Speaker 0: With them.

Speaker 1: Hello. Hello, everybody filtering in. Welcome to MarDreamin’. If it is your first day, first time, hello. Hello, Sharon. We are so excited to get started today. We have the wonderful Kelly Ryan leading today’s session. It’s about twenty five minutes long. Post in chat for any questions you have. Kelly is going to get started with building an ABM strategy with what you have. Welcome, everybody. Kelly, take it away.

Speaker 0: Perfect. Thanks, Lee. So I am Kelly Ryan. I am a marketing automation specialist here at Sercante. And today, we’re going to be going over building an ABM strategy with what you have. I’m here to tell you it is possible, and we can do this together. So we’re going to go over just some general tips to get the right messaging, right channel, right person, and then make sure we have marketing sales alignment.

So again, yes, we can do this. I made it in six easy steps, so it’s easy for you to do, either whatever admin level you are or platform. Hopefully, you’re on some sort of Salesforce platform because that’s what this is about at MarDreamin’, but we shall go from there.

Okay. Step one. Are we ready? Buy all the tools. This is what we want to do in our hearts. However, no. Please don’t do that. This is what we’re going to do. We’re ABM with what we have. We don’t want to add a bunch of tools and think it’s going to solve the problem. It won’t. It’s just going to make things worse. It’s going to make a mess. You’re going to be unhappy and you’re going to waste money. So what I wanted us to do is we’re going to audit what we have, do all the upfront work, which is going to take long, but it will be worthwhile. And then we’re going to launch. We won’t buy a bunch of stuff. So let’s take it back step, high level, and then we’ll deep dive into each section.

Okay. Step one for real, goals. So ABM is a strategic approach to designing and executing highly targeted personalized marketing programs, and that is an initiative to drive business growth and impact with specific named accounts. So in short, that’s going to mean right message, right time, right audience, right channel. However, this is easier said than done. So, again, my six steps: goals, audit, plan, activate, analyze, optimize. And you can see it’s on a circle, so we’re going to repeat that and keep going with our ABM planning.

With our goals, just remember, not all ABM is the same. Make sure it makes sense. And what I mean is make sure it makes sense for you as your role, your skills, the company, the company goals, your budget, and everything else. We want it to make sense. Don’t just see an acronym and go for it. ABM is always changing. As you can see, Account Based Marketing. Now everybody’s saying ABX, the Account Based Experience. Who knows what the next variation is? So please don’t get hung up on those abbreviations and do what actually makes sense for you and your company.

So with your ABM goals, with a company starting ABM or in later phases of maturity, they usually don’t make the shift all at once. We want to change the way we’re measuring and thinking about marketing strategy to really think about the effectiveness of our programs and make sure it makes sense. It’s most likely going to be different than what you’re currently doing with your marketing programs. So when we keep that in mind, think in phased approaches. We want to target groups and tiers of specific named accounts and contacts. And then we want levels of personalized content. We don’t have to go hard and go crazy all at once. We can do levels of it. And if you think of it this way, we’re going to do a starting, scaling, and optimizing. So these are our stages or phased approaches to ABM.

Here’s some things to think about. What actually are your ABM goals? Did your boss just see the acronym and go crazy for it, or you have actual goals? Think about it. Think it through. Then make sure those are aligned with marketing, sales, and key stakeholders. If you skip one of these people or departments, it’s not going to work out in the end. And then finally, I like to say draft out your goals and plans to see the full flow and the gaps. This is going to put red flags up easily or show you where you’re feeling really good and ready to launch.

So we have our funnels, ABM versus demand gen.

This is our standard confusion point as well as fight across the teams, but I want to break it down for you easily. So on the right, we have our yellow standard demand gen funnel. We’re starting at large with awareness, and we’re moving all the way down the funnel into the purchase. That’s our standard. On the left, we have our orange ABM funnel. You can see it’s flipped. So we start out with a smaller identified group and we expand, engage, and advocate all the way down. The purple boxes are a way to think about ABM across both these funnels. So our standard demand gen is going to be one to market or 300 plus accounts in your target group. On the left, we can have one to one, one to few, one to many. So you’re going to hear these phrases a lot and you’re going to see these funnels a lot. So again, make sure it makes sense for your company. Ideally, with our ABM goal, we’re going to have low volume on the left and then we’re going to have a higher conversion rate because we are hand holding and personalizing that journey all the way to conversion.

However, now these funnels don’t work for everybody. So my thing is, why not do a little bit of both? That way we’re getting a full life cycle marketing. This is going to give it you the chance to make it easier for yourself to launch, scale. And at the same time, we’re going to focus on developing opportunities across the whole customer journey. This is going to be a little bit of net new, a little bit of current customers. So it’s combining our targeted personalized account approach. But potentially at the same time, we’re also lead generating. So a little bit of both, the revenue flywheel and the full cycle marketing.

So once we have our goals defined, we’re going to go ahead and go on to step two, the audit phase. So if you don’t know what you are doing, you don’t know what you can do until you know where you’re at. So when we’re auditing our current state, we’re thinking about our ABM capabilities. These are a lot of key questions I like to ask clients and myself when I was launching ABM to see where we are at and what we can actually reasonably do without buying a bunch of technology. So a couple of my key questions that I want to point out are in bold. So as you’re going through your audit, how do your prospects qualify for different stages? Who is actually on the target account list? What is your budget? That’s a really key one. You can’t do much if you don’t have anything. And what content can you repurpose? This is really important, especially for launching for the first time because we don’t want to draft a bunch of personalized content from scratch. We want to be able to just use what we can, slightly tweak it, and go live. What new KPIs or reporting functionality need to be in place? And finally, who’s in charge? Someone needs to be in charge to answer questions both in this planning stage and live. We might need to make some quick pivots, and we want someone to be there to realize. If that’s you, awesome. Own it.

So once we have our audit, we’re going to move into stage three, plan. We’re taking these same questions, but now we have answers to them. So let’s write down those answers and start our full planning process to make it real. Based on these answers, we should have a pretty straightforward approach with what we can and cannot do, both for ABM long term goals and solid phased approaches. So always keep those two in your mind.

With that, we can check out some account based marketing strategies. This is from Terminus. This is one of the easiest ways I think about our different strategy approaches. So if we’re moving towards that full life cycle ABM, we can phase in our ABM plan at any place in the journey, making this process much more scalable and quicker to launch. So we don’t have to do all of this at once. Please don’t do that. Please don’t promise that. Think about the phases and where you want to come in. So if we’re looking at acquisition, that’s our lead generation step. That’s going to be pretty easy to get going because we don’t need a lot of deep dive content. If we’re in the acceleration phase, that’s more of our pipeline support, really good partnership with marketing sales. If we’re in the expansion phase, that’s our customer focus and support. So that’s going to be a lot of upsells and resells. So think about what your audit, your plan, and your goals, and then you can kind of pick and choose where you want to be.

Once you’re done, you can outline your phased ABM approach. On the left here are the things you want to think about. Goals, target, timeline and budget, channel mix, content messaging, pass up points, and reporting. So these already should be answers from your audit, but I like to call them out again. Don’t forget, sales and marketing need to agree, contribute, and have a feedback loop. This is essential for all versions of ABM. You also want to get stakeholders sign off early and keep that relationship strong because the worst thing is to not please your stakeholder and then they pull the plug before you can actually show results. And always remember, ABM is about quantity quality, not quantity. So start small, start personalized, and get going that way.

We’re into step four now, activate. This is our big one. Remember, launch a phased approach with a pilot group is going to be most successful. That way we can have our control group and our pilot to show ABM success along the way. And also remember, we’re in a digital world, so you can fail fast and try again quickly. That’s why that optimized step is going to be so essential as ABM launches and ABM strategy happens because the world’s moving very fast. We need to keep up in whatever ways we can.

So activating our pilot program. Step one, setting up tracking and reporting. Using what tools you have and what skills you have, this is going to be a really essential first step. We want to set up Google Analytics and Tag Manager across our site, tracking code, if that’s Pardot or whatever marketing cloud provider you have. Then we also want to have our connected campaigns. This one is essential. If we don’t have our campaigns in place, how are we going to report? So I like to suggest grandparent, parents, and child for your campaigns. The children are going to be each touch point or measurable activity and effort, both for sales and marketing. So those could be emails. It could be, display ads, any sort of sales cadences or outreach. Having all these upfront is going to make life easier when we get to that monitor and optimize phase.

Step two, create landing pages and content. Easier said than done for sure, so that’s why you want to think about what you can repurpose from our earlier audit. This, we can determine our best mix of channels, engagement points, and building personalized assets depending on what we have in place, our timeline, and our budget. Once we have that, we can do landing pages and progressive forms. I say that because usually ABM-ers don’t want forms. We already know who we’re reaching out to. We know our buying groups. We don’t want to hassle them with a form fill. But if we’re doing a combo with our full life cycle marketing, let’s do some progressive forms. So we generally know who we’re targeting, but we might get a couple new buying members of our buying group, and we want to make sure we can convert them into our database. With that, we can go into dynamic content HTML. So if we’re repurposing what we have, we can have our landing page, but let’s make it a little bit more personalized with our levels of personalization and see, let’s grab account name or seniority or region industry. You can just literally put in their first name. That counts. That’s still a personalized approach. So think about what you can handle and what information we have. Finally, page actions and custom redirects. These are really important especially for using third party tools, ad platforms, or anything off-site that we want to track. A good example would be using products on our landing pages or in our ads so then we can then determine with our tiered accounts what product cycle they are in. And then that will give us our personalized content for our landing pages. This is also going to work really well with depending on where they are in the funnel. Maybe we were incorrect and they’re actually at bottom of the funnel. So then we can change up what content we’re displaying to them. So these are all out of the box tools with most of our technology platforms that are in our tech stack. If not, this is a very simple way to do on your own.

Step three, enroll your audience. So creating targeted count lists in your key buyer groups is going to be really important. You should have already done this with sales and marketing based on, persona insights, scoring or grading. We also have Einstein scoring depending if you’re using like that or buyer intent signals. With that, we can make dynamic lists and use automation rules to enroll our audience in the right place at the right time and the right channels. We don’t have to automate life, but we should as we can. So using these automation rules or engagement studio programs is going to make it much easier and scalable later on. But remember, phased approach. So maybe we do manual first phase, and then we move into the automations for the second phases.

Finally, monitor and optimize on step four. We want to measure the success of our strategy with engagement history and campaign influence. This is going to be the easiest both as or for marketing and sales. However, if we skip the first step and never set up campaigns or we skip the third step and we never actually enrolled anybody anywhere, this is going to be made very difficult to measure the successes. So make sure those are turned on, but also make sure you do all your prep work and prep, make sure it’s all working out. So we also have to have opportunity contact rules. Campaign influence doesn’t really work out if we’re not connecting our contacts and leads to the opportunities. We also want to see our pipeline progress. So if we don’t know who actually is enrolled or maybe we skip some steps around our target account list, we’re not going to see what is actually progressing. This is also true with our pilot and control groups. We want to see the differences there and actually show the success of marketing ABM. And then finally, feedback loops. Like I said, sales and marketing need to be friends, they need to be talking, and they need to be honest. So at a high level, this is how you would activate your ABM pilot program and going through these steps with the tools and processes you already have in place. Remember, you don’t have to make it fancy. Please just launch what you can. We’re digital, and then we can optimize from there. Start small, scale, optimize.

Okay. Step five, analyze. So I always like to say ABC or always be checking. Because we are in this digital world and you already did all your steps and prep work, you can monitor your campaign in real time. You can monitor your your accounts and your buying groups in real time, and then you can pivot quickly. So when you’re using your campaigns, check out your engagement history and campaign influence reports, both for your pilots and for your control groups. Having clean and organized data for pipeline progress and scoring and grading checks is going to be also essential both before you launch your program and while the programs are running. So keep that in mind, try to have the clean data, we all know how that is a struggle. Setting up your baseline reports for your pilot and control groups ahead of time will be especially helpful for your stakeholders. They can then check while you’re checking to see how they’re progressing and if ABM is actually having an impact. This will also help you with budgeting later on or maybe even during your process. We want to show that we are actually making an impact. And always feedback loops. Marketing and sales need to talk. I’m never not going to say this. It’s very essential and it’s a very skipped step.

Some questions we can ask while we’re analyzing and optimizing. How long should we let our campaign run before evaluating success? This is going to depend on what we are doing with our pilot program and our pipeline cycle. Are we targeting the right accounts, job titles, departments? We can always change what our segmentation is and mix it up a little bit. Are our accounts engaging with our messaging? Maybe we just launched with what we had. Awesome. Great. It’s live, but now we can pivot slightly and update our messaging to either be more personalized or, different for the stage they are in. Are sales scheduling more meetings? Are they higher quality meetings? Are contacts calling warmer after engaging with our ABM campaigns? Did sales come on that call and the client said, oh, yeah. I’ve heard of the content. I saw that ad. I saw that email, whatever that looks like. That is a good indication of ABM that is not measurable in our reporting dashboards, and that’s why that feedback loop is so important. Have you seen a positive impact on email open rates or response rates? This is for marketing or sales. All of a sudden, they might be seeing those ads or getting other nurture emails, and now they’re going to engage with us because they trust us as a brand.

Here are some ABM KPIs that I find are pretty prevalent in the ABM world. I highlighted some that are much different than probably your general, lead generation cycles. So we’re looking at target accounts engaged. That would be those email opens, phones picked up, going to the website. Cost per opportunity, is that reduced or is that now more expensive with ABM? Campaign and web unique visitors to the website, that’s going to be helpful to see who our buying groups are and if we’re targeting the right people. Conversion rates and then average deal size and length. So we want to see that the deal size is increasing while the deal cycle is decreasing. More money, less time.

Finally, a repeat. Remember, we want to deliver the right channel messaging to the right person at the right time. That’s why we made this fun little circle. Goals, audit, plan, activate, analyze, optimize, and then we’re going to circle through it. This is how I see have seen success and our clients have seen success.

Some questions to think about when we’re moving to the next phases and steps is, are there other points in the sales cycle that could benefit from ABM? Are there opportunities to upsell, expand, renew within our customer base? That would be another phase within the chart. Are there specific marketing initiatives like events or product launches that could run for ABM? This could either supplement what you already have live with ABM or combine, and now we can have extra efforts around marketing. Could you get more targeted with your campaign messaging and further segment within your ABM campaigns? Maybe you started in that one to many or one to, more than many and more on the demand gen side, and now you want to phase down to one to few or one to one and really get targeted. And then are you running through stage based campaigns? Could you separate them out? Should there be more ABM instead of full cycle? Maybe we’re just doing top of funnel or bottom of funnel, depending on where we could support sales or what efforts marketing has to actually work with.

Now you can buy all the tools. At this point, we should have completed our pilot for ABM. We should have been able to prove the success with our reporting tools, and we can tell our stakeholders, hey. ABM works. It’s great. Please give me more money. Also, I’d like to buy all these things. This is a really cool chart that Demandbase puts out that shows us all the different things that can help us as marketers and sales become even better ABM executioners. So depending on where you want to be and where you need that help, these are some options. And finally, you can become the ABM champion just like the stand the yep. Definitely.

Okay. So I want to thank our sponsors. We have a lot of them. And a lot of these also work great for ABM. So keep them in mind. They’re some of our favorite tools, and they support us. Okay. Great. So that is ABM in a nutshell.

Speaker 1: Do we have any questions, Celine? We do. Heidi wants to know if you have any experience using 6sense with Pardot.

Speaker 0: Yes. We love 6sense. Okay. She wants to turn on. Big ones. Yeah. Totally. So 6sense is great depending on what features and functionality you have turned on. It works with Pardot in really great ways for account targeting based on those intent signals and helping us with the personalized. Because we’re getting a lot of data from 6sense so then we can dynamic content or HTML it into our landing pages and emails because it’s talking through everything. And it helps us push data back to 6sense to help us with showing which accounts are engaged based on the activities that people are interacting with.

Speaker 1: Awesome. Got another one for you, Kelly. Beyond buy all the tools, what guidance can you offer for hire all the people?

Speaker 0: Do you have a space model?

Speaker 1: What are essential core in house roles to start with?

Speaker 0: Yes. So during your audit phase, some of the questions I propose, there’s who’s actually doing what? Is it internal or external? So instead of tools, maybe you have a content developer or web developer who’s really good and can customize things. Maybe you have an ABM manager who’s just talking to sales and getting those accounts set up. So that’s really good when you launch your pilot. If you’re a person of one, team of one, tool of one, you can see what were the struggle areas and where we can improve. And if that’s a person with a specific title, money, or tools, that will pretty much be very apparent through that pilot.

Speaker 1: Awesome. Awesome. What other questions, guys? Anything?

Speaker 0: Based on that team one, you can always check out Upwork too and just grab a quick person to help you out if you’re not very budget ready.

Speaker 1: Awesome. Glad it was helpful, Erin. Yes. Great, Heidi. Great, Katrina. Awesome. Awesome. Like Kelly mentioned, we want to thank our sponsors again because it wouldn’t be possible. MarDreamin’ wouldn’t be possible without them. Be sure to check out their booths, sponsor booths to learn more. If you guys think of questions after the session, feel free to contact Kelly directly. You can find her on LinkedIn. You can, send us an email, anything for we’re happy to continue the conversation. I saw Brian post in chat for some more resources about continuing on to learn about ABM, such as user groups. Yes. It’s it’s it’s a common topic that, continues to happen.

Speaker 0: And remember, we also have our Genius Bar too. If you have questions after today’s session, we have one more day at Genius Bar so you can sign up and ask all the questions there too.

Speaker 1: Yes. Stacy, can we get the slide deck? Yes. Check out that pinned message. It’s at the very top. I it should be highlighted in blue from me, and it’ll it’ll give you more information. You these all these are being recorded too, so you can also go back and and reference this recording. Anything else? Got two minutes. Let me

Speaker 1: just check this Q and A tab, see if it was in chat. Oh, Andrew has one for us for the last two minutes. How do I track leads in ABM? Leads are not inherently tied to an account. Once converted, may have a different account. Their strategic account is the ABM account, but I am seeking hundreds of accounts to attribute.

Speaker 0: Yes. This is a normal concern. So that goes back to your auditing. What do you have in place with your tools and how are you reporting? If this is a huge hole, maybe we do think about our, Salesforce Flow where we can help attribute the leads to the account based on their domain and their email address. Or there’s our tools that fix that, like, LeanData where you can connect the orphan leads. But in most cases, that’s going to be our buyer group. We want these leads. So I would say convert those to the account, make sure sales and your marketing team are keeping your data clean and organized. Because if we don’t know that lead is connected to that account, how do we even enroll them in a program? They have to be seen and existing. If that isn’t the use case and you want to keep them as leads, then you have to think about that in your planning stage and ensure you’re doing both lead and contact based ABM pilots to grab all those people who might be not attached to the account.

Speaker 1: Awesome. We’re going to get cut off soon, guys, so thank you all so much. Again, reach out if you have any other questions. Bye, guys.

Speaker 0: See you in the next