization, um, to show us those intent signals. Um, I would recommend that any organization do their proper due diligence to ensure that they select the right technology that’s good for their organization. Um, I can’t emphasize enough, um, what a great partner Sixense was for us within this process, um, in setting up the technology. Um, in addition to that, we were also migrating our marketing automation platform at the time, moving from HubSpot into the account based marketing. So we also had a great partner with Circante to help with that migration. So we were standing up the ABM technology and standing up a new marketing automation platform. I would definitely not recommend anybody do that in the future. There’s some nuances you have to look for. Um, one of the things I will say with the technology for the ABM platform is that it did take a solid ninety days to run before we actually started seeing real insights. Um, so as Britney alluded to, you know, people are gonna ask you when are we gonna see results? When can we start using this? It’s really important that you manage expectations during that official that initial launch to ensure that, um, you know, the the system does have time to bake. It needs to actually pull in those robust, learn a little bit before it can actually do that. Um, the next piece of that is obviously our Salesforce instance. We had an amazing applications manager who was able to do some really great things within Salesforce to ensure that we had proper flows. He set up automation. We have things that, um, are creating opportunities. And I’ll kind of touch a little bit on all of the crazy that went into building our Salesforce and sense to ensure that we’re getting the right signals, alerting the right people, um, within this process. Um, he was an excellent partner with that. And then we’re also using LeanData to do all of our routing and our orchestrations and notification notifications across the teams, um, and reallocation. So as you can imagine, there are a lot of moving parts. Um, talking a little bit about our Salesforce orchestration, um, you know, we have it built in such a way that 6sense sends us our signals. As soon as Six Senses sends the signals, then it activates this, um, fantastic environment within Salesforce where it’s going to, um, update the MQA statuses. It will calculate the number of days, um, that an account is within that. It calculates the activities that are coming from sales. When the status change changes from, like, new to working, um, it updates that behind the scenes to systems. Whenever our BDR teams and their AEs are booking meetings, we’re creating automatic opportunities in that pursuing stage, sending out notifications. So there’s a lot of moving parts. So, hopefully, you know, it kind of keeps sales doing what they need to be doing, which is obviously doing the outreach, selling to the individual, and not having to work behind the scenes and cleaning up our Salesforce instance. Going through that a little bit more, we also have an automated cadence, um, in just kind of how all of this technology works together. So 6sense sends the signals of the accounts that are in our ICP. We do the behind the scenes items within our Salesforce instance, but then we also take this a step further. We use the 6sense technology to actually, um, do some contact acquisition and orchestration based on persona creation. So, um, an account triggers a six sense. We look at the account. We say, okay. Do we have the contacts that we need behind the that sales needs in order to do this outreach, to do that multithreading, to kind of do that touch point with them. If we don’t have those personas, we’re acquiring those content. So, um, contact. So, hopefully, sales kinda stays within the platform. They can have everything at their fingertips to do what they need, and they’re not having to go to things like LinkedIn, um, ZoomInfo, or, you know, other technologies to find the people that they need to talk to because we’re providing that information with them. Once that occurs, we send the notification via LeanData that says, okay. Hey. You have an MQA. You have a hand raise. Here’s where you need to do. Um, here’s some of the things that you wanna do. And then from a marketing side, we’re actually enabling, um, the marketing teams and saying, okay. Here’s where you’re at within the buying stage of this journey. So then behind the scenes, the marketing team is creating automations and engagement studios that’s sending out digital ads. We’re doing all of this orchestration, um, both in our marketing automation platform, also within 6sense. So then whenever sales goes to actually do the outreach to the contact, um, they’re familiar with our technology. They are with our technology solution here at Affinity. Um, and then we’re also serving them up the right language and messaging. And then with all of that, it’s like, do we have the right KPIs? Are we tracking? Are we providing sales with the information that they need from an SLA perspective? And then are we able to also track revenue? So we’ve created a very robust, um, set of dashboards. First dashboards for the AEs and BDRs. So here’s how you work your day. Then we create SLA dashboards that show where we’re at, um, in our lead to speed type of process and velocity, and then how we’re actually also tracking, um, the marketing engagements and then attribution that goes along with that. So then I’m gonna pass it on to Jeff so he can talk a little bit about, um, the harmony and the work that we’ve had to do from a sales and marketing perspective.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Thanks, Jess. And a lot of what I’m gonna share today are lessons learned the the hard way or in some cases where, you know, we made decisions as a collective org and then ultimately saw attribution, right, and pull through into some of those leading and lagging indicators we all care about. So I think the the first thing when I just think about, like, ABM, and you’re gonna move away from an MQL traditional model, every single AE’s eyes get bright and they go, oh, account based marketing. Like, marketing is gonna get me more pipeline. This is awesome. I’m just gonna sit back. I’m gonna relax. I’m gonna do my thing, and I’ll I’ll work these things as they come to me. Number one thing, like, from a a sales perspective in alignment with marketing is combating that narrative. It’s really not we’re not we’re not talking about a company’s marketing. We’re talking about account based messaging. Right? So, really, for us, there was four things that we tried to accomplish because ABM is so broad. So I just want an AE perspective. How do we really narrow this in and then break it down into phases so we can collectively see incremental progress as we get this program going? So the first thing was what I just alluded to, which is the mindset of the AE needs to take extreme ownership here on it. We’re getting all these signals, and it’s our job to take ownerships of the signals and to then orchestrate across your SDR, your, um, marketing resource, right, on the ABM side, and also what you can contribute from the AE perspective. So mindset was the first thing then being very clear on the selection. So we’ve done a really robust exercise on ICP persona following the intent. Therefore, we’re not spending time on low value accounts. We’re spending time on, ultimately, where we can provide the most value in our messaging. And then third part is really around the collaboration. So what’s the feedback loop internally? Right? Because you have all these different accounts. You’re trying to align different messaging. Like, how do we communicate with you, Britney? What what does that look like? Are all channels open? Let’s align on what the sync is. When do we chat as a team? When do we do reviews of really the accounts we’re trying to penetrate and focus? Because a lot of times this thing can just go. Right? And it extends, and then it’s like, well, we’re going really fast and we’re trying really hard, but we’re not seeing necessarily the value that we want. And then the last part of it is the the reporting and cadence I just alluded to. So as you think on, like, just the overall harmony in the next slide, Britney, um, really what what I wanna focus on is there’s really three buckets that we then broke down. This is what needs to be accomplished in the very short term for us to have successful launch into this. And then as the program goes, we’ll scale up on the roles and responsibilities and expectations. So the first bucket is really around the enablement. So what we didn’t wanna have happen is we do an hour long session with a group of 50 AEs and BDRs. We say, this is what we’re doing. Let’s go. This is the expectation. This is the overall metrics we’re trying to hit. It takes, obviously, lots of iterations to get things to stick. So forming things like committees, right, with AEs that are very engaged, high performers, things of that nature to ultimately build the program together. It it’s all levels. Right? So not just top down. And then also for the individuals that maybe, uh, you’re not looping in consistently to help shape this program on, like, the ground floor, It’s over communicating what’s coming, when it’s coming, and what the expectation is, and that’s done in every all hand, that’s done in every one on one just for a clear alignment. So by the time we got to kickoff, like, everyone has already come to speed on the goal, what we’re trying to accomplish, what success looks like, things of that nature. And then you think in on the the second bucket here, which is really around accountability on it. So, again, we can assign, you know, unrealistic SLAs, right, and reporting capabilities for the ease, but it’s so much more impactful if you align with them on what we’re trying to accomplish as a business and how this will help you, the seller, and also marketing get to our mutual goals on here. So just a few of the things we we touched on is, like, really speed, right, when it comes to, like, an MQA of how fast, like, what are the things we can control and what our response time is? How many touches are we trying to get on an account across how many personas? What’s realistic? Let’s negotiate this. Right? Let’s have a realistic conversation, and let’s hold ourselves accountable based off what we agreed to on what’s working and what’s not. And then the last bucket on the accountability piece was there’s always blockers and there’s unknowns when you move to a brand new model. So, like, what are the blockers? What can we see around corners on? Like, for instance, we had a little bit of, like, contact quality. Right? How do we get the right information, uh, to the AE so when this does flip on on the light switch, we’re ready to go? And then last but not least is really just the team alignment, which I alluded to earlier. And one of the things we had to give on, because I think with ABM and one of the areas I’ve I’ve struggled in previous life on is you’re trying to do too much. Right? And you’re doing everything okay, but then the results aren’t really there. So what’s the scope of what we’re trying to solve for? And one of the things we had to give on is, like, we’re actually not gonna work through our customers, uh, in this first touch. We’re just gonna focus in on a sub select group of accounts, and we’re gonna get very, very, very good at this. And then we’re gonna expand and keep expanding, but let’s get everyone rowing in the same direction. Let’s not bite off too much, and then we’ll execute. And, uh, obviously, as an overall ABM program, like, we shouldn’t be in the same spot six months from now or even one month from now. So one of the examples in the next slide is really some of the messaging that we delivered. So if you wanna pop over to the next slide, please. Thank you. So this is the the one of the slides we we sat down with the AEs on. In tandem with marketing, they join these conversations. And what what our goal was here is just education. Like, you need to do so much more education than you typically think you need to do. Um, and then part of that education is also just setting clear expectations. So this is a very, very, very simplified version of what we’re what what we moved to on the MQA front. Right? Where each of them has in their name, in in some cases, depending on the segment, anywhere from a couple 100 accounts to a couple thousand. And expectation is that we’re not gonna be able to cover all these accounts, and that’s okay. Right? That’s okay. We’re getting a a select amount of MQAs that can range anywhere from, um, 50 to a 100 if you’re more upmarket to a couple 100, right, if you’re more downmarket on it. And how do we align who owns what? Right? What is the job to be done by function? And then based off that job to be done, what is the expectation? So from an AE perspective, what we settle it on is that we have 20 accounts at all times. Now we are hyper focused on that. We are adding value every single day. We are aligning with Britney and her team on the selected amount of plays that we can run as an organization. And it’s that way, it’s not just like an AE doing it. That’s why it’s not just a BDR doing it. Right? Everyone’s got skin in the game. And ultimately, what we’re then doing is measuring the effectiveness of our top 20. Right? The penetration, the plays, what’s working, what’s knowledge sharing. And then when we sit down as a collective group, it’s, uh, less of like a, hey. What’s going on specific to the top 20? More like, hey. How do I move this account from this stage to this stage? Oh, we have a round table coming up in two weeks. Okay. Great. So then I’m gonna coordinate as the AE across multiple teams here to then drive more value, right, to the customer. And that way, it’s not just on one individual. So, ultimately, this is where we started. Right? And then we’ve moved past this now to where we’re doing consistent syncs and AEs. Right? The goal is to make them proactive, and they own the top 20. These things fail because there’s no ownership. Right? And there’s everyone’s kinda owning a little piece of, like, the top 20 or the ABM piece. So, obviously, marketing is delivering to the pot, but it is AE driven with heavy collaboration. And then last but not least, look, you gotta celebrate what’s working. So even those small things, of, like, every single outbound meeting that we set through a top 20 program. Right? Overshare and overcommunicate the top performers and what’s happening out in the field. Everyone wants to be successful. Everyone wants to generate pipeline. So as far as, like, the overall funnel and where we started, we felt like this was the best place. Uh, and then, again, as I mentioned earlier, we scale from there. So that’s it on the sales side. Obviously, happy to chat in more detail with anyone interested on what we’ve done since there. But to keep it simple, keep it organized, pick your top three or four things that you’re trying to accomplish, uh, mutually, and then develop a plan within those four things. And you’ll thank yourself in three months when you’re seeing green shoots, and it’s, uh, keeping it simple and keeping it moving forward. So thank you.

Speaker 1: Awesome. Thanks so much, Jeff. Um, so we actually had a couple of questions that came into the chat that I’d love to be able to kind of take some time to answer. Um, let’s go ahead and start with one of the questions that were asked. Um, so it says with the MQA approach, um, does your team still work in the leads object or, um, we actually do not. So one of the things that we implemented was, um, obviously, it’s an account based. So when our signals are coming from the account, um, we determine that it’s either a higher or low signal, do prioritization on that. But there’s always instances where you’re gonna get hand raisers or it’s a non known account within the system. So in those cases, we actually run that as a lead through the system. We send it through main data. We enrich it through 6sense as well as our ZoomInfo enrichment, and then we convert that lead to an account and then trigger that account flow, um, to the teams from that side of things. So, um, hope that definitely answers your questions. Um, we also have other processes where we’re adding, um, you know, event registrations, things like that. We send those through the orchestration within LeanData, match them to the named accounts, convert those, um, and then do those. So I try to keep my team out of that lead object as much as possible because that’s where we’re gonna get most of the enrichment. Um, another question, Jeff, I think you might be able to kind of touch on this. For the first iteration, it says round of ABM programs, um, how many accounts did we target? So it might be a Britney and Jeff question on that.

Speaker 3: Yeah. We did our top 20 on ABM.

Speaker 1: Okay. Oh, okay. Yeah. We did that within that. And then are you using 6sense to create contacts for BDRs to Outreach too? Um, we actually use a couple of text in this respect. We use 6sense first as the first pass of it. Um, then we also use another, um, technology within ZoomInfo to create, like, buying committees. Um, and then we actually just recently implemented a solution specific for, um, I think it was UserGems, which that was definitely, um, through sales outreach from that perspective. Um, and I think we’ve been seeing some success within that. What are some other questions that I’m missing here, guys? Sorry.

Speaker 3: Um,

Speaker 1: one of the questions I see here also is how long roughly did it take to go from we wanna switch to ABM? Well, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, it took about ninety days for us to actually implement the technology itself for that. Um, so we kinda started in phases. So first, we turned on the ABM technology, familiarizing the teams with here’s how it kind of works, here’s what you’re gonna do from that. And then within phase two, we built out the full, um, MQA type of arm, working with the sales and marketing, standing up the enablement, um, doing all the training from that perspective. So that was about three months to kinda get there. Now we’ve just recently started implementing the SLA. So you have the technology. You know how to use it. Here’s kind of how things are working. Now here’s the SLA. Now we’re gonna hold you accountable kind of, um, within that motion, up leveling that within the teams. Um, we just hit about a year within our ABM kind of technology. We turned I guess, we bought the solution in November, officially turned it on in December, um, and so then we will be coming upon a year soon. What are some of the other questions that, um, Britney might this might be you. How, um, how big does an organization need to be to take advantage of the ABM strategy?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I did reply to that, um, written, but I think really I mean, you’re going after your target audience. Right? And that’s all that that ABM, ABX, ABS, whatever last letter you wanna put on that acronym is is saying we’re gonna quit going after companies that don’t fit our solution, and we’re gonna really target those that do. And so I think you can be any size of company. I think where the limitations that I’ve seen lie is just the size of budget that you have. Right? And and, um, the tech stack of available to you. But at that same time, you know, you can start running some of these ABM motions. You can start getting the theories in place, and it builds a bigger business case to then bring in a sixth sense or Salesforce or wherever you’re at in your tech stack process. But, um, really, I mean, this is what we’re seeing here is pretty simple. Right? It’s and it’s funny that it, like, takes this this big motion to get there, but it’s just saying target those who are going to, you know, be your ideal customer profile and then do that in a really meaningful way.

Speaker 1: Did I miss any other questions here, Michelle?

Speaker 0: I think that we’ve covered them all. Um, a new one just popped in. How have you guys been successful in encouraging salespeople to prioritize?

Speaker 3: Yeah. It’s always a challenge. Um, I think the the first thing we did when we did our kickoff with them, actually, we did a bunch of education is, like, we had marketing present on their KPIs and what they’re trying to do. Essentially, like, both sides are accountable on this, and, like, we’ll be in future syncs talking through how they’re doing on what they’re converting to hand razor or to opportunity. So I think once a a seller, right, sees that others, um, that are non sales or e equally accountable, it helps combat some of that narrative. And then the typical stuff around launching spiffs, um, and incentivizing them, honestly, staying on top of them if there’s no pipeline coverage. And I think it’s really about just narrowing in on, like, where they should be spending their time. So if it’s not an open opportune, first thing is work your opportunities that you have, work your inbound, work top 20, then work your customers, that are your top 10. So the more you can narrow the scope on it and allow them more resources, right, to help create pipeline. And on the top 20, if they don’t flag your top 20 account, it doesn’t get air cover, meaning digital support. So, like, they’re getting, like, the whole skin in the game. So then they’re like, I want that. I want these accounts to come inbound. So that’s helped drive a little bit more of, like, behavior, which I think is the question.

Speaker 0: Guys, thanks so much. We have about nine seconds left before it cuts me off, but thank you so much for joining us today. Um, and I hope you check out.